The work of the Cuban novelist and musicologist Alejo Carpentier (1901–1980) was a nodal point in the debate about how to define Latin American uniqueness. His fiction struggled to identify this Latin American cultural uniqueness within the long-standing history of Latin American dependence on and mimicry of Europe – in essence, Paris. Paris, as is often cited, was the capital of the nineteenth century, where the life of the mind vibrated most contagiously, to paraphrase Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, famously accused by the Spanish critic Juan Valera in 1888 of having adopted a French mindset. A crucial moment in this history of Gallic cultural dominance was the Parisian-based surrealist movement, which developed out of post first-world-war Dada despair into an organized group, energetically controlled by André Breton with the first surrealist manifesto of 1924. Surrealism ushered in a poetics based on unpredictability, magic, primitivism and surprise that in fiction became loosely called magical realism.

The French Connection

Alejo Carpentier's creative tussle with André Breton and French cultural domination has been well studied and I intend to review this briefly. Parisian surrealism welcomed foreign painters into the group. The visual image transcends the language barrier. The Hispanic contribution to surrealist painting has been enormous, as just listing names like Miró, Dalí, Domínguez, Matta, Varo and Lam (whom I will discuss in greater detail later) suffices to indicate. In the case of writing, the Latin American ‘viaje a París’ (journey to Paris; the literal translations are mine) rarely resulted in a change of language from Spanish to French, but it did lead to bilingualism in Latin American attempts to be recognised and accepted abroad in Paris. The Chilean experimental poet Vicente Huidobro, who invented his own rival theory of poetry against surrealism, called ‘creacionismo’, but lacked the group energy of Breton's surrealists, duplicated what he wrote in Spanish in the 1920s in French, modifying his name as Vincent Huidobro. A Peruvian poet pseudonymously called César Moro, the sole Latin American writer to publish in one of Breton's main journals (Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution in 1933), went one step further and wrote his poetry in French, despite living in Peru and Mexico.