Arqueles Vela's short story collection Señorita Etcetera, a landmark of Mexico's Stridentist movement, is considered to be the first work of avant-garde prose from Latin America. The title story was written the same year as Ulysses, albeit "a microbe to the monster of Joyce's novel," as Vela would put it in an interview with Roberto Bolaño shortly before his death. Expressing the alienation of the new urban environment and the breakdown of traditional values in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, it follows a series of increasingly abstracted encounters between the narrator and an elusive woman with a plural, contradictory character, whose memory haunts him. "If you reread Señorita Etcetera, you'll see that it's the 'I' that creates everything," said Vela decades later. "The conflicts, the realizations: the reality that exists doesn't exist except through the 'I.'" This theme of fragmented identity and reality resurfaces in A Provisional Crime, a parody of murder mysteries in which the riddle is not who the killer is, but which of his many selves is the killer, as well as Nobody's Café, which mythologized the café that served as the gathering place for the Stridentists, in real life known as Café Europa, but given its famous nickname due to its desolation. "Nobody cares for it or administers it," Vela wrote. "No waiters bother the customers, nor does anybody serve them anything... We are the café's only customers, the only ones who don't pervert its spirit." According to the poet Germán List Arzubide, movement leader Manuel Maples Arce simply entered the café one day, found no one and nothing but a pot of coffee, served himself a cup, drank it, and left a tip for the waitress he never once saw. Originally a chronicle of life at the Cabaret Voltaire of Anahuac, the story centers on two men, fictionalized versions of Maples Arce and Vela himself, who haunt the back tables. "In this angle of the café, our intellectual and sentimental laboratory, Maples Arce erected the scaffolding of his poems," Vela would write. "Señorita Etcetera rebuilt the forms and languidities of women compiled in a certain chair."
Arqueles Vela's short story collection Señorita Etcetera, a landmark of Mexico's Stridentist movement, is considered to be the first work of avant-garde prose from Latin America. The title story was written the same year as Ulysses, albeit "a microbe to the monster of Joyce's novel," as Vela would put it in an interview with Roberto Bolaño shortly before his death. Expressing the alienation of the new urban environment and the breakdown of traditional values in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, it follows a series of increasingly abstracted encounters between the narrator and an elusive woman with a plural, contradictory character, whose memory haunts him. "If you reread Señorita Etcetera, you'll see that it's the 'I' that creates everything," said Vela decades later. "The conflicts, the realizations: the reality that exists doesn't exist except through the 'I.'" This theme of fragmented identity and reality resurfaces in A Provisional Crime, a parody of murder mysteries in which the riddle is not who the killer is, but which of his many selves is the killer, as well as Nobody's Café, which mythologized the café that served as the gathering place for the Stridentists, in real life known as Café Europa, but given its famous nickname due to its desolation. "Nobody cares for it or administers it," Vela wrote. "No waiters bother the customers, nor does anybody serve them anything... We are the café's only customers, the only ones who don't pervert its spirit." According to the poet Germán List Arzubide, movement leader Manuel Maples Arce simply entered the café one day, found no one and nothing but a pot of coffee, served himself a cup, drank it, and left a tip for the waitress he never once saw. Originally a chronicle of life at the Cabaret Voltaire of Anahuac, the story centers on two men, fictionalized versions of Maples Arce and Vela himself, who haunt the back tables. "In this angle of the café, our intellectual and sentimental laboratory, Maples Arce erected the scaffolding of his poems," Vela would write. "Señorita Etcetera rebuilt the forms and languidities of women compiled in a certain chair."
Über den Autor
Arqueles Vela (1899-1977) is a cult author if there ever was one: though he is cited as writing the first piece of avant-garde prose in Latin America (La Señorita Etcétera, 1922) and forming part of Mexico's Stridentist movement, which became a password for later generations of literary rebels, there is much about him we don't know - even his country of birth. Some sources mention Guatemala, others Mexico. As editorial secretary of El Universal Ilustrado, he championed Mariano Azuela, the great novelist of the Mexican Revolution, and up-and-coming writers like Gilberto Owen. He took an irreverent approach to the magazine: one article, for example, was illustrated entirely with photos of women's hands, even though this had nothing to do with the text. He used his editorial position to defend the early poetry of Manuel Maples Arce, controversial founder of Stridentism, which led Maples Arce to recruit him for the [...] early writings contained few signs of the revolutionary impact of his breakthrough story, "La Señorita Etcétera", first published in El Universal Ilustrado the following year. Later included in his first collection, Nobody's Café, published in 1926, this story introduced experimental prose techniques to Mexican literature when much European modernist literature had not yet been published in Latin America. When Maples Arce moved Stridentism's base to Veracruz to take advantage of the governor's offer to patronize the movement, Vela stayed behind in Mexico City; he later went to Spain as a foreign correspondent and spent several years traveling around Europe. His first novel, The Non-Transferable Man, built on the innovations of his early stories, went unpublished for 50 years due to the collapse of the Stridentist movement. Upon returning to Mexico in the early 1930s, Vela worked for the Public Education Secretariat, promoting the arts at night schools for workers. He resumed writing fiction in the forties, albeit in a somewhat less experimental key. These later works have largely fallen into neglect and his reputation rests on his writings of the 1920s - above all, Nobody's Café and La Señorita Etcétera. He died in Mexico City in 1977.
