Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:00:18.795Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Edmundo Desnoes and Cuba's Lost Generation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Terry J. Peavler
Terry J. Peavler*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Scholars working in the area of contemporary Cuban literature are frequently asked about the current state of literary affairs on the island. The novel in particular, with the exception of a handful of resounding yet politically controversial successes, is rarely mentioned. Only one novelist of merit, Edmundo Desnoes, has fully embraced the revolution and achieved some measure of success in serving it without greatly compromising his aesthetic standards. How he has achieved this and why he is unique are questions that deserve exploration.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , 1977 , pp. 129 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Carpentier's major works were published before the revolution: Los pasos perdidos in 1953 and Guerra del tiempo in 1956. While El siglo de las luces appeared in 1962, it was essentially finished in 1959 according to the author (see Alejo Carpentier, “Autobiografía de urgencia,” Insula 20, no. 218 [Jan. 1965]: 13). His latest novel, Recurso del método (México: Siglo XXI Editores, S.A., 1974) does very little to enhance his reputation. Lezama Lima (b. 1912) was an internationally known poet when he wrote his only novel, Paradiso (México: Biblioteca Era, 1968). Neither author has a novel that deals directly with revolutionary Cuba.

2. The most prominent ones are Guillermo Cabrera Infante (defection 1965), Severo Sarduy (defection 1960), and Juan Arcocha (defection 1964).

3. Arenas's novel, El mundo alucinante (México: Editorial Diógenes, S.A., 1969), directs several veiled barbs at the Castro government, and has never been published in Cuba, presumably because of its sexual explicitness.

4. Manuel Cofiño López, La ultima mujer y el próximo combate (La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1971); Miguel Cossío Woodward, Sacchario (La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1970). The first touches on the abuses of power by those in charge of agrarian and reforestation camps, while the second portrays the rigors of cane cutting and the inefficiency of reluctant volunteers.

5. Mario Benedetti, El escritor latinoamericano y la revolución posible (Buenos Aires: Editorial Alfa Argentina, 1974), pp. 74–75.

6. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 212.

7. This change from stress on the subservience to the independence of the individual as a keystone in the evolution from epic to novel has been emphasized by nearly all major literary historians and critics including Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953); Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967); and Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1967).

8. Both men are primarily short story writers. Eduardo Heras León was expelled from the editorial board of Caimán Barbudo, a major revolutionary literary magazine, because his collection Los pasos en la hierba (La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1970), which won the Casa de las Américas prize, depicted, according to the other editors, revolutionaries as inferior human beings rather than noble idealists. The official statement of his explusion was published in Caimán Barbudo, no. 46 (May 1971), p. 2. José Norberto Fuentes lost his job for similar reasons. His critics felt that Condenados del condado, which won the same prize in 1968, suffered the same fault. Fuentes was also accused by Heberto Padilla of being counterrevolutionary. His spirited self-defense won him the support of Fidel Castro, who according to unsubstantiated rumor, promptly reinstated him.

9. The editions used for this study are: No hay problema, 2nd. ed. (La Habana: Ediciones Revolución, 1964); El cataclismo (La Habana: Ediciones Revolución, 1965); Memorias del subdesarrollo (La Habana: Ediciones Unión, 1965).

10. The protagonist of Memorias is named only at one point, and then by his surname (p. 35). His anonimity increases the sense of his nonexistence. In the film he was given the name Sergio.

11. Edmundo Desnoes, Punto de vista (La Habana: Instituto del Libro, 1967).

12. Edmundo Desnoes, rev. of Un Dia en la vida de Iván Denisovich, Casa de las Américas, no. 24 (Jan.–April 1964), p. 100.