Based on a reading of select prose by Julián del Casal and Amado Nervo, this article reveals a tendency in modernista fiction to invert notions of unhealthy modernista decadence and salubrious bourgeois morality. Literary texts include Casal’s “La cámara doble” (The Dual Chamber), “La última illusion” (The Last Hope), and selections from Cuentos amargos (Bitter Tales) and Historias amargas (Bitter Stories), all from 1890. We will also examine a selection of short prose by Nervo published in the Revista de América (Journal of America) before 1915. The narratives in question suggest that creativity depends on the pleasure and catharsis of decadence. Importantly, these writers posit that national discourses aimed at redirecting citizens away from their own instincts and toward a narrowly and externally defined heteronormative lifestyle, and that this project debilitated the individual, thereby affecting national progress. An examination of historical and literary discourses that sought to define the ideal citizen in opposition to modernista decadence roots the texts in a Latin American context. The thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, on the cleansing function of decadence, and Carl Jung, on health and wholeness, allow us to see the confluence between Casal’s and Nervo’s narratives and the international intellectual milieu that informed Latin American modernismo.

Decadence as a Progressive Force in Select Prose of Julián

Based on a reading of select prose by Julian del Casal and Amado Nervo, this article reveals a tendency in modernista fiction to invert notions of unhealthy modernista decadence and salubrious bourgeois morality. Literary texts include Casal’s “La camara doble” (The Dual Chamber), “La ultima illusion” (The Last Hope), and selections from Cuentos amargos (Bitter Tales) and Historias amargas (Bitter Stories), all from 1890. We will also examine a selection of short prose by Nervo published in the Revista de America (Journal of America) before 1915. The narratives in question suggest that creativity depends on the pleasure and catharsis of decadence. Importantly, these writers posit that national discourses aimed at redirecting citizens away from their own instincts and toward a narrowly and externally defined heteronormative lifestyle, and that this project debilitated the individual, thereby affecting national progress. An examination of historical and literary discourses that sought to define the ideal citizen in opposition to modernista decadence roots the texts in a Latin American context. The thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, on the cleansing function of decadence, and Carl Jung, on health and wholeness, allow us to see the confluence between Casal’s and Nervo’s narratives and the international intellectual milieu that informed Latin American modernismo .

Decadence as a Progressive Force in Select Prose of Julián del Casal and Amado Nervo

The critics usually consider Manuel Reina (1856-1905) a transitional author between nineteenth-century poetry and Spanish modernism. A thorough analysis of his most important work La vida inquieta (1894), published two years before Ruben Dario’s Prosas profanas , reveals, however, an innovation in aesthetics that makes him a significant forerunner. Reina contributes to turn-of-the-century Spanish poetry a renovation of the sensibility in terms of “art for art's sake,” the quest for ideal beauty, and an image of the poet as the hero for such an ideal. But the newly proclaimed faith in beauty also conveys consciousness of an emerging crisis arising from the very heart of modernity that Reina expressed through the emblematic title of his book: vida inquieta or spiritual uneasiness, doubts, spleen and complex states of mind.

José Andújar Almansa

Papers

La vida inquieta de Manuel Reina