84 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : winter 2007

que Horswell propone. La razon por la que el autor termina su analisis con el Inca
Garcilaso no es fortuita; al contrario, esta muy bien pensada ya que la prosa del
Inca representa los tropos sexuales occidentalizados al remplazar en su escritura
los tropos maternos indgenas por los ibericos, o como Horswell lo expresa: By
ending this study with my analysis of Inca Garcilasos Comentarios reales [ . . . ] we
cross back to Iberia to engage the mestizo writers mediation between the con-
quered colonized Andeans and the Renaissance Spaniards (28).
En el eplogo, se hace un recuento breve de lo analizado en el libro, sintetizando
y enfatizando los conceptos mas importantes y explorando cuestiones obligadas
como la manera en que los tropos sexuales queer continuan siendo practicados en
ceremonias en la region andina. Por lo tanto, como todava persiste una nocion
de tercer genero, Horswell apuntala, Andean society changes, while ancient,
gendered performances are reiterated, in new contexts, in response to contempo-
rary needs, discourses of power, and desires (264). Asimismo, cuestiones de alteri-
dad siguen desarrollandose y a su vez perpetuandose en la literatura andina.
En suma, Horswell no solo analiza el discurso hegemonico de los conquistado-
res, sino que tambien estudia el papel de los sujetos mediadores en la sociedad
colonial o tercer genero, lo cual nos da una perspectiva mas completa de la
manera en que el genero y la sexualidad se desarrollaron en la epoca colonial y
continuan desarrollandose en nuestros das. Es importante subrayar que este mo-
delo alternativo hace el trabajo de Horswell innovador, novedoso y solido, digno
de ser incluido en cursos de literatura e historia colonial latinoamericana, genero,
sexualidad, estudios queer y en cursos enfocados en el estudio del discurso colonial
hispanoamericano en general.

g ui ll er mo de lo s r ey es
University of Houston

g ul lo n, ge rm an . La modernidad silenciada: la cultura espanola en torno

a 1900. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2006. 170 pages.

Beginning with the publication of his acclaimed La novela en libertad in 1999

(reviewed in these pages), German Gullon has adopted a particularly engaging
approach to literary studies, one in which literature informs culture as much as
culture informs literature. In this respect, anyone familiar with Gullons constant
and prodigious literary output is bound to recognize that his recent foray into
producing his own short stories and novels has considerably enhanced the manner
in which he reexamines the cultural status of literary movements and texts on
which he was already an undisputed authority.
 r ev ie ws j 85

In the present volume, that enhancement is noticeable in two ways. Foremost,

Gullons first-hand knowledge of what it means to issue works of fiction into the
world allows him to cast a more refined net over the literary landscape, one that
captures not just authors and texts but also their social and historical milieus, as
well as the (sometimes sinister) effects of their contemporary and long-term recep-
tion by readers, critics, and literary historians. Secondly, as he does so, Gullon
seamlessly combines scholarly rigor with historical insight, unexpected anecdotes,
and imaginative analogies that drive the point home and serve to make La modern-
idad silenciada highly readable.
Gullon argues that Spanish modernism represented a threat to the social and
political currents that prevailed at a time when Spain was in the throes of grappling
with the loss of its last overseas colonies in America and the Philippines. What is
useful about this argument is not merely that it persuades us to revise the way we
view and teach modernismo and its various offspring and congeners (vanguardia,
decadentismo, erotismo, exotismo, et al.), but that the lines of reasoning and the kind
of evidence Gullon puts forth in order to make the argument stick are in them-
selves captivating and worthy of being applied to other historical moments. A
guiding premise of his thesis is that the very notion of literary movement should
remain permanently open to question. While some authors may at first benefit
from having their works placed (or pigeonholed) within this or that -ism, it is
more often the case, especially over time, that categories and labels exert a stifling
influence on the works they purport to illuminateeven if these are judiciously
categorized in the first place. Rather than tossing the notion of literary categories
overboard, however, Gullon suggests questioning them and reviewing their short-
comings and contradictions, and then follows his own advice by breathing fresh
air into various movements, in particular, noventayochismo, modernismo, and, with
special vigor, decadentismo. In doing so, he shows that the latter two posed a threat
to the established order, which was more preoccupied with licking its wounds than
with investigating how the disaster of 1898 might have been averted. Healing those
wounds took the form of an inward-looking nationalism and conservatism that
privileged the writings of the so-called Generation of 98 over the subversive mus-
ings of authors who, if not silenced, might have pointed the way for Spain to join
the modern world sooner than it did. Gullon maintains that literary institutions
took it upon themselves to compartmentalize these musings by closing the door
labeled modernista on them, thereby exercising a subtle form of control over an
emerging European attitude that, in the view of the Spanish establishment, was
thought to transgress the limits of acceptable personal and social conduct. In a
sense, noventayochistas helped history repeat itself, as Spain once again took to
shielding herself from the intellectual winds that were blowing outside its borders,
this time, by withdrawing into self-contemplation, in search of a glorious past
86 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : winter 2007

which Gullon unmasks as a futile logocentric quest for an ultimate and true iden-
tity. That isolationist move entailed rejecting every conceivable form of the other
(the foreign, subjective, feminine, symbolist, eroticin summodernista other),
a rejection later sustained by the Franco regime and revisionist critics like Pedro
Lan Entralgo and Guillermo Daz Plaja. In the process, Gullon asserts, even the
standing of Spains late nineteenth-century masterworks suffered, for they es-
poused too much individualism for the new nationalist project.
In fashioning his argument, Gullon brings to bear many authors (and painters)
of the period, among them, Azorn, Baroja, Galdos, Ganivet, Juan Gris, Daro,
Pardo Bazan, Picasso, Ortega y Gasset, and Unamuno, availing himself especially
of Valle-Inclan and Juan Ramon Jimenez to show that Spanish modernism was a
richly nuanced movement. He also delivers a substantial chapter on colonialism
and the loss of Cuba, in which he demonstrates that, to its own detriment, Spain
preferred to view the debacle as an enforced exchange of territory from one empire
to another rather than as the result of her own cruel mismanagement of a colony
that, unsurprisingly, craved independence. Even if only in passing, Gullon has no
qualms about drawing parallels between the close of the nineteenth century and
the present, relating, for example, the times of General Valeriano Weyler (the Prus-
sian-born Spaniard who crushed the Cuban rebellion by instituting massive con-
centration camps) to the times of George W. Bush (16). He suggests that there are
lessons to be learned from reappraising modernismo from the vantage point of the
present, pues atravesamos ahora otro momento de transito, cuando los valores
de la globalizacion tratan de sobreponerse a los del irracionalismo, nacionalismo
[. . .] (17). And he points out that while generations of Americans were taught to
believe that the United States rescued the Cuban island from Spanish tyranny, la
base de Guantanamo sigue siendo a comienzos del siglo XXI uno de los iconos de
la ignominia universal (101). These and similarly astute parallels are peppered
throughout La modernidad silenciada, lending a timely and provocative edge to its
clear and reasoned argumentation.
In Encounters Across Borders: The Changing Visions of Spanish Modernism, 1890
1930 (2001), Bretz writes that the ignorance of Spanish modernism [. . .] in studies
of international modernism produces an incomplete portrait and erases voices that
could considerably enrich and expand current views [. . .] (21). That incompletion
and erasure is unlikely to be completed and revoiced until we come to grips with
German Gullons fresh and compelling arguments for how and why modernismo
was silenced.

w if re do de ra fo ls
University of Nevada