WHAT A REMARKABLE occasion for a pan-American literary conference at a Spanish university: the centennial of the Spanish-American War and of Spain’s consequent loss of her last American colonies; the end of her enormous empire, which, as the British historian Hugh Thomas recently declared, “in its duration and cultural influence. . overshadows the empires of Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and even Russia.”
At first one might wonder, Why commemorate such an historical setback with a literary conference? But then one remembers that when a newspaper reporter once asked William Faulkner what, in his opinion, accounted for the impressive literary flowering of the North American Southland after our Civil War, Faulkner replied: “We lost.” And does not Homer somewhere remark ironically that “Wars are fought so that poets will have something to sing about”? Perhaps we can revise that obiter dictum to read “Wars are lost so that” et cetera. Clearly, the aphorism applies with particular poignancy to Spain after 1898. I shall return to it after expressing my gratitude to this university, to the Fulbright Commission, and to the organizers of this conference for providing my wife and me with an occasion to revisit España: a country for which we share a longstanding affection; a country that we have visited a number of times over the decades, and that has been of some importance to me as a writer of fiction.
Indeed, for reasons that I shall presently make clear, one of my tentative titles for this talk was “One Hundred Years of Gratitude” (Cien Años de Gratitud: The rhyme with solitude works in English, though not in Spanish). Reflecting upon the literary activity in North and South America since 1898 and upon literary relations between the two continents as well, I also considered “One Hundred Years of Plenitude.” But then, shaking my head at some unfortunate aspects of our political relations through that period, I thought perhaps “One Hundred Years of Turpitude” might be more appropriate. (Do we have the word turpitud en español? No? We certainly have it in English.) And then, considering what my more knowledgeable friends tell me of the vigor and diversity of contemporary Spanish literature, I considered “The (Re)Generation of ’98;2 or, Forget the Maine!” To this subject, too — I mean the infamous event that triggered the Spanish-American War — I shall return.
What a formidable cien años ours has been! As a novelist, I make occasional use of what are called in English “time lines”: those reference books and computer software programs that attempt to show, like an orchestral concert score, what was happening more or less simultaneously in various fields in various parts of the world at particular periods of history. To look back upon the closing years of the 19th century and at the year 1898 in particular with the help of these time lines is to be impressed by their busyness, by their sheer activity in just about every area of human endeavor, and by what their remarkable accomplishments can now be seen to have portended for the century that followed. Perhaps the same could be said of virtually any decade in recent centuries if one examines it through the lens of hindsight; but just consider: The years 1890 through 1899 gave us the Nobel prizes and the modern Olympic games, Social Darwinism, the Dreyfus Affair, Gobineau’s “scientific” racism, and the Klondike Gold Rush. They saw the triumph of Europe’s colonization of Africa (except for Ethiopia and Liberia) and the suppression of our North American Indians at the battle of Wounded Knee, along with our westward expansion into the new states of Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. They gave us the Sino-Japanese War and the Cuban Revolution and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; they gave us the first cinema and the first comic strip; they gave us the discovery of radioactivity and the invention of wireless telegraphy, the diesel engine, the automobile, electromagnetic sound recording, rocket propulsion, synthetic fibers, electric subways, the clothing zipper, the safety razor, and the “safety bicycle.” They gave us Frazer’s Golden Bough and Freud’s Studien über Hysterie and Havelock Ellis’s Psychopathia Sexualis; Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (Volume 3) and Bergson’s Matiere et Memoire and Herzl’s Der Judenstraat and John Dewey’s School and Society. It was the decade of Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau; of Debussy and Puccini and Richard Strauss and Sibelius and Mahler and Massenet; of Chekhov and Darío and young Yeats and old Tolstoy, of Ibsen and Shaw and Conrad and Henry James and Machado de Assis.
As for our “baseline” year: The timelines tell us that 1898 saw the opening of the Paris Metro, the construction of Count Zeppelin’s first dirigible, the discovery of radium and xenon and neon and the dysentery bacillus, and the first successful photography with artificial light. In China, the Boxer Rebellion against Western influences began. Bismarck and Gladstone died that year; so did Lewis Carroll and Stefan Mallarmé. On the other hand, Bertolt Brecht and Ernest Hemingway were born (as was my mother), and, if my obstetrical arithmetic is correct, both Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov were conceived in 1898. Zola’s “J’Accuse” was published that year, as were Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Knut Hamsun’s Victory and H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol and Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and J. K. Huysman’s La Cathédrale.
All very impressive and rich in promise. But then we reflect upon the staggering century that followed — two world wars and abundant smaller but also dreadful ones; poison gas, automatic weapons, aerial bombing, nuclear and biological weapons; totalitarianism and massacre on an unprecedented scale, despite which our species overruns and despoils the planet and its atmosphere, et cetera ad nauseam — and I am reminded of a cartoon in our New Yorker magazine a few years ago: Our astronauts have landed on a beautiful, verdant new planet, a virtual paradise; indeed, as they step out of their space vehicle they see in the near distance a fruit tree, under which stand a man and a woman, naked; there is a serpent in the tree; the woman holds an apple in her hand, from which she seems about to take a bite — and one of the astronauts runs toward her, shouting “Wait!” Looking back at the timelines for the pre-dawn of this century, I feel like that astronaut: “¡Cuidado! ¡Un momento, por dios!”
Too late: Consummatum est, or almost so — for who knows what may yet happen to us in the small remaining interval between today and the next century, not to mention what that century may have in store for us?
Cien años de plenitud; cien años de turpitud (I’ll use the word, even though it doesn’t exist in Spanish and doesn’t rhyme with soledad). As for gratitud. . welclass="underline" In the face of our century’s human catastrophes — the hundreds of millions of victims of militant nationalism and colonialism, of ideology in general and totalitarianism in particular — one feels that there is something unseemly, perhaps even obscene, about reviewing its positive accomplishments in science, technology, and the arts, including the Hundred Years of Literary Plenitude that inspired this conference: the century of modernismo and of Modernism; of Postmodernism and Magic Realism and El Boom.3 As if, for example, the scientific and cultural enrichment of the United States (and the world) by refugees from European Fascism and Russian Communism — by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann and Pablo Casals and Vladimir Nabokov and dozens of others in every field, including my own Johns Hopkins professors Leo Spitzer and Pedro Salinas — as if their achievements somehow mitigate the evils that they fled! Or, to come closer to home, as if, in some humanistic double-entry bookkeeping, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica can somehow be balanced against the Guernica of Francisco Franco. Something obscene, I say, about that. And yet….