Conclusion

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, and in typical romantic fashion, the Spanish American modernistas set their face against the perceived philistinism of a modernizing society. Their opposition was not absolute. It was marked, rather, by the kind of messy entanglements that characterize daily life, compromises that seem on occasion to have been a cause for celebration rather than melancholy.¹ In contrast, the modernistas succumbed tamely to the contradictions of the philosophico-aesthetic discourse of modernity. That discourse does not value the chronologically new; it values the new that is simultaneously a negation of the past and an affirmation of something better. The word modern thus functions in two ways: on the one hand, it designates certain institutions, ideas, and objects that emanate from a period of history closely identified with the West, and that most mark out the historical phase of modernity from what preceded it; on the other hand, it means whatever negates and surpasses the past, on the understanding that that thing will one day in turn be exceeded by something more “modern.” In their reflections on what it means to be modern, the modernistas make liberal use of the disjunctive conceptual habits and rhetorical figures of modern thought (cut, disinheritance, revolution), yet remain deeply wedded to the demands of a historical consciousness and to the most traditional of nineteenth-century axioms: historical progress.