ABSTRACT
The critic Weldon Thornton reads James Joyce's subversion of Stephen Daedalus's theories in A Portrait as a sustained critique of modernist aesthetics. This chapter explores how a Joycean tradition emerged and developed in Spanish America as a reaction against modernist poetics — as an affirmation of local interests against aesthetic disinterestedness. One of the fragments that Julio Cortazar selected to offer a panoramic view of Paradiso may illustrate the poetic creativity. The terms that Cortazar uses to refer to Ulysses and his projected Rayuela recur in his discussion of Joycean novel, Jose Lezama Lima's Paradiso. The subversive treatment of aesthetic autonomy that connects Tres tristes tigres with Ulysses effectively undermines totalizing theories of representation and disembodied notions of subjectivity. The linguistic experiments and formal innovations shared by Tres tristes tigres and Ulysses also characterize contemporary Mexican novels as relevant as Salvador Elizondo's Farabeuf and Fernando del Paso's Palinuro de Mexico.
