Humanism and Deshumanización – Fiction and Philosophy of a Transatlantic Avant-Garde by Robert Snider Wells
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Humanism and Deshumanización – Fiction and Philosophy of a Transatlantic Avant-Garde by Robert Snider Wells A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Romance Languages and Literatures: Spanish) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Juli A. Highfill, Co-Chair Professor Gareth Williams, Co-Chair Professor Cristina Moreiras-Menor Associate Professor Santiago Colas “The beautiful stands on quite a different footing […].” Immanuel Kant – Critique of Judgment “In a word, Beauty must be exhibited as a necessary condition of humanity.” Friedrich Schiller – On the Aesthetic Education of Man “Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivety rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.” Friedrich Nietzsche – Twilight of the Idols “Es un síntoma de pulcritud mental querer que las fronteras entre las cosas estén bien demarcadas.” José Ortega y Gasset – La deshumanización del arte © Robert Snider Wells 2011 Acknowledgements To begin, I would like to acknowledge the co-chairs of my dissertation committee, Juli Highfill and Gareth Williams. Thanks to their insight and encouragement, what was once a rather ambitious and sprawling idea is now a completed, if still somewhat sprawling, dissertation project. Juli, your enthusiasm for the project has never wavered, which, in turn, has always inspired me to keep going. Gareth, your ability to help me get to the pith of whatever it might be that I am trying to say has served to enhance and sharpen my own ability to adequately express the matter at hand. I would also like to thank the other two members of my dissertation committee, Cristina Moreiras-Menor and Santiago Colas. The seed for my dissertation project was planted many moons ago – in my first semester in graduate school at the University of Michigan, in fact – thanks to a paper on José Ortega y Gasset and Walter Benjamin that I wrote for Cristina’s graduate seminar on “War.” Cristina, you were very positive in your response to the paper, which let me know that I was possibly on the right track. And Yago, you have taught me so many things. In line with all that I have learned from you, I have subsequently been able to teach others and live myself according to a similar pedagogical/empirical spirit of curiosity, openness, and wonder – no matter whether it be in regards to “the eternal return” or “the eternal return that is the forever underachieving Kansas men’s basketball team.” Thanks, then, to all of you, for all of this. A special thanks goes out to all of the students that I have had in class in my five years of teaching at the University of Michigan. As I have tried to teach you, you have ii taught me as well. And, hopefully, we all had fun together while learning about el subjuntivo and about a strange man who just so happens to vomit up bunny rabbits. My students have shown me how much I love teaching and how much their thoughts and analyses frame my own when it comes to both my research and my life. I no doubt would not have been able to complete my dissertation and perform all the research necessary to do so without the generous financial aid that I have received over the years from both the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Rackham Graduate School. Thanks to the fellowships and funds that I have been awarded from both entities, I was able to examine all the revistas that are so key to my project and, what is more, see the world. To my friends, I owe you all so much – Geoff Perrin, Forest Juziuk, Baaron Lindell, Patty Keller, Jon Snyder, Brad Hales (KTF, mate!), D3PO, Alan Itkin, and Topher Davis, plus all my friends and colleagues in RLL, all my fellow DJs and collectros on the soul and funk circuit, all my peoples in Kansas and around the world – To all of you, thanks for being who you are, thanks for helping me to be who I am. Thanks for sharing. And, finally, to my family – Mom, Dad, Brother Jay, Brother Curtis – thanks for your continued and undying love and support. I love you all, with every fiber of my being. Together, we’ve come so far. And, yet – We’ve only just begun…to live! iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Abstract v Chapter 1 – A Transatlantic Avant-Garde – An Introduction 1 1.1 – Lo Nuevo 28 1.2 – Revista Culture 34 1.3 – Un Tal “Meridiano Intelectual” 43 1.4 – Síntesis 57 2 – Of Currents and Bodies – Ramón, Marinetti Borges, Ortega 67 2.1 – Una “Salutación” and “El concepto de la nueva 68 literatura” – Ramón 2.2 – El Futurismo – Marinetti 86 2.3 – El Ultraísmo and the Argentine Avant-Garde – Borges, et al. 100 2.4 – Ortega’s Designs Of, For, and On a New Generation 130 2.5 – Ortega In and On Argentina 149 3 – Humanism, Aesthetics, Politics 160 3.1 – Deshumanización – An Orteguian Critique? 194 3.2 – La ficción deshumanizada – Pedro Salinas 214 4 – Order or Disorder – Masses, Morals, and Rebellions 234 4.1 – Ortega Returns to Argentina 266 4.2 – The Humanist Passions of Eduardo Mallea 282 5 – Order and Disorder – Society, Misanthropy, and Traitorous Joy in 296 Roberto Arlt 5.1 – Wills to Powers – El Astrólogo and La Sociedad Secreta 298 5.2 – Silvio Astier’s In Between Days 330 6 – Art, Good and Bad, in Life, Love, and Death – Macedonio Fernández 358 6.1 – First, the “Last Bad Novel” 394 6.2 – Conclusions and Future Relations, By Means of the “First 420 Good Novel” Works Cited 449 iv Abstract This dissertation treats the narrative fiction, philosophical essays, and the revistas (cultural/aesthetic/philosophical journals) published and disseminated by the Argentine and Spanish avant-gardes between 1918 and 1936. I argue that the multifaceted relationships formed within this cross-cultural exchange are constituitive of a transatlantic avant-garde assemblage. The key compositors in this assemblage’s constitution are Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Jorge Luis Borges, and José Ortega y Gasset. Additionally, the translatlantic revista, Síntesis, is presented as a case study that confirms my hypothesis regarding the transatlantic nature of this specific avant-garde assemblage. Within this assemblage, the avant-garde’s aesthetic expressions and philosophical figurations of the human provide it its unique composition and consistency. As I further submit, avant-garde notions regarding the relationship between the human and the aesthetic can often be genealogically traced to German humanistic and anti-humanistic philosophies, such as those that emerge out of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, and Nietzsche’s general ouevre. A thinker trained in German philosophy, Ortega acts as the primary transatlantic avant-garde figure that rides an alternately transparent and turbid wave of thought and practice revolving around the human. In El tema de nuestro tiempo, La deshumanización del arte, and La rebelión de las masas, Ortega complicates and radicalizes certain humanistic concepts in the name of dehumanized aesthetics, hierarchical order, and reactionary politics. Ortega’s influence in Argentina can be seen in the work of Eduardo v Mallea, whose book, Historia de una pasión argentina, recapitulates many of Ortega’s basic theses. Many other vanguardists receive racical ideas from both their avant-garde contemporaries and from the German philosophical tradition, though not all follow Ortega down a path toward conservatism. The Spanish writer, Pedro Salinas, utilizes a dehumanized aesthetic technique in Víspera del gozo, but does so in order to critique Ortega’s limited epistemological approach. Meanwhile, the Argentine novelists, Roberto Arlt and Macedonio Fernández, propose their own radical alternatives in hopes of freeing life from such limited models. Arlt does so in El juguete rabioso, Los siete locos, and Los lanzallamas, while Macedonio does so Adriana Buenos Aires and Museo de la Novela de la Eterna. vi Chapter 1 A Transatlantic Avant-Garde – An Introduction “La modernidad de la Estética ya es un concepto definitivamente asentado por el pensar filosófico.” Carlos Astrada – “El juicio estético” “Intentaré una exégesis.” Jorge Luis Borges – “Al margen de la moderna estética” After the Great War, as the dawn of a new century brought about the dawn of a new destiny that came to be known as modernity, what did it mean to be a human being living in what, by all appearances, appeared to be a new and modern world? What did modernity promise to give to humanity? What did the new promise? And the avant- garde? What promises did it make? How did writers, thinkers, and philosophers – how did creators and vanguardists – express these promises, these new ways of living? What are their stories? How did they write them? What aesthetic, political, social, and ideological theories and philosophies gave shape to these promises and stories, and, perhaps, to the world – itself an eternally-returning promise, a never-ending story? These are but some of the questions that frame the investigation that follows. In order to rein in such expansive, complex questions, the current study addresses them within the transatlantic context of Spain and Argentina during the time of the avant- gardes, or las vanguardias, from approximately the end of World War One (1918) to the 1 outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936).1 The literary works, philosophical essays, and revistas (literary, philosophical, and cultural journals) composed and issued by las vanguardias in Spain and Argentina serve as the primary points of departure. Additionally, the origins of las vanguardias will be genealogically traced back to the advent of Italian futurism in 1909 and further still to German Idealistic, Romantic, and Nietzschean philosophies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.