Over the past few decades, a return to modernismo has been taking place in contemporary Spanish American literature. By “return” I do not mean, of course, an attempt to evoke and re-create modernismo as a whole, nor a wish to revive old-fashioned styles and ways of writing. I am referring instead to allusions to modernismo, some as short as a few pages and others as lengthy as a novel, that can be found in many significant works of Spanish American narrative and poetry from the late 1960s until today. My purpose in this brief concluding chapter is to present an overview of these remnants of modernismo and to offer some conjectures about the possible meaning of the retrospective glance recent Spanish American writers have taken at modernismo.

In 1974, two major “dictator novels” were published which contain detailed evocations of modernismo: El recurso del método (Reasons of State) by Alejo Carpentier and El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch) by Gabriel García Márquez. Roberto González Echevarría has remarked on the profound reflections on modernismo's cultural significance found in El recurso del método, whose main character is a music-loving Francophile dictator of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Latin America who, among other things, in one of his speeches, plagiarizes shamelessly Ernest Renan's Prière sur l’Acropole (1876). For his part, the “patriarch” in García Márquez's novel, although a coarser member of the dictatorial species, nevertheless enjoys the poetry of Rubén Darío. García Márquez himself has pointed out that the pages-long sentences of El otoño del patriarca contain numerous verbatim quotes from Darío's verses, as well as of his prose poems. The link between dictatorship and modernismo in these novels is deliberate: there is clearly a parallel between the dictator, whose authority emanates from his voice, from orality, and the modernistas’ attempts to attain literary authority by means of the evocation of music and the spoken word in writing.