The Routes of Modernity: Spanish American Poetry from the Early Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century by Andrew Bush (review)

Abstract

848 Reviews Legenda's elegantly produced volume is all things to all people. It does discuss literature and science, but its miscellany is all the more enjoyable for not being tightly constrained by a potentially dogmatic, even questionable, unifying theme of 'L & S', and no doubt Patrick Boyde, whose photograph opens the volume and whose bibliography closes it, will be well satisfied with the tribute. Magdalen College, Oxford J.R. Woodhouse The Routes of Modernity: Spanish American Poetry from the Early Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century. By Andrew Bush. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 434 pp. $69.50. ISBNo8387 -55H-3. Spanish American poetry of the century and a half to 1850 has not been a favoured period for deep study. It could be that Ruben Dario's dismissive comment in Prosas profanas (1896) regarding the poetry that preceded him has had an inhibiting ef? fect on subsequent critics. In his review of that book Jose Enrique Rodo, who, like Manuel Gondra, had championed the earlier poets, considering the modernistas to be decadents, declared his allegiance to the new poetry, now finding that in its way this new poetry was also Americanist. Andrew Bush in his impressive study compensates for much of the scholarly slight. Debating with critics who have pronounced sweepingly or precisely on Spanish American political, social, and literary history,he accomplishes a vigorous reassessment of the period in question and of the poets who account for its literary standing. In the admirably functional introduction Bush lays out the principal theoretical and thematic concepts, as well as the historical events and currents, that will spur his arguments. He gives prominence to Octavio Paz's repetition of the view that the colony had continued in the new republics, uncovers instances of dependency within the independence movement, and posits, as pervasive, notions such as rupture and melancholia, which he arrives at under the partial guidance of Freud. He also justi? fies there the three historical periods into which he divides his study. The fact that in doing so he adopts the periodization of the Mexican economist Miguel Lerdo is indicative of the spectrum of knowledge this study enjoys. In his firstchapters, in which he deals with the Church and constitutional matters, his findings are sustained by supplementary information from a variety of fields, all of this preparing the paths to a more intense focus on the literary production of the third period. The multidisciplinary character ofthe book's overall structure is reflected at the level of sentences whose clauses boast an attractive array of specializations. Modernity, prizing European leadership and the isolated self over concern for the well-being of Spanish America, is seen by Bush as realized most fully in the poetry of Gertudis Gomez de Avellaneda, which he reads with great skill and verve. With Gondra-like patriotic sentiment, he nevertheless reveals in the soaring ecstasy of his climactic conclusion his satisfaction at Avellaneda's tribute to the United States. There are times when the predilection for the private leads to questionable inter? pretation. For example, Heredia seems badly served when, through a devious route involving Jorge Mafiach and Lezama Lima and focusing on one ambiguous image, 'Fantasma colosal', he reads the poem 'En el teocalli de Cholula' as dealing with the death of Heredia's father and links it to 'Niagara'. The clear message of the poem, relevant to our time?that there has been too much of the horror of war and blood? shed sometimes prompted by the false exercise of religion?is thus hidden, as are its links to poems such as 'A la paz' and to the 'fanatismos' he later condemns in 'A la religion' of 1828. Besides, Bush's reading of 'En el teocalli de Cholula' decouples the MLRy 100.3, 2??5 849 poem from the effortto set independence on a constructive course. It would also rob Heredia, in his admonitions against war, of his association with the strong humanist current that preceded and transcends what has come to be called modernity. That is why Ruben Dario, in his passion forpeace in the last years of his life,attacked promi? nent European vanguardists and invoked both medieval and...