The Novels of Orígenes

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The Novels of Orígenes

C É S A R A . S A L G A D O

University of Texas at Austin

Si una novela nuestra tocase en lo visible y más lejano, nuestro contrapunto

y toque de realidades, muchas de esas pesadeces o lascivias, se desvanecerían

al presentarse como cuerpo visto y tocado, como enemigo que va a ser reem-

plazado.

[If one novel of ours were to touch on what is visible and what is most dis-

tant, our counterpoint and vertex of realities, many of these burdens and

lecheries would vanish after being shown as an observable and tangible body,

as an enmity about to be replaced.]

—José Lezama Lima, “ La otra desintegración” (The other disintegration)1

I

One intriguing aspect of the Orígénes phenomenon in Cuba is the emer-

gence in the late seventies of a peculiar subgenre in that nation’s post-

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 bel-

ligerently stigmatized in the sixties as “vacuous,” “hermetic,” “formalistic,”

day

“anesthetized,” “evasionist,” and “ineffectual”—as was Orígenes—becomes

rehabilitated in the eighties and nineties as a symbol of a socially progres-

sive 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 to , 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 institu-

tional 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 (‒),

Lunes de Revolución (‒), and Casa de las Américas during its first

decade (‒).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 (‒) and drew to a

close during General Fulgencio Batista’s second dictatorship (‒).

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 in one of the most important international conferences

held that decade in Cuba.4

Writing about the usefulness of genre theory in critical analysis, Claudio

Guillén argues that it is enough to find “significant resemblances” among a

given group of historically contiguous texts to begin to propose or “decide

upon” the idea of a new genre. Regarding genre as a dynamic, diachronic

interplay between universal formal conventions and historical particulars,

as a “problem solving model on the level of form” for both the poet and the

practical critic, Guillén ascribes to the concept a generative, poietic power

that emphasizes “process and instrumentality” in artistic creation.5 Thus

Guillén sees genre (and subgenre) as part of a dialectic of expressive and

critical renovation in which new forms are historically engineered or recog-

nized. Still, at first sight, Guillén’s ideas or genre conceptions in general may

not seem appropriate for a discussion of what I am choosing to call here the

“Orígenes novel.” First of all, this subgenre is made up—so far—of only two

texts, both published in : Cintio Vitier’s De Peña Pobre first came out in

T h e N o v e l s o f O r í g e n e s202 ●

Mexico; Lorenzo García Vega’s Los años de Orígenes in Caracas.6 Second,

these texts are interpretative accounts of the Orígenes saga written by mem-

bers of the original circle who have been bitterly opposed personally and ide-

ologically since Vitier’s public espousal of the Revolution in a

conference at the José Martí National Library and García Vega’s departure

from Cuba four days after.7

To begin to fathom the antipathy between Vitier’s and García Vega’s

interpretations of the Orígenes experience in their novels, it would be useful

at this point to briefly review their careers as origenista writers. Born in

Matanzas in , son of the influential Cuban philosopher, essayist, and

politician Medardo Vitier, Cintio Vitier first met Lezama Lima in and

collaborated in Espuela de plata, an eclectic, high modernist journal Lezama

edited from to that prefigured the aesthetic-poetic line of Orígenes.

As a poet, translator of French symbolist and Catholic authors (such as

Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Claudel, and Simone Weil), essay-

ist on speculative poetics, and reviewer of poetry books, he belonged to the

circle of writers that contributed to Orígenes from its inception to its end.

In the forties, most of Vitier’s poetry and essay books came out from the

journal’s publication series Ediciones Orígenes; among these, Vitier’s 1948

anthology Diez poetas cubanos helped define the roster and the diverse

ideoesthetic principles of the Grupo Orígenes participants according to a

constellated notion of origenismo as a cluster of converging yet essentially

independent orbits of poetic criteria. In the fifties, he situated the origenistas

within the overall history of Cuban poetry in his anthology Cincuenta

años de poesía cubana and his essay Lo cubano en la poesía. He is thus

considered, after Lezama Lima, the principal expositor or “spokesman” of

the manifold poetic ideals and praxes of the Orígenes group; Roberto

Fernández Retamar has written that he considers Vitier the “otro portavoz

relevante, al punto de que creo que a él se debe la arquitectura del Grupo”

(the other relevant spokesman, to the point that I think the architecture of

the Group is his due).8

After , Vitier stayed in Cuba and embraced the social ideals of

Castro’s Revolution from a militant, non-Marxist Catholic position conver-

sant with Latin American Liberation Theology. De Peña Pobre is the first of

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 203

a cycle of four autobiographical novels that relate Vitier’s growing commit-

ment to the problems of the Third World poor and to Revolutionary Cuba as

the way in which he has been able to fulfill his lifelong poetic vocation and

live up to his late conversion to Catholicism.9 He has maintained a success-

ful and prolific production as poet, essayist, and editor that has been highly

recognized in Cuba and abroad while working as a researcher at the National

Library and the Centro de Estudios Martianos. In he was elected

diputado (congressman) to the Cuban Popular Assembly.10

Born in in the sugar mill town of Jagüey Grande in Matanzas

province to a political family, Lorenzo García Vega met Lezama Lima and

became his disciple in , one year after Orígenes was first launched; he

began contributing essays and poems to the journal soon after. His agnostic

and nervous sensibility made him more receptive to the more strident

influences in cubism, surrealism, and the avant-garde in general than were

most origenistas. Ediciones Orígenes published his books, the first of these a

collection of poems, Suite de la espera, in . In he was diagnosed with

an obsessive mental condition just as he was about to finish his law degree;

in he won the National Literature Prize in Cuba for Espirales del cuje, a

memoir-like novel about provincial life. After he continued his work as

a poet-novelist, publishing with state support an Antología de la novela

cubana and an experimental novel titled Cetrería del títere in .

Disaffected with what he now calls the “Castrato” and incapable of adjust-

ing to the new conditions in Cuba, he defected in Madrid in . He moved

to Miami and then to New York where, while struggling to make a living

doing menial jobs, he had a nervous breakdown. After his psychiatric treat-

ment was interrupted due to the loss of his insurance, in García Vega

began writing Los años de Orígenes and a novel, Rostros del reverso, with the

support of exiled friends; both texts were published by Monte Avila Editores

in Caracas in . He moved back to Miami to become an underground

writer of aggressively experimental verse and prose works inspired by Joseph

Cornell’s ready-mades and John Cage’s conceptual music. García Vega pub-

lishes these works in limited editions and in idiosyncratic, self-financed lit-

erary journals such as Ujule (a colloquial Spanish exclamation akin to “wow!”

or “whoops!”) read by a small, cult-like group of readers in Cuba, Venezuela,


and the United States. In all his writings since Los años, García Vega has

made it a point to dissect, denounce, and contradict the mystification of the

origenista aesthetic and what he considers is the collusion of the island ori-

genistas with the Castro regime. Unsuccessful in his attempts to get or retain

a professional job, at years of age García Vega still works as a bagger at a

Miami supermarket. He has an unpublished book of memoirs, “El oficio de

perder” (The business of losing).11

The antagonism between Vitier and García Vega is painfully apparent in

the texts themselves: just one preliminary reading of the works at issue

would remark on the extreme contrasts in narrative construction, canon

politics, archival agenda, ideoesthetic posture, poetic operativity, and over-

all interpretation of the Orígenes experience. Vitier and García Vega are even

at greater odds concerning the very possibility of a Cuban cultural ontol-

ogy—of what, if anything, constitutes lo cubano, a central concern in their

poetics. Precisely because of this enmity many Orígenes scholars would see

no point in finding the commonalities in these two works —the “significant

resemblances”—implicit in the notion of genre. Writing about De Peña Pobre

in his book-length study on Cintio Vitier, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones states:

“Otra versión de los años de Orígenes, diametralmente opuesta a la de Vitier,

y aun hostil, la ofrece ya desde el exilio, el poeta Lorenzo García Vega en su

memoria Los años de Orígenes” (We find another version of the Orígenes

years, diametrically opposed and even hostile to Vitier’s, in the memoirs of

exile poet Lorenzo García Vega, Los años de Orígenes [my emphases]).12

Other critics would question the classification of either De Peña Pobre or Los

años de Orígenes as novels, given their explicit autobiographical,

nonfictional, poetic, and essayistic dimensions.

Still, I want to go against the grain of those who, emphasizing the ani-

mosity between García Vega’s caustic deconstruction of origenismo and

Vitier’s ethicist promotion of it, end up disassociating these texts to brand

them as mutual negations. It is not fortuitous that De Peña Pobre and Los

años de Orígenes share the same year of publication: both authors admit that

the death of José Lezama Lima instigated their decision to write about

the Orígenes years.13 Vitier and García Vega have often acknowledged that

Lezama, the undisputed leader of the Orígenes group, was their most

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 205

influential literary mentor. Thus the writing of both texts is partly motivated

by the loss of a father figure; they evidence a mourner’s ambivalent urgency

to find the frameworks in personal and historical memory with which to

remember, confront, and evaluate the legacy of an “era” marked by Lezama’s

death. Oddly enough (and unbeknownst to each other), both Vitier and

García Vega decide not to write a novel or a memoir in the strictest sense,

but to generate a hybrid variant of these genres: a “memoria y novela” (mem-

oir and novel; so reads the subtitle of De Peña Pobre, which I would also

translate as “memory novel”). Although the sophisticated narrative tech-

niques in De Peña Pobre may classify the text as a modernist fiction com-

bining Proustian remembrance, Faulkner’s play of temporalities, and

Flaubertian focalization, Vitier has insisted on the veritable and candid

nature of De Peña Pobre as a very personal “testimonial” account in many

interviews and articles after the novel’s publication. Vitier figures as one

among many characters and voices in his “memory novel”; García Vega, on

the other hand, organizes the telling in Los años obsessively around himself,

arranging temporality, poeticity, subjectivity, and recollection in ways radi-

cally different from those in Vitier. Still, García Vega also calls his text a novel

following the surrealist assimilation and application of the genre and the

tautological method in Gertrude Stein’s modernist narratives.

The paradoxes in the oscillations between recollection and fictionaliza-

tion, individual memory and collective history, intimate testimony and

experimental narrative, autobiography and heterodiegesis, poetic proclama-

tion and kitsch statement that characterize these texts—the greatest formal

paradox that of being both, for the most part, transparently confessional sto-

ries told rigorously in the third person—are at the core of what I call the

“Orígenes novel.” In Guillén’s terms, Vitier and García Vega use modernist

and avant-garde novelistic technologies to process personal and historical

materials in order to instrumentalize—that is, authorize, legitimize—an

interpretation of Cuban literary history within an arena of competing nar-

rative poetics (the testimonial novels of Miguel Barnet in Vitier’s Cuba; the

neobaroque writings of Severo Sarduy and Guillermo Cabrera Infante in

García Vega’s exile). The “Orígenes novel” promotes its author as “witness

of an era” and anointed high modernist literary craftsman to elbow out or


disqualify adversarial claims about literary prestige and experience in Cuba

and abroad. It instrumentalizes, in Vitier’s case, the rehabilitation of ori-

genismo in the Revolution; in García Vega’s, that of his own marginal psyche

and, contiguously, that of the Orígenes group.

I also want to consider how the testimonial dimensions of De Peña Pobre

and Los años de Orígenes end up agreeing upon on a type of iconology built

around and beyond the figure of Lezama as “Maestro.” This iconology is con-

stituted by themes, images, and slogans that illustrate and promote an

esthetic and political ethos, a poetic mandate, the principles of literary apos-

tleship. While Vitier might be cast as the iconographer and García Vega as

the iconoclast, both officiator and desecrator reach a peculiar insular agree-

ment on how to interpret Orígenes; this interpretation has inflected all dis-

course on Orígenes after 1978. Vitier and García Vega achieve an implicit

consensus that has been instrumental in the current strategies of official

rehabilitation: the definition of Orígenes as a “grupo” of Cuban poet-friends

and relatives engaged in family-like, mentoring relationships around a father

figure instead of Orígenes as a “revista” or cosmopolitan editorial enterprise

featuring or reviewing world cultural currents and authors.14 In short, in

Vitier and García Vega’s novels, Orígenes appears as a Cuban icon rather

than as a high modernist text. In both Los años and De Peña Pobre, Orígenes

is reconstructed as a closed emblem of positive (Vitier) or corrosive (García

Vega) notions of Cuba and lo cubano (Cubanhood) rather than as a textual-

ity openly and globally intervened and reconstituted by many extrainsular

voices through translation.15

Both De Peña Pobre and Los años de Orígenes emphasize—either by

affirming or contesting—a paternalistic dimension of the Orígenes phenom-

enon that promotes the mystique of an insular nuclear group—a “sacred fam-

ily” of the Cuban nation, functional in Vitier’s representation, dysfunctional

in García Vega’s; a reclusive and exclusive apprenticeship in the often-called

“taller renacentista” (Renaissance workshop) centered around Lezama’s “craft

master” figure, prophetic and transcendental in Vitier’s view, flawed and

gnosticly false in García Vega’s. This iconology is communicated through

visualized tropes of festive or resented domesticity, through the ekphrasis of

pictures from an origenista family album: the “fiesta innombrable” (ineffable

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 207

feast) of the group’s gatherings in Habana or Bauta according to Vitier’s hal-

lowed vision; the rendering of these same gatherings as repressed and cas-

trating “family romances” according to García Vega’s scenarios. Such

iconology devolves into an un-reading of Orígenes’s strategic position in the

global cartography of high modernism. Among other thing, it achieves the

nullification and erasure of José Rodriguez Feo’s metropolitan editorial

agency in the Orígenes enterprise.16

I I

C I N T I O V I T I E R I N D E P E Ñ A P O B R E :

E L T E S T I G O O C U L T O ( T H E S E C R E T W I T N E S S )

“Es posible por la poesía constituir la Tribu dentro de la Ciudad. Es decir una

familia que se mueve con más facilidad, que se contrae, que hierve. Si se logra

por la poesía la tribu, la novela nacerá con sus ojos para ver los desliza-

mientos, los rencores de casa a casa . . .” ¿Qué significaban estas palabras,

precisando en lo oscuro lo mismo que buscaban a ciegas las palabras del

libro enigmático?

[“It is possible to constitute through poetry the Tribe-within-the-City. I mean

a family advancing with the greatest ease, contracting, effervescing. If

through poetry the Tribe is indeed achieved, the novel will be born with eyes

to see the displacement, the resentments from house to house . . .” What did

these word mean, searching in the dark what the words in his enigmatic

book also sought?]

—De Peña Pobre, 96

In a conference on De Peña Pobre, Cintio Vitier recalls that the idea for

this first novel came forth abruptly, without premeditation, revealing itself

while he was “scribbling some pages” during a tedious afternoon in his

research cubicle at the National Library.17 Vitier describes writing the novel

in a trance-like state without revisions in one stretch from November


to January . “[D]e algún modo que desconozco,” writes Vitier, “[la no-

vela] estaba ya completa, o casi, dentro de mí” (In some way I can’t explain,

the novel was already finished inside me)—”una especie de realismo soñado

se apoderó de mí durante meses” (a sort of dreamlike realism took me over

for months) (). Quoting an expression by Giambattista Vico, Vitier calls

De Peña Pobre “una ficción del ánimo conmovido” (a fiction of spiritual com-

motion) that emerged as a way to come to terms with the significance of

Lezama Lima’s mentorship and literary legacy shortly after the latter’s death

in April . Vitier goes on to say that the novel became much more than

the evocation of a father-figure; it is also “un recuento, un saldo, un juicio”

(a tally, a settlement, a reckoning) () of his own life and career. There he

details his own participation in the formation and flourishing of the Orígenes

group during the Republican years and the transforming impact the Castro

Revolution of had on his sense of self, Cubanhood, and history. Vitier

declares that the revisiting and retelling of the past in De Peña Pobre pro-

duced in him an epiphanic understanding that, clarifying his secondary role

in the social history of Cuba, motivated his conversion from “secret witness”

into “participant”: “El pasado, que llega hasta el presente revolucionario,

hecho de futuro . . . se me abría como el escenario de un drama colectivo, el

de mi pueblo, en el que yo jugaba un papel muy secundario, de testigo oculto

que de pronto comprende que lo que ha visto . . . es nada menos que su des-

tino. Al comprenderlo . . . ya no es un testigo sino un participante.” (The past,

arriving to the revolutionary present, made up of future . . . opened up as a

scenario of a collective drama, that of my people, in which I played the very

secondary role of secret witness that suddenly understands that what he has

seen is nothing less than his destiny. After this understanding he is no longer

a witness, but a participant) ().

Despite Vitier’s evangelical characterization of the unconscious unfold-

ing of De Peña Pobre’s writing process, the novel demonstrates at first read-

ing a sharp neatness of design and a steel-tight narrative architecture.

Personal and social history, memory and imagination, fact and fiction, real-

life and made-up characters, and disparate timelines are carefully inter-

locked in a forward-moving allegory about the consolidation of Cuban

nationhood. The novel consists of two main narrative/temporal lines that

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 209

are laced together in a helix-like pattern across Cuban history from to

. The first storyline emphasizes national history and political events by

way of a genealogical narrative describing the fate of the progeny of two

Cuban Independence War conspirators across three generations. The sec-

ond storyline focuses on personal and intellectual history from the Machado

era onwards; it is structured as an autobiography written in the third per-

son. There is a symphonic flair in the measured flow and the fugue-like

rhythm in which historical motifs in one narrative echo and resonate with

those of the other throughout the novel’s seven chapters.18 The two story-

lines merge into one in the very last vignette of the novel, which takes place

in , shortly after the success of the Revolution. In De Peña Pobre’s broad-

est historico-allegorical schema, the triumph of the of July guerrilla rebel-

lion against the Batista dictatorship resolves the state of “national

disintegration”—a situation now understood to have been openly

denounced in many of Lezama’s Orígenes editorials19—that characterized

the “false” and corrupt Republican period (‒) and belatedly fulfills the

ambitions for a “decorous” state sovereignty sought by the War of

Independence orchestrated by José Martí. Since the remembrance of the

Orígenes project only occurs in the second storyline, I will concentrate my

discussion here on this part of the novel.

This narrative sequence is focalized through the perspective of a single

character who remains unnamed for the first half of the novel. As the novel

progresses, the reader realizes that this character is in fact the novel’s hetero-

diegetic narrator and main protagonist as well as the author himself,

although he never assumes the first-person voice and is only occasionally

identified with a nickname: Kuntius (Greek for Cintio). The intimate descrip-

tion of minor details and associations, reflections about the phenomenology

of memory, and the sensual evocativeness of place and ambience give this

narrative line a pregnant, memoir-like spirit. It unfolds both as a bildungs-

and kunstler- roman—as the story of poetic awakening in the artist’s jour-

ney from childhood to maturity. Thus the reader learns of the protagonist’s

magical childhood in Matanzas, his searing asthma attacks, the spellbind-

ing stories his maternal grandmother tells of relatives who were heroes in

the Independence struggle, the enchanting lights of the Habana-Matanza


train crossing near the farmhouse, the confusion of growing up in two

houses (his father, a free-thinking intellectual and educator, is divorced), the

solemnity of his father’s demeanor in his library, and the rigor of his musical

training traveling from Habana to Matanzas to attend concerts and special

violin classes. Mixed with these wonderments of childhood is the gloomi-

ness of “machadismo,” a suspect word the child hears whispered ominously

at home in relation to the dictatorship. He associates this word with “new

tar” on the streets and the “yellow uniforms” of the ubiquitous and threat-

ening mounted guard.

The story then transitions to Havana, to where the protagonist’s family

moves after the uprising when Kuntius’s father is called to assist in

short-lived political reforms. Kuntius experiences the failure of post-

Batista regimes to renovate the national spirit in the poor educational stan-

dards, cronyism, factional agitation, and general mediocrity he witnesses at

the University of Havana. He compensates for such institutional and politi-

cal disappointments by developing a coterie of friends who share his cultural

interests and commitment to poetry; he meets them regularly on long walks,

outings, and parlor discussions. Vitier chronicles closely the evolution of

these friendships. Thus, while suffering through the drudgery of fulfilling

university requirements, the protagonist seeks out and shares with his

friends the acquaintance with important independent intellectual figures

who will become his and his friends’ mentors. Thus Kuntius recalls how he

realizes poetry is an ultimate state of knowledge and beauty through the

reading of an anthology of poems by the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez

(who lived in Cuba at the time); how he comes to understand the merits of

the Christian notion of human liberty by attending the lectures offered by

Spanish exile philosopher María Zambrano; and, most importantly, how he

finds a role model of poetic being and behavior after his encounter at the

University’s Aula Magna with the “Maestro,” the then-notoriously-aloof and

“prince-like” José Lezama Lima, whose hermetic poetry all in his clique

admire.

Thus, in a transparent roman-à-clef fashion, Vitier gives his account of

the emergence of the “Orígenes group” (although the expression does not

appear in the novel). At first, this circle is an intimate fellowship of five

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 211

University friends who are never identified by name but through odd pseu-

donyms and oblique references. Kuntius first meets the ceremonious and

reticent “Más que tiempo” (More than Time); the physical description makes

obvious that this is Eliseo Diego, whose poetry “salva en secreto la profanada

ciudad” (secretly saves the desacrated city) (). Both Más que tiempo and

Kuntius are courting “las hermanas” (the sisters), who are to be identified as

Bella and Fina García Marruz, Diego’s and Vitier’s respective wives in real

life. (Fina would eventually become one of Orígenes’s most important women

contributors.) They are joined by the intense “Arduo de veras” (Really Harsh),

their close friend and poet Octavio Smith, whom Kuntius also calls “the

mediator.” After getting to know each other better in long promenades

across Havana in which they read and discuss poetry intently, they start

meeting for evening tertulias (discussions) and piano recitals at the sisters’

apartment on Neptuno Street. Smith playfully nicknames these meetings “El

turco sentado” (the Seated Turk).

Other soon-to-be-members of the Orígenes group begin to frequent these

gatherings. “Nuestro querido Ignacio” (our dear Ignatius), who has a “rostro

esculpido en bronce sensible” (face sculpted in sensitive bronze) (),

becomes “misterioso y acompañante al principio” (a mysterious companion

at first) to then “perderse en su propio laberinto” (get lost in his own

labyrinth) (). Thus Vitier elliptically describes the mulatto poet Gastón

Baquero’s early affinity with the group and subsequent withdrawal when he

became editor for the right-wing newspaper Diario de la Marina, abandon-

ing poetry writing until his exile from Cuba. “El graduado de Harvard, al día

en todo lo último, fugazmente irónico, sencillo después” (the Harvard grad-

uate, up to date in everything, vapidly ironic, modest afterwards) () is the

only phrase in the novel describing José Rodríguez Feo’s participation in the

tertulias and in the group. His transition from Harvard dandy to becoming

“sencillo” (as in Martí’s “Versos sencillos”) may be a reference to Rodríguez

Feo’s later-life decision to give up his rich inheritance and embrace the

Revolution. A long section is devoted to the first visit of “el Músico” to the

tertulia: Julián Orbón, Orígenes’s most important music critic, appears as the

recently orphaned son of the founder of the Cuban Musical Conservatory.

His genius for playing scorching Bartok-like classical piano pieces that


incorporate Cuban folk melodies dazzles Kuntius; the group instantly adopts

him as if he had been one of them “desde el origen” (from the start).20 Several

more contributors to Orígenes also appear as regular or occasional partici-

pants at the Neptuno gatherings: the poet Eugenio Florit, the philosopher

and art critic Guy Pérez Cisneros, theater critic Mario Parajón, and close

friend and tertulista Agustín Pi. “El poeta de Las furias, de visita tensa” (the

poet of Las furias, anxious during his visit) () is the novel’s only reference

to Virgilio Piñera. By alluding only to Piñera’s most origenista-like poem and

highlighting his discomfort at the tertulias, Vitier predicts the distancing

that comes early on between Piñera and the group (or at least the Christian

configuration of the group Vitier promotes) after Piñera’s publication of “La

isla en peso” (The Burdened Island) in , an anti-essentialist poem pro-

moting a pagan vision of Cuba as a place of condemnation.

The Maestro (Lezama Lima) also attends these musical and poetic

soirées accompanied by his “joven sacerdote” (young priest) friend from the

Spanish province of Navarra: Angel Gaztelu, one of the main contributors of

poetry to Orígenes and to Lezama Lima’s previous journals. Kuntius portrays

the latter as the prototype of the transcultured Spaniard whose exposure to

Cuban art facilitates his conversion into lo cubano: “venido de la cultura del

trigo, el aceite y el vino, entró a Cuba, finalmente, por las mamparas de

Portocarero, las lucetas de Amelia y los gallos heráldicos de Mariano” (from

the culture of wheat, olive oil, and wine he came into Cuba through

Portocarrero’s glass doors, Amelia’s windows, and Mariano’s heraldic roost-

ers) (). This sentence is one of a few references in De Peña Pobre to the

principal plastic artists who contributed illustrations to the journal. These

artists never appear as characters in the novel; Vitier thus promotes the idea

of the Orígenes group as a coterie of poet-friends for whom poetry was a col-

lective, spoken endeavor closer to a form of symphonic conversation or of

“coralidad” (choral arrangement). Kuntius and Más que tiempo’s marriage to

the sisters forces the group to move and find new locales. They reconvene

first at the Músico’s Conservatory and then at the priest’s designated parish

in Bauta, a town southwest of Havana. There they are joined by the last

member of the group, “el más joven, entrevisto por Kuntius en la casa de

Trocadero (Lezama’s house), a la hora del crepúsculo, como devoto del

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 213

Maestro” (the youngest one, whom Kuntius had seen in the house on

Trocadero Street, at twilight, a devotee of “el Maestro”): Lorenzo García Vega.

Kuntius gives him the following nickname: “Rencor” (Rancor) ().

Thus what Vitier emphasizes in the textual fabric of his “memory novel”

is the image of Orígenes as a transgenerational company of friends who

shared a keen interest in poetry and who, unbeknownst to themselves at the

time, began to constitute, to use María Zambrano’s designation for the

group, “a secret Cuba.”21 Vitier promotes Orígenes as a “fiesta innombrable”

(ineffable feast) of friendships that, through the ethical exercise of poetic

comportment and an interpersonal dynamic distinguished by integrity and

fineza (politesse), resisted the dissolute, immoral codes of conduct of the

Republican years. As a private, close-to-clandestine civic alternative to the

reprehensible educational and cultural institutions and practices of the

Republic, the Orígenes group thus collaborated “undercover” with the

national redemptive process that climaxed with the Cuban Revolution.

Still, the emphasis in Vitier’s novelistic representation is on Orígenes as

a group dynamic rather than as a publishing or even writing enterprise.

Very little is said about the editorial production of Orígenes itself. Vitier

only mentions the making of the journal once; instead of speaking about

the compilation of any particular issue or commenting on the revista as a

textual entity, he chooses to describe the ambiance of the Old Havana locale

in which Orígenes was printed in order to define it as another place for ori-

genista socialization.22 Vitier does not comment about Rodríguez Feo’s suc-

cessful solicitations from foreign contributors or any of the other

interactions with non-Cubans who collaborated with Orígenes as an edito-

rial project. There are no references in the novel to Octavio Paz, Luis

Cernuda, Wallace Stevens, George Santayana, Jorge Guillén, Alfonso Reyes,

or any other outstanding international intellectual associated with Orígenes

or any one person from the group. Jiménez and Zambrano are the excep-

tions since they lived in Cuba during the “tiempo de fundaciones” (founda-

tional time) of the group; given their Cuban locality at the time, they

become part of the story. Orígenes may have been the textual mode of

expression of the group, but in the novel the group is defined not by how

they contributed to the publication of the revista but by how they inter-


acted personally in private ceremonies and festivities that accentuated the

group’s character as a narrowly localized Havana enclave. Rather than that

of a cosmopolitan literary project, the idea of literary publishing as group

enterprise communicated in De Peña Pobre is that of an amateur printshop

that produces domestic editions for the group’s own consumption. The

printing of Orígenes at the Old Havana press thus appears as a slightly more

mechanized version of the sort of occasional self-publishing that occurred

at the Neptuno tertulias. In De Peña Pobre, Orígenes-as-journal is regarded

as the result of a primitive, circumstantial, “tribal” mode of literary pro-

duction:

Los santos, los cumpleaños, las Navidades, se celebraban con ediciones

caseras de poemas, confeccionadas en secreto por las dos hermanas, lo que

añadía a la casa musical . . . un encanto de taller poético, primera imprenta

de la tribu. ()

[Saint’s days, birthdays, and Christmases were celebrated with homemade

editions of poems, put together in secret by the two sisters, which added to

the musical house the air of an enchanted poetic workshop, the first print-

ing press of the tribe.]

In De Peña Pobre’s “retrato de familia” (family portrait) iconology, con-

versation, ritual, and ceremony are more important than the act of writing.

The novel’s fixation with iconizing the Orígenes group becomes fully mani-

fest in the ekphrastic passage inspired by the famous dining room picture of

the group in the Bauta chapel on pages ‒. After reviewing the behavior

and manners among group members and acknowledging that it was not

always altogether pleasant or forthcoming (although reconciliation and spir-

itual growth followed the worst altercations, according to Kuntius), Vitier

concludes his evocation with the image of Gaztelu officiating mass for the

group one Sunday morning in Bauta and Lezama speechifying on the mira-

cle of achieving such a paradise-like “kingdom” of friendship and chorality

in the midst of a national spiritual crisis (‒). Orígenes-as-journal is thus

played down, as Orígenes-as-group assumes central stage in De Peña Pobre.

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 215

It is as if the act of writing were secondary in the practice of poetry and the

notion of literary prestige completely incidental to the constitution of the

Orígenes group. In De Peña Pobre Vitier thus achieves by novelistic means

the interpretation of the “Orígenes years” he proposed in an interview with

Enrico Mario Santí in :

Los años de Orígenes son los años de nuestra juventud y por lo tanto los años

en que tuvimos las experiencias más formadoras, definitivas o decisivas de

la vida . . . Esos años fueron, para nosotros, de mucho trabajo poético. La

revista yo creo que tuvo esencialmente, y en eso todos estaremos de acuerdo,

un carácter poético. Es decir, que todo se hizo a partir de la poesía. . . . Esos

años fueron años de plenitud de trabajo y de plenitud de amistad. Yo creo

que ése es uno de los signos de Orígenes, pues no fue un movimiento entre-

comillado, desde el punto de vista literario, sino que surgió de un encuentro

muy significativo, porque ocurrió en una forma casi simultánea de todos los

componentes del grupo. No era un grupo, en principio, de escritores, sino un

grupo de amigos.23

[The Orígenes years were the years of our youth and thus were the years in

which we had the most influential, definitive, or decisive experiences in our

lives . . . These years were for us years of great poetic work. I think that the

journal, in essence, had a poetic character. In other words, everything was

done with poetry as point of departure . . . Those years were years of pleni-

tude in work and in friendship. I think this is one of the particularities of

Orígenes since it was not a “movement” in the literary or academic sense of

the word; it rather came up from a very special encounter, since it happened

almost simultaneously with all of the group members. In principle, this was

not a group of writers, but a group of friends.]


I I I

L O R E N Z O G A R C Í A V E G A I N L O S A Ñ O S D E

O R Í G E N E S : E L N O T A R I O R E S E N T I D O

( T H E S P I T E F U L N O T A R Y )

Y él recordaba la frase que Carlos M. dijo:

—La novela de los exiliados debería ser como un collage. Todo se pondría,

pero como sin hilo.

El empieza sus coordenadas:

Ponme la mano aquí, Macorina, pon, pon;

el collage de lo cubano, los años de Orígenes;

el recuerdo de su sueño sobre la mujer, y la cubano que recuerda sus per-

sonajes de la adolescencia;

el fondo—New York en invierno—, el utillaje del relato; personajes de los

años de Orígenes, que el recuerdo parece querer soñar. ()

Disco rayado. Dice. Vuelve siempre a lo mismo, a lo mismo. Vuelve a los años

de Orígenes. Se está volviendo viejo, y está en las mismas. Volver y volver,

porque el collage del exilio cubano es volver, volver y revolver. ()

Si seguimos repitiendo. Si desplegamos este collage, disco, de lo cubano,

quizás nos toparemos con la perversión. ()

[And he remembers Carlos M.’s phrase:

—The [Cuban] exile novel should be something of a collage. Everything

would fit in, but with no connecting thread.

He begins his coordinates:

Put your hand right here, Macorina, right here, right here. [Mambo refrain.]

the Cuban collage, the years of Orígenes;

the memory of his dream about that woman, and the Cuban lady that

remembers the characters of her adolescence;

the background—New York during winter—the tale’s props; characters from

the years of Orígenes that memory seems to keep dreaming.

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 217

Scratched record. So he says. He always comes back to the same. To the years

of Orígenes. He is getting old, and he is still stuck. Returning and returning,

since the Cuban exile collage is returning, returning and revolving.

If we keep repeating. If we deploy this Cuban collage or record, we may bump

into perversion.]

—Los años de Orígenes

Like Vitier, García Vega begins to write his account of the Orígenes years

around the time of Lezama’s death; unlike Vitier, García Vega does not write

an apology but a highly critical, often acerbic exposé. The negative assess-

ments and derisory arguments García Vega makes about the Orígenes group

in Los años have become a source of contention and feuding between him

and the origenistas that, unlike García Vega, stayed behind in Cuba to give

their support to the Castro revolution.24 In Los años de Orígenes, García Vega

demystifies the group by characterizing it as a set of overly pious writers

belonging to a bourgeoisie venida a menos (reduced to poverty) because of

social restructurings and class realignments in a young Cuban Republic

transformed by the American hegemonic influence. The corrosive portrait of

the Orígenes group as the last guardians of the aristocratic fantasies, ambi-

tions, and nostalgias of a displaced, white sacarocracia (sugar-landed oli-

garchy) runs against Vitier’s ethical vision of Orígenes as an enterprise

teleologically aligned with the utopian and humanitarian objectives of the

Cuban Revolution.

Appalled by García Vega’s stinging critique and his idiosyncratic, exas-

peratingly repetitive style of writing, some critics have unfairly dismissed

Los años as an incoherent and malignant book. Roberto Fernández Retamar

has gone as far as describing it as “una obra desquiciada y triste, llena de

inculpaciones y cotilleos absurdos” (an unhinged and saddening book, full

of absurd accusations and gossip).25 I would argue instead that Los años is a

text as lucidly and exactingly constructed, argued, and documented as

Vitier’s novel. Although García Vega admits he writes “out of rancor” (),

it is not to enact a vendetta but to confront personal ghosts and resentments


systematically in order to understand and dispel them. The discrepancies

between his and Vitier’s valorization of the Orígenes project and experience

are due in greater part to how rigorously each writer-qua-poet subscribes to

contrasting poetic notions and ideals. At the time he is writing De Peña

Pobre, Vitier has learned to approach poetry with a Catholic’s participant

sense of logos. García Vega is driven by an atheist’s sense of the absurd and

by a Freudian/surrealist symptomatology that regards writing as a neurotic

but potentially therapeutic activity rather than as an inherently redemptive

act. Still, however drastically adversarial Vitier’s and García Vega’s perspec-

tives may be in terms of their poetico-narrative strategies, they have much

in common in their Lezamian definition of the novel form as a post- and

para-poetic discursive strategy that conjures an “enmity” in order to exorcise

it. Both Vitier and García Vega seem to be responding, each in his own way,

to Lezama’s appeal in “La otra desintegración” (quoted at the beginning of

this article) to use the novel as a poetic instrument to give shape and order

to memory, self, and experience, and thus “bodily substance” to ghostly

“pesadeces y lascivias” (burdens and lecheries) so that these can be finally

expiated. In Vitier’s case it is the historical specter of the pseudo-Republic

that first needs to be “visto y tocado” (visualized and touched) in a novel, to

then be banished and replaced by the presence of the Revolution. In García

Vega it is the just as painful shadow of personal and collective neurosis.

Still, to read Los años de Orígenes as a novel requires some critical

license. The book’s chapters mix many modes of factual and semi-factual

discourse: dire stories about personal misfortune, maladjustment, unem-

ployment, and meager jobs in New York City (working as a doorman at the

Gucci building, as a mail carrier at Doubleday); lucid and hilarious com-

plaints about the inane social landscape of Cuban exile life in “Albino Beach”

(García Vega’s moniker for Miami); bitter anecdotes about backstabbing and

gossip among Orígenes members (a well-to-do Gastón Baquero snubbing a

poverty-stricken Lezama Lima during parties; Lezama’s nasty putdowns and

prejudicial comments during Orígenes gatherings in Bauta; Vitier’s not

responding to García Vega’s plea to help his daughter leave the island); a sar-

donic tirade against American academia and its attempts to make Orígenes

into a dissertation industry; essayistic asides on “Zen psychoanalysis,” pop,

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 219

kitsch, and the impact of radionovelas (radio soap opera) on Cuban senti-

mentality; transcriptions of the narrator’s failed psychotherapy sessions;

carping analyses of passages from Lezama Lima’s novel Paradiso; probing

critical notes on a novel by the younger Cuban exile writer Fausto Massó

published in Venezuela; and one long pastiche of literary analysis skewing

Severo Sarduy’s poststructualist interpretation of Lezama Lima’s work titled

“De donde son los Severos” (“Whence come the Severos,” a play on the title

of Sarduy’s best-known novel). Still, the first, overture-like chapter,

“Introducción Zen,” addresses García Vega’s conundrum about how to pro-

duce a personal narrative about the return of repressed trauma while in

exile. Using “Zen” terms, García Vega declares that in writing Los años he is

trying to find out how to speak the unspeakable, how to orchestrate “a spec-

tacle without spectator and a spectator with spectacle” in which what is

unconscious becomes manifest.26 The solution he finds is to structure his

narrative-memoir-commentary of the Orígenes years as the “collage novel of

exile” proposed by his friend Carlos M. (Carlos M. Luis, one of the youngest

poets of the late period of Orígenes).

Thus Los años de Orígenes is organized as a jarring assemblage of pre-

and post- island and exile memories, readings, reflections, perceptions,

and hallucinations, loosely combined by free association as in a John Cage

musical experiment. While Vitier sets the writing process of De Peña Pobre

in the highly specific locale of his office at the National Library (and thus

officially identified with Revolutionary Cuba as a poetico-political location),

García Vega’s vantage point of narration for Los años is that of Cuban exilic

dispersal in several countries and cities. Thus the novelistic aspect of this

collage method ensues from the contrasting phenomenologies of recalled

socio-urban experiences that alternate systematically throughout the text as

if it were a cubist composition slicing in multidimensional glimpses from

different cityscapes in time (the Cuban mill town of Jagüey Grande in the

s; the Havana of the Orígenes group in the s and early s; the

exile’s Madrid, Miami, and New York after ; Caracas in the s).

Novelistic fictionalization in Los años, as in De Peña Pobre, consists of the

coordination of disjointed chronotopes into an illusion of simultaneous

totality. While Vitier wants to invoke the teleological coherence of Cuban


insular history, García Vega wants to convey the fractured experience of the

post- Cuban exile vertiginously stuck in an evocative, eternal return to

the island (in García Vega’s case, to the Orígenes years). At many points in

his writing, García Vega even assumes the voice of fictional alter egos to

emphasize this delirious novelistic effect—the mentally unstable Calixto

Abad hallucinates in a Miami latrine; Severo Sarduy’s transvestite characters

Auxilio and Socorro editorialize loudly on the narrative; and the spirit of

Gertrude Stein herself is “channeled” to assist in Cuban gossiping.

The argument about the Orígenes experience that García Vega repeats ad

nauseam throughout his “memory novel” is that Vitier’s notion of Orígenes’s

interpersonal dynamic as an “ineffable feast” of friendships that “secretly”

redeemed Cuban nationhood for the Revolution is in fact the symptom of a

falseness inherent in the political culture of the “pseudo-” Republic.

(According to García Vega, this falseness still prevails in present-day Cuba.)

The orígenistas’s devoted “cult of the fathers”; their protoreligious under-

standing of poetry as the revelation of immanent mysteries; the baroque,

elliptical, proliferating poetic styles they cultivated; and their rejection of

surrealist poetics and existentialist doctrine are labeled by García Vega as

forms of a prudish tapujo (blockage; in Cuban slang, constipation). García

Vega considers this tapujo the manifestation of the group’s many repressions

and denials: their failure to admit their social condition as inheritors of a

venida a menos bourgeoisie, to confront the complexities of exacerbated

configurations of sexuality and desire brought in by new forms of mass

media (such as the movie theaters on La Rampa, Havana’s downtown in the

s), and to recognize and transcend their absurd, “clown-like” marginal-

ity in the Republican intellectual world. Such denials, argues García Vega in

some of the strongest passages in the book, made real friendships impossi-

ble in the origenista reunions. These he describes as cold, rigid affairs of

social pretense, diametrically contradicting Vitier’s hallowed characteriza-

tion of these rituals.27 It is on this argument about the possibility/impossi-

bility of real friendship within the open/repressed atmosphere of Orígenes

sociability that Vitier and García Vega are most opposed, although both

writers add important qualifications in their texts concerning the way each

either mystifies or degrades this aspect of the group. Still, García Vega fixates

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 221

on Orígenes as a localized group phenomenon and not as a cosmopolitan,

high modernist literary enterprise, as does Vitier. José Rodríguez Feo’s edi-

torial contribution to the internationalization of the journal is reduced to

that of “el rico que pagaba la revista” (the rich man that paid for the journal)

in the few pages García Vega dedicates to the feud between Rodríguez Feo

and Lezama Lima that led to the closing of the journal (‒).

García Vega structures the wayward telling of each of many of his circu-

lar chapters by juxtaposing memories about the “splendid” activities and

ceremonies of the group with abysmally banal vignettes extracted from his

life as a Cuban exile. In this fashion García Vega seeks to both clarify and

trivialize the Orígenes experience. For example, in the chapter titled “El

cofre” (the chest), he recalls compulsively a cartoon-like bicycle accident he

had recently in New York City while patching together an anecdote about

Lezama Lima’s losing a month’s salary buying an expensive small coffer for

his art collection. Thus García Vega illustrates and spoofs the myth of the

group’s “pobreza irradiante” (luminous poverty)—the assumption that the

origenistas’s ethical poetic practice drove them to publish on their own with-

out interest in fame and fortune and without latching onto the graft system

of state-funded cultural agencies. In “Una muchacha llamada Milagros” (A

Girl Called Milagros), he begins by relating some Miami women’s fascination

with “El derecho de nacer” (The right to birth), a popular radio soap opera

of the s about illegitimacy, to then address the ludicrousness of what he

calls the origenistas’s false “cult of the virtuous parents” in their poetry.

According to García Vega, in poems such as Eliseo Diego’s “El lugar en que

tan bien se está” (The place where so well we are) the origenistas gave a false,

dignified halo of heroism and integrity to their parents’ generation when in

fact this generation had engineered the beginnings of corruption—and,

thus, of illegitimacy—in the Republic.

García Vega’s point with these odd juxtapositions is to show that the

social neurosis the origenistas demonstrated in their poetry and high-

minded behavior—the fear of bastardía (illegitimacy) and mulataje (mulat-

toeness), of being exposed as part of an increasingly irrelevant, economically

diminished, and growingly opportunistic social class—was a general symp-

tom in bourgeoise responses to modern mass culture across Cuba and Latin


American in general. Thus, García Vega denounces the aristocratic, tran-

scendental, or radical justifications of the Orígenes group’s “ostrich-like” iso-

lation from political and social reality in Cuba. By situating the Orígenes

story on the same level as a soap opera, a serial folletín (pulp-fiction pot-

boiler), or a Cuban operetta, he diagnoses the group’s rituals as another

social performance or simulation in the highly theatrical period of Bastista

and Auténtico Cuba. Here lies the core of García Vega’s critique of the poet-

ics of his Orígenes colleagues: their cult of high literature and corresponding

neglect of popular culture blinded them to the fact that their reclusive cer-

emonies were in fact replicating the alienating rituals and fantasies of the

depraved social groups, conditions, and interests they rejected.28

Nevertheless, while all this might confirm the critical assumption that

García Vega’s Los años is an ingrate, acerbic account of the Orígenes years,

one cannot conclude that the text is completely hostile and cynical. There is

an important therapeutic subtext to the writing of Los años that resituates

García Vega’s project within the Lezamian ethical imperative that first

inspired the group. García Vega decides to write about the neuroses of the

Orígenes group in order to address a personal manic-obsessive condition

terribly compounded by the maladjustments of exile and the divisive

wounds left by the Revolution. In the chapter titled “Un método jesuita” (A

Jesuit Method), García Vega gives a searing and highly crafted confessional

account of a condition of mental disease, narrating his attendance, at

years of age, to a psychiatric appointment in which he is diagnosed with an

irreversible disorder. Almost as if a scene from Luis Buñuel’s film Un chien

d’andalou had nightmarishly come true, the chapter’s protagonist cannot

overcome the painful psychosomatic sensation of a knife about to pierce his

eyes; this nerve-racking condition spoils his chances of fulfilling his career

ideals and potential as a writer. The analyst prescribes electroshock as the

only possible cure. Obdurate against this treatment, at the end of the chap-

ter the character overcomes his obsession by neurotically previewing and

controlling each movement of his body, following the exercises in self-disci-

pline taught to him by the Jesuits. Linking this episode to the fact revealed

in the introduction that García Vega is writing Los años in order to complete

a psychoanalytical treatment interrupted by the loss of his insurance, it

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 223

becomes clear that García Vega does not write Los años out of spite or dejec-

tion, but in a sincere attempt to regain mental balance and perspective. If

García Vega is implacable with the neuroses of Orígenes, it is because he

understands it as a constitutive element in his own personal illness. García

Vega also believes the cure he may find writing Los años de Orígenes could

turn out to be a remedy for the personal and literary contradictions of the

rest of the group. García Vega thus does not end Los años with an acrimo-

nious note reiterating the group’s schism, but with a recognition of Lezama

Lima’s and Orígenes’s merits given the difficult historical context of late

twentieth-century Cuba. In Los años, he leaves the door open for some still

undefined possibility of reconciliation.

I V

F I N A L N O T E : T H E O R Í G E N E S

N O V E L A S G O S P E L

More than fictionalized testimonies, De Peña Pobre and Los años de Orígenes

as novels may gear up to be testaments in the biblical sense. Vitier and

García Vega promote themselves as witnesses to Lezama Lima’s proto-mes-

sianic word about poetry and nationhood. They feel called upon to give nov-

elistic testimony of Lezama Lima’s unshakable mentorship; thus the

Orígenes “memory novel” could also be read as “novel-as-gospel” (although

García Vega’s text here would be a type of apocryphal “Gnostic Gospel of

Lezama-as-Fraud”). Vitier and García Vega each mark their place as adver-

sarial evangelists in a Byzantine mosaic in which Lezama appears as a

Christ/Clown Pantocrator in the temple/ruins of Cuban nationhood/dias-

pora. Whether they are true or false witnesses, whether one is a devout tes-

tigo vidente (visionary witness) and the other an unbelieving notario de

occisos (death notary), whether the Messiah is for real or a fake, should not

concern us. What matters is the iconic consensus that both worshipper and

desecrator reach in their devotion or resentment.

�


N O T E S

1. “Señales: La otra desintegración.” Orígenes, no. 21 (spring 1949): 61.

2. In the article “La poesía en su lugar” (Poetry in its Place), the poet Heberto Padilla noto-

riously synthesized the negative radical appraisal that regarded the Orígenes project as

obsolete during the early years of the Castro Revolution: “¿Qué queda de Orígenes?

¿Dónde está el gran libro de esa generación? ¿Dónde está la originalidad y la madurez

de ciertos frutos obtenidos? . . . No hay nada . . . Lezama Lima terminó ya . . . su nom-

bre quedará en nuestras antologías ilustrando las torpezas de una etapa de transición

que acabamos de cancelar en 1959.” [“What’s left of Orígenes? Where is the great book

of that generation? Where are the originality and the maturity of their literary harvest?

. . . There’s nothing. Lezama Lima is defunct . . . ; his name will remain in our antholo-

gies to illustrate the ineptitude of a transition phase that we have voided in 1959.]

Lunes de revolución, no. 38 (December 7, 1959): 11–12. In many writings done before

and after his 1968 controversial UNEAC prize, his 1971 arrest and trial, and his exile

from Cuba in 1980, Padilla would repeatedly retract this demeaning censorship of

Lezama and Orígenes, especially in the poem “Ese hombre” (That man) in Fuera de

juego (Havana: Unión, 1969), 22–23, and in his memoir, La mala memoria (Barcelona:

Plaza & Janés, 1988), translated into English by Alexander Coleman as Self-Portrait of

the Other (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1990).

3. On the Ciclón writers’ critique of Orígenes see Roberto Pérez León, Tiempo de Ciclón

(Habana: Unión, 1995); and Salah Hassan, “Locating Orígenes: Cuban Cultural History

and Problems of Periodization,” chap. 1 in Between Issues: The Politics of Cultural

Journals in the Postwar Era, 1944–1962, Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin,

December 1997, 45–47. On Lunes de Revolución’s aggressive deprecation of Orígenes’s

“ineffectual inaction” due to Lunes’s subscription to a Sartrean model of the intellec-

tual committed to social change through armed action, see Oscar Montero, “El com-

promiso del escritor cubano en el 1959 y la ‘corona de las frutas’ de Lezama,” Revista

Iberoamericana 57, no. 154 ( January–March 1991): 33–42. Juan Carlos Quintero

Herencia examines a more “ensordinada” (nuanced) rebuke of Orígenes in articles

espousing Marxist-Leninist historico-cultural principles that Robert Branly, José

Triana, Ambrosio Fornet, and Roberto Fernández Retamar published in Casa de las

Américas throughout the sixties. See “Moralidad y crítica en la Casa de las Américas

(1960–1971): Notas sobre la Casa ante las revistas Lunes de Revolución y Orígenes,”

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 24, no. 1 (1997): 85–110.

4. There were on-and-off signs of rectification attempts in the seventies and eighties with

the publication of critical and anthological works that sought to reconcile Lezama’s

eccentric poetic praxis with the Revolution’s political line: Pedro Simón’s collection of

favorable critical essays and testimonies commemorating Lezama Lima’s sixtieth birth-

day, Recopilación de textos sobre José Lezama Lima (Habana: Casa de las Américas,

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 225

1970); Ciro Bianchi Ross’s compilation of Lezama’s post-1959 uncollected miscellany,

Imagen y posibilidad (Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1981); and Carlos Espinosa’s

biographical assemblage of anecdotes about Lezama from surviving friends, Cercanía

de Lezama Lima (Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1986). However, the full rehabili-

tation of Orígenes in Cuba may have been coined in Rául Hernández Novás’s review of

the 1989 facsimile edition of Orígenes published in Spain; there he contradicts the dis-

missive official characterization of the group’s poetics in state reference publications

such as the Diccionario de la literatura Cubana of 1984. This review appeared in Casa

de las Américas 30, no. 180 (May–June 1990): 133–42. The Coloquio Internacional

Cincuentenario de Orígenes (International Colloquium Fifty Years of Orígenes) was

organized by the independent and now defunct Pablo Milanés Foundation and cospon-

sored by state agencies such as the Ministry of Culture, Casa de las Américas, and the

UNEAC. It took place from June 27 to July 1, 1994, in the Casa de las Américas complex

in Havana; Cintio Vitier was president of the organizing commission, Jorge Luis Arcos

its secretary. Orígenes scholars from Cuba, Spain, Europe, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil,

Puerto Rico, and the United States presented more than 80 papers. Although the organ-

izers announced and initiated an edition of the proceedings, it still has not been pub-

lished.

5. “Now, genres change, unlike ‘radicals’ or ‘universals.’ As they change, they affect one

another and the poetics, the system to which they belong, as well. Although genres are

chiefly persistent models, because they have been tested and found satisfactory, it has

been generally known since the Enlightenment . . . that they evolve, or fade, or are

replaced . . . Thus it seems important to reconsider the terms of generic theory from

the point of view of new genres. Let us recall some of the criteria that have been used

in this discussion: empirical relevance, formmaking, invitation to the matching of mat-

ter and form, informing drive, problem-solving model, principle of construction,

process or writing, moment of composition. As I review them it seems evident that they

imply two things: process and instrumentality.” “On the Uses of Literary Genre,” in

Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1971), 121.

6. Cintio Vitier, De Peña Pobre (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1978); Lorenzo García

Vega, Los años de Orígenes (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1978).

7. García Vega recalls this split in Los años as follows:

No olvidaré la noche que Cintio relató las peripecias de su conversión. Fue en una confer-

encia, pronunciada en la Biblioteca Nacional. A mí me faltaban cuatro días para salir de

Cuba—tenía que salir sin mi familia. Y si bien es verdad que estábamos preparados para el

show—allí estaban los figurones intelectuales del partido comunista—no dejó de ser aque-

llo ¿qué adjetivo podré usar? algo así como un acabóse. (109)


[I will never forget the night Cintio related the acrobatics of his conversion. It was in a con-

ference he gave at the National Library. In four more days I was to leave Cuba—I would be

leaving my family behind. And even though it’s true we were all ready for the show—all the

big-shot Communist intellectuals were there—that still was, what adjective can I use here?,

the end-beyond-all-end]. (Vitier published this conference under the title “El violín” (The

Violin) in Poética (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1997), 191–212.)

8. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Orígenes como revista,” Thesaurus: Boletín del Instituto

Caro y Cuervo 49, no. 2 (1994): 299.

9. The other novels are: Violeta Palma, a continuation of De Peña Pobre that he began

writing a year after he finished the first novel, published as part 2 of an expanded

Cuban edition of De Peña Pobre (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1980); Los papeles

de Jacinto Finalé (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1984); and Rajando la leña está

(Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1986). Because Vitier’s participation in Orígenes is

addressed only in the first novel, I will concentrate my discussion on De Peña Pobre in

this paper.

10. For first-rate book-length studies of Vitier’s life and work, see Arcadio Díaz Quiñones,

Cintio Vitier: La memoria integradora (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial Sin Nombre,

1987); and Enrique Saínz, La obra poética de Cinto Vitier (Habana: Letras Cubanas,

1998).

11. For the most recent and insightful profiles and articles on García Vega, see the dossier

in his tribute “Homenaje a Lorenzo García Vega” in Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana

21/22 (summer/fall 2001): 7–55; esp. Carlos Espinosa’s interview with García Vega,

18–27; Víctor Fowler, “De un notario incómodo,” 38–43; Lourdes Gil, “Jagüey, La

Victoria, Playa Albina,” 44–47; and Carlos M. Luis, “Crónicas de un reencuentro,” 52–54.

12. Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, Cintio Vitier: La memoria integradora, 47 n. 36.

13. Vitier calls De Peña Pobre “‘una ‘ficción del animo conmovido’ surgida pocos meses

después de la muerte de Lezama” (a fiction of spiritual commotion that emerged a few

months after Lezama’s death). “Hacia De Peña Pobre,” in Cintio Vitier, Poética (Habana:

Letras Cubanas, 1997), 224. Although García Vega states that he began Los años right

before learning about Lezama’s death, toward the conclusion of the book he recognizes

that this knowledge intensified the affective contradictions behind his writing:

Pero ¿y Lezama? Había comenzado este libro cuando recibí la noticia de su muerte.

Esperaba que él hubiese leído este libro, esperaba. . . . Así que comencé ese libro, y supe de

la muerte de Lezama. Aumentó la contradicción. Pues no creo que con este libro logre una

catarsis, ni que con él llegue a una reconciliación. Pues confieso que mantengo mi rencor

hacia Lezama, así como mantengo ambivalentes actitudes ante lo que significó su vida. Los

años de Orígenes, 282

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 227

[But . . . what about Lezama? I had already started on this book when I got the news about

his death. I was hoping he’d read this book, I hoped . . . Thus I began this book and found

out about Lezama’s death. The contradiction increased since I don’t believe that through

this book I am going to reach a catharsis or a reconciliation with him. I must say that I still

maintain my resentment against Lezama as well as ambivalent attitudes regarding the

significance of his life.]

14. The preferential tendency to define and evaluate Orígenes as “group” instead of as “jour-

nal” can be gleaned from the titles and methodologies of most book-length studies of

this chapter in Cuban literary history: Jesús J. Barquet, Consagración de la Habana: La

peculiaridad del grupo Orígenes en el proceso cultural cubano (Miami: University of

Miami North-South Center, 1992); Jorge Luis Arcos, Orígenes: La pobreza irradiante

(Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1994); Alfredo Chacón, ed., Poesía y poética del

grupo Orígenes (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1994). Even in self-conscious attempts

to read Orígenes as a journal and not as a group, such as Fernández Retamar’s article

“Orígenes como revista” (also the text of his plenary address at the 1994 Orígenes con-

ference), slippages occur. Here, through references to Rodríguez Feo’s published corre-

spondence with Lezama, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Wallace Stevens, Retamar begins

to document how Rodríguez Feo’s fundamental contributions as editor, essayist, and

translator helped give Orígenes its counter-nationalist, high modernist cosmopoli-

tanism. Nevertheless, he slips back into the origenista interpretation of the journal as

the advocate of a localistic ethos of cubanidad, turning into a slogan Stevens’s “anti-

imperialist” admonishment to Rodríguez Feo to “expresses the genius of his country”

in his work as an editor, 307–8. The only study I know in which Orígenes is approached

exclusively as a text without “transgenerational group” mystifications is Salah Hassan’s

dissertation chapter. For a different reading of the political and ideoesthetic implica-

tions in Stevens and Rodríguez Feo’s letter exchange, see Rob Lesman’s work-in-

progress, “Wallace Stevens in Orígenes,” unpublished.

15. For an alternative interpretation of Cuban culture as a non-essentialist, anti-insularist

translation of foreign influences, see Gustavo Pérez Firmat, The Cuban Condition

(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

16. For a fuller idea of Rodríguez Feo’s key role in the internationalist, cosmopolitan fash-

ioning of the journal’s perimeter of contributors, see José Rodríguez Feo, Mi correspon-

dencia con Lezama Lima (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1989); and Beverly Coyle and Alan

Filreis, eds., Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens and José Rodríguez

Feo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986).

17. “Hacia De Peña Pobre.” In Poética (Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1996), 213–26.

18. In a running metafictional commentary on the writing of De Peña Pobre included in

the Violeta Palma sequel, Vitier makes more explicit the deliberate musical structure

of the novel: “Dos temas quisiera conjugar, como dos temas musicales, en el libro que


vengo pensando desde la muerte de Lezama. Uno es el de la ‘peña pobre,’ que tiene va-

rios planos . . . El otro es tema maestro es el del Cuarteto 16 de Beethoven.” (I would

like to conjoin two themes, as if they were musical motifs, in the book I’ve been con-

templating since Lezama’s death. One is that of the “destitute promontory,” which has

many levels . . . The other master theme is Beethoven’s Quartet 16.) De Peña Pobre

(Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1980), 210–11.

19. Much of the writing arguing for the rehabilitation of Orígenes in post-1959 Cuba sus-

tains itself on an interpretation of these editorials as instances of a politically militant

discourse, emphasizing Lezama’s famous editorial statement, “un país frustado en lo

esencial político, puede alcanzar virtudes y expresiones por otros cotos de mayor

realeza” (a country frustrated in its political essentials, can reach virtue and expression

through other venues of higher worth) (“La otra desintegración,” 61). For a critique of

the current interpretation of the Orígenes poetic project as a coordinated attempt to

build up alternatives of cultural resistance against the political and social dissolution

of the Republican period, see Rafael Rojas’s article in this issue of CR.

20. The novel claims that Orbón, at El turco sentado,” was the first to use José Martí’s verses

as lyrics to the Guantanamera.

21. María Zambrano, “La Cuba secreta,” Orígenes, no. 20 (winter 1948): 43–56.

22. “La Habana Vieja, donde estaba el taller en que se imprimía la Revista y los libros del

grupo, y en cuyas librerías y cafés de pinta española había sentado sus reales el Maestro,

se había convertido en un radio de atracción para Kuntius” (100–101). (Old Havana,

where stood the shop in which the Journal and the books of the group were printed,

and where in bookshops and Spanish cafés the Maestro had made his court, had

become a radio of attraction for Kuntius.) What is stressed in this passage is the wel-

coming social atmosphere of Old Havana, not the procedures involved in editing and

producing the journal.

23. Enrico Mario Santí, “Entrevista con el grupo Orígenes,” in Coloquio Internacional sobre

la obra de José Lezama Lima, ed. Eugenio Suárez Galbán and Cristina Vizcaíno (Madrid:

Editorial Fundamentos, 1984), 157.

24. For example, Cintio Vitier. Fina García Marruz, and Eliseo Diego turned down an invi-

tation to attend a 1994 conference commemorating Orígenes, organized by the

Universidad de las Palmas in the Canary Islands, when they found out García Vega had

also been invited. For a curious document commenting on this dispute, see Lorenzo

García Vega, “Carta a X,” Ujule 1–2 (summer–fall 1994): 142–44.

25. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Orígenes como revista,” 195. Lourdes Gil’s assessment of

the book is much sounder: “Los años de Orígenes es, además de una cartografía político-

literaria de nuestro país, una deconstrucción del concepto canónico de nación como

centro y un escarceo por redefinir la diáspora y el descentramiento de la cultura

cubana.” (Besides being a politico-literary cartography of Cuba, Los años de Orígenes is

a deconstruction of the canonical notion of nation as center and a struggle to redefine

C é s a r A . S a l g a d o ● 229

the diaspora and the decentering of Cuban culture.) “Jagüey, La Victoria, Playa Albina,”

Encuentro de la cultura cubana 21/22 (summer/fall 2001): 46.

26. On this respect, I find Lourdes Gil’s recently published comments on the book quite on

the mark: “Pero el tour de force de Los años de Orígenes consiste en su desafío al dicta-

men de Sartre de que el subconsciente no posee un status epistemólogico. ¿Y qué es Los

años de Orígenes, sino el triunfo epistemológico del subconsciente, el hilvanamiento de

la lógica interna, invisible, del subconsciente?” (But the tour de force in Los años de

Orígenes consists in how it challenges Sartre’s dictum that the unconscious does not

have an epistemological status. And what is Los años de Orígenes if not the epistemo-

logical victory of the unconscious, the unthreading of the internal, invisible logic of the

unconscious?) “Jagüey, La Victoria, Playa Albina,” 46.

27. “[L]a atmósfera de Orígenes había sido siempre lo frío, lo convencional, y lo estereoti-

pado; una atmósfera desde donde no podía surgir ninguna amistad” (109). (The mood

of Orígenes had always been cold, conventional, and stereotypical, an atmosphere in

which no friendship could come forth.)

28. “Y [este tapujo] llevó, siempre, a mantener a nuestro grupo en una atmósfera

enrarecida, enfermiza, y castrante. Fue una de las paradojas, y debilidades, que siempre

arrastramos. Y lo que es más lamentable, fue una debilidad que pudo minar nuestra

expresión. Pues esta falta de espontaneidad fue la forma que adoptó, entre nosotros,

esa mentira del vivir cubano, esa mentira contra la cual, principalmente, debíamos

haber luchando” (156–57). (And this [constipation] always led us to keep our group in

a rarified, sickly, castrating atmosphere. That was one of the paradoxes, and weak-

nesses, that we had to bear. And, what’s worse, this weakness undermined our expres-

sion. Because that lack of spontaneity was the way through which the untruthfulness

of Cuban life found its way among us, that falseness that we should have fought above

all.)


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The Novels of Orígenes

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