Everything in Its Place: The Life and Works of Virgilio Piñera

Thomas F. Anderson

2005
320 pages
ISBN 9781611482454
LC 2005053602

Everything in Its Place: The Life and Works of Virgilio Piñera is a seminal book that fills a major gap in Cuban and Latin American literary criticism. In addition to being the most comprehensive study to date of the life and work of Virgilio Piñera, this is the first book in English on this major twentieth-century Cuban author. In this study Thomas F. Anderson draws extensively on unpublished manuscripts and diverse critical writings, bringing new insights into how Piñera's works responded to key literary influences as well as events in his life and in Cuban political and cultural history.

Part I is an intellectual biography divided into three chapters that correspond to major periods of Piñera's life: his early literary career and his polemical association with Jose Lezama Lima and his literary circle, his years of self-imposed exile in Argentina where he collaborated with Borges and Witold Gomrowicz, and his rise to glory and precipitous fall into oblivion in the years following the Cuban Revolution. In these chapters Anderson emphasizes Piñera's polemical role as a cultural and social critic by examining little-studied articles published in Poeta, Orígenes, Los Anales de Buenos Aires, Revolucíon, Lunes, and other journals and newspapers.

In Part II Anderson explores Piñera's short stories, novels, and plays from various critical perspectives. In his analysis of Piñera's early stories in chapter 4, Anderson argues that while many of their central themes and motifs are clearly anchored in the universal aesthetic of the absurd, they also echo certain aspects of Cuba's socio-political reality in the early 1940s. In Chapter 5, Anderson draws attention to the impact of the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and the Marquis de Sade on La carne de René (1952), and he posits that the homoerotic subtext of Piñera's first novel serves to debunk the myth of the aggressive, sexually domineering Latin American macho. In the following chapter on Pequeñas maniobras (1963), Anderson argues that the protagonist's anxiety, self-depreciation, suspicion of Catholics, and fears of confession are manifestations of his closeted homosexuality. He also calls attention to parallels between Piñera's second novel and Gombrowicz's Ferdyurke, which Piñera's helped to translate into Spanish in 1946. The final chapter offers an original reading of the three plays - La boda (1957), El no (1965), and Dos viejos pánicos (1968) - in which Piñera repudiates traditional Cuban views on sexuality, morality, and matrimony. Anderson discusses the plays from the 1960s in light of the revolutionary visions of a "New Man" that led the Cuban government to send homo-sexuals and nonconformists to organized camps to be "rehabilitated."

In the epilogue Anderson examines the recent resurgence in interest in Virgilio Piñera and his works and explains why Piñera - a long undervalued author, intellectual, and social critic - is now widely viewed as one of the most important Cuban writers of the twentieth century and a major figure of modern Latin American letters. Everything in Its Place also features the most exhaustive bibliography of Piñera's work yet assembled.

About the author:

Thomas F. Anderson, Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame, has lectured and published widely on the literature and cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean. A Fellowship from the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies faciliated his research for Everything in Its Place. He is presently working on his second book, Carnival, Comparsas, and National Identity in Cuban Poetry, 1916-1961.