«Aquí llegamos, aquí no veníamos». The last poetry of Lezama and the mutations of the canons

Abstract

The present work is based on the analysis of José Lezama Lima’s last poems, Fragmentos a su imán, a posthumous publication (1977), and commences a reading of the author’s work which questions the traditional views established by the canonical “ups and downs” of political imageries; those which caused that the rejected author in the compromised 60’s due to his non-political ideas and silenced as a dissident in the 70’s because of the ideological manichaeism that accompanied the totalitarian radicalism of Cuban Socialism, was recuperated in the 80’s as a aesthetic alternative by the new creators and reinstated officially in the 90’s as a part of the Cuban government’s interests to the post-communist nationalism. In all that process of consecutive and contradictory Lezamas, his work has suffered in each case selective readings, out of context processes and denial of the problematic or non-adjustable aspects to the last outline established by the outlook given him, specially when the official canonization of the author provoked as a collateral effect the interest in deciphering his position in a context of the Cuban Revolution Literature to which he belongs entirely. Of all the mentioned, his last poems give an unmistaken testimony which do not fit (perhaps that is why they are the least mentioned or studied) in any of the phases of that “back and forth” of the official rejections and recoveries of the author, but with a reading within the context, he can contribute to compensate the determinants, strategies and political propaganda proposals which cause that his writing can risk the fact of being submitted to a biographical, historical and ideological manipulation which recreates the author as it pleases, from a well-known, defined and propagated in just a few aspects of his multiple meanings, in an unknown or absolutely unrecognizable author.