Making Prophecy: Time in José Lezama Lima's Cultural Thought

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.9.2.0196
• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Date: 01 December 2017
• Pages: 196-211
• Author: Robert S. Lesman
• Subject Matter: José Lezama Lima,Cuban literature,history,time,the Cuban Revolution,Catholicism

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 9.2 WInter 2017

ACADEMIC ARTICLE

MAKING PROPHECY: TIME IN JOSÉ

LEZAMA LIMA’S CULTURAL THOUGHT

Robert S. Lesman

Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, USA

Abstract

In his many essays on literary and cultural topics, the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima

(1910–1976) develops a complex system of ideas about history and time. Lezama

objects to simplistic ways of conceptualising temporality and favours a flexible notion

of time. His way of thinking on the subject is bound up with his preference for literary or

generally artistic expression as opposed to what he sees as the problematic ontological

claims of historiography. He privileges the artistic image as a force that can transcend

linearities and determinisms. Lezama sees the image as essentially future-oriented, as

a force that makes possible an arc of Cuban cultural progress that stretches forward in

time.

Keywords: José Lezama Lima, Cuban literature, history, time, the Cuban Revolution,

Catholicism

In essays written over the course of his literary career, the Cuban author José

Lezama Lima (1910–1976) complicates simplistic concepts of time. His thinking

challenges restrictive temporal linearities of various kinds, most importantly the

primacy of historiography, the deadening limitations of traditionalism and the

absurdity of nostalgia. Underlying these ideas is an optimistic orientation towards

the future. As has been well established, Catholic theology influences Lezama’s

thinking about time, though the result is not dogmatic in a conventional sense.1

Close examination reveals that theology stands as a support for art, rather than

the other way around. The creation of images in visual or literary art for Lezama

is the highest of all human activities, and its essence is freedom. Though he asserts

that art offers freedoms of different kinds, the present study examines specifically

MAKING PROPHECY: TIME IN JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA’S CULTURAL THOUGHT 197

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the ways the author sees imagistic creation as loosening our bondage to the past

and resisting the limitations of linear notions of time.

For Lezama, literature’s proper orientation is towards the future. Nostalgia is

of little use to the writer who aspires to lasting cultural relevance. Lezama gener-

ally sees the past negatively, a stance shared by many Cuban intellectuals, as

Rafael Rojas (2006) explains: ‘En la cultura cubana de la primera mitad del siglo

XX abundan los testimonios de un malestar, provocado por una sensación de

ausencia de mitos fundadores’ (51). Founding myths help resolve the question of

national identity, providing a sense of collective cohesion. A crucial point for the

purposes of this study is the fact that this sense of cohesion lends meaning to

history; without founding myths, the national story is not a coherent narrative.

In his thinking about Cubanness, Lezama denigrates nostalgia in part because

he sees the national past as ruination or vacuity, as ‘una desolación que no mues-

tra ni un fantasma que la recorra’ (Lezama Lima 1945: 51). As Roberto González

Echevarría (2010) explains:

La obra de Lezama se inicia en un clima de desilusión muy distinto al de optimismo

y euforia de sus antecesores más inmediatos, los escritores de la vanguardia, que

en los años veinte habían hecho del fervor artístico y político un credo. (62)

Lezama laments that his is a nation without a tradition, lacking a shared narra-

tive in which the Cubans might glimpse an arc of collective self-realisation. In

large part because it transitioned directly from colonial to neocolonial status at

the moment of its purported national independence, Cuba never achieved a sub-

stantive and coherent image of itself. What substance Lezama did find in the

national past was largely execrable:

Aún los jouisser más optimistas, tendrán que reconocer que las fuerzas de

desintegración han sido muy superiores a las que en un estado marchan formando

su contrapunto y la adecuación de sus respuestas. A la honradez municipal y

foradada de los primeros años republicanos, ocasional y pintada, desde luego,

pues si en aquellos venturosos años eran diez las familias que salieron beneficiadas

de empréstitos y contratos, hoy son cien las que salen de cada Gobierno girando

contra su propio banquero, que es la hacienda pública. (Lezama Lima 1949: 60)

In place of a sense of national commonality, Lezama finds a corrupt plutocracy

walled off from the victims of its greed. In a Cuban context, nostalgia is myopic;

it might rescue moments of individual happiness but at the expense of recognis-

ing two unfortunate realities: a historical pattern of degradation and the painful

fragmentation of collective identity.