Latin America and Existentialism: A Pan-American Literary History (1864-1938)

By Edwin Murillo

Latin America and Existentialism is a preliminary intellectual history, prioritising literature and contextualising Latin American philosophical contributions from the 1860s to the late 1930s, decades that coincide with the canon’s foundational years. This study takes a Pan-American approach to move the critical focus away from the River Plate, a region that has received some critical attention. In doing so, it focuses on existentially-neglected writers such as Brazil’s Machado de Assis and Graciliano Ramos, José Asunción Silva from Colombia, Cuba’s Enrique Labrador Ruiz, and the Chilean María Luisa Bombal. Underappreciated Latin American philosophical voices and existentialism’s canonical perspectives allow the author to discuss the many problems concerning the experiencing ‘I’ of these authors, and to consider such existential themes as ethical vacuity, forlornness, the crisis of insufficiency, the conundrum of choice, and the enigma of authentic being. The concentration on Latin America’s existentially-hued interest in the human condition is an invitation to the reader to reconsider the peripheral status in the existentialism canon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781837720026

Book preview

Illustration

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Latin America and Existentialism

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

Samuel Amago (University of Virginia)

Roger Bartra (Universidad Autónoma de México)

Paul Castro (University of Glasgow)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Lloyd H. Davies (Swansea University)

Luisa-Elena Delgado (University of Illinois)

Maria Delgado (Central School of Speech and Drama, London)

Will Fowler (University of St Andrews)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

Other titles in the series

Spain is different? Historical memory and the ‘Two Spains’ in

turn-of-the-millennium Spanish apocalyptic fictions

Dale Knickerbocker

Blood, Land and Power: The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Nobility

and Lineages in the Early Modern Period

Manuel Perez-Garcia

Fantastic Short Stories by Women Authors from Spain and Latin America: A Critical Anthology

Patricia Gracía and Teresa López-Pellisa

Carmen Martín Gaite: Poetics, Visual Elements and Space

Ester Bautista Botello

The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia: Revolution in the Sugar Cane Fields

Robert Mason

Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema

Maite Conde and Stephanie Dennison

The Tlatelolco Massacre, Mexico 1968, and the Emotional

Triangle of Anger, Grief and Shame: iscourses of Truth(s)

Victoria Carpenter

The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina

Ignacio Aguiló

Catalan Culture: Experimentation, creative imagination and therelationship with Spain

Lloyd Hughes Davies, J. B. Hall and D. Gareth Walters

Illustration

© Edwin Murillo, 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

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ISBN: 978-1-83772-000-2

eISBN: 978-1-83772-002-6

The right of Edwin Murillo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Cover image: ‘Las Ruinas’, the ruined eighteenth-century Santiago Apóstol church in Cartago, Costa Rica, destroyed by an earthquake in 1910. © John Mitchell / Alamy Stock Photo.

Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

1.  Latin America and Existentialism: An Introduction

2.  Machado de Assis and the Art of Existential Deciphering

3.  José Fernández as Modernity’s Impossible Patient

4.  The Existential Exegete in Enrique Labrador Ruiz’s El laberinto de sí mismo

5.  María Luisa Bombal and the Poetics of Inconformity

6.  The Burden of Anonymity: Existential Toxicosis in Graciliano Ramos’s Angústia

7.  Latin America and Existentialism: An Interlude

Works cited

Notes

Series Editors’ Foreword

______________

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

Acknowledgements

______________

To the most important people in my life, my daughters, Mariana and Mía, you inspire all my work. To my wife Krysta, thank you for your reassurances and faith. My eternal gratitude to my mother, Carmen Rosa, who introduced me to reading. To my father, Olivier, and my brothers, Rob, Allan, Marco, thank you. To Eileen, Olger, Betsy, Doralee and Noemí. This book is dedicated to you all.

I’d like to express my thanks to the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State University, and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga for the financial support to complete this book. Thank you to colleagues and friends in Miami: Hugo Achugar, Nelson Bass, Sabrina Dräi-Wengier, Elena Grau-Lleveria, Joanne Pol and George Yúdice, all of whom have offered praise and comments for this project. Thank you to friends and colleagues in Pennsylvania: Jayne Brown, Sudip Ghosh, César Martínez-Garza, Danielle Moser, Randy Newnham, Michele Ramsey, Kirk Shaffer, Miguel Stella and Rosario Torres. I am deeply indebted to Belén Rodríguez-Mourelo for her generous support. My appreciation goes to my colleagues in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. I am grateful for the support of Joshua Davies. Thank you to the librarians in Austin, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Chattanooga, Houston, La Habana, Miami, Reading, Rio de Janeiro and San José.

I offer my sincerest gratitude to the University of Wales Press, and in particular, Sarah Lewis, for her advocacy, encouragement and belief in this project. Likewise, I extend my thanks to the anonymous readers and reviewers.

1

Latin America and Existentialism: An Introduction

______________

How should one live next to the people?

Does he act recklessly,

does he live, he who sustains and elevates men?

Nezahualcóyotl1

Every man is the son of his own works.

Don Quixote2

This book begins with the premise that Latin American existentialism is misconstrued in the canon. A compulsory belatedness has been imposed in literary, philosophical and cultural studies. Thus, when the subject of existentialism has been broached, Latin America has been assumed to be subsequent to its European and US American counterparts. To address this inaccuracy, I have undertaken the investigation of existentialism in Latin America in the decades preceding the European boom of the 1940s, prioritising its expressions in literature while accounting for its philosophical presence. For this study’s purposes, by existentialism (and its adjectival forms), I mean the cultural phenomena still intriguing many today with roots that go back at least to the nineteenth century. By existentialism, I am primarily referring to literature that showcases the disquieted individual who becomes aware of and attempts to reckon with their irrational and indifferent existence. As a result, disillusionment concerning the human condition often arises, manifesting as forlornness, anguish, estrangement and/or rage.3

In this book, existentialism also means the reflection on and narrativisation of that problematic individual’s experiential dissidence, as they cannot merely surrender, believe or subsist unconditionally. To be existential also connotes the double consciousness of human solitude (be it the product of God’s non-existence, abandonment or disinterest) and our mortality. As Richard Schacht puts it, with existentialism, humanity has come to recognise that we are ‘home alone in a godless and alien universe. There are no absolutes in the realms of value and morality. There is no happily ever after’ (p. 113).4 Yet all is not lost! On the contrary, as Mexican philosopher Francisco Larroyo underscores, the vital energy at the heart of existentialism focuses not only on ‘the greatness and misery of life, but also our inescapable fate, death, whose experience must be an incentive for action and a stimulus to accept resolutely our fundamental human condition’.5

Latin America’s absence in the historiography of the formative years of existentialism is a puzzling lapse, given the seemingly interminable interest and output of studies in the field, an area of study whose anthropocentric premise helps explain its universal and contemporary appeal. As Jonathan Judaken reminds us quite directly, ‘the Archimedean point for existentialism is thus the question, Who am I?’ (p. 6). I came across tangible ‘evidence’ of this most human of preoccupations in Latin America, some years ago, in the famous colonial neighbourhood of Bogotá known as La Candelaria. In this neighbourhood stands the world-renowned Botero Museum, the Plaza Bolívar (home to the Metropolitan Basilica Cathedral), the University of the Andes and the Silva Poetry House, the former home of one of the foundational voices of Latin American existentialism, José Asunción Silva. La Candelaria also houses the Gold Museum of Colombia.

Established in 1939, the museum serves as cultural memory and a testament to Native American artistry, knowledge and social complexities. The museum reinforces Pre-Columbian historical perseverance and reconstructs the heritage nearly decimated by the Conquest in all these facets. The museum also demonstrates indigenous people’s expertise as artificers and goldsmiths while safeguarding indigenous belief systems, religions and philosophies, as expressed through relics and sculptures. One artefact, in particular, continues to inform this book. I am referring to El pensador precolombino (The Pre-Columbian Thinker), from the Tumaco region in Colombia.6

My serendipitous encounter with the Pensador helped galvanise this book in three ways. Firstly, it provides a testament to the legacy of introspection in the pre-Hispanic world. In my estimation, the Pensador functions as a cultural touchstone for the long-standing tradition of Latin American thought that traces its roots not only to European masters, but to our Native American ancestors. Secondly, and equally significant, the Pensador connotes self-examination as patrimony of humanity. In other words, the Colombian thinker functions as a synecdoche of presence, a kind of Native American philosophical creation ex nihilo, which begins to contradict any belated peripheral status prejudices for Latin America. Lastly, the similitude between the Colombian statue, dated to the Inguapí period (700 BCE to 350 CE), and Auguste Rodin’s immortal The Thinker (1907), an icon of existentialism (and the patron saint of introspection) is uncanny.

I look to the Pensador as a symbol of presence and as the retort to the fallacy of indisputable subsequence that has traditionally plagued various Latin Americanisms. In fact, in the presence of the Tumaco statue, one might recall the undeniable philosophical echoes coming from Mexico in the poetry of Nezahualcóyotl. In poems such as ‘Niquitoa’ (‘I ask it’), ‘Zan nic caqui itopyo’ (‘I perceive the secret’), or ‘Can nelpa tonyazque?’ (‘Where shall we go?’), a reader could agree with Miguel León-Portilla that the work of Nezahualcóyotl substantiates the idea of ‘Nahuatl philosophy’.7 Such an eclectic source should not surprise because, as Julio Fausto Fernández informs us, existentialism’s ideological footprints can be traced back to ‘ancient origins not only in the literature of the West but also in the Eastern and even in pre-Columbian America’.8

In the Nahuatl poems I have just mentioned, such is the lingering uncertainty yet insatiable desire to inquire about existence that today’s readers could justifiably assume a modern poetic voice is at work. Take for example the proto-existentialist resonances in the following three poems, taken from distinct regions, eras and languages of Latin America: Nezahualcóyotl’s ‘Where shall we go?’, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera’s ‘¿Para qué?’ (‘For What?’) (1883) and Júlia Cortines’s ‘Renúncia’ (‘Renounce’) (1905).9

Where shall we go

where death does not exist?

But should I live weeping because of this?

May your heart find its way;

here no one will live forever.

Even the princes die,

people are reduced to ashes.

May your heart find its way;

here no one will live forever.

(‘Where shall we go?’)

Where do we sail? Who commands the work?

Why the concerns, the struggles, and the pain

if the captain mistreats and the end is cruel?

Whatever the place, whatever the port,

in churning seas, just like in the desert,

no matter how much we fight, death will be the end.

(‘For what?’)

I do not come, through the shadow that watches you,

God, cruel illusion, to on your sovereign face

hurl, in a cry, that whips, and scourges,

an insane blasphemy [. . .]

I expect nothing from you, neither hurled at you,

O brutal power, O dark deity,

in a vain plea, in a vain hope

my soul in agony!

(‘Renounce’)

All are philopoetic examples of Latin American existentialist presence because of their similar tonality and themes.10 These examples should pique the curiosity of anyone interested in Latin American existentialism. A close reading reveals concerns that are recognisable in existentialists, such as acknowledging life as pained, the quest for meaning and greater purpose in life, a will towards reckoning, and an exasperation with the idea of God. Of further interest is the synchronicity of Gutiérrez Nájera and Cortines with the historicising of existentialism, as most specialists look to the late nineteenth century and build to the end of World War II when reconstructing an origin story. Taking this synchronous approach, Latin American existentialism becomes more self-evident. In addition to the examples introduced here, other precursory existentialist echoes are present in Hispanic modernistas, like José Martí and Rubén Darío, and Brazilian simbolistas, like Raimundo Correia, João da Cruz e Sousa, and in Augusto dos Anjos’s haunting Eu (I) (1912), all of whom have engagements with the challenges of being. Similarly, curious readers that look to the avant-gardism of César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda’s Residence on Earth (1935) will encounter substantial poetic samplings of unquestionable existentialist nuances.

Naturally, the manifestation of existentialism in Latin America is not limited to poetry. Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881), Manuel Díaz Rodríguez’s Ídolos rotos (Broken Idols) (1901) and Raimundo de Farias Brito’s philosophical tome O mundo interior (Inner World) (1914) are a few plausible selections to begin any study with. A representative list of short stories that have not been studied but merit critical attention must include the work of Mexicans Ciro Bernal Ceballos and Amado Nervo, and the Uruguayan Víctor Pérez Petit. Likewise, Neruda’s El habitante y su esperanza (The Inhabitant and Its Hope) (1927) and the Argentine Eduardo Mallea’s La ciudad junto al río inmóvil (The City by the Immobile River) (1936) coincide with the usual thematic and historical starting points of existentialism.

Two writers deserve special mention because of their contemporaneity with the existentialism boom of the twentieth century. The first is María Luisa Bombal, to whom I dedicate an entire chapter in this book.11 The Chilean’s transformative novels La última niebla (The Final Mist) (1934) and La amortajada (The Shrouded Woman) (1938) predate important texts from the 1940s, and her 1938 novel appears in the same year as Sartre’s canonised Nausea. The second Latin American worth mentioning is Juan Carlos Onetti. The Uruguayan’s The Pit (1939) is likewise a transformative literary moment for the modernisation of Latin American narratives that has been fleetingly mentioned as proto-existentialist.12 Nevertheless, several older studies (for example, Segundo and Díaz Ruanava), and more recent contributions to the study of existentialism in Latin America continue the post hoc approach.13 Yet, as the brief inventory of voices I have provided demonstrates, a synchronised reading of Latin American existentialism is possible and necessary.

In taking this comparative and synchronised approach, I have opted to follow the methodology of other literary historians, considering the matter as a transnational and cross-disciplinary phenomenon. As the most recent histories have concurred, the story of existentialism covers several centuries, languages and mediums. From Pascal in the seventeenth century, through Kierkegaard in the nineteenth, to the French trinity of Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir in the 1940s, the roots and manifestations of an existential perspective are not limited, or easily quantified as a genre or school. This same international and multigenerational reality applies to Latin American existentialism. As a preliminary origin story, Latin America and Existentialism begins in Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century (Machado de Assis), makes its way to the Colombian altiplano with José Asunción Silva, to later find its way back to Brazil (Graciliano Ramos) after passing through the Caribbean of Enrique Labrador Ruiz and María Luisa Bombal’s Chile.

Close readings of works from the Caribbean, the Andes and Brazil allow me to engage texts in Spanish and Portuguese, the latter being another significantly under-represented language in existentialism studies. To emphasise the inroads of existentialist thought throughout the continent, I have purposefully selected writers from beyond the river Plate, the only region in Latin America to have a sustained, if limited, critical interest.14 While I discuss key figures such as Juan Carlos Onetti and Ernesto Sábato within a larger existentialism context, I have favoured the less studied regions. Additionally, to draw attention to Latin America’s existential coetaneity and provide a precursory foundation on which to build, I examine texts that appear before existentialism’s miraculous decade: the 1940s.15

Lastly, I have approached Latin American existentialism as a cultural phenomenon, and various commonalities have guided me in the field. This shared space has led me to agree with Gordon Marino when he asserts that although ‘they may disagree about the details, the existentialists are linked by their commitment to the common themes of freedom, choice, authenticity, alienation, and rebellion’ (p. xiv). I’ve also preferred conceptualising Latin America as part of a long existentialist perspective, agreeing with Kevin Aho, who posits that existentialism ‘cannot be dismissed as a moribund, decade-long episode of post-war France. Rather, it represents a centuries-long engagement with the most fundamental of human questions: "Who am I? and How should I live?"’ (p. 17). As I will demonstrate in the coming pages, both Marino’s and Aho’s formulations of an existential common ground link all the Latin Americanists studied here.

Conceptualising Existentialisms

Jeff Malpas, among others, has emphasised the synergy between philosophy and literature in existentialism. For Malpas, the intertwining of the two disciplines, particularly in the French tradition, is long-standing. As Malpas puts it, ‘existentialism can thus be viewed as naming not only a philosophical attitude or approach but also a certain literary genre or style’ (p. 295). However, Malpas, like so many others, excludes Latin America from the discussion by categorising existentialism as ‘closely associated with French literature from the middle of the twentieth century’ and other ‘nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers from Europe as well as the United States’ (p. 295).16

Similarly, Eduardo Mendieta locates existentialism’s origins in its literary form in European sources, specifically Cervantes’s famous knight.17 Mendieta’s meritorious reconstruction of Hispanic existentialism, while inclusive of indispensable Latin American philosophers, references only a select few Hispanic American writers that appeared after the 1940s. Similarly, Roberto Domingo Toledo provides a vital philosophical history of Latin Americans; however, he also defines literary existentialism in Latin America as a post-1940s phenomenon, most associated with Hispanic American Boom writers Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and even Gabriel García Márquez. This critical gap compelled Stephanie Merrim to lament that ‘all told, I believe that the field of Latin American existential fiction has not been fully construed or constructed as such’ (p. 96).18

The question, partly addressed in the opening paragraphs, becomes paramount: What is existentialism? Several historians across eras and languages guide my study. A practical definition is provided by Demetrio Estébanez Calderón, who predictably defines existentialism from a Eurocentric perspective. Estébanez Calderón characterises it as a ‘philosophical movement that developed in Europe during the interwar period (1918–1939) and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War’, to which he adds that the central thrust is ‘the affirmation of the primacy of the concrete individual over the universal, and existence over the essence’ (‘Existencialismo’).19 Aho understands the unifying idea of existentialism as the ‘concern for the human situation as it is lived’ (p. x). For his part, Emmanuel Mounier provided an influential visualisation with his ‘Existentialist Tree’ (1946), sketching existentialism’s primarily European roots to antiquity passing through Pascal and Maine de Biran in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. Still, most histories of existentialism, from Larroyo (1951) to George Cotkin (2003), begin in the nineteenth century, primarily with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and the novels of Dostoyevsky.20 However, it is not until the twentieth century that existentialism, as such, collates into the phenomenon that continues to intrigue various sectors of global culture.21

In existentialism, both literature and philosophy, a diverse collection of voices will prioritise the individual of flesh and bone, one bereft of certainties. This primacy of the here and now helps explain existentialism’s unofficial slogan, the often-cited Sartrean position that existence precedes essence.22 This existentialist mantra puts forth that no all-encompassing, infallible significance exists, resulting paradoxically in the burden of freedom and responsibility. As we will corroborate in the upcoming texts, the voicing of suspicion will be the signifying epicentre from which to ponder the implications of behaviour, our solitude and purpose.

In this book, existentialism, which builds on the groundwork cited above, also stipulates the following:

1. It is reactionary to the abstract, systematic and collective view of humanity espoused by positivism and rationalism. Existentialism displays what José Joaquín Brunner calls the ‘exasperation with modernity’ (p. 53). Existentialism’s reflexivity functions as an apologia to the individual’s importance, a grounding theory of the individual into life’s visceral experiences.

2. Existentialism does not aspire to be objective or definitive. Instead, the individual’s experience communicates their existence and involvement with an indifferent world.

3. Existential stories unveil and engage with humanity’s burden: the realisation of its orphanhood. This recognition produces fear, anguish, sickness, alienation, denial, and at times, hate.

4. Existentialist literature produces vivid images of life that problematise bourgeois normativity.

5. Ultimately, exploring these experiences points to liminal moments of choice, with humanity’s mortality always within view.

Two final expositions of note, by Mendieta and then D. E. Cooper, add to a comprehensive philopoetics of existentialism that informs my understanding of its Latin American expressions as well:

At the center of all existentialist thinking is the inescapably free subject who must make herself in a world bereft of meaning. Yet, the obduracy of this world is determined by the limits of a circumstance that is traced by the freedom of others. I am thrown into the world, condemned to freedom, and what I encounter are always other freedoms. God is useless, for my freedom is never breached by a sovereignty that reigns by granting absolute freedom. I am born unfinished and have nothing but a vacuum at the core of my being. I become what I make of myself. I have nothing but what I make. I am nothing but become my own story. I am a project. History sets the terms because it is what I, we, have made, but it does not determine the outcome. I am and must become, but I can do so only with others, or against others. Freedom, indeterminacy, self-making, others, meaning to be made, not discovered – these are the key themes, notions, insights of existentialist thinking. (Mendieta, p. 180)

***

Indeed, philosophical reflection on human existence and the world reveals that neither is thinkable in the absence of the other. A main reason for this is that the world of things cannot be understood except by reference to the significance that these things have in relation to human purposes and practices. Once this intimacy is appreciated [. . .] it emerges that each human being is possessed of a radical freedom and responsibility, not only to choose and to act, but to interpret and evaluate the world. (D. E. Cooper, pp. 29–30)

Both Mendieta and Cooper highlight humanity’s autonomy and the importance of the other, the inescapability of being in the world, and the individual’s interaction with that existence. Given all of the above, I would suggest that Mendieta’s composite of existentialism applies to every literary example referenced up to now. For example, in the poetry of Gutiérrez Nájera, Asunción Silva and Cortines, God’s silence and the world’s indifference compel the poetic voices to confront their signifying emptiness while accounting for death. Likewise, D. E. Cooper’s existentialist ‘manifesto’ synthesises the exegetical experiences common to all the texts I analyse in the subsequent chapters of Latin America and Existentialism.

In every narrative to be discussed, the protagonist purposefully attempts to reckon with their respective existences to decipher their feelings of insufficiency. This engagement with their status quo does not narrativise the triumph over adversity, merely the necessity of confrontation. In many cases, that necessary engagement with being involves the very act of writing, another commonality of literary existentialism, as several protagonists foster literary ambitions. For this study, existential narrative poetics is based on the parameters of literary existentialism derived from Dostoyevsky, the aforementioned French trinity, and Unamuno.23 Naturally, the philosophical contributions of all parties involved, for example, Nietzsche, among several of the usual suspects, are indispensable to my Latin American existentialism formulation and will be accounted for. Moreover, as I will discuss next, Farias Brito’s under-appreciated contributions, and other Latin Americanists such as Samuel Ramos, Fernando González Ochoa and Vicente Ferreira da Silva, also contribute to my characterisation of existentialism in our Americas.

Thus Spoke the Latin Americans

In Latin America, interest in historicising existentialism, in its philosophical form, began almost immediately in the 1940s, but regrettably, most sustained the illusion of belatedness through omission. It was not until the latter decades of the twentieth century that David Sobrevilla’s ‘Phenomenology and Existentialism in Latin America’ (1988) catalogued Latin America’s presence throughout the twentieth century and indirectly presented a case for its writers’ inclusion as early participants.24 Undoubtedly due to Sobrevilla’s work, historians have now documented how in several of the foundational thinkers of Latin American philosophy, especially those who form part of the professionalisation of philosophy after the 1940s, a constant preoccupation with the ‘self’ is palpable, in an overt existentialist manner.25

This inclination towards existentialist matters becomes apparent in various philosophical cohorts throughout the continent, such as Argentina’s ‘Generación del 25’ and the subsequent ‘Nueva izquierda’ (‘New Left’) generation whose work appeared in Contorno magazine in the 1950s. Similarly, in Mexico, the Hyperion Group and Spanish exiles Ortega y Gasset, Juan David García Bacca and José Gaos have been duly recognised for their role in expanding the existentialism imaginary in Hispanic America. Finally, recent studies have rightfully recorded Alberto Erro and Ángel Vasallo’s contributions in Argentina and Leopoldo Zea and Jorge Portilla in Mexico.26 Nevertheless, all these meritorious histories continue to overemphasise publications that appear after the late 1940s, meaning they are (unintentionally) contributing to the mythology of subsequence.

Apart from the literary contingency that is the focal point of this book, a case for a participative Latin American existentialism rest with the philosophical contributions of other foundational figures who produced clear anti-positivist attitudes. Such is the case with Martí, Farias Brito and Samuel Ramos, to mention only these, who manifest a return to self-affirming vitalist perspectives. All three show a preoccupation with modern man (understood as the self or individual), but more precisely, not idealised man, but rather the concrete, subjective, fallible and relativised individual. With this in mind, Martí’s figure becomes foundational, given his anticipatory contributions in poetry and in his essays. The most recognised exposition of Martían scepticism is his famous ‘Prologue to Poema del Niágara’ (1882).27 However, before the prologue’s publication, the Cuban’s ‘Juicios’ (‘Judgements’) (1877–8) engage directly with the re-vindication of the contemplative nature of certain malcontent individuals.

‘Juicios’, an unedited collection of essays, explores, among other concerns, the role of philosophy and the philosopher, the confrontation with God, and the symbiosis between life and death, in particular the incontrovertible shadow of death in life, a distinctly existentialist problematic. From the onset, Martí’s deeply religious anthropocentric interest serves as an apologia for the experiencing ‘I’, a vestige of Kierkegaard’s advocacy of the ‘single individual’.28 Thus, much like his fellow religious existentialists, like the aforementioned Dane and Unamuno, Martí’s concerns are profoundly rooted with his fellow ‘earthly’ men, or as Unamuno called them, ‘concrete man’ (Tragic, p. 1).29 Furthermore, for Martí, that earthly, pensive individual is involved with discerning not only existence but also the epistemological pillars of humanity’s being. As the Cuban suggests:

We always have the work of creation before us and always in us the desire to know how it works. Whom can we ask? God? – Oh! – He does not answer because we have been taught to believe in a God who is not the true one. – The true one imposes work as a means of reaching rest, study as a means of reaching the truth, honesty to reach purity. How happy a martyr dies! How satisfied a wise man lives! He does his duty, which, if it is not the end, it is the means.30

Martí’s wise martyr has much in common with existential man. Firstly, the Cuban recognises that for some, especially those who I would label as existentially curious, the will to know is a centripetal force. Next, Martí ponders the recourse for this existentially curious individual, seeming to find error in unquestioning faith and ideological tribalism, instead advocating for introspective ‘action’. What Martí will not lose faith in, what he promotes is a return to the meditative ‘I’. Martí’s concern for tangible man is a phenomenological turn towards the subjective individual. Also, it is notable that Martí’s call to ‘duty’, what he refers to as his ‘philosophy of the relationship’ (p. 362), is a precursor to the importance of contingency given by future existentialists to the presence of the other. Martían philosophy also underscores subjectivity as an investigative perspective, reflexive, dynamic and incessant self-production. Thus, for Martí, philosophising becomes both tangible and a dialectical synthesis of perspectival ‘seeing’, evolutionary but not conclusive, à la Nietzsche.31

Martí’s relational philosophy, what he describes as a dialogue between the experiential ‘I’ and ‘what is not me’, unearths several assertions that begin with key existentially attuned questions, chief among them being ‘Who or what is this curious, indefatigable, melancholic, and rebellious being that we have in ourselves?’ (‘Juicios’, p. 364).32 The question is representative of the Martían individual, all at once inquisitive, disquieted and defiant, yet constantly striving for purpose. The said individual recognises that anguish is both relentless and constitutive for those wilful beings open to engaging with the challenges of authenticity and meaning. As Martí understands it:

What is perennial is the cause of pain. Pain is the result of the nonconformity of the soul – sentient nature – with real existence. Or the dissatisfaction of desire with attainment. The former is the pain of thinkers and poets – Ultraman –. The latter is the pain of men. The former is philosophical pain. My examination should fall exclusively on the former. Inconformity is constant; but not incessant.33

In this passage, Martí is engaging Schopenhauerian pessimism directly.34 Moreover, the Cuban’s ideas on inconformity place him at the epicentre of existentialism, as he argues that human suffering is regenerative, centrifugal and a perpetual condition, yet not prohibitive of authentic being. For Martí, pain and discontent galvanise the sentient individual according to their will towards inconformity, thus, bringing into being the Martían ‘Ultraman’. For this surprising construct, immediately reminiscent of the Nietzschean Übermensch, and considered at length in his aptly titled poem ‘Homagno’ (‘Magnus Man’), pain as revelation points to the necessary task of dismantling the subjugated individual.35 One of the first steps in that transvaluative agenda requires the surrender to the ‘Ultraman’. Nevertheless, Martían surrender means rejecting conformity:

Genuine resignation in misery produces the same interior beauty and majesty, the same calm and ‘quiet spirit’ that Catholics attain with ‘submission to the will of God’. The calm lies, not in believing that it is God who sends us sorrow and knows why, and it will be for our good – but in carrying it with dignity, even when we do not see it as possible. There is a thousand times more merit in philosophical resignation than in Christian resignation.36

Martí reimagines resignation, exchanging static submission for conscious engagement. The Cuban will also vehemently reject suicide as a defeatist tactic towards the close of his ‘Juicios’. The analogy Martí makes between Catholic and philosophical resignation alludes to the intention of man to reach fulfilment, that is, the will towards a ‘quiet spirit’. Nonetheless, it is not unwavering faith that leads to the path of purpose, but rather dignity and inconformity in the face of the endless calamity of existence. In this vein, Martí is anticipating Camus’s similar transvaluative conceptualisation of ‘absurd’ existence, especially when the French philosopher finds that man might find purpose in resignation. Alternatively, as Camus describes it, in defiant acceptance, he finds ‘my revolt, my freedom and my passion’ (Sisyphus, p. 47). In many ways, Martí is advocating the same, ultimately using the Christ as a paradigm for authentic being, which puts him once again in the sphere of religious existentialists.37

The will towards denaturing the individual, considering that for Martí, the individual is a socially bound construct, becomes clear further on in ‘Juicios’ when he emphasises that his modern man carries the burden of that which has been communally ‘acquired and imposed’ upon him.38 This interest in the transvaluation of the idea of man reappears in a more mature phase in Martí’s renowned ‘Prologue’. Here the imperative in Martí’s work continues to be the ‘rehumanisation’ and rediscovery of the individual. As the Cuban suggests:

How much work did it cost to discover this very thing! Man, who has only recently begun to enjoy the use of reason that from his birth was denied him, has to unmake himself to truly come into his own [. . .] There is no more difficult task than this, of distinguishing the acquired, proficient aspects of our existence from the spontaneous and natural; what man brings into the world with him, from the lessons, laws and ordinances imposed on him by those who came before him. Under the pretext of completing the human being, they interrupt it. He has not even been born, and they are already standing beside his crib with great and strong crutches, by their hands prepared: philosophies, religions, political systems and the passions of his parents. And they tie him up, strap him down; and man becomes a bridled horse throughout the rest of his life. (‘Prologue’, p. 309)

This famous quote accentuates Martí’s concern with nineteenth-century man’s constructiveness and the Cuban’s apologia for the modern being’s transvaluation. Interestingly, Julio Ramos would depict this vein of thought as representative of Martí’s awareness of the ‘exhaustion of codes’ (p. xxxviii), which likewise became central to other twentieth-century existentialists.39 This ethical problem, meaning the role of philosophy in everyday life, the virtue of pain in the will towards authenticity, and the necessary recognition and dismantling of prescribed identity, are distinctively existential and overtly present in Martí. Conjoined to the oft-studied aesthetic focus of much of Martí’s essays, both ‘Juicios’ and the ‘Prologue’ offer new proto-existentialist dimensions to the Martí canon.

Humanity’s vacuity crisis and the individual’s revaluation are ever-present in Martían thought, which also involves a consistent preoccupation with our immediacy. Other philosophers in Latin America continue this investigation of existence by characterising modern life as labyrinthine, wherein the pursuit of self-affirmation results in confrontation, anguish and a defence for the disintegration of the inauthentic being. These same concerns are attributable to Farias Brito and Samuel Ramos, as their writings address the challenges of purposeful being, the potential of philosophy to assuage humanity’s perpetual crisis, the vulnerabilities of consciousness, all the while recognising the apparent permanence of a tragic vision of existence.

For the Brazilian and the Mexican, the self is a concrete entity lacking essentiality, metaphysically, what I read as humanity’s orphanhood. Like Nerval and Nietzsche, others called this solitude the death of God, while Unamuno, Cortines and Martin Buber wrote of God’s silences.40 Furthermore, human beings are continually becoming, choosing what to be in situations that are not always of their own making. The self’s freedom connotes a cyclical action with the implicit problem of constant reconfigurations and the burden of self-accountability. The axiological vacuum in the individual’s character is the proverbial nothingness that both Farias Brito and Ramos address directly, and which Sartre will make famous some years later.

Near concurrent with Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Farias Brito expressed his own tragic vision of humanity in the aptly titled O mundo interior (Inner