Bazaar, merchandise and decadence: Antonio José Ponte and Julián del Casal

The fascination of Latin American modernism for 19th century French fashion merchandise has been widely addressed in literary theory. Texts filled with diverse cultural materials, textures and objects configured a poetics of the bazaar that became part of a series of strategies through which Latin American literature defined and linked itself to hegemonic aesthetics of the 19th century. The poems and chronicles of Cuban writer Julián del Casal (1863-1893) are no exception; this proliferation of merchandise reveals how the gaze and the images become configured as empty fictions, filled by a cosmopolitan desire. This feature, tied to the function and configuration of images in Cuban modernism, makes possible an anachronical reading of the presence of State merchandise at the other end of the century: Antonio José Ponte’s decadent reality in post-Soviet Cuba.

Heirs: Ponte, García Vega and Casal

In this article I examine a specific aspect of the literary relation between Antonio José Ponte and Lorenzo García Vega by analyzing their respective essays on the work of Julián del Casal. In the first part, I consider the main arguments of García Vega’s well-known “La opereta cubana en Julián del Casal”. In the second, I clarify the continuities and differences that Ponte establishes in El libro perdido de los origenistas, and analyze its depictions of Martí and Casal. Finally, I reflect on García Vega and Ponte’s forms of enunciation.

Call to Julián del Casal. The poet’s life in José Lezama Lima and Antonio José Ponte

The article deals with biographical mediation in Latin America. It examines the process of construction and deconstruction of the life of an emblematic 19th century Cuban poet: Julián del Casal. The poem “Oda a Julián del Casal” (1963) by José Lezama Lima, written for the centenary of Casal’s death, reflects on the possibility of building a vital poetic life as an alternative to the Cuban literary and cultural system. This question about the meaning of life, made by one poet to another, underlines the disruptive mode of creation that the Lezamian position enables, from “Julián del Casal” (1941) and “Oda a Julián del Casal” (1963), to the essays on Casal by Antonio José Ponte in El libro perdido de los origenistas (2004).

Femme fatale e intertextualidad, la onomástica en los poemas de Raúl Gómez Jaittin: Medea y Electra

El poeta colombiano Raúl Gómez Jattin (1945-1997), una de las voces más prístinas y encomiadas de la poesía colombiana de la segunda mitad del siglo XX, publica el poemario Del amor (1988), en donde reúne una compleja intertextualidad basada en la mitología y en la historia cultural de la humanidad. Me interesa analizar, en este artículo, dos poemas en los que Gómez Jaittin da rienda suelta a esa concepción decadentista de la femme fatale, revisitando así las figuras de Medea y de Electra. Su detallismo preciosista y la voluptuosidad, que tira hacia el sadismo, hacen que la visión de la mujer se acerque a la poesía del cubano modernista Julián del Casal, quien ya nos proponía en su poesía tal figuración de un erotismo malsano y punzante.

Tradición clásica y mitos en la poesía cubana del siglo XIX

Study of myths and motifs of classical antiquity in the poetry of some important Cuban poets of the 19th century (José María Heredia, Juan Clemente Zenea, Enrique José Varona Julián del Casal and especially José Martí). The importance of art as a subject and as a way of connecting with the ancient world and above all, the centrality of political issues are key aspects that explain the repeated presence of Prometheus and Laocoon

Julián del Casal

In 1941, a young José Lezama Lima, the Cuban poet, essayist, and novelist—who would go on to author the polemically erotic neobaroque masterwork Paradiso (1966) and essays on cultural expression in the Americas, such as “La expresión americana” (1957)—published an article in a Havana newspaper on the late-nineteenth-century queer Cuban modernista poet Julián del Casal that advocated for a decolonial poetics of reception and failure and a creative use of the artist’s archive. This is the first published English translation of Lezama Lima’s “Julián del Casal.”

Lezama Lima’s “Julián del Casal”

This examination of José Lezama Lima’s groundbreaking essay on the controversial late-nineteenth-century Cuban poet Julián del Casal situates the essay in the postrevolutionary context in which it first appeared in a Havana newspaper in 1941, a year after the ratification of the Constitution of 1940 and the publication of Fernando Ortiz’s celebrated Cuban Counterpoint. It explores Lezama Lima’s essay as a response to this moment in Cuban history as one that sought to forge, according to Rafael Rojas, a new “pact of national reconciliation,” and was characterized by anxieties over Cubans’ ability to produce. It argues that Lezama Lima’s essay responded by turning from questions of production and proposing instead an urban aesthetic practice of reception and failure that foregrounds—in a manner not unlike contemporary queer critics—the racial and sexual spectral and ephemeral as sources for alternative forms of productivity and agency.

Una “sombra terrible”: enfermedad y muerte o lo no dicho en la correspondencia de Julián del Casal

Resumen Nuestro trabajo se interroga acerca de una paradoja que articula las cartas de Julián del Casal (1889-1893), en las que simultáneamente se abunda en la inscripción del malestar síquico, el spleen, tal como la época demandaba para la configuración de la figura del artista decadentista, mientras se niega o minimiza la potencia devastadora de la enfermedad física que terminará con su vida a los 33 años. A partir de estas condiciones del decir y no decir la angustia, nos preguntamos: ¿Qué es lo que se puede o no escuchar a finales del siglo XIX en Hispanoamérica en un género supuestamente íntimo? ¿Qué es lo que se puede o no decir en ese momento sobre la amenaza y el no saber acerca del propio cuerpo, pero también acerca del cuerpo social? ¿Dónde encontrar palabras para decir lo indecible de la muerte joven?

Existencial Poetics in the 19th Century Latin America

Typically, the origin story of Existentialism has depicted Latin America’s contributions as subsequent and tributary to its European counterpart. Nevertheless, a select few critics have approached this history in Hispanic America from a chronologically inclusive perspective, by calling attention to an Existential Poetics in modernismo. This article expands the borders of Existential Poetics to fashion a Latin American literary imaginary. Given the work already done on Rubén Darío and José Martí, both of whom have been studied independently, my analysis will be collective, favoring philopoetic works by Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Julián del Casal, José Asunción Silva, and João Cruz e Sousa. The purpose of examining Hispanic-American poets in conjunction with a Brazilian is to accentuate the Pan-American quality of this Existentialism avant la lettre. As I will discuss, all these poems deal with a crisis of irrelevance and overtly question being in the world, classic motifs of Existentialism. Together, these poems allow for the synchronized inclusion of Latin American voices to the universal history of Existentialism, an approached not explicitly carried out by most philosophical and literary historiographers.