Visión de Anáhuac (1519) as virtual image: Alfonso Reyes’s Bergsonian aesthetic of creative evolution

Abstract

This essay offers a new reading of Alfonso Reyes’s canonical imagining of Mexican national identity, published in 1917 during the Mexican Revolution. Reyes and his contemporaries of the Ateneo de la Juventud were self-proclaimed “vitalists” inspired by James, Boutroux, and Bergson. Despite this, there has been minimal examination of the impact of this philosophy on Reyes’s writings. Robert Conn’s recent monograph on Reyes denies genuine engagement with vitalism on the part of the Ateneo and he, alongside Ignacio Sánchez Prado, draws on Hegel for an interpretation of the text. Beginning with a close examination of Sánchez Prado’s article, I argue that, despite the historical frame of Part I, Reyes’s essay does not set out to provide a historical idealist depiction of Mexico. Instead, working closely with three of Bergson’s major texts, I argue that Reyes’s “vision” can be understood as an aesthetic of metamorphosis echoing the philosophy of creative evolution. Deriving his thesis on Mexican identity from a textually visual aesthetic, I conclude that the essay equates to a Bergsonian, virtual image of nation, evoking a communal, ahistorical consciousness. In this way, my reading shows that, although Visión de Anáhuac connects to Romantic ideas of perception and subjectivity, Bergson’s influence separates the essay from mainstream nineteenth-century currents.

Keywords:

• Alfonso Reyes
• Mexican literature
• the Ateneo de la Juventud
• Henri Bergson
• creative evolution
• philosophy
• aesthetics
• Romanticism

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by a period of study leave provided by the University of Leicester.

Notes

1. As Robert Conn (2002, 55) notes, Reyes would immediately endorse Caso’s championing of anti-intellectualism in the following volume of Nosotros.

2. The translations are my own.

3. For a discussion of the figure of the spiral in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, see Bates (2004, 143–5).

4. Bergson’s visit to Madrid was prefaced by a series of lectures by Manuel García Morente whose La filosofía de Henri Bergson (1917) was to become the primary critical source for generations of Spanish readers. García Morente’s readings of Bergson place a strong emphasis on Creative Evolution and it is perhaps not coincidental that the Ateneo’s use of Bergson’s ideas shares this tendency.

5. Glantz extends her analysis to make a comparison between the colonists’ accounts of the Valley of Mexico and Reyes’s own impressions of Spanish foodstuffs in Madrid, arguing that he executes the same process of incorporation. Whilst this may be the case, Reyes’s portrayal of the colonial accounts is, I would suggest, more nuanced than Glantz’s comparative analysis would permit.

6. For a discussion of this, see Hancock (2001, 139–62).

7. For a revealing analysis of the meaning of Bergson’s virtual image, see Ansell-Pearson (2002, 143–8).

8. For an unambiguous affirmation of the latter, see Bergson (1991, 240).