Un dibujo del mundo: extranjeros en Orígenes (review)

Abstract

Reviews 113 nity’’ as unique, noting that all modernity is uneven. Current historiographical and literary-cultural studies, however, stress Spain’s uneven modernity precisely to undercut the myth of Spain’s exceptionality, not to argue for its uniqueness. Perhaps, as Iarocci seems to think, some critics naively believe that other Western countries ‘‘completed’’ the process of modernity with comparative ease, but one rather doubts that. It would not have been possible to have written this book without the path breaking historical and cultural revision of Spain’s nineteenth century that has occurred in the last fifteen years. Properties of Modernity is best when it brings out clearly the restrictions and contradictions of modernity in these texts, weakest when it attempts to argue on the basis of only three authors and a handful of writings for a particular vision of Spanish modernity based on ‘‘what might have been.’’ Part of his argument rests on the notion that there exists a ‘‘master narrative of European modernity from which Spanish culture was systematically purged.’’ This is far too strongly put. No doubt Europe created a mythified ‘‘Romantic Spain,’’ and no doubt the country’s reduced position, under waning empire, made it convenient for her rivals to dismiss Spain. But one cannot forget one irreducible reality: that Spanish life in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was most emphatically provincial and often backward. Its modernity paradoxically is founded in part on that provincialness, in which romantic anguish and alienation I suspect did not necessarily play the large role for which Iarocci argues. In all these texts, Iarocci sees ‘‘the paradox of privileged pain’’ as a paradigm of liberal modernity. But when is pain not privileged? It is not possible to see the pain of others unless the self experiences its own suffering first. It is easy for the twenty-first century to view with superiority the limitations of bourgeois liberalism , the relative blindness of Don Álvaro, Tediato or Larra’s fictive self toward the powerless in society. To compare this particular paradox of privileged pain, however, to the relentless, amnesiac trivializing of collective suffering found in today’s twenty-four hour news strikes me as not only anachronistic but undeserving . The book has more typos than it should; and one historical error, which refers to the Carlist War of the 1830s as the second of these wars (it is the first). Despite my reservations, I think this is a worthwhile book that will allow readers to rethink the literature and period of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . My hope is that readers will also question some of the book’s premises while benefiting from Iarocci’s excellent analyses of individual texts in revisiting Spanish romanticism and modernity. NOËL VALIS, Yale University kanzepolsky, adriana. Un dibujo del mundo: extranjeros en Orı́genes. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2004. 299 páginas. Aunque la revista cubana que ha conseguido más influencia internacional es indudablemente Casa de las Américas, resulta casi un lugar común reconocer que 114 Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.1 (2007) es Orı́genes la mejor revista literaria del pasado siglo en Cuba. En ese pequeño grupo de revistas de ‘‘arte y literatura’’ publicadas en los años de la República (1902–1958) al margen de las instituciones estatales, la trimestre dirigida por José Lezama Lima y José Rodrı́guez Feo sobresale no sólo por su mayor duración (que no significó sin embargo mayor cantidad de números, pues Orı́genes alcanzó 40 mientras la subtitulada Revista de avance, de mayor frecuencia, llegó a 50) ni por la indiscutible calidad de los escritos poéticos y reflexivos que publicó, sino también por cierto carácter legendario que el tiempo no ha hecho más que aumentar y, sobre todo, por el destacado lugar que el grupo de poetas que se reunió en torno a ella ocupa en la poesı́a hispanoamericana del siglo pasado. Llama la atención, sin embargo, que mientras otras importantes revistas literarias del continente como la mexicana Contemporáneos y la argentina Sur han sido estudiadas con tanta agudeza como minuciosidad, no es hasta la reciente publicacio ́n de Un dibujo...