The Structure of Crisis in José Asunción Silva's De sobremesa

The Structure of Crisis in José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa 59

The Modern Self AS SubJeCT:The STruCTure of CriSiS in JoSé ASunCión SilvA’S

De sobremesa

niColAS fernAndez-MedinAstanforD University

In order to suppress everything, it is necessary, and it suffices, as it appears, to be all science, all sensation, and all action.

(Maurice blondel, L’action, 1893)

José Asunción Silva’s (1865-1896) De sobremesa is undoubtedly one of modernismo’s more ambitious novels. Presented mostly as an episodic travel journal, it opens in the reclusive study of the dandy poet José fernández y Andrade. Settled in with a cup of tea and surrounded by a close group of friends, José reads from his european travel journal of his relentless pursuit of a mystifying woman called helena. helena, as her literary name suggests,1 represents none other than the ideal of beauty and perfection, and she is described by José as “sobrenatural casi.” entry after entry, Silva interlaces José’s quest with a plethora of thematic detours and digressions that survey everything from occultism, decadentism, religion and philosophy, to fin de siècle spleen, pre-raphaelite art, psychotherapy and the drug culture. in the end, José catches up with the enigmatic helena, but it is too late, she has passed on. At the foot of her grave in Paris, the incredulous José admits that she may have never existed at all, that she may have been just a figment of his overactive imagination, an elaborate illusion that obscured the limen between objective and subjective realms: “eres un sueño más real que eso que los hombres llaman realidad [...] tú eres el Misterio mismo” (350). With this final cry, José closes his journal and the novel ends.

Silva’s encyclopedic array of literary influences in De sobremesa is astounding and includes Max nordau, Maria bashkirtseff, hippolyte Adol-

60 latin American literary review

phe Taine, friedrich nietzsche, henri beyle Stendhal, Paul bourget, J. K. huysmans, baudelaire, verlaine, d’Annunzio, edgar A. Poe, and oscar Wilde, among others.2 it is precisely De sobremesa’s breadth and scope that has precipitated some critics to read the novel as a loosely ordered text with little structural cohesion. baldomero San�n Cano, one of Colombia’sbaldomero San�n Cano, one of Colombia’s foremost literary critics and once Silva’s close friend, considered De so-bremesa “una obra de construcción defectuosa, de análisis arbitrario y de verdad puramente subjetiva” (Maya 81). Similarly, rafael Maya believes that “De sobremesa carece de plan exterior y es zurcido de relatos cortos, de incidentes, de episodios, de los cuales es centro y protagonista un tal José fernández” (84). Although valuable and worthy of study, Maya argues that De sobremesa’s poor form is simply too chaotic for a novel: “hay demasiado adorno y fantas�a en ella, demasiada música, demasiado color” (91). �long the same lines, �duardo �amacho �ui�ado finds Silva’s novel�long the same lines, �duardo �amacho �ui�ado finds Silva’s novel of interest principally in its scenic artistry and ornamental panache, but considers its many stylistic excesses and its “mal modernismo [...] as� como su descuidada construcción,” an insurmountable barrier to deem it a truly transcendental work (xiii).

This line of criticism has been revised in recent years by reevaluating De sobremesa’s structure more closely within its modernist tradition; that is, within the broader “actitud” and aesthetic praxis that critics—among them worth mentioning are ivan Schulman, Max henr�quez ureña, and �níbal �on�ále�—have agreed upon as the first modernist generation (José Mart�, Gutiérrez nájera, Asunción Silva, among others) that sought a renewal in language and the arts as a response to and expression of ac-celerated industrialization, capitalism, positivism, and the overall erosion of what foucault termed knowledge systems. As such, critics have inter-preted the novel’s fragmented form not as a sloppy novelistic experiment of the famed poet of Gotas amargas, but as an effective medium to explore the complex, and oftentimes contradictory, ideological milieu of the late nineteenth century. in this vein, Gioconda Marún approaches the novel by tracing a higher grade of symbolic structure in various recurrent symbols of the occult (la mariposa, la rosa, la cruz) that unify the text into a “cos-movisión modernista.”3 from Juan loveluck’s perspective,from Juan loveluck’s perspective, De sobremesa presents us with “un nuevo héroe, heredado del romanticismo con ropaje de pequeño dios: el artista” (Author’s emphasis 20). loveluck proposes thatloveluck proposes that Silva’s interest in advances in psychotherapy and his zeal for modern art act as guiding structural principles that situate José fernández’s plight within “la angustiosa conciencia del hombre finisecular” (28). �ector �. �rjuelahector h. orjuela also perceives De sobremesa as a more cohesive text. “la búsqueda de“la búsqueda de helena por José fernández,” orjuela tells us, “se establece mediante signos


y elementos estructurantes que el autor—sin ser novelista hábil—maneja adecuadamente para cohesionar lo que a simple vista parece desordenado y fragmentario” (21). These “signs” and “structural elements” can well beThese “signs” and “structural elements” can well be José’s cosmopolitan environment, his craving for spiritual meaning, or even the famed pre-raphaelite painting of Sidall (a spitting image of helena) that keeps reappearing throughout the novel. in sum, orjuela’s valuable study evaluates De sobremesa on various levels, including its language, its philo-sophical currents, and more importantly, its prose genre within modernismo, concluding that Silva “se coloca con De sobremesa entre las figuras claves de la prosa de ficción modernista en lengua española” (47).

These critical revisions have been key in pointing to deeper symbolic structures within the novel and reveal the broader crisis of the late nine-teenth century episteme as a foundational “premisa de trabajo” within the novel—in other words, the instability of “truth” and “reality” in a fragmented and decentered discourse symptomatic of José’s irrationalism to the sup-posedly rational world around him. however, rarely do critics engage the fragmentation in the very fabric and subtle play of the novel or account for it convincingly in their readings. To say, as Gabriel Garc�a Márquez does in the preface to Silva’s Poesía completa, that De sobremesa’s Achilles heel lies ultimately in its lack of credibility, only points to the obvious without teasing out the underlying formal subtleties of the text (26-28). The ques-tion that largely remains unanswered is quite simply: does De sobremesa’s fragmentation serve any purpose? An aspect commonly obviated is that the text’s fragmentary nature is in fact an organizing principle of its textuality, and as i will demonstrate, its modernity. dismissing this fragmentation as a novelistic defect, poor thematic organization, or worse yet, “mal modern-ismo,” is to ignore a crucial dialectical frame within Silva’s prose.

When speaking of frames within this context we must pause a moment and turn our attention to An�bal González’s work on the latin American novel and the crónica. for González, Silva’s novel is best considered within a fruitful mise en abyme approach, one that seeks to delimit the larger frame of action in which the modernist intellectual was developing at the time. What González proposes is that the text is mapped within frames; that is, from the opening passage in José fernández’s study (itself a “marco lim-inar” for the ensuing diary), textual frames are continually situated in and subsumed by other frames:

en el texto de Silva, la preocupación por el marco no sólo lleva a la proliferación, la diseminación de éstos a lo largo del texto, sino que esa proliferación asume a veces la forma de una gradación de un marco dentro de otro marco dentro


de otro […] es un intento de producir una serie no graduada de marcos, a la manera de una galer�a de cuadros […] la misma forma del “diario” que asume la novela sugiere este intento de Silva de ir narrando su historia como si se tratase del despliegue de una serie de cuadros en una galer�a o museo. (94-95)

González concludes that José’s quest involves attaining “un marco trans-cendente, un l�mite absoluto,” yet a “limit” that is ethereal and impossible to attain and forces José’s ego into all manner of earthly experimentation in his pursuit of helena (González sees it as José’s inability to distinguish between “lo interior de lo exterior, la acción de la contemplación, la vida de la literatura”) (102). hence,hence, De sobremesa provides ample space for dis-quisitions on art and beauty of the topos Uranus variety while delving into the depths of epicureanism, excess, decadentism, and other related topics. González hones in punctiliously into the congruities of De sobremesa with its fin de siècle age, and makes many valid points; however, in the question of fragmentation and structure, González seems to have overlooked one of the larger frames of the novel: the original text.

De sobremesa is, for lack of a better term, a reconstructed text, and the metaframe (the obra prima in the strict sense of the words) was lost in the foundering of the L’amérique in 1895. Silva rewrote the text from memory in Colombia—originally penned in venezuela under different affective conditions—months before his suicide. The khaos, literally the gapping void referenced implicitly by the missing text, displaces any move towards a textual center, a place of truth or authenticity. As benjamin noted, “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space” (220). As we will see, this point frames, perhaps like no other, the epistemological crisis that lies at the heart of the text’s formal dialectic.

De sobremesa begins precisely by pointing to its own fragmented structure as part of what Wolfgang iser termed “the reading experience.” José fernández admits at the outset that his interests—those that inform the novel—are simply too varied and aimless:

[…] es que como me fascina y me atrae la poes�a, as� me atrae y me fascina todo, irresistiblemente: todas las artes, todas las ciencias, la pol�tica, la especulación, el lujo, los placeres, el misticismo, el amor, la guerra, todas las formas de la actividad humana, todas las formas de la vida. (233)(233)


José’s friend, Juan rovira, admonishes him that he risks dissipating into nothingness if he pursues all of these interests: “¡dios m�o! ¡Si hay un hom-¡Si hay un hom-bre capaz de coordinar todo eso, ese hombre, aplicado a una sola cosa, será una enormidad! Pero no, eso está fuera de lo humano [...] Te dispersarás inútilmente” (232). Presaged here is the tension between the futile impulsePresaged here is the tension between the futile impulse towards coordinating José’s narrative and the narrative praxis itself, col-lected in the indeterminate future tense “dispersarás.” further still, rovira goes on to describe the disorder plaguing José’s study desk as if governed by a principal of incoherence. The objects strewn haphazardly across its top—a symbolic microcosm of signs and signifiers of José’s many pas-sions—introduce key themes in the novel. As such, the desk’s principal of incoherence claims a space for the written word:

el aspecto de tu escritorio ayer por la mañana dar�a en pensar en un principio de incoherencia, a cualquiera que te conociera menos de lo que te conozco. hab�a sobre tu mesa de trabajo un vaso de antigua mayólica lleno de orqu�deas monstruosas; un ejemplar de T�bulo manoseado por seis generaciones, y que guardaba entre sus páginas amarillentas la traducción que has estado haciendo; el último libro de no sé qué poeta inglés; tu despacho de General, enviado por el ministerio de Guerra; unas muestras de mineral de las minas de r�o Moro [...] tu libro de cheques contra el banco Anglo-Americano, y presid�a esa junta heteróclita el �dolo quechua que sacaste del fondo de un adoratorio, en tu última excursión, y una estatueta griega de mármol blanco. (231)(231)

lastly, the structure of José’s journal, and de facto most journals—episodic, introspective, laced with voids and silences, oftentimes an exercise in free association (José tells us: “escribo e involuntariamente cedo a mis exagera-ciones”)—is clearly alluded to at the outset when each one of his friends urges him to read something altogether different from his journal:

[…] te hab�a suplicado que nos leyeras unas notas escritas en Suiza, pero resulta que rovira desea conocer unas páginas que según dice tienen relación con villa helena; Pérez otras que dizque [sic] describen una enfermedad que sufriste en Par�s y el doctor Sáenz no opina. (238)(238)

�ven before José reads his journal, then, there are sufficient clues on the


disorderly enterprise at hand. More concretely, the futility of textually coordinating a splintering self teetering on the brink of absolute solipsism, as well as the incoherence of the spatial and literary geometry as it pertains to knowledge production (it is no accident, for example, that the journal is read in a study strewn with bundles of books and misplaced objects from nearly ever corner of the world), and the treatment of time as a malleable phenomenon (as Garc�a Márquez notes: “es una novela de dos tiempos paralelos. un tiempo que tal vez no se prolongue más allá de esa noche enun tiempo que tal vez no se prolongue más allá de esa noche en que el protagonista lee los originales […] y otro tiempo—el tiempo invisible del manuscrito le�do—que es el relato de la vida del mismo”) (15).

In the first lines of the journal, José establishes a dialectical frame in the following terms: “la lectura de dos libros que son como una perfecta ant�tesis de comprensión intuitiva y de incomprensión sistemática del Arte y de la vida, me han absorbido en estos d�as” (239). The opposition in questionThe opposition in question consists of an interplay between “comprensión intuitiva” and “incomprensión sistemática.” José’s notion of “comprensión intuitiva” is derived from his readings of the late Marie bashkirtseff’s autobiographical the journal of marie bashkirtseff (1890), a popular work containing—much in the same manner as De sobremesa—the intimate thoughts of an up-and-coming artist struggling to find her place in the world.4 The “comprensión intuitiva” that José gleans from bashkirtseff’s journal is artistic in nature, and is centered plainly on the emerging modernist affinity for emotive sensitivity, receptivity to beauty, utopianism, the quest for knowledge, and the ideal:

no, ella no es eso, siente que ha nacido para concentrar en sí todas las gracias y los refinamientos de una civili�ación, que su papel verdadero, el único a la medida de sus facul-tades, es el de una Madame récamier, que su teatro será un salón donde se junten las inteligencias de excepción y de donde irradie la doble luz de las supremas elegancias mundanas y de las más altas especulaciones intelectuales. (241-242)

The significance of Bashkirtseff’s journal cannot be understated, since José repeatedly extols it as an integral text capturing the emerging sensibility of his age: “el amor que a la bashkirtseff profesamos algunos de hoy, tiene como causa verdadera e �ntima que ese diario, en que escribió su vida, es un espejo fiel de nuestras conciencias y de nuestra sensibilidad exacerbada” (247).

As for the “incomprensión sistemática,” José relies on the physician Max nordau, “grotesco doctor alemán,” and his popular work Degeneration


(1892)5 to propose the antithesis to bashkirtseff. dr. nordau’s fin de siècle positivism, entrenched in large part in the scientism of Caesare lombroso and benedict Morel,6 was geared towards elucidating the notion of degen-eracy in contemporary artists. for dr. nordau, “degenerates in literature, music, and painting have in recent years come into extraordinary prominence […] exerting a disturbing and corrupting influence on the views of a whole generation” (xi). Degeneration, therefore, is largely dr. nordau’s response to the rise of Modernism in the arts. in it he argues that the natural Sciences provide Man with a clear understanding of the world, and that all Man needs is to grasp the inner-workings of these sciences to unlock the mysteries to progress and evolution. Society did not need degenerate artists—that is, any group of mystics, writers, musicians, or painters on the cultural periphery that failed to conform to Dr. Nordau’s scientific traditionalism—straying from the logic of the natural sciences and undermining the loftier project of “clear understanding.” With Sigmund freud and Josef breuer appearing on the scene only a few years later with studies in Hysteria (1895), the foun-dational work for early psychoanalytic case-writing, dr. nordau’s narrow brand of diagnostic positivism was revealed to be grossly insufficient for the times (a fine example of Dr. Nordau’s scientism is evident in his diagnosis of impressionist painters, whom he believed derived their distinctive style from nystagmus and partial anesthesia of the retina, defects common to both degenerates and hysterics) (Mosse Xv). Pioneers like freud and breuer (we could add G. M. beard, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Alfred binet) made apparent the modern preoccupation with retreating into the subjective realm in an age of unprecedented mechanization, division of labor, consumerism, socioeconomic transitions, and shifting axiological precepts in areas as disparate as marriage and crime prevention. The naiveté of a world founded upon the pillars of clear understanding, at least as dr. nordau interpreted and represented them, was rapidly dissolving as established loci of mean-ing—God, the State, language—were contested by the so called corrupting influence of an emerging sensibility and proven to be inadequate.

To better ground nordau’s acerbic critique and the concept of de-generacy that holds it together, we must look more closely at the notion of decadentism as it emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century. like modernismo, decadentism was a complex reaction to an age in transition, yet it often assumed more volatile, and even self-destructive overtones by privileging experimentation and new experiences as mediated through he-donism, excess and the subconscious. In 1907, Nikolai Berdyaev described Decadentism as “the reflection of the illusory aspect of being,” stating further: “decadentism senses individuality as a disintegration of being and it snatches at the morsels, the fragments, in the experience of the moment


it seeks after all fullness” (22-34). The illusory aspect of being berdyaev describes as a disintegration of the self speaks to the difficulty of anchoring individuality on stable terra firma during a time when traditional notions of self (the bourgeois self especially) were being rejected or called into question. in the arts, as bourget understood it, decadentism revealed the “uneven, violent creation […] of more daring artists,”7 that were able to extract the profound consequences of their historical age precisely through experi-mentation and iconoclastic behavior (Calinescu 169). from romanticism to Symbolism and beyond, balzac, baudelaire, Chateaubriand, huysmans, and Musset, all daring artists, set the stage for the decadent persona—the dandy José Fernánde� included—that was defiant and self-fashioned; in other words, the persona that rejected convention to construct an ulterior value system through artificiality in dress, theatricality, indifference, and a skeptical air of superiority and intractableness. �n the flip side of this emerging decadent aesthetic we could point to the Marxist proletarian ideal (post-hegelian historical materialism socially legitimizing the voice of an emerging proletarian class) or nietzschean nihilism that condemned herd morality and proposed instead the will to power and the Übermensch. dr. nordau’s relevance, therefore, is crucial in De sobremesa’s dialectical frame. in sum, he symbolizes the margins of a shifting age. for this reason dr. nordau is razzed as an anachronism, “un esquimal miope” meandering aimlessly through the halls of a great museum replete with “las obras mae-stras que ha producido el esp�ritu humano en los últimos cincuenta años,” concluding, wholly perplexed and disengaged, that “rosetti es un idiota, Swinburne un degenerado superior, verlaine, un medroso degenerado [...] Tolstoy, un degenerado m�stico e histérico; baudelaire, un maniático obsce-no; Wagner, el más degenerado de los degenerados, grafónomo, blasfemo, y erotómano” (240).

More than a strict opposition, Silva presents us with a more fluid dialectic of a surfacing socio-cultural reaction that was reshaping what he termed, in referring to “comprensión intuitiva” and “incomprensión sistemática,” “Arte y vida.” it is worth noting that bashkirtseff’s “comprensión intuitiva,” especially in relation to Nordau, finds common ground with �enri Bergson’s notion of intuition as the genuine discoverer of truth, what he considered a type of knowledge as opposed to the intellect.8 bergson attempted, at least in part, to overcome Kant’s impossibility of absolute knowledge vis-à-vis intuition. in the Creative mind he refers to intuition first as a true empiri-cism that involves an entering into ourselves, or seizing ourselves from within, as a means of self-knowledge (175). � more heterogeneous view unfolds through sympathy, that is, situating ourselves in the place of another (159). intuition, and not analysis (“lo sistemático”), reveals the real world


and provides a certain access to the thing-in-itself, a proposition all the more appealing for José fernández, “[que de] las venticuatro horas del d�a y de la noche no le alcanzan para sentir la vida” (252). As the confessions of a young artist, bashkirtseff’s diary is awash in intuitive receptivity, and José feels as if she has somehow entered into his own life and lived what he has lived, knows what he knows: “hay frases del diario de la rusa que traducen tan sinceramente mis emociones, mis ambiciones y mis sueños, mi vida entera” (252).

We can begin to get a sense of how the interplay between “comprensión intuitiva” and “incomprensión sistemática” structures De sobremesa by tracing how José’s subjectivity is constructed, and more specifically, how it is constructed upon the notion of crisis that expressively matures in the novel. The doctors rovira, rivington and Charvet diagnose José at different stages and prescribe him an assortment of lifestyle changes and narcotics that promise to alleviate the acute anguish that keeps him bedridden from time to time. José’s anguish stems from “contradictorios impulsos encaminados aJosé’s anguish stems from “contradictorios impulsos encaminados a un sólo fin, el mismo tuyo [María Bashkirtseff]: poseerlo T�D�” (�uthor’s emphasis, 248). �et it is this anguish of wanting it all, of attaining the unat-�et it is this anguish of wanting it all, of attaining the unat-tainable, that propels José to such intoxicating heights of self-exploration and expression. from these heights, and considering the copious amounts of opium, laudanum, hashish, morphine, ether, and chloroform he ingests (let us not forget his sexual escapades and experimentation), he crashes and ends up bedridden once again. José is thus mediated by a cycle of shifts between what dr. nordau would judge as degenerate behavior on the one hand, and his intellectual curiosity, his thirst for knowledge and his artistic sensibility on the other hand, characterized by studies in Greek, russian, art history, comparative grammar, poetry, philosophy and literary commentaries. José’s persona is further entangled in a mind-body problematic; that is, the sensual man (the degenerate) and the intellectual man (the artist, scholar, businessman) occupying the same textual space:

Junto a ese mundano fatuo está el otro yo, el adorador del arte y de la ciencia [psicofísica…] el maniático de filosofía […] y cerca de ese yo intelectual funciona el otro, el yo sensual que especula con éxito en la bolsa, el gastrónomo de las cenas fastuosas, dueño de una musculatura de atleta. (Author’s emphasis, 250)

José touches upon this same question in terms of his genealogy:

hijo único del matrimonio de amor de dos seres de opuestos


or�genes, dentro de mi alma luchan y bregan los instintos encontrados de dos razas [...] Por el lado de los fernández vienen la frialdad pensativa, el hábito del orden, la visión de la vida como desde una altura inaccesible a las tempestades de las pasiones; por el de los Andrades, los deseos intensos, el amor por la acción, el violento vigor f�sico, la tendencia a dominar los hombres, el sensualismo gozador. (291)(291)

José’s desire for universality, of wanting it all, “Todo,” allows his textual space to continually absorb the full gamut of influences that Silva internalized in his readings and in his own tour through europe in 1884 (a tour highlighted, we must recall, by meetings with Stephane Mallarmé, Gustav Moreau, Maurice barrès, and oscar Wilde, and that coincided with Mar�a bashkirtseff’s death, freud’s arrival in Paris to study under the emi-nent dr. Charcot, and the publication of huysmans a rebours, considered a model for De sobremesa). As orjuela tells us, “su notable capacidad deAs orjuela tells us, “su notable capacidad de asimilación se hizo entonces más patente que nunca y en poco tiempo el sensible joven era prototipo del dandy cosmopolita y un entusiasta abande-rado de los ideales de la modernidad” (427). 99 Cristóbal Pera’s work on the Paris myth is revealing here, since he effectively ties De sobremesa with Silva’s urban Parisian experience by honing in on “los principales motivos [del texto que] nacen de un tronco primario a partir de la oposición Par�s/hispanoamérica” (125).10 Although Pera’s work does not tackle the formalAlthough Pera’s work does not tackle the formal structure of the novel per se, it does provide us with a keener understanding of José’s cosmopolitismo and how it might structure our reading. it is mostly in Paris, the decadent city par excellence (helena, after all, succumbs in Paris), where dr. nordau’s degeneracy theory continually grounds José’s ever-expansive—and concomitantly self-destructive—subjectivity in a more judgmental diagnostic value system, causing the young latin American poet to experience bouts of guilt and self-loathing after he experiences all the metropolis has to offer and pushes his libidinal drive to its limits. The violent shifts brought on by decadent city life force José—and the text—into an increasingly fragmented and neurotic state where the body acts and reacts against the mind, sickness is temporarily relieved by episodes of health and rejuvenation, anguish is drowned out by childish exhilaration, decadence is cast in the long shadow of feelings of guilt and purity, and sexuality is punctuated by abstinence.

To better understand how the text unfolds we must look more closely at the structure of the journal itself, and more specifically, of how José comes to pursue helena, the unattainable universality (Todo) he longs for. one of the first entries, dated June 30 in Whyl, we read of José’s seduction of


lelia orloff, a common Parisian woman with aristocratic aspirations. After a brief wooing period, José becomes increasingly infatuated with her, finally abandoning his intellectuality to satiate his hedonistic curiosity:

Goza, gozar es mejor que pensar, añadió con acento de convicción �ntima [lelia orloff]. � parece que yo hubiera aceptado su filosofía, a ju�gar por mis últimos meses, en que no he abierto un libro y he abandonado el griego y el ruso y los estudios de gramática comparada y los planes de mis poemas, y los negocios, para vivir preocupado sólo de placeres, de sport, de fiestas, de esgrima, en una incesante cacer�a de sensaciones [...] Me estaba ahogando por falta de aire intelectual. (255)

José’s slip into hedonism has dramatic consequences. When José learns ofWhen José learns of �rloff’s homosexual infidelity, he is overcome with a feverish “impulso de loco duplicado por la ira,” that incites murderous impulses in him. in a mad fit of rage, he stabs Lelia several times, yet only managing to gra�e her skin.

This episode with lelia orloff is characteristic of the many seemingly inconsequential fragments in the novel. other than providing us with some insight into José’s increasingly unstable character, the episode appears to lead nowhere. The next long journal entry, for example, deals with José’s stay in the secluded provincial town of interlaken, Switzerland. This escape into the country could be read as yet another inconsequential fragment, since its connection to the lelia orloff incident is weak at best. Many of the main themes and topics sustained up to now (José’s infatuation with lelia, her infidelity) are all but ignored. Instead, José fills his journal with lengthy descriptions of interlaken’s breathtaking countryside and his far-fetched scheme of securing the Colombian presidency. This break could easily be dismissed as evidence of Silva’s slack structure. however, the lengthy journal entry in interlaken serves many structural and thematic purposes. firstly, the opposition of decadent city versus untouched provincial town contrasts the degeneracy—to use dr. nordau’s term—of the metropolis with the regenerative effects of the country: “ni un deseo, ni una imagen sensual me han perseguido [a interlaken…] ¡Adiós, sensualidades de bi-zantino, a vivir vida de hombre!” (266). if we follow José into Geneva, london, and Paris, further on in the journal, we learn that this opposition corresponds to José’s violent shifts; for example, his noble pursuit of vir-ginal helena is interrupted by all types of sexual exploits with prostitutes. Secondly, alone and surrounded by “un paisaje envuelto en brumas suaves


[…] el azul de montañas lejanas [...] cantos de pájaros,” José experiences a spiritual renewal at interlaken, “una nirvana divina” (Author’s emphasis 258). Thus recharged, José takes a vow of abstinence, yet ironically, of theThus recharged, José takes a vow of abstinence, yet ironically, of the many topics he ruminates on during this period, none is as paramount as “[cómo] aumentar al doble o al triple lo que vale hoy mi fortuna” (259). if we recall that José’s “yo sensual […] especula con éxito en la bolsa” (an almost sexual exhilaration of risk, fear and grand payouts), we learn that his libido immediately takes control once again.

�s we review this journal entry we find that the entry in Interlaken reinforces a gamut of oppositions (city/country, degeneracy/abstinence, hedonism/spiritualism) significant in the novel that fall into the overarch-ing—and mutually subverting—categories of “comprensión intuitiva” and “incomprensión sistemática.” This entry also creates new meanings when contrasted to the previous entry by calling into question what we know, or think we know, about the protagonist.

The following August 9th entry in Geneva is also revealing. José leavesJosé leaves interlaken for Geneva with his libido restored and succumbs to the lure of opium: “Acabo de levantarme, después de pasar cuarenta y ocho horas bajo la influencia letárgica del opio, del opio divino, omnipotente, justo y sutil” (269). holed up in a hotel room with the prostitute nini rousset, “la que vestida con una guirnalda de hojas de parra, enloqueció una sala de pros-titutas y de vividores,” José’s lives out all sorts of sordid sexual fantasies. Again, embracing hedonism and letting go of his intellectual and artistic self ends dramatically:

[…] una furia inveros�mil, una ira de Sansón mutilado por dalila, me crispó de pies a cabeza, al pensar, con toda la excitación del alcohol en el cuerpo, en los insultos groseros que nos hab�amos prodigado en la hora anterior, entremez-clándolos de caricias depravadas y en mis planes de vida racional y abstinente, deshechos por la noche de org�a. un impulso loco surgió en las profundidades de mi ser, irra-zonado y rápido como una descarga eléctrica y como un tigre que se abalanza sobre la presa cerqué con las manos crispadas, sujetándola como con dos garras de fiero, la garganta blanca y redonda de la divetta [nini rousset…] con la agilidad de un venado perseguido por la jaur�a, huyó medio desnuda... (269)(269)

José’s spiritual renewal, his vow of abstinence, and the imagery of purity so elaborately constructed earlier, is negated by the climactic final image of


nini rousset’s strangulation, reminiscent of lelia orloff’s stabbing. once again, José seeks spiritual renewal, this time not in nature, but in a higher power: “¡dios m�o! ¡dios m�o! ¡dios de mi infancia, si existes, sálvame!¡dios m�o! ¡dios de mi infancia, si existes, sálvame! [...] ¿dónde están la señal de cruz y el ramo de rosas blancas que caerán en mi noche como símbolo de salvación?” (270).(270).11 True to form, in the very next journal entry dated August 11th, José finds renewal. In this case, byin this case, by gazing upon helena:

�l otro perfil, el de ella, ingenuo y puro como el de una virgen de fra Angélico, de una insuperable gracia de l�neas y de expresión […] los recuerdos de mis livianidades pasadas desaparecieron ahuyentados por la luz, la fuente de aguas vivas brotó del peñasco árido, y las imágenes de idilio se desarrollaron y vivieron en el fondo de mi esp�ritu [...] Con la voz ahogada le dir�a que la hab�a buscado por largos años, que mis labios, quemados por los cálidos borgoñas y los champañas ardientes de las org�as de la tierra, ten�anorg�as de la tierra, ten�an sed de su amor infantil y puro. (271-273)(271-273)

As we look back over lelia orloff’s seduction and stabbing, José’s spiritual renewal and vow of abstinence at interlaken, the strangulation attempt of the floo�y Nini Rousset, and finally, the virginal image of �elena, it remains clear that De sobremesa evolves within a dialectical logic that manifests itself—both structurally and thematically—in readings of modernity that become increasingly fragmented, unstable and discontinuous as they play out in José. in the following excerpt, for example, they are manifested in the extremes of madness and total spiritual rejuvenation:

Tem� la locura al salir de las org�as brutales de la carne y ahora el noble amor por la enigmática criatura [helena] que me parec�a traer en las manos un hilo de luz conductor que habr�a de guiarme por entre las negruras de la vida, ese amor delicioso y fresco que me ha rejuvenecido el alma, es causa de supremas angustias porque mi razón se agota. (282)(282)

These extremes are further drawn in line with José’s struggle for meaning within his conflicted self:

[…] mi personalidad se fue desarrollando y alternaron dentro de m� épocas de salvajez gozadora y ardiente y


largos d�as de meditativo desprendimiento de las realida-des tangibles y de ascética continencia. estoy harto de la lujuria y quiero el amor; estoy cansado de la carne y quiero el esp�ritu. (293)(293)

entry after entry, José is torn between helena and his don Juan seduc-tions of nelly, Consuelo, the German baroness olga, and Julia Muserallo. he is also divided between his intellectual studies and his narcotic potions, and his youthful vitality and his stifling anguish. For Víctor Ignacio �rtega, author of sobre “De sobremesa”—Dos estudios psicoanalíticos de la novela de José asunción silva, this acute splintering of the self—and thus the textual form—constitutes a model case for freudian psychoanalytic theory.

De sobremesa’s fragmentation allows Silva to convincingly engage the broader impulse of modernismo as crisis on many levels. federico de on�s’s foundational and often-cited paradigm will serve as a starting point for defining the term and identifying some of the more salient connections within the narrative. on�s describedon�s described modernismo as:

la forma hispánica de la crisis universal de las letras y del esp�ritu que inicia […] la disolución del siglo XiX y que se hab�a de manifestar en el arte, la ciencia, la religión, la pol�tica y gradualmente en los demás aspectos de la vida, con todas las caracter�sticas de un hondo cambio histórico. (on�s Xv)

The key concept is “disolución del siglo XiX,” but considered within the margins of a broader insufficiency of empirical truth systems to adequately accommodate new forms of perception and expression. We can draw a parallel between these new forms with what James M. Mellard termed “the modernist element […] those philosophical positions identifying human consciousness as the basis of the external world’s meanings” (ix). This reshifting of consciousness from the objective to the subjective realm, from the systematic to the intuitive, from the public to the private sphere, had a catalytic effect, so to speak, on derationalizing the fin de siècle psyche. freud’s popular quotation speaks volumes on this shift: “every normal per-son, in fact, is only normal on the average. his ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.” What does normal on the average really mean? if the newfound dimension of the ego is psychotic, as freud suggested, where do we draw the line between normalcy and psychosis? The notions of normalcy and psychosis were indeed problematic. We can think of the complexity opened up here by noting the


avalanche of nervous disease cases reported among late nineteenth century women when they begin questioning the established ideals of the victorian age and forging a public space of their own.12

Julio ramos develops this shift looking more closely at the emergence of the modern author and intellectual. he demonstrates how the modernist element, to use Mellard’s term, deflected an objective and rational will to embrace a subjective “espacio literario […] zona del nuevo sujeto,” that al-lowed authors, within a newfound authorial space, to delegitimize dominant discourse and legitimize new worldviews:

desde esa zona excluida y a la vez creada por la racio-nalización, habla el nuevo sujeto literario, enunciando frecuentemente el ideal de la informalidad, de la indisci-plina, y a veces incluso de la transgresión y la locura […el] sujeto literario […] erige su voz por el reverso—y como cr�tica—de la racionalización, su voz cargada de valor “espiritual” precisamente en un mundo ya desencantado y mercantilizado. de ah� que la “crisis” de la literatura que enunciaron Mart� y sus contemporáneos fuera sumamente relativa, al punto de constituir un dispositivo de legitimi-zación y proliferación. (54-55)(54-55)

This phenomenon, however, did not wait for on�s, ramos or Mellard to be properly explained within the arts. Charles Morice and hermann barr had sounded off a critique of naturalism and realism at the turn of the twentieth century that praised the turn towards a subjectivist aesthetics (in essence, a return to the self). in Morice’s words, “the external appearance of things is only a symbol which it is the task of the artist to interpret. Things have truth only in the artist, they only possess an inner truth” (bürger 96). in his essay “The crisis of naturalism,” hermann bahr echoes this sentiment by stating that “the curiosity of the reader and the inclination of the writer turn inwards once again, away from the depiction of the external world that surrounds us to become a confession of the innermost depths within us” (bürger 96).

in terms of the novel, as Mellard explains, this recentering of the subject within a modern subjectivist paradigm gave way to a galaxy of modalities (xi). ramos offers Mart�’s ismaelillo as an example of a new modality in poetry, which he describes—referencing the collection’s vi-sionary assimilation and reformulation of established discourses—as “uno de los núcleos generadores de la modernización literaria” (54). Silva’s fragmented De sobremesa could well be an ingenious—if not, altogether


original in 1895—modality of what would later fall under the rubric of the modernista novel. This is not to say that the fragmented novel did not exist before Silva, but it does say something about the emergence of a highly fragmented prose within modernismo’s first generation that privileged a textual space for temporal displacement, aporia, dissonance (as opposed to “armon�a verbal”), and the simultaneous dissolution and reconstruction of the episteme. To take this a step further, it would not be terribly out of place to consider it, formally speaking (think form and content in relation to its copious references to pre-raphaelite art and artistic expressionism), as a text that augurs the compound subjectivity of the early avant-garde. Similar to what lugones’ Lunario sentimental would do afterwards for poetry, De sobremesa recasts the subjective realm as a space not unitary in its aims and forms, but fragmented, dislocated, contradictory, and continu-ally unfolding. hence, De sobremesa is a visionary text in that, on a very overt and conscious level, it consistently negates and renews its referential organicism towards its own textuality and modernity; thus, José is as likely to utter the decadent quip “¡hurra la carne!” in one entry, daydream through a nietzschean digression on “la enseñanza de zaratustra” in another, assert his affinity for D’�nnun�io’s “más ardientes poemas” in another, and even vent his most nihilistic renunciation of modernity in another:

¡Neomisticismo de Tolstoi, teosofismo occidental de las duquesas chifladas, magia blanca del magnífico poeta cabelludo, de quien Par�s se r�e, budismo de los elegantes que usan monóculo y tiran florete; culto a lo divino, de los filósofos que destruyeron la ciencia, culto del yo, inventado por los literatos aburridos de la literatura; espiritismo que crees en las mesas que bailan y en los esp�ritus que dan golpecitos, grotescas religiones del fin del siglo die� y nueve, asquerosas parodias, plagios de los antiguos cultos, dejad que un hijo del siglo, al agonizar éste, os envuelva en una sola carcajada de desprecio y os escupa a la cara! (336)(336)

Although orjuela connects the construction of José fernández’s frayed psychology with other decadent heroes like “dorian Gray, Andrés Sper-elli, y el señor de Phocas, protagonistas de obras de Wilde, d’Annunzio y Lorain respectivamente” (17), José’s crisis transcends the strict decadent hero typology. José, like Silva, embodies much broader antagonisms. The similarities between Silva and his protagonist have long been noted by many critics. both José and Silva are Columbian poets confronting a culture toeing the line between traditionalism and an ever-increasing counter-culture. So


much so, in fact, that De sobremesa opens with the hero’s crisis; that is, the crisis of a poet incapable of settling into “la vida burguesa sin emociones y sin curiosidades” (232). for José, his need for universality and his pursuit of the ideal in an empirically rationalized world in transition polarized his “ego” towards deciphering the private realm—surely the realm of “incomp-rensión” for dr. nordau—where “emociones” and “curiosidades” were not only possible, but acceptable thanks to figures like Bashkirtseff.

Also relevant is the manner in which bogotá’s provincial traditionalism aggravated Silva’s personal crisis. The bogotá of the 1890s never valued his need for refinement, culture or art. �ven during his school years many of his classmates had written him off as “pretty boy,” later referring to him as José Presunción Silva.13 This scorn alienated Silva—both the business-man and the poet—from Colombian society. As Silva explained it in aAs Silva explained it in a letter to his friend San�n Cano, “las decepciones, las luchas, mis cincuenta y dos ejecuciones, el papel moneda, los chismes bogotanos, aquella vida de convento, aquella distancia del mundo,” were simply too much to bear. in a letter written to luis durán umaña from Caracas in 1894 (Silva was appointed as Colombia’s diplomatic Secretary in venezuela this year), Silva’s increasing disgust with bogotá is obvious: “no pudiendo vivir en grand seigneur vivo sin placeres, con ocupaciones por cuatro, y muy contento, a pesar de la falta de mis viejos, porque no eSTo� en ColoMbiA […] hoy no siento ni la más remota veleidad de volver” (Author’s emphasis, obra Completa 694). in terms of Silva’s antagonisms with bogotá, San�nin terms of Silva’s antagonisms with bogotá, San�n Cano sums them up accurately in terms of alienation:

bogotá no es un campo favorable al desenvolvimento total de la inteligencia […] un régimen semisecular se apoya en la estudiada desconfian�a ante las manifestaciones de talento superior a las medidas aprobadas por el concepto general [...] La desconfian�a es mayor y toma actitudes de agresividad si el talento se muestra independiente con tendencias a la innovación [...] en esta dolorosa inconse-cuencia, se encierra la tragedia vital de José Asunción Silva. (�ficio del lector 227-228)

during the same period, Silva expresses to San�n Cano his growing des-peration and need for a cleansing retreat into the self in the metaphor of an inner garden: “necesito estudiar mucho y regar con toda especie de abonos violentos el jard�n interior para no sentir tan intensamente el vac�o de esta vida” (obra Completa 690).14 This metaphor is referenced by Pedro César dominici, who visited Silva in Caracas and noted his preference for the


private inner world of literary illusion: “Silva viv�a por y sobre los libros, es decir, cultivaba su jard�n interior entre las frondas del modernismo francés” (Schulman Génesis 190). it is during this solitary period of french booksit is during this solitary period of french books and isolation, highlighted by his perfunctory public duties as Colombia’s diplomatic Secretary in venezuela, that Silva penned De sobremesa. The text was lost on his return voyage to Colombia in 1895, but Silva rewrote it in the ensuing months, just before his suicide. like the derridaean pharma-kon, De sobremesa serves as a remedy to the void left by the original, but it also tries, as Silva tells us, to replace the irreplaceable, and in so doing, the original will always “poison” its copy within a metonymic frame of nagging instability and temporal and spatial displacement. Was the original even structured as a journal? did Silva’s own suicidal malaise give form to José fernández’s depression and mania? More than leading us down the dead-end path of what could have been, this “poison” is generative, it adds perspec-tive and dimension to the text, it (over)exposes it to exegetic potentiality, to range rather than specificity, and even subsumes, in a narrative form, its irreducibility. for Camacho Guizado, for example,for Camacho Guizado, for example, De sobremesa’s “slack” structure derives from this last point: “Como bien es sabido, De sobremesa es una reconstrucción apresurada de una novela perdida en el naufragio del vapor L’amérique y se echa de ver en sus páginas con claridad el descuido estil�stico y estructural” (“Ante el Modernismo” 420). for An�bal Gonzá-lez on the other hand, the novel’s internal structure—beyond its apparent diary form—is wholly deliberate: “De sobremesa es, a mi juicio, la más importante y profunda de las novelas modernistas, y lo es debido a su de-liberada imperfección formal” (estómago y cerébro 247). �erein liesherein lies De sobremesa’s formal genius. The fact that the novel is a reconstruction of an unknown original that pushes the formal envelope without ever completely surrendering its referentiality to absolute abstraction, will always call truth, reality and Silva’s own authorial intentions, into question.

if the infamous dr. Max nordau had met José Asunción Silva, he would have surely written him off as one of those incorrigible degenerates in literature. indeed, if Silva’s novel De sobremesa would have fallen prey to dr. nordau’s judicious gaze, in all probability it would have been catalogued as a shining example of what he disapprovingly termed the fin de siècle mood. federico de on�s’ paradigm of “crisis universal,” 15 along with the readings of ramos, Mellard, Morice, barr, bergson, and freud, allows us to trace the formal eddies and collected pools of this mood throughout the novel. Moreover, they allow us to situate De sobremesa within one of modernismo’s central notions: modernismo as a practice of concurrent dissolutions and reconstructions of worldviews, aesthetic sensibilities, power structures, and truth systems. These dissolutions and reconstructions, however, are not as


rigidly divided as they may seem. on the contrary, Silva cultivates them, of all places, within the neurotic ego of his dandy protagonist José fernandez. As Susana rotker suggests, these tensions, oftentimes irreconcilable, lie at the very heart of modernismo:

The writer’s voice constructs within the text a private place of representation, a refuge and above all a reserve in which to seclude himself. �et he clamors simultaneously, to open up to cosmic comprehension. This contradiction between representing the private and the cosmic was one of the riddles that most fascinated modernists. (22)

We can better recognize now the tensions that force a wedge between José’s ego and the university he pursues, and how the lines between “comprensión” and “incomprensión,” and “lo intuitivo” and “lo sistemático,” are repeatedly drawn, blurred, and redrawn.

Structurally speaking, we can safely say that Silva’s prose has noth-ing to do with “mal modernismo.” As we return to our initial question of whether De sobremesa’s fragmentation serves any purpose, it remains clear that it structures our reading in several ways. The novel’s dialectic of gaps, temporal breaks, thematic turns, and more importantly, its oppositions—of which only a handful have been presented here—open up an array of inter-pretative possibilities without ever proposing the logic of synthesis. helena, after all, is never found except in a grave, and even then, we are left with the question: “¿quién era?” And so, from dr. nordau’s “incomprensión sistemática,” bashkirtseff’s “comprensión intuitiva,” José fernández’s anguish, neurosis, spiritual doubt, self-destructive decadentism and incon-formity, to Silva’s own spiritual sterility and fateful predicament, it is only through a fragmented form that Silva is able to momentarily wrap his arms around a mood, an “actitud,” and an elusive sense of self, that he intuited would change the moment he stopped writing.

noTeS

1 héctor h. orjuela notes: “helena constituye más un s�mbolo que la repre-sentación de un ser real. Algunos cr�ticos han querido relacionar la hero�na de Silva con la princesa helena en el idilio de Tennyson, pues fernández las asocia en su deliquio amoroso, pero el nombre tal vez provenga del poema “To helen,” de Poe, o de helena Muti, personaje de il Piacere, de d’Annunzio. Cualquiera de estas interpretaciones podr�a tener validez, empero es posible que la helena troyana,


arquetipo de belleza noble y clásica, fuera en última instancia la inspiradora del nombre” (350).

2 For the influence of �scar Wilde on Silva see “José �sunción Silva and �scar Wilde,” by �arl W. �obb; for the influence of J .K. �uysmans see the chapter titled “J. K. huysmans y J. A. Silva” in orjuela’s “De sobremesa” y otros estudios sobre José asunción silva. Also of interest is ferdinand v. Contino’s “Preciocismo y decadentismo en ‘de sobremesa,’ de José Asunción Silva” in Jiménez’s estudios críticos sobre la prosa modernista hispanoamericana.

3 Gioconda Marún’s study analyzes the presence of rosicrucian symbols in Silva’s De sobremesa as a more detailed study of “la presencia de la filosofía oculta como configuración de la cosmovisión modernista [...] la obsesión por lo oculto en los modernistas tiene varias motivaciones: el recha�o del ‘cientifismo ingenuo que se propone desterrar de la realidad toda irracionalidad, todo misterio,’ la negación de los valores materialistas y la búsqueda en religiones antiguas de una fe que reemplace la del cristianismo” (14).

4 Maria bashkirtseff was born in Gavrontsi russia in 1860. As a young girl, she was afforded a well-rounded education in the classics and could easily write in four different languages. As a teenager she showed a talent for singing, but her passion for art dominated. In 1887 she settled in Paris and worked in Tony Robert-fleury’s studio. from 1880 to 1883 she exhibited her work—mostly portraits—in various studios in Paris and was considered an artist with great promise. by the end of 1884, however, she died of consumption, leaving behind a modest series of works and her autobiographical journal.

5 before Degeneration, the publication of Conventional Lies of society (1883) earned dr. nordau the reputation of being a controversial writer known mostly for his attacks on egotism, irrationality and nihilism as the end-all evils of modern times. Another well-known and successful publication includes Paradoxes (1896).

6 dr. Max nordau dedicates Degeneration to his “dear and honored master” Ceasare lombroso, “one of the loftiest mental phenomena of the century.” during the later part of the nineteenth century, lombroso’s work centered on perfecting an evolutionary and phrenological criminal typology. researching extensively in prisons, Lombroso argued that criminals had clearly defined physical traits iden-tifying them as “evolutionary throwbacks to lower forms of life.” benedict Morel was the first to identify schi�ophrenia, which he termed dementia praecox. his interests in mental degeneration and illness, and his theories are best explained in traité des maladies mentales (1860).

7 As quoted in Calinescu’s five faces of modernity: “Paul bourget, who was responsible for this characteri�ation of the �oncourt brothers, was the first French writer to accept unwaveringly (unlike baudelaire or even Gautier) both the term and the fact of decadence, and to articulate this acceptance in a full-blown, philosophic and aesthetic theory of decadence as a style […] bourget spoke of decadence from within, with unmistakably dramatic accents, in a manner that prefigured Niet�sche’s treatment of de cadence a few years later. even bourget’s earliest pronouncement on decadence (in 1876) conveys that sense of personal involvement: It is decadence,


but vigorous: with less accomplishment in its works. decadence is superior to or-ganic periods because of the intensity of its geniuses. its uneven, violent creation reveal more daring artists, and audacity is a virtue which despite ourselves elicits our sympathy” (169).

8 first insinuated in time and free Will (1889) and more concretely in an introduction to metaphysics (1903), bergson attempts to overcome Kant’s impos-sibility of absolute knowledge by mapping out the difference between intuition and intellect.

9 For more information see �rjuela’s study “José �sunción Silva: �onflicto y transgresión de un intelectual modernista,” included in obras completas (427-431).

10 Also relevant is Marcy e. Schwartz’s Writing in Paris—Urban topog-raphies of Desire in Contemporary Latin american fiction. by examining short stories and novels by Cortázar, Manuel Scorza, Alfredo bryce echenique and luisa futoransky, Schwartz is able to provide convincing evidence that Paris, “as an imagined, fictional city in Latin �merican writing provides a site for the struggles and complexities of urban identity on this side of the Atlantic” (2).

11 José’s seemingly religious turn is yet another aspect of the evolving dia-lectic. In other parts of the text we find José stating: “�l cadáver del Redentor deIn other parts of the text we find José stating: “�l cadáver del Redentor de los hombres yace en el sepulcro de la incredulidad,” or “Tú estas vació, oh, cielo hacia donde suben las oraciones y los sacrificios.”

12 See Chapters 1 &2 in bronfen’s the knotted subject and Chapters 2 to 4 in david-Ménard’s Hysteria from freud to Lacan.

13 Silva was donned with the name José Presunción Silva as early as his school days. �e was a precocious child, writing his first poem at age ten. Shy and reserved, he did not make friends easily, and he sought to distinguish himself from the other children through his maturity and his excellent school record (he won a Silver Merit Medal for outstanding achievements). Some biographers also mention his boyish good looks, his overprotective mother and sister, and his innate sense of taste and refinement as aiding in his isolation from other children, and then later, from Colombian society at large.

14 in edmundo rico’s brief study La depresión melancólica en la vida, en la obra y en la muerte de José asunción silva, rico uses a more contemporary discourse of illness to propose that “estados mixtos cicolot�micos, duelos hipomaniacos, y esponsales melancólicos,” are significant forces of Silva’s personality that could explain the anguish and melancholia deposited in his work (47).

15 in modernismo, Girardot uses federico de on�s’s crisis paradigm in part to answer the following question: “¿comparte el Modernismo las caracter�sticas de expresión de otras formas de esa crisis que tiene sus ra�ces remotas en el renaci-miento y que no es, como lo pensaba de on�s, la del disolución del siglo XiX, sino la que acompaña a la expansión del capitalismo y de la forma burguesa de vida?” (18). in Los hijos del limo, octavio Paz takes up this very notion from the angle of Western religion, postulating that “el modernismo fue la necesaria respuesta contradictoria al vac�o espiritual creado por la cr�tica positivista de la religión y la


metaf�sica” (128). Calinescu also connects with the crisis paradigm by equatingCalinescu also connects with the crisis paradigm by equating aesthetic modernity with what he terms “a crisis concept […] a threefold dialecti-cal opposition to [Christian] tradition, to the modernity of bourgeois civilization [...] and finally, itself, insofar as it perceives itself as a new tradition or form of authority” (10). finally, ivan Shculman, infinally, ivan Shculman, in el proyecto inconcluso: La vigencia del modernismo, tells us: “otra consecuencia del proceso revisionista ha sido la liberación del modernismo hispanoamericano de una restringida conceptualización y en su lugar la idea de un modernismo hispánico que pertenece a un proceso de alcance occidental, a ‘una crisis universal de las letras y del esp�ritu’ producto de la ‘disolución del siglo XiX’’’ (Author’s emphasis 9).

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