3—
"Surely from His Lips a Cockatoo Will Fly":
The Vanguards' Stories of the New World

Patience brothers! No! I won't go to Europe, no. I'm an American and my place is in America. European civilization will surely shatter the integrity of our character.
—Mário de Andrade, Macunaíma

Europe . . . decadent and fatigued . . . still rigorously demands of every stranger his own task. She is bored by the rhapsodies of her thought and her art. She wants from us, above all, the expression of ourselves.
—José Carlos Mariátegui, "Waldo Frank"

In the final chapters of Mário de Andrade's 1928 novel Macunaíma , the work's eponymous hero "without any character" returns with his brothers to the virgin forest of his origins following a peripatetic São Paulo sojourn. Macunaíma cuts an impressive figure. His beloved muiraquitã , the amulet he has retrieved from the city of "the children of Manioc," hangs from his lower lip. But the hero also displays on his body predilect artifacts of the great São Paulo civilization he leaves behind. A Smith and Wesson revolver and a Swiss watch dangle from his ears, and in his hand he carries two caged leghorn fowl. Defined by his folkloric origins but also portrayed as a tourist in his own land, Macunaíma is cast as a "primitive" being who discovers, conquers (after a fashion), and manipulates the technological marvels of

the modern world. Although he is described as explicitly Brazilian, Macunaíma, especially at this moment of his return, simultaneously epitomizes and parodies the principal issues shaping the Americanist component of Latin American vanguardist activity. His destiny at birth is to become a Brazilian national hero, but in conception and development he is also an American. In the words that provide an epigraph for this chapter, Macunaíma abandons his dream of a European tour, and later, while searching for the conscience he had discarded on the island of Marapatá, he decides to "seize the conscience of a Spanish American" and shape himself "in that fashion" (148). In a similar spirit, the novel that ironically poses the problem of a Brazilian national character constitutes a deliberate and self-conscious geographic and linguistic amalgam, a composite of folkloric sources expressed in a collagelike language nobody actually speaks.^[1]

In the preamble to The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Latin American Literature, Roberto González Echevarría affirms that from the romantic period until the 1950s, modern Latin America and its literature were conceived as "a metaphoric field whose ground is nature," a field through which it was posited that "Nature, the landscape, created through its own uniqueness and originality a new and original being who expressed himself or herself in the form of a new and different literature" (4). Founded on classical and romantic notions of the organic, this idea, according to González Echevarría, envelops Latin American literature and culture like an enormous vine, is most forcefully expressed in the organicist metaphors of José Martí's "Nuestra América" (1891), and is not profoundly undermined until Alejo Carpentier's 1953 novel Los pasos perdidos (The Voice of the Masters 41–43). The widespread Americanist activity within Latin America's vanguards, particularly in the manifestos and little magazines, builds on and even exaggerates organicist myths of America. As González Echevarría notes, however, the organicist notions, present in Latin American thought since Independence, had never been totally lacking in irony and had always implicitly questioned themselves. I would argue that during the vanguard period this critique is particularly intense. While vanguardist rhetoric in manifestos may have reinforced long-standing myths of the New World, the vanguards' Americanist creative texts, predating Los pesos pardidos by more than two decades, seriously questioned the organicist conception of Latin America's cultural integrity.

America in Vanguardist Manifestos

During the century's early decades, Latin America's search for a sharper regional and continental understanding neither originated with nor was limited to the literary vanguards. Serious inquiries into the cultural specificity of New World experience constituted an influential political and intellectual current, a fact evident from the most superficial perusal of major essayists' work: Ricardo Rojas's La argentinidad (1916) and Eurindia (1924); Gilberto Freyre's Manifesto regionalista (1926); Franz Tamayo's "Carta de americanos para americanos" (1926); José Vasconcelos's La raza cósmica: Misión de la raza iberoamericana (1925) and Indología, una interpretación de la cultura iberoamericana (1926); Antenor Orrego's "¿Cuál es la cultura que creará América?" (1928); Pedro Henriquez Ureña's Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión (1928); and Juan Marinello's "Americanismo y cubanismo literatios" (1932). European and North American thinkers with New World concerns had an impact on this work, for example, Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West, 1918–22), Count Hermann Keyserling (Meditaciones suramericanas, 1933); José Ortega y Gasset (in particular, "Carta a un joven argentino que estudia filosofía," 1924, "Hegel y América," 1928, and "La pampa ... promesas," 1929); and Waldo Frank (The Re-discovery of America, 1929).^[2] In addition, Ortega's journal Revista de Occidente circulated widely in Latin America and played a critical role in disseminating Spengler's ideas about the future significance of non-European cultures.^[3]

Many of the Latin American works manifest certain broad attitudes in common. Most reverse the nineteenth-century civilization versus barbarism dichotomy and celebrate cultural difference and mestizaje as sources of national energy capable of overcoming an enervated European civilization. In the spirit of José Martí's "Nuestra América," these works often reaffirm a link between humanity and nature as a positive determinant of Latin American experience, and some explore essentialist notions of an emergent American character or soul. Literary historiography has traditionally ascribed the impact of these currents to the Spanish American novela de la tierra, or "novel of the land" (for example, La vorágine, 1924; Don Segundo Sombra, 1926; and Doña Bárbara, 1929), and to other regionalist writing such as Brazil's Northeast novel of the 1930s. But New World concerns and Americanist rhetoric

are also widely evident in the activities of vanguardist groups and writers who addressed questions of aesthetic modernity.

As I have observed in the introduction, cultural nationalism was common in Latin America's vanguards, and literary experiments were often marked by the deliberate reclaiming of autochthonous traditions. Mariátegui's well-turned phrase "Peruanicemos al Perú" (Let us Peruvianize Peru), the title for his 1925–29 column in Lima's Mundial, also informed the agenda for intellectual modernity in his influential vanguardist journal Amauta (1926–30). In Brazil, the term "Abrasileirar o Brasil" (Brazilianize Brazil) was coined in the editorial inaugurating the 1927 magazine Verde, and the question of cultural selfdefinition dominated major manifestos and magazines in Brazil's modernismo movement. In Nicaragua, signers of the first manifesto of the Anti-Academy outlined a program to disseminate vanguardist techniques while giving free rein to emotions of being (ser y estar ) in Nicaragua (MPP 378; emphasis in original). In addition, vanguardist groups or writers throughout Latin America expressed similar interests in indigenous cultural experience, concerns that also emerge in numerous innovative creative works, for example, Oswald de Andrade's Pau Brasil poetry (1925); Mário's Macunaíma (1928); Brazilian Raul Bopp's Cobra norato (1928–31); Mexican Xavier Icaza's Panchito Chapopote (1928); Pablo dc Rokha's Escritura de Raimundo Contreras (1929) from Chile; Miguel Angel Asturias's Leyendas de Guatemala (1930); Carpentier's ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1927–33); Cuban Nicolás Guillén's Motivos de son (1930) and Sóngoro cosongo (1931); Pablo Antonio Cuadra's Poemas nicaragüenses (1930–33), Peruvian Carlos Oquendo de Amat's 5 metros de poemas (1927); Luis Barrios Cruz's Respuesta alas piedras (1931) from Venezuela; or Peruvian Alejandro Peralta's vanguardist indigenista poetry collections Ande (1926) and El kollao (1934). But beyond this attention to regional culture, many of these works are also framed in broader Americanist contexts, while manifestos and literary magazines, including some openly eschewing regionalist concerns, often affirm explicitly Americanist positions.

As I have noted in my introductory comments, the continental university reform movement enacted an Americanist agenda in the political and intellectual arenas. Thus, although it is more a political than an aesthetic document, the June 1918 proclamation from the Argentine "youth of Córdoba" to the "free men of South America," marking the historic student congress in that city, may well have set the ecumenical tone for many of the literary manifestos that followed (MPP 64).^[4] A

comparable mood characterized the earliest calls for artistic innovation, for example, in the Dominican Republic's 1921 postumista manifesto that addressed the youth of America in polemical tones, Puerto Rico's second euforista manifesto (1923) proclaiming "the Great Euphoric American Republic" (LHA 232), or the 1925 noísta manifesto celebrating "the great Republic of American Thought" (LHA 245). In Cuba, the "Dcclaración del Grupo Minorista" (1927) lobbied "for Latin American cordiality and union" (MPP 250), a position subsequently developed in the Revista de Avance (1927–30).^[5]

Almost all of Lima's magazines of the "new art," including Flechas (1924), Guerrilla (1927), and the Trampolín-Hangar-Rascacielos-Timonel series (1926–27), assumcd an Americanist posture, typified, for example, in Guerrilla 's forecast of a new America's birth. Among regional publications, Arequipa's Chirapu (1928) published a piece on "Latin American continental citizenship," and Puno's Boletín Titikaka (1926–30) included articles on "aesthetic Indoamericanism." Most important, Mariátegui's skepticism about an emergent American culture notwithstanding, Amauta committed itself to a continental exchange of ideas and published copious materials with Americanist content including portions of Waldo Frank's Re-discovery of America in translation.^[6] Elsewhere, Enrique Terán wrote of an "Indoamerican soul" in "El arte de vanguardia" for Quito's Elán (128), Montevideo's La Pluma (1927–31) called for the "intellectual autonomy of America" (MPP 258), and in a Nicaraguan manifesto, Pablo Antonio Cuadra supported preserving all "Indo-Spanish" spirit (50A 27).

An Americanist mood emerged even in those vanguardist endeavors that generally avoided cultural nationalism and ostensibly cultivated more internationalist goals. Argentina's Martín Fierro (1924–27) underscorcd the country's debt to European culture, decried the "stupidities" perpetrated in the name of Spanish Americanism, and defended itself from attacks for its use of a national mastcrpiece for its name. Still, the journal's inaugural manifesto celebrated America's intellectual contributions and praised its creative assimilatory capacity (MPP 135). The landmark anthology Indice de la nueva poesía americana (1926), edited by Alberto Hidalgo, Vicente Huidobro, and Jorge Luis Borges and including poetry from Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, manifested editorial ambivalence toward the Americanism implicit in its selection criteria. In the volume's introduction, Huidobro remained silent on the subject, and Peru's Hidalgo declared that Spanish Americanism repulsed him.

But Borges, who would later distance himself both from his early vanguardism and from cultivated cultural autochthonism, cited examples from Argentina, Mexico, and Chile to suggest that "the poetifiable truth no longer lies only across the sea" (INPA 15).^[7] Although both Martín Fierro and Mexico's Contemporáneos (1928–31) consistently refrained from openly nationalist or Americanist posturing, both journals frequently published writers from Argentina and Mexico, respectively, as well as other Spanish Americans, and both participated in a continental exchange with magazines with an Americanist agenda. And, though it was not a vanguardist publication, Joaquín García Monge's widely circulated Repertorio Americano (San José, Costa Rica, 1919–59) facilitatcd these continental contacts and published significant Americanist pieces.^[8]

In Brazil, Americanist concerns were more openly evident in creative works such as Macunaíma, Oswald de Andrade's 1925 Pau Brasil poetry collection, and Ronald dc Carvalho's poetic composition Toda a América (1926) than in most manifestos or little magazines. Occasional references to Spanish American writers appeared in A Revista of Bclo Horizonte (1925–26) and the Revista de Antropofagia (São Paulo, 1928–29), and a broader interaction with Spanish America was documented in Rio dc Janciro's Festa (1927–28 and 1934–35), including an exchange with Repertorio Americano . In 1927 and 1928, Mário de Adrade reported on Argentine aesthetic innovation for São Paulo's Diário Nacional . These articles and Mário's annotations in the Spanish American works in his own library document a concern with the questions of American cultural specificity being debated in other countries.^[9] Although focused on Brazil, Oswald de Andrade's "Manifesto antropófago" (1928) presents the most provocative Americanist position in Brazilian modernism. The manifesto stresses Europe's debt to the New World for its conception of natural man, as set forth in writings by Montaigne and Rousseau, and proposes instead the "bad savage," an all-consuming cannibal, as a New World model of cultural critique and capacity for creative assimilation.

In general, the polemical Americanist discourse in vanguardist manifestos and magazines celebrated the continent's humanism, energy, "ancestral" spirit, and radical newness as powerful antidotes to European cultural exhaustion. With echoes of Whitman, Nietzsche, and Spengler and doses of Bergsonian elán vital, vanguardist documents forecast an energetic new day, a potent new human species, and a pow-

erful new art. But, although these pronouncements sometimes cast aspersions on the "sterile ultraisms" of Europe's avant-gardes, they were often saturated themselves by the futurist rhetoric of international vanguardism that proposed, as Renato Poggioli observed in The Theory of the Avant-Garde, an "artistic palingenesis" paving the way for a future new art (75). Thus Martí Casanovas's affirmation in the Revista de Avarice piece "Arte nuevo" echoed throughout Latin America: this generation's art would require a "profound humanism" to be found in the "virgin essence" and "inexhaustible fecundity" of Indo-Latin America (HV 137). Essential for this new culture would be the emergence of a new American being, variously designated as the new "cosmic fetus" (engendro cósmico ), the "new human soul," the "matrix race," and the "Atlantic shoulders of the formidable creators of beauty."^[10]

A striking feature of this Americanist language is the penchant for organicist metaphors, telluric and anatomical, through which America, portrayed as the earth or as a living, breathing human body, would engender the new American art. The postumistas proclaimed that the new art would be molded from America's "grotesque clay" (MPP 109), and Peru's Antero Peralta Vásquez proposed similarly that a new art could be forged from the "clay of the soil" and the "breath of the race" ("El uno y vario del arte vanguardista" 2). With comparable telluric language, the Brazilian modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral conceived the antropofagia agenda for cultural transformation as a kind of psychodynamic archaeological dig: "Let us descend to our prehistory. Bring up something from that immense, atavistic depth. . . . Remix the roots of the race, with psychoanalytic thought. From that recncounter with our things, in a creative climate, we will be able to achieve a new structure of ideas."^[11] Calls for American cultural unity were often expressed through metaphors of an anatomically explicit body-continent with a spinal column and vascular system traversing the Andes and a speaking voice embodied in the new American intellectual or artist. Thus Luis Valcárcel declared in Peru's Amauta that "just as the mountain range running from South to North gives unity because it serves as column and axis, so is there a common desire among youth: create American Culture" ("Hay varias Américas" 39). Similarly, editors of Ecuador's Elán proposed that a new creative impulse was to be found in "the profound pulsating of a single aorta spread out along the length of the Andes" ("Editorial" 59), and Puerto Rican noístas used similar body

language in their "Gesto" manifesto: "Let us put our aesthetic into harmony with Niagara Falls and may the emotion open out like the mouth of the Orinoco" (LHA 243).

But the most striking feature of this Americanist rhetoric was the claim that vanguardism itself was a fundamentally New World event. The manifesto-style preface to Oswald de Andrade's novel Mamórias sentimentais de João Miramar affirmed that the time was right for the art of "Brazil in America" because this New World (Brazil in particular) had always been shaped by the "human outbursts" and "clangorous attacks" cultivated by European literary modernity (9–10; RN 113). Peruvian Federico Bolaños affirmed that "the birth of the word VANGUARDIA belongs to America which has centered in its 10 letters all the directions of the European movement" (MPP 330). Venezuela's Uslar Pietri argued that America had not only not plagiarized the European vanguards but had made its own considerable contribution to the movement (MPP 273). And Peruvian poet Emilio Armaza claimed that "vanguardism in Europe was a fetus; here it is a sturdy, thoroughbred specimen" ("Confesiones de izquierda" 1).

These hyperbolic claims for future American culture and art did not escape sharp contemporary criticism, even from within the vanguardist ranks, for example, from Peru's César Vallejo. In 1926, he deplored the paucity of Latin American cultural leadership but conceded that the vanguardist generation might serve as a source of creative hope (MPP 188). But he also insisted that modern motifs alone (telegraphs, skyscrapers, lowercase typography) could not create a modern spirit, and he indicted his generation for creative impotence and for a "false and epidermic Latin Americanism" that still aped Europe by dancing the "vanguardist charleston" (MPP 189 and 242–44). Autochthonism, Vallejo explained, did not consist in saying that one is autochthonous but rather in being it without saying it. As a major promoter of vanguardist activity and of exploring Americahist concerns, Mariátegui, like Vallejo, was guarded in his assessment of both. Under attack by more nationalist contemporaries, in the Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928), he defended his interest in European thought as the "only salvation for Indo-America" (OC 2: 12). Mariátegui supported intellectual and cultural exchange among Latin American nations and argued that most South American countries had experienced comparable processes of national development, but he turned away from the ideal of a unified Spanish American cultural experience or of an incipient new American culture.^[12]

ln Brazil, even though Mário dc Andrade's hero Macunaíma adopts a Spanish American conscience on the island of Marapatá, if we recall that Macunaíma was a hero without any character, it is not surprising that Mário himself was also guarded about Americanist rhetoric. In an article on Argentine literature, he recoiled from the concept of PanAmericanism and argued that "continental psychological or ethnic unity" did not exist (de Andrade in Antelo 165). However, in an otherwise highly critical review of André Sigfried's Amérique Latine, Mário agreed with Sigfried's identification of a persistent Latin American "savage" quality but insisted, as his novel Macunaíma explores, that this "primitivism" was historically and culturally complex (de Andrade in Antelo 193).

The Americanist component of Latin America's vanguardist activity was also always ironically intertwined with European expectations of an imagined New World. The European sojourn, actual or literary, had become a standard step in a would-be artist's formation, and for many writers of this period—Mariátegui, Asturias, Carpentier, Oswald de Andrade, Evaristo Ribera Chevremont, and Luis Cardoza y Aragón—the transatlantic experience had provoked a "discovery" and reengagement with Latin American culture. Not surprisingly, the transatlantic is a frequent motif in Latin American manifestos and poetry. Through writers such as Spengler and Keyserling as well as through the expectations of European vanguardists, the agenda for Latin American self-discovery was closely intertwined with a European rediscovery of what was imagined as the non-European world. Pilgrimages in search of an autochthonous America were eventually undertaken by some European vanguardists, including Blaise Cendrars, André Breton, and Antonin Artaud. Mariátegui notes in the article on Waldo Frank (cited in an epigraph to this chapter) that Europeans wanted from America the expression of itself (OC 3: 194) rather than "rhapsodies of European 'isms'" (OC 12: 73). But European artists' expectations for American art were often problematically shaped by primitivist quests and by romantic and vitalist conceptions of America as the organic. Even as their own work was marked by these same ideas, Latin America's vanguardists were also ambivalently aware that their own New World stories manifesting these conceptions were often exactly what European artists wanted to hear.

"We are still the land of Columbus 'where people are born with tails.' Victims of the Europeans' literary hysteria," Oswald de Andrade observed in 1929 (Costa, "Revisão necessária" 6).^[13] In a similar tone,

Mariátegui lamented absurd demands by exoticism-seeking Europeans that Peru's Parisian-based surrealist poet César Moro produce work with indigenist themes (OC 2: 329). Other writers documented European expectations of Latin America and its art. In "Las posibilidades de un teatro americano," written from Paris for Guatemala's El Imparcial, Asturias noted that the performance of a European-style South American play had been received critically by an audience "anxious for exoticism" and seeking a spectacle of "American substance" (Paris 1924–1933 476–77). Similarly, in his aphoristic composition Membretes (1932), Argentina's Oliverio Girondo noted Europe's projection of its exoticist dcsircs onto Latin America: "Europe is beginning to be interested in us. Disguised in the feathers or the chiripá that she attributes to us, we could achieve clamorous success! What a shame that our sincerity obliges us to disenchant her, ... to introduce ourselves as we are" (Veinte poemas 95). In a 1931 article, "América ante la joven literatura europca," Carpentier summarized a survey of young European vanguardists, including Philippe Soupault, Nino Frank, Robert Desnos, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Georges Bataille. Carpentier had asked how they imagined Latin America, and he noted the antiEuropean tone of their answers that proposed Latin America as the site of the West's cultural and political future. The contemporary reader is also struck by the penchant for organicist language, as in Desnos's affirmation that America's "effervescent virgin and fertile land" would be the scene of formidable events (Carpentier, OC 9: 299). Latin American writers needed to pay attention, Carpentier suggested, to European clamorings for a New World vernacular art (OC 9 303–4).^[14]

America in the Vanguards' Experimental Texts

A humorous critique of such transatlantic expectations was constructed by Peruvian Carlos Oquendo de Amat's brief poem "Amberes" from his 5 metros de poemas (1928). As a collage of images from that port, "Amberes" records the city's expectations upon the arrival of "passengers from America": "The curious read American landscapes in his eyes / and the puma that embraces the Indians with his boots. / fountains of gold / Surely from his lips a cockatoo will fly" (n.p.). But even as they noted the ironies in European expectations, Latin American writers rigorously investigated the possibilities such a

vernacular expression might present for affirming a peculiarly American experience and art. Americanist manifestos and little magazines generally portrayed America as the new, the primordially telluric, or the organic. In a critical forum, as I have noted, writers such as Vallejo, Mariátegui, and Mário de Andrade, among others, seriously questioned these images. But a more nuanced critique of these New World stories unfolds in experimental literary works that either address Americanist questions directly or cast their vernacular content in New World frames. Five works that exemplify this critical process are Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma (1928); Gamaliel Churata's El pez da oro (1927–57) from Peru; Carpentier's ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1927–33); Asturias's Leyendas de Guatemala (1930); and, from Guatemala, Luis Cardoza y Aragón's Pequeña sinfonía del nuevo mundo (1929–32). Similar works not encompassed in my analysis include the Brazilian writer Ronald de Carvalho's poetic collection Toda a América (1926) and, from Chile, Pablo de Rokha's surrealist poematic prose composition Suramérica (1927–28).

Macunaíma, subtitled The Hero without Any Character, draws its narrative substance from the "Myths and Legends of the Taulipang and Arekuná," from German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg's Vom Roroima zum Orinoco (1916–24). The work recasts these tales into the story of Macunaíma's life of heroic misadventures, erotic encounters, and dirty tricks. By mating with the queen of the Amazonian Icamiabas, Macunaíma becomes Emperor of the Forest, but his wife and son die from a curse, and she leaves him a magical amulet, the muiraquitã . The giant Piaíma, alias the huckster Venceslau Pietro Pietra, steals the amulet, which Macunaíma and his brothers travel to São Paulo to retrieve. Back in the virgin forest, the hero encounters new antagonists, loses the amulet again, and is mortally wounded by the sun goddess Vei. After telling his life story to a parrot, Macunaíma willfully ascends to heaven and is transformed into Ursa Major. One day the work's nameless narrator, wandering in the vanished tribe's land, encounters the parrot, who repeats Macunaíma's story. As the parrot flies off to Lisbon, the narrator begins to sing in "impure speech" Macunaíma's tale.

A hero of enormous appetites and a trickster of Pantagruelian proportions, Macunaíma defeats his adversaries with his wits. As a Brazilian hero, he learns spoken Brazilian and written Portuguese, and the language recording his story incorporates regionalisms, colloquialisms, puns, and indigenist and Africanist elements into a singular idiom. The work's New World substance derives from Macunaíma's adoption of a

Spanish American conscience and from the discovery and encounter motifs woven through his story.^[15]

A prime mover of Andean vanguardist activity, Gamaliel Churata (née Arturo Peralta) wrote significant portions of the 501-page El pez de oro (1957; The Fish of Gold) between 1924 and 1930.^[16] Subtitled Retablos del Laykhakuy (referring to a traditional Aymara healer) and divided into eleven retablos, the work narrates a young writer's journey to a pre-Columbian past where he seeks to resolve the conflict of competing cultural traditions that hampers his creativity. With a fragmented structure and multiple narrators, the story is told in a surrealist prose of modern and baroque Spanish with frequent inclusions of Quechua and Aymara, neologisms, and linguistic hybrids of the author's invention. The inchoate work, highly uneven in quality, includes rambling narrative prose, indigenous poetry and songs, polemical essays, dramatic dialogues, short tales, and stories within stories. Essayistic musings on metaphysical, historical, linguistic, ethnographic, and indigenous issues weave through the autodiegetic frame narrative. Countless references to America's contested cultural, linguistic, and artistic identity situate the work's engagement with Peruvian indigenous culture within a broader American context.

¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! was published in 1933, but Carpentier wrote a first draft in 1927. Originally subtitled Historia afro-cubana, the work narrates the life story of its Afro-Cuban protagonist, Mencgildo Cué. The story includes Menegildo's birth and childhood in a sugarcane central (mill) community, initiations into Afro-Cuban customs, his murder of his lover Longina's mate, imprisonment in Havana, initiations into Havana street life and Afro-Cuban ñáñigo cults, and his death in a fight with a rival group. The novel ends with Longina's return to the central community where Menegildo's son is born and the life cycle begins again. Though it draws on the naturalist novel and the Bildungsroman, critics have noted that ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! is a strikingly heterogeneous work.^[17] In addition to sometimes disconcerting shifts in narrative tone and focalization, the novel incorporates Afro-Cuban songs, ethnographic accounts of ñáñigo rituals, samples of vernacular speech, and jarring vanguardist metaphors. Although Menegildo's story unfolds in an unmistakably Cuban world, as with Macunaíma, discorery and encounter motifs insert his tale also into an Americahist mode.

The first (1930) edition of Asturias's Leyendas de Guatemala contained five lyrical prose narratives based on colonial and pre-Columbian folklore as well as tales from the Popol Vuh .^[18] These tales are framed by

two introductory pieces. "Guatemala" situates the reader in the world to be explored, as a first-person speaker returns to the land of his origins. Through ephemeral voices and lost shadows and with the help of el Cuco de los sueños (the phantom bogeyman of children's dreams), he constructs an imaginary journey through the layers ofa pre-Columbian and colonial past searching for the substance of his stories. "Ahora que me acuerdo" presents a narrative proving ground for deciding who shall tell these tales and in what voice. Here, the narrator displays his lyric prowess to the town's güegüechos, centenarians with magical powers, by assuming the form of the mythological Cuero de Oro (Cuculcán or Quetzalcoatl) and recounting his people's beginnings. The collection creates profuse sensorial imagery through vanguardist accumulations of metaphors coupled with rhetorical strategies such as responsive repetitions of key words and phrases. Key references to the Spanishindigenous encounter place these Guatemalan stories in a broader Americanist context.^[19]

Although the work was not published until 1948, Luis Cardoza y Aragón composed the 100-page prose poem Pequeña sinfonía del nuevo mundo (Small Symphony of the New World) between 1929 and 1932. The composition's twelve sections present in a baroque, surrealist style the poetic discovery of the modern and the primitive New World, in New York, Havana, and Central America's pre-Columbian past. Three poetic perspectives organize the poem's profuse material. In response to modernity's technological jungle, an adult poet recreates an autochthonous world of his childhood and of America's prehistory, what Cardoza y Aragón termed the "universe of the animal and the flower" (245). Two other perspectives are embedded in this experience: that of a child poet who reclaims an innocent vision and that of Dante in New York's modern inferno, a focus that links the adult poet's journey to a Western poetic tradition. These perspectivcs intersect in a search for a poetic language to express what the poet himself called the "reconditc feeling of the New World" (246).^[20]

These five works differ markedly from one another in genre, style, and quality, and they register a multitude of narrative and poetic voices. But even at first glance, they share certain obvious features. Each work presents itself as a self-consciously vanguardist text. Although they all seek to address a specific cultural reality, they all ignore, alter, or parody inherited mimetic conventions. With varying degrees of effectiveness, each work mobilizes specific literary strategies commonly associated with the literary, vanguards: parody, linguistic free play, and the inter-

play of the primitive and the modern in Macunaíma; multiple narrators, stream-of-consciousness narration, and the inclusion of diverse literary and nonliterary genres in El pez de oro; variations in narrative style and focalization, startling metaphors, and the interplay of the modern or the urban and the primitive in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó!; lyrical prose, ambiguous voicing, and linguistic free play in the Leyendas; and the cultivation of logical incoherence and the baroque proliferation of surrealist imagery in the Sinfonía 's poematic prose. In addition, each work is marked by a generic indeterminacy or voracity, invading generic boundaries and incorporating multiple genres. The Sinfonía plays with the boundaries between poetry and prose. The Leyendas, El pez de oro, and Macunaíma combine prose fiction with folklore. And ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! alters its Bildungsroman infrastructure and incorporates collagelike descriptions and, as both González Echevarría and Frank Janhey have noted, somewhat static visual scenarios with the quality of religious retablos .

Beyond a studied experimentalism, each of these works is emphatically culturally focused in vernacular content and expression. These are site-specific texts that seek to evoke the sensorial, linguistic, or cultural environments of known New World locations: from the Amazonian world to São Paulo in Macunaíma, the Lake Titicaca kollao in El pez de oro, the sugarcane central setting and the Havana underworld in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó!, the overlapping pre-Columbian and colonial worlds in the Leyendas, and New York, the Caribbean, and Mesoamerica in the Sinfonía . Most strikingly, in all of these texts, New World specificity is equated with non-Western cultural presences, some indigenous, some transplanted: the Quechua-Aymaran in El pez de oro, the West African in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó!, the Amazonian and the legendary Tapanhuman in Macunaíma, the Maya-Quiché in the Leyendas, and the West African (in Harlem) and the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican in the Sinfonía .

It would seem logical to attribute this primitivist mode to the general New World climate that produced the less overtly experimental novela de la tierra . This is particularly tempting because most of these writers were no mere dabblers in Latin America's vernacular cultures. Carpentier and Mário de Andrade undertook serious work in ethnomusicology, and Mário promoted the study of Brazilian folklore. Asturias studied Mesoamerican myths and legends at the Sorbonne and, under the tutelage of Georges Raynaud, translated the Popol Vuh and Los anales de los Xahil into Spanish. Gamalicl Churata collected ethnographic materials from the indigenous cultures of Puno, Peru, and Bolivia, and

Luis Cardoza y Aragón translated Raynaud's version of the play Rabinal Achí into Spanish. But these writers' use of vernacular materials for aesthetic purposes must also be considered in the context of international vanguardism. The avant-gardes' ethnographic impulse has been carefully explored by James Clifford in a study of Parisian-based "ethnographic surrealism." Vanguardists' ethnographic activities included the self-conscious collection and recontextualization into experimental projects of non-Western visual artifacts and the cultivation of what were regarded as "primitive" verbal forms. The widely traveled 1985 Museum of Modern Art exhibit, "Primitivism in 20th-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern," focused on this process in the visual arts. But primitivism was also common in verbal and performing arts, for example, in Dada's "African Nights" in Zurich and Tristan Tzara's inventions of a pseudo-African language; in works such as Apollinaire's "Zone," Cendrars's Anthologie Négre, Marinetti's Il Negro, Fernand Léger's and Cendrars's theatrical ballet La Création du Monde; and in materials on non-Western cultures published in magazines such as Documents and Minotaure .

Drawing on emergent practices of psychology and cultural anthropology and operating in an intellectual climate influenced by James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890–1915), Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913), and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's La mentalité primitive (1910), European vanguardism conceived through its primitivist discourse a link between "procivilized" experience and primary or nonrational states of mind and being. Vanguardists sought such primary experience as an antidote to what was perceived as the mediated quality of modern life. In the study of ethnographic surrealism, Clifford suggests that the Parisian vanguards' ethnographic concerns were different in kind from romantic exoticism because they emerged from a "reality deeply in question." Other cultures, according to Clifford, "appeared now as serious human alternatives; modern cultural relativism became possible" (The Predicament of Culture 120). It is true that the vanguards turned to non-Western cultures for divergent modes of thinking and interacting with the world. But in her groundbreaking study of Western primitivism, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Marianna Torgovnick argues that, until recently, Western primitivism has been a projection of the West's own cultural constructs (leading at their worst to racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes) and has seldom been based on substantive information about the societies defined as primitive. Even in the postmodern era, she suggests, cultural relativism has been pain-

fully slow to develop. André Breton himself conceded in the 1950s that surrealism's pursuit of the primitive was a questionable activity because it was based on such "partial knowledge" of ancient cultures (Surrealism and Painting 333).

But in Latin America, the vanguardist encounter between Western society and its imagined "others" affirmed a historical specificity and cultural proximity that the European avant-gardes could not claim. Even though many Latin Americans might have had relatively little personal contact with the non-Western cultures present within their own and even though most vanguardist writers participated little in those cultures, what Antônio Cândido said of Brazil could be applied to many parts of Latin America: "in Brazil, primitive cultures mingle with everyday life or are living mcmories of a recent past." Primitivism, therefore, was "fundamentally more coherent" with Latin American cultural heritage than with the European (Literature e sociedade 121). In this spirit, the Americanist texts of the vanguards present their vernacular material not as something foreign and rcmote but rather as palpable experience that might serve as rcsource material for a new Latin American art. For this reason, these works interweave their vernacular material with thematic explorations of the artistic process. Usually this connection is established through a potential artist or creative figure with privileged connections to America's "Americanness" or cultural specificity. As I have demonstrated in the chapter on portraits of the artist, the vanguards constructed an artist figure more immersed in the contingent world than aestheticist predecessors. In the works with an Americahist orientation, that contingent world assumes a vernacular substance.

Thus, El pez de oro 's principal narrator is a would-be writer searching for a language that will express his culturally conflictive experience, a quest that leads him to the Andean indigenous underworld. Here, a debt to Lucian, Homer, and Dante is superseded by the vernacular connection, as he descends, "strumming not the heptachord but the Laykha's khirkhinchu " (an Aymara healer's charango ; 264). The Leyendas ' frame narrator is a storyteller who finds his creative voice in Guatemala's multilayered cultural world and by retelling Mayan cosmogonic myths. Other leyendas address the creative process, through stories of transformation in "Leyenda del Cadejo" and "Leyenda de la Tatuana" and a tale of art's gratuitous and playful qualities in "Leyenda del Sombrerón." Menegildo Cué is not an artist in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó!, but through Afro-Cuban cultural practices, he and his people are cast as intimately linked to sources of aesthetic creation. Menegildo is intuitively "doctor-

ate in the gestures and cadences" of music, dance, and improvisation (OC 1: 46), and the ñáñigo rituals into which he is initiated require performative and linguistic agility, linked to the natural world: "animal instruments" and "black litanies . . . coupled under the sign of an invisible jungle" (OC 1: 47–48). The Sinfonía invokes the aesthetic process in epigraphs from Nerval, Shelley, de Chirico, and Pound, in its structural musical metaphor, and in the poetic voice centering the work's perceptions and openly addressing poetic issues. The work's multifocalized artist speaker finds a poetic voice in America's "universe of the animal and the flower" (245). Though Macunaíma 's unnamed narrator is cast as a singer of tales, the novel's most imposing artist figure is the crafty hero himself, capable of radical linguistic inventiveness and dramatic, instantaneous transformations, into a "comely prince," a French prostitute, a drop of water, a leaf ant, or varieties of fish.^[21]

Each of these works claims direct connections to America's nonWestern substance, through a narrator, a character, or a specific cultural practice, as a source for creative power and a new vernacular art. At this level, these works do indeed appear to sustain an organic notion of cultural wholeness and the idea of a new and different literature emerging from Latin American experience. But these organicist links and authenticity claims become more complex as one examines carefully just how these texts represent that vernacular Ameriean substance and, most important, the impact on this image of the vanguardist motifs with which it is framed.

America as the Vanguards' Ground Zero: A Challenge to the Discourse of Origins

A resolute pursuit of the new is vanguardism's defining feature and its greatest cliché, even as this search unfolds, as Matei Calinescu suggests, in the parody or the critique of modernity itself (141). More than a youthful gesture or a willful breach with tradition, the obsessive cultivation of novelty provoked inquiries into the nature and substance of newness. Sustaining the avant-gardes' relentless quest for the original, or the very new, was the paradoxical fascination with the originary, the very old, that is, with a time-before-time of experience harboring the mysteries of the creative process. This search for beginnings is characterized by Poggioli as a "disturbed nostalgia for a new primitiveness" (76). Paraphrasing futurist Massimo Botempelli, Poggioli notes the avant-gardes' will to re-create a "primitive" or "primor-

dial" condition that would pave the way for a "grand future renascence" (75). Peter Bürger notes similarly in Theory of the Avant-Garde the surrealists' quest for "pristine experience" (71). In her essay "The Originality of the Avant-Garde," Rosalind Krauss states this idea more boldly: "Avant-garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth" (157).

In Latin America, originary discourse was widespread even in vanguardist writings that eschewed an autochthonous agenda. Poets, Huidobro wrote in "La poesía," are "those who carry the memory of that time, only those who have not forgotten the cries of the universal birth, nor the accents of the world in formation" (OC 1: 655). And according to the "Manifiesto del Ultra" signed by Borges, among others, the aesthetics of ultraísmo required of each poet "a vision, as if the world were arising dawnlike before his eyes" (HV 269). A similar language has often characterized the critical language applied to vanguardist works.^[22] But in the Americanist context, the vanguardist link between the very old and the very new was often expressed as a return to vernacular sources. Thus, in his memoirs of Nicaragua's vanguardist movement, Pablo Antonio Cuadra explained that "the formula was clear: the original was the originary" ("Los poetas en la torre" 188). Because of its ongoing engagement with what were perceived as originary cultures, indigenous or, as with West African presences, more recently imported, Latin America was depicted through the primitivist motifs of its vanguardist texts as the originary site of the original, the place of first times and of a new language, a new art, and newness itself.

In a sense, of course, this representation of America is not new at all. Gonzláez Echevarría affirms in The Voice of the Masters, as I have already noted, that Latin American literature from Indepcndence until Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos is marked by a romanticist "anxiety of origins" (4). And Djelal Kadir argues persuasively in Questing Fictions that an obsession with "making it new" was inscribed into Latin America's cultural imagination both by the proleptic Old World texts forecasting the New World's discovery and by the "errantry" that led to the discovery itself. This determination, according to Kadir, manifests itself in Latin America's "pcrpctually unfolding fictions that endlessly re-make the New World anew" (6). Although he sees this process already at work in colonial texts, Kadir traces in key modern works an elusive quest for beginnings that, he suggests, locates its "perpetually dislocated" home in the homelessness, or exile, of "originary ciphers" (5 and 3).

I would argue, however, that what is singular in the originary quests

undertaken by the vanguards' Americanist works is the primitivist mode in which they are framed. The concept of exile, geographic or metaphoric, has always been implicit in twentieth-century primitivism, often characterized, as Torgovnick has observed, by recurrent metaphors of finding a home or being at home. Using Georg Lukács's concept of "transcendental homelessness," Torgovnick underscores a "sense of cultural void" and "a fear of the fragility of the self" that often motivate modernism's primitivist projects (190). Taking this idea, I would suggest that even as originary textual quests cast American experience as the homelessness of a cultural void, vanguardist notions of the primitive offered a way of imagining that elusive home as a ground zero of artistic creation to be forged through autochthonous sources. In his deliberative study of Spanish America's twentieth-century regional novel, Carlos Alonso suggests that Latin America's founding cultural myths predicated on a "radically new beginning" foreclosed the possibility of defining national cultural identities on the necessary identification with a "fathomless past" (33–34). But within the vanguards' primitivist discourse, the fathomless past and the "future renascence" coincided through the equation of artistic originality with origins, providing a way for imagining that past. Thus, because of its continuing engagement with non-Western cultures, Latin America was portrayed by the Americanist texts I have bEen describing as the very old that was also very new: a primeval world of unprocessed experience where inaugural events, like Macunaíma's birth in the virgin forest, had happened once and could therefore, paradoxically, happen again and again, always for the very first time.

These creative works simultaneously affirm and undercut this image. All portray America as the locus of very first times, through characters construed as originary beings, through primal scenes and events, or through cosmic creation stories or humbler accounts in the folktale mode of "how things came to be." Thus the frame narrators in the Leyendas and El pez de oro derive their expressive originality from the ancient creation stories of America's indigenous worlds. The narrator in the Leyendas ' "Ahora que me acuerdo" transforms himself into Cuero de Oro and journeys to the ancestral jungle where life began and to the "uncreated" sensory jungle where his own sense of being emerged. Here he hears echoes of the original errant tribes—"This is where their life began!"—and invocations to their creators, as he witnesses the creation of the paths of the land and the beauty of the colors and of language that provides the source for his artistry. In the Popol

Vuh 's originary spirit, the leyendas that follow present founding talcs, such as the arrival of the Quiché world's original inhabitants in "Leyenda del Volcán" or accounts of how things came to be: the Cadejo (night-stalking animal) and the opium poppy in "Leyenda del Cadejo"; the almond tree in "Leyenda de la Tatuana"; the Maya-Quiché love for ball playing in "Leyenda del Sombrcrón"; and the emergence of a new volcano on the shores of Lake Atitlán in "Leyenda del tesoro del lugar florido." The comparable originary motifs in El pez de oro include its title and the semantic field of its most repeated words—germ, gcnesis, seed, avolue, root, genesic cell, generate, and nest. The narrator seeks his cxprcssive system in the "lacteal point" of humanity in the depths of the earth and, descending to the Andean underworld, hears its inhabitants' stories of America's beginnings. The title's fish of gold, or Khori Chalhva, a cosmogonic being associated with origins of life and whose birth in Lake Titicaca is reenacted in a dramatic dialogue, provides the work's sustained metaphor for America's beginnings and for human creative energy derived from this source.

Mcnegildo Cué in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! does not enjoy the same geographic proximity, to his roots as the inhabitants of indigenous worlds do. But possessed of an "unpolished humanity" (OC 1:81), he is cast as an originary being, and the community to which he belongs is portrayed as an carly world. Its physical dwellings for the zafra (cane harvest) evoke humanity's first shelters (OC 1: 34); its inhabitants are said to experience "primary" emotions, and their music is characterized as "elemcntal" and of "primary rhythms" (OC 1: 152). The music of Mencgildo's world teenacts what is portrayed as that art form's birth, and the Afro-Cuban ritual dances keep him and his people in contact not only with the continent of their origins but also with their secret knowledge of "remote eras, pregnant with intuitions and with mystery" (OC 1: 47). In addition, the novel casts Menegildo as a perpetual initiate, forever new through rcpeatcd losses of innocence, a role his newborn son will resume through the continuing cycle of beginnings. The comparably repetitive originary, motifs in the Sinfonía are based on creation images from the New World's multiple traditions, European, indigenous, and African. A return to beginnings is enacted through repeated allusions to the birth of Venus, through pre-Columbian sacrificial scenarios, and through the "primal" music and dance of Harlem. An epiphanic moment in the lengthy prose poem is provoked by the adult poet's discovery of nature's artifact, horse manure, in New

York's mechanical jungle. This scatological Proustian device evokes a flood of memories, of the world of "sensible chaos," of his "double infancy as a poet," of a childhood in Antigua, Guatemala and of the pre-Columbian past (264–65). Here, the child poet assumes the identity of one about to be sacrificed and experiences the convergence of the very old and the yet to be born: "My past, so ancient, and my future, so remote, suddenly combine some of their threads, intertwine them" (269). At the moment of sacrifice, the poet participates in the "creation of a world" (276).

Significant differences of style and tone notwithstanding, each of these works evokes originary events, situating a speaker or character in a position privy to special knowledge harbored at the sources of things. Each work records beginnings: initiations, transformations, births of characters, of a people, of a country, of a continent, or of a world. Most important, the creative inventiveness of speakers or characters derives from this originary activity. As the founding story of a people embodied in their hero, Macunaíma shares many of these features. The hero's birth in the depths of the virgin forest, surrounded by the enormous silence of the murmuring Uraricoera River, has the aura of a primal event. Dislocated in São Paulo like Menegildo in Havana or the Sinfonía 's poet in New York, Macunaíma and his brothers yearn for the land of abundance they have left behind. Macunaíma is a being perpetually (re)created, even returning several times from the dead. Like the Leyendas, moreover, Macunaíma employs the folkloric how-things-came-tobe mode ("And it was thus that ...") to describe the emergence of something new: a plant, a word, or a custom.

But Macunaíma is a radically parodic work, and by exaggerating these originary motifs or placing them in curious contexts, the novel performs a critical mimicry of originary discourse, pointing to its flaws and bringing into focus similar though less conspicuous critiques in the other works as well. The primal ambience of Macunaíma's birth offers a case in point. As I explore in detail in the chapter on language, in the other works, originary moments are construed as prelinguistic events. Cuero de Oro witnesses language's emergence in the Leyendas; the Khori Challwa's birth precedes language in El pez de oro; the Sinfonía 's speaker alludes to a time before things had names; and in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! , through their music and dance, Menegildo's people conjure up a time before song had been invented. Macunaíma renders this idea literally, providing a humorous twist. For six years after his birth, Macu-

naíma fails to emit a sound, and when he speaks at last, it is only to complain, "Ai, quc preguiça!" (5) ("¡Ay, que flojera!" in Spanish, or, literally, "Oh, what laziness!" in English).

The originary creative capacities Macunaíma derives from the natural world of his origins are extended to São Paulo's land of technology, as when he transforms his brother into a "telephone-machine" on cue. Macunaíma's proclivity for self-(re)creation is exaggerated even more as he and his brothers recycle themselves to the point of obscuring their origins. Before they enter São Paulo, Macunaíma bathes in the shoals of a magic river and becomes white-skinned and blue-eyed, and his brothers lighten their skin and limbs. Speaking of the vanguardist link between origins and originality, Rosalind Krauss notes the movement's parables of "absolute self-creation," for example, Marinetti's account of his (re)birth as a futurist: "thrown from his automobile one evening in 1909 into a factory ditch filled with water, [Marinetti] emerges as if from amniotic fluid to be born—without ancestors—a futurist" (157). But Macunaíma's frequent experiences in self-(re)creation are portrayed not as birthlike primal events but as self-conscious reconstitutions, for example, when the giant chops him up into a stew and his brother hastily reassembles his parts. In addition, Macunaíma 's folkloric accounts of originary occurrences often commemorate banal accidents of modern life rather than sacred natural events. The story of a new plant emerging from the grave of Macunaíma's son preserves the aura of a legendary tale, but other such "and that is how ..." tales expose their constructed quality. Thus, when Macunaíma slings a brick at his brother, the soccer ball is born.

Macunaíma 's most significant critique of originary discourse unfolds in the ambiguity of the novel's own telling. Combining references to countless geographic sites, colloquialisms not limited by time or place, and a multiplicity of folkloric sources, Macunaíma resists delineation as the founding story of one place or one people. The work's narrative structure also avoids such boundaries. If Macunaíma is a story of origins, the origin of its own telling remains obscure even as the novel ends. From the opening reference to the "hero of our people," the nameless narrating voice identifies with the group whose story is being told, and though he does not arrive on the scene until the story has ended, this initial participatory tone is maintained by the colloquial expressions and linguistic inventiveness the speaker shares with the characters he describes. Close to death, Macunaíma tells his story to a talk-

ative parrot, and once the hero dies, his tribe and its language vanish until a man wandering along the Uraricoera stumbles upon the parrot, who repeats Macunaíma's tale in a marvelously new language. That man, the speaker confesses to his "dear reader," is the narrator himself who has stayed on to repeat the story. But Macunaíma 's originality is only in its (re)telling, for the narrator is repeating a story he has heard from a parrot. Though the parrot has allegedly heard it from the hero himself, a parrot is not a creator but a repeater of the words of another. And everything we know about the parrot's source, Macunaíma himself, suggests a radically unreliable narrator. Thus, although Macunaíma 's teller shares a supposedly original account of a people's beginnings, the work portrays him as the repeater, twice removed from unreliable sources, of the words and stories of others.

The other Americanist works are not overtly parodic. But like Macunaíma, they also expose uncertain origins, through ambiguous narration and poetic voicing or through obscure or multiple sources. Thus, while drawing on creation myths, the Layendas undermines the primacy of first times through its ambiguous and multiple origins. The speaker in the two initial narratives assumes a variety of forms—the returning native son, Cuero de Oro—and vacillates from singular to plural with the result that we do not always know who is speaking or from where. Though as Cuero de Oro the narrator returns to Mayan sources, the leyendas that follow are presented less as primary experience than as a retelling of what was already there. The initial native son narrator culls his tales from "lost shadows and phantoms with empty eyes" that populate the air (13), and the world from which they emerge, like Guatemala's layered pre-Columbian and colonial past, is a palimpsest of voices in which the original layers are obscured. In addition, these lost stories are inscribed in the oral tradition that is repeatedly invoked in their telling. The narrator participates in this tradition not only by explicitly quoting from it but by reminding us that he, too, is in the process of retelling: "And it happened that..., and it happened, I repeat in order to take a breath" (35). And although it is a story of beginnings, the Leyendas itself has not one but two beginnings, the narrator's return to Guatemala and the storytelling test with the güiegüechos . Curiously, the narrator has asked them to tell him stories, but transformed into Cuero de Oro, he becomes the teller, an ambiguity of speaker and audience that poses the problem of how to begin and of who shall begin. Significantly, the second section's title, "Ahora que me acuerdo" ("Now

that I remember," or, more colloquially, "Now that I think of it") provokes a sense of interruption and digression, of a beginning in media res.

As in the Leyendas, one is often unsure in El pez de oro exactly who is speaking, as the principal narrative voice unfolds into three perspectives: the voice of experience remembering, a youthful voice, and an authorial voice that examines in an essay style cultural and linguistic questions. A multitude of additional voices intermingle with the principal narration without warning or accountability for their sources: poetic voices reciting indigenous verse, a teacher and student debating linguistic mestizaje, Aymara healers arguing with Western doctors, biblicalsounding voices telling stories of Khori Challwa and Khori Puma, and the disembodied "gutturalizations" reminiscent of "old voices" (267) that the narrator hears in the land of the dead. The narrator's "originality" derives from collecting these voices and transmitting them without comment to the reader. More important, in his underworld sojourn, rather than the unified originary account he seeks, the narrator unearths a polyglot cacophony of classical European, Spanish, and indigenous versions of America's beginnings.

In a comparable mode, as the Sinfonía 's poetic speaker searches for originary experience, the focalizer for that voice shifts continually from adult poet to child poet to Dante, and the work incorporates other voices that emerge from the natural world. Even as it accumulates images of first times, the poem also addresses the difficulty of ascertaining beginnings, as the child poet seeks primary explanations in vain through the fossilized framings of blackboards, maps, and philosophy: "The philosophers finished reading the libraries, closed the last volume and began to write a new one for future philosophers who on rereading the libraries would write another volume, that one they didn't find, which would be read by future philosophers who on not finding the volume they were seeking would write another" (257–58). Seeking to create lyrically what could not be found in philosophy, the adult poet poses to the reader directly the problem of aesthetic originality. The work espouses an antiartifice approach to art. Thus, through the child poet's freshness of vision that transforms the familiar into the unknown, the ordinary will become new: "Habitual the bewilderment, renewed, strange, and familiar" (337). But by making explicit its own intention to seek out the primary experience of the unintentional, the poem exposes the artifice of originary searches.

Over the years, critics such as Juan Marinello, Joseph Sommers, and

González Echevarría have noted disconcerting vacillations in narrative perspective in ¡Écue-Tamba-Ó!, a feature that, as in the other works here, makes the speaker's position difficult to pin down. Portrayed as a nonreflexive, self-present, and originary being, Menegildo is paradoxically situated by this novel in vanguardism's self-reflexive context. The actual source of Menegildo's story is never clearly identified, but the voice that tells it speaks in different registers, sometimes detached and ostensibly objective, sometimes critical of social conditions, and, particularly while describing Afro-Cuban rituals, sometimes seemingly yearning for participation in Menegildo's world.^[23] I would suggest that this voice parallels the ambiguity James Clifford describes in the ethnographically inclined Parisian avant-gardes, as it combines ethnography's intentions to make the strange familiar with vanguardism's impulses to make the familiar strange (The Predicament of Culture 121). As in some ethnographic narrative, the voice speaks from the interstices of participation and distance, seeking to describe from within a fullness of experience that it desires and projects from the outside.^[24] Narrator observations, at once condescending and admiring, are multiple. Thus, though neither Menegildo nor his companions "had ever undertaken the arduous task of analyzing first causes," the narrator notes that "they possessed, through atavism, a conception of the universe that accepted the possible magical nature of any event" (OC 1: 68).

The tension bred by such a split focus accounts for the "crack" that has been noted in the novel's structure, but this crack produces the text's critique of its own originary discourse and is manifested in Menegildo himself.^[25] He is characterized as a man imbued with the fullness of being but with no self-reflexive "gaps," no "lost space" to disturb this plenitude. Menegildo, the narrator asserts, "felt himself, complete, solid, filling his skin, with no lost space, with that same essential reality possessed by the heat or the cold" (emphasis in the original). He had a "sensation of living that excluded all metaphysical anguish" (OC 1: 162). These affirmations or the observation that Menegildo feels overcome by a sense of grief that he is incapable of analyzing construct a feeling and yet unreflective being who is paradoxically both aware and unaware of his condition. But as the work repeatedly suggests, there are indeed gaps in Menegildo's being, as he repeatedly experiences estrangement and, indeed, suffers at times from the very sense of "transcendental homelessness" that Western yearners for the primitive have sought to resolve by inventing beings like Menegildo. Thus in a crosscultural context that parallels the position of the novel's ethnographic

speaker observing Menegildo's world from outside, Menegildo attends a festive gathering, feels "strange among so many blacks of other customs and other languages," and is reassured by the sight of one of his own who at least speaks "like a Christian" (OC 1: 73). The most selfconscious and willful split in Menegildo's persona unfolds theatrically when he adapts to city life by joining an amusement park sideshow. With turban and red robe, Menegildo portrays the ghoulish executioner of Saint John the Baptist, a part he plays with care and gusto and fully "aware of his role" (OC 1: 167). Throughout ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó!, Menegildo spends far more time adjusting to things foreign to his experience than he does partaking in the existential fullness of his ancestral primal world.

All of these works represent America as a primordial ground zero of human experience and creation. But through the multiplicity and ambiguities of their sometimes obscure, sometimes mediated sources, these works also undermine the creative primacy of first times, that is, the vanguardist notion of the originality of originary events. By suggesting that there are no purely originary beings, no univocal or "unifocal" experiences, and no absolutely new stories to be told, these works explore the elusive nature of newness and suggest that the originality of artistic creation—American or otherwise—resides elsewhere than in the imagined original moment. Through shifting voices and focalizers and by emphasizing their own repetitions, these works cast doubts on the originary substance of characters or narrators and make evident the constructed nature of originality. And even as they posit an ahistorical time-out-of-time of human experience, these works also reveal the contextual and historical contingencies of the new, evident particularly in its dependence on the eye of its beholder.

Columbus's Egg: Discoveries in the Eye of Their Beholder

The vanguardist image of artistic discovery harbors a profoundly paradoxical idea, and in part this paradox emerges from the meaning of the word itself. To discover is to obtain for the first time, through purposeful search or by accident, sight or knowledge of something previously unknown to the discoverer. In vanguardist artistic practice, this interaction between purpose and accident is exemplified in the artist who deliberately sets out to discover a new effect with the hope of being dazzled by the surprise of his or her discovery. The paradox is intensified by the word's aura of scientific pursuit. Poggioli notes

that the avant-gardes' idea of discovery was imbued with the spirit of scientific experimentation, as artists tested new modes. But to be open to the process of discovering, artists, like scientists or explorers, needed to be properly disposed. They needed to cultivate a discovering attitude or a propensity for divergent thought, what Haroldo de Campos has called an "inaugural inclination" ("Uma poética da radicalidade" 25), or what Bürger calls a "pervasive openness to impressions" (65). The paradoxical combination of the willful "inaugural inclination" and the surprise encounter it should generate also underlies the gcographic meaning of discovery and its historical allusions to the encounter between the Old World and the New. This historical context is embedded in the vanguards' quest for "original effects" among artifacts of nonWestern cultures. As Poggioli points out, the deliberate search for such effects sometimes became a Faustian "search for Eldorado and the fountain of youth" (135). Breton made this historical allusion explicit while expounding on the creativity of the insane: "Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen," he observed (Manifestoes of Surrealism 5–6).

Recent assessments of Columbus's widespread appearance as a literary symbol in Western literature have revealed the discovery concept's problematic substance.^[26] His appearance in vanguardist discourse in particular embodies those aesthetic problems of special concern within the avant-garde projects. In Latin America's vanguards, discovery references were common in the context of "inaugural inclinations" and the innocence of vision they implied. "We want to discover life. We want to see with new eyes," Borges wrote (MPP 75). "See with open eyes, " Oswald de Andrade affirmed in the "Pau-Brasil" manifesto (GMT 330; SMSR 186; emphasis in original). But references to Columbus's venture and to the cross-cultural conflicts it provoked were also quite common in writings on aesthetic discovery. On one level, writers identified with and admired the discoverer. Thus Vicente Huidobro compared "theoretical adventurers" or discoverers (such as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Shakespeare, Góngora, or Rimbaud) to "practical or dynamic adventurers" who discover or conquer new lands (for example, Columbus, Cortés, Napoleon, Livingstone, Cook, or Magellan) (OC 1: 752). Columbus, he argued, had provided "a new poetic sustenance" for the world (OC 1: 779). Puerto Rico's atalayistas claimed Columbus as one of their own (LHA 104), linking the idea of Columbus's farsightedness with the group's name derived from atalaya, a watchtower or lookout point. Oswald de Andrade dedicated his experimental Pau

Brasil poetry collection to Blaise Cendrars "on the occasion of the discovery of Brazil" (Poesias reunidas 65). And Paulo Prado's introduction to that edition compares the work (in which the "História do Brasil" section presents a rediscovery of that land) to "Columbus's egg," that is, something doubted by others but ultimately enriching the discoverer.

This expression, "o ôvo de Colombo," underscores the tension in the vanguardist idea of discovery between chance and intention as well as the role of divergent thought. The saying "É como o ôvo de Colombo" (literally, "It's like Columbus's egg," but more figuratively translated, roughly, as "It's easy when you know how") emphasizes the change in perception provoked at the moment of insight.^[27] But the expression refers also to the apocryphal story of Columbus's response to the skeptics. Declaring that an egg could be stood upright, he is said to have challenged the doubters to figure out how. After their futile efforts, Columbus then flattened the egg's curved bottom (by smashing its shell against the table) and stood it up straight, an unconventional solution to the problem, obvious once it was revealed.^[28] This story underscores the interaction between intention and chance. The answer to the riddle, moreover, shows not only a determination to solve it but also a predisposition to divergent thought. A similar idea was posed by Mexican Contemporáneos group member Jaime Torres Bodet. The genius, Torres Bodet suggested, cannot foresee all the results of his work but consciously finds the direction to follow. "What was admirable in the history of the discovery of America," he wrote, "was not the discovery, a mere finding in which nature got to know herself a little bit better, but rather the will of Christopher Columbus placed at the service of a route wisely intuited " (Contemporáneos 108; my emphasis).

But invoking Columbus's discovery points to another problem as well, for the word discovery harbors the paradox of seeing for the very first time something, or somebody, that was already there. Thus allusions to Columbus's discovery, foreground the conflict of perspectives between those who discover and those who are discovered. In fact, this problem is already embedded in Breton's suggestion that Columbus needed madmen to discover the New World. We know that for Breton and other vanguardists, madmen were grouped with "primitives" and children as repositories of the unmediated experience and divergent thinking that vanguardist artists were seeking. Making a truly grand discovery, then, would require the "wisely intuited," willful plan of a Columbus combined with the "inaugural inclination" of the "primi-

tives," that is, of those he believed he had discovered and onto whom (we know from his writings) he projected prior imaginings of who they would be. This paradox is fully exploited by vanguardist works that portray America as a site of the inaugural disposition required for discovering and as a place for seeing for the very first time things that are already there, wisely, or foolishly, intuited. Through exaggerations, inversions, and parody, these Americanist vanguard works play with the interaction of discoverer and discovered, exposing the ironies of such meetings as well as their historical and cultural contingencies.

The Sinfonía tightly interweaves perspectives of discoverer and discovered, as the New World is perpetually reinvented through the perception of the one who beholds it. The poem emphasizes the power of a radically innocent vision by reiterating the phrase "the child sees" to provoke floods of accumulated imagery and by lauding childhood's creative focus: "Poetry and reality, simultaneous, ubiquitous, without guile, without age" (346). Evocations of an Antigua childhood and of Mesoamerica's pre-Columbian past link the child poet's discovering eye to America's "universe of the animal and the flower." But the Sinfonía also reveals discovery's purposeful mode, for the adult poet willfully conjures up the child poet and Dante to evoke alternate experiences of a single encounter. Imagining Columbus's discovery of indigenous sacrificial rites from the navigator's perspective, for example, produces one kind of response: "From the deck of his caravel he could contemplate a procession bathed in blood, that wailed monotonous songs" (268). But by shifting the focus through the child poet to the position of the sacrificed, ascending a pyramid flanked by obsidian-bearing priests, the poet imagines a sacred, time-defying experience: "all is Present, all, even past and future" (268–69). Later, perceiving Harlem as a primeval world and feeling a connection with its displaced inhabitants, the poet relives the arrival of America's discoverers through the discovered's fearful gaze: "He saw from the depths of his infancy white men, with thin noses and fine curly lips, who were looking for something as if demented" (319).

A similar transformation is brought about when the child poet recasts Dante's New World discovery, providing two different visions of New York. Dante discovers a modern inferno, an urban world of "dense subterranean rivers, [which] capillarily irrigated the metropolis's body laid out in the night, soft and translucent like a great lizard," and of houses like "skulls with empty sockets" and with "slate craniums" over which "the crystallized crocodiles stuffed with sugar warm themselves"

(256). But a shift in perspective willfully rediscovers New York in the spring, projecting onto the city the child poet's animal and flower worldview: "New joy in the typewriter keyboards, in the automobile horns, in the firemen's polished bells ..., Spring of the air" (282). These perpetual rediscoveries seek to bring the ordinary reality of one world under the estranging perception of another.

In the same way that the child poet fearfully recalls the white men's arrival in the Sinfonía, the Leyendas ' initial lines invoke the specter of prior encounters in the land the narrator has returned to find: "The road sinks like the blade of a broken sword in the plaza's fist" (11). But the "Leyenda del Sombrerón" examines in a more playful mood how the encounter's creative impulses interfered with its ideological goals. Here Guatemala is the land of the historical encounter—"that remote corner of the world promised to a queen by a crazy navigator" (34)—and initially the story seems to emerge from the conqueror's perspective. Thus religious leaders inhabit a beautiful temple raised side by side with monuments to the "idolatry of man" (34). But those charged with eradicating idolatry are overcome by the very "inaugural inclination" that led the crazy navigator to the New World and devote their time instead, the narrator notes ironically, to sinfully creative pursuits: the fine arts, science, and philosophy. One particularly devout monk resists these temptations only to be discovered and captivated himself by a magical rubber ball that bounces his way, emblematic, Asturias observes in a note, of the indigenous love of the ball game. As the story inverts the hierarchy between discoverer and discovered, the monk charged with converting the infidel is transformed by the creative power of the discovered culture, a conversion facilitated by the very "openness to impressions" that led the discoverers to this land.

The "Leyenda del tesoro del lugar florido" enacts a more profound inversion by recounting don Pedro de Alvarado's attack on Lake Atitlán from the perspective of the indigenous world. But here, too, the conqueror's "inaugural inclination" helps those he finds to outwit him. Santiago de Atitlán and its market present an alluring profusion of sensorial abundance. As high priests read signs from the nearby volcano, the town prepares for attack with a multichromatic display of warriors. This "centipede rainbow" parade of deception serves as a weapon: "May the white men be confused by seeing our arms!" (41). As the white men advance in a rigorous silence contrasting with Atitlán's vociferous color, the fleeing Indians abandon their treasures, and the conquerors crossing the lake on a boat are dazzled by the artifacts they

behold. But before they can seize a thing, the erupting volcano reproduces itself, covering the Indians' tracks and their abandoned treasures. The conquerors are left to contemplate the illusory riches afloat in the water, and the reader is left to speculate whether the wonders bedazzling these discoverers were mere projections of their "wisely intuited" desires.

The fourth retablo of El pez de oro enacts a similar inversion as it recreates Columbus's discovery from the perspective of the non-Western world. From the heights of the Andean kollao, Pachamama and her son the Khori Puma watch the Spaniards arrive in the Caribbean and unmask Columbus's mistake. Recast as the catastrophe foretold by indigenous myth, the event is precipitated by the willful intention of Pachamama herself who (through a momentary lapse in judgment) tricks the lost explorers to America's shores. Indigenous narrative voices interspersed with archaic Spanish from Columbus's writings create a stepby-step account of the Caribbean landing. "And this sublime dreamer discovered us!" the indigenous voices announce (143). The natural world responds with a cosmic concert of Andean verse, reaffirming Pachamama's power. By turning the explorer's "openness to impressions" against them, the New World version of the encounter underscores that what the travelers believe they behold (Marco Polo's land of the Great Khan) is not what they are actually seeing (the Khori Challwa's indigenous world). Instead, it is the "primitives" Columbus believed he had found who see clearly, as the lines of a traditional haylli record: the "discovering of discoverers" was all simply the magic of Aymara healers (147). Thus, when Columbus discovers a nova in the sky, it is only Pachamama herself giving the disoriented dreamer a hand, as "compassionately she went out to meet him" (147).

¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! and Macunaíma undertake more radical inversions of discovery motifs by repositioning the non-Western beings, traditional objects of discovery, in the discerning role of discoverer. Both Menegildo Cué and Macunaíma contemplate the modern urban world with the eyes of the newly arrived. And each dazzled discoverer scrutinizes this new world's banalities through the lens of the first encounter, shaped, as with Columbus and the chroniclers, by the frame of his own worldview. Mcnegildo becomes an infant discoverer when he explores the wonders of his family's bohío . Focusing through the toddler's innocent eye, the narrator imbues this ordinary event, designated "Initiation (a)," with the awe of a momentous revelation, as Menegildo moves beyond the "civilized world" of his cot. The child willfully undertakes

the journey on all fours, propelled like all explorers by the lure of the yet to be known. His discovery of "the great mystery... in the base of the wardrobes" is charted in a language reminiscent of the chroniclers first contemplating America and anticipating the baroquely prodigious natural world that Carpentier's nameless narrator finds around every bend in Los pasos pardidos: "The dust transforms those regions into ancient caves, with stalactites of animal threads that oscillate like soft pendula... [and] the world displays itself as a jungle of pillars that sustain platforms, plateaus, and cornices populated by discs, sharp edges, and fragments of dead beasts" (OC 1: 41). Although this panorama unfolds in words beyond Menegildo's expressive powers, the passage is focalized from his position and that position's relationship to the world he observes. Thus the physical limits of Menegildo's lived experience shape his perception of the new world he beholds. As with many exploratory journeys, Menegildo's most "marvelous discovery" is an ostensibly human scene. The "magical theater" of the family altar filled with colorful figures and objects presents a world separated from Menegildo by its theatrical frame but one that he desires to enter and, as with the treasure seekers of Lake Atitlán, one that he reaches out to seize.

Menegildo's second major new world encounter, his trip to Havana as a prisoner, is not a willful endeavor. But although he is initially passive in the hands of his captors, on the train his "openness to impressions" takes over. Thus, although the landscape he surveys is identical to the world he is leaving behind, very small variations, say, in the shape of a tree or the course of a river, assume the aura of a discovery. Just as Columbus and the chroniclers often compared what they saw to what they had known so too does Menegildo seize on the familiar, for example, when the landscape dotted with novelty is interrupted by a group of blacks at work. This penchant for reframing the new into a context already known shapes Menegildo's most basic perceptions as he "hears" the train car's wheels as the words and rhythms of a popular refrain: "Huye alacrán, que te pica el gallo.... Huye alacrán, que te pica el gallo" (Run, scorpion, or the rooster will sting you) (OC 1: 121). In the city, Menegildo is once again dazzled by his surroundings, objects and people as "exotic" in the young man's eyes as the New World's inhabitants to arriving Europeans. But at this very moment, Menegildo is brought back to earth by a child who recognizes him as a black prisoner. This shift underscores Menegildo's marginality from the world he has discovered, a position that generates the work's open critique of modernity's cultural leveling. Marginal as Menegildo may be, however,

the novel credits his culture with the critical power of resistance: "The bongo, antidote for Wall Street!" (OC 1: 115).

As a folkloric and Rabelaisian creation unfettered by the lingering naturalist conventions that shape ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó!, Macunaíma undertakes his São Paulo journey voluntarily and in a more powerful position than Menegildo to subject the urban world to the condescending scrutiny of his own discovering eye. Macunaíma is portrayed as a conqueror as the narrator recalls "so many conquests and so many past deeds" (36). In São Paulo, Macunaíma reacts with "surprised contemplation," his intelligence "very perturbed" (40). Initially he processes the fantastic and strange paulista "world of beasts" through the frame of his own experience. But he soon learns to rename what he sees though continuing to identify it with his own world. Thus wild animal roars and shrieks turn out to be the city's sirens and horns, and the flora and fauna perceived by Macunaíma are actually signs, chimneys, buses, and cars. Even so, Macunaíma remains outside of the culture he observes, as he demonstrates in his approach to machines, a feature of São Paulo life, he quickly intuits, that dramatically distinguishes it from his own. Thus, although São Paulo's "Children of Manioc" have many different words for their machines, in Macunaíma's mind they form a single category that sets them apart from the nonmachine (nature, animals, humans, and gods), and he persists in referring to the telephone-machine, the taxi-machine, and the elevator-machine. In his customary augmentative fashion, moreover, he broadens the category to encompass all artifacts of São Paulo life foreign to his own world, including the rouge-machine, the shoe-machine, the dress-machine, and the newspaper-machine.

The work's most acerbic critique of the discourse of discovery, and the power relationships surrounding it develops in Macunaíma's notorious letter home to the Icamiabas (Amazonian women). Imitating the chroniclers' style and parodying the language of travel and ethnography, Macunaíma describes the banalities of modern life as exotic features of São Paulo civilization (its sexual habits, its materialism, its insects) and reports on the quaint and picturesque customs and mores of its people. Macunaíma's description of street-cleaning machines as monsters recalls the chroniclers' accounts of America's fantastic creatures. The city itself is the edenic, abundant "ground zero" of origins for urban life; the water is so magnificent, the climate so mild, the earth so healthy that "one could well affirm, in the manner of the chroniclers," that ... "the urban fauna was spontaneously generated" (80).

São Paulo's filth is ironically recycled through the bedazzled discoverer's eye; its streets are "adorned" with litter and fruit peelings and a "delicate dancing dust" full of germs that contaminate the city's people. And as in the chroniclers' accounts of the New World's inhabitants, Macunaíma assumes an ethnographic distance from the city's people, recasting them as the "primitives" imagined by their discoverer: "The paulistas are a bold and plucky people, inured to the hardships of war. They live in singular and collective combat, all armed from head to toe" (81). They have "curious" and "original" habits, and they speak in a "barbarous and multifarious chatter" (84).^[29]

This letter interweaves various levels of perception. The "primitive" being contemplates the modern through the lens of his own worldview, refracted through the distancing language of discovery once elaborated by those who constructed their own representations of the primitive and his world. As the object of the modern world's primitivist discourse, Macunaíma simultaneously embraces and celebrates his own primitiveness and turns that discourse against its creators. It was this process that led Oswald de Andrade's antropofagia group to regard Macunaíma as the anthropophagic work par excellence. A polemical document that radically inverts European texts of discovery, the "Manifesto antropófago" constructs, as critics such as Benedito Nunes and K. David Jackson have affirmed, the "ignoble savage," never successfully "catechized" by the conquest, to consume primitivist fictions and turn them around as critiques of European culture and social institutions. "I only want what is not mine. Law of man. Law of the anthropophagic," the manifesto's cannibal voice declares against "all importers of canned consciousness" (GMT 353–54). As a guide for aesthetic practice, this primitivc ingests all foreign models, recycling them as his own and launching a "Caraíba Revolution" against Western cultural institutions.^[30]

In the spirit of the antropófago manifesto, all of these Americanist works employ the vanguardist discovery motifs for purposes of cultural critique. On one level, this critique unfolds as a celebration of vernacular cultures through the voices of those who claim them as their own, as if enacting El pez de oro 's admonition that "nobody can discover a world already discovered" (143). Claiming a cultural proximity to the discovered, these works invoke Taulipang and Arekuna myths, Andean cosmology, Afro-Cuban ritual, Mesoamerican rites, Harlem's music and dance, and America's untamed song as prodigious aesthetic resources, cultural worlds constructed not as the outsider imagines them

but as capable of telling their own stories. Beyond celebrating the creative power of the vernacular, however, these works reveal the process of projection at work in one culture's discovery of another. In a specific critique of Western primitivism, they suggest that original effects in art may be provoked by subjecting any group or practice to a discoverer's gaze, focused through anybody's eye. Estrangement, aesthetic or cultural, may be generated through the clash of one world with another, and, as Bürger points out, the surrealists in search of estranging effects cultivated an innocent eye as they wandered like primitives through the "enigmatic nature" of Paris (71). But the discovery inversions enacted in these works suggest that, though one may cultivate a "primitive" perspective with the hope of seeing for the very first time, there is no radical purity of vision, primitive or modern, for what the discovering eye "wisely intuits" is always shaped by its prior experience. Thus the "seeing with new eyes" that these works portray derives not from an originary innocence of vision but from experiences of personal or cultural estrangement, fortuitous or by design. This idea blurs the primitive-modern dichotomy as well as the nature-culture opposition that sustains it. Latin America becomes the site of discovery not because it presents the more pristine, natural world the discoverer seeks or because it harbors the "inaugural inclination" the discoverer ascribes to and seeks from the discovered but rather because Latin American experience brings into focus the estrangement provoked when one culture encounters another, an effect that Latin America's history repeatedly reenacts. Such a conception of America poses an emergent cultural pluralism and reconceives the New World not as the site of vernacular or modern culture but as an all-encompassing space where all cultures potentially encounter and interact with one another.

America's New World Rhapsody: From Totality to the Nonorganic

Art in the early twentieth century, according to Arnold Hauser, was seized by a "mania for totality" (4: 237),^[31] and the international avant-gardes gave this impulse free rein to the extreme. But at the same time, vanguardist art undermined wholeness by attacking classical and romantic models of art's organicity, that is, the idea that a work's constituent parts form a complete and unified whole. Bürger affirms in Theory of the Avant-Garde that the organic work of art seeks to appear as a work of nature and to make "unrecognizable the fact that it has been made" (72). Challenging the organic model, vanguardists

constructed what Bürger terms "nonorganic" art, creations that undermine any sense of wholeness and focus attention on their own incompleteness and the decontextualized quality of their parts.

In Latin America, the impulse to encompass all was evident in the manifestos' hyperbolic language and grand schemes that I explore in chapter 1. It was also manifested in the vanguards' portraits of the artist, as I show in the chapter on that topic, particularly in the aestheticist inheritance of an all-encompassing grand poetic vision. But this totalizing drive was particularly evident in the vanguards' Americanist vein, not only in manifestos that imagined a colossal continent of the future but also in creative texts inclined to represent America as an allencompassing whole. But in the construction of this portrayal, these works employ strategies of containment that undermine the notion of New World integrity and reveal an overflowing and disconnected American experience, simultaneously too out-of-bounds and too fragmented to be comfortably inscribed within an organic whole.

In part, this revelation takes shape by exaggerating the organic model in an America so full and complete that it exceeds its own wholeness. The title of Ronald de Carvalho's Toda a América, a work that I have mentioned but have not analyzed in detail here, presents the most obvious example. De Carvalho's America, moreover, is a world of "all imaginations" that "merges all cosmologies" (45). In vanguardist works, this perception of an all-inclusive world emerges in spatial constructions as well. But if the Americanist manifestos cast the New World as an organically integrated body-continent, the creative works generally construct a "baggy monster" geography that overflows its own boundaries, organicity out of control. This view relies in part on characters, narrators, or poetic speakers who traverse hyperbolic distances. The frame narrator in the Leyendas moves freely from layer to layer of his country's geographic and temporal past, and in the body of Cuero de Oro, he roams the Mayan jungles and mountains to their prehistoric beginnings. El pez de oro 's principal narrator executes similar tours of the Andean world, and in the discovery retablo, indigenous characters embrace at a glance a vast reality in which the Caribbean and the Andean kollao are contiguous. The Sinfonía 's poetic pcrspective encompasses Florence, Pompeii, and China along with New York, Havana, and Mesoamerica. Here a sense of physical expanse is produced by repetitions of the word recorrido (traversal), and as the child poet's "traversing the maps," by land, by sea, or by air. Macunaíma traverses space on a comparably grand scale in repeated adversarial chases, on foot, by

stallion, or on the back of an insect, that take him all over Brazil and from Venezuela to Argentina and back through São Paulo.^[32] But this New World's uncontrollable size disorients its travelers, as the Sinfonía 's child poet and Dante become lost traversing the city, Macunaíma forgets where he is going, and El pez de oro's frame narrator becomes geographically and temporally disoriented. Even Menegildo Cué in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó!, who as an islander and a prisoner experiences geographic and existential confinement, contemplates the threat of an uncontainable world in the ocean, an open expanse onto which he cares not to venture.

If geography fails to chart America's totality, music provides another option. The symphony metaphor, with the artist as conductor, provided an early vanguardist totalizing motif, as in Apollinaire's essay on modernity's "new spirit," which, he forecast, would dominate the entire world. The new artists, the French poet proclaimed, would be "like conductors of an orchestra of unbelievable scope" and would "have at their disposition the entire world, its noises and appearances, the thought and language of man, song, dance, all the arts and artifices ... with which to compose the visible and unfolded book of the future" (227–28). The New World was also being portrayed through symphonic metaphors, not only in some poetry's Whitmanesque "I hear America singing" imagery but also, for example, in Waldo Frank's The Re-discovery of America, which, as I noted earlier, was translated and disseminated by Amauta and other vanguardist magazines. Frank described America, which he defined in continental terms, as a symphony of voices (259–61). Symphonic imagery was not uncommon in vanguardist manifestos, for example, in the second estridentista manifesto seeking poetry with "orchestrally synthesized" images ( MPP 125 ). Creative texts employed global musical constructs as well, either as organizing principles or as recurrent motifs. These include, for example, Mário de Andrade's oratorio in verse, "As enfibraturas do Ipiranga," the Chinfonía burguesa by Nicaragua's Joaquín Pasos and José Coronel Urtecho, and the poetic "Orquestación diepálica" by Puerto Rico's diepalista poets J. I. de Diego-Padró and Luis Palés Matos.

The Americanist vanguard texts employ a variety of musical motifs to evoke America's "murmurous world," to borrow José María Arguedas's characterization of Andean experience, in which sounds, human intervention notwithstanding, seem to assume a life of their own. But in general these motifs underscore music's multiplicity, improvisational potential, and unlimited scope, playing down its reliance on or-

derly synthesis. The 100-page Sinfonía, for example, is symphonic in scope, but chains of surrealistic imagery orchestrate the multiple voices and perspectives. Cardoza y Aragón explained the poem's title as a "single and vast metaphor" for the endless growth of the poem's music (245). A scenario in which the child poet and Dante witness a New York opera performance alludes to a symphony's potential to organize the world. But the performance of a "disproportionate" composition that follows unleashes a disorderly string of surreal connections, in which hippopotamuses are changed into swallows and cacti sprout irises (309).

Mário de Andrade subtitled Macunaíma a "rhapsody," and numerous critics have addressed the work's rhapsodic qualities. In music, a rhapsody is sustained by improvisation and an irregular form, and a literary rhapsody stitches together a medley of miscellaneous pieces with effusive incoherence or a nonorganic, fragmentary style (Princeton Encyclopedia, 2d ed.). The cacophonous medley of disconnected sounds provides a recurrent motif in Macunaíma, both in the collage of urban noise that disorients the hero in São Paulo and in the jungle's pandemonium that greets him on his return. The musical performances in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! are usually more symphonic than this in their orchestration. But the music assumes an extemporizing life of its own at times, and the sounds enter the round "successively like voices in a fugue" (OC 1: 47), as the improvisation becomes potentially boundless, repeatedly enacting new counterpoints (OC 1: 154). The cosmic symphony in El pez de oro that marks Columbus's arrival presents a stylistic medley of Andean verse forms in a range of styles and a responsive musical exchange among constellations. The principal narrator also often alludes to spontaneous sound-medleys emerging from the Andean ayllus ' "tranquil disorder" (286). Asturias's "Leyenda del Sombrerón" combines in a similar disorder an expansive medley of human and animal sounds that open out "like lassoes in infinite rings, encompassing it all " (36; my emphasis). And Atitlán's rhapsody of bird songs and human sounds in "Leyenda del tesoro del lugar florido" helps to lure and deceive the discoverers.

These disconnected and improvisational New World medleys are often organized into lists, a common mechanism in all of these works. List making is a favorite vanguardist strategy, in manifestos that inventory their attacks and their goals and in prose and poetic writing employing the clipped synthetic phrase or even surrealism's cumulative metaphoric flow, adding image upon image.^[33] Because of its reliance

on enumeration, a list always implies additional entries and is thus an openly nonorganic construct that resists the possibility of wholeness. Citing the "sequence of isolated events" typical of surrealist automatic writing, Bürger suggests that though these items lack cumulative coherence, their repetition of identical structures (as with items in a series) adheres to language's paradigmatic mode. Unlike the syntagmatic mode in which the end is always reached, the sequence in principle possesses no end (79).

Lists are common in the Leyendas, for example, for creating the sense of abundance in the Atitlán market's "florid place." Its penchant for stream-of-consciousness flow notwithstanding, El pez de oro incorporates lists of Andean sounds, objects, birds, dances, songs, and verbal obscenities. And although the Sinfonía is also written in baroque, poematic prose, its paragraph-long sentences present inventories without syntactical pauses of the New World's surreal images. The one-word, all-noun chapter titles in ¡Écua-Yamba-Ó! organize the novel as a list of scenes with the vanguardist manifesto's enumerative quality. Though Carpentier's incipient baroque prose might seem antithetical to the clipped style of the vanguardist list, many of the novel's descriptions enumerate the contents of Menegildo's world. It would not be an exaggeration to describe Macunaíma as a book of lists, of bird sounds, bugs, trees, wild animals, fishing paraphernalia, precious stones, and dirty words. The list's open-ended resistance to organic completion is underscored in some works in run-on sentences incorporating inventories of items (the Sinfonía, El pez de oro ), in some by accumulating phrases or sentence fragments (Leyendas, ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! ), and in Macunaíma by the suppression of commas in many lists. Macunaíma alludes explicitly to its inventories' limitless substance as it describes the forest with "close to fifteen times a thousand" animal species and "so many millions of trees that nobody could count them" (96; EAG 90).

List making in Americanist works did not begin with the vanguards, and such inventories build on the chroniclers' representations of the New World's unending abundance. But a list is a verbal collection, and the inventory syntax in these works creates the sense of a vast material medley of countless curious collections, assemblages of objects, images, forces, and beings. Walter Benjamin suggested in "Unpacking My Library" that collecting is a childlike mode of acquisition intertwined with the process of renewal, and at some level the numerous collections these works incorporate support the construction of America as an elusively originary world. But, as James Clifford has outlined in "On Col-

lecting Art and Culture," in modern Western societies, the assembly and display of collected items is closely tied to cultural identity formation and notions of cultural authenticity (The Predicament of Culture 215–51). The modern development of collecting is also associated with the Western world's engagement with non-Western cultures. Thus, in São Paulo, Macunaíma quickly grasps that collections have something to do with power and that one can somehow define one's relationship to other cultures through the force of one's own collections. When he learns that the modern giant Venceslau Pietro Pietra owns an impressive collection of precious stones, Macunaíma quickly assembles an equally imposing assortment of obscenities that he eventually deploys as a weapon. It is not inappropriate that works addressing Latin America's cultural specificity should engage in verbal collecting as a syntactical mode, gathering and displaying artifacts to affirm a culture's authenticity and creative power.

But the integrity of a finished collection derives from its aura of completion, its incorporation of a last missing item, and from its modes of arrangement as well. Traditional collectors arrange their goods—geographically, chronologically, by topic—to produce an impression of wholeness. Even so, all collections harbor a tension between order and chaos, or, in Benjamin's words, an underlying "disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order" ("Unpacking My Library" 60). Vanguardist collectors, particularly those with ethnographic pretensions, exploited this underlying disorder through the (dis)organizing strategies of collage, producing rhapsodic, nonorganic collections of items decontextualized and rearranged. It is precisely in this spirit that these Americanist vanguard works construct a New World of disorderly collections, seemingly randomly assembled artifacts from an ever-expanding sphere in which cultural specificity becomes difficult to define. Such a process of random assembly, Clifford points out in his study of ethnographic surrealism, avoids the "representation of cultures as organic wholes" (The Predicament of Culture 146). Thus many of the lists in these works possess a collagelike quality that presents the American world as an unsynthesized "fleamarket of images,"^[34] created like the surrealists' startling metaphors through the juxtaposition or superimposing of items from conventionally dissonant spheres.

Ronald de Carvalho's Toda a América, the poetic work I have mentioned briefly, presents an outstanding example of America's flea market of images in vanguardist works. Here America is portrayed as the

world of "all the imaginations" (Aztec, Germanic, Hispanic, Guaraní, Latin, Incan, Aimoré, Saxon, Slavic, and African) and presents an assemblage of "indisciplines" as it brings together the descendants of pre-Columbian heroes with the children of Isis, Minos, Eleusis, and heirs to the Bible, the Koran, of the Sagas, the dolmens, and the Magdalenan caves (47). Similarly, the curious mixture of styles and materials in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! has been repeatedly noted by its critics, as vanguardist metaphors juxtapose nature and technology. In a world of telephone poles with "a thousand porcelain artichokes glistening on their arms," locomotives expel bull-like snorts and peacocks honk their "lugubrious horns" (OC 1:33). The novel's collagelike collections also display similar cultural medleys, as in the zafra scenes that bring together multiple nationalities for work and for a polyglot musical performance. Similarly nonorganic collections fill the city's storefronts, as in the espiritista center of Cristalina Valdés: "a photograph of Allan Kardek cohabited with a Masonic triangle, an Italian Christ, the classic Cuban St. Lázaro 'printed in Switzerland, ' a Maceo effigy, and a Victor Hugo mask" (OC 1:164).

Described in the collagelike Portuguese that juxtaposes countless regionalisms into a composite that nobody speaks, Macunaíma 's profuse collections are comparably heterogeneous. Thus Pietro Pietra displays in his home objects from all over Brazil, a stone collection that includes a potpourri of artifacts—including arrowheads, stones, jewels, petroglyphs, and stelae—such as one might have found in the twenties at the Parisian Trocadero museum. Macunaíma's countercollection of obscenities constitutes a linguistic museum of expletives from all living languages, Latin and Greek, and an obscure Hindu phrase for a centerpiece. Most impressive is the culinary medley Pietro Pietra dishes up to entertain Macunaíma disguised as a French woman, including shrimp bisque and tapioca, a cannibal soup from the body of a meat porter, alligator shinbone stew, Spanish and Peruvian wines, and São Paulo champagne. In the mode of the curious collection, the Leyendas ' sources superimpose the natural sounds with human oral and written creation; the Cuco de los sueños weaves the spoken tales, as the king's chroniclers record stories of the Indies, accompanied by a chorus of psalmodies and the croaking of frogs (15). Here cultural juxtapositions are organized in a montagelike spatial and temporal palimpsest, in a city constructed of buried cities. The juxtapositions in El pez de oro suggest a similar verticality, as the narrator descends to the Aymara underworld to unearth a linguistic medley of indigenous idioms and a mixture of

literary and intellectual sources: Andean cosmology, combined with bits of Dante, Lucian, Saint Paul, and Horace. The novel's glossary lays out a similar mélange of Quechua, Aymara, neologisms, plebeianisms, and Quechua-Aymara-Spanish hybrids. The Sinfonía 's surprising juxtapositions construct an American poetic world in which swans dance at a ball with divers and butchers dressed in armor from the Crusades enter forests to waken Sleeping Beauties.

As a nonorganic construct, the collagelike collection always reveals the absence within it of a unifying principle or center. But in some of these works, the absence these profuse collections harbor is openly laid out before the reader. According to Cardoza y Aragón, for example, he sought to give the Sinfonía the structure of an artichoke, an apt metaphor for its layers of imagery. But this artichoke has no heart, as it encloses a world of uncertain substance. Significantly, what the poetic speaker values most in the symphony is the empty space, "that vacuum that follows the perfect performance of a concert" (346), and the work presents repeated tributes to "grandiloquent silences" (292). Similarly, the material abundance in the "Leyenda del tesoro del lugar florido" serves to deceive the conquerors by concealing an absence, the illusory jewels in the water. Hyperbolic accumulations also cover up voids in Macunaíma, for example, when the hero laments in São Paulo that he cannot go fishing because he lacks the proper gear and lists, item by item, not the paraphernalia he possesses but that which he lacks. Here, as in the Leyendas, accumulation provides adversarial protection. Incarnating the antropófago manifesto's credo "I only want what is not mine," the hero's body becomes the site of material overabundance as he devours all the edibles around him in order to regurgitate and hide in his own vomit.

This body reference is not incidental, for as Clifford points out, the fact that the body has traditionally provided a "privileged image of order" made it a favorite vanguardist target (The Predicament of Culture 132). In a similar vein, Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain points out that the human body becomes emblematic of the human being's desire to define a "stable internal space" (39). While the collagelike, rhapsodic collection challenges the notion of an integrated cultural order, the instability of the body—its absence, its transformational propensity, or its fragmentation and disintegration—constitutes a further negation of wholeness. Thus disembodied voices populate the Sinfonía in which human bodies are often unstable (the child poet returns through a man-

nequin's hand to his past as an Indian) and in which images of human and statue decapitations abound. Human bodies in the Leyendas, El pez de oro, and Macunaíma are subject to instant transformation, into other human bodies, mythological beings, animals, trees, or (in Macunaíma ) machines. Although he is described as a human with no "gaps" in his being, even Menegildo Cué in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! transforms himself with relish into John the Baptist's executioner, and the bodies of ñáñigo ritual participants become agents and voices for supernatural beings. Macunaíma's quintessentially nonorganic body is the most radically unstable, as the dismembered and reconstituted hero returns several times from the dead. Tristan Tzara provided a recipe for the composition of a Dada poem by cutting out words from a magazine, mixing them up in a paper bag, and reassembling them in the order in which they left the bag. Following an interestingly similar procedure, when the giant chops Macunaíma up into his stew, the hero's brothers reassemble him by fishing out the scraps of flesh and bones, wrapping them in banana leaves, and blowing smoke on the concoction from which a reconstituted Macunaíma—a bit weak in the knees—emerges.^[35]

Conclusion

The image with which I began this chapter—Macunaíma returning to the virgin forest—suggests a more composed and selfpossessed being than the hero whose brothers retrieve him piece by piece from the giant's stew. But this collagelike portrait of the Brazilian hero, adorned with artifacts juxtaposing the world of his origins with the "great São Paulo civilization," also underscores its own constructed substance. This picture of Macunaíma presents a fitting emblem of the confrontation in Latin America's vanguard movements between a continuing search for vernacular art and the cultivation of literary modernity, as well as of the tensions produced by multiple cultural and historical registers within Latin America's lived experience. And this image of Brazil's Amazonian hero turned São Paulo tourist calls to mind many other images these works project: Dante strolling with the Sinfonía 's child poet surveying the "craniums of crystallized crocodiles" adorning houses in New York's inferno; Menegildo Cué, child of an ancestral early world, dispatching Saint John the Baptist with gusto in a Havana

carnival sideshow; the narrator of El pez de oro unearthing the voices of Lucian, Homer, and Dante among the "gutturalizations" of the Aymaran underworld.

In Theory of the Avant-Garde, Bürger suggests that by juxtaposing elements from many eras and cultures, the avant-gardes undercut the validity of a hierarchy of techniques and styles derived from historical succession or tradition and sought instead to legitimize the "simultaneity of the radically disparate" (63). Calinescu also notes that the avantgardes constructed a "blunt rejection of the principle of hierarchy in all walks of life and primarily, obviously, in art itself" (143–44). A similar idea is developed by Edward Said, who observes that modern works cultivate "random appetites" and establish with other works relationships of "adjacency" rather than of dynastic succession (9–10). "Beginnings" within this context require not the establishment of a dynastic origin from which an individual work or a body of literature descends but rather the marking out of a space alongside other works and other traditions. The Americanist vein of Latin America's vanguard movements addressed the problem of the origins and genealogy of a Latin American artistic tradition. The manifestos with an Americanist vein generally perpetuated romantic, organicist myths through images of an integrated, telluric, body-continent rooted to its ancestral origins, a body for which the new American artist would provide a voice, as I explore further in the chapter on language. Although they address similar issues, the vanguardist creative texts propose a different view. On the occasion of a new edition of ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! in 1979, Carpentier noted the apparent contradiction many of his generation had faced: "It was necessary to be 'nationalist,' trying at the same time to be 'vanguardist.' ... A difficult aim given that every nationalism rests on the cultivation of a tradition and that 'vanguardism' of necessity signified a rupture with tradition" (OC 1: 26). This apparent contradiction is worked through when the tradition that one is constructing denies the hierarchy of traditions, as the vanguardist creative texts do by posing a more collagelike American culture of the fragmentary and the displaced.

These texts' exaltation of America as a quintessential originary space always ripe for new beginnings serves to reveal the mediated quality of such origins and the difficulties to be encountered in attempting to pin them down. If Latin America provided fertile ground for the endless generation of new discoveries, this potential derived less from the integrity or perfect presence of its originary cultures—indigenous or im-

ported—than from the dislocating heterogeneities generated by multiple cultural collisions. On one level, these works do enact the search for an "authentic" tradition in the distant past of the continent's nonWestern cultures. But instead of the definition of America's "essence" affirmed by the manifestos or the clear line of cultural descent implicit in the search for national traditions, these works embody, as Haroldo de Campos has said of Brazil, a "refusal of the essentialist metaphor of gradual, harmonious natural evolution" ("The Rule of Anthropophagy" 45).^[36] They propose instead a tradition of "random appetites" and "adjacency," to borrow Said's terms, or, to employ Bürger's, of the "simultaneity of the radically disparate." By appropriating vanguardist motifs as the idiom through which to explore Latin American cultural specificity, these writers create sometimes bizarre "hybrid works," as Carpentier said of ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! Through these unusual works, these writers also laid claim to the vanguards' dislocations, fragmentations, and nonorganicity as peculiar to and definitive of Latin American lived experience. If one lends any credence to such claims or simply recognizes their presence in Latin American literature, it is not surprising that contemporary theoreticians of the postmodern have not infrequently directed their attention to Latin America's new narrative, as several writers of the past three decades have been credited with postmodern writing. As European vanguardists in search of the primitive looked to the Latin American artists for the cockatoo that would surely spring from their lips, so contemporary theorists of the eighties expected them to speak in "postmodern." In his meticulous typology of postmodernist fiction, for example, Brian McHale suggests that because of the continent's mosaic of dissimilar cultures, languages, worldviews, landscapes, and ecological zones, Latin America's condition might well be described as "intrinsically postmodernist" and the worlds that its literature constructs as "heterotopias" (52–53; emphasis in the original). It is certainly true that Latin American literature's time has come, and perhaps this is partly because it has been paradoxically in step and in tune with the cacophonous dislocations of our postmodern times. But if we look carefully at these Americanist vanguard writings, we may discern that the experience of radical discontinuity is a story that Latin American literature has been trying to tell about itself and its world already for quite some time.