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PARTISAN REVIEW
'melancholy muleteer.'
If
the South Americans had to wait for Euro–
pean thought until Spain or the gallicized Spanish poets got around
to giving it their blessing, they would be backward indeed. Certainly
I shall not be the one to invite them to accept the values established
by the academicians of Madrid: for they would tell me, and very
reasonably, too, that a country which rejects Picasso and shoots
Garda Lorca has no standing except among the dark preserves of
barbarism. On the other hand, both Picasso and Lorca are immensely
influential in South America despite the blindly accepted
dicta
of the
'Spanish literary world.' The young poets of Argentina, Mexico,
Cuba, Uruguay and Chile know very well where to look for their
sources.
But the miracle of Dario could still repeat itself; and if currents
of thought circulated as easily today as they did in 1902, we should
have South American poets casting their shadow over Spain.
When I spoke of a flowering of rhapsodists, did I mean to imply
a lack of other forms of expression?
It
seems to me that the pre–
eminent value of the novel is analysis; and with peoples, just as with
individuals, analysis is an act of maturity. The novel demands points
of departure, elements validated by a network of commonly accepted
concepts of a poetic nature. That is to say, it needs an already estab–
lished imagery. The relation of the earth to man, of man to destiny,
is full of incidents in which new forms become apparent little by little.
In this process the language of the metropolis gradually takes on its
proper accent, its flourishes, its colors; and in it society finds its ex–
pression as it unfolds and grows in love, in religion, in the thousand
and one forms of the struggle against the Nature which is forests and
mountains, or the thinking nature of mankind. In this mythology
poets have a place of honor, and all beings and
all
familiar things
an active part: the horse in the Argentine, the cactus in Mexico, the
native flute in Peru. When such a mythology is an active force, it is
very easy to generate the novel; and it is because of the novel that the
mythology achieves its complexity and draws forth, so to speak, judg–
ments of value.
We cannot imagine a Balzac in the twelfth century. Then, the
caterpillars of the popular imagination were laying their eggs in the
fabliaux and the trouveres.
If
the novel flourished first in Spain, with
Amadis,
the
Quijote,
and Montemayor's
Diana,
the reason is that
Spain was reaping the full foison of her medieval harvest, which was
by far the richest in Europe. In South America, the novel exists in
countries with an already established rhapsodic imagery. The clearest
