Cuban Realism, or the Novel as a Democratic Fiction: Abilio Estévez’s Los palacios distantes

BÁEZ, ANA

doi:https://doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2020.18

BÁEZ, ANA

Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (2020), 97, (10), 1095–1112.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2020.18
Language: English
Pages: 18

Abstract

In the last decades, attention to post-Soviet Cuban fiction has often intimated that this body of literature is the aesthetic counterpart to socialism’s exhaustion and that its narrative is likely to follow a telos of disenchantment. This article argues that counter to such a paradigm and in the wake of the Special Period, Cuban fiction registers the formation of new subjectivities as it opens a space for a new politics through a non-mimetic form of realism that points to writing’s democratic capacity. Taking as an example Abilio Estévez’s 2002 novel Los palacios distantes, this article points to the novel’s suspension of dystopian causality and argues that textual interruptions in the novel afford the repartitioning of the limits of the sayable, visible and possible with respect to socialist ideology. This article draws attention to the politics of aesthetics in post-Soviet Cuban fiction, while also attributing this politics of form to the broader relation of aesthetics to politics.

En las ultimas décadas, atención a la ficción pos-Soviética en su narración del agotamiento del socialismo cubano ha sugerido que esta literatura es la contrapartida estética del agotamiento ideológico socialista y que, por ende, su narración obedece un inevitable telos de desencantamiento que da cuenta del fallo de tal política. Este artículo arguye que, contra este paradigma de acercamiento crítico, la ficción cubana del Periodo Especial registra la formación de nuevas subjetividades y lo hace mediante una forma no-mimética del realismo que marca la capacidad democrática de la escritura misma. Mediante un enfoque en la novela Los palacios distantes de Abilio Estévez, se demuestra como la suspensión de la causalidad en la narrativa hace posible la re-partición de los límites de lo decible, visible y posible. En el contexto del Periodo Especial, la ficción democrática de Estévez subvierte las formas predeterminadas de lo sensible. Este artículo expone estas subversiones para dar cuenta de la política de la estética en la ficción cubana post-Soviética.

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