SOURCE: "From Cuba With a Song," in Poetics of Change: The New Spanish-American Narrative, University of Texas Press, 1984, pp. 173-79.

[In the following essay, Ortega examines how the structure and literary style of From Cuba With a Song contribute to an examination of "Cubanness."]

From Cuba with a Song, by the young Cuban writer Severo Sarduy, is a novel that carries radicalism of form to a new level in the Latin-American novel. It is a novel, an antinovel, and a scrapbook of a possible novel. It strikes the reader first as a jumble of innovations, but it actually possesses a self-induced program within its obstinate will to transgress. This program takes the form of the draining of the traditional novel in new variations of the reshaping of cultural forms.

The book consists of an introduction followed by three segments, each dealing with one of the three racial components of Cuban culture:

(a) "Curriculum cubense," a sort of prologue, poses the idea of the text as iconographic writing. Through this writing, Sarduy will attempt to make visible the different and conjugated components of the Cuban world.

(b) The first segment, "By the River of Rose Ashes," is a mirrored recreation of the Chinese world of Havana. Its detailed descriptions, enumerations, and transformations are not intended as a snapshot of this world but as its possible metaphor: the masks are switched in this feverish transgression of its own design, in the play of its verbal fireworks. The humor found here is a form of criticism, of self-questioning. This text is, therefore, a brilliant pastiche sustained by the code of its baroque gratuitousness and is valid in its own right. The glossed world of this novel is drained—by the act of glossing itself—of signification and even of materiality, because the baroque line of this work is light and airy and the sensation it distills is an insinuation, a trace of desire, rather than the full sensation of desire itself.

(c) The second segment, "Dolores Rondón," is a pastiche of the Black component of a "Cubanness" brilliantly reduced by Sarduy to a myth of sensible forms. Whereas the Chinese spectacle implied a world of objects, a happy confusion of changing characters and masks, the Black spectacle implies a theatrical oralness. The tragic game of a feminine character sarcastically followed through the popular legends about her is developed here in another literary game. Through a popular theatrical performance we witness the lost cause of this Cuban mulattress who has been elevated to a national symbol. Sarduy once again constructs a rhetorical parable, a baroque, oratorical pastiche, intended as another mask of reality within language.

(d) The third segment, "The Entry of Christ in Havana," is the most accomplished part of the text. It too is a verbal parable, but its object is the Hispanic component of this "curriculum cubense," which we now realize has critical implications and a dynamics of festive interrogation. The hallucinating creation of a language as a totally imaginary adventure, a process whose very nature implies a radical criticism of the tradition of this genre and of representation, reaches it expressive culmination in this text through gratuitousness. Its most beautiful creative energy emerges from the play of free verbal invention.

This ethnic and cultural anthropology turns out to be a proposal for an antianthropology, so to speak. The conjugation of "cultural" and "ethnic" elements is presented here starting from a different perception: the pictorial and theatrical possibilities of language. The three glossed components are seen as pure spectacle; thus their essences are disclosed through appearances, through faces represented as masks. Hence the Chinese is only a repertoire of objects; the Black is a full-bodied voice; and the Hispanic is a rotting wooden statue (of Christ), a parable of signification. Pastiche and inversion, the novel's secret Sadian or satirical festivity provide the touchstones for an ironic criticism of the three cultural components and the key to the possible reshaping of popular creativeness in a textural fullness. This popular imagery is reduced to a few sensuous signs, and the novel thus becomes a radical rejection of the meanings of culture in the name of the liberation of the senses provided by art.

Appearance is inevitably also a cultural form in Sarduy's literary game. It is a form emptied of meaning but infused with another proposition, the baroque in this case. The baroque aspect of Sarduy's work is not, however, the allegoric and sensorial baroque encountered in Lezama Lima or the solar baroque of Octavio Paz; it is, instead, a hyperbole of pure form, a spiral of metaphorical accumulations, a double mask, perhaps because the pastiche implies a total suppression of density and at the same time a pure presence of language. Deprived of a signifying connection with all referents, Sarduy's baroque requires a formal relationship with them based on its own medium: the word, the phrase, the text. Therefore, this baroque is almost a parody of itself, because Sarduy longs for the idea of the baroque as a kind of verbal absolute. The text is thus produced as a recodification by the image and as a recovery of the world through the senses. Repeatedly proposed as an erotic activity, Sarduy's writing is also the nervous or tense desire for a fulfilling eroticism, which is found here as suggestion, as a beckoning. Thus, even if the lack of density does not imply an aleatory eroticism (as in Lezama Lima), the origin of writing does. For Sarduy, narration amounts to liberating meaning through the senses, to posing a parody of the world through empathy.

This reduction of reality to the image produces various rhythms and scenes in the novel, from the image constructed and then displaced ("By the River of Rose Ashes") to the spectacular and sonorous image ("Dolores Rondón"), and to the image playing with the irony of symbols ("The Entry of Christ in Havana"). A warm and festive current runs through the novel in these sequences. This festive energy suggests the continuous displacement of the text's own findings, because the reader himself loses, in the barrage of images, the course of its reference; the text thus continues to unfold in a constant imagistic beginning.

Sarduy has found a way to reconcile the surrealist method of figurative exploration by the image (especially in the delirious final text) with the nouveau roman's method of detachment and objectivity.

Through this dual method, his writing evinces a pictorial base that is immediately transformed into a theatrical space and then converted into a dream. Hence this novel is nothing other than the dream of an innocent apocalypse.

Guillermo Sucre has written as follows:

Sarduy's novel is a metaphor, and this metaphor is nourished, above all, by art. Sarduy looks through art at what is real. Art is his mediator and it is knowledge, but not in the sacred way it was for Proust, Joyce, or Thomas Mann, for all of whom art was still an absolute. Although Sarduy superposes art on all his perceptions, he does it in a playfully ironic way. [Guillermo Sucre, Imagen, No. 20]

This accurate comment also points to the place of this novel within the Latin-American narrative. The baroque aspect of Sarduy's work is rooted in a transgression of culture in the name of art as a sensuous resumption of reality through words.

But this novel also engages in an obstinate effort to destroy the pathos of the everyday world and attempts, instead, to rescue the world through the possible formal purity, in the full simplicity of its sensible evidence. "The Entry of Christ in Havana," in particular, suggests a critical zeal in its progressive hollowing out of the great myth (myth of Meaning? of Humanism?). This amused rage is the patient and final reconstruction of reality, its reformulation in the synthesis of dreaming and verbal actions. Through its changing images and the playfulness of its forms, the radical criticism of this operation also suggests a parody of traditional works, but this parody finally becomes a fervent reconstruction of the pure spectacle of sensible forms, of language as an infinite metaphor of tradition.

The verbal action or the verbal liberation have the same motivation, the reshaping of the world in the pleasure of the word, the desire for a conjugated perception arousing the desire to live reality anew as though it were a language of feelings. The freedom of the word is also the freedom of desire in the fleeting perception that conjugates them through the magic of writing. But the lucidity of this dream in From Cuba with a Song carries with it the inevitable ambiguity that goes with creative criticism: when it is critiqued poetry is destroyed and empties its references in the neatness of sensoriality. In this case poetry perhaps sees itself as a mask, as gratuitous appearance and, therefore, as ironic criticism of its own poetic game. Perhaps more critical than poetic in nature, this novel consumes itself as its own excessive example. Thus, its creative resolutions lie in the radical position gained by its own textual drama, because this novel is also on the cutting edge, on the edge of culture. But Sarduy's imagistic fervor and verbal passion will undoubtedly reveal to us that culture itself is just another form of the more radical art he is proposing.

Critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal has given us a key to the creative work of Severo Sarduy in an interesting interview with him (Revista de Occidente, No. 93). Referring to Cobra, the title of his best-known novel, Sarduy establishes various possibilities of association with it that are based on reference and allusion and imply an interplay between a given structural system and a peculiar mechanism of writing.

From Cuba with a Song (1967) also shares in this multiple interplay. The title in Spanish (De donde son los cantantes) is a line from a popular Cuban song, in which it is heard as a question, but in the novel it appears as an answer. In the song the singers are from Havana, but the novel tells us they are from Cuba. This phrase is thus an epithet. In addition to establishing an association with the song and Cuba, the title establishes an association, through popular culture, with the reader. The title is thus the first phrase of the book: its metaphor and its incitement.

In effect, the association is established through allusions, and this is the point at which writing formulates its design. As in Three Trapped Tigers, in From Cuba with a Song allusion operates actively and permanently, although in Cabrera Infante's novel it tends to the direct, obvious pastiche, to the play on words as proliferating material. In Three Trapped Tigers the allusions serve the novel; they are one of its levels but are not necessarily the basis of its structuring, which is to be found instead in the unfolding of a parody that alludes to itself. On the other hand, in Sarduy's novel the three-part structure itself is referential: the curriculum cubense implies the Chinese component, the Black element, and the Hispanic factor (names that are places, races, cultures). Hence the three levels of the novel allude, in the manner of a gloss or masquerade, to these "anthropological" components, which are stripped of their traditional meaning.

Sarduy realizes that the only way to speak separately of these three components is to approach them from a detached point of view and through the effusiveness of play and sensorial empathy. Thus the system that creates the novel (three "full" worlds that are emptied exultantly) permits the release of a writing that always alludes to a potentially "infinite," presupposed objective correlate.

The allusion can refer to literature but, above all, it begins by referring to the visible and formal characteristics of those three festive worlds. Consequently, this writing achieves the brilliance of a formal play that is ironic in its perspective and sensorial in its choices. These detached points of view and the approximations in the structure of the narrative allow the work to be self-sufficient, to require only the spectrum of its artifice, of its illusional game: sleight of hand, magic word, and final switch. We can say, then, that this novel is critical in its antitraditional formulation and "poetic" in its ritualization of the fantastic paraphernalia adopted by the three texts-worlds-glosses.

Therefore, the reductive activities of the novel (the sharp humor of its parodies and its "draining" of the meaningful levels) are countered by an accumulating and masquerading activity (the novel chooses to carnivalize the signs of a festive and spectacular reality).

Notwithstanding its lack of density, which is precisely what makes it a mirage or a chorus of echoes, From Cuba with a Song contains several books: first, those that are part of the basic structure, whose common space is the exalting parody constructed by empathy, by identification; second, the substratum of the three "full worlds" that are simultaneously present and absent and imply the area in which the author cuts, selects, and reassembles; third, the writing that constructs with masks, that is, on the "surface" levels of a purely verbal deduction; and, finally, the other book, the one with critical implications, because this play of unrestricted, gratuitous appearance—this pageant of appearance—implies the irrepressible and systematic criticism of literature and of the traditional need that explains by "meaning" while overlooking the "meaninglessness" of the "artificial" forms, which are no more and no less artificial or gratuitous than desire and its labyrinth.

In La Maison de Rendez-Vous, a novel by Robbe-Grillet, the sensuous nuance of the Chinese scene is also produced starting from a repertoire of objects relevant to a Western outlook: a dancing woman in a clinging silk dress, for example. The erotic suggestion emerges, in this case, from a very clear notion of femininity: full presence, pure object. In the Chinese chapter of Sarduy's novel, on the other hand, the sensuous suggestion emerges from an expectation, a proximity, a light touch—from the postponement, therefore, of the act itself—and from the successive incitements that permit the disguising and imagistic proliferation of what in the end is not a woman but an empty mask. Robbe-Grillet prefers to design the unhurried sensuality of a repeated and formalized scene duplicated in the sumptuous tradition of typical objects. Sarduy opts for a bric-a-brac, delirious, and multiform China stripped of its tradition and reduced to a game, to a buoyant spectacle.

In so doing Sarduy places himself within a characteristically Spanish-American tradition. His critique of literature operates by expansion. He selects a formal and imagistic repertoire that goes beyond verism and the need to correlate words with the "reality" that supposedly underlies them. Lezama Lima had already brought images of snow close to his tropical landscape, but Sarduy goes one step further: he makes it snow in Havana. This mechanism has come to us from the baroque. The first Spanish-American baroque poets pretended to see European flowers among our own. This act is more audacious than comparing an Araucanian girl with some mythological goddess, or the environs of Mexico City with some classical longing.

The greatest audacity is not, however, the inducement of an imaginary reality; it is the attitude toward language, because the use of words becomes as decisive as the knowledge of the world: language seeks to be the final transparency. This use of language reveals, above all, a nominal faith: the poet need only say the names of the world to believe that the world is inexhaustible. Names, therefore, are the images, the birth of metaphors and figuration. The mechanics of Spanish-American Modernism are not much different: a nominative repertoire becomes a fantastic paraphernalia; the world is transformed into a series of prestigious images.

Like Lezama, Sarduy has developed a variation within this tradition. Lezama's dense baroque, full of symbolic implications, is followed by the light baroque constructed on pure figuration that characterizes this novel. But the exultation itself of its artifice discloses its critical slant. In the end, in its draining of the meaningful levels, Sarduy's writing acts significantly based on the irony of a questioning, demythifying criticism.

The component aspects of "Cubanness" expose in this novel the other side of their full appearance: their empty appearance. The Chinese factor exists only as a carnivalesque masquerade; the Black factor exists as a chorus of voices (a mulattress reviews her "career" from the vantage point of her death, of her legend); and the Hispanic factor is seen from the perspective of the traditional and meaningful symbol par excellence, a statue of Christ on the cross, gradually and spectacularly destroyed during a religious procession. Along with the festiveness of the characterizing images and the masquerading, we find again a reduction of the mirages. Thus, the celebration of "Cubanness" is also the discovery of its significant "nonexistence," in other words, of the sole presence of its forms, which language consecrates through a reuniting croticism.