Given the fact that in the early decades of the nineteenth century northern Spanish America, except for Cuba and Puerto Rico, had only just proclaimed its independence it is not surprising that the many issues raised by nationhood (achieved or hoped for) should be of primary concern among the region’s essayists. Thus the essay tends to be a “serious” genre, one in constant contact with the realities of the times, with what Spanish Americans often refer to as la problemática national. While more literary essays were produced - texts in which the author gives free rein to imagination, to speculation on eternal questions, to writing in which stylistic elegance, word play, or humor take precedence over content - the works that are remembered were those that reflected the pressing issues of the period. Although some of the essayists sought original, or at least “American,” formulations of these problems, more often than not they were guided by existing European social and political thought. Thus, during the first half of the century the thinking of the Enlightenment was very much in evidence, while during the latter half various versions of Positivism and social organicism held sway.

Our survey begins with Mexico and the work of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827). Best known as the author of the long, rambling picaresque novel El Periquillo Sarniento (Mexico, 1816) [The Itching Parrot], along with other works of didactic fiction, Lizardi was also a prolific journalist and pamphleteer: his major efforts in this area were El pensador mexicano (Mexico, 1812-1814), the Alacena de frioleras (Mexico, 1815), the Conductor eléctrico (Mexico, 1820), the Conversaciones del payo y el sacristán (Mexico, 1824-1825), the Correo semanario (Mexico, 1826-1827), and a host of uncollected tracts and pamphlets.

The costumbrista sketch

By any account the history of nineteenth-century Spanish America appears as a relentless panorama of upheaval. After gaining independence from Spain, the former colonies endured a long process of ideological and territorial fragmentation. Frail republics emerged everywhere, soon to be split up by the vicious struggles caused by caudillos and local bosses. Quite suddenly this conglomeration of independent territories faced the need to view itself as a community of nations, linked by similar institutions and a common history. Yet in those initial days of turmoil they did not find it easy to think in terms of covenants and solidarity. Chile and Brazil managed to consolidate relatively stable political systems but such was not the case in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and other new republics. Cuba and Puerto Rico were still lagging behind as colonial possessions. The disruptions set in motion by independence were aggravated by the territorial ambitions of foreign powers. In 1833 England occupied the Malvinas Islands; in the 1840s the United States divested Mexico of half its territory and in the early 1860s France sought to control what was left of the impoverished Mexican republic.

Predictably, the widespread turbulence reigning in nineteenth-century Spanish America is reflected in the political discourse and literary output of that period. The early novels, and, above all, the massive flow of texts produced by the costumbristas offer striking descriptions of societies besieged by uncertainties and political violence. The costumbristas practiced “the sketch of customs and manners.”

Within fifty years of Columbus’s landing, the sedentary areas of Latin America had been conquered by Spain, inaugurating its Golden Age. Sieges of the new-found lands took on epic dimensions and reaped victories of monumental importance for the Spanish church and state. The Spanish soldiers themselves were said to rival the ancient Romans for their loyalty and heroism in conquest as time and again the few vanquished the many.

Focusing our sights on the first wave of conquests in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America, however, we are struck by an ironic if perhaps inevitable fact: that this larger tissue of Spanish victories, heroism and loyalty was woven in significant ways of failures and transgressions. Less than heroic actions underlie and even enable the eventual victories. Of course, the whole Discovery and Conquest rests on Columbus’s original miscalculations. However, let us not forget, to mention but a few egregious examples, that Columbus was later sent back to Spain in chains; that the conquest of Mexico issued from Hernán Cortés’s disobedience of Diego Velázquez; that Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s peregrinations of discovery across the North American southwest to Mexico were occasioned by the shipwreck and deaths of his companions. Disobedience of superiors, cruelty to the native populations, self-interest, failed attempts at religious conversion, incomprehension of the New World, and so on, form the landmarks in a ‘thick’ description of the Conquest, as seen from within.

Theatre in eighteenth-century Spanish America reflected the contradictions of what was, for most of the Hispanic realms in the New World, the last century of colonial rule. Like other aspects of colonial culture, theatre followed closely the dictates of the Spanish peninsula; accordingly, it tended to support and defend the colonial regime, while adhering to the anachronistic, late baroque repertoire that remained popular in Spain through most of the period. Yet the very conservatism of colonial theatre ensured its participation in the changes that peninsular drama underwent during the century, changes that corresponded to the reformist spirit of Neoclassicism and the critical perspective of the Enlightenment. It was inevitable that these changes would acquire their own kinds of momentum in the colonies, given the energy and diversity of the Hispanic realms beneath the official veneer of ideological and bureaucratic uniformity. Conformism in colonial theatre guaranteed change, and change moved irrevocably in the direction of individuation and disengagement.

Records of plays performed throughout the Hispanic world in the eighteenth century show a remarkable consistency of repertoires. The most popular playwright, through to the very end of the century, remained Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), followed by other, lesser playwrights of the Calderonian school. Yet, by virtue of its close connection with the theatre of France, Hispanic theatre experienced a gradual and uneven acceptance of the neoclassic aesthetic: traditional Golden Age plays were often revamped according to the “new rules,” which demanded a closer adherence to the classical unities; tragedies and comedies of manners by Racine, Voltaire, Corneille, and Molière were translated or adapted for Hispanic stages, and original plays in the French neoclassic mold by Hispanic playwrights were written and performed.

Historical context

The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in Spanish America witnessed the flowering of the genre of epic poetry which, like the chronicle and the Mission drama, was a literary product of the encounter between the Old World and the New. In addition to its artistic aspirations, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century epic poem frequently had a pragmatic intention, in which case it would turn into a long narrative of the merits of the author or of his friends. Like the chronicle, the epic would document the conquistador’s astonishment at the wonders of the new lands. Unlike the chronicle, the epic poem would arrange its eight-line hendecasyllabic stanzas around the individual hero – Hernán Cortés, Garcí Hurtado de Mendoza, or Francisco Pizarro – or the collective hero – Araucanian Indians and Spaniards, in the work of Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, Spaniards, in Juan de Castellanos. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial epic is the genre that belongs to the moment in history when Spain dominated the world and her captains embodied the ideal of the heroic knight. The survival of the genre into the eighteenth century evinced a desperate effort to keep that ideal alive.

Medieval and renaissance epic

Epic poetry was cultivated in Spain from the fifth century, beginning with the Visigothic conquest. In heroic narrative verses, anonymous authors wrote of the “pursuit of honor through adventure.” The poems were possibly the work of jongleurs who wrote at the very moment of the events they narrated. Two types developed: the heroic epic, aimed at a popular audience (Cantar de Mío Cid, Siete infantes de Lara, Poema de Fern´n González), and the literary epic (Libro de Alexandre), directed to an elite audience and inspired by Virgil. The genre began to decline in the fifteenth century (Deyermond, Historia de la literatura española, 1, 65-101).

The most cursory glance at the collected works of the major Spanish American Modernistas [Modernists] shows that the majority of these writings were prose. An unprejudiced reading of that prose soon reveals that most of it is of a quality equal to the Modernists’ best verse works, or to the prose works being written in Europe and the United States at about the same time.

Shortly after the Modernist movement waned in the late 1920s, critics, influenced on the one hand by the prestige of the telluric narratives, such as La vorágine (1923) [The Vortex] and Doña Bárbara (1929) [Doña Barbara], and on the other by the splendor of modernist poetry and that of its successors, such as Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), César Vallejo (1892-1938), and the Generation of 1927 in Spain, began to value Modernismo [Modernism] primarily as a poetic movement and to ignore or reject the achievements of modernist prose. When the Modernists’ prose was studied at all, it was usually in a fragmentary manner and subordinated to poetry. Thus, for example, fragments of essays and chronicles by José Martí (1853-1895), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859-1895), and José Enrique Rodó (1871-1917) were studied for their value as “poetic prose.” Scant attention was paid to works in their entirety and to the ideas about art, literature, and society expressed in them, not only because some of these ideas had become unfashionable, but also because many had in fact become deeply ingrained in the fabric of Spanish American writing and were accepted without question.

Andrés Bello: nationalism and narrativity

In his article “Modo de escribir la historia” (1848), Andrés Bello (1781-1865) gave the following advice: “When the history of a country exists only in scattered, incomplete documents, in vague traditions which must be compared and evaluated, the narrative method is obligatory.” With this judgment Bello disqualified any effort to write works of philosophy of history because he considered it, in the case of Spanish America, premature. He thought the history of a young nation ought to be far removed from theoretical generalizations, that it ought to be a concrete narrative based on the examination and comparative study of those sources which refer to American events since the pre-Columbian era. One may suppose that Bello’s intention was to give the new nations ample room to develop historiographical discourse, an enterprise then in its infancy, before it was to be judged by more demanding standards of historiography. Nevertheless, I think there was another motive behind his strategy, a concern related to the question of nationalism. We can see this additional objective in his praise of the work of Bernal Díaz del Castillo: “no synthesis, no collection of historical aphorisms, will ever allow us to conceive so vividly the conquest of America” (“Modo de estudiar la historia,” 246). In other words, Bello favored the writing of history in narrative form because such a form, with the vitality of its story-telling, made it possible for the reader to identify with the protagonists of the exploration and conquest of the American territories.

Historiography of the seventeenth century reflected many of the patterns of historical writing developed during the earlier age of discovery and conquest. The principal historians of the sixteenth century worked with fundamental models of historical expression that survived well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We see a continuation of the crónica mayor, religious historiography that dealt with the history of religious orders and the spiritual life of the colony, various forms of testimonial literature, works that are primarily descriptive of New World geography, and other narrative modalities that were commonly employed during the era, such as the relación and learned commentaries. Yet there were significant developments within these well-defined norms – creative endeavors that have recently interested literary scholars – to communicate a more imaginative interpretation of those events and processes that led to the expansion and stabilization of the colonies. Though somewhat guided by functional models written in the sixteenth century, historical writing of the late colonial period became more complex and varied in style and structure.

Chroniclers of the Indies

A curious irony surrounds the role of cronista mayor during much of the seventeenth century. According to some indications, these historians were the most capable of any group of producing comprehensive studies of New World history. Those fulfilling this role had the greatest authority and prestige of any kind of historian in the late colonial period. They possessed the legal charge to petition, read, and censor the work of other historians writing about the American Conquest and settlement.

Introduction

In the year 1737, as an epidemic raged in and around Mexico City, its inhabitants carried out desperate acts of devotion to a number of holy images in a series of unsuccessful attempts to halt the disease’s mortal progression. Finally, after the city formally declared the Virgin of Guadalupe as its official patron, the epidemic subsided. Recounting this miraculous turn of events in his four-volume Historia de la Provincia de la Compañía de Jesús de Nueva España (1767; Mexico, 1841–1842), Francisco Javier Alegre (1729–1788), a Jesuit himself and the acclaimed historian of the Order, observed that it appeared the exterminating angel was only waiting for the declaration of patronage in order to sheath his sword (Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe 86; see also Deck, Francisco Javier Alegre). Jacques Lafaye points to this moment as the occasion for the “belated flowering for the Guadalupe cult,” two centuries after its apparition, a flowering he relates to incipient Mexican national consciousness and, more generally, to a period of creole triumphalism in the early 1700s. Even discounting these later developments, Alegre’s account preserves for us a striking example of colonial hagiolatry.

Almost half a century later, in 1779, a smallpox epidemic was declared in Mexico City. Dr. José Ignacio Bartolache (1739–1790), who had edited the Mercurio Volante (which some consider to be America’s first medical journal) during its brief appearance from 1772 to 1773, presented to the viceroy a plan for combatting the disease. Although Bartolache’s text has unfortunately been lost, his recommendations were preserved in the Cabildo’s official approval of the plan.

Story or history

The existing accounts of the Spanish American short story consist almost completely of conventional literary history: the modern short story is said to have been born with Echeverría or Palma or Darío or Quiroga, to have been descended from earlier sources in the Spanish or indigenous or mestizo traditions, to have developed or matured or produced such progeny as Borges and Rulfo and Bombal. Attention is not usually called to the organicist metaphors at work in these accounts, the authors seeming to find them beyond question. The literary historian’s task, as defined in the manuals by Leal, Menton, and others, consists of a taxonomy by movements (Naturalism, mundonovismo, criollismo, the fantastic, Neorealism), by generations (the Generations of 1930, 1938, 1940, 1950, and so on, depending on the history of the country in question, or the “first,” “second,” and “third” generations of writers of the Mexican Revolution), by country or region, or by the gender or ethnicorigin of the writers; sometimes, indeed, an uneasy combination of all of the above forms the “history.” There is no agreement between the different accounts of this supposed “history,” and indeed no agreement would be possible, given the uncertain foundations on which these accounts are built. It is not even very certain that a “history” of the short story genre in Spanish America could be written: the notion of the short story as genre has been vigorously debated internationally, and in Spanish America the constitution and preservation of such a genre is problematized by the uncertain relations between the “short story” and the “costumbrista sketch,” the “tradición” and the “crónica.”

Until well into the twentieth century most stages in Spanish America were characterized by plays in which peninsular theatre exerted a dominating influence. It was not until the 1920s that theatre groups in a number of Spanish American countries broke definitively with the aesthetic hold of the nineteenth century and its emphasis on costumbristic realism and comedy of manners in order to enter a new phase that incorporated experimentation with expansion and diversification of themes and techniques. Prior to the emergence of these experimental theatre groups in Mexico, Argentina, and Puerto Rico, the theatre had been dominated artistically and economically by companies composed largely of Spaniards. Typically, the stage was filled with actors mouthing platitudes in a peninsular accent, dressed in old-fashioned costumes surrounded by dated scenery in outmoded theatrical halls. The audiences before which these commercial companies performed were generally bourgeois and upper-class, affiliated with the government, and not overly critical of official political policy. In order to excise a false, out-dated tradition whose social realism and fixed sense of “dramatic illusion” no longer matched the reality beyond the theatre, experimental groups in several countries were formed to create a new dramatic tradition that would address psychological and metaphysical concerns in an innovative dramatic idiom based on technical advances.

Individual differences related to sociocultural conditions make generalizations difficult among the countries in Spanish America, and the number of countries prohibits even a cursory reference to activities in each area. A brief review of the experiences in three major theatrical regions will serve as a representative summary of the nature of the transition from the illusionistic, costumbristic, commercial theatre of the nineteenth century to the formation of a mature dramatic expression that gives testimony to the multiplicity of national identities that comprise each of the nations of Spanish America.

Introduction

The gaucho genre or gaucho poetry originates in the Río de la Plata region at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Its constitutive elements include: the traditional Spanish songs and ballads that were disseminated by the Spanish explorers and conquerors from as early as the sixteenth century, the poetry of the payadores (illiterate peasants who, accompanied by their guitars, roamed the country singing ballads and often competing against each other in payadas or contrapuntos), the dramatic essays that brought to the stage the dialogues in rustic language of the colonial peasantry, and, finally, contemporary “cultivated” poetry. From the traditional sources, the genre adopts its octosyllabic meter and strophic forms; from the poetry of the payadores, it appropriates the character of the gaucho-singer, together with many tones and themes of his song; the dialogue, meanwhile, is inherited from the primitive theatre. But the gaucho genre was written, in its entirety, by literate, urban poets, many of whom also wrote neoclassical and romantic poetry. These poets, who were sometimes involved in either the military or in politics, utilized the rustic language of the gauchos and politicized it, on the basis of the wars of independence, which can be designated as the beginning of the genre. Some critics look for the genre’s origins in the last years of the eighteenth century, during which colonial Argentina battled with Portugal and, more specifically, in an anonymous one-act farce entitled “El amor de la estanciera,” which was staged in the last decade of the century and made reference to the Argentinian-Portuguese war.

FICTIONAL BONA FIDES

Mariners lie like old sea dogs. In James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), the adventuring hero, Leopold Bloom, never leaves the confines of his native city, but he does run into an old sailor named Murphy who boasts of his travels to several remote regions of the world. Bloom has his doubts about Murphy, “assuming he was the person he represented himself and not sailing under false colours after having boxed the compass on the q.t. somewhere” Listening to the yarns and finding something out of joint about them makes Bloom “nourish some suspicions of our friend's bona fides” (512).

What does it mean to nourish suspicions about a narrator's bona fides? This is the very question that haunts Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), and for good reason. Gulliver's Travels has been a notable gathering place, almost a convocation, for the severer sort of Western Critic who sees its satiric action as a vicious attack on the political and cultural institutions of eighteenth-century British civilization in the guise of a satiric send-up of travel literature.

But what if Swift's satiric travel narrative is directed not simply at the experience of modern political, social, and intellectual life in England and Europe, but at the narrative bona fides of those middling fictional subjects who emerged during the early decades of the eighteenth century in England precisely to endorse the modern, progressivist, commercial vision of the world that Swift's satire bemoans? The novel is the literary form positing the fitness of a low-life, pseudoprofessional, or merchant-class narrator - Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, Colonel Jack, Captain Singleton - to record the contingencies and changing valences of modern life. As such, it was a likely and predictable Swiftian target.

In Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), shortly after having escaped from her imprisonment in the monastery of San Stephano, the heroine, Ellena di Rosalba, accompanied by the hero, Vivaldi, and his garrulous servant, Paulo, travels toward Naples through the pastoral mountain scenery near Celano. In this scene between two imprisonments (the hero will shortly be confined in the prisons of the Inquisition in Rome), Ellena and Vivaldi, two characters whose aesthetic sense is a function of their genteel social status, admire the ruins of an ancient castle and the sublime and beautiful landscape. But their aesthetic sense is also determined differentially by gender. Vivaldi is typically more sensitive to the sublime, noting how the mountains appear “threatening, and horrid,” “barren and rocky,” “mighty”and dark. Ellena observes how the beautiful - that which is sweet, soft, elegant, under cultivation, and under human control - contrasts with “the awful grandeur” of the mountains (I 58). The third observer, Paulo, apparently as a natural consequence of his low birth, sees nothing in these scenes to arouse aesthetic appreciation, admiring in the prospect only the things that remind him of his native city of Naples.

That the novel began in either 1719 with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe or in 1740 with Samuel Richardson's Pamela is a commonplace familiar to all students of English literature. Both assertions are based upon the notion that an entirely new literary form emerged in the first half of Britain's eighteenth century, for no one familiar with early fiction would deny that an extensive body of prose fiction existed before either of these two dates. Without attempting to show that the so-called “Greek romances”of antiquity contained almost all the possibilities that the eighteenth-century novelists were to explore, as a recent critic has maintained,' I find it difficult to disqualify Cervantes's Don Quixote, some of the many picaresque fictions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many of the extremely popular “novels” (a work of prose fiction often as long as a modern novel and frequently about contemporary life) written mainly in France and Spain during the latter century merely because they were not written in English.

Laurence Sterne has always been considered the least rule-bound of the British eighteenth-century novelists, and his Tristram Shandy is generally cited as the most eccentric production within the already varied collection of narrative types of eighteenth-century fiction. The common method of assimilating his work to the new province of novel writing is to assume that the digressions, apostrophes, typographical outrages and zany time scheme that make it so unaccountable are the result of a thoroughgoing parody of the conventions of realism established during the previous decade by Richardson and Fielding. Accordingly, when Sterne is not sporting with the immediacy encouraged by the epistolary novel by intimately addressing the reader, accumulating heaps of pointless minutiae, or confounding real time with narrative time, he is taking Fielding's modified neoclassicism to absurd conclusions by invoking the principle of selectivity to justify his missing chapters, or using that principle to authorize wild appeals to the reader about what to include and what to leave out, and by wickedly clever misapplications of the rule of ut pictura poesis (a poem should be like a speaking picture) in the shape of marbled and blackened pages, and waving lines intended to represent the flourish of a stick or the digressions of his story.'

Toward the end of The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt makes a throwaway remark that has since become famous: that most of the novels of the eighteenth century were written by women. A recent study of the eighteenth-century novel echoes Watt with the claim that “the numerical (if not qualitative) majority [of novels] were actually written by women.” Such remarks seem to be made less with a view to statistical accuracy than in order to belittle the women novelists' achievements as merely quantitative: they are the modern version of the eighteenth-century reviewers' complaints that women writers were engrossing the trade in novels and debasing the new genre with hastily written performances. The most recent statistical and bibliographical work does not substantiate assertions of female numerical dominance, but does suggest that the sharp increase in novel production in the final decades of the century was even steeper in the case of female writers than male, and that women novelists may have equaled or slightly outnumbered men in certain subgenres such as the epistolary novel. This indicates such a high proportion of women writing fiction as compared to their share in the production of poetry or drama that it is not surprising that women were perceived as taking over, even though they were not. Such an unprecedented level of female participation in a literary genre deserves investigation.

Henry Fielding was born in 1707, into a family in straitened circumstances but of aristocratic connections. A family myth, based on forged papers, claimed descent from the Habsburgs. The combination of financial embarrassment and gentlemanly caste is emblematic of the whole atmosphere of his life, and is variously reflected in his writings. He turned to writing fiction for a living (and to practicing law for the same reason) after his career as a prominent and successful dramatist was ended by the Licensing Act of 1737, which his own antigovernment plays helped to precipitate. He is the only one among the early novelists whose origins were patrician, and the only one whose style and cultural loyalties were closely tied to the tradition we sometimes call Augustan. Early in his career he sometimes called himself Scriblerus Secundus, after the Scriblerian coterie of Swift and Pope. One of his earliest poems, however, was an unpublished mock Dunciad against these authors, discovered some years ago among the papers of his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an adversary of Pope and his friends.