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Lino Novás Calvo's ‘the Other Key’: the Other Insular Space in the Hispanic Caribbean

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569321003590011

1469-9575

Jorge Marturano,

Hispanic-African Historical Relations

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement I want to thank Isis Sadek for her insightful help with the translation of this article and her constant feedback and comments about its contents and organization. Her suggestions have been key in shaping this article. Notes 1 See Ileana Rodríguez Rodríguez, Ileana. 1994. House/Garden/Nation, Durham: Duke University Press. [Google Scholar] for an early consideration (1994) and then an expanded consideration (2004) of this spatial approach, and Dara Goldman and Ben A. Heller Heller, Ben A. 1996. Landscape, femininity, and Caribbean Discourse. MLN, 111(2): 391–416. [Google Scholar] for a more specific reading of insularity in the Cuban context. See also Damián Fernández and Madeline Cámara Betancourt's Fernández, Damián and Betancourt, Madeline Camara, eds. 2000. Cuba, the Elusive Nation: Interpretations of National Identity, Gainesville: University of Florida. [Google Scholar] edited collection, especially Jorge Duany's article (‘Reconstructing Cubanness…’). 2 Mañach distinguished four periods: the imitatitive period (colonial times until 1820), the speculative period (1820–1868), the executive period (1868 until independence) and the acquisitive period (the first two decades of the Republic), which Mañach, as most of the intellectuals of the period, identified with decay and decadence. 3 This corpus includes most of the writings of Jorge Mañach, Ramiro Guerra Guerra, Ramiro. 1970. Azúcar y población en las Antillas, La Habana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales. [Google Scholar], José Lezama Lima Lezama Lima, José. 1975. “Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez [1938]”. In Obras Completas, Madrid: Aguilar. [Google Scholar] and Fernando Ortiz Ortiz, Fernando. 1978. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, Caracas: Ayacucho. [Google Scholar]. See Rojas (2008 Rojas, Rafael. 2008. Motivos de Anteo. Patria y nación en la historia intelectual de Cuba, Madrid: Colibrí. [Google Scholar]) for an analysis of the problem of ‘the nation’ in Cuban intellectual history. 4 For a very insightful overview of the meaning of mestizaje in Latin America, including Brazil, see Marilyn Miller Miller, Marilyn Grace. 2004. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America, Austin: University of Texas Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. 5 This is most notably the case in some Afro-Hispanic literary examples such as the first episode (‘Los orígenes’) of Manuel Zapata Olivella's Zapata Olivella, Manuel. 1983. Changó, el gran Putas, Bogotá: La oveja negra. [Google Scholar] epic novel, Changó, el gran putas. 6 See Michael Dash Dash, Michael. 2003. Anxious Insularity: Identity Politics and Creolization in the Caribbean. Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society, 27(1): 287–99. [Google Scholar] for another perspective on insularity that takes into account Edouard Glissant's theory of a relational poetics. Glissant, through the influence of Gilles Deleuze Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. “Desert Islands”. In Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-74), Edited by: Lapoujade, David. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Trans. Michael Taormina [Google Scholar] and a more consciously postcolonial position, emphasized dislocation and rootlessness and managed to think insularity in a much less territorialized way than has historically been done in the Hispanic Caribbean. 7 See Arcadio Díaz Quiñ Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio. 2006. Sobre los principios. Los intelectuales caribeños y la tradición, Buenos Aires: Universidad de Quilmes. [Google Scholar]ones for a comparison between Pedreira Pedreira, Antonio. 2001. Insularismo: ensayos de interpretación puertorriqueña, Edited by: Baralt, Mercedes López. San Juan: Plaza Mayor. [Google Scholar] and Guerra. See also Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé Cruz Malavé, Arnaldo. 1998. Lezama y el insularismo: una problemática de los orígenes. Ideologies and Literatures, 3(2): 185–96. [Google Scholar] and Dara Goldman (2008 Goldman, Dara. 2008. Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. [Google Scholar]) for Lezama Lima's own approach to the ‘myth of insularity’. For an important reflection on Lezama Lima's later formulation of his theory of culture, see Pérez Firmat (1999 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. 1999. “The Strut of the Centipede”. In My Own Private Cuba: Essays on Cuban Literature and Culture, Boulder: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies. [Google Scholar]). 8 Having lived the life of a poor immigrant in Cuba was without a doubt a defining formative experience. In a letter to José Antonio Portuondo Portuondo, José Antonio. 1945. “Introducción”. In No sé quien soy by Lino Novas Calvo, 5–12. México: Colección Lunes. [Google Scholar], he states: ‘I have always been with the underdogs, with those who are trampled upon. […] I haven't found a unique truth […] But I will always stand by this feeling: I am with the poor people, with the little ones, those who have been left out, those who suffer’ (Romero and Castillo 2002 Romero, Cira and Castillo, Marcia, eds. 2002. Cuestiones privadas. Correspondencia a José Antonio Portuondo, Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente. [Google Scholar]: 164). 9 After working at the factory, he became a botero, a kind of informal cab driver, until he was rediscovered by chance by one of the editors of the Revista de Avance, the avant-garde journal founded by the minorista group (Roses 1986 Roses, Lorraine Elena. 1986. Voice of the Storyteller. Cuba's Lino Novás Calvo, Westport: Greenwood Press. [Google Scholar]: 4–5). The short stories ‘La noche de Ramón Yendía’ (The Dark Night of Ramón Yendía) and ‘En las afueras’ (On the Outskirts) are two of the most well-known stories about the world of cab drivers. For more details on Novás Calvo's biography see Roses, Souza and Espinosa Domínguez (2004). 10 In his introduction to Novás Calvo's No sé quien soy (I don't know who I am), Portuondo considers that ‘Lino Novás Calvo Novás Calvo, Lino. 1945. No sé quien soy, México: Colección Lunes. [Google Scholar] is the most outstanding writer among Cuban narrators and that he is one of the first who writes in our language’ (1945: 4). He most likely refers to the change that Novás Calvo introduces in the Cuban narrative of the period when he compares his fiction to English-language writers in the sense that it doesn't fit into the traditional, locally adopted models for the genre of the short story, which was still heavily influence by the Spanish naturalist tradition. 11 The circumstances in which Novás Calvo's Novás Calvo, Lino. 1959. El otro cayo, México: Ediciones Nuevo Mundo. [Google Scholar] collection of short stories El otro cayo (1959) was published in Mexico are particularly revealing of the way in which his narrative production was construed. The volume was part of the series entitled ‘Comprensión de Cuba’, published alongside Montenegro's prison novel and Enrique Labrador Ruiz's ‘realist’ novel. The list of titles eloquently conveys the editorial attempt to insert Novas Calvo's collection in a realist canon, as it includes Montenegro's novel Hombres sin mujer, Labrador Ruiz's novel La sangre hambrienta, Humberto Arenal's novel El sol a plomo and Y mi honda es la de David, a collection of essays by José Martí. 12 Montenegro is a contemporary of Novás Calvo. He is also considered as one of the innovators of narrative prose in the period going from late 1920s to the 1940s. An important portion of his best writings deals with prison and incarceration. 13 See Roberto González Echeverría's Gonzalez Echevarría, Roberto. 1995. Canaima y los libros de la selva. Casa de las Américas, 201: 22–31. [Google Scholar] excellent article ‘Canaima y los libros de la selva’ in which he analyses Rómulo Gallegos's Canaima as a novel that fully expose the implementation of capitalist exploitation in Latin America. 14 The Spanish Diccionario de la Real Academia Cayo. 2001. Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, 22nd edn. [Google Scholar] (RAE) considers the word ‘cayo’ (key) to have a distinctly Antillean origin and it defines it as ‘cualquiera de las islas rasas, arenosas, frecuentemente anegadizas y cubiertas en gran parte de mangle, muy comunes en el mar de las Antillas y en el golfo mexicano’ (any of the low and sandy islands, frequently prone to flooding and covered on most of its surface by mangrove, very common in the Caribbean basin). The Oxford English Dictionary (1989, 2nd edn.) defines a key as ‘A low island, sand-bank, or reef, such as those common in the West Indies or off the coast of Florida’. What is referred to in the Spanish definition is closer to the space that is evoked in Novás Calvo's short stories. 15 Critics recognized this phantasmagorical characteristic early on, identifying it with a magical aspect (as Enrique Anderson-Imbert and Ángel Flores did; see Espinosa Domínguez [2004] for his discussion of this aspect of critics' reception). To my knowledge, Sergio Fernández's Fernández, Sergio. 1958. “‘El otro cayo’: vía de redención”. In Cinco escritores hispanoamericanos, 89–111. México: UNAM. [Google Scholar] article is the only example of an analysis of ‘El otro cayo’ (until Souza's and Roses's books) in which he also stressed the magical aspect of the story. Subsequent critics such as Souza, Roses, Romero, Garrandés and Espinosa Domí Espinoza Domínguez, Carlos. 2005. “Introducción”. In Otras maneras de contar by Lino Novás Calvo, 9–20. Barcelona: Tusquets. [Google Scholar]nguez have analysed much more closely the relationship between this aspect and Novás Calvo's innovative (expressionist and modernized) realism. 16 Roses translates the title as ‘On the Island’, but I am following Raymond Souza in the use of the word ‘key’. Unless indicated otherwise, all the translations from Novás Calvo's short stories are mine. The versions of the short stories published in Revista de Occidente and in the book collections are not exactly the same. See Roses (61–4) for a comparison between the different versions of these stories. The change of title to include ‘En el cayo’ in Cayo Canas (after publishing it without changing its title in La luna nona) could be understood as a way of addressing the existence of another key in another story (‘Cayo Canas’), but, as I explain later, it also could be interpreted in relation to the story narrated in the short story itself. 17 ‘Maroon’ doesn't necessarily refer to the fugitive slave but rather more widely to a fugitive. Interestingly enough the second definition in the OED points out that the transitive form of the verb ‘maroon’ (‘to maroon someone’) is related not to flight, but to confinement, since it means ‘To put (a person) ashore on a desolate island or coast, to be left there esp. as a form of punishment’. It is the fourth definition of the verb that refers specifically to the slaves' flight (Oxford English Dictionary 1989, 2nd edn.). 18 The first version of this short story, published as ‘En el cayo’ (‘In the Key’) in the Revista de Occidente, stressed the narrator's perspective: ‘This is what I have to tell you: something in my memory, eating away at me, and I must descend to clear away the stones that the years have piled over it and bring out for you’ (trans. and cit. by Roses, 1986 Roses, Lorraine Elena. 1986. Voice of the Storyteller. Cuba's Lino Novás Calvo, Westport: Greenwood Press. [Google Scholar]: 65). Roses considers that the deletion of this first paragraph is an example of how this later, abridged, version, is ‘shorn of its imagistic embellishment’ (1986: 65). In my opinion, however, the fact that the inscription of the narrator is less noticeable makes the beginning of the story more intriguing, and is therefore more functional to the multiplicity of voices that appear in the short story. 19 Although their chronological setting is never too clearly specified, Novás Calvo Novás Calvo, Lino. 2005. Otras maneras de contar, Barcelona: Tusquets. [Google Scholar]'s short stories seem to be set in the period that runs from the second decade of the twentieth century to the 1940s. ‘El otro cayo’ seems to be quite contemporary to the moment of publication because there are references to the prison of Isla de Pinos (2005: 65) and to the ‘Prohibition’ period (2005: 61) in the USA. 20 The amendment disguised this obligation as a commercial transaction by stating that Cuba had to ‘sell or lease’ to the USA ‘lands necessary for coaling or naval stations’. It was obviously the USA, not Cuba, who determined whether and when these lands were ‘necessary’ to them. See Louis A. Pérez Jr Pérez, Louis A. Jr. 1991. Cuba under the Platt Amendment, 1902–34, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. [Google Scholar]. for a detailed analysis of Cuba under this constitutional Amendment. 21 Souza finds that this feature, ‘the combination of a first-person narrator and a series of voices’, is the ‘most striking similarity’ (39) between the first two stories published in Revista de Occidente (‘La luna de los ñáñigos’ [The Moon of Ñáñigos] – later renamed as ‘En las afueras’ [On the Outskirts] – and ‘En el cayo’ [In the Key], later known as ‘El otro cayo’). 22 Just as in ‘En las afueras’ (On the Outskirts), there is a relation between the activity performed and identity. In this short story which takes place in a solar (tenement building), the Galician immigrant Garrida is the only white person living among the solar's residents and she finds herself at a crossroads in which white people blamed her for her relationship with black people and the black people in the solar blamed her for their bad luck. The motive of incineration and turning into charcoal also appears prominently in this story. As her boss tells her: ‘you have become black inside. Women like you that become black should be incinerated. Their skin should be carbonized […]’ (2005: 50). A mentally disturbed woman sets fire to Garrida's white son who, once carbonized, is perceived as if he were black. Far from leaving the tenement building, Garrida keeps on living among them, becoming black by her participation in ritual dances. In the 1932 version, the references to the Abakúa sect and its rituals are more prominently displayed, something that Novás Calvo Novás Calvo, Lino. 1942. La luna nona y otros cuentos, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nuevo Romance. [Google Scholar] tamed down in the 1942 version included in La luna nona, changing its title from ‘La luna de los ñáñigos’ to ‘En las afueras’. Roses specifically compares the two versions (1986: 60–1). 23 For different accounts of the consideration of plantation as a site of identity formation, see the volume edited by Hillary McD. Beckles Beckles, Hilary McD., ed. 1996. Inside Slavery: Process and Legacy in the Caribbean Experience, Mona, Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press, The University of the West Indies. [Google Scholar]. Antonio Benítez Rojo is still an important source in this respect. See also Michel-Rolph Trouillot Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1992. The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21: 19–42. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] for an understanding of the cultural theory concerned with the social and anthropological dynamics in place in the Caribbean. For a seminal work on plantation society, see Manuel Moreno Fraginals Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. 1978. El ingenio: complejo económico social cubano del azúcar, Edited by: Traviesas, Luis M. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. [Google Scholar]. 24 Paton emphasized how ‘the construction of a dense state-organized system of prisons began not with the emancipation but at the high point of slave-based wealth in Jamaica’ (3), stressing how the set of oppositions contrasting slavery, private penal power and flogging, on one side, and free labour, state authority to punish and imprisonment, on the other, has obscured the fact that ‘slavery relied on prisons; and that slave-holders made direct use of imprisonment, both on and off their estates’ (6). Her first chapter, ‘Prison and Plantation’, studies specifically the extent to which these two institutions became historically and conceptually related. It is also important to take notice of a long-standing tradition in Afro-American literature that links the two institutions inextricably, as can be seen in Tara Green's Green, Tara, ed. 2008. From the Plantation to the Prison: African-American Confinement Literature, Macon: Mercer University Press. [Google Scholar] volume. 25 Isla de Pinos, the second biggest island of the Cuban archipelago, served as a kind of penal colony during the nineteenth century, and the Presidio Modelo was built during Gerardo Machado's government by inmates organized as if they were in a forced labour camp. Forced labour, on the other hand, was a common punishment under Spanish rule as can be seen in José Martí's El presidio político en Cuba, and it was Valeriano Weyler, as governor of Cuba, who began the practice of the 'reconcentrados', the displacement and herding of the population in concentration camps during the War of Independence. 26 It is worth observing that when ‘one’ Jiménez becomes ill, the narrator refers to the other one by his name, as if illness humanized him and distinguished him from his brother. This technique is used to its fullest effect when the narrative voice ceases to refer to ‘a’ Balseiro and speaks of ‘the’ Balseiro, conveying that one of the brothers has died. 27 See the third volume of Jorge Castellanos and Isabel Castellanos's Castellanos, Jorge and Castellanos, Isabel. 1994. Cultura Afrocubana, 4 Vols, Miami: Ediciones Universal. [Google Scholar] Cultura Afrocubana, for a detailed account of the contents of Afro-Cuban religious beliefs. This volume is dedicated to the analysis of the lucumí and conga reglas and of the Sociedad Secreta Abakuá. Because of its connotations, the authors reject the term ‘animism’. They nevertheless admit that this term could be useful to characterize the fact that in these belief systems, the entire natural universe seems to possess a will of its own. For Espinosa Domínguez, ‘Novás Calvo's gaze isn't that of a folklorist and ethnologist’, as he instead paid special attention to ‘the magical components of these beliefs, which helped him give a proper atmosphere to the short stories in which the supernatural takes place. That's why the religious ingredients and motifs are included with extreme paucity’ (2005: 15), contrary to the negrista tradition's foregrounding of these motifs and themes. 28 Roses has noticed this in her parallel with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1986: 64). Novás Calvo has acknowledged in a interview with her the similar conception about the belief in the soul of things he shared with Conrad (1983: 3). 29 It is useful here to recall Alberto Moreiras's Moreiras, Alberto. 2004. “Introduction: the Conflict in Transculturation”. In Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History, Edited by: Valdes, Mario J. and Kadir, Djelal. 129–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar] consideration that in Latin America ‘transculturation is the original sin of cultural production’ in the sense that there is ‘no Latin-American culture without transculturation’ (129), and indicates the two main uses of this concept, as ‘a descriptive word for any kind of cultural mixing’ and as a ‘critical concept’ (130) as Angel Rama has used it. It is against this second meaning that Novás Calvo, in my interpretation, works, separating himself from a ‘Latin American literary system understood as a field of integration and mediation’ (quoted by Moreiras, 130). 30 See Rojas (1998 Rojas, Rafael. 1998. Islas sin fin. Contribución a la crítica del nacionalismo cubano, Miami: Ediciones Universal. [Google Scholar]), whose ‘La diferencia cubana’ addresses ‘the meta-narrative of national identity’ (1998: 105) which Rojas proposes to deconstruct. For Rojas, Sarduy's conception of Cuban culture is ‘not a hierarchy nor a synthesis […], but, instead, a superposition or overlapping’, and that's why, following Sarduy's Escrito sobre un cuerpo, Rojas states that his ‘novels are intended to show the archeological layers of that secular montage’ (1998: 112). 31 For Garrandés, Novas Calvo ‘represents the turning point of contemporary Spanish-American prose […] especially on the path towards two of its most influential and rich poetics in the 20th century, and particularly from the second part of the 1940s onwards: the real maravilloso and the magical realism’ (101). Novás Calvo Novás Calvo, Lino. 1932. ‘En el cayo’. Revista de Occidente, 37(107): 235–69. [Google Scholar] had no small number of apologists (the list of critics who praised him included Enrique Anderson-Imbert, Antonio José Portuondo, Ángel Flores, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Ambrosio Fornet, among many others), but Novás Calvo himself was the first to acknowledge his uneasiness regarding his place, or the lack of one comparable to the ‘big names’ in Latin American literature, even though he was more important than Alejo Carpentier in the short story genre until the fifties and even some time after that (González Echevarría 1999). Since the end of the 1980s his work has been partially republished and its reappraisal has begun to gather momentum (inside Cuba, beginning with Jesús Díaz and Lisandro Otero's articles in La Gaceta de Cuba and Unión, and also gaining the unanimous admiration of the young generation of Cuban critics and writers of the 1990s: Garrandés, Romero Romero, Cira. 2003. “Prólogo”. In Angusola y los cuchillos by Lino Novás Calvo, 5–27. Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente. [Google Scholar], Arango and Abilio Estévez, who wrote the prologue for the new edition of El negrero in 1999, as well as Espinosa Domínguez, who re-edited a good part of his short stories in 2005, to name just a few). 32 In his move to canonize Novás Calvo among the Cuban ‘superstar novelists’ – the denomination used by an issue of Revista Iberoamericana dedicated to the international projection of Cuban literature – Seymour Menton Menton, Seymour. 2001. Cuba's Hegemonic Novelists. Latin American Research Review, 36(4): 260–6. [Google Scholar] comments that ‘he became embittered in his later years by his political exile and his failure to share in the great success of the writers of the Boom’ (261). Though Ángel Flores in the 1950s included Novás Calvo among the ‘magical realist’ writers, and although his name was usually included in the early lists of writers associated with the Boom, it is obvious that Novás Calvo was quite secondary in comparison with the most renowned writers of the Boom generation. Julio Rodríguez Rodríguez-Luis, Julio. 1975. Lino Novás Calvo y la historia de Cuba. Symposium, 29(4): 281–93. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] emphasized that as his later writings aimed to attack the Cuban revolution he was at odds with the Boom's contemporary critics (281). See Espinosa Domínguez (2004) and his Introduction to Otras maneras de contar (2005) for a further account of Novás Calvo's relationship with the Boom and magical realism.