Severo Sarduy
Severo Sarduy was a significant Cuban writer and intellectual, known for his influential role in bridging Latin American culture and the avant-garde movements in Paris during the 20th century. Born into a working-class family in Cuba, Sarduy initially pursued a career in medicine before immersing himself in the literary world. He became associated with key literary figures and movements, notably the "boom" of Latin American narrative and the Tel Quel group in France. His writing is characterized by a neobaroque style, which blends elements of Cuban cultural identity, including Spanish, African, and Chinese influences, with experimental narrative techniques.
Sarduy's literary works often explore themes of identity, exile, and sexuality, reflecting his own experiences as a gay man living in a politically charged environment. Notable novels such as "Gestos" and "Cobra" exemplify his innovative approach, merging pop culture references with complex narrative structures. Despite his emigration to France and subsequent estrangement from Cuba, Sarduy maintained a connection to the revolutionary ideals of his homeland through his writing. He continued to produce significant literary and critical works until his death in Paris in 1993 due to AIDS-related complications, leaving behind a legacy that resonates within Latin American literature and beyond.
Severo Sarduy
Cuban novelist and poet.
- Born: February 25, 1937
- Place of birth: Camagüey, Cuba
- Died: June 8, 1993
- Place of death: Paris, France
Biography
Severo Sarduy was the most prominent link between twentieth-century Latin American culture and the Parisian poststructuralist intellectual circles (the Tel Quel group). He was also a promoter of the “boom” of Latin American narrative in France in the 1960s and after.
Sarduy was born into a working-class family in a provincial Cuban town; at his birth, it was prophesied that he would become a writer. In 1956 he left for Havana to study medicine. While there, he joined the splinter group of writers who had recently abandoned José Lezama Lima’s journal Orígenes (Origins) and had begun publishing their own journal, Ciclón (Cyclone). Yet Sarduy remained dazzled by Lezama, whose work continued to be a major influence on his writing and on his concept of Latin American culture. Following Lezama’s lead, he developed an interest in art criticism, and visual arts would become an important influence on his novels.
Sarduy welcomed the ouster of Cuban president Fulgencio Batista in 1959, marking the victory of the Cuban Revolution, and he worked on the “cultural front” until his departure for France at the end of that year to study art criticism at the Louvre. The intellectual ferment in France in 1960 proved too irresistible for him to return to Cuba, and when the new revolutionary government asked all scholarship students to return from abroad, he requested an extension so that he could remain in Paris to finish writing his first novel. Receiving no response, he remained in France regardless and, in 1967, became a French citizen. As an emigrant, he was labeled “traitor” and “counterrevolutionary” by Fidel Castro’s government; Sarduy, however, dutifully maintained his faith in the revolution for many years, in spite of the ongoing savage persecution in Castro’s Cuba of gay people in general and of his literary mentors, Lezama and Virgilio Piñera, in particular. Only much later would he exchange his faith in modern utopia for Buddhism and Afro-Cuban santería; strangely enough, after 1989, the revolution itself took similar steps, selling out its deteriorating rites of “machismo-Leninism” for the local syncretistic Afro-Cuban powers. He never returned to Cuba and died in Paris in 1993 due to complications from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).
Yet the revolution to which Sarduy was committed in his heart was found in his literature and criticism. Various elements—the Lezamian concept of the baroque (hyperbolic, imagistic, and carnivalesque), the French nouveau roman, structuralist semiology, the erotic and hedonistic concept of writing “with/on/into the body” that was developed by the poststructuralistic Roland Barthes, Western pop culture, gay and symbolic transvestism, and the new cosmology of the big bang—all gave rise to a joyous syncretistic Caribbean literary concoction that Sarduy called neobaroque. He was an extremely self-conscious writer, and his theories crisscross both his essays, such as those in Escrito sobre un cuerpo (1969; Written on a Body, 1989), and his narratives.
Sarduy began writing his first novel, Gestos (Gestures, 1963), while still in Cuba in 1959, dealing with a terrorist act in Havana under the waning dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Gestos is an experimental exercise inspired both by the early nouveau roman avant-garde literary movement and by action painting.
In France Sarduy worked for the radio, covering scientific topics, and his intimate knowledge of the medium would later be reflected in his experimental radio plays. In his narrative work, science seeps through in many ways, but it takes up a carnivalized form, degraded to yet another manifestation of contemporary pop culture. In 1966 Sarduy became editor of the Latin American collection for French publishing house Éditions du Seuil.
Sarduy's second novel, De donde son los cantantes (1967; From Cuba with a Song, 1972), puts to the test the later, more experimental nouveau roman and his own neobaroque approach in the search for Cuban cultural identity. Sarduy, himself of Chinese Cuban origin, saw Cuban cultural idiosyncrasy as a result of an interaction of three cultural components: Spanish, coming with discovery and conquest; African, from those who were brought to Cuba as slaves after much of the indigenous population was killed by Spanish colonizers and diseases; and Chinese, from those who were brought to Cuba in the nineteenth century to be agricultural workers, first alongside slaves and then, after slavery was abolished in 1886, instead of them. The text of From Cuba with a Song exploits, plays on, and parodies cultural stereotypes, while at the same time exploding traditional narrative forms. The literary result is exhilarating and perplexing. Language is the true protagonist of this antinovel.
Sarduy's next work, Cobra (1972; English translation, 1975), is a perplexing exercise in narrative experiment. Completely cosmopolitan in its themes, it nonetheless remains profoundly Caribbean in its popular and carnivalesque undertones. The antinarrative constructs and dismantles the story of a beautiful transvestite who is unhappy about his ugly feet, a motorcycle gang enacting violent rituals, and the sadistic castration performed by Dr. Ktazob (a multilingual pun meaning “penis cutter”) in pursuit of the phantom of feminine perfection. This search for unattainable perfection is paralleled by the topsy-turvy writing understood as verbal transvestism. Cobra received the coveted Prix Médicis for best foreign work translated into French in 1972.
In the 1970s Sarduy made several trips to India. His subsequent novel Maitreya (1978; English translation, 1987) uses the myth of the last Buddha and plays on the theme of exile and flight all around the planet, from Java to Cuba, Miami, New York, and the Islamic world. Colibrí (Hummingbird, 1984) returns to a Latin American setting and cultural intertexts, taking place in a gay brothel at the edge of the Amazonian jungle. The main theme of Cocuyo (1990; Firefly, 2013) is voyeurism. Sarduy's final novel, Pájaros de la playa (1993; Beach Birds, 2007), completed just before his death and published posthumously, is about a dilapidated former nudist retreat turned sanatorium that houses young men in the late stages of an unnamed illness bearing a marked resemblance to AIDS.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
Gestos, 1963
De donde son los cantantes, 1967 (From Cuba with a Song, 1972)
Cobra, 1972 (English translation, 1975)
Maitreya, 1978 (English translation, 1987)
Colibrí, 1984
Cocuyo, 1990 (Firefly, 2013)
Pájaros de la playa, 1993 (Beach Birds, 2007)
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
Gatico-gatico, 1994
Radio Plays:
Para la voz, 1978 (For Voice: Four Plays, 1985)
Poetry:
Flamenco, 1969
Mood Indigo, 1970 (with linocuts by H. M. Erhardt)
Overdose, 1972
Big Bang, 1974
Daiquiri, 1980
Un testigo fugaz y disfrazado: Sonetos, décimas, 1985
Un testigo perenne y delatado: Precedido de Un testigo fugaz y disfrazado, 1993
Epitafios, imitación, aforismos, 1994
Nonfiction:
Escrito sobre un cuerpo: Ensayos de crítica, 1969 (Written on a Body, 1989)
Barroco, 1974
La simulación, 1982
El Cristo de la rue Jacob, 1987 (Christ on the Rue Jacob, 1995)
Nueva inestabilidad, 1987
Ensayos generales sobre el Barroco, 1987
Cartas, 1996 (correspondence; Manuel Díaz Martínez, editor)
Miscellaneous:
Obra completa: Edición crítica, 1999 (2 volumes; Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl, editors)
Bibliography
Blanchard, Marc. “Site Unseen: Cuba on the Rue Jacob.” Sites, vol. 5, no. 1, 2001, pp. 79–88. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=5636779&site=ehost-live. Accessed 9 June 2017. Profile of Sarduy focusing in his retention of “cultural difference” after settling in France.
Bush, Andrew. “On Exemplarity and Postmodern Simulation: Robert Coover and Severo Sarduy.” Comparative Literature, vol. 44, no. 2, 1992, pp. 174–93. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9208170609&site=ehost-live. Accessed 9 June 2017. Uses Sarduy’s and Robert Coover’s works as case studies in discussing the relationship between theory and fiction.
Gosser, Mary Ann. “Cobra: Writing Is the Art of Ellipsis and Digression.” Critical Essays on the Literatures of Spain and Spanish-America, edited by Luis T. González-del-Valle and Julio Baena, Society of Spanish and Spanish American Studies, 1991, pp. 111–20. Useful for a general reader in English.
Kushigian, Julia A. Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition: In Dialogue with Borges, Paz, and Sarduy. U of New Mexico P, 1991. Studies Sarduy’s Asian connection, the theme of oriental exoticism, and Asian influence on Latin American literature.
Montero, Oscar. The Name Game: Writing/Fading Writer in De donde son los cantantes. U of North Carolina P, 1988. Focuses on the narrative experiment.
Rivero-Potter, Alicia, editor. Between the Self and the Void: Essays in Honor of Severo Sarduy. Society of Spanish and Spanish American Studies, 1998. A collection of essays from a variety of perspectives summing up Sarduy’s career.
Salgado, Cesar Augusto. “Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory.” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 112, no. 445, 1999, pp. 316–31. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=2248399&site=ehost-live. Accessed 9 June 2017. Discusses Sarduy’s “neobaroque” theory.
Santí, Enrico Mario. “Textual Politics: Severo Sarduy.” Latin American Literary Review, vol. 8, no. 16, 1980, pp. 152–60. A broad cultural perspective.