UCLA

This dissertation maps out the connections between the Cuban author José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) and a network of anti-modern intellectuals, journals, and publishing houses that had an active presence in Latin American’s public sphere during mid 20th century. My dissertation argues that in order to understand, not only Lezama’s singular position in the history of Cuban and Latin American literatures, but also some of the most characteristic and polemic features of his work —his radical critique of rational subjectivity, his explicit Catholicism, and his nostalgia for the past—, it is crucial to recuperate a context that has been largely ignored both by Lezama scholarship and traditional Latin American intellectual history. The anti-modern milieu, which took deep roots in Latin America and Europa between 1920 and 1959, embarked on a fierce critique of Modernity that transcended the paradigms of rejection and revisionism. The singularity of their critiques comes from the fact that they were able to see Modernity trough lenses that were at the same time anachronistic and contemporaneous, archaic and ultramodern.

The connections between Lezama and anti-modern writers such as Paul Claudel (1868-1955), Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), and G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), or his interest in journals such as Sur (1931-1970), Sol y Luna (1938-1943), and Cruz y Raya (1933-1936), to mention just a few, have traditionally been seen as a part of a larger debate about the orthodoxy or heterodoxy of his Catholicism. Taking a set of traditional ideas about Catholicism as a starting-point, this approach tends to emphasize the ontological and theological dimension of those interactions by reducing religion to one all-encompassing concept: transcendence. Following what appears to be a precise logic, this slant concludes that the “transcendent” poetics of the anti-modern Lezama are not only anachronistic, but have an implicit link with what Rafael Rojas has called “the formulae of authoritarian nationalism”.

My dissertation situates this debate within the rather different domains of intellectual history and comparative literature. More specifically, I propose that any assessment of Lezama’s anti-modernism should be preceded by a careful analysis of the transnational and transatlantic intellectual net that made possible the dissemination of an anti-modern agenda in cultural capitals such as Buenos Aires, Havana, Paris, and London. In this new context, the very idea of an anti-modern Lezama gains in complexity and, at the same time, offers both a more flexible framework to understand the paradoxical modernity of the Cuban writer and a way to recover an alternative response to the narratives of Modernity that have prevailed in the continent.