Nacionalismo, estética y literatura en el México posrevolucionarioun acercamiento desde la obra de Jorge Cuesta

Laburpena

The figure of Jorge Cuesta is completely unknown in the Hispanic letters on this side of the Atlantic. However, his critical talent and inquisitive spirit led him to elucidate some ideas about the Mexican identity that have been the key to legitimize the debate on the modernnation -of his country and therefore of Latin America- and its right to participate in Western and universal culture. The obvious disregard and lack of interest on his work in the Spanish context contrasts witht he up ward attention Jorge Cuesta has experienced in recent decades in Mexico. It is a figure that has been repeatedly claimed by unquestioned writters of recent generations, such as the Cervantes Prize Jose Emilio Pacheco, Carlos Monsivais, Jorge Volpi, or Nobel Octavio Paz, who openly acknowledges that his ideas about the Mexican identity would not have been possible without the teaching of Jorge Cuesta. But Jorge Cuesta is a damned poet, the first damned poet of Mexico, the only Mexican writer who owns a legend. If Mexican letters needed one, Cuesta, of course, offered the opportunity, as we will see, to make his person and character the Mexican paradigm of the damned poet. On the other hand, his work is not strange to the character of exceptionality: his poetry is complex and inscrutable, glacial, dehumanized, tangled in a haunting theme: time, and concludes with a monumental poem, Canto a un diosmineal, considered the darkest and indecipherable of modern poetry in Spanish. More over, his essays covered topics ranging from politics, economy, education, university or philosophy, to literature, painting, music and theater, even sex, tourism or chemistry. Throughout this work we will try to bring to light some aspects of the prose work of this thinker to provide a vision that flees from enthusiast panegyrics, whichuntil now have been dominating the comments on our author. In order to frame and contextualize the commentary on the essays of Jorge Cuesta, in the first part of this study we will try cover some concepts that allow us to locate better his thinking within the margins of modernity. Making use of works in which the authors have tried to narrow this complex notion establishing tiesbothold and new, as postmodernism and a so-called anti-modernity, we will try to establish a few basic coordinates that allow us to define Western modernity, in order to have conceptual theoretical margins among which we can discuss the work of Cuesta and of Los Contemporáneos, the literary group he belonged to. It will be interesting to see, even briefly, how the modernization process in Latin America and specifically in Mexico was developed, since one of the tasks consciously assumed by cultural and political elites in these countries has been effectively to promote modernity and the incorporation to international flows of circulation of ideas. Following this introductory and conceptual part we will briefly discuss some aspects related to the links among canon, developmentand literature, to go the momental most founding of the Mexican modernity: the Revolution. This is the fact that initiate all narratives trying to build the modern identity of Mexico and only from here we can understand the various crucial developments in the field of culture implicated in which Cuesta and Los Contemporáneoswere involved. The final part of this work is dedicated to making a thematic review, that can not be exhaustive, of the contributions of Jorge Cuesta to different aspects of culture for which he was interested. We have divided this section, perhapsin a some what artificial way, because sometimes it becomes difficult to award a text of Cuesta to a specific subject, since his essays throw numerous crossed suggestions that involved themin a complex thought very little susceptible of partialdelimitations. Despite this difficulty we have decided to order his writings done after 1932 in specific areas to help us cull some of his fundamental ideas about painting, education, music or literature, but without neglecting the glimpses of that coherence, that certain unsystematic unit, that make the thought of Cuesta an object of research and study highly stimulating, and that deal with concepts such as uprooting, classicism and universalism.