Jose Lezama Lima

José María Andrés Fernando Lezama Lima (Havana, December 19, 1910 — ib., August 9, 1976) was a poet, novelist, short story writer, Cuban essayist and aesthetic thinker.

He is considered one of the most important authors of his country and of Spanish-American literature, especially for his novel Paradiso, one of the most important works in the Spanish language and one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century in that language, according to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

A main referent of what Severo Sarduy called American neo-baroque, his work is characterized by its lyricism and the use of metaphors, allusions and allegories, based on a poetic system that he developed in essays such as Analecta del reloj (1953), The American Expression (1957), Treaties in Havana (1958) or The Bewitched Quantity (1970).

Only the difficult is exhilarating; only the resistance that challenges us, is able to bind, arouse and maintain our knowledge power.

José Lezama Lima, The American Expression

Biography

Early years and training

He was born on December 19, 1910 in the Columbia military camp, in Havana, the second of the three children of José María Lezama y Rodda, artillery colonel and engineer, and Rosa Lima Rosado. His father's profession led the family to settle, first, in the La Cabaña Fortress, and later in Florida, when Colonel Lezama volunteered in the Allied troops in World War I. His death from the flu in 1919 marked the character and vocation of the writer:

I had my father dying thirty-three years. He was at the center of my life and his death gave me the sense of what I would later call the beat of absence. The place my father occupied at the table was empty, but as in the pythagorean myths, he always came to talk with us at the time of the meal [...] My mother always kept the cult of Colonel Lezama: one afternoon, when we played with her the Yaquis, we warned, in the circle that the pieces were forming, a figure that looked like the face of our father. We all cried, but that patriarchal image gave us a supreme unity and installed in Mom the idea that my destiny was to tell the story of the family.

In 1920, back in Cuba, Lezama entered the Mimó school, where he finished his primary studies in 1921. He began his secondary studies at the Havana Institute, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in sciences and letters in 1928.

The family's financial situation was difficult, so in 1929 they moved from their grandmother's house, at Paseo del Prado 9, to a much smaller house a few blocks away, at Trocadero 162, where Lezama he resided for the rest of his life.

The same year he began studying law at the University of Havana. He participated on September 30, 1930 in the student movements against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, which caused the closure of the house of studies. In 1935 he published his first work, the essay Tiempo negado, in the magazine Grafos, in which his first poem entitled Poesía, at the same time that he resumed his university studies.

Beginnings of his literary career. Origins Group

The year 1937 was especially significant for Lezama, since he published his first poem of repercussion, Muerte de Narciso, and he met Juan Ramón Jiménez, with whom he forged a friendship. A year later he graduated as a lawyer and his work Colloquium with Juan Ramón Jiménez appeared.

Between 1937 and 1943 he founded three magazines, Verbum (1937), Silver Spur (1939-1941) and Nadie parecía (1942 -1944), and published the collection of poems Enemy rumor. Around this time he met the poets Gastón Baquero, Eliseo Diego and Cintio Vitier, who later joined the Orígenes Group.

Directed by Lezama and José Rodríguez Feo, Origenes was one of the most important cultural publications in Cuba at that time, it managed to publish forty issues between 1944 and 1956, and brought together a group of artists and intellectuals including, among others, Gastón Baquero, Eliseo Diego, Cintio Vitier, Fina García Marruz, Virgilio Piñera, Octavio Smith, Mariano Rodríguez and René Portocarrero. Among the foreign collaborators were Juan Ramón Jiménez, Aimé Césaire, Paul Valéry, Vicente Aleixandre, Albert Camus, Luis Cernuda, Paul Claudel, Macedonio Fernández, Paul Éluard, Gabriela Mistral, Octavio Paz, Alfonso Reyes and Theodore Spencer, among others.

Lezama's activity in this period was almost feverish: in addition to directing and editing Origenes, between 1945 and 1959 he was an official in the Department of Culture of the Ministry of Education, he published two collections of poems (Aventuras sigilosas and La fijeza), two essays (Arístides Fernández and Analecta del reloj) and undertook the only two trips he he did outside the island, the first to Mexico in 1949 and the second to Jamaica in 1950. Also, it was in those years that he published the first chapters of his novel Paradiso, which he did not finish for almost twenty years. years later.

In 1954, a dispute between Lezama and Rodríguez Feo caused the latter to leave Origenes, which only published three more issues until it closed two years later.

In January 1957, he gave a series of five lectures at the National Institute of Culture, which were collected in his book La expresión americana, one of his most important essays, and the following year he published Treaties in Havana, a collection of articles and essays written between 1937 and 1957.

Cuban Revolution and work at Casa de las Américas

With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, he was appointed director of the Department of Literature and Publications of the National Institute of Culture, from where he directed important collections of classic and Spanish books.

In 1961 he acted as a jury for the Casa de las Américas Award, in the poetry category, participating again in two other editions (1965 and 1967).

In the framework of this call, he personally met Julio Cortázar in 1963, who had been invited as a jury in the novel category, and with whom he had been writing since 1957, based on a copy of Origins that they had sent to the Argentine. The friendship between the two authors was one of the most famous and fruitful encounters between two emblematic figures of Spanish-American literature. In addition to the correspondence and the heartfelt dedications that the Cuban made to him, the mutual admiration produced a generous critical exchange: Cortázar was a great disseminator of Lezama's work thanks to his essay "To get to Lezama Lima", included in his book -collage Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, published in 1967; and in turn, Lezama wrote the prologue to the Cuban edition of Rayuela, «Cortázar and the beginning of the other novel", collected later in The bewitched quantity .

On September 12, 1964, he suffered a severe blow with the death of his mother, with whom he had a strong emotional bond. This loss was the second most important in his life, after that of his father, and he accompanied him for the rest of his days, to the point of saying "I began to grow old the day my mother died."

On December 5 of the same year, he married his secretary, María Luisa Bautista. In 1965 he held the position of researcher and advisor to the Institute of Literature and Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences. It is at that time that he published his Anthology of Cuban poetry in three volumes.

Paradiso appearance and controversy

In 1966 he published his first and only novel to appear while still alive, Paradiso. The laborious writing process, which took him seventeen years, demonstrates the central character that Lezama gave to this text within his work.

Conceived as the synthesis and culmination of his poetic system, the novel follows the formation of the poet José Cemí, from his childhood, going back to his family origins, to his university years. It is a complex text, not only because of its baroque style and poetic exuberance, but also because of its heterogeneous nature, which combines narrative, poetic and essay elements, in a work of an initiation and partially autobiographical nature, which has led some to consider it as learning novel.

The appearance of Paradiso represented an event in the literary panorama of the time. The most effusive recognitions came from abroad, counting Octavio Paz and Julio Cortázar among the most enthusiastic. The Mexican Nobel Prize winner wrote:

Delhi, 3 April 1967.

José Lezama Lima, Havana.

Dear friend:

Thank you for sending Paradisso [sic] and Orbit. Thank you also for the generous words that accompany you. Leo Paradisso gradually, with growing astonishment and dazzling. A verbal building of incredible wealth; better said, not a building but a world of architectures in continual metamorphosis and, also, a world of signs—rumors that are configured in meanings, archipelagos of the sense that is made and undone—the slow world of the vertigo that revolves around that untouchable point that is before the creation and destruction of language, that point that is the heart, the nucleus of the language. In addition, it is the proof of what some of us guessed when we first met their poetry and criticism. A work in which you fulfill the promise you made to the Spanish of America Sor Juana, Lugones and a few more.
Your brotherly friend,

Eighth Peace

Cortázar, for his part, expressed:

In their higher moments Paradiso It is a ceremony, something that preceded all reading for purposes and literary modes; it has that aquecious presence typical of what was the primordial view of the eléatas, amalgam of what was later called poem and philosophy, naked confrontation of man with a sky of star sails. A work like that is not lee; you consult it, you advance through it line to line, juice to juice, in an intellectual and sensitive participation as tense and vehemently as that which from those lines and those juices seeks us and reveals us.

The Mexican critic Carlos Monsiváis also commented on the matter, evidencing the difficulty of classifying the work in the novelistic genre:

What is it? Paradiso? The multiplicity of its levels, of the orders of the knowledge involved, make impossible a single answer: it is treated of theogony; platonic dialogue about being, sex (orthodox and heterodox) and consciousness; fabulation and myth; revision and invention of the language, baroque monument. In any of these orders, Paradiso results in a totalizing exercise and achievement. (...) In Paradiso all is reconquest: reconquest of childhood; reconquest of the first joy and the first astonishment before knowledge; reconquest of the potentialities of a language that had perhaps never been ours, but that was there, at our disposal, to extinguish the conseja of the poverty of Spanish resources and to increase the legend of an ignorance that had left without exploring, conquering and assimilating a whole language; reconquering the metaphor,

These comments contrasted with the harsh official criticism of the Cuban communist party, which with exceptions such as Vitier or Carpentier, described it as a "hermetic, morbid, indecipherable and pornographic work", especially for its homoerotic passages. During this controversy (which included the withdrawal of the novel from bookstores), the support of Cortázar was fundamental, who managed to get his essay «To get to Lezama Lima» published in the magazine Casa de las Américas, which meant important support for Lezama in the face of attacks from the most orthodox sectors of the government. Finally, the novel was published again, authorized by Fidel Castro.

In 1968, the Mexican publisher Era published a revised and corrected edition of the novel, illustrated by René Portocarrero and curated by Cortázar and Monsiváis, correcting the errors in the neglected Cuban edition. The same year, Lezama was part of the jury of the Julián del Casal Award, ruling in favor of the collection of poems Fuera del juego by Heberto Padilla, in contravention of the UNEAC verdict, which further deepened the distance between the writer and the official cultural authorities.

Last years, ostracism and death

Manuel Pereira and Lezama Lima, at one of the sessions Delific courseDecember 1970.

Despite no longer having official support, Lezama continued to be linked to the Casa de las Américas, for the third and last time as a juror for the Poetry Prize in 1967 and as a literary advisor in 1969; He also published his Complete Poetry and the volumes Possible Images and The Bewitched Quantity , which collected essays written in previous years.

The episode known as the Padilla Case in 1971 marked the beginning of the so-called Grey Quinquenio (1971-1976), a period in which the attempt to impose socialist realism from official cultural organizations caused a wave of persecution and censorship of writers and artists considered "counterrevolutionaries", such as Virgilio Piñera, Reinaldo Arenas and Lezama himself, who since then suffered public ostracism, with the prohibition of publishing their works or the mention of his name in the media. Subsequently, the authorities rectified that position, with the republishing of the work of the censored authors and the dissemination of critical works and tributes.

The correspondence that Lezama maintained with his sister Eloísa bears witness to those years of internal exile. When in 1972 he was awarded the Maldoror Poetry Prize in Madrid and the prize for the best Spanish-American work translated into Italian by Paradiso, Lezama could not go to collect either of the two awards:

I got your letter on the Italian prize. No wonder they say they haven't even received a letter of thanks. I sent them wires and I wrote to thank them. I haven't received the least indoor or outdoor news about the award. It's all very weird.

Complaints frequently pointed to the government's refusal to authorize their departure from the country:

At night Maria Luisa and I read some book that we like, like the wonderful Journal Paul Klee. It seems to me that I live those wonderful existences, while remaining, although with disgust, immobilized, since in the past year and in this I have received as six invitations to travel to Spain, to Mexico, to Italy, to Colombia, and always with the same result. I have to stay in my house until God wants.

Lezama's health, a lifelong asthmatic, began to deteriorate in his last months, due to his smoking habits and obesity. On August 8, 1976, he was admitted to the Calixto García Hospital as a result of a lung infection that he had developed, but he died at dawn due to a heart attack caused by his weakened general condition. However, there are controversies regarding the care received. While the doctor who accompanied Lezama in his last hours, José Luis Moreno del Toro, places part of the blame on Lezama himself (since he refused to be hospitalized a day before when everything was ready), there is speculation that that the care received at the hospital was not adequate, and that the medical team that received the writer did not know how to treat the situation.

He was buried the following day in the family tomb in the Colón Cemetery, along with his parents. A year later his unfinished posthumous novel, Oppiano Licario, sequel to Paradiso i>; and in 1978 Fragmentos a la imán de él , his last collection of poems, with a prologue by Cintio Vitier. The Mexican edition, again in charge of Era, carried a poem-prologue by Octavio Paz.

Tributes

• After operating as an extension of the Municipal Library, in 1994 his home of Trocadero 162 in Old Havana (where he resided since 1929 and where he received friends and readers) was converted into a museum dedicated to his life and work, which preserves the original furniture and library of Lezama, in addition to family portraits and paintings acquired by the writer. In 2010, in the context of the celebration of the centenary of the writer, the house was declared a National Historical Monument.

• Since 2000, the House of the Americas has awarded an honorary prize in the category of poetry with its name.

• In 2008, director Tomás Piard made a personal film adaptation Paradisowith the title The Moving Traveler. Far from being a linear reconstruction of the plot of the novel (impossible for its poetic density), the film reconstructs the story of José Cemí through different narrative planes, alternating the newest action with scenes where it reflects on the importance of the work of Lezama and specifically of Paradiso, and fragments of a report to the author, in which he recalls his life and the influence of his experiences in his work. It was produced by the ICAIC.

• In January 2011 the magazine Revolution and Culture, official organ of the Cuban Ministry of Culture, drew a number dedicated to Lezama Lima, with a selection of articles and reviews on his work, written by the Minister of Culture Abel Prieto, Dr. Luisa Campuzano, the poet Marilyn Bobes, the disciple of Lezama, Cintio Vitier, the researchers Felix Guerra and Ciro Bianchi and the exiled writer Fernando Velázquez Medina, among other intellectuals who thus paid tribute to the Master in his centenary.

Work

In Lezama, it is the passion of a writing that becomes body. Vitality of the senses reproducing itself in a knowledge made of images. Cultural spaces that make multiple presence and multiplier, inexhaustible force of suggestions. There are no limits to knowledge. Knowledge permeates knowledge, interconnects with knowledge. Times, works, authors, themes, times, ideas, are all, rotten pot, bullying profusion in which everything coexists with everything: the religious with the profane, the old with the modern, the immense with the tiny, the beautiful with the ugly, the tragic with the comic, the grotesque with the sublime. Lezama was a writer of a sweet word, filled with barrunts about the most extraordinary images. In it, the vocable sinks, like immense cucharón, in a broth that contains all the knowledge and all the flavors and manages to extract, unimaginably mixed, bites that are images, which are poetry. Lezama is a poet of the sensual; a writer of a word that is delight, which is pleasure, which is fullness. Lezama's aesthetic is the aesthetic of intuition and intuitiveness: primary perception where all the clairvoyances are found.
Rafael Faquié, Write the strange.

It is impossible to provide a complete and detailed exposition of Lezamian poetics, given the vastness of its influences and the complexity of its framework. Therefore, what follows is a synthesis of some of its most important elements, for guidance purposes only.

Poetic system of the world

Far from being thought of as a mere literary theory, Lezama's is a worldview, a vision of the world with Neoplatonic traits with pantheistic overtones in which Eros or Universal Love, God, establishes a harmony among all beings. Life, then, would be nothing more than a search to apprehend fixity, the unique essence of the world in the permanent temporal evolution. For Lezama, God emanates to the world from its own substance, but it is found in a sphere superior to the sphere of the world and inaccessible to man.

Within this worldview, which Lezama called the poetic system of the world, the concept of image occupies a central place, especially the poetic image. Lezama thinks of poetry as a path of spiritual perfection, an asceticism, since this would allow access to the contemplation of the fixity or essence of the world. And since the instrument of poetry is the word, it must be used in a way that makes it transcend its immediate communicative purpose, having to be transmuted into an image, which is why Lezama's texts work on a complex series of image associations. and allusions, which the reader must reconstruct. Thus, Lezam's poetic baroque does not respond to a mere rhetorical display, but a condensation of images and meanings that seeks to apprehend the meaning of the world, the pure and essential image.

Imaginary eras

From this conception of image and poetry, Lezama postulates another relevant concept in the corpus of his work: the imaginary eras, which he partially enunciates in La expresión americana, but will develop more in depth in later essays. The imaginary eras do not always coincide with the chronological continuity of history, rather they are moments or individuals who manage to transcend their moment and their era, and access a higher plane, that of the poetic imago. As Lezama wrote in "From poetry":

In the millennia, demanded by a culture, where the image acts on certain exceptional historical circumstances, by becoming the fact into a living metaphorical causality, is where those imaginary eras are located. The history of poetry cannot be anything but the study and expression of the imaginary eras.

Alvina Camacho-Gingerich defines imaginary eras as "circumstances, concepts, exceptional periods, which, when trapped by poetic imagination and image, become archetypal and, therefore, living, eternal and universal", whose most outstanding features are "the fabulous, the marvelous or supernatural, the unconditioned, the different and a desire for integration and incorporation into a whole or unity".

In the same study, and following Lezama, the author mentions the following imaginary eras:

• The phylogeneratriz, which includes the study of the tribes of the times my remote ones: the idumeos, the scites and the chichimecas among them. This era includes the study of the tothemic philic and of all the old (mythic) forms of reproduction.

• The stupend of Egyptian culture. For the Egyptians, death follows the same course as life, and life is installed in the bosom of death. The figure of Osiris, the son of Keb, the god of the earth, and of Nut, the goddess of heaven, embodies that synthesis of heaven and earth, of the divine and human. Lezama says that Egypt is "the only country in the world that in prehistory offers a religious and expressive fullness".

• The orific and the Etruscan, of great importance in his work. Orpheus, son of Apollo, the first to show a double nature; of divine origin, sings for humans. From Orpheus says Lezama who preludes Christ for his dual status as human and divine (he was the son of Apollo) and for being the first to descend into the underworld. With the Etruscans, says Lezama, the potensThat ability to believe that there is nothing so unbelievable or so impossible that it cannot be realized: “if possible, it is credible, it is verifiable”.

• The mirror of identity in Parménides; being as an expression of the divine; study of poetry from Parminides to Valery, of the identities stumbled into substance and substance in the sacral cord.

• The study of Chinese foundations: Taoism, the confucian library, the library as a dragon, the phrase of Confucius “I do not invent, I only transmit”; the conjures of the Yi King. Many Taoist themes will have a great impact on the Lezamian work: the mirror, the Great One, the sphere, the regressus ad uterum, “return to the matrix”, or return to the antenatal origins, “which were for the Chinese the return to the Lexian”.

• The cult of blood, as seen in the cultures of Druids and Aztecs.

• The Incaic Stones; the Biblical Flood; the phrase of Nietzsche «In every stone there is an image».

• The Catholic concepts of grace, charity and resurrection; these first two concepts are very important, for they establish an ambivalent relationship between man and the gods: the more grace we are given, the greater the return of charity. And with the resurrection, man attains fullness and eternal life; through it we participate "in the other kingdom of God". For Lezama, only three worlds have been able to inhabit the historical image: the Etruscan, the feudal order caroling and the Catholic; in the latter, poetry reaches its greatest fullness, for in its two great themes, the metapheric gravitation of the substance of the non-existent and the resurrection, is the germ of all great poetry.

• The infinite possibility, which among the Cubans is incarnated by José Martí, whose spirit of poverty leads to poetic creation, to an infinite possibility, because to be poor means to penetrate the unknown and to be surrounded by the miracle, "is the expectation, until it becomes creative, of the distance between things".

The American Expression

In an inclined appearance towards the most remote of a universal past, between real and mythical, Lezama im tirelessly sought the roots of the present Cuban, of the Cuban man, and in doing so illuminated the mental subsoils, the deep layers of all Latin America.

Julio Cortázar

The earliest attempt by Lezama Lima to test a theorization about the American condition dates from 1937, when his Colloquium with Juan Ramón Jiménez took place, published a year later in the Cuban Magazine and collected much later in Analecta del reloj. In his encounter with the Spanish poet, Lezama develops a claim for Cuban "insularity", understood not as a geographical condition but on the level of poetic sensibility. Thus, Lezama distinguishes between an insular sensibility and a continental sensibility, represented by Cuba and Mexico respectively.

To the internalizing effect that Juan Ramón gives to the insular condition, Lezama counterposes an optimistic universalism: the island is not a space that leads to introspection and discouragement, or that condemns cultural isolation (a vision expressed by Virgilio Piñera in La isla en peso), but rather a privileged space for transit and meeting, a space for the creation of a mestizo expression. With these ideas, Lezama sought to propose the insular character as a constituent element of Cubanness of national identity. This singularity of Cuba would place it, along with Mexico and Argentina, as axes of American identity:

Argentinian people have long tried to cope with their myth, whose symbolic form is embodied in "The Cross of the South". If they had more determined sociologists, they would strive to twist what we have agreed to call the path of civilization, which we have so far assumed to go from east to west. They are in love with a voluntary error and claim that the route is vertical, from north to south. An external arrogance moves them to consider the other fellows as old deflated tanglers. The Mexicans, undeniably, since they rely on a Spanish chronist, throw their claim, which is delight of one of their current humanists; they abruptly stop the traveler and assure him that he has reached the most transparent region of the air. We, forcibly bound by water borders to a teleology, to put ourselves on the track of our only telos, do not exaggerate by saying that Argentina, Mexico and Cuba are the three Spanish-American countries that could organize an expression. We, islanders, have lived without religiosity, under species of passengers accidents, and it is not our arrogance that can lead us to ridicule. We have lacked pride of expression, we have recured to vice, which is elegance in the delightful geometry of the flower, and the work of art is not given among us as a subterprigenous requirement but as a frustration of vitality.

José Lezama Lima

But it would not be until twenty years later that these ideas would crystallize in the lecture series The American Expression (1957). In this work, Lezama rereads American history in a poetic key, giving Baroque art a central place, a position that will bring him closer to Alejo Carpentier, the other Cuban author who defends this movement as a key to explaining the American condition. However, Lezama's vision is notably different from that of the author of El reino de este mundo.

Carpentier seeks to inscribe the Latin American singularity in a kind of historical continuity of different times and cultures, through the "theory of contexts", developed in the essay Problems of the current Latin American novel , for which he maintains that the Baroque is not only an artistic movement that emerged in Europe in the 17th century, but that it is "a kind of creative drive", a constant that is repeated cyclically throughout the time, given that "all symbiosis, all miscegenation engenders a baroque". It is a much more comprehensive conception, which dilutes the essence of the baroque in manifestations as different as Russian architecture, French literature, Indian culture, etc..

Lezama rejects this universalist and transhistorical conception, since he is not interested in locating the American singularity in relation to cultures from other latitudes (not to be confused with imaginary eras, since these are not united by a common aesthetic), but to investigate its character and nature. For Lezama, the baroque is a purely American and Iberian expression, the result of miscegenation. In his essay "The Baroque Curiosity" he describes two characteristics of the American baroque: tension and plutonism. The tension refers to a way of organizing the elements that does not remain in the mere accumulation, but produces a counterpoint from the opposition of these, a counterpoint that seeks to be resolved in an overcoming unification, manifested in the mestizo culture. Plutonism, for its part, is not a concept that has thanatic connotations, but refers to the ability to create something new from the fusion of opposite and fragmentary elements. This is why Lezama defines the American baroque as a «art of the counter-conquest», an expression in which the Brazilian critic Irlemar Chiampi sees a political orientation:

The decisive thing in this americanization of the Baroque is the orientation to modernize it with that concept of revolutionary art, in full premodernity. By differentiating our European Baroque, by reversing the terms of Weisbach ("baroque, art of the Counter-Reform"), Lezama wants to reveal a content opposed to the Baroque Scolista, which is used for propaganda and persuasion of Catholic dogmatics, according to the statute of the ecclesia militans of the Jesuits. On the contrary, due to its diabolical/symbolic appetite, the Baroque operates as a counter-catechesis that outlines the underground policy and the conflicting experience of the colony's transculturating mestizos. On the other hand, by showing in his design of our becoming the continuity of poiesis demoniac—from the 17th to the 20th century—the baroque ceases to be "historical", a perfect pretery condemned for reactionary and conservative, and becomes our permanent modernity, the other modernity, outside the progressive schemes of linear history, the unfolding of the logos Hegeliano. Baroque is, for Lezama, our metahistory.

In short, Lezama agrees with Carpentier in recognizing the importance of the Hispanic influence, but restricts the concept of baroque to the American sphere, at the same time that he updates it and considers it a continuous evolution in permanent mutation. If Carpentier attributes to the American the features of the marvelous real as signs of identity already closed and made, Lezama maintains that the baroque, due to its very characteristics (tension and plutonism) is renewed and updated at every moment, even today.

These ideas would later be taken up and reworked by different authors, especially by Severo Sarduy, who proposed the concept of neo-baroque based on Lezama's ideas, but it can be seen in other Cuban writers, such as Reinaldo Arenas and, more recently, Fernando Velazquez Medina and Froilan Escobar.

A diverse interpretation of The American Expression, with the explanatory added subtitle of "A Treatise on Applied Aesthetics", is the one elaborated by Aullón de Haro in the study he put before his edition of the work in 2020. This study is in turn based on the strictly philosophical examination carried out by the same critic ten years earlier in his reconstruction of the premeditated labyrinth of Lezamian thought through the selection of purely theoretical texts by the author with the title of Escritos de Estética. In this way, Lezama's powerful and disseminated theoretical labyrinth is clearly reconstructed as Aesthetics for both American and European or Western culture, even in the sense of a brilliant alternative, subsequent to the critical-philological work of Curtius and parallel to the aesthetics of the second half of the XX century.

Works

Novel

• Paradiso (1966)
• Oppiano Licario (1977)

Poetry

• Death of Narcissus (1937)
• Enemy rumor (1941)
• Sigilous adventures (1945)
• The fijeza (1949)
• Dice (1960)
• Fragments to your magnet (1977)

Essay

• Colloquium with Juan Ramón Jiménez (1938)
• Arístides Fernández (1950)
• Watch analysis (1953)
• The American Expression (1957)
• Productos veterinarios en La Habana (1958)
• Possible images (1970)
• The hechized amount (1970)

Anthologies

• Anthology of Cuban poetry (1965)
• Orbita de Lezama Lima (1966)
• Anthology of the Cuban story (1968)
• Complete poetry (1970)
• Introduction to the morphic vessels (1971)
• You were imaginary. (1971)
• Image and possibility (1981)
• Reports (1987)
• Aesthetic writings (2010)

Other works by Lezama and related ones

• Gonzalez Cruz, Ivan. Lezama in her diaries in: Latin American Journals of the 20th Century. Edition of Ana Gallego Cuiñas, Christian Estrade, Fatiha Idmhand. Bruxelles: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2016.
• Gonzalez Cruz, Ivan. Lezama and the cinematographer in: Letral Magazine. Revista Electrónica de Estudios Transatlánticos de Literatura, number 4, 2010. [Monographic Lezama Lima] [1]
• Gonzalez Cruz, Ivan. Lezama or stone guest in: Aldabonazo in Trocadero 162. Edition of William Navarrete and Regina Ávila. Valencia: Aduana Vieja, 2008.
• Gonzalez Cruz, Ivan. Dictionary. Life and work of José Lezama Lima [Second part] Valencia: Editorial de la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, 2006, pp. 1-1791. [Contains unpublished drawings of Miquel Barceló]
• Gonzalez Cruz, Ivan. Anthology for a poetic system in the world. Valencia: Editorial de la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, en dos tomos, 2004, pp. 1-903.
• Gonzalez Cruz, Ivan. Dictionary. Life and work of José Lezama Lima [First part] Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 2000, pp. 1-676.
• Gonzalez Cruz, Ivan. Lezama Lima. Madrid: Philosophical Library of Orthal Editions, 1999, pp. 1-94.
• Lezama Lima, José. Journals. Critical edition of Iván González Cruz. Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2014, pp. 1-243.
• Lezama Lima, José. Lezama-Michavila: art and humanism. Critical edition of Iván González Cruz. Valencia: Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno [IVAM], 2006, pp. 1-315.
• Lezama Lima, José. Imago. Archive of José Lezama Lima. Critical edition of Iván González Cruz. Valencia: Consellería de Empresa, Universidad y Ciencia, 2005, pp. 1-287. [Contains: Notebook of unprecedented Lezama and unpublished epistolary notes. ]
• Lezama Lima, José. Poetry and prose. Anthology. Iván González Cruz Edition. Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2002, pp. 1-365.
• Lezama Lima, José. The American Gnostic Space. Archive of José Lezama Lima. Critical edition of Iván González Cruz. Valencia: Editorial de la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, 2001, pp. 1-460. [Contains: Unpuntested Lezama notebooks and unpublished epistolary. ]
• Lezama Lima, José. The infinite possibility. Archive of José Lezama Lima. Critical edition of Iván González Cruz. Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2000, pp. 1-309. [Contains: Lezama's Unpuntested Notebook and his unknown texts. ]
• Lezama Lima, José. Album of the friends of José Lezama Lima. [Edición facsimilar] Transcription by Iván González Cruz and Diana María Ivizate González. Introduction, chronology and notes by Iván González Cruz. Valencia: Editorial de la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, 1999, pp. 1-319.
• Lezama Lima, José. Archive of José Lezama Lima. Miscellaneous. Critical edition of Iván González Cruz. Madrid: Editorial Centro de Estudios Ramón Areces, 1998, pp. 1-869. [Contains: poems, essays, conference, and unpublished notes of Lezama and unpublished epistolary. ]
• Lezama Lima, José. Fascination of memory. Iván González Cruz Edition. Havana-Madrid: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1994, pp. 1-341.