Abstract
This chapter explores the Spanish American modernista movement and the textual production and alteration of language that allowed writers to wield symbolic power in the cultural, journalistic, literary and political fields for several decades. Using textual examples from Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, Julian del Casal and Enrique Gómez Carrillo, the chapter incorporates the theoretical concept of Bourdieu’s “Imposition of Form” in order to think through Modernismo’s symbolic power and its wide, transnational influence at the turn of the twentieth century. It extends Bourdieu’s “imposition of form,” mediated through social institutions and the construction of the cultural field, resulting in an overcoming of the natural censorship that the sociologist sees as a direct result of deliberate formalism. In this way, Modernismo complicates literary autonomy through the wide public dissemination of its texts, and the movement’s interfield influence paradoxically increases its symbolic power across the Hispanic world.
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Notes
- 1.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 22.
- 2.
Rubén Darío , Prosas profanas (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1979), 142–43. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
- 3.
Darío , Prosas profanas, 142–43.
- 4.
I am in debt to Susana Rotker for the term “space of condensation” in her description of the modernista movement in La invención de la crónica. She writes, “el espacio de condensación […] es en este sentido, de unir formas diversas, donde los modernista intentaron—no siempre con éxito—la dualidad como sistema, la escritura como tensión y punto de encuentro entre los antagonismos: espíritu/materia, literatura/periodismo, prosa/poesía, lo importando/lo propio, el yo/lo colectivo, arte/sistemas de producción, naturaleza/artificio, hombre/animal, conformidad/denuncia” [“the space of condensation […] is in this sense one to unite diverse forms, where the modernistas attempted—not always successfully—a system of dualities, writing as tension and point of encounter between antagonisms: spirit/materiality, literature/journalism, prose/poetry, import/origin, the self/the collective, art/systems of production, nature/artifice, man/animal, conformity/rebellion”]. Susana Rotker , La invención de la crónica (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005), 53.
- 5.
See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 29–73. In addition, for more modernista criticism that incorporates Bourdieu’s work, see Jeff Browitt , “Modernismo, Rubén Darío , and the Construction of the Autonomous Literary Field in Latin America,” in Practicing Theory: Pierre Bourdieu and the Field of Cultural Production, ed. Jeff Browitt and Brian Nelson (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2004): 113–29; Miguel Gomes’ “La retórica del capital en el ensayo modernista,” Revista Iberoamericana 72.215–16 (April–September 2006): 449–65; José Eduardo González’s “Modernismo y capital simbólico,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 79.2–3 (2002): 211–28; Alejandro Mejías-López’s The Inverted Conquest (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009); and Reynolds’ The Spanish American Crónica Modernista (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012).
- 6.
Mejías-López , The Inverted Conquest, 112.
- 7.
Rodrigo Caresani uses the term “sistema modernista” to discuss the “hegemonic textualities” constructed by Rubén Darío in his extensive use of the prologue genre. In a sense, this study is a continuation of Caresani’s work by extending the construction of a systematic cultural strategy out to additional modernista authors and forms of expression.
- 8.
Ivan A. Schulman, Relecturas martianas: Narración y nación (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 15.
- 9.
Gwen Kirkpatrick, The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo: Lugones, Herrera y Reissig, and the Voices of Modern Spanish American Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 51.
- 10.
Jorge Brioso, “Ser y vivir como poeta en Cuba: Casal , Lezama y la tradición,” Hispanic Review 75.3 (2007): 265.
- 11.
Rubén Darío and Ricardo Jaimes Freyre , “Nuestros propósitos” in El Modernismo visto por los modernistas, ed. Ricardo Gullón (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1980), 47.
- 12.
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power , trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 139.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Aníbal González , “Estómago y cerebro: De sobremesa, el Simposio de Platón y la indigestión cultural,” Revista Iberoamericana 63.178–79 (January–June 1997): 237.
- 15.
González, “Estómago y cerebro,” 235.
- 16.
Since Ángel Rama’s groundbreaking work on the social factors influencing Modernismo, criticism of the movement has rather successfully demystified its aesthetic coherence to uncover extraneous factors that have contributed to modernista literary production. See also Cathy Jrade , Modernismo, Modernity and the Development of Spanish American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Julio Ramos , Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth Century Latin America, trans. John D. Blanco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Noé Jitrik , Las contradicciones del modernismo: Productividad poética y situación sociológica (México: Colegio de México, 1978); and Gerard Aching , The Politics of Spanish American Modernismo: By Exquisite Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- 17.
Amado Nervo , “El modernismo,” in El Modernismo visto por los modernistas, ed. Ricardo Gullón (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1980), 101.
- 18.
Nervo , “El modernismo,” 101–2.
- 19.
Bourdieu expands on the idea of formal gatekeeping, stating: “Any exposition of the originary thought which rejects the inspired paraphrase of the untranslatable idiolect is condemned in advance by the guardians of the sanctuary.” Bordieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 149. Hopefully the examples in this study will help to complicate the notion of modernistas as “guardians” of their formalisms or any institutionalized “sanctuary.”
- 20.
Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 145.
- 21.
Bourdieu describes the “initiated” in this way: “Indeed, despite the anathema that is poured upon them, these negated meanings still fulfill a philosophical function, since they act at least as a negative referent in relation to which philosophical distance is established, […] i.e. the initiated from the lay person who alone is responsible, through his ignorance and perversity, for the culpable evocation of vulgar meanings.” Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power , 145.
- 22.
Nervo , “El modernismo,” 99.
- 23.
Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 151.
- 24.
Pierre Bourdieu, On Television , trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (New York: The New Press, 1998), 69.
- 25.
Studies on journalism and Modernismo have flourished since the 1980’s. For book-length works on journalism and Modernismo, see González, La crónica modernista; José Ismael Gutiérrez , Perspectivas sobre el Modernismo hispanoamericano (Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 2007); Adela Pineda Franco , Geopolíticas de la cultura finisecular en Buenos Aires, París y México: las revistas literarias y el modernismo (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Latinoamericana, 2006). Ramos , Divergent Modernisites; Reynolds, The Spanish American Crónica Modernista, Temporality & Material Culture: Modernismo’s Unstoppable Presses; and Rotker, La invención de la crónica.
- 26.
Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 113.
- 27.
Julio Ramos , Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth Century Latin America, trans. John D. Blanco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 100.
- 28.
Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, “La protección a la literatura,” in Fin del siglo: Retrato de Hispanoamérica en la época modernista, ed. Robert Jay Glickman (Toronto: Canadian Academy of the Arts: 1999), 67.
- 29.
Gutiérrez Nájera, “La protección a la literatura,” 67.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
José Martí , “Julián del Casal,” in Ensayos y crónicas, ed. José Olivio Jiménez (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004), 170.
- 32.
Ángel Rama , The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 76.
- 33.
José Juan Tablada , “Los libros nuevos,” Revista moderna de México 6.4 (June 1906): 248.
- 34.
Guatemalan Enrique Gomez Carrillo once proclaimed that he was a “doctor en ciencias frívolas” [“doctor of frivolous sciences”] (“Las sibilas” 152) and “director de conciencias ligeras” [“director of light-hearted consciousnesses”] as well as “catedrático de coquetería transcendental” [“professor of transcendental flirtation”] (“El arte” 98).
- 35.
Yet some explored and represented their formal tensions within verse. Delmira Agustini’s poetry is a case in point for the subversion and reaction to formalism in modernista poetics. In her poem “Rebelión” she expresses that poetic form is tyranny and even death. She writes:
La rima es el tirano empurpurado,
es el estigma del esclavo, el grillo
que acongoja la marcha de la Idea.
¡No aleguéis que es de oro! ¡El Pensamiento
no se esclaviza a un vil cascabeleo!
Ha de ser libre de escalar las cumbres,
entero como un dios, la crin revuelta,
la frente al sol, al viento. ¿Acaso importa
que adorne el ala lo que oprime el vuelo?
[…]
¡Para morir como su ley impone
el mar no quiere diques, quiere playas!
Así la Idea cuando surca el verso
quiere al final de la ardua galería,
más que una puerta de cristal o de oro,
la pampa abierta que le grita “¡Libre!”
Agustini , “Rebelión,” in Poesías completas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 2008), 101–2.
[“Rhyme is the ennobled tyrant, / It is the stigma of the slave, the cricket / that oppresses the march of the Idea. / Do not allege that it is golden! Thought / does not enslave itself to a vile jingle! / It has to be free to scale the mountaintops / Undiminished like a god, its mane disheveled, / Its forehead facing the sun, facing the wind. Could what / adorns the wing possibly be important if it weighs down flight?”]
Cathy Jrade , Delmira Agustini, Sexual Seduction, and Vampiric Conquest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 50.
[…]
[“To die as its law demands / the sea does not want dikes, it wants beaches! / Thus the Idea when it plows poetry / wants at the end of the arduous passageway, / more than a door of crystal or gold, / the open pampa which shouts ‘Free!’”]
Jrade , Delmira Agustini, 52.
- 36.
Rubén Darío , quoted in Ricardo Rojas, “Rubén Darío ,” Revista Moderna de México 10.3 (May 1908): 172.
- 37.
Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, 151.
- 38.
Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, 152.
- 39.
Although modernistas often railed against the effects of journalism on literary production, (Julián del Casal proclaimed “Yes! Journalism, as we still understand it to be, is the most nefarious institution” (Qtd. in Ramos , Divergent Modernities, 98), they also regularly expressed interest in its creative function. Darío wrote: “Un intelectual no encontrará en la tarea periodística sino una gimnasia que le robustece. El reporter tiene una misión que parece modesta y, sin embargo, es interesantísima y vasta” (Darío , “París: Hombres…” 81) [“In her journalistic labor, an intellectual will only find a gymnasium open and ready to strengthen her. The reporter has a seemingly modest mission that, nevertheless, is vast and fascinating”].
- 40.
Rubén Darío , “Los asuntos de Nicaragua,” in Escritos inéditos de Rubén Darío, ed. E.K. Mapes (New York: Instituto de las Españas, 1938), 164.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Rubén Darío , “Las palabras y los actos de Mr. Roosevelt: Protesta de un escritor,” in La República de Panamá y otras crónicas desconocidas, ed. Jorge Eduardo Arellano (Managua: Academia Nicargüense de la Lengua, 2011), 289.
- 43.
See Darío’s “El triunfo de Calibán,” Martí’s “Nuestra América” and José Enrique Rodó’s “Ariel” for canonical anti-imperialIst essays. Also see Rufino Blanco-Fombona’s “La americanizacion del mundo,” and Manuel Ugarte’s “El peligro yanqui.”
- 44.
Ellen Peel , “Subject, Object and the Alternation of First- and Third-Person Narration in Novels by Alther, Atwood, and Drabble: Toward a Theory of a Feminist Aesthetics,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 30.2 (1989): 108. Peel studies how this narrative alternation results in a “feminist aesthetic” and the female burden of representation as both subject and object. It is also a burden in Darío’s case, but one he is able to reconcile and incorporate into a forceful representation of poetic authority.
- 45.
Loïc J.D. Wacquant, “From Ruling Class to Field of Power: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu on La nobles d’État,” Theory, Culture & Society 10 (1993): 21.
- 46.
Bourdieu proclaims that “It is essential that those designated as heirs agree to accept their inheritance, and that they devote themselves to its aggrandizement, which should not be taken for granted (Wacquant, “From Ruling Class,” 21). Darío never seems to take his status as literato for granted during his lifetime.
- 47.
Darío , “Los asuntos,” 165.
- 48.
María Salgado , “Literatura y sinceridad en las semblanzas de Rubén Darío ,” Magazine Modernista 14 (2010): n. p. Web. July 1, 2013.
- 49.
Salgado , “Literatura ysinceridad,” n. p.
- 50.
Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 171–72.
- 51.
Darío , “Los asuntos,” 165.
- 52.
Darío , “Los asuntos,” 166–67.
- 53.
Darío , “Los asuntos,” 167.
- 54.
Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 144.
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Reynolds, A. (2018). Bourdieu’s Imposition of Form and Modernismo: The Symbolic Power of a Literary Movement. In: Sánchez Prado, I. (eds) Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71809-5_2
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