2 - Modernist prose

Summary

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.