The Novels of Origenes

One intriguing aspect of the Orígénes phenomenon in Cuba is the emergence in the late seventies of a peculiar subgenre in that nation's post-1959 narrative: the Orígenes novel. With the Orígenes phenomenon I mean the process of rectification that has occurred within the cultural officialdom of the Cuban Revolution whereby a pre-Revolutionary aesthetic ideology belligerently stigmatized in the sixties as "vacuous," "hermetic," "formalistic," [End Page 201] "anesthetized," "evasionist," and "ineffectual"—as was Orígenes—becomes rehabilitated in the eighties and nineties as a symbol of a socially progressive Cuba and of a nationalist teleology of emancipation. 2 The nominally "apolitical" high modernist literary and cultural journal Orígenes that José Lezama Lima and José Rodríguez Feo edited from 1944 to 1956, as well as most of the Cuban poets in the so-called Grupo Orígenes associated with this editorial enterprise, have now gained great iconic power and institutional prestige in today's Cuba. This rectification thus corrects and atones for an early phase of silencing and denunciation of the Orígenes enterprise orchestrated by succeeding journals and cadres such as Ciclón (1956-59), Lunes de Revolución (1959-61), and Casa de las Américas during its first decade (1960-70). 3 A secluded, independent literary project, Orígenes arose and flourished during the corruption-ridden years of Ramón Grau San Martín's Auténtico Party constitutional regime (1944-52) and drew to a close during General Fulgencio Batista's second dictatorship (1952-58). Orígenes was first neglected, derided, or resented by its contemporaries; antagonized by the radical intellectuals and apparatchiks of the first years of Castro's Revolution; officially ignored in the seventies; and finally fully canonized in 1994 in one of the most important international conferences held that decade in Cuba. 4

Art · Democracy · Denunciation · Dictatorship · Emancipation · Humanities · Ideology · Intelligentsia · Literature · Narrative · Nationalism · Phenomenon · Political science · Politics · Prestige · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American Literature Studies · Law · Philosophy

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