Perverse International: Modern War and World Imaginings in Pablo de la Torriente Brau's Aventuras del soldado desconocido cubano

ABSTRACT

This article examines Pablo de la Torriente Brau's 1936 novel, Aventuras del soldado desconocido cubano, which was unfinished at the time of Brau's death and remains little known to this day. The novel's use of magical realism, proletarian narrative, and satire make it an important work for consideration in contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism and world literature. I will show how the novel exposes the limits and epistemological implications of nationalist and internationalist models of community during the period between the First and Second World Wars, a crucial juncture both in world history and in the history of the concept of “world.” I argue that the novel's brand of magical realism allows it to represent its particular form of cosmopolitan critique, a cosmopolitanism of the undocumented.

KEYWORDS:

• Border thinking
• cosmopolitanism
• internationalism
• magical realism
• nationalism
• proletarian novel
• uncanny
• Unknown Soldier
• world literature

Notes

1. Torriente Brau is known mostly for his letters and chronicles; his narrative work is less anthologized. Virtually all editions of Torriente Brau's writings have been published in Cuba. In 1996, the Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau opened in La Habana, under the direction of Víctor Casaus, with the objective of fostering national literature as well as oral history and testimonial projects (“El centro”). This organization republished Torriente Brau's writings with critical essays by way of preface. However, this scholarship focuses on Torriente Brau as a historical figure. Torriente Brau's life of epic heroism lends itself to such analysis, and his story as national hero augurs Cuba's more internationally famous Communist revolutionary, Che Guevara. There exists very little critical work on the literary aspects of Torriente Brau's writing. My work in this article looks at the literary and also international dimensions of Torriente Brau's production.

2. Torriente Brau wrote for the journals New Masses (New York) and El Machete (Mexico) while in Spain.

3. My use of the term “magical realism” follows Alejo Carpentier's original coining of the term as a distinctly American phenomenon in which the marvelous is quotidian (16–18). Magical realism differs from fantasy in that it naturalizes the unreal (Chiampi 26); by the same token, the genre serves to denaturalize the real (26).

4. Here and elsewhere in the article, the phrase “imagined world” references Arjun Appadurai's concept of an imagined connectivity in modern times that exceeds and potentially undermines that of the national imagined community or “the official mind” (33).

5. Michel de Certeau's notion of the “tactic” (xix), that is, the strategic seizing of the moment that results in the improper use of official space, informs my analysis here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Holly Jackson

Holly Jackson is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley.