This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University]On: 09 October 2014, At: 17:13Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

ANQ: A Quarterly Journalof Short Articles, Notes andReviewsPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vanq20

Introduction: Hispanic Writersand American LiteratureEdward F. Stanton aa University of KentuckyPublished online: 24 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Edward F. Stanton (1997) Introduction: Hispanic Writers andAmerican Literature, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews,10:2, 3-7, DOI: 10.1080/08957699709602263

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08957699709602263

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

17:

13 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Introduction

Hispanic Writers and American Literature

In the spring of 1995 I invited some thirty writers to participate in a special issue of ANQ on American literature and Spanish-speaking authors from around the world. I asked these writers about American literature in their readings, their work and their dreams; which authors influenced them most; what trends they considered to be exciting, valuable, and worth watching as we approach the millennium (or dull, overrated, and deserving of prompt oblivion). I told them that their responses could be critical or lyrical, in prose or verse, personal or theoretical. I asked them to write for a literate general public rather than a limited audience of specialists, to be wary of the latest literary chic, to avoid footnotes and other scholarly bag- gage. I tried to invite authors from both inside and outside the academy; I did not want to let the issue become still another session of intramural stroking. Nearly half the contributors do not make their living as teachers. This explains in part the variety and daring of so many responses.

In my invitation I also told the Hispanic writers that I knew the word “American” could be as explosive as a car bomb. For most Spanish-speak- ers outside the U.S., America means the entire hemisphere. The Cuban writer and patriot JosC Marti, who spent much of his life in the States, referred to “Our America’’-meaning North, South, and Central-from pole to pole as well as sea to shining sea. As North Americans we have no right to annex the word for our country or continent. For this reason some of the writers in this issue use the term “U.S.” as both a noun and adjective, to avoid the kind of linguistic colonization implied by the words “Ameri- cdAmerican” when these refer to the United States alone. A partial solu- tion, not a very graceful one, to an insoluble problem. How can we avoid using a word in English that rings in our consciousness and leaps to our tongues? We cannot convert America into a taboo; we must speak the lan- guage we have inherited, the language understood by others. Let the read- er be alert to this dilemma in these pages.

By the fall of 1996 I had received some thirty spirited responses from Hispanic writers all over the world. They came from Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban-Americans; from Spaniards living in both Spain and the U.S.; from novelists, poets, and critics in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina. With the exception of Central America, this special issue houses writers from all the major regions of the Spanish- speaking world, but it makes no claims to being comprehensive. I regret that none of the authors from Neruda’s “sweet waist of America” was able to join the venture.

3

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

17:

13 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

4 ANQ

The results of the venture were unpredictable. They have turned out to be wide-ranging, fresh, and surprising. Here are some of the threads that seem to stand out in the complex tapestry of “America and the Spanish- Speaking World”: 1. The US. has replaced France as the major source of foreign influence on Spanish-speaking wirers. For years Hispanic writers followed Parisian fashions in literature as closely as women followed them in clothes. The Argentine writer Ana Maria Shua says,

In the beginning, there was France. French literature was forbidden and was everywhere. . . . How and when was it replaced? Was it step by step? Was it suddenly? Who knows. . . .

Now the poets, novelists, and short story writers of the Hispanic world are immersed in American literature. We can be sure that the might of the U.S. in the twentieth century has something to do with the spread of its culture. The Spanish filmmaker Luis Buiiuel once said,

Steinbeck would be nothing without American weapons. I think the same is true of Dos Passos and Hemingway. If they had been born in Paraguay or Turkey, who would read them now? A country’s power determines who the great writers are.

So it is with a country’s language. The ascendancy of France’s literature co- incided with the prestige of its language. Shua says,

English is Esperanto, the language of money is the language of the world, the language of the Empire, as ANQ itself reminded us when we were asked to write in English. It is not only that American literature is the most widely translated lit- erature all over. There are too many publishers in Europe who refuse to even con- sider a book that has not previously been translated into English.

The Hispanic authors in this issue know American prose and poetry up and down. As the Colombian JosC Cardona says, any writer must be “first and foremost a reader.” It is simply “a necessary gesture of good manners” for artists to recognize and admit their sources. It is also a way to define their own identity. In the 1994 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Nadine Gordimer noted: “When young people are said to ‘live in books’ rather than in themselves, this is regarded as an escape; it is more like a search.” In these pages we relive the search of writers from New York to Buenos Aires, from Mexico to Spain. The search of Latin American artists may be wider. In words that could apply to readers in many Spanish-speaking countries, the Argentine novelist Mempo Giardinelli says, “we . . . have a great advantage over the Europeans and Americans: we read our writers and theirs, while they read only themselves.”

Sometimes the relations between authors resemble a confluence of rivers. The Spanish novelist Carlos PerelMn was surprised to learn that his prize-winning La Ciudad Doble [The Double C i o ] reminded one critic of Paul Auster’s work-which Perell6n did not read until his own book had

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

17:

13 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Spring 1997, Vol. 10, No. 2 5

been published. In the same way, JosC Cardona thought that he recognized the characters of his novel Suerios para una siesta [Dreams for a Nap] when he read John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces. Could Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence flow in two directions? What appears to be an influence to the outsider may be a kind of synchronicity, a spirit of the time revealing itself in different places in cultures that are becoming more global every day. 2. Poe may still be the single most important American author in the Span- ish-speaking world. Almost a third of the writers mention the man whom Roland0 Costa Picazo calls “our cousin, Mr. Poe.” The one poem in the issue, Margarita Merino’s “Black Birds in the Windows,” depicts the raven as the speaker’s guardian angel and solitary muse. For the Colombian Marco Tulio Aguilera Garramufio, Poe was “a rope in the darkness” that he clutched when he was writing his first story. JosC Cardona says: ‘‘I can remember him as if he were my own raven dictating stories to me. And he still moves his wings on my shoulders.” More than an influence, Poe seems to be an archetype of American literature for writers abroad, an embodi- ment of the original genius whose flame bums brightly until it is snuffed out by an uncomprehending society. It is curious that none of the Latino writers in this venture-Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Cuban-Americans- mentions him. Ever since Baudelaire praised and translated his work, Mr. Poe has been chiefly for export. 3. Faulkner continues to fascinate Hispanic writers. The authors of the famous Latin American Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s paid constant tribute to Faulkner’s fiction. Unlike the rest of the U.S., the South shares with Latin America a past of political failure and colonial exploitation. The rural, self-contained, tragic realm of Yoknapatawpha County seemed to strike a chord with Boom novelists Juan Carlos Onetti, Gabriel Garcia Mhrquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and many others. As the Peruvian Ernest0 Delgado points out, “it is also unthinkable to ignore Faulkner’s exuberant prose,” which translates easily into Spanish and resembles at times the Baroque style of so many Hispanic writers.

Most of the authors in this journal belong to younger generations, those of the post-Boom; they continue to admire Faulkner’s fiction but his influ- ence could be on the wane. New writers always search for new masters. Changes in population patterns throughout the Hispanic world, where for the last forty years millions of people have been fleeing the countryside and migrating to the cities, have also made Faulkner’s self-sufficient agrar- ian world seem remote from the lives of most Spanish-speaking authors. 4. Urban writing is on the rise. Many of the authors in this special issue have visited or resided in the U.S., and nearly all share a fascination with the metropolis and its writing. Carlos Perellbn, who has settled in New York, says that “the city is as full of American literature as American literature is full of the city.” JosC Cardona sees the city as the center toward which West-

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

17:

13 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

6 ANQ

em literature is gravitating. Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Chandler, Hammett, Bellow, Mailer, Roth, Auster are names that recur throughout these pages. So also do the poets of urban spaces: Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg. PerelMn says: “Americans charted the map of modem life in an elegant way, because they were the first moderns.” 5. Cultural lag is gone forevec The great Spanish critic Ramdn MenCndez Pidal believed that Spain suffered from a cultural lag compared to the rest of Europe and that it worked to the country’s advantage by producing works that were “late fruits”-late but ripe. The literature of the Spanish empire in the New World suffered from a double lag, in space and time. So when Romanticism reached Spain and Spanish America, for example, it was already dying out in northern Europe.

Now the cultural lag is gone forever. Hispanic writers know what is hap- pening right now in American life and literature. More of them read English than ever before; if not, translations abound. Readers of this special issue may be surprised to learn that Hispanic authors are familiar not only with the works of Dickinson, Poe, Whitman, and Hemingway, but also Louise Erd- rich, Anne Tyler, Brett Easton Ellis, and Douglas Coupland.

Far from suffering a cultural lag, Spaniards and Latin Americans nowa- days are often in the vanguard of international art, literature, and film. No longer can we think of influence as a one-way street running from north to south or east to west. Literature in Spanish may now be the major foreign pull on American writing. Willis Barnstone believes Hispanic verse has been a source of liberation for our poetry: “Suddenly, the night became blacker and more sexually vibrant, the day became hotter and the sun burned across nature with a new metaphysical passion.” In prose, magic realism has sprout- ed like a native plant in North American soil ever since the international suc- cess of Garcia Mirquez‘s One Hundred Years of Solitude. 6. Latino writers are still striving to become a part of the global culture. When Roland0 Hinojosa-Smith’s novel Klail City y sus alrededores [Klail City] won the Casa de las AmCricas award in 1976-the “Cuban Pulitzer”- Latino writing became a part of Spanish-American literature. Like many Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American authors, Hinojosa-Smith writes in both Spanish and English. When he translated his own prize-winning novel into English under the title Klail City, it became a part of American lit- erature too.

Twenty years later it is curious to note that only one of the Spanish and Latin American poets and novelists in this issue bothers to mention Latino writers. From the point of view of Spanish speakers abroad, Chicano, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican authors apparently do not belong to the mainstream of our literature. Latino writers are also struggling for recog- nition at home, as well as with the usual racial, linguistic, social, econom- ic, and linguistic problems. Yet their main concerns nowadays seem to be with their own writing. Dagoberto Gilb warns “If you want to be The

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

17:

13 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Spring 1997, Vol. 10, No. 2 7

Leader of the People, if you want to be a Saint, if you want to be The Guru, please don't pretend to be first of all a writer." Latino authors are reading books from all over the world as much as they are reading each other. Like any thriving literature, theirs is exploring language and style. Gilb says, "I don't agree with many of the ideas of Richard Rodriguez, but his prose is superior." I think a sentence like this one would have been hard to find in a Latino author just ten years ago. 7. The free market and literature are not always good allies. In spite of the confluences of Hispanic and American writing, the political and economic landscapes are bleak. The freer exchange of books and ideas has not nar- rowed the chasm between the countries of north and south, any more than NAFI'A has brought equal prosperity to both sides of the Rio Grande. As the Venezuelan writer Yanira Paz notes, the illiteracy rate in Latin America is higher than it was a few decades ago. The values that the U.S. is selling abroad, she says, "are not the values of its wonderful literature, nor its art in general, but the values of McDonald's and Mickey Mouse." Not to men- tion the values of Madonna, Terminator, and Robocop. Ms. Paz and the other writers in this issue have shown too much politesse and restraint in their pieces; they could have spoken with greater crackle and gall. We are still a long way from "Our America," a full century after Jose Marti.

It would have been easy to organize this special issue in some artificial way, by country, age or genre. I prefer the most neutral order-alphabeti- cal, so that the authors' voices can converse freely like instruments in a jazz riff. The effect is sometimes serendipitous, as when the young Chicano novelist Dagoberto Gilb tells how he visited Roland0 Hinojosa-Smith at the University of Texas and drank long-necked Mexican beers from the tiny refrigerator in the older writer's office. The next essay in alphabetical order is none other than Hinojosa's; the reader learns that there was much more than beer in those long-necked bottles.

I would like to thank the writers for their lively contributions to this engaging issue. All of the pieces are in English, with the exception of the single poem, which appears both in the original and in translation. Readers should bear in mind that most of the contributors are not writing in their mother tongue; I have made a few editorial changes to let the responses breathe. Finally, I would like to thank Art Wrobel, editor nonpareil, for the idea that brought this special issue to life. I am grateful for his patience, wisdom, and friendship.

EDWARD F. STANTON University of Kentucky

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

17:

13 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014