Cuba and the New Origenismo (review)

Abstract

Buckwalter-ARias, james. Cuba and New Origenismo. Woodbridge, Eng.: Tamesis, 2010. viii + 206 pp.James Buckwalter-Arias's Cuba and New Origenismo is a lucid, finely argued book that brings depth and perspective to scholarship on post-1989 Cuban literature. For a period whose cultural production, broadly defined, has been abundantly celebrated in popular and academic venues, this book invokes distinction of literary as a category and an aspiration. It reads reemergence of Origenes - literary movement that flourished in Cuba in 1940s and 1950s - in post-1989 writing as a repudiation of socialist imperatives that in first decades of Revolution, as now standard history tells us, privileged politically committed works. But new of narrative by Senel Paz, Jesus Diaz, Eliseo Alberto, Leonardo Padura, and Antonio Jose Ponte is rich with contradictions and unanswered questions, which Buckwalter-Arias elucidates with remarkable rhetorical eloquence and conceptual confidence. Indeed, like article on Reinscribing Aesthetic: Cuban Narrative and Post-Soviet Cultural Politics that author published in PMLA in 2005, Cuba and New Origenismo is notable for unusual elegance of its writing.Buckwalter-Arias's critique of 1990s origenismo finds prerevolutionary movement and its individual writers rehabilitated for what they represent politically - as emblems, that is, for a literature independent of State - rather than as models of style or form. Novels of 1990s have far less in common with Lezama's Paradiso, for example, than they do with more prosaic and historically situated works of socialist realism ostensibly favored by Revolution. At same time, Revolution as a negative force has an importance in 1990s writing that it lacked in Origenes movement, which was neither clear nor organized in its relationship to Castro's regime and cultural policies, while object of origenistas' more cohesive and sustained derision, namely US neocolonialism and the consumer-driven culture industry (8), is conspicuously spared censure in their recent revival. This silence connects to a more general failure on part of Cuban writers post-1989 to acknowledge material conditions that govern publication of their work: namely, those of transatlantic publishing market in which, Buckwalter-Arias proposes with careful nuance, works read as dissident, while not just commodities (160), carry a historically determined and economically advantageous appeal. This final argument is both crux of book and basis for its own vision of a new origenista literature that would transcend simple aesthetics versus ideology - or Lezama versus Guevara - binary and enter the realm of oppositional praxis (195).In some ways first and last chapters, on Paz's lobo, el bosque y el hombre uevo and Ponte's El libro perdido de los origenistas, are most interesting: first because it demonstrates where book's compelling narrative of rediscovery begins, and last where origenismo may lead. In a skillful dialogue with some of more strident criticisms of Paz's sexual politics, BuckwalterArias suggests that his story stands as a final but doomed attempt to reconcile Revolutionary teleology with notion of transcendence that origenistas had drawn from modernists and, in its more redemptive strain, from Catholicism. Ponte's essay enters narrative as an exception - inevitably, perhaps, Ponte being so deft a critic that he often seems to anticipate analyses of his work. Buckwalter-Arias, however, draws El libro perdido into a larger interrogation of origenistas' legacy precisely through loss that, for Ponte, is at core of their project: finding in his work a poetics of history, [a] means for mapping a historico-literary landscape that contributes at very least to task of conceptualizing current impasse (162). …