Reinventing Modernity in Latin America pp 109-141 | Cite as
Translating the Past into the Present: The Synthesizing Modernity of Alfonso Reyes
Chapter
Abstract
The idea that historical rupture is fundamental to the condition of modernity, as proposed by Marshall Berman and others, has been widely questioned in Latin America. Conservatives have not been alone in expressing fears about the consequences of profound upheaval: even revolutionary movements, committed to modernizing policies, have tended to cast themselves not so much as a break with the past as the culmination of its underlying trends. When Castro declared that history would absolve him, he was not only expressing faith in the judgment of the future, but also claiming legitimacy from his identification with a long line of “rebels against tyranny,” from the sages of ancient India and China all the way down the centuries to Rousseau and Tom Paine.2 The Mexican Revolution was born alongside “a burning defence of the past”;3 the Cuban Revolution declared its own end of history long before Fukuyama wrote his famous book; and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua represented their revolution as the long-deferred triumph of Sandino’s heroic struggle against U.S. occupation in the 1920s. Latin American revolutions have tended not to repudiate the past, as happened in France and Soviet Russia, but instead, to stake a claim to transcendent continuity based on creative assimilation of the past.
Keywords
Mexico City Literary Critic Mexican State Grand Narrative Mexican Culture
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- 2.Fidel Castro, “History Will Absolve Me” [1953], in Fidel Castro and Regis Debray, On Trial, Lorrimer Publishing, London, 1968, pp. 62–5.Google Scholar
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- 6.Alberto Gerchunoff, “Prólogo” to Alfonso Reyes, Aquellos días [1938], in Reyes, Obras completas, vol. III, p. 310. References in this chapter are to works by Alfonso Reyes unless otherwise stated. Most are taken from the 26-volume edition of his Obras completas published by Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1956–1993, hereafter OC.Google Scholar
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- 30.Boyd G. Carter, Las revistas literarias de Hispanoamerica: Breve historia y contenido, Ediciones de Andrea, Mexico City, 1959, p. 19. During the 1920s, there were 12 in the capital and 10 elsewhere (declining to only 10 throughout Mexico during the 1930s).Google Scholar
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- 66.Reyes translated three works by Chesterton: a short social history of England, Pequena historia de Inglaterra, Editorial Calleja, Madrid, 1920; the first collection of Father Brown stories, El candor del Padre Brown, Editorial Calleja, Madrid, 1921; and the novel El hombre que fue jueves, Editorial Calleja, Madrid, 1922.Google Scholar
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- 155.Adolfo Castanon argued that what Reyes taught was “the modest but difficult art of walking in language” [el modesto si dificil arte de caminar en el lenguaje]. Alfonso Reyes, p. 61.Google Scholar
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© Nicola Miller 2008