La Jornada: Lezama Lima and the insurrection of the gaze

More than half a century ago, Julio Cortázar already warned of the growing supremacy of the image over writing and the proliferation of prefabricated literature.

Today we live besieged by the immediacy of the visible and bulk prose. The moment has become common currency: the image flickers, seduces and vanishes in the same gesture. Books are advertised with slogans like “the novel of the year” only to disappear weeks later, when the next essential novel appears.

In this vertigo of the ephemeral, the written word seems to have lost the battle. Seems. Because there are texts that do not surrender to the tyranny of the eye, that demand another type of attention. ParadisoJosé Lezama Lima’s crowning novel, is one of them. It’s ours Ulyssesour In search of lost time in Spanish. 60 years after its publication, and on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, it is worth asking: what can this verbal monument offer to a reader accustomed to the speed of liquid literature?

In a time that glorifies synthetic brevity – the mutilated message, the digestible morsel – Lezamian voluptuousness returns to language its sacred dignity. Its verb is not a mere instrument of utilitarian transmission, but a living organism capable of founding realities.

Faced with the verbal anemia of the present, Lezama pushes us to the opulence of nuance and restores to us the capacity for wonder at the texture of a clause or the clash of two ideas that illuminate the universe from an unprecedented angle. To claim it in this century saturated with pixels is to reconquer inner time. While the screen fragments our attention into fleeting sparks, Lezam’s text demands the contemplative pause of true literature. Reading it today is not a luxury for initiates, it is a prophylaxis against haste, a way of returning to the spirit the ability to inhabit the mystery.

Harold Bloom stated that Paradiso It is a Summa of Hispanic culture, of an extreme sensuality and spirituality that evokes Dante and Whitman, and that Lezama is the legitimate heir of Quevedo and Darío.

Lezama wrote from an island that he never left, but from which he built an unfathomable universe.

His work – poetry, essay and a single novel – is an attempt to found a new relationship with reality, not through reason or dialectic, but through “the image.” But not the image that is consumed on the screen. For Lezama, the image was “the last of the possible stories”, a condensation of meanings where temporalities converge, challenging linearity. The Lezamian image is not looked at: it is inhabited. It is not captured: it is danced. Reading it is a celebration, said Cardoza y Aragón, and an act of resistance: not that of the refugee in the past, but that of the one who believes that language can still be revelation.

The Cuban writer conceived his work as “digging into the marrow of the elderberry,” a search without distinction of genres. His baroque prose, described as “jungle” or “orography of words,” is not an aesthetic whim, but rather an ontological bet: reality is too complex for a simple sentence. “No adventure,” he said, “has ever started from a similarity and an image.”

How to read it, then, in an era that privileges the shock effect? Maybe the question should be reversed: how can you not read it? Because in his difficulty – which kept him opaque in the face of the glare of the boom– lies its relevance. As some critic has written with irony: “do not read Lezama if you are hungry, hungover, or have an appointment in less than three hours.” Reading it is a gradual immersion that the world has made almost illegible. But that same difficulty is its antidote to trivialization.

Faced with the image that is offered as evidence, he proposes one that is built in reading, which requires active participation; His lasts, folds and unfolds like an accordion or origami. That is why Octavio Paz spoke of “a world of architectures in continuous metamorphosis.”

There are those who maintain that his baroque – that “tropical theology”, that “Afro-Caribbean Catholicism” – is evasion. Could be. But it is also resistance: that of the verb that does not yield to the flash, that of the phrase that does not surrender to immediacy.