Stridentism Revisited?

Claudio Palomares Salas Stridentism Revisited? Elissa Rashkin: La aventura estridenista: Historia cultural de una vanguardia. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Economica; Universidad Veracruzana, 2014. ISBN: 978–607–161–862–7. 420 pages, 19 illustr. 21 x 14 cm. Mex.$ 280,00; US$ 24.95; € 24.90. Daniar Chavez, and Vicente Quirarte: Nuevas vistas y visitas al estridentismo. Toluca: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, 2014. ISBN: 978–607–422–575–4. 166 pages; 22 x14 cm. Mex.$ 60,00; US$ 13.99; € 12,95; £ 10.85. In the 1960s and 1970s, investigating the Stridentist movement was a truly avant-garde endeavour. Few sources and a hostile scholarly climate against the Mexican vanguard were reasons enough to discourage – or maybe encourage – the serious researcher. The ground-breaking study by Luis Mario Schneider El estridentismo, o Una literatura de la estrategia (Estridentismo, or A Literature of Strategy, 1970) – revised in 1983, 1985, 1997, 1999 – opened the floor for the telling and retelling of the story of a small group of poets and painters who, timely and bravely, upset the Mexican cultural establishment before disappearing into oblivion. Since Schneider’s exhaustive chronicle of the movement, the story of Stridentism has been told many times. It has been improved, questioned, sharpened and clarified. Early critical discussions of the movement were taken a stage further by Stefan Baciu, Merlin H. Forster and Kenneth Monahan, and they should be given credit, along with Schneider, as pioneers in the quest for recognition of the Mexican vanguard. A major exhibition on Stridentism, curated by Judith Alanís and Fernando Arechavala, took place at the Casa del Lago in Mexico City in 1983 and generated a vivid interest among scholars, along with a special issue of the magazine La palabra y el hombre on the movement in 1981 and the anthology Estridentismo: Memoria y valoración (Stridentism: Memory and Assessment, 1983), edited by Gabriela Becerra, which has the merit of being the first critical collec tion dedicated exclusively to the movement. 1 But it was not until the 1990s that 1 The collection includes papers from a congress of the same name held in Xalapa in 1981. An other important text of this time was Les Peintres révolutionnaires mexicains (1985) by Serge Fauchereau. DOI 10.1515/9783110527834-030 410 Claudio Palomares Salas a boom of historical and critical exploration on Stridentism set in. The decade saw the appearance of noteworthy monographs and of a second edited volume called Estridentismo: Vuelto a visitar (Stridentism Revisited, 1997), all of which attempted to revaluate previous critical perspectives in a moment of time when Stridentism was not any longer ‘something to be discovered’. The decade also produced relevant studies on the Latin American and Spanish vanguards that confirmed that the study of Stridentism was ready to move from a strictly historical perspective into more adventurous critical realms. Since then, a substantial body of innovative research has set a high standard of archival examination, critical investigation of the movement. For a more detailed assessment of this literature, see the essay by Elissa J. Rashkin and Carla Zurián in this edition of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies. Elissa Rashkin’s The Stridentist Movement in Mexico (2009) / La aventura estridenista: (2014) It is within this critical, academic context that Elissa Rashkin published, in 2009, The Stridentist Movement in Mexico: The Avant-Garde and Cultural Change in the 1920s, a book that in Rubén Gallo’s words “has the merit of being the most comprehensive source of information on the movement’s history and output available in English”. 2 The text works as a kaleidoscope showing vignettes on several historical and aesthetic aspects of the movement. In a fast-paced way, Rashkin embarks on a review of the well-known Stridentist story, adding productive analyses of the manifestos, books of poems, paintings, magazines and short-stories, as well as short biographical comments on the personal lives of the painters and poets. The volume has now been translated into Spanish by Avital Bloch and Marco Franco as La aventura estridenista: Historia cultural de una vanguardia (The Stridentist Adventure: The Cultural History of a Vanguard Movement) and has confirmed its scholarly relevance, despite some shortcomings observed by the scholars, most significantly the occasionally lack of critical depth in some of the topics studied. The book was a necessary contribution to the critical literature of the movement in English, and is still the best available alternative to Schneider’s El estridentismo, o Una literatura de la estrategia in terms of a general historical survey. It is worth mentioning, however, that Schneider’s study, in addition to its valuable introduction, provides a complete catalogue of primary texts, which are absent 2 Gallo: “The Stridentist Movement in Mexico”, p. 111. Stridentism Revisited? 411 in Rashkin’s book. A translation of these texts into English would certainly help circulate Stridentism amongst a world-wide audience. Rashkin’s study is divided into two parts, the first – “Metropolis” – deals with the story of the movement in Mexico City, covering topics such as performance, politics, and gender. In “From the Street to the Stage” (Ch. 5) Rashkin examines Maples Arce’s reading of his poem TSH: El poema de la radiofonía (Wireless Telegraphy: The Poem of Radiophony, 1923), in the first ever radio broadcast in Mexico by La casa de la radio in 1923, La tarde estridentista: Historia del Café de Nadie (A Stridentist Afternoon: A History of the Café de Nadie) published by Arqueles Vela in El universal ilustrado (17 April 1924), and the ephemeral Teatro Mexicano del Murcielago (Mexican Bat Theatre) as examples of Stridentist performances following the model of the Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity (teatro sintetico). Although the discussion is convincing and the argument of performativity persuasive, it is not yet certain whether these events can be seen as examples of the iconic juxtaposition of art and life that characterized most avant-garde movements. A clarification between performance in general and avant-garde performance, with its ontological quality, could have enriched this discussion. In “Politics and the Avant-Garde” (Ch. 6), Rashkin offers an engaging reading of Urbe: Superpoema bolchevique en cinco cantos (Metropolis: Bolshevik Superpoem in 5 Cantos, 1924), with further connections to Plebe: Poemas de rebeldía (The Rabble: Poems of Rebellion, 1925), by List Arzubide, and Sangre roja: Versos libertarios (Red Blood: Anarchist Verses, 1924), by Carlos Gutiérrez Cruz. The great asset of the book is Rashkin’s approach from a Gender Studies perspective, something Stridentism was desperately lacking despite some audacious attempts by Daniel Balderston (1998), Sara Anne Potter (2013) and Ángela Cecilia Espinosa (2014). Rashkin’s reading of machismo and masculinity in “Women, Sexuality, and Modernity” (Ch. 7) is compelling; as it is the attention she pays to some of the women close to the movement such as Lola Cueto and Adela Sequeyro. The second part – “Horizontes” – tells the story of the movement once it settled in Veracruz and discusses the work and life of Xavier Icaza, a writer not often associated with the movement. There is a persuasive historical reading of Xalapa as a site of struggle between oil companies and avant-garde aesthetics, as well as a discussion and recognition of Panchito Chapopote (1928) as a late – yet significant – Mexican avant-garde work on a gullible, naïve Mexican character (Panchito) and his experiences with the American and English exploitation of Mexican oil. Rashkin shows that once in Xalapa, Stridentism played a part in what Mirna Santiago has called the “ecology of oil”,3 a new, changing environ- 3 Santiago: The Ecology of Oil. 412 Claudio Palomares Salas ment in which powerful economic interests transformed social, spatial, and cultural dynamics. The book ends with a quick survey of the paths which members of the movement pursued after 1927. The Stridentist Movement in Mexico is a strong and valuable study with several thought-provoking discussions. The Spanish translation honours the original text and allows for an easy and elegant reading; yet, its impact on the critical literature in Spanish is somehow reduced by the abundance of critical texts already available that not only survey the history of the movement, but also embark on deeper, more focussed analyses. Daniar Chavez and Vicente Quirarte’s Nuevas vistas y visitas al estridentismo (2014) Another book published in 2014, Nuevas vistas y visitas al estridentismo (New Views and Visits to Stridentism), should make us reflect on the stage we have reached today in our quest for knowledge and innovation regarding the study of the Mexican vanguard. Edited by Daniar Chavez and Vicente Quirarte, the book joins the two previous critical anthologies on the movement: Estridentismo: Memoria y valoración (Stridentism: Memory and Assessment, 1983) and Estridentismo vuelto a visitar (Stridentism Revisited, 1997). According to the editors, the aim was to pay tribute to Luis Mario Schneider by continuing “his insatiable curiosity to find new avenues of interpretation of the movement”. 4 The collection includes essays by Evodio Escalante, Elissa Rashkin, Vicente Quirarte himself, Rodrigo Leonardo Trujillo-Lara, Silvia Pappe, Lydia Elizalde, Marina Garone-Gravier and Fernando Curiel. Evodio Escalante, a renowned critic, poet and professor who has done much to further the study of the movement, including his noteworthy Elevación y caída del estridentismo (Rise and Fall of Stridentism, 2002), opens the collection with “La revista Irradiador y la consolidación del estridentismo” (The Magazine Irradiador and the Consolidation of Stridentism). The essay focusses on the brief but essential first Stridentist magazine edited by Maples Arce and Fermín Revueltas in 1922. Escalante himself, along with Serge Fauchereau, enabled us to understand the importance of Irradiador in the introductory text he wrote for the 2012 4 “[…] pretende continuar su insaciable curiosidad por encontrar nuevos caminos de interpretación del movimiento.” Quirarte: “Presentación”, in Chavez and Quirarte: Nuevas vistas y visitas al estridentismo, p. 10 Stridentism Revisited? 413 facsimile edition of the magazine;5 nonetheless, his essay here does not offer the same illuminating insights. Escalante maintains that Irradiador consolidated the Mexican avant-garde because it amalgamated the work of poets, painters, sculptors, musicians and photographers, confirming in this way the multidisciplinary ethos of the movement, as well as its cosmopolitan scope. Escalante surveys some of the texts that appeared in the magazine, including the calligram by Maples Arce, “Irradiación inaugural”, which for a long time was attributed to Diego Rivera, but which, according to Rubén Gallo, was in fact the work of Maples Arce, 6 something that Escalante overlooks, or disagrees with, when he claims that Irradiador never published a single text by the Stridentist leader. The essay offers a fair appreciation of José María González de Mendoza, a writer and scholar whose participation in the Stridentist movement has yet to be studied. Although instructive and in some points enlightening, the essay does not shed light on why Irradiador stopped being printed after only three numbers, despite the fact that it represented the consolidation of the Stridentist movement. Escalante asks the question, but does not give us an answer that would fill in one of the blanks in the history of the movement. In the second essay of the collection, “Las aventuras de Panchito Chapopote y el estridentismo veracruzano” (The Adventures of Panchito Chapopote and Stridentism in Veracruz), Elissa Rashkin continues with the non-centric, Veracruz-oriented investigation of Stridentism that is palpable in the second part of The Stridentist Movement in Mexico, and that has become her trade-mark. By reviewing the history of the conflicting relations between foreign oil companies and the federal and provincial governments, Rashkin teaches us a great deal of the paradoxical rôle Xavier Icaza played as a lawyer and writer during his time in Veracruz. On the one hand, he supported a literary and artistic movement sponsored by a protectionist, pro-avant-garde government; but on the other hand he actively defended the interests of foreign, predatory oil companies in the eastern Mexican State. The essay constitutes a revaluation of the movement by showing how modernity and oil played a rôle in shaping Stridentism’s cultural products not from central Mexico City, but from peripheral Veracruz. Rashkin successfully proves how the less glamorous, exploitative and destructive aspect of modernity that greatly affected the lives of workers and peasants was also noticed and portrayed by the Mexican vanguard, confirming the ambivalent attitude of the move ment towards modernity. 5 Escalante and Fauchereau: Irradiador: Revista de vanguardia. 6 Gallo: “Un caligrama desconocido de Manuel Maples Arce.” 414 Claudio Palomares Salas Vicente Quirarte’s essay “Germán List Arzubide, educador heterodoxo” (Germán List Arzubide: A Heterodox Educator) confirms the importance of List Arzubide in the history of Mexican literature and acknowledges the crucial rôle played by List and the Cueto family in turning puppetry into a serious, major genre in Mexico. We learn how characters such as Comino and Troka, el poderoso (Troka, the Strongman) helped List to spread his socially engaged agenda, which in the case of children also included the fight against microbes and the struggle for proper tooth brushing. The essay complements Rashkin’s discussion of “El teatro del murciélago” in The Stridentist Movement and thus improves our understanding of the performing arts in Mexico. Rodrigo Leonardo Trujillo-Lara joins a selected group of scholars, whose work has been imperative in shedding light on the only fiction writer of the movement, Arqueles Vela Salvatierra. The author observes in his essay, “Parodia de un crimen: Lectura de ‘Un crimen provisional’ de Arqueles Vela” (Travesty of a Crime: A Reading of ‘A Provisional Crime’ by Arqueles Vela) the intimate nature of Vela’s writing, in which we can perceive disenchantment with the promises of modernity, a position that contrasts with the noisy, extroverted nature of Maples Arce’s writings. Through his analysis of the short story “Un crimen provisional” (1926), Trujillo-Lara corroborates the often neglected place Vela had in the development of avant-garde fiction in the Hispanic world. His fragmented and emotional stream-of-consciousness style crafted a minimal, yet fundamental body of work that aligned with the demands of a truly innovative modern Western literature. It is a “literature of crisis”, as Trujillo-Lara calls it; but it is above all a reforming literature, more interested in playing with previous genres than in destroying them. Trujillo-Lara demonstrates how by parodying crime fiction, Vela in fact parodied modernity from a very personal perspective. The essay opens up the path for even more engaging readings of Vela’s writings, which although limited to only a handful of texts, are among of the earliest examples of avantgarde fiction in Spanish. In “La historia como manifiesto: Un breve ensayo sobre la distorsión” (History as Manifesto: A Short Essay on Distortion), Silvia Pappe displays the rigorous writing that has characterized her scholarly work. Focussing on the two different versions of El movimiento estridentista (1926, 1967), Pappe offers an exciting reading that turns List’s text into both a manifesto and a fictional history of the movement. From this perspective, El movimiento estridentista suddenly becomes one of the most original literary experiments of the Mexican avant-garde. Pappe explains how the book functions as a foundational narrative – as a manifesto – that in an original way turns the proclaimed expectations of the movement – modernity, revolution, innovation – into a past whose accuracy cannot be verified. Citing a passage from the 1967 text, she observes that List Arzubide tried to 416 Claudio Palomares Salas oughly researched, the essay explores the development of European typography in the first decades of the twentieth century and the influence it had in Mexican avant-garde art and graphic design in the 1920s. Of particular interest is the discussion on the different trends which Mexican typography followed. Garone-Gravier focusses on how Stridentism incorporated typographic developments in its publications concentrating on three particular media: manifestos, magazines and books. The first two are not discussed, but the author makes it clear that both manifestos and magazines were the media in which Stridentist truly exper imented with typography. The analysis centres on the books of the movement, in particular Maples Arce’s Andamios interiores: Poemas radiográficos (Interior Scaffolding: Radio Poems, 1922), List Arzubide’s Esquina (Corner, 1923) and Quintanilla’s Radio: Poema inalámbrico en 13 mensajes (Radio: A Wireless Poem in 13 Messages, 1924). The discussion is brief but provides eye-catching information on the source of many of the fonts used in the books, all of them included in the catalogue of the National Paper and Type Company, New York, 1908. We learn, for example, that the title of Andamios interiores was typeset in Post Old Style Roman. No. 1 and that the inside texts are both Bookman and Old Style. These facts remind us of the dialectical and paradoxical relationship between avant garde originality and mechanical reproduction. Two shortcomings of the article are the lack of images and the short length of the text. Nonetheless, Garone -Gravier’s research, if expanded, offers potential for a much-needed book on Mexican avant-garde typography and design that would complement Salvador Albiñana’s México ilustrado: Libros, revistas y carteles, 1920–1950 (Illustrated Mexico: Books, Magazines and Posters, 1920–1950, 2010). The last text of the anthology is not actually an essay, but an avant-gardish attempt by Fernando Curiel to pay tribute to Luis Mario Schneider. As a sort of stream-of-consciousness text combined with historical accounts and literary dis cussions, the text freely and spontaneously covers an array of subjects. We learn something about the friendship between Schneider, Curiel and Fernando Tola de Habich; something about the authors – Schneider included – who influenced Curiel’s own pop-experimental-urban-style and modus operandi as researcher; something about the importance of the idea of a generation in order to study a literary/cultural phenomenon; and something about Octavio Paz. Curiel explains that both Stridentists and Los Contemporáneos were part of one same generational impulse, which according to the author was not in agreement with Schneider’s views. Curiel mentions how around 1997 he asked Schneider for a contribution for the Biblioteca del Estudiante Universitario, the result of which was El estridentismo: La vanguardia literaria en México (Stridentism: The Literary Vanguard in Mexico, 1999). The text then offers a classification / definition of what a current, movement, tendency, “-ism”, school and mode are, and a discussion in Stridentism Revisited? 417 which Curiel again argues against Schneider setting up an opposition between Stridentists and Los Contemporáneos. For Curiel, there are no oppositions but rather similitudes, one of them, interestingly, of class. There is a brief acknowledgment of the originality of Estridentopolis as an imagined city and a very short discussion of the periods in twentieth-century literary history in Mexico. Finally, Curiel remembers some of the events and places in which he and Schneider met. The fragmented – Cubist (?) – text, works as a collage of Curiel’s memory, a sort of informal, non-academic epilogue that nonetheless puts Curiel’s figure in the limelight and Schneider in the shadows. The quixotic quest of recognizing Stridentism as something more than an entertaining episode in the literary and artistic life of Mexico has already been achieved. For this we should thank – besides all the critics mentioned in this review – the writer Roberto Bolaño, whose early interviews with Stridentist members in the 1970s, and above all his novel, Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives 1998), served to legitimize the study of the movement, making Stri dentism academically worthwhile and ‘cool’ again. By 2014, the ‘discovery’ of the Mexican vanguard had already taken place, as numerous articles, books and exhibitions show. No need, then, to keep telling again and again the story of how Maples Arce filled the walls of Mexico’s city central square with Actual No. 1 or how noteworthy the imagined Estridentopolis was or is. We should not repeat what critics have already written many times in the past fifty years. Yet, it seems, some of the ‘stridentologists’ have a tendency to keep discovering with amazement the adventures of Maples Arce and his friends. It is time to move on and to challenge the sometimes biased assumptions about the topical relevance of the movement. A translation into English of primary texts is an essential task for the future, as it would allow a global community of scholars to investigate the movement from new perspectives. Transnational and transatlantic discussions are neces sary to assess Stridentism’s importance and transcendence for the international avant-garde. Paying attention, for example, to the powerful influence of Spain and Argentina in the development of the movement can help us leave behind nationalistic assumptions. Issues of race, class, gender and other identities – together with the critique/deconstruction of such identities – are still to be addressed; as well as current theoretical trends such as spatiality, ecocriticism and thing theory. Approaching Stridentism from a digital humanities perspective is also an open ground. We can still discover many things about the Mexican avant-garde, but we should be weary of discovering the same ones over and over again. 418 Claudio Palomares Salas Bibliography Alanís, Judith, and Fernando Arechavala, eds.: El estridentismo. Mexico City: Casa del Lago-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983. Albiñana, Salvador, ed.: México ilustrado: Libros, revistas y carteles, 1920–1950. México, D.F.: RM, 2010. Baciu, Stefan: Estridentismo estridentistas. Veracruz: Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura, 1995. Bolaño, Roberto: Los detectives salvajes. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1998. Balderston, Daniel: “Poetry, Revolution, Homophobia: Polemics from the Mexican Revolution.” Sylvia Molloy, and Robert McKee Irwin, eds.: Hispanisms and Homosexualities. Durham/ NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Becerra, Gabriela: El estridentismo: Memoria y valoración. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983. Escalante, Evodio: Elevación y caída del estridentismo. México, D.F.: Ediciones Sin Nombre “Conaculta”, 2002. Escalante, Evodio, and Serge Fauchereau, eds.: Irradiador: Revista de vanguardia. Edición facsimilar. México, D.F: Casa Abierta al Tiempo, 2012. Espinosa, Ángela Cecilia: “La masculinidad marginada en la vanguardia postrevolucionaria: El caso de ‘El Café de Nadie’ de Arqueles Vela.” Mexican Studies / Estudios mexicanos 30:2 (Summer 2014): 397–420. Fauchereau, Serge: Les Peintres révolutionnaires mexicains. Paris: Messidor, 1985. Forster, Merlin H., ed.: Las vanguardias literarias en México y la América Central: Bibliografía y antología crítica. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt a.M: Vervuert, 2001. Gallo, Rubén: “The Stridentist Movement in Mexico: The Avant-Garde and Cultural Change in the 1920s, by Elissa J. Rashkin.” Latin American Literary Review 38:76 (2010): 111. Gallo, Rubén. “Un caligrama desconocido de Manuel Maples Arce.” Revista iberoamericana 74:224 (2008): 667. Monahan, Kenneth C. et al.: Estridentismo: Vuelto a visitar. Veracruz: Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura, 1997. Palomares Salas, Claudio, and Carla Zurián de la Fuente: “El Café de Nadie: Aproximaciones al mito.” Letras hispanas 11:1 (2015): 19–29. Potter, Sara Anne: Disturbing Muses: Gender, Technology and Resistance in Mexican Avant-Garde Cultures. Ph.D. Dissertation. St. Louis/MO: Washington University, 2013. Santiago, Myrna I.: The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900– 1938. 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