ANGELA L. WILLIS

REVISITING THE CIRCUITOUS ODYSSEY OF THE BAROQUE PICARESQUE NOVEL:
REINALDO ARENAS’S EL MUNDO ALUCINANTE

IT IS A CRITICAL COMMONPLACE that Lazarillo de Tormes’s appearance in 1554 engendered a literary tradition, usually referred to as the “picaresque” (be that the picaresque novel, genre, mode, frame, style, or strain), that played a dominant role in Hispanic letters during Spain’s Renaissance (here, chiefly designating the sixteenth century) and the “historical baroque period” (mainly the late sixteenth and entire seventeenth centuries). However, the picaresque has not remained restricted to the Peninsula during the peak of its empire. Rather, we shall find that the picaresque novel—specifically one written in a decidedly baroque fashion—has resurfaced as recently as 1969 in the Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas’s El mundo alucinante (Hallucinations). In this transtemporal, trans-Atlantic investigation, I first demonstrate that the baroque picaresque is a Hispanic literary constant or, at a minimum, that it cyclically reappears. I examine how El mundo alucinante engages in dialogues with two canonical baroque picaresque novels of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain: Mateo Alemánn’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599/1604) and Francisco de Quevedo’s El buscón (The Scavenger, 1626). I also briefly examine how Arenas employed his primary historical source, Fray Servando’s Memorias (The Memoirs of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier). Ultimately, I attempt to explain why Arenas, a Cuban who reached maturity under Castro’s rule, would have intentionally chosen to frame his tale in a literary style that flourished four centuries earlier on the other side of the Atlantic.

According to Reinaldo Arenas, El mundo alucinante was written in 1965 and awarded “First Honorable Mention” in UNEAC’s (la Unión de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos [the Cuban Writers and Artists Union]) 1966 literary competition. Suspiciously, though, no “winner” was declared. Thus, while Arenas’s novel received the honor of “Primera Mención,” in this political game EMA “won”  without winning outright. Consequently, it was denied the possibility of publication in Cuba. The manuscript was later smuggled off the island by friends (the Camachos), who then had it translated into French and published in 1968 as Le monde hallucinant. Arenas did not know of its publication in France, or of the fact that it had won several prestigious awards in Europe, until he was arrested by the Cuban government. Indeed, his choice to publish El mundo alucinante without the consent of Castro’s regime helped to ensure him a life of persecution and imprisonment. Although the Spanish text was finally published in 1969 in Mexico, to this day EMA remains mostly unseen by Cuba’s readers. Apparently, Arenas’s novelization of eighteenth-century Mexican Independence leader Fray Servando Teresa de Mier’s Memorias is considered threatening to the goals of the Revolution.

Fray Servando Teresa de Mier y Noriega (1763-1827), generally referred to as Fray Servando or Fray Mier, was a colonial Mexican friar who spent most of his life in prison for attempting to delegitimize the Spanish presence in the New World by arguing that there had been a pre-Columbian Christian evangelization of America. According to Mier, because Jesus had sent Saint Thomas the Apostle to America to spread the Gospel and Christianity to the autochthonous “Indians,” the Spaniards lacked a legitimate reason to be in America (la cause justa), much less a justification to exploit its natural resources and people. Fray Servando’s Memorias are comprised of the Apología, in which he defends his earth-shattering speech and theories, as well as the Relación, in which he recounts the stories of his travels, adventures, and incarcerations as he fled from one country and continent to the next.

One may easily imagine how the picaresque-like adventures of the historical Mier’s novelistic life and death, as depicted in his autobiographical texts, caught the attention of fiction writer Reinaldo Arenas. In fact, Mier himself recognized the novelistic, improbable aspects of his adventures. In his Memorias, he anticipates his public’s response, telling his reader that when he related the story of his life to one of his many jailors, his captor reacted with incredulity: “Mi historia le pareció una novela, y seguramente fingida” (“My life story must have seemed to him like a novel, and surely a fictitious one”). Mier’s Apología frequently approximates the picaresque narrative’s structure and thematics, and it reveals a baroque style. Just as Lazarillo de Tormes defends his caso (although we are never told why he must do so), so Mier defends his actions, possibly to save his life. In vindicating his honor for posterity—“Es tiempo de instruir a la posteridad sobre la verdad . . . para que . . . [se] haga justicia a mi memoria, pues esta apología ya no puede servirme en esta vida” (“It’s time to instruct posterity of the truth so that justice be done to my memory. This apology can no longer serve me in this life”)—Mier’s ostensible goal was formally to defend his theory regarding the pre-conquest evangelization of America. But there was a second—and perhaps more urgent—motive as well: to avenge himself against the deceased Archbishop Haro and his henchmen, who had indefatigably pursued him both in Spain and America.