The problem of periodization of Baroque and neo-Baroque concepts in Latin American Literary philosophy of the turn of the Millennium (using the example of Irlemar Chiampi's works)

Peshkov Dmitrii Igorevich ORCID: 0009-0001-8649-2581 Senior Lecturer; Institute of Foreign Languages; Moscow International University Senior Lecturer; Institute of Foreign Languages; Moscow City Pedagogical University lecturer; Institute of Hotel Business and Tourism; P. Lumumba Peoples' Friendship University of Russia 125183, Russia, Moscow, Bolshaya Akademicheskaya str., 73, 1, 273, sq. 273 Demetriofalso1982@gmail.com

By the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, Latin American literature had given the world a number of original writers, whose works became a vivid phenomenon of world culture. To simplify somewhat, it can be said that in a short period of time, the literature of Latin American countries has gone from marginal and epigonous in relation to European literature to capable of giving rise to one of the most interesting literary phenomena of the entire twentieth century — the new Latin American novel.

The concept of a "new Latin American novel" should be clearly distinguished from the concept of the boom, which is often used (primarily in Western literary criticism) in relation to the growing global popularity of Latin American fiction: the latter is beyond the aesthetic category and is associated with commercial policy in the book market ^{[1, 50]}. Works by such writers as Miguel Angel Asturias, Jose Lesama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Maria Argedas, Augusto Roa Bastos, Juan Rulfo, Arturo Uslar Pietri, Julio Cortazar, Juan Carlos Onetti, Miguel Otero Silva, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ernesto Sabato, Mario Benedetti, Jose Donoso, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa gained worldwide fame and aroused great interest from publishers and readers who saw in Latin American literature a powerful and unique phenomenon that became a manifestation of a different worldview compared to the European one.

As for the reasons for the interest in the "new" novel, they can in no way be interpreted solely for commercial and general cultural reasons — we are talking about the fact that in conditions when Western European literature in the middle and second half of the century became a field of experimental production of "texts", the main thing that attracted both publishers and readers, There was an obvious new artistic quality of the Latin American novel, revealing to the world the image of a continent that had previously been on the margins of history...^{[1, p. 50]}.

This is how V. B. Zemskov explained the reasons for the popularity of the "new" novel in the world. Interest in Latin American literature led to its appearance on the map of modern classics: to the realization that this literature is no longer something marginal and secondary. However, there were serious problems with understanding its essence.

Attempts to perceive and comprehend Latin American literature as part of the common Spanish-speaking space ^{[2, 3, 4]} or as a phenomenon close to the literature of the United States, that is, as part of the common (in a geographical sense) American space ^[5], despite the presence of certain arguments and arguments, were generally unsuccessful. There was an almost paradoxical situation: the writers of the Latin American "new" novel declared themselves to be a major and original phenomenon, the essence and ethno-cultural basis of which could not be formulated and theoretically substantiated for a very long time. Even the concept of "Latin American literature" itself did not have such specific frameworks, boundaries and stages of development as any of the European national literatures had.

The ancient literatures of European countries arose and grew on the nutritious soil of folk literature, which forms the basic, primary layer of a particular national cultural tradition. <..Due to special historical reasons, the situation in Latin American literature is completely different. In principle, it could not develop on the basis of the ancient folklore of Native American peoples: firstly, because of the language barrier that had not been overcome; secondly, because the latter actively dominated the interaction of Native American and Iberian cultures ^{[6, p. 11]}.

The need for a theoretical justification of the basic features of Latin American literature appeared almost simultaneously with the boom of Latin American literature itself, when it became obvious that attempts to explain and comprehend this phenomenon, considering it as an exotic variant of Spanish (in the case of Brazil — Portuguese) literature or as a legacy of folklore of Native American civilizations are doomed to failure. Chronologically, it was in the middle of the twentieth century that the idea of the uniqueness of the very model of the ethnocultural genesis of Latin American civilization began to form, precisely due to the fact that the main works of the "new" novel for Latin American authors themselves were, to one degree or another, artistic searches for a model of continental self-identification. It can be said that Latin American literature attracted the attention of intellectuals in different parts of the world, primarily because of its special novelty, in which subjectively interpreted mythological principles were combined with manifestations of European culture. And if we add to this that the Latin American authors themselves were so different from each other that they often had great difficulty being classified into a single cultural space, then we get an image of a completely new harmony, full of dissonances and internal contradictions, built on principles never seen before in world literature, which A.F. Kofman, using a quote from Romulo Gallegos' novel Canaima, defined it as a "well-organized mess" ^{[7, p. 72]}.

Thus, Latin American authors faced a double task: on the one hand, they sought to artistically express the special ethno—cultural essence of Spanish America, and on the other, to theoretically comprehend it and integrate it into the paradigm of world culture. The fact that, at least at the first stage, the task of theoretical understanding of local literature fell on the writers themselves was predetermined by the lack of a systematic literary school in Latin American countries.

Of course, attempts to identify their own otherness have been made by Latin American intellectuals before. Even figures from the era of the War of independence and the period of formation of the young states of Spanish America, first of all, Simon Rodriguez, and the Cuban philosopher, poet and national leader Jose Marti, and the largest representative of Spanish-American modernism Ruben Dario, and the philosophers and art theorists Jose Henriques Rodo and Jose Vasconcelos confidently declared the originality and uniqueness of the world of "our America" ^{[8, 9]}. But these authors, in their attempts at ethnocultural self-identification, did not so much look for the origins of their own cultural code as they opposed their world in all its diversity and inconsistency to the world of Western civilization. It can be said that Latin American authors realized quite early what they were not, but finding an adequate model for understanding their own civilizational essence turned out to be a more difficult task. But it was even more difficult to formulate a cultural concept relevant to understanding the specifics of the civilizational essence of Spanish America, which could be integrated into the paradigm of world culture.

By and large, the first more or less structured cultural concepts of Latin America were the theories related to the Baroque by two famous Cuban writers Jose Lesama Lima and Alejo Carpentier. For all their differences and the small number of points of contact, they complemented and reinforced each other in the main — in an attempt to consider the Baroque principle both as the fundamental basis and as the permanent essence of the Latin American world. Despite the ambiguous use of the term Baroque and its derivatives (baroque, baroque — lo barroco), these concepts were a great success, as they were, in fact, the first conscious and reasoned attempts to identify the main ethno-cultural constants of the Latin American world. But the main thing is that the Baroque saw a model that made it possible to connect the present of Latin America with its past and introduce the Latin American cultural substratum into the space of world culture.

Now, from the height of the first quarter of the 21st century, it can be stated that, despite the inconsistency and non-academic nature of the concepts of Lesama Lima and Carpentier, they became the first independent Latin American cultural theories, and it was from them that almost all the theoretical searches of Latin American authors grew – from the last quarter of the twentieth century to the first quarter of the 21st century. The Baroque as a model of self-identification has proved to be in great demand in Latin American literary studies and philosophy. It was within the framework of this cultural and historical paradigm that theorists as unlike either Lesama or Carpentier as Severo Sarduy with his postmodern reworking of Baroque into neo-Baroque and Bolivar Echeverria with his "theory of baroque ethos", claiming to have a global philosophical understanding of the uniqueness of the Latin American worldview ^[10].

Therefore, it is quite natural that by the end of the twentieth century there was a need to classify the Baroque and non-Baroque theories themselves and build a paradigm of the history of perception of Latin American literature through the prism of the Baroque. The periodization of the Brazilian philologist Irlemar Chiampi seems to be the most well-reasoned.

Since the mid-70s of the twentieth century, the Brazilian researcher has witnessed the absorption of European structuralism and post-structuralism by Latin American humanitarian thought. And in this often complete absence of a time gap between the studied material and its research, the uniqueness and originality of Latin American literary criticism also lies. Using the example of Chiampi's work, it once again becomes clear that there is no need to talk about any academic tradition in Latin American literary studies in general and in the 90s of the twentieth century in particular. Having no solid scientific foundation for his research, Kyampi performs work similar to that of a discoverer, who must formulate an idea of phenomena and give them a name. This direction implies not just working according to the existing scheme, but creating the scheme itself that is suitable for this type of research. Thus, even at the end of the twentieth century, a researcher of the phenomena of the Latin American world and artistic consciousness is faced with the need to fulfill the function designated by Alejo Carpentier as "a task worthy of Adam: to name things" ^{[11, p. 24]} (the famous Uruguayan critic Emir Rodriguez Manegal called this phenomenon a specific phenomenon of the humanitarian thought of Latin America of the twentieth century ^[12]. And the very category of Latin American artistic consciousness, defined by A. F. Kofman as Adamism ^[13], turned out to be somewhat applicable to literary theorists.

Chiampi had to create, nothing less, a systematic view of the history of Latin American literature that would be adequate to the cultural and historical paradigm of the turn of the millennium, and a corresponding view of the main milestones of Baroque concepts in Latin America. It is no coincidence that we are talking about Baroque concepts, since the very idea of the Baroque as something systematized is a kind of oxymoron.

The landmark work "Baroque and Modernity", published in Portuguese in 1998 and in Spanish in 2000 ^{[14, 15]}, was preceded by a series of works: "Wonderful Realism. Form and Ideology in the New Latin American Novel" ^[16], preface to Lesama Lima's book "American Self-Expression" ^[17], as well as chapters in collective works and articles ("Baroque Proliferation in Paradise" ^[18], "The Miraculous and History of Alejo Carpentier and Pierre Mabille" ^[19], "Neo-Baroque in Latin America and a pessimistic view of history" ^[20], "Carpentier and Surrealism" ^[21], "Baroque and Aphasia in Alejo Carpentier" ^[22], "Modernity and Anti-Modernity: A Non-Baroque Metaphor in Jose Lesama Lima" ^[23], "Non-Baroque literature in the face of postmodernism"^[24]), which are directly or indirectly related to the understanding of Baroque and non-Baroque issues on Latin American soil. Chiampi identified four stages of perception of the aesthetic phenomena of the Baroque by Latin American literature and designated them by dates: 1890, 1920, 1950 and 1970. Thus, the Brazilian researcher tried to contrast the rigor of the scientific approach with the verbose and often extremely subjective Latin American Baroque theories. The most interesting thing, from our point of view, is that the resulting periodization echoes Alejo Carpentier's idea of the Baroque as a kind of permanent entity, a constant (Carpentier himself learned this idea from the works of the Spanish-Catalan philosopher Eugenio D'orsa, who considered the history of world culture as an alternation of two constants – Baroque and classicism ^[25]). In this regard, it is significant that Irlemar Chiampi did not include the phenomena of the Baroque as a historical style in her systematization of the Baroque phenomena of the New World. Chiampi was interested in a field where cultural and aesthetic receptions were not imitative, but truly culture-forming. Let's focus on the periodization of Chiampi in a little more detail.

The year is 1890. This year is conventionally designated by Chiampi as the first stage of the perception of Baroque phenomena by the Latin American cultural consciousness. The literature of the 17th century, when Creole culture and continental identity, distinct from Spanish, were just beginning to take shape, Chiampi still does not fully relate to the original Latin American literature, she considers the literature of the 18th and a significant part of the 19th century already marked by signs of imitation and even epigonism and frankly secondary to European literature.

Irlemar Chiampi attributes the first stage of Baroque influence on Latin American literature to the end of the nineteenth century, that is, to the period of the dominance of modernism, one of the key phenomena that determined trends in Latin American literature in the twentieth century — the direction in which Latin American literature reached the level of world culture for the first time in its history.

But it is not only the certain aesthetic affinity of Latin American modernism with the Baroque that gives Irlemar Chiampi the reason to call him the first experience of the Baroque perception by Latin American literature. The Latin American modernists themselves, and first of all Ruben Dario, proclaimed the work of the masters of Spanish Baroque literature as one of their aesthetic landmarks. Forgotten in the 18th and 19th centuries, Spanish poets and writers of the Golden Age (Luis de Gongora, Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracian) have once again attracted attention. It is no coincidence that in his famous poem "The Song of Life and Hope", Dario mentions Gongora among the significant phenomena of world culture.:

Like Gongora, I was captivated by Galatea, and like Verlaine, by the beauty of the Marquise...^{[26, p. 72]}

Irlemar Chiampi writes about this:

These poems by Ruben Dario are the first, not yet fully mature attempt to perceive the Baroque. The obvious aestheticization of the language and the excessive appeal to the outside world (in the style of Gongora) make it possible to detect aesthetic Baroque reminiscences in Dario's poems. However, the Nicaraguan poet, within the framework of his modernism, mixed elements of Baroque aesthetics with the tradition of poetry of the "Parnassians" and "symbolists" ^{[15, p. 19]}.

The 1920s. The next stage of the reception of the Baroque by the Latin American cultural consciousness, marked by Chiampi, is associated with the work of avant-garde poets. In relation to this cultural phenomenon, both the researcher's specific non-baroque approach and the peculiarities of avant-garde literature in Latin America, analyzed by her through the prism of the literary process of the twentieth century, are clearly evident. At first, it seems that the avant-garde as a trend in art is rather opposed to the Baroque world, rather than inheriting it to some extent. There are no stylistically similar moments between them, as there are between Baroque and Latin American modernism. But the Baroque in relation to Latin America has its own distinct features. In Latin America, the Baroque could not, in principle, become the art of the Counter-Reformation due to the absence of the Reformation, and therefore could not be considered a stagnant and reactionary phenomenon. As early as 1957, Jose Lesama Lima wrote that European Baroque was not relevant to Latin American Baroque: "Among the features that should be noted in European Baroque are composure without tension and asymmetry without plutonism, which go back to the interpretation of Baroque with an eye to the Gothic style. <...>. For Latin America, clarifications are needed. The Baroque here lives, firstly, by tension, secondly by plutonism, the primordial fire that splits and reunites parts of the whole, and, thirdly, it is marked not by degeneration, but by overabundance..." ^{[27, p. 162]}. This is essential for understanding the Latin American avant-garde, as it sets a special, continental coordinate system for the aesthetics of the Baroque, in which not all aspects related to the Baroque as a historical style find their place.

For Kyampi, such a seemingly non-obvious interrelation of literary phenomena from different eras is important, as it provides additional arguments to substantiate non-literary theories. Here we can already talk about the conventionality of using the name "Baroque"/"neo-Baroque" to refer to a wide range of literary phenomena.

It should be remembered that the "Discovery" of Gongor's metaphor is connected with the context of the European criticism of post-symbolism, which began to rethink the aesthetics of Gongora, and in parallel with the aesthetics of Mallarmé. <...> It was only after this revolution of poetic language, which occurred at the end of the century, that Gongora's work was rehabilitated and returned to the literary context, to be used later by the generation that created modern poetry ^{[15, p. 20]},

Irlemar Chiampi writes, pointing out the importance of literary phenomena (Spanish—American modernism and the avant-garde), which can be conditionally designated as "proto-baroque", since the prerequisites for future Baroque theories of Latin America are already quite noticeable, although not always openly present in them.

So, as part of her systematization of the Baroque theories of Latin America, Chiampi was able to discover phenomena within the Latin American avant-garde that played an important role in the process that Chiampi herself would call the "Americanization of the Baroque." At the same time, the researcher emphasizes, as in the case of the perception of Baroque phenomena by modernism, one should not exaggerate the importance of the interest of the authors of the Latin American avant-garde in the Baroque, if only for the reason that both did not perceive the Baroque as a timeless phenomenon of continental significance.

"The Americanization of the Baroque." The year is 1950. Irlemar Chiampi considers the performance of Lesama Lima at the exhibition of the artist Roberto Diago ^[28], which took place on November 12, 1948, to be the starting point of Baroque concepts proper. Thus, we have a date that can be called the birthday of the Baroque concepts of Latin America. By highlighting the Baroque concepts of Lesama Lima and Carpentier, Chiampi, at first glance, does not reveal anything new: in the second half of the twentieth century, they were widely known and were among the most significant cultural concepts in Latin America. However, it is important that Chiampi's point of view on the theoretical views of Cuban authors combines the positions of both a younger contemporary of the apogee of these theories and a representative of a fundamentally new literary philosophy. The main merit of the researcher is the discovery in the concepts of Lesama Lima and Carpentier of a certain Baroque matrix, relevant to the phenomena of Latin American neo-Baroque, already closely related to the tradition of European postmodernism.

If the authors of Latin American modernism and the avant-garde found certain points of contact with the phenomena of Baroque aesthetics, then first Jose Lesama Lima, and later Alejo Carpentier, in fact, appropriated this aesthetic. In other words, it was no longer a question of Latin American authors searching for phenomena relevant to the history of their own culture in European culture. On the contrary, both Baroque theories arose from the opposition of the European cultural tradition. Sometimes it seems that in their theoretical pursuits, both Lesama Lima and Carpentier fundamentally followed the cultural and civilizational opposition of America and Europe (in the twentieth century, Europe was more often referred to as the "global West", which includes the United States).

Thus, Irlemar Chiampi, indeed, very accurately called the Baroque theories of Lesama and Carpentier the "Americanization of the Baroque", since both authors considered the Baroque precisely as a purely Latin American phenomenon. Already in the speech of Lesama Lima at the Diago exhibition, the main thesis of Latin American ideology related to the understanding of the Baroque was voiced, which consisted in the fundamental separation of the concept of Latin American Baroque from the established ideas of the Baroque as a European artistic style. This is the basic thesis on which both concepts are based: the realization that the Baroque world is the world of Latin America, its history, culture and modernity is the main postulate of the Baroque concepts of Lesama Lima and Carpentier, which brings them closer, despite their numerous differences.

(Neo)Baroque and postmodernism. Irlemar Chiampi draws attention to the fact that for the authors of "classical" Baroque concepts, a whimsical and complicated form is not an end in itself, but is subordinated to the conceptual idea of the author. In the essays of Lesama and Carpentier, the ideological load determines the choice of form, that is, cultural ideas are at the forefront, not the stylistics of the text. In this regard, it would be appropriate to cite the words of Cynthio Vitiera, who, speaking about the classics of Cuban literature, Nicolas Guillen, Alejo Carpentier and Jose Lesame Lima, formulated his ideas about the work of each of them very succinctly in the form of a thesis title for a student essay.:

Guillain and the world of the conditioned (answer: social poetry).

Carpentier and the world of conditioning (answer: the dialectic of the process).

Lesama Lima and the world of the unconditional (answer: infinite possibility) (quoted in ^{[29, p. 6]}).

The concepts of "dialectic of process" and "infinite possibility", which Vityer, a man with a fine artistic sense, characterized the works of Carpentier and Lesama Lima, speak about the ideological orientation of the work of the classics of Cuban literature. Even with all the complexity of Lesama Lima's style, his works are not art for art's sake, they are subordinated to the goal of understanding Latin American, especially Cuban reality. As for Carpentier, the ideological integrity of his works is not in doubt at all.

The "classical" Baroque theories, with the appearance of which Chiampi associated the concept of "Americanization of the Baroque," were primarily a culture-forming phenomenon for Latin America. With their help, Lesama and Carpentier tried to model the Latin American ethno-cultural space. It was a creative, constructive activity, quite in the spirit of the New Age, which in Latin America, unlike the "aged" Europe, has not yet lost its creative potential. A distinctive feature of these concepts, especially from the point of view of a researcher at the turn of the millennium, is their isolation from the literary philosophy of postmodernism. These concepts drew a kind of line under Latin American Baroque theories that existed outside of postmodern discourse.

The following systematized Baroque concept, which appeared on the literary soil of Latin America, was already inextricably linked with the trends of the European philosophy of structuralism/post-structuralism. We are talking about the theoretical developments of another Cuban writer, a younger contemporary of Lesama Lima and Carpentier, Severo Sarduya.

In 1994, the Cuban magazine "Critérios" published Chiampi's article "Neo-Baroque literature in the face of the crisis of modernism" ^[30], a significant part of which the Brazilian researcher devoted to the analysis of the theoretical works and artistic works of S. Sarduya in the context of the metamorphoses of Baroque concepts in Latin America. In it, Chiampi considers Sardouy's work as the beginning of a fundamentally new stage of the "Americanization of the Baroque", based on the ideas of the philosophy of postmodernism, despite the fact that the Cuban author himself used the concept of "postmodernity", which was not yet in use in Latin America in the 70s, in his landmark work "Baroque and Neo-Baroque" (1972) I didn't use it. For Ciampi, Sardouy's views primarily mark a kind of watershed between "classical" Latin American Baroque theories and the reinterpretation of the concept of "Baroque/neo-Baroque" on Latin American soil under the influence of postmodernism. Sardouy "chose from the features that characterize the Baroque as a historical style, those that can be used in the criticism of Art Nouveau" ^{[31, p. 178]}. This is primarily "artificiality, metalanguage, a tendency to parody and self-parody, hyperbole as an important structural component, the apotheosis of form and its ridicule" ^{[31, p. 178]}.

If Lesama rediscovered the verbal wonders of the Baroque for the literary language of Latin America, which in many aspects, such as the inaccessibility of content, was more complex than the language of high modernity (Proust, Pound, Joyce or Kafka), then Sardouy discovers that the explosive Baroque destructive force, with the help of its charades, can corrode the game itself. space ^{[31, p. 178]}.

Chiampi draws attention to the fact that the Cuban author was able to discover in the Latin American Baroque signs relevant to the aesthetics of postmodernism. In other words, Sardui, trying to derive a formula for understanding the ideas of postmodernism based on Latin American literature, came up with the concept of "neo-Baroque", which in his works became a kind of bridge between the new trends in Western literary philosophy and the Latin American literary process of the post-Boom period.

The periodization of Latin American Baroque theories, created by Irlemar Chiampi, laid a certain foundation for ideas about the metamorphoses of the Baroque on Latin American soil and, along with other periodizations (see attempts to create largely similar Baroque paradigms for Latin America by the Venezuelan researcher Carmen Bustillo ^[32]), contributed to the systematization of views on the Baroque as a cultural and philosophical model of self-identification of representatives of the Latin American cultural space.