Rubén Darío Visits Ricardo Palma: Tradition, Cosmopolitanism, and the Development of an Independent Latin American Literature

• Published in: Chasqui Vol. 36; no. 1; pp. 48 - 61
• Main Author: de Castro, Juan E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Tempe Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana 01.05.2007; Arizona State University - Languages and Literatures
• Subjects: American literature; Chinese culture; Cosmopolitanism; Culture; Essays; French language; French literature; Hispanic Americans; Irony; Language history; Latin American culture; Latin American literature; Literary criticism; Literary translation; Modernism; Modernist art; Modernist poetry; Narrative poetry; Poetry; Poets; Spanish; Traditions; Writers; New York; Mexico; California; Chile
• ISSN: 0145-8973

[...]in 1925, the populist politician Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre had claimed that "Palma was a writer of tradiciones but not a traditionalist," and that "no institution or person of the colony . . . escaped the frequently accurate bite of the irony, sarcasm, and always ridicule of Palmas' criticism" (quoted in.Mariátegui 247; for a summary of the critical debates around the Tradiciones, see Rodríguez-Arenas, especially 405-08). The rigid asceticism prescribed, or at least presented as exemplary, by the colonial Church, is substituted by the representation of Christ as a benevolent bon-vivant. [...]the role played by the virginal bride and the reason given for Jesus's return to Jerusalem-to maintain peace between the Samaritan woman and Mary Magdalene-contradicts the frequently extreme ecclesiastic misogyny, which, for instance, reached an apex in the behavior of Francisco de Aguiar y Seixas, Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz's persecutor, who, according to colonial sources quoted by Octavio Paz, "tried to avoid even a glimpse of a woman's face" (Sor Juana 408). [...]if Palma, though knowledgeable of European trends-he visited Paris in 1864 and, as we have seen, translated Victor Hugo-used the Spanish American and Peruvian colonial cultural traditions as the starting point for his attempt at creating a national republican literature, Darío, despite not having traveled outside Spanish America before publishing Azul, would attempt to become a version of a French writer. Robert, while a relative late-comer to the U.S. business world, is thus far from an isolated example. [...]implicit in the story is the central economic role of the United States in late nineteenth century Spanish America-it mediates between the exchange of goods between China and Chile-and its role as a magnet for immigration.10 Thus, in spite of their obvious cosmopolitanism, Dario's writings reflect the actual breakdown of Spanish cultural hegemony in the region, as well as the expansion of the region's economic and populational contacts with the rest of the world. [...]as we have seen, Darío, even at his most ethereal, developed a poetic and narrative discourse that was also rooted in the specific social and cultural reality of the Latin America of his time. [...]the mutual admiration between Dario and Palma can serve as an example of a frequent compatibility hidden behind the facades of cosmopolitanism and regionalism, of the universal and the local. 1 According to Anderson: "We owe the 'coinage' of 'modernism' as an aesthetic movement to a Nicaraguan poet, writing in a Guatemalan journal of a literary encounter in Peru" (3).