Collecting from the Margins: Material Culture in a Latin American Context 9781611487336, 9781611487343, 9781611487350

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Collecting from the Margins

Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

Copyright © 2016. Bucknell University Press. All rights reserved. Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

Collecting from the Margins Material Culture in a Latin American Context Copyright © 2016. Bucknell University Press. All rights reserved.

Edited by María Mercedes Andrade

Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

Published by Bucknell University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com

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Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield Cover Photo © Claudio de Casas All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-61148-733-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61148-734-3 (electronic) ISBN 978-1-61148-735-0 (pbk : alk. paper) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

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For Marcelo and Mauricio, my two loves

Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

Copyright © 2016. Bucknell University Press. All rights reserved. Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction María Mercedes Andrade

1

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A Note on Translations

13

1 Sacking the Botanical Expedition: Natural and Military History in the First Museum of Colombia Felipe Martínez-Pinzón 2 An “Immense Museum” or an “Immense Tomb”?: War and the Rhetoric of Continuity in the Writings of Francisco Moreno Javier Uriarte 3 Of bayaderas, congaïs, and fumerías: “Virtual” Collecting in De Marsella á Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón, by Enrique Gómez Carrillo Olga Vilella 4 “That heteroclite assembly”: Collecting, Modernity, and the “Savage Mind” in De sobremesa María Mercedes Andrade 5 Postcards, Autographs, and Modernismo: Rubén Darío on Popular Collecting and Textual Practices Andrew Reynolds 6 Delmira Agustini, Gender, and the Poetics of Collecting Shelley Garrigan vii

Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

15

35

49

75

93 115

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Contents

7 “I have put all I possess at the disposal of the people’s struggle”: Pablo Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet Kelly Austin 8 Antropofagia, Bricolage, Collage: Oswald de Andrade, Augusto de Campos, and the Author as Collector Fernando Pérez Villalón 9 From the Space of the Wunderkammer to Macondo’s Wonder Rooms: The Collection of Marvels in Cien años de soledad Jerónimo Arellano 10 Collecting Revisited (and Left Behind): The Treasure Chambers in Ruy Guerra’s Eréndira and Portugal S.A. Ilka Kressner

141

165

183

203

219

About the Contributors

225

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Index

Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.1

Rufino Blanco-Fombona, Postcard to Rúben Darío 99

Fig. 5.2

First postcard from La Revista Moderna series

100

Fig. 8.1

Augusto de Campos “SS”

176

Fig. 8.2

Manuscript note provided by Augusto de Campos on “SS”

177

Fig. 9.1

Wood engraving, interior of Ferrante Imperato’s wonder chamber 184

Fig. 9.2

Neo Museum Wormianum. Installation

191

Fig. 10.1

Jacinto visiting Boaventura’s stables

207

Fig. 10.2

Padre Francisco’s chess game

210

ix Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

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Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions provided help for various stages in this project. I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the Universidad de los Andes, from which I received a research grant that allowed me to develop the article that I wrote for this volume and the theoretical framework for the project as a whole as well as to present initial versions of my research at various conferences. I also received support from the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University, where I was a visiting scholar between 2010 and 2011. Thanks to this invitation, I was able to spend many fruitful hours at Columbia’s Butler Library; I am grateful to Professor Carlos Alonso for having made this possible. I also thank Francisco Morán, editor of the journal La Habana elegante, for the opportunity he gave me to put together a dossier on collecting, which constituted my first attempt to bring together a plurality of voices on the topic. I am grateful to Edward Cutler for inviting me to present my work at the Humanities Center at Brigham Young University and to Matthew Wickman, the director of the center, for his hospitality and for the fruitful conversations I had with him and his colleagues. I want to give special thanks to Daniela Gutiérrez, a former student who worked as my assistant during the initial stages of the manuscript and whose help in formatting the text was truly invaluable. I also want to express my immense gratitude to the authors who participated in this project, for their exemplary professionalism but also for their patience and good humor during the many revisions and rewritings that were involved, and their willingness to work together in the completion of this book. Although many of us have yet to meet in person, the academic community that we developed during this collaboration will remain for me a model for projects to come. Thank you also to Greg Clingham, editor at Bucknell University Press, for believing in this project and encouraging me to continue with it, as well as to the editorial xi

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xii

Acknowledgments

team at Bucknell University Press and Rowman & Littlefield and to Ms. Sam Brawand for her professionalism in copyediting the final manuscript. I am very grateful for the insightful suggestions that the two anonymous reviewers made about how improve this manuscript: this volume would not be what it is today if it had not been for their comments. The other authors in this volume and I would like to give special thanks to those who allowed us to include their work in this volume. Special thanks go to the photographer Claudio de Casas and the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid for their generosity not only for allowing us to use the image that is on the cover of this book but also for providing an excellent copy of it. The photograph is originally part of the catalog for the exhibition Amor al mar: Las caracolas de Pablo Neruda, published by the Instituto Cervantes in 2009. Thank you also to Luz Bejarano from the Insituto Cervantes for all her help. We are grateful to the Biblioteca Histórica “Marqués de Valdecilla” at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid for permitting us to use the images of Ruben Darío’s postcards, which appear in the chapter by Andrew Reynolds, as well as to the poet Augusto de Campos, who gave us permission to reprint the image from his poem “SS” and the manuscript note regarding the possible meaning of the title, both of which are included in Fernando Pérez Villalon’s chapter. We thank the photographer Jens Anstrup and the Natural History Museum of Denmark for allowing us to print a copy of the installation by Rosamund Purcell “One Room,” which appears in Jerónimo Arellano’s chapter. Thank you also to Birgitte Rubaek of the Natural History Museum of Denmark for her help in this process and to the Smithsonian Museum for permitting us to the image of Ole Worm’s cabinet of curiosities. Kelly Austin’s “‘I have put all I possess at the disposal of the people’s struggle’: Pablo Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet” was published in The Comparatist 32 (May 2008): 40–62, and it appears here with the permission of the University of North Carolina Press. Jerónimo Arellano’s “From the Space of the Wunderkammer to Macondo’s Wonder Rooms: The Collection of Marvels in Cien años de soledad” was published in Hispanic Review 78, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 369–86, and we publish it here thanks to the permission granted by Penn Press. Parts of my article “That heteroclite assembly”: Collecting, Modernity, and “The Savage Mind” appeared in Spanish, in a significantly different version, in La Habana elegante in 2009. I also want to express my gratitude to all the friends and colleagues with whom I have had many inspiring conversations on these topics over the years: to Alejandro Mejías-López and Olga Vilella for our shared enthusiasm for modernismo and for the occasions we have had to share our work, although they are too few and too far apart; to Edward Cutler for our discussions about Benjamin, the romantics, and the language of objects; to Julio Paredes for our many conversations about collections and collectors; to my colleague David Solodkow for sharing his bibliography on Latin American

Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

Acknowledgments

xiii

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decolonialism; and to Marcela Medina, Alonso Botero, María Carolina Sánchez, Catalina Acevedo, and Carolina Sanín for their friendship. I am grateful also to my parents, Juan Andrade and Helga Restrepo, and my sisters, Inés Elvira and Juanita, for their support. Finally and most importantly, I thank my two sons, Mauricio and Marcelo, for all the happiness they bring to my life.

Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

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Introduction

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María Mercedes Andrade

The activity of collecting and the role that it has played in the development of modern, Western culture is a topic that has long been the subject of discussion by writers, artists, and scholars working in various fields. Given that collecting, both private and institutional, has been instrumental in the consolidation of certain notions of the individual and of the nation, numerous studies have addressed its complex political, social, economic, anthropological, and psychological implications. From the Wunderkammern of the Renaissance to the souvenir collections of today, selecting, accumulating, and organizing objects are practices that are central to our notions of who we are and what we value both as individuals and as societies. The collection, a site where our innermost desires and beliefs are materialized, is a privileged vantage point from which to think about the processes by which we constitute ourselves as individuals and as societies. Writers such as Jean Baudrillard have spoken eloquently about the way in which, in modern societies, objects become “intimately bound with the subject.” In his words, they are “no longer simply material bodies offering a certain resistance, they become mental precincts over which I hold sway, they become things of which I am the meaning.” 1 Collecting is consequently much more than a marginal activity, and instead it is central to the process of the formation of identities, both of individuals and of groups. As Walter Benjamin, a writer whose reflections on collecting are perhaps among the most suggestive, has discussed, the collector lives in the objects he acquires, and thus the passion for collecting is tied directly to the way we try to understand and constitute ourselves through an act of selecting, acquiring, and ordering the material world. 2 Although the task of accumulating things is evidently common to many societies, collecting has a specific trajectory in Western culture, as it is bound to certain notions of private property, of the self, as well as of rationality and 1

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2

Introduction

order. Concerning the questions of ownership and its relationship to selfhood, James Clifford has pointed out that the modern activity of collecting is tied to the development of the notion of “an ideal self as owner,” which, following C. B. Macpherson, he traces back to the seventeenth century and the origins of capitalism. 3 According to this notion, the self, whether an individual or a group, acquires an identity through the accumulation of property. It is the role of this self to select certain objects that are considered valuable and to arrange them according to aesthetic or scientific criteria in a new setting, the collection, which endows them with a meaning that they previously did not have. For this reason, Susan Stewart has argued that “just as . . . the collection can serve as a metaphor for individual personality, so the collection can also serve as a metaphor for the social relations of an exchange economy”: it expresses “the interior of the self” as well as the system of capitalist exchange. 4 Collections reflect the system of values of a culture, and consequently, when viewed from a historical perspective, one may read in them the development of Western modes of thought. According to Susan M. Pearce, modern collecting becomes possible once certain “axioms” have been accepted, among which she includes the belief in the power of human reason to comprehend the world and the need for material evidence in this process of comprehension: “Collections, therefore, do not merely demonstrate knowledge; they are knowledge.” 5 Consequently, as certain Western notions of knowledge developed, so too did the ways in which collecting was practiced and understood. Thus, while in the sixteenth century objects acquired in the “New World” entered the European context as marvels and curiosities, by the nineteenth century they tended to be valued for their antiquity and scarcity, and, in the case of manmade objects, they began to be seen as either artworks or as ethnographic examples in the twentieth. 6 Additionally, while the principle that governed the selection of objects in the Wunderkammer was eclecticism and the desire to cause amazement through juxtaposition, after the Enlightenment, the newly developed taxonomic and scientific models increasingly guided the activity of collecting. As a later development, bourgeois, nineteenth-century private collections followed either scientific or aesthetic selection criteria. In all of these cases, regardless of whether items in the collection are arranged according to scientific or aesthetic standards, it is essential to note that collecting is understood as a rule-bound activity, one that puts into practice certain notions of order and rationality. Clearly, not all accumulations of objects are collections: a process of discernment and differentiation must necessarily accompany the task of the collector as certain objects are chosen or discarded. In fact, one may go so far as to say that “the collection is not constructed by its elements; rather, it comes to exist by means of its principle of organization.” 7 In other words, the criteria that

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Introduction

3

govern the collection precede it, and the processes of selection and acquisition are subsequent steps. In collections, objects are abstracted from their practical function and integrated into a system “through which the subject strives to construct a world, a private totality.” 8 Collecting dislocates an object from its original environment and attempts to invest it with a meaning beyond its mere existence or functionality by inserting it into a new system. In Benjamin’s words, it can thus be viewed as “a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system.” 9 The meaning of an object is no longer the one it originally had in virtue of its belonging to a certain context or having a specific function, as it acquires another one within the newly created system that is the collection. This narrative, which authors such as Clifford and Walter D. Mignolo have deemed “redemptive,” is undoubtedly also related to questions of power, as it ascribes to some cultures the role of endowing objects with meaning through a process of selection and classification, while others are assigned the task of furnishing the “raw materials,” the objects to be collected. 10 In general terms, one may say that collecting, as it has been conceived throughout the development of modern Western cultures, is understood as an activity that rescues an object that is considered valuable because of its spatial or temporal distance, by reinscribing it within a new setting. From a political and historical perspective, one must not forget that the activity of collecting played a crucial role in the development of the ideology of Western colonialism and imperialism as objects from the colonies made their way to the metropolis. Thus, “as Europe became the core of a truly global system after the sixteenth century the number of exotic objects—now also from the Americas—entering its countries also dramatically increased,” and an entire system of acquisition and trade was developed. 11 Objects brought from distant lands, for display in both museums and private homes bore witness to Western political and economic power and were endowed with significance by those who owned them. However, as Nicholas Thomas has noted, as objects from other cultures appear as separated from their original context in the collection, they suffer a kind of “discursive deprivation,” as they no longer seem related to a human context in a way that “alienate[s] and exclude[s] humanity.” 12 These objects are no longer artifacts but things, the meaning of which is provided no longer by their human environment but by the subject who is able to bring them together. A similar argument can be made for natural objects, which are ripped from their environment in order to acquire a meaning through the classification that the collection provides. In this sense, one can argue that the Western tradition of collecting is instrumental in solidifying the idea that the role of the West is that of acting as a collecting subject who has the capacity to infuse with

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Introduction

meaning those decontextualized objects that have been brought from other parts of the world. It is not surprising that studies on collecting, as well as literary portrayals of the act of collecting, tend to focus on a Western collector, while non-European cultures are overwhelmingly represented as objects that are part of the collection. Taking into consideration such antecedents, the purpose of this anthology is precisely to counter the usual narrative and the division of labor that assigns Europe the role of collector and labels other subaltern cultures, such as that of Latin America, as purveyors of collectible, “exotic” objects. It stems from an interest in exploring what happens when a Latin American subject adopts the role of the collector for him- or herself, and it addresses what the possible consequences of this act may be. Has collecting been understood or portrayed differently in a Latin American context? Has it served functions similar to those it has had in European societies? Does the act of collecting, when viewed from a Latin American perspective, unsettle the way we think about it? What differences, if any, arise in the activity of collecting in colonized or previously colonial societies? How is one to think about the implications of this change of context? Such a perspective has been largely absent from the growing field of studies about collecting and material culture in European and U.S.-American contexts, an omission that reinforces inherited views concerning who occupies the position of legitimate collector. In the specific case of Latin American literature and culture, much work remains to be done, although it is worth noting that, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in material culture studies, particularly in the area of public collections such as museums and exhibitions. Galerías del Progreso: Museos, exposiciones y cultura visual en América Latina, edited by Beatriz González Stephan and Jens Andermann, for instance, brings together a series of essays that address issues related to the construction of national identities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the field of public exhibitions and museums. 13 In a similar manner, Shelley E. Garrigan’s Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity provides an in-depth discussion of “the story of Mexico’s political and cultural consolidation through a series of collected objects.” 14 Mario Humberto Ruz and Adam T. Sellen’s Las vitrinas de la memoria, los entresijos del olvido: Coleccionismo e invención de memoria cultural also contributes to the study of the role of museums in the formation of Mexican cultural identity. Additionally, some important work exists on the subject in the field of studies on modernismo, dispersed in articles and centered mostly on individual authors and the role that collectible objects play in their texts. Rosemary C. LoDato’s Beyond the Glitter: The Language of Gems in Modernista Writers Rubén Darío, Ramón del Valle-Inclán and José Asunción Silva is an important contribution in this sense. Other cases worth mentioning are Matías Ayala’s article “El

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Introduction

5

interior en el modernismo,” Nancy La Greca’s “Erotic Fetishism in the Short Prose of Almas y cerebros (1898) by Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–1927),” and Francisco Morán’s “El museo ideal de Julián del Casal: Caminando sobre cristales rotos.” 15 However, to my knowledge, there is to date no sustained discussion of the problems posed by the act of collecting, both private and public, that specifically addresses a Latin American perspective and how this perspective may lead to a reframing of previous theorizations on the subject, nor is there yet any work that approaches the topic from a broader historical standpoint that would allow one to establish connections and to trace differences among different versions of collecting in Latin America. This anthology attempts to broach these issues and to foster a reflection about the meanings and implications of the activity of collecting within a Latin American cultural context. The chapters are arranged in chronological order, and they span the period between the early nineteenth century and the twentieth. The historical point of departure is the period immediately following the wars of independence since it is at this time that the question of Latin American national identities emerges and becomes a political and social matter, in contrast with the colonial period, during which colonial subjects still identified with Spain. The first two chapters are devoted to the postindependence period: Felipe Martínez-Pinzón’s “Sacking the Botanical Expedition: Natural and Military History in the First Museum of Colombia” discusses the establishment of the country’s first national museum after the process of independence and how this museum was built on the remnants of the colonial scientific enterprise known as the “Botanical Expedition.” Javier Uriarte’s “An ‘Immense Museum’ or an ‘Immense Tomb?’ War and the Rhetoric of Continuity in the Writings of Francisco Moreno” addresses the period of postindependence Argentina and the way in which the traveler and collector Francisco Pascasio Moreno, whose collections would eventually become the origin of the La Plata Museum of Natural Sciences, transforms the Argentinean desert into a site for collecting while he simultaneously obscures the war that makes this situation possible. The next four chapters deal with the Latin American fin de siècle, a period characterized by the entrance of Latin America into the world economy as a provider of raw materials and by its growing contact with international material culture. Olga Vilella’s chapter, “Of bayaderas, congaïs, and fumerías: ‘Virtual’ Collecting in De Marsella á Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón by Enrique Gómez Carrillo,” discusses how the articles written by the Guatemalan writer for local newspapers engage in a form of virtual collecting that provides his public with a reified and sexualized image of the exotic “other.” Under the light of Jacques Ranciére’s notions of “dissensus” and of the “distribution of the aesthetic,” Andrew Reynolds’s “Postcards, Autographs, and Modernismo: Rubén Darío on Popu-

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Introduction

lar Collecting and Textual Practices” follows Ranciére’s notion of the “distribution of the sensible” in order to explore Rubén Darío’s awareness of how postcard collecting functions as a mechanism that helps democratize access to the aesthetic in the Latin American fin de siècle. My own chapter, “‘That heteroclite assembly’: Collecting, Modernity, and ‘The Savage Mind’ in De sobremesa,” addresses the activity of collecting as it appears in the novel by the Colombian writer José Asunción Silva and how this depiction of collecting destabilizes the hierarchies characteristic of European collections, where Latin America is usually represented as a collected object that is “redeemed” by a European collector. While these three chapters address the literary movement known as modernismo and the specificities of the way in which this movement was preoccupied with the significance of material culture, the last chapter devoted to the fin de siècle, Garrigan’s “Delmira Agustini: Gender and the Poetics of Collecting,” examines the way in which the work of the Uruguayan poet, unlike that of the modernistas, advances a notion of collecting in which the separation between subject and object is blurred through her problematization of desire. Collecting in twentieth-century Latin America is discussed in the four remaining chapters. Kelly Austin’s “‘I have put all I possess at the disposal of the people’s struggle’: Pablo Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet” addresses the complex relationship between collecting and translation in Neruda’s own collecting practice, as well as the dilemmas posed by his selfidentification as a communist and his practice as a private collector. Fernando Pérez Villalón’s chapter, “Antropofagia, Bricolage, Collage: Oswald de Andrade, Augusto de Campos, and the Author as Collector,” explores the idea that the poems of the avant-garde writer of the 1920s, as well as those of the Concrete Poet, function as a form of collage and thus as a collection that has political and critical implications. Jerónimo Arellano’s “From the Space of the Wunderkammer to Macondo’s Wonder Rooms: The Collection of Marvels in Cien Años de Soledad” discusses the way in which García Márquez reinterprets and transforms the collection model of the Wunderkammer in his novel by making the technological into an object of wonder, and he explores the critical implications of this move. Finally, Ilka Kressner, in her chapter, “Collecting Revisited (and Left Behind): The Treasure Chambers in Ruy Guerra’s Eréndira and Portugal S.A.,” discusses the chaotic collections of objects that appear in two of Ruy Guerra’s films and the way in which these films reject colonialist models of accumulation and question the practice of collecting in postcolonial societies by revealing its underlying violence. The perspective that is adopted in the present book owes its inspiration to what has come to be known as the decolonial tradition of Latin American thought. As Mignolo has shown, a decolonial perspective would question the assumption that there is “one ‘modernity of reference,’” before which all

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Introduction

7

other modernities appear as defective. 16 Mignolo’s argument is ultimately directed at the way in which “modernity/coloniality are two sides of the same coin,” that is to say, to the way in which colonialism reveals itself as the “darker side” of the modern project, an aspect that European narratives had tried to obscure. 17 In a similar manner, Enrique Dussel argues that “en el concepto emancipador de la ‘modernidad’ se encubre un mito” 18 [in the emancipating concept of “modernity,” a myth is concealed]. This “myth” is for him related to the way in which Europe posited itself as the center of modernity and as the rightful subject of history, while other peoples, in this case those of Latin America, were denied agency in the historical process by virtue of their alleged “inmadurez” [immaturity]. 19 Such point of departure would allow one to address the way in which the division of labor between collector and collected to which I alluded earlier is also an epistemological divide between the European knower and a non-European object to be known, and it uncovers the colonial underpinnings of First World narratives of collecting. Additionally, the notion that there is no “singular modernity” 20 but rather various experiences of modernity makes it possible to consider how the discussion of “other” modernities may in fact pose questions to “official” modern narratives and to critique what, again following Mignolo, is “a European perspective that passes as universal.” 21 A study such as this one assumes that the examination of collecting practices in Latin America may contribute to a different understanding of the modern practice of collecting in general. What emerges from these pages, however, is not a homogeneous view of Latin American collections and collectors, nor have we attempted to propose that collecting in Latin America follows a single, unified model. Instead, the reader will find that there are certain recurring themes in the discussions that appear in this book. Tracing these themes, following the various paths of argumentation, will allow the reader to think about the different modes of collecting that have existed in Latin America, how they may relate to one another, and how they enrich and/or unsettle the prevalent understanding of this activity. In their own chapters, the authors have suggested some of these paths, and they have identified specific relationships among each other’s texts. These associations are not meant to be exhaustive, and, although below I will highlight some of the paths that seem particularly salient, each reader will find his or her own. Possible ways of relating the chapters in this volume include tracing the way in which they ask questions concerning the identity of the collecting subject and the collected object, how to understand the very notion of collecting, and, a related matter, what are the criteria involved in the organization of a collection. The first of these questions, who collects and what is collected, is a theme that permeates the entire book. Garrigan’s chapter addresses the issue not only by focusing on a female collector but also by discussing the

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8

Introduction

way in which the clear separation between a collecting subject and a collected object is questioned and blurred in the work of Delmira Agustini. Austin’s text discusses Neruda’s attempt to go beyond an individual subject who collects in order to propose a collective one, while my analysis of José Asunción Silva’s novel problematizes the alleged transparency and stability of the collecting subject. These chapters have in common the way in which they identify other models of subjectivity in the collections they discuss. Other chapters in the book approach the issue differently: in the case of Martínez-Pinzón and Uriarte, for instance, the question at stake is that of the state and of official institutions that function as collectors, while other chapters explore how the artist or poet adopts this role as well. The variety of the collected objects that appear in this book is evident: from postcards to luxury items, from technological apparatuses to human remains, from quotations to experiences in an exoticized Orient, the cases that are discussed bear witness to the diversity of the material and the scope of the collector’s task. Which objects are considered legitimate and worthy of being collected is a crucial question in Jerónimo Arellano’s text, for instance, as he focuses on how technological objects become resignified as “wonders” in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude 22 and analyzes the use of the same critical strategy in contemporary visual artists. Andrew Reynolds approaches the same question when he discusses how the popular format of the postcard is imbued with value in collections of autographs and autographed poems, as does Olga Vilella when she discloses how a foreign subject is sexualized and reified in order to be transformed into an object in a collection. These two chapters also engage with the way in which an object becomes a souvenir, which, as Villella reminds us, means “something to remember by,” and thus acquires value as the repository for someone’s lived experience and as site for memory. 23 Adding to the variety of objects that can be included in a collection, Fernando Pérez Villalón’s chapter studies how fragments from other texts—and even cutout fonts from the popular press— become collectible in the work of Oswald de Andrade and Augusto de Campos. As is already evident, some of the chapters in this book take the notion of collecting in a literal sense, and they focus on the type of assembly of objects that has traditionally been considered a collection, while others understand collecting in more metaphorical ways. The notion of “verbal collecting,” proposed by Fernando Pérez Villalón, as well as that of “virtual collecting,” discussed by Olga Vilella, expand the concept in order to include the activities of citation, referencing, and/or montage. While they do not address the matter explicitly, other chapters are consistent with such a perspective, including those of Garrigan, Austin, and my own. Questioning the identities of both the collector and the collected object also implies an examination of our understanding of the very notion of col-

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Introduction

9

lecting and of the guiding criteria at work in the assembly of a collection. In this sense, the relationship between collecting and power is an important theme in this anthology, and it is addressed explicitly in various chapters. Thus, Martínez-Pinzón and Uriarte focus directly on the way in which violence and, more concretely, war are constitutive of the collecting project of both the Colombian Museo Nacional and the La Plata Museum of Natural Sciences during the nineteenth century, and Kressner’s chapter centers on how the depiction of collecting that appears in Ruy Guerra’s films provides a critique of the way in which collecting is associated with the power of capital. A complementary perspective is that of Andrew Reynolds’s discussion of more “democratic” collections, where the value of the objects is not directly linked to their material worth but rather to their symbolic value, as well as Olga Villella’s analysis of collecting in the popular press, where an experience that only a privileged subject has lived becomes accessible to many. Another theme that emerges regarding the organization of collections is the preoccupation with notions of apparent chaos and/or eclecticism and how some of the cases analyzed propose models that distance themselves from the taxonomic paradigm of other collections. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage, which is used by Garrigan, Fernando Pérez Villalón, and myself but which can be extrapolated to other contributions to this volume, provides a useful perspective for understanding the ways in which many of the collections discussed in this anthology are organized. It is worth remembering that the notion of bricolage appears in Lévi-Strauss’s work as a mode of arranging the material world that deviates from “Western” notions of order and taxonomy and that takes “whatever is at hand” in order to address a specific need. 24 In this anthology, bricolage is used in connection with heterogeneous collections and collage, and it is proposed as a mode of collecting in which eclecticism becomes the overarching principle, as is argued in the case of modernista aesthetics and of Brazilian modernism. A related notion, proposed by Jerónimo Arellano, is that of “decollecting,” which he understands as a reassembly of found objects that is both unsettling and productive, a notion that could also shed light on Kressner’s discussions of the eclectic interiors in Ruy Guerra’s films. This anthology does not attempt to offer a comprehensive study of the role of collecting in Latin American literature and culture but rather to highlight a topic that appears frequently in Latin American texts and that up to now has been addressed only in relatively isolated ways. By bringing together chapters that address collecting as it has been practiced and represented in different moments in Latin American history and culture, this book opens the possibility of a comparative discussion of the role of collecting in different Latin American contexts and at various times. It is truly a collection about collecting, and, as such, I am aware that it is not complete. Instead, like any

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collection, this book is an attempt to propose meanings, a call for other interpretations, and an invitation to others who may want to add to it.

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NOTES 1. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996), 85. See also John Elsner, “Introduction,” in The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books, 1997]: “As one becomes conscious of one’s self, one becomes a conscious collector of identity, projecting one’s being onto the objects one chooses to live with,” 3. 2. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), vol. 2, pt. 2, 492. 3. James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 217. 4. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 164, 158. 5. Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting (London: Routledge, 1995), 111. 6. On the acquisition of objects as curiosities, see Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 4. See also Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 14. On the nineteenth century’s interest in the antique and the rare, see Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” 222. 7. Stewart, On Longing, 155. 8. Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 86. 9. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, based on German version ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 205. 10. James Clifford has written insightfully about the redemptive narrative that accompanies Western modes of collecting, and about power dynamics that are involved when the Western collector approaches non-European objects. Speaking of the 1984–1985 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” an exhibition that highlighted the “affinity” between modernist painting and sculpture and “tribal” cultures, Clifford points out the taste of modernist art “for appropriating or redeeming otherness” (“Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” in The Predicament of Culture, 193) and understanding it on its own terms (195). More recently, Walter D. Mignolo has argued that “the rhetoric of modernity (salvation, newness, progress, development) went hand in hand with the logic of coloniality” (“Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity,” in Modernologies, ed. Sabine Breitwisser, catalog of the exhibit, September 23, 2009–January 17, 2010 [Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009], 43). 11. Gavin Lucas, “Fieldwork and Collecting,” in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 231–33. 12. Nicholas Thomas, “Licensed Curiosity,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 119, 121. Thomas’s argument relates specifically to the decontextualized illustrations of objects from Thomas Cook’s Pacific voyages, but it can be extended to the practice of colonial collecting. 13. Galerías del Progreso: Museos, exposiciones y cultura visual en América Latina (Galleries of Progress: Museums, Exhibitions, and Visual Culture in Latin America), ed. Beatriz González Stephan and Jens Andermann (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2006). 14. Shelley E. Garrigan, Collecting Mexico (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 2. 15. Rosemary C. LoDato, Beyond the Glitter (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999); Matías Ayala, “El interior en el modernismo,” Estudios Filológicos 41 (September 2006): 7–18; Nancy La Greca, “Erotic Fetishism in the Short Prose of Almas y cerebros (1898) by Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–1927),” Ciberletras 16 (January 2007): n.p., http:// www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v16.html (accessed July 24, 2015); Francisco Morán’s “El museo ideal de Julián del Casal” appeared in the dossier on collecting that was published in the online journal La Habana elegante 46 (September 2009): n.p., for which I was the guest editor,

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at http://www.habanaelegante.com/Fall_Winter_2009/September_2009.html (accessed July 24, 2015). 16. Mignolo, “Coloniality,” 42. 17. Ibid. 18. Enrique Dussel, 1492. El encubrimiento del otro: Hacia el origen de la modernidad (La Paz: Plural Editores, 1994), 13. 19. Ibid., 14–16. 20. Mignolo, “Coloniality,” 42. 21. Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), xii. 22. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). 23. For more on the souvenir as an object that functions as the trace of a unique experience, see chapter 5 of Stewart’s On Longing. 24. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 17.

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A Note on Translations

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Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the contributors.

13 Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

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Chapter One

Sacking the Botanical Expedition Natural and Military History in the First Museum of Colombia

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Felipe Martínez-Pinzón

On May 26, 1816, the Spanish Expeditionary Forces commanded by General in Chief Pablo Morillo entered Santafé victoriously. Morillo’s arrival in the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada marked a culminating milestone of his successful reconquest campaign. That day, triumphant arches, Spanish flags, and cavalcades awaited the Royalist armies throughout Santafé, setting the scenario for the capital city dignitaries to welcome the general as a hero. 1 Disguised as a private soldier, Morillo refused to be paid homage either by the local Royalists or the repentant Republicans. Purposefully arriving early to the celebration, he managed to escape the welcoming committee. His intentions were other, as the locals would later find out. Military trials, after which Republican leaders appeared shot or hanged in Santafé’s public squares, were ordinary views for the population days after Morillo took control of the city. Much has been written about “Morillo’s Terror” or the “Spanish Reconquest” (1816–1819), as this period of Colombia’s war for independence is known. Nonetheless, little has been written about one aspect of its aftermath: the sacking of New Granada’s Botanical Expedition (1783–1816) under the orders of General Morillo, who specially commissioned one of his officers, the Spanish captain Rafael Sevilla, to undertake this military operation. 2 The ultimate goal of this special mission was to pack the objects gathered by the Botanical Expedition and ship them back to Spain. For the Spaniards, this mission had a triple purpose. The first reason was to claim the money invested in a large scientific research project funded directly by the Spanish 15

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crown since 1783. The second was that Morillo was sure that sending the objects back to Spain would prevent Republicans from selling them to the British, thus procuring funds that would enable them to strengthen their military power. 3 A third, more political reason might have also been behind Morillo’s mission. Expropriating Republicans from the prestigious collection of botanical illustrations—assembled by the Spaniard José Celestino Mutis and eagerly awaited by naturalists all over Europe—would sever future connections of the independent republic with non-Spanish European countries. Apparently unworthy of serious attention, this third reason had immediate effects on the future rhetoric and politics concerning the foundation and constitution of Colombia’s first museum, whose primary collection items derived from the remnants Morillo’s army left behind after the looting of the Botanical Expedition. 4 Captain Rafael Sevilla was thorough in undertaking his mission. According to testimonies by Francisco Javier Matís and Sinforoso Mutis, botanists who personally packed the objects, almost 7,000 illustrations, dozens of maps, texts, and other materials, were fitted into 104 boxes. The latter were in turn delivered to Colonel Antonio Van Halen, who took them via Santa Marta to the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid. 5 The collection would lay there until 1954, when another “reconquest,” ironically speaking, would put it to good use. During the Conservative government of renowned philoFrancoist Colombian politician Laureano Gómez (1950–1953), the Colombian Institute for Hispanic Culture, a public institution then part of the state, would undertake the mission to organize and publish in Colombia prints of the illustrations of objects collected by Mutis’s expedition, in transatlantic collaboration with Franco’s Spain. 6 Set against the cultural backdrop of the Cold War, another chapter of the Spanish Reconquest would thus be written by nostalgic Hispanophiles along both sides of the Atlantic. Military history and natural history intertwine in Colombia’s first institutional narrative. The military bursting into the Botanical House’s headquarters is a scene that can be imagined as one where war interrupts the seemingly timeless refuge of herborization, inventory, and plant design. For example, Federico González Suárez, a nineteenth-century Ecuadorian priest and historian who wrote extensively on the Botanical Expedition, saw no contact between military and natural history in Colombian independence: Los pintores quiteños, ajenos a los trastornos de la política y amparados por su humilde condición de artesanos, continuaban dibujando plantas y copiando flores, tranquilamente, consagrados en silencio a sus modestas faenas, mientras a su alrededor se derrumbaba con estrépito el trono secular de Carlos Cuarto [sic] y surgía vigorosa, aunque bañada en su propia sangre, la gran República de Colombia. 7 [Strangers to the political mayhem and protected by their humble condition of artisans, the (botanical) painters from Quito (who resided in Santa Fe), contin-

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ued to draw plants and copy flowers peacefully, absorbed in silence by their modest work, while around them Charles IV’s (sic) secular throne collapsed dramatically, and the great Republic of Colombia arose, vigorous, although washed in its own blood.]

War, nonetheless, had already turned, as we will see, botanical painters into Republican propagandists and naturalists into soldiers before the Spanish Reconquest had set its iron foot in New Granada. The inrush of war onto botanical research contributed to the reorganization of natural history, making the political narrative always already embedded in this discipline resurface in devious ways. The sacking of the Botanical Expedition not only exposes the military ways in which imperial economic policy worked in relation to the colonies but also gives testimony to the ways in which history as knowledge—in this case of the Spanish Reconquest—incorporated itself into the most random materials, making disparate objects speak against institutional narratives. In our case, that institutional narrative refers to Colombia’s first museum as a foundational space from which the incipient state wanted to give account of its existence. A realization of the discourse of the nascent state, the museum was created by law to assemble together and centralize in the same space diverse objects sent by persons who, by the very same act of sending, turned into part of an incipient community of citizens dispersed in a vast and isolated geography. Founded by a decree issued on June 28, 1823, by Vice President General Santander, the first national museum of Colombia started out as a Natural History Museum and a Mining Industry School. Its first headquarters were taken from the recently abandoned Botanical House, offices to the Botanical Expedition, where it stayed until 1825. 8 The first museum collection was drawn from the remnants of two sackings: first, from what was left after Bolívar’s troops took over Bogotá at the end of the civil war between Federalists and Centralists that ensued shortly after the 1810 cry of independence and, second, from the final boxing and shipment of most of the Botanical Expedition materials in May 1816 by Spanish military forces. 9 It is my contention that in both the 1823 decree that created the museum and the official communiqué that informed citizens of its existence (Gaceta de Colombia, August 1824), 10 a narrative of abundance is created in order to enter European history under the guise of progress. I continue to argue that the material deficit of the first collection reveals the underside of rhetorical abundance, namely, the indelible mark of the recent past of war. Despite not wanting to be exhibited but concealed, this past reemerges precisely in the space chosen to exhibit the first narrative of the nation: the former Botanical House, home to José Celestino Mutis’s Botanical Expedition. Erasing the Botanical House’s history is a gesture that speaks to the conflictive, often erratic procedures entailed in creating a foundational narrative for a nascent

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state. 11 In Colombia, the juridical documents that gave birth to its first museum created a historical void that one is tempted to call a magnetic field from where to assemble a feeble, strange, and interestingly early national discourse based on deficit and randomness. Finally I contend that the respatialization of the Botanical House as a Natural History Museum maps out a new set of political and economic relations of the republic in relation to non-Spanish European countries, while it invents the museum as a site where, by means of material collaborations sent from various places of the country, nationality can be symbolically exchanged for natural specimens and other curious objects. This chapter aims to tell the story of three objects that, although they belonged to the museum’s first collection, exceeded the pattern of its organization. That is, these three objects do not fit into the planned narrative of the collection and thus unveil the particular making of the narrative that tries to naturalize them. The first of them is a living eagle found in the gardens of the Botanical House. The second is a piece of paper slipped into a collection of botanical illustrations that announces the lack of order of everything found there. The third is a sala de dibujo [drawing room] excluded from the museum’s exhibit in order to be used as part of the Mining School facilities. While telling their story, it is my aim to reconstruct the sacking of the Botanical House and its connections to the first national narrative exhibited in the Natural History Museum of 1823.

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A “TERRIBLE LIVING EAGLE” AT THE BOTANICAL HOUSE In compliance with General Morillo’s orders, June 2, 1816, was the day Captain Rafael Sevilla and his men entered the Botanical House, headquarters of the Botanical Expedition since 1791. In his posthumous memoir (1916), Captain Sevilla would lay bare his personal impressions of the Spanish Reconquest and, specifically, of Morillo’s commission to confiscate the products of José Celestino Mutis’s Botanical Expedition. His text spells out the moment in which, on entering, he casts eyes over the objects there displayed. Like many European travelers before him, his eyes would contemplate what he already deemed as his. Sevilla’s gaze expropriates while registering the inventory. Bewildered, he writes, Era un verdadero museo de historia natural. Cuadrúpedos, aves, reptiles e insectos raros, objetos preciosos del reino mineral, colecciones de maderas; muestras de cristal de roca, de oro y platino; la macana y la hamaca del último cacique de Bogotá; la riquísima custodia que había regalado la ciudad de Cartagena, la terrible águila viva que habían traído de Popayán, como símbolo de la libertad, cual al ser cogida había devorado a un hombre y otra infinidad de curiosidades, era lo que tenía que encajonar, clasificar e inventariar.

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Imposible me habría sido cumplir solo aquella comisión. Afortunadamente, entre los prisioneros aristócratas estaba el doctor [Sinforoso] Mutis, sabio naturalista, que había sido jefe de policía bajo el gobierno rebelde. 12 [It was truly a Natural History Museum. Mammals, birds, reptiles, and rare insects, precious objects from the mineral kingdom, wood collections; gold, crystal, and silver samples; the macana (indigenous club) and hammock that belonged to the last cacique of Bogotá; the rich monstrance awarded by the city of Cartagena; the terrible living eagle brought from Popayán, as a symbol of freedom, which in the process of being captured had devoured a man, and a vast number of curiosities I had to box, classify and inventory. It would have been impossible to do this all by myself. Fortunately, among the aristocratic prisoners Doctor (Sinforoso) Mutis was there, a sage naturalist who had been chief of police during the rebel government.]

This narrative follows a well-known pattern: the invader who profanes the sanctuary, imprisons the sage, but still requires his services. Incarcerated for being a Republican, José Celestino’s nephew Sinforoso, a naturalist and then director of the expedition, was forced by Spanish soldiers to pack, alongside illustrator Francisco Javier Matís, the objects assembled by the expedition throughout the course of more than three decades. Sevilla, a military man turned naturalist thanks to Morillo’s triumph over the Republicans, names and classifies everything he sees within his eyesight. Following Buffon’s classificatory methods almost to perfection, his enumeration is a classification of the animal kingdom beginning from vertebrate to invertebrate animals, to minerals and to human objects, first indigenous and then European. Thus, from a chronological standpoint instilled with political vindication, Sevilla first contemplates the culture of the defeated only to reconfirm a 300-year-old victory over Chibcha peoples. The reappropriation of the macana, a symbol of resistance in the hands of the Spaniards once again, revalidates the military victories of the Spanish Conquest in the Spanish Reconquest of 1816. The expropriation of the hammock of the last cacique of Bogotá guarantees that the indigenous armies will never wake up again. The last gesture in this museumized performance of the reconquest is the reclaiming of Spanish power over the monstrance awarded by the city of Cartagena. Within the political narrative provided by the context of the Spanish Reconquest, Sevilla’s Natural History Museum is a war exhibit. Objects in the Botanical House acquire a different political connotation when sorted by a member of Morillo’s reconquering army. In Sevilla’s story, the Spanish Reconquest museumizes the conquest if we understand that “los museos son el presente del pasado” 13 [museums are the present of the past], or, as Mary Roldán puts it, museums “no sólo ordenan los componentes de la memoria, sino también eliminan y rearticulan los traumas nacionales” 14 [not only order the materials of memory but also eliminate or rearticulate national traumas].

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In Sevilla’s inventory, there is an object that exceeds the collection, and, cogently enough, he leaves it at the end of his enumeration. Incorporating a mythical discourse to the scientific description, he speaks of “the terrible living eagle brought from Popayán, as a symbol of freedom, which in the process of being captured had devoured a man.” Almost as if it were an object from a sixteenth-century European cabinet of curiosities, this monstrous animal introduces the mythical into the scientific sphere while connecting natural to social history and the animal world to the human world through the key political concept of freedom. The eagle of freedom that devours whoever attempts to capture it could be read as a horrific allegory of Morillo’s Terror unleashed, during those days on Republican leaders, but also as a parable of the failed 1810 revolution as seen in 1816, a rendition of the myth of a republican Prometheus subdued by a monarchist world. The living eagle is the sacking’s milestone, and it points to an abundance in discourse but marks precisely a deficit in natural history objects and introduces the mark of war: that eagle is a political allegory for the colony’s 1810 uprising. An eagle presided the first flag of the independent state of Cundinamarca and was also the frontispiece to that same state’s 1811 atlas commissioned by zoologist turned Republican President Jorge Tadeo Lozano to geographer and botanist Francisco José de Caldas, both of them former members of the Botanical Expedition. 15 The image that illustrates the frontispiece of the atlas was painted by Manuel Martínez, one of the many botanical illustrators who, in the midst of revolutionary turmoil, turned from miniature plant illustrator to propagandist of the Republican regime. One is tempted to think that the eagle that presided the atlas’s frontispiece was a copy derived from the model of the “terrible living eagle” that inhabited the Botanical House and made such an impression on Sevilla. Like many other members of the Botanical Expedition—such as Salvador Rizo, Francisco José de Caldas, and Jorge Tadeo Lozano, to name only three naturalists who had become military men and afterward were shot by Morillo’s firing squads—the war for independence would expel Martínez from colonial history as natural history (i.e., a system of fixed categories, in this case racial) onto republican history understood as military history, the history of an uprising, while it recast the Botanical House as the Republican Headquarters. We cannot forget that this passage from colony to republic was recorded by an otherwise neglected art in documenting history, namely, drawing, an art that specializes in leaving marks just like writing does but nonetheless tells a story/history from its underside, that is, illiteracy. 16 Sevilla’s eagle appears again in an official document that contained an inventory of the objects in the Botanical House. In a letter to the Spanish secretary of the interior on September 2, 1816, Morillo writes about the results of what he deliberately calls Sevilla’s “comisión botánica” 17 [botani-

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cal commission]. He describes the way in which the objects would be shipped to Spain and names the appointed officers in charge of the operation. In a way that breaks with the military tone of the letter, General Morillo’s strict laconism caves in at the following phrase: “[Entre los objetos de la Expedición Botánica] también va una águila para Su Majestad, porque es muy propia para la casa de fieras y la conservaba el Congreso [Republicano] como el símbolo de poder . . .” 18 [(Among the objects of the Botanical Expedition) there is also an eagle for Your Majesty, which can prove useful for beast hunting; it was kept by the (Republican Congress) as a symbol of their power . . .]. The ellipsis in this phrase can be interpreted as a selfcongratulating gesture that celebrates the Spanish triumph while mocking the defeated Republican project. Sent to the Spanish king as an animal to be domesticated for hunting purposes, Morillo cannot deprive the eagle of the political significance that lies in its allegorical content. In trying to normalize colonial life symbolically by sending the eagle back again to natural history, the footprints of military history will come out in the act of recasting the animal as a symbol not of freedom but of triumph. In the hands of the Spanish king Ferdinand VII, the eagle of freedom will not be a sign of peace between the metropolis and the colonies but one that will give Morillo’s pacification a distinctive narrative. The living eagle among the progression of mineral objects on the one hand and human produce on the other shows the collection’s artificial making and breaks the siren song spell of natural history as a predetermined narrative. The eagle pushes back the objects to their singular materiality, precisely by turning the homogeneous series of the collection into a pile of knickknacks and trinkets, 19 making us aware of their disorganized materiality. There lies the paradox inherent to Sevilla’s inventory; he deems the Botanical House “un verdadero museo de historia natural del país” 20 [a true Natural History Museum of the country], but the living eagle is the only disrupting element that prevents it from being conceived in such terms. It is because of the eagle that the Botanical House cannot be seen as a Natural History Museum but rather as a site of conspiracy, a workshop for Republican iconography, and a headquarters inhabited by botanists turned military men. A NOTE ON A NOTE In June 1817, a year after the Botanical Expedition was plundered by Morillo’s armies and under the government of Spanish occupation forces, Ángela María Gama filed a lawsuit in defense of her husband, botanist Sinforoso Mutis, convicted for being a Republican and sent to prison at the Caribbean outpost of Cartagena de Indias. As part of the legal proceedings, she de-

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manded the painters employed in the Botanical Expedition to be summoned in order to testify in favor of her husband’s conduct during the failed 1810 revolution. Among those who were called to testify was painter Francisco Javier Matís, who had helped Sinforoso Mutis pack the materials of the Botanical Expedition in 104 boxes. One of the questions he was asked to answer was how long Sinforoso Mutis and he had taken to sort and pack the materials of the expedition. To this, Matís answered,

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que es cierto y verdadero que en seis días limitados solo se encajonó la Flora bogotana, . . . como que el declarante puso con lápiz en una anatomía de plantas de las que fueron, un letrero que decía: “nos han hecho empaquetar esta obra con tanta celeración [sic] que no ha habido lugar de poner las anatomías con las láminas. 21 [It is true that we were given only six days to pack the Flora de Bogotá (the almost seven thousand item collection of botanical illustrations belonging to José Celestino Mutis) . . . to which the witness can vouch for since he himself had written, on the back of one of the illustrations, a note that read: “we have been forced to pack this work (La Flora de Bogotá) in such a hurry that it has been impossible to pack the botanical descriptions (the anatomies) along with the illustrations.”]

The political significance of this note lies in the way in which it unveils the military history always already embedded in the Botanical Expedition’s plans to organize and make a profit out of New Granada’s flora and fauna. From a present of war and occupation, it shows the Botanical Expedition’s relation to the late eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms that institutionalized enlightened discourse as Spanish imperial economic policy but also its relation to the 1810 uprisings, depicting Fernando VII’s military response to his colonies’ six-year period of internal conflict and desire for emancipation. Thanks to his note, the materials of the Botanical Expedition shipped to Spain are made to belong to a narrative different from that of natural history, integrating them with the history of the wars for independence in South America. Probably unaware of it, Matís unmasked the military underpinnings that had always constituted the gist of botanical expeditions in the Americas, if we were to agree with John Lynch’s statement that “Spanish America was subjected in the late eighteenth century [with the Bourbon Reforms] to a new imperialism; its administration was reformed, its defence reorganized, its commerce revived.” 22 “REMOTENESS” IN THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM After Morillo’s army was defeated in December 1819, Simón Bolívar conferred Francisco Antonio Zea, former member of the Botanical Expedition, ample authorization to go “cerca de diversas cortes [europeas], tenga el más

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completo suceso, y que al mismo tiempo pueda realizar cualquier proyecto que conciba para bien y prosperidad de la República” 23 [around diverse (European) courts (to) have the most complete success in undertaking any project he thinks could serve the good and prosperity of the republic]. Fulfilling his mission two years later, Zea hired French scientists Jean Baptiste Boussingault, Desiré Roulin, Justin Goudot, and Peruvian scientist Mariano Eduardo de Rivera to “conseguir en Europa una colección mineralógica, una biblioteca de ciencias naturales, una colección de instrumentos físicos y astronómicos y un laboratorio y a presentar todos estos objetos al gobierno de Colombia; [para] contribuir a la formación de un Museo de Historia Natural” 24 [procure in Europe a mining collection, a natural sciences library, a collection of physical and astronomical instruments, and a laboratory, in order to present them to the national government; and contribute that way to the formation of the Natural History Museum]. Hired as mining professors, organizers, and administrators to the new museum, these scientists traveled to Colombia in 1822. In the company of General Santander, they were present during the inauguration of the Natural History Museum and Mining School of the republic on July 3, 1823. Unfortunately, “la falta de apoyo financiero por parte del gobierno hizo imposible que la misión francesa pudiera cumplir sus objetivos educativos” 25 [the lack of financial government support made it impossible for the French mission to achieve its educational goals]. Deficit, this time financial, would eloquently speak about the material deficit of the first collection exhibited in that museum. In the same way the “living eagle” did not fit into Sevilla’s collection and Matís’s note disrupted the illustrations to the Flora de Bogotá, in the first collection exhibited in the Natural History Museum there is an object that exceeds the progression and denaturalizes the narrative. The state journal Gaceta de Colombia informed citizens of the republic in August 1824 about the recent foundation of the museum while asking them for contributions to its collection: Tenemos el placer de anunciar al público que el día 4 del corriente se abrió el museo de historia natural. S.E el vicepresidente [General Santander] con los secretarios del interior y de la guerra y alguna comitiva concurrieron a la apertura. El museo en su infancia posee ya algunas cosas raras; las siguientes son las principales. Una colección de minerales arreglada según el sistema del célebre Huy en la que se encuentra algunas muestras singulares por su cristalización y escasez. La mayor parte de estos minerales viene de Europa y de otras partes muy remotas. Tiene algunos pedazos de hierro meteórico encontrados en diferentes partes de la República y analizados por los señores Rivero y Boussengoult [sic]. Muchos huesos de animales desconocidos sacados de Soacha que son muy curiosos por su tamaño. Una momia encontrada cerca de Tunja con su manta bien conservada y se supone tener más de 400 años. Algunos insectos de extraordinaria hermosura. También posee varios

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mamíferos, reptiles, peces y algunos instrumentos muy bien hechos. Tiene además el establecimiento un laboratorio y sala de dibujo. Deseoso el gobierno de fomentar un establecimiento que es indispensable para propagar las luces, y ver al mismo tiempo reunidos en la capital todas las producciones de la República; encarga a los intendentes, gobernadores, curas, jueces políticos, y alcaldes remitan todas aquellas cosas curiosas, como minerales, animales, pájaros, insectos, reptiles, peces, conchas, etc, etc. . . . Se espera que con la ayuda de dichas personas en algunos años la capital de Colombia podrá rivalizar con los gabinetes de las naciones europeas. 26 [We have the pleasure to announce to the public that the past Fourth (of July) the Natural History Museum was inaugurated. Your Excellency (General Santander) alongside with the interior and war secretaries and some members of the retinue attended the opening. In its infancy, the museum already has some rare objects; the following are the principal ones. A mineral collection arranged according to the Huy system, in which some peculiar samples are noteworthy because of their crystallization and rarity. Most of these minerals come from Europe and from other remote places. It also holds some pieces of meteoric iron found in different parts of the republic, analyzed by los señores Rivero and Boussengoult (sic). A large number of bones found in Soacha that belong to unknown animals that are very curious, given their size. A mummy found near Tunja, whose well-conserved poncho supposedly is 400 hundred years old. Some insects of extraordinary beauty. It also holds various mammals, reptiles, fish, and some very well made instruments. The place also has a laboratory and a “sala de dibujo” (drawing room). With the desire of supporting an establishment that is indispensable in order to spread the light, and to see, assembled in the capital, all of the productions of the republic, the government commissions governors, priests, judges, and mayors to send all things found curious, such as minerals, animals, birds, insects, reptiles, fishes, etc., etc. . . . We expect that, with their help, the people of Colombia can soon compete with the cabinets of European nations.]

There are several noteworthy elements in this document. First, the shortage of materials exhibited is noticeable. Despite Zea’s hiring of foreign scientists, the random disposition of the museum’s possessions and the urge to demand materials from citizens marks a desire to amend the collection’s poor inventory. A foreseeable argument would be to think that a deficit such as this one works as evidence of a young republic’s inexistent history. That is, that republican infancy can be related—mistakenly, in my opinion—to a national history born suddenly ex nihilo. 27 On the contrary, true deficit covered with a narrative of natural abundance—that of insects, for example— attempts to create an emptied historical space from which to create national discourse as a performative negation of a colonial past of subjection. Following Susana Rotker, it is possible to think that the first national foundational narratives in Latin America derived from “un proceso cuya racionalidad no es clara” 28 [a process of unclear rationality] that, in our case, was fueled by the anxiety to cut the umbilical cord of colonial history and rebel against a

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disturbing fact for the new ruling classes, namely, that the history of the Vice Kingdom of New Granada was until then the history of Spain. It is also interesting to note that the “bigger part” of the museum’s minerals “came from Europe and other remote parts.” The notion of “remoteness”—of an object being remote in both space and time—is crucial when reading this document. The organizing principle of the collection, as announced by the communiqué of the Gaceta de Colombia, is not only what is deemed as curious but also what is curious due to its remoteness. This relation sterilizes the objects there assembled out of any political value, even in the case of objects allegedly found in the nearby town of Soacha (a few kilometers away from the capital city of Bogotá). That is why “[the] mummy found near Tunja whose well-conserved poncho supposedly is 400 hundred years old” fits into the organizing principle of the museum because its remoteness turns it into a curiosity while depoliticizing it at the same time. Nonetheless, this does not happen with the sala de dibujo that is remote neither in space nor in time. Close in time, given the fact that it was part of the Botanical House until very recently, the sala de dibujo was a privileged space in Mutis’s Botanical Expedition before independence, a center for calculation, as Mauricio Nieto argues, from which to “accumulate the necessary information to obtain control over knowledge.” 29 After the declaration of independence, the sala de dibujo was the place where Matís or Martínez, among other local plant designers, drew military maps and pieces of republican propaganda. 30 Yet with the re-spatialization of the Botanical House as a Natural History Museum and Mining School, another more refined texture of remoteness springs forth due to a particular disjuncture of the spatial and temporal axis that constitutes this term. The gesture of erasing the particular history of the sala de dibujo and incorporating it almost aseptically into the museum renders it so remote in time—not in space, obviously—that it turns into the emblem of national memory being wiped out precisely in the moment of its institutional constitution. 31 The sala de dibujo will be used not as part of the museum but as an academic space where foreign mineralogists would teach locals the science of their craft. The transition from colony to republic entailed rethinking the spatial status of Colombia in relation to other states, mainly non-Spanish European. Not exposing the sala de dibujo as part of the collection stages a desire for a final detachment from imperial subjection by obliterating it as a center for calculation, a room where imperial knowledge was assembled, or even a place for political conspiracy. Reframing the sala de dibujo thus marks a radical break from the recent colonial past, signaling an unbridgeable distance between 1823 and 1816. This mark silently exhibits the revolutionary narrative of time: silencing the recent military past—and in this sense naturalizing it as a stance where the subject turns into object in not being able to speak back—as a remote object, a presence so remote it has been (purposefully) forgotten. As

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a desire, this mnemonic tactic of choosing what to exhibit and what to use wants to guarantee that the past—a colonial past of occupation—will never prove atavistic and, thus, will never come back. Víctor Manuel Rodríguez argues that in the first Colombian museum, “los criollos presentaron la nación como un lugar natural, fuera del tiempo histórico y disponible para dar respuesta a las nuevas condiciones económicas” 32 [creoles presented the nation as a natural place, outside historical time, available to give answers to the new economic conditions]. It is Rodríguez’s contention that the mummy is the object that denaturalizes the collection, revealing the collection’s contingency, “la contingencia histórica y cultural del principio que la organiza” 33 [the historical and cultural contingency of its organizing principle]. The human presence of the mummy, his argument goes on, breaks the order of the collection, showing the marks of the “narrativa de nación criolla . . . que facilitó el control de la diferencia interna (mestizos, mujeres, negros e indígenas), mediante la exclusión de las historias no nacionales y propendió por la inserción del nuevo Estado en las condiciones imperantes del capitalismo moderno” 34 [creole narrative of the nation . . . that facilitated the control of difference (among mestizos, women, blacks, or indigenous peoples), through the exclusion of nonnational histories, aiming at the new state’s insertion into modern capitalism]. Finally, Rodríguez contends that the organizing principle of the pile of stones and corpses that constitute the museum’s first collection is the “naturalización de la nación” 35 [naturalization of the nation] as a means to exclude the people in the form of the mummy as the mark of a repressed atavistic past. Rodríguez’s final comment shows how creoles, by naturalizing the nation, went back to the old imperial arsenal of representation under which New Granada appeared to be simply a natural landscape ready to be exploited economically. I find that not only is the naturalization of the nation exhibited in the first museum of Colombia, but also the naturalization of the recent military history is a way to give the republic peaceful entrance into an international market. Assembling diverse random materials, organized through the erratic notion of the “curious due to its remoteness,” intends to render natural the nascent relations of power between the young state and the community on the one hand and of Colombia with European financial capital on the other. For Colombia, entering into the international market implied creating a narrative of peace 36 in order to obliterate the recent past and present of war. 37 That narrative had to relabel as remote every mark or object that could have hindered the country’s entry to the international community. Progress (or a mere parody of it) cannot incorporate ongoing war or violence within its narrative of normality. It is well known that narratives of progress mask violence—physical, cultural, and economic—as an inherent characteristic of the movement-toward-the-future that feeds its teleological nature.

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Depoliticizing the newly established relation between the state, the national, and the international community is an operation that leaves its marks in the museum’s inventory. By means of what could be labeled as a military slip, the naturalization of military practices aimed at equating sidereal stones with indigenous corpses. That is why the suspicious addendum of “a mummy found near Tunja whose well-conserved poncho is supposedly 400 hundred years old” cogently erases the mark of the then 300-year-old conquest. This has to be read as a not-so-innocent explanation but also as a clear sign of the cleansing of atavistic military practices. Just as the military history of the Botanical House was erased, the history of the mummy has to be also occluded. Coincidentally, 400 years is enough time, in 1823, to make it impossible to relate the mummy’s death with the Spanish Conquest. Hence, triggering a relation between crime and community, war and nationality also fade into the air. Deficit is precisely that which does not allow the obliteration of the recent military past of the young republic. The mark of the sacking is the scarcity and resultant randomness of objects from which the museum’s first collection is assembled. In order to enter the teleological narrative of progress and to mitigate scarcity, the young republic’s first narrative has to relieve its collection’s approach from temporal to spatial remoteness, passing from astral stones and prehistoric remnants to the national and international community. In the word “remoteness” lies a temporal connection but also a spatial depth that puts into perspective one’s localization in relation to a given distant object. The collection is based on temporal remoteness (what is curious is remote), but it aims at consolidating and bringing into proximity what it finds remote in space, nationalizing and internationalizing the republic’s territory, thus launching it into the European narrative of progress. Commissioning “governors, priests, judges, and mayors to send all things found curious” in order to assemble in the capital “all of the productions of the republic” has, thus, a double purpose. On the one hand, sending objects from the periphery to the center, as a performative gesture, inserts the individual-in-process-of-nationalization into a map to which he or she now belongs, that is, to a “circuito de poder y de experiencia nacional” 38 [circuit of power and national experience]. On the other hand, assembling a vast array of diverse productions in the capital builds up an itinerary aimed at symbolically reaching Europe as the ultimate destination, the telos of progress, and the site of abundance: “We expect that, with their help, the people of Colombia can soon compete with the cabinets of European nations.” The first narrative exhibited in the Natural History Museum intends to make remote in time everything preceding the birth of the republic, including, at the same time, the mummy and the minerals, the insects and the sala de dibujo, while making remote in space the national and international communities in order to set a distance that the republic desires to bridge by means

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of the constitution of the state. In the act of “sending all products from the capital to the republic,” the two textures of the remote—the temporal and spatial—collide, plotting to wipe off the colonial mark of the sacking. Reaching abundance is necessary as a means to overcome deficit at a national scale in order to compete with non-Spanish Europe and thus be recognized by European states. Let us not forget that items making up the museum’s first collection were cataloged as brought from Europe 39 (and administered by new appointed European scientists), emphasizing a condition of lack in relation to the old continent, a condition that problematically puts in tension abundance and scarcity, nature and culture, as being categories spatially localized. Europe is the site where abundant material culture is to be found, while Latin America, in this case Colombia, is a space where scarce material culture can be overcome only by the exploitation and export of natural resources. Thus, history is seen through the lens of a scarcity redeemable only by debt: Latin America owes Europe its entrance into progress, a narrative literally familiar to the first generation of Republicans who had taken immense debt from the English in order to found their nation-states. 40

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AN ACCEPTABLE BASIS OF ACQUIESCENCE? Michel de Certeau speaks of the ways in which progress privileges time over space despite the latter being its obvious condition of possibility. 41 To forget space, its relation of resistance as it faces the new, the practical, or the useful, seems to be the motto driving progress. To be critical about this entails a process of historicizing space, always problematizing progress and showing the inner contradictions to its seemingly neutral, peaceful, and objective narrative. It is not only metaphorically, then, that the Botanical House, after being sold by the government in 1842, was demolished in 1950 to build new city roads. 42 Jens Andermann argues that progress in nineteenth-century Latin America—he speaks of the particular cases of Argentina and Brazil—was envisioned as the “natural time of human history,” a time that could be, in the likes of museums and exhibitions, represented as space. 43 There is, then, an underpinning tension to the notion of progress as space-time when compared to another notion of space-time as problematic as war, precisely the spatiotemporal axis from where many Latin American republics sprung. The debate is more complex than this, 44 but let us say that while progress privileges time over space, in the minds of Latin American elites war was seen as privileging the latter over the former. In privileging geography, maps, and frontiers, war was seen by nineteenth-century elites as an antimovement interrupting the swift notion of progress as a historical wave advancing from one stage to another, from underdevelopment to development, from barbarism to civilization. During the nineteenth century (and even today), almost

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all of Colombia’s Republican intellectuals—Miguel Samper, Manuel Murillo Toro, and Rafael Núñez, among other elite letrados—wrote about civil wars as the main cause for the country’s backwardness. This is why it seems that exhibiting war in 1823, when Bolívar’s armies where still fighting in Peruvian and Bolivian territory, would have interrupted or annulled the possibility of progress, making it historical and pushing it out of its naturalness as the uncontested time span of Western civilization. Showing how Bolívar’s apocryphal “Juramento del Monte Sacro” is a historical fraud, Susana Rotker asserts that this document—taken and adapted from one of Simón Rodríguez’s texts and then compiled by Colombian Manuel Uribe Ángel— 45 contains what would be the founding traits of early national foundational narratives in Latin America: “el modelo deseable de gobierno no en función de la propia realidad sino por comparación con el modelo europeo, la historia como un salto desde la Europa clásica al grado cero americano del período de la Emancipación; el Nuevo Mundo como un vacío, una incógnita, una no entidad” 46 [the desired model of government, based not on American reality but in comparison with the European model, history as a jump from classical Europe to an American degree zero during the Emancipation period; the New World as a void, an unknown factor, a nonentity]. Just like “Juramento del Monte Sacro” was a fraudulent discourse that mobilized (again) these ideas about America, the first Museum of Natural History in Colombia was a site to live a future of abundance, possible only through the construction of a “fraudulent” discourse whose narrative is plagued by elements that attest to the feeble and incoherent facture of a history constructed as an artificial void. Emptying the Botanical House of its particular history created a discursive magnetic field from which to centralize the performance of citizenship, representing state power as a bartering machine that in exchange for stones and curiosities naturalized subjection to the new Republican state, showing more than ever that the state as an apparatus does not exist but as a series of practices that render acquiescence acceptable. 47 This has, of course, a disturbing underside. If the modern state is the outmost center of ideas such as reason, progress, and individual freedom, 48 it has to be said that in Colombia—and possibly in other Latin American countries that founded museums around the same time (Argentina in 1823, Brazil in 1818)—exhibiting the constitution of state power was a process that uncovered irrationality, randomness, and deficit as the lacking ingredients from which early narratives were assembled, showing painstakingly that the state is founded on an illusion. Probably more dramatically than elsewhere, given that institutionalized discourses on nationality happened earlier than in Europe but also because in Latin America these were channeled through a feeble state still at war with the Spanish Empire, the centralization of a community showed itself, literally, as a random selection of objects obtained by enforced ritualistic practices. Following Abrams’s notion of the state as

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the acceptable basis for acquiescence, it remains for us to ask ourselves in the face of this first institutional narrative how acceptable that basis was for the Colombian case. In conclusion, the Natural History Museum’s first collection sets in motion problematic connections among individuals-turning-into-citizens at a national level and a young republic’s desire to enter the international market while purposefully forgetting war. Paula Findlen, in her book on collecting nature in early modern Italy, speaks of the ways in which collecting practices during the Renaissance served to bridge distances among European cities. 49 One may think that with its first collection, the Republic of Colombia desired to cut across the Atlantic and, as always henceforth, become part of European history. To achieve this, it seemed crucial to erase the marks that could have disturbed that process. Naturalizing the past military history and rendering it remote in time in order to create a national cosmopolitan history was seen as a means by which the national community was able to enter Europe’s narrative of progress. Hiding scarcity and exhibiting natural abundance were actions that led to an invention ex nihilo of nationality instead of conceiving nationality as a quest for (self)knowledge. 50 This had a price: erasing the marks of deficit, reducing history to its degree zero, and, furthermore in our particular case, sacking the Botanical Expedition.

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NOTES 1. Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, Los grandes conflictos de nuestra historia, 4th ed. (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1966), vol. 2, 312. 2. Guillermo Hernández de Alba, Historia documental de la Real Expedición Botánica del Nuevo Reino de Granda después de la muerte de su director Don José Celestino Mutis (1808–1952) (Bogotá: Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, 1986), 336; Rafael Sevilla, Memorias de un oficial del ejército español en campañas contra Bolívar y los separatistas de América (Madrid: Imprenta América, 1916), 96. 3. Hernández de Alba, Historia documental, 47. 4. Beatriz González, “Un museo libre de toda sospecha?,” in Museo, memoria y nación, ed. Gonzalo Sánchez and María Emma Wills (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, Museo Nacional de Colombia, 2000), 86. 5. Hernández de Alba, Historia documental, 380. 6. Santiago Díaz-Piedrahita, Matís y los dos Mutis (Bogotá: Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, 2000), 101; Hernández de Alba, Historia documental, 489. 7. Federico González Suárez, Memoria histórica sobre Mutis y la Expedición Botánica en el siglo décimo octavo (1782–1808) (Quito: Imprenta del Clero, 1808), 122. 8. Martha Segura, Itinerario del Museo Nacional de Colombia (1823–1994) (Bogotá: Instituto colombiano de Cultura, Museo Nacional, 1995), 57. 9. Guillermo Hernández de Alba, Historia documental, 336; González Suárez, Memoria histórica, 121. 10. Colombia, Gaceta de Colombia 1, no. 1 (Bogotá: J. A. Cualla, 1821–1861). 11. In chapter 2 of this volume, Javier Uriarte also explores the founding violence of the state through institutional narratives like the museum. In his case, however, Perito Moreno’s skull collection speaks to the genocidal “Campaña del Desierto” against indigenous populations in late nineteenth-century Argentina.

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12. Sevilla, Memorias de un oficial, 96. 13. Gonzalo Sánchez, “Memoria, museo y nación,” in Sánchez and Wills, Museo, memoria y nación, 26. 14. Mary Roldán , “Museo Nacional, fronteras de la identidad y el reto de la globalización,” in Sánchez and Wills, Museo, memoria y nación, 105. 15. Mauricio Nieto, La obra cartográfica de Francisco José de Caldas (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2006), 98. 16. It is worth noting that illiteracy was a trait that characterized botanical painters in Mutis’s expedition and was the overwhelming characteristic of New Granadean population at the time. 17. Hernández de Alba, Historia documental, 336. 18. Ibid. 19. Víctor Manuel Rodríguez, “La fundación del Museo Nacional de Colombia,” in Pensar el siglo XIX, ed. Santiago Castro-Gómez (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 177. 20. Sevilla, Memorias de un oficial, 96. 21. Judicial interrogatory taken by Spanish officials (no first name) Ugarte and Eugenio de Elorga to Francisco Javier Matís in Santafé (de Bogotá), July 28, 1817. The minutes of this interrogatory appear in Historia documental, 378-381. 22. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions 1808–1826 (New York: Norton), 2. 23. Efraín Sánchez, Gobierno y geografía (Bogotá: Banco de la República y El Áncora Editores, 1999), 71. 24. Florentino Vezga, La expedición botánica (Bogotá: Biblioteca Aldeana de Cultura, 1936), 178. 25. Sánchez, Gobierno y geografía, 77. 26. Colombia, Gaceta de Colombia, August 1824, emphasis added. 27. Roldán, “Museo Nacional,” 105. 28. Susana Rotker, “Juramento del Monte Sacro,” in Bravo Pueblo (Caracas: Fondo Editorial La Nave Va, 2006), 92. 29. Nieto, “Políticas imperiales,” in Historia Crítica 11 (Bogotá: Universidad de Los Andes, 1995) 39–52, 49. 30. Díaz Piedrahita, Matís y los dos Mutis, 90. 31. In line with this discussion but regarding a different context (that of Argentina in the later part of the nineteenth century), chapter 2 of this volume discusses how the state combined anthropology with archaeology in order to wipe out the contemporary history of indigenous presence in the territory. These erasing practices are, hence, unfortunately endemic in the constitution of the Latin American modern state. See Javier Uriarte’s interesting discussion on Johannes Fabian ’s term “denial of coevaleness” in chapter 2. 32. Rodríguez, “La fundación del Museo Nacional,” 172. 33. Ibid., 179. 34. Ibid., 169. 35. Ibid., 179. 36. Ironically, this is the same narrative used 2 00 years later by the recent governments in order to be considered as “well-qualified” places for European and U.S.-American investment. I thank one of the anonymous readers of this text for pointing out the striking similarities between state-sponsored discourses about the territory of the nation then and now. 37. We cannot forget that in 1823, Republican armies were still fighting against Spanish armies in what are now Bolivia and Perú. 38. Roldán, “Museo Nacional,” 104. 39. In chapter 3 of this volume, Olga Vilella explores modernista Enrique Gómez Carrillo’s processes of validation of Asian cultural products by means of comparison with European renditions of said products. That way, the European copy turns into the original, setting the paradigm for what is culturally accepted as being of buen gusto [good taste] for the Spanishspeaking middle-class reading public. 40. This narrative, already exhibited by the rhetoric of the first Colombian Museum, creates lack and debt as the principle that drives, to this very day, the relations between Latin America

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and Europe. Since its very moment of constitution, the state invented a narrative according to which Colombia is pre-Europe, a promise of finally becoming Europe that will come about only when natural abundance replaces Latin America’s imagined “cultural scarcity.” Exchanging natural abundance for European “culture” is a 200-year-old discourse that still drives the dynamics of resource exploitation in the region by transnational companies (today particularly buoyant in the mining and agricultural export sectors). 41. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 95. 42. Segura, Itinerario, 18. 43. Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 10. 44. In this respect, Malcolm Deas’s recent readings on war and progress in nineteenthcentury Colombia are exceptional. Working on Deas’s ideas but also with Walter Benjamin in mind, it is possible to think that war and progress, civilization and barbarism, still work in tandem. For further reading, see Deas, “Inseguridad y desarrollo económico en Colombia en el primer siglo de vida republicana independiente,” in Economía colombiana del siglo XIX, ed. Adolfo Meisel Roca and María Teresa Ramírez (Bogotá: Banco de la República y Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010). 45. Rotker, “Juramento del Monte Sacro,” 90. 46. Ibid., 88 –89. 47. Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” in The Anthropology of the State, ed. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 117. 48. Rotker, “Juramento en el Monte Sacro,” 91. 49. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 70. 50. Rotker, “Juramento del Monte Sacro,” 95.

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WORKS CITED Abrams, Philip. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.” In The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, edited by Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, 112–30. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Andermann, Jens. The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Colombia. Gaceta de Colombia 1, no 1. Bogotá: J. A. Cualla, 1821–1861 Deas, Malcolm. “Inseguridad y desarrollo económico en Colombia en el primer siglo de vida republican independiente: Unas consideraciones preliminares.” In Economía colombiana del siglo XIX, edited by Adolfo Meisel Roca and María Teresa Ramírez. Bogotá: Banco de la República y Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Díaz-Piedrahita, Santiago. Matís y los dos Mutis: Orígenes de la anatomía vegetal y de la sinanterología en América . Bogotá: Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, 2000. Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. González, Beatriz. “Un museo libre de toda sospecha?” In Museo, memoria y nación: Misión de los museos nacionales para los ciudadanos del futuro, edited by Gonzalo Sánchez and María Emma Wills, 84–97. Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, Museo Nacional de Colombia, 2000. González Suárez, Federico. Memoria histórica sobre Mutis y la Expedición Botánica en el siglo décimo octavo (1782–1808). Quito: Imprenta del Clero, 1808. Hernández de Alba, Guillermo. Historia documental de la Real Expedición Botánica del Nuevo Reino de Granda después de la muerte de su director Don José Celestino Mutis (1808–1952). Bogotá: Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, 1986.

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Liévano Aguirre, Indalecio. Los grandes conflictos de nuestra historia. Vol. 2., 4th ed. Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1966. Lynch, John. The Spanish American Revolutions 1808 –1826 . 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1986. Nieto, Mauricio. La obra cartográfica de Francisco José de Caldas. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2006. ———. “Política imperiales en la Ilustración española: Historia Natural y la apropiación del Nuevo Mundo.” Historia Crítica 11 (July–December 1995): 39–52. Rodríguez, Víctor Manuel. “La fundación del Museo Nacional de Colombia: Gabinetes de curiosidades, ordenes discursivos y retóricas nacionales.” In Pensar el siglo XIX: Cultura, biopolítica y modernidad en Colombia, edited by Santiago Castro-Gómez, 165–84. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. Roldán, Mary. “Museo Nacional, fronteras de la identidad y el reto de la globalización.” In Museo, memoria y nación: Misión de los museos nacionales para los ciudadanos del futuro, edited by Gonzalo Sánchez and María Emma Wills, 99–116. Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, Museo Nacional de Colombia, 2000. Rotker, Susana. “Juramento del Monte Sacro: La identidad como negación de la historia.” In Bravo Pueblo: Poder, utopía y violencia, 87–97. Caracas: Fondo Editorial La Nave Va, 2006. Sánchez, Efraín, Gobierno y Geografía: Agustín Codazzi y la Comisión Corográfica de la Nueva Granada. Bogotá: Banco de la República, El Áncora Editores, 1999. Sánchez, Gonzalo. “Memoria, museo y nación.” In Museo, memoria y nación: Misión de los museos nacionales para los ciudadanos del futuro, edited by Gonzalo Sánchez and María Emma Wills, 19–31. Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, Museo Nacional de Colombia, 2000. Sánchez, Gonzalo, and María Emma Wills, eds. Museo , memoria y nación: Misión de los museos nacionales para los ciudadanos del futuro. Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, Museo Nacional de Colombia, 2000. Segura, Martha. Itinerario del Museo Nacional de Colombia (1823–1994). Bogotá: Instituto colombiano de Cultura, Museo Nacional, 1995. Sevilla, Rafael. Memorias de un oficial del ejército español en campañas contra Bolívar y los separatistas de América. Madrid: Imprenta América, 1916. Vezga, Florentino. La expedición botánica. Bogotá: Biblioteca Aldeana de Cultura, 1936.

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Chapter Two

An “Immense Museum” or an “Immense Tomb”? War and the Rhetoric of Continuity in the Writings of Francisco Moreno

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Javier Uriarte

Nicolás Avellaneda, president of Argentina from 1874 to 1880, stated in a letter that served as a prologue to Álvaro Barros’s “Actualidad Financiera de la República Argentina” that “la cuestión fronteras es la primera cuestión para todos” 1 [the problem of the frontier is the first problem for everyone]. He added that “suprimir a los indios y las fronteras no implica en otros términos sino poblar el desierto” 2 [to suppress the Indians and the frontier does not imply, in other words, but to populate the desert]. This strong desire for extinguishing the desert led in fact to the construction of other deserts— this time not just imagined or fictional but tragically concrete. The direct cause for this desertification was war, the main instrument that made possible this new emptiness, which was the basis for the strong modernizing impulse that came to Latin America in the last years of the nineteenth century. In these pages, I discuss the forms in which Francisco Pascasio Moreno, perhaps the best-known Argentine traveler to Patagonia (the southernmost part of the country) in the final years of the nineteenth century, discursively transforms the desert into his personal collection. This collection would be the origin of the La Plata Museum of Natural Sciences, which he directed from its opening to the public in 1885 until 1906. I argue that war was a condition of possibility for the building of this personal collection and, ultimately, for the museum. Moreno was an explorer and scientist, and he is officially considered the discoverer of large territories of Patagonia, where he traveled on several 35

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occasions from 1873 to 1912. Moreno’s use of a strong patriotic and scientific discourse refers to the Patagonian space and the museum as a continuum, silencing in this way all traces of the so-called Conquest of the Desert, the systematic war of extermination that the Argentinian state waged against the indigenous peoples of Patagonia and the pampas from 1879 to 1885. I am not trying to suggest here something that has already been convincingly argued by many scholars, namely, that Moreno’s project complemented and was in fact a necessary part of the official campaign of extermination. 3 However, there is practically no explicit mention of war in Moreno’s texts: in his writing, war seems almost inexistent: it becomes an absence, a silence. In this chapter, I argue that Moreno makes frequent use of metonymic operations in order to avoid the explicit mention of violence, of the same violence that is a condition for the very existence of the museum. 4 Furthermore, I suggest that war is precisely that which makes Moreno’s collecting gaze possible. I think here of metonymy as a rhetorical figure of contiguity that works through associations, identification, and similarities. It is precisely the activity of collecting, the collector’s gaze, that which makes the transition from the now deserted desert to a museum seem uneventful, harmonious, a necessary continuity without breaks or erasures. It is true that Moreno, through his trips and his writings, contributed to the mapping of Patagonia. However, even as he made those territories visible for the eyes of the state, his texts also display different strategies that make war (the very instrument that transforms the frontier into something visible and appropriable for the state) invisible. Jens Andermann has argued that “the violence of conquest that had allowed the formation of the museum’s collection was thus simultaneously disavowed and restaged in the encounter with a ‘dead’ nature.” 5 While in The Optic of the State this critic discusses only Moreno’s texts directly related to the museum’s foundation, characteristics, and social role and examines its forms of exhibition and display through the analysis of photographs, I suggest that Moreno’s descriptions of Patagonian spaces and peoples in his travelogues already constitute a form of museification. The dynamics and the logic of the collection are already present in the forms in which the traveler traverses, modifies, and even looks at these spaces. 6 Throughout these pages, I focus my analysis on Moreno’s best-known book, Viaje a la Patagonia Austral [Travel to Southern Patagonia], and the only one published during his life. The book narrates a journey to Patagonia made in the years 1876–1877, at a moment in which the quotation by President Avellaneda that opens these pages suggested the commonly accepted idea that the war against the indigenous peoples was the only possible way to extend modernization and progress to southern Argentina. The book was published in 1879, when the Conquest of the Desert effectively began and when most of its crucial battles took place. I also discuss Moreno’s Reminiscencias, a book published posthumously in 1942 by Moreno’s son, Eduardo.

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This book was not planned as such by Moreno, and it reunites a heterogeneous group of texts (letters to and from Moreno, official documents, sections of Moreno’s diaries, etc.) written at different times, mostly near Moreno’s death and around twenty years after the events narrated in them. In these pages, I suggest that Moreno’s writings should be read from the perspective of war and that his texts cannot be fully understood without referring to the Conquest of the Desert. However, these texts, for the most part, do not mention the war. This chapter reveals the different metonymic operations of which the traveler makes use in order to silence war. The rhetoric of continuity that transforms the “desert” into a museum is actually an operation of erasure of the violence inherent in the collector’s gaze. In his voyages, Moreno assumes the role of a pioneer while competing with European travelers on behalf of his fatherland and reaching regions in which nobody—that is to say, no European or white man—had set foot before himself. This role is also assigned to him by the state. While applying for funding from the Argentine Scientific Society, Moreno receives a letter of support from Bartolomé Mitre, one of the key political figures in the country during the second half of the nineteenth century and president from 1862 to 1868. The letter, included in Reminiscencias and published in 1879 (the year in which the war begun and Moreno’s first book was published), gives us some elements to interpret the official support to Moreno’s trips. Above all, it makes clear the state’s interest in the museum: “su obra mejor es un museo antropológico, arqueológico, paleontológico que ha formado en su casa, con objetos reunidos por él, entre los cuales se cuentan más de 400 cráneos de razas indígenas, que es, sin duda, la colección craneológica americana más vasta que exista” 7 [his best work is an anthropologic, archaeological, paleontological museum that he has created at his home, with objects collected by him, among which there are more than 400 skulls of indigenous races; this is, undoubtedly, the vastest American craniological collection existing]. This private collection is, of course, the origin of the La Plata Museum of Natural Sciences that Moreno would direct for twenty-one years. The logic of the museum—its gaze, its institutional character—shapes Moreno’s travels and writing. As a parallel element to this official construction of Moreno, it would be useful to ask ourselves what is the role of the state in his writing and how this traveler imagines the state throughout his route. How is the relationship with the state conceived when it does not exist in the territories visited? How is the central power made visible? The answer to these questions lies in the relationship between the state, the violence that founds it, and the rhetoric of the collection and the museum. In Viaje a la Patagonia Austral, Moreno gives authority to his discourse by way of use of scientific discourse. In the beginning, he affirms that the “mission” of his travel is “en provecho de la patria y de la ciencia” 8 [ tobenefit fatherland and science]. The equivalence between the patriotic and

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the scientific discourses, clearly present throughout Moreno’s Viaje, becomes evident in the fact that science legitimates the paleontologizing discourse that the narrator uses in relation to the territory and its inhabitants. Thus, the collector’s gaze fossilizes the landscape:

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esta inmensa tumba que conserva un mundo que la erosión desentierra y revela al feliz observador, guarda los vestigios de la vida de miles de años. He investigado sus ruinas, he recorrido sus paredes y al menor indicio las he atacado batiéndolas con el martillo y el pico; y entre esa árida soledad he encontrado la animación de las épocas perdidas, ¡han resucitado a mi vista los extinguidos vertebrados de los tiempos de la aurora del terciario. 9 [this immense tomb, which preserves a world that erosion has exhumed and reveals to the happy observer, keeps vestiges of life that are thousands of years old. I have searched its ruins, I have studied its walls and, upon the minimum trace, I have attacked and beaten them with the hammer and pickax; and in the middle of that arid solitude I have found the animation of lost epochs, the extinguished vertebrates from the dawn of the Tertiary have resurrected before my sight.]

The quotation creates a space of death, of silence, an absolute void. The only thing that can be found there are signs, ruins, traces of something that is always hidden and needs to be brought to life (i.e., to the collection, to the museum) by the traveler’s hand. Here, the task of the collector implies the ideas of revelation and discovery (in the sense of uncovering). For Moreno, the desert is, potentially, a museum: “un inmenso museo existe en las capas superficiales del suelo de la República; démosle a la luz” [an immense museum exists in the surface layers of the national soil: let us bring it to light]. 10 The “immense tomb” becomes here an “immense museum.” The archaeological work closes a temporal gap; that is to say, the prehistoric objects regain life when they penetrate into the present time. Paradoxically, though, this entrance into the present takes place as long as they continue to be dead objects, as long as they are immobilized as ancestors. The voyage becomes thus a temporal one since the appropriation of the space implies its inclusion in the modernizing logic of the museum. The objects found are read as part of the past and inserted into the national narration of progress. 11 The quote gives importance to the past only with respect to the future. Moreno seems satisfied only when he describes the land as what it is going to be transformed into, or as a past that can be incorporated into his own narration. The present, for him, is nothing more than an “arid solitude,” or an “immense tomb.” Of course, these expressions can be read as anticipatory references to the effects of the war that was taking place when the book was published but that was already being discussed and foreseen as almost inevitable at the time of Moreno’s voyage. From this perspective, Patagonia is literally a space of death.

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When we study Moreno’s gaze from a temporal perspective, it is important to insist on its strongly “projective” character. Nature is a form of the past that is meaningful as long as it can be transformed, as long as it can be described as something different from what the traveler sees, as what it will become. However, the strength of this rhetorical faith in the changes that the arrival of progress would carry hides the erasures that this same arrival presupposes. While the narrator, celebrating the presence of state institutions in Patagonia, highlights the transformative power of formal education, his desire operates through a clear logic of substitution:

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Ansío para esos lugares, una escuela donde se aprenda a aprovecharlos, levantada quizá en el mismo sitio donde en la vieja modorra de hace muchos años, vegetaba aquel robusto algarrobo, el “Walichu,” que vi coloreado todo con jirones de ponchos y otros objetos colgados en sus ramas por los indios. . . . El ferrocarril y los automóviles han borrado los rastros del saqueo y del degüello. 12 [I long for a school in these places, where one can learn to take advantage of them, built perhaps at the same spot where long time ago, drowsily, there existed that robust carob tree, the “Walichu,” which I saw colorfully colored with shreds of ponchos and other Indian objects hanging from its branches. . . . (The arrival) of the train and cars have erased the traces of looting and throat cutting.]

The last sentence suggests an almost grammatical substitution, of an exact correspondence: modern trains and cars replace looting and throat cutting, two activities implicitly associated with the natives. However clear this operation of substitution seems, it is expressed through a strong rhetoric of continuity since the text refers to an apparently inevitable transformation of the indigenous space. That is why I prefer to read a metonymic tone—rather than a metaphoric one—in this writing. The quote includes another operation of substitution, perhaps subtler and rhetorically more effective than the one I just described. In the quote, the tree is a synecdoche of indigenous life; it is the space of religious life (as the word “Walichu” suggests) and a deposit of clothes and other daily objects. The quote implies that this same space will be replaced by the school, a figurative way of expressing the disappearance of a traditional form of knowledge for a modern state institution. This replacement is ideologically construed since the explanation for the disappearance of indigenous life does not lie on the presence of the school, of labor, or of the new means of transportation. This series of rhetorical substitutions disguised as continuities hide their celebration of the genocidal war that makes them possible. This operation is the discursive parallel to the La Plata Museum’s logic of exhibition, in which “the violence of conquest that had allowed the formation of the museum’s collection was . . . simultaneously disavowed and restaged in the encounter with a ‘dead’ nature.” 13 Of course,

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Andermann’s allusion to “dead nature” reminds us of Moreno’s mention of the “immense tomb” quoted above. The carob tree is the space of indigenous culture, but it is also an abandoned space since there is no mention of the actual presence of people around it. In addition, the quote’s last sentence implies that trains and cars have not replaced actual barbarous activities but rather their traces. The rhetorical construction of a desert in nature as the origin of the collector’s activity that leads to the emergence of the museum thus omits the mention of the museum’s true condition of possibility: the Conquest of the Desert. As Susan Stewart has showed, the collection is characterized by the “impulse to remove objects from their contexts of origin.” 14 In this case, the origin is actually the destruction of the world to which these objects belonged. By erasing all traces of the narratives that constitute its own origin, the collection is a kind of product similar to the map, as described by Michel de Certeau: “The map, a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a ‘state’ of geographical knowledge, pushes away into its prehistory or into its posterity . . . the operations of which it is the result or the necessary condition.” 15 In fact, this could be the very description of the museum, at least as it was conceived in the last years of the nineteenth century, that is to say, as a discursive mechanism that tried to comprise a heterogeneous group of elements in order to write a modern totalizing narrative for the nation-state. While the mention of violence is absent from the collector’s description, he nonetheless attributes violence to the indigenous inhabitants of those spaces. As mentioned above, only traces of barbarian activities disappear thanks to modernization. Furthermore, one page later the traveler refers to “los rastros dejados por las lanzas al arrastrarlas sobre la arena” 16 [the traces left by spears when dragged along on the sand]. The association of natives with violence constitutes a mechanism for legitimizing the very fact that they are, when Moreno writes his text, nothing more than a trace. This operation goes further than what Andermann has pointed out as one of the characteristics of Argentine frontier literature, the fact that it “ratifica, celebra y finalmente “olvida” esta “solución,” erradicando a la violencia” 17 [ratifies, celebrates, and finally “forgets” this “solution” (the extermination of indigenous cultures), by eradicating violence itself]. Moreno’s operations here do not just erase state violence, but they assume that the other is the violent subject, as a way of implicitly justifying the—still unmentioned—violence against him. The only part of indigenous life that is recalled here is its violence, while the conquests of civilization appear as elliptic operations that only show a satisfactory result, eliding the war that remains silenced as an explanation for those civilizing achievements. There is a rhetorically constructed continuity between those underground vertebrates that constituted the “immense tomb” and these other “traces” that now belong to an absolute past. Even the indigenous populations contempo-

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rary to Moreno are always described as objects of research: they are susceptible to measurement, classification, and exhibition. They are conceived as part of a collection. The narrator’s obsession with the measurement of indigenous skulls is particularly striking. During his 1876–1877 voyage to Patagonia, he performs a true “skull harvest.” The activity of measuring does not distinguish between the buried skull and the living native. Furthermore, the traveler does not exhume just skulls but entire bodies as well. He even desecrates indigenous tombs to obtain the buried bodies. The most macabre moment in this respect is the exhumation of the body of Moreno’s “friend” Sam Slick. 18 I do not study this episode in depth since it has been extensively commented on by critics. 19 Sylvia Molloy refers to the “doble vocación de Moreno, arqueólogo y a la vez antropólogo” 20 [Moreno’s double vocation, archaeologist and anthropologist at once]. Thus, the traveler’s rhetoric of preservation construes a continuity between the living native and the dead object, between life and death. Everything is equally subject to being exhibited and studied. This discourse transforms the living Indians into a piece of “living history,” into pure past. It is important to mention that, when he wrote Viaje a la Patagonia austral, Moreno explicitly opposed the “final solution,” and later on he would denounce the “excesses” of the war. The problem with this position lies in the distance between that which is openly expressed and that which at the same time is being stated surreptitiously, through silences and ellipses. These operations of invisibility are precisely the ones that, in Moreno, make war legitimate. In the final years of the nineteenth century, from the perspective of the Argentine state, it is not possible to reconcile the ideology of progress—reflected in the importance of the museum institution—with the opposition to the extermination of indigenous peoples. This is what Susana Bandieri, when discussing Moreno’s writings, described as “el doble carácter, muchas veces contradictorio, de representar un rol muy activo en el nuevo proyecto estatal a la vez que sentirse movido por un sentimiento paternalista con el indio” 21 [the double character, usually contradictory, of representing a very active role in the new state project and being moved by a paternalistic feeling toward the Indian]. It seems, then, that there are no alternatives for the indigenous peoples beyond their museum “destiny.” However, even if considered as objects, they can be included in the official project by becoming productive forces and being thus incorporated within the capitalist logic that arrives in Patagonia—together with the war—in the last years of the century. In this way, their permanence within the national space would become meaningful for the modern state. Moreno believes that when the Tehuelches “conozcan nuestra civilización antes que nuestros vicios y sean tratados como nuestros semejantes, los tendremos trabajando en las estancias del Gallegos, haciendo el mismo servicio que nuestros gauchos” 22 [get to know our civilization instead of our vices and be treated as

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our equals, we will have them working in the estates of Gallegos, doing the same service our gauchos do]. In the future that the traveler projects for Patagonia, natives are imagined as a subordinate and precarious workforce. There is, in Moreno’s sentence, a clear grammatical distinction between the “us,” with which the traveler identifies himself, and the group of gauchos and indigenous people. On the one hand, there is the “Argentine” capitalist group, who owns the means of production; on the other hand, we have a group composed of marginal subjects, who have been incorporated to the national project as a cheap workforce for the benefit of the first group. Thus, the state that consolidated in these years implied the establishment of new capitalist relations of production. At the same time, this discourse projects a certain form of precariousness within the national space, a space composed by that which was outside and has now been incorporated into that space, perhaps conditionally, and with a very precise and restricted task. It is interesting to point out the fact that the indigenous worker would share this task with the gaucho, who was the epitome of barbarism in Sarmiento’s 1845 Facundo. Thirty-five years after the publication of this book, though, the gaucho has been incorporated, albeit with subaltern position, into the national project (even if, strictly speaking, this domestication or incorporation of the gaucho implied the disappearance of the nomad gaucho—the “gaucho malo”—described by Sarmiento). This is what Moreno expresses in his 1879 travelogue. However, in his Reminiscences, where we find texts written once the disappearance of indigenous cultures has become a concrete and tragic reality, Moreno refers to the role of the indigenous peoples in the nation as different from that of the gaucho while still proposing the museum as the inevitable destiny for the former. The distance between natives and gauchos is now significant. In a footnote, Moreno refers to anthropophagy, which, according to him, was a common indigenous custom. Even if the narrator affirms that this habit is no longer practiced, the text still produces a barbarizing effect: “Conozco casos en que en el vértigo de la matanza algunos indios han bebido sangre y comido el corazón del blanco enemigo” 23 [I know of cases in which, during the frenzy of the killing, some Indians have drunk blood and eaten their white enemy’s heart]. Immediately after this, he refers to “una espantosa carnicería de soldados y gauchos argentinos en la que ese cacique [Chacayal] y Shaihueque tomaron parte. Las escenas que ellos me contaron a ese respecto, horrorizan. De esta matanza escapó un solo soldado y éste presta actualmente, servicio de guardián en el Museo Histórico Nacional” 24 [a dreadful slaughter of Argentine soldiers and gauchos in which this cacique (Chacayal) and Shaihueque participated. Only one solider escaped this killing, and he now provides service as guardian at the National History Museum]. By referring to the gauchos as “Argentine,” the narrator differentiates them clearly from the natives while excluding the latter from the space shared by

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soldiers and gauchos. At the time of the Argentine independence’s centennial celebration, when Moreno writes this text, the gaucho has been decisively incorporated into the national imaginary as having taken part in the struggle for independence, in other words, as a national symbol. This shows a certain change in the nation’s symbolic frontier, which now separates gauchos from indigenous peoples, barbarizing the latter while situating the former in the estate, the basic space of capitalist production in southern Argentina. Moreno’s quote imagines the irruption of indigenous violence into the harmonic space of productivity, where fissures or conflicts do not exist. In this context, the group constituted by “soldiers and gauchos” appears as a synecdoche of the fatherland. The quote is also rich in that it can lead us to reflect on the oblique or additional modes of exhibition employed by the museum in those years. In this particular case, through a macabre operation, it is not the native who is exposed but rather the soldier who survived the massacre perpetrated by the natives. This person’s situation has not really changed in a significant way because he has been transferred from one precarious job to another. He continues to be a cheap workforce in the modern nation-state since he is a marginal part of two of its most representative spaces: the estate and the museum. The soldier, victim of the barbarians, will still share the space with them, even if they have been domesticated by the museum and their proximity is no longer dangerous. At the same time, it is as if the indigenous violence had a particularly strong metonymic effect: anything or anyone that is touched by it, that suffers it, or that is a witness of it becomes a part of the narration about it. The survivor is now a part of a collection; in a way, he is a trace of the indigenous past, becoming thus one of the ruins that constitute those two “immense tombs”: the desert and the museum. In addition, the indigenous people are not exposed in the museum only as skulls or skeletons, but the institution also has the task of preserving the living Indian. In an 1886 letter, Moreno expresses, “He obtenido del Ministro de Guerra, que permita que ese Cacique [Foyel], y sus familias comprendiendo sus hermanos y lenguaraces, en todo quince personas, vengan a vivir conmigo a este Museo, mientras no se les envíe a sus campos” 25 [I have obtained from the Ministry of War the permission for this Cacique (Foyel) and his families, including his brothers and translators, fifteen people in total, to come live with me to this Museum, while they are not sent to their fields]. There is a subtle continuity between the archaeological object found and exhibited at the museum and the living Indians who are also exhibited and studied with the excuse of their preservation. 26 Both the soldier and the native are survivors; both of them are not completely within the nation-state. The museum is, therefore, the ideal institution to place them. It is the space for those who preserve traces of death, be it their own or that of the other. It is, in fact, a ghostly place, in between life and death. The life of the indige-

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nous people, in the context of the modern state, exists as long as they are parts of a collection, in other words, as long as they are read as part of a continuum with dead objects. Moreno actually did send someone to look for this group of natives: “envío al portador de ésta Sr. Telémaco Arvelli empleado de este Museo, que empleará el tiempo, que Ud. juzgue conveniente para hacer entrega de dichos indios . . . en coleccionar objetos de historia natural en aquellos alrededores” 27 [I am sending the bearer of this letter Mr. Telémaco Arvelli, an employee of this Museum, who will spend the time that you find convenient for entrusting him the said Indians . . . collecting objects of natural history in the surrounding area]. Mr. Arvelli’s trip would mean thus a double benefit for the museum’s collection since he would not only pick some specimens of living Indians in order to “preserve” them but also, while waiting for them, look for (other) elements of “natural history” for the collection. The text once again establishes a continuity by subtly identifying the different elements that the envoy will gather and thus fossilizing the indigenous people. By bringing them to the museum and transforming them in part of the collection, Moreno implicitly equals the discourse of anthropology to that of archaeology. When Moreno looks at the indigenous people, even before their extermination, they are for him objects of “preservation.” Uncannily, he cannot look at them or describe them without the shadow of their disappearance being implied in his words, almost as if they were ghosts or zombies. This is what Johannes Fabian has called “denial of coevalness”: “By that I mean a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.” 28 The description of the indigenous people in Moreno’s Reminiscencias, when the consequences of the war are visible, highlights the presence of what I call the rhetoric of vanishing. This is the nostalgic tone of progress, the ghostly description of spaces and peoples that are disappearing as a result of the new temporal dimension that war is projecting into space. While in Viaje a la Patagonia austral there is a clear tendency to establish beginnings since the narrator of this book constructs himself as an absolute pioneer, the Reminiscencias are in a certain sense the narration of an ending. In this book, the encounters with indigenous people are frequently the anticipation of their imminent disappearance. At the moment of writing, the extermination is already a certainty that is visible in Moreno’s use of language. The traveler affirms that one of the objectives of his trip is to “ver al indígena en su medio, lejos de la civilización, y vivir en el toldo para recoger entre aquellas tribus próximas a desaparecer, documentos que sólo conocía de oídas” 29 [see the native in his environment, far from civilization, and live in the tent in order to gather, among those tribes that were about to disappear, documents I only knew by hearsay]. It is precisely the disappearance of the tribe that makes the existence of the museum meaningful and necessary. 30 The use of

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the word “those” to refer to the indigenous tribes he visited makes explicit the distance between the adventures he narrates and the moment of the writing. The death of the people he describes allows Moreno to change his perspective and describe, hyperbolically, different things he finds as if they were the “last” specimens: “Vi allí la última máscara de madera que se haya usado en festejos indígenas en esas regiones, objeto etnográfico de la más alta importancia” 31 [There I saw the last wood mask to be used in indigenous celebrations in these regions, an ethnographic object of the highest importance]. It is the rhetoric of vanishing that makes this mask become an “ethnographic object.” As Susan Stewart has showed, the uniqueness of the object is essential for it to be valuable as part of a collection. If, as she says, “this finitude becomes the collector’s obsession,” 32 then the Conquest of the Desert is what makes the La Plata Museum’s collection so unique. The collection is not just “the antithesis of creation” 33 in the cases I have studied here; it is the very result of destruction.

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NOTES 1. Nicolás Avellaneda, “Carta-prólogo a Actualidad Financiera de la República Argentina, de Álvaro Barros,” in Proyecto y construcción de una nación (1846–1880), ed. Tulio Halperín Donghi (Buenos Aires: Ariel/Espasa-Calpe, 1995), 499. 2. Ibid. 3. In this respect, see Jens Andermann, Mapas de poder (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2000), 121; Sylvia Molloy, “De exhibiciones y despojos,” in El salto de Minerva, ed. Mabel Moraña and María Rosa Olivera-Williams (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2005), 143; Mónica Quijada, “Ancestros, ciudadanos, piezas de museo: Francisco P. Moreno y la articulación del indígena en la construcción nacional argentina (siglo XIX),” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 9, no. 2 (July–December 1998): n.p., http://www7.tau.ac.il/ojs/index.php/eial/article/view/1084/1116 (accessed July 25, 2015); Fermín Rodríguez, Un desierto para la nación (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2010), 127; and Claudia Torre, Literatura en tránsito (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2010), 118. 4. In chapter 1 of this volume, Felipe Martínez-Pinzón discusses the connection between war and the museum during the War of Independence in Colombia, that is, more than fifty years before the events narrated by Moreno. Significantly enough, however, he points out other operations of erasure of the past connected to the museum’s foundation and to the corresponding project of building a national narrative. 5. Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 52. 6. There is an interesting dialogue here with modernistas such as Enrique Gómez Carrillo, especially in relation to the notions of travel and the collection. The exteriority and exotic character of the lands described by these very different travelers can lead us to compare the divergent operations of classification and cataloging that take place in each of them. On the importance of collecting, reading, and consumption in Gómez Carrillo, see chapter 3 in this volume. 7. Francisco P. Moreno, Reminiscencias del Perito Moreno, coll. Eduardo V. Moreno (Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 1997), 21. 8. Francisco P. Moreno, Viaje a la Patagonia austral (Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 2003), 7. 9. Ibid., 321, emphasis added.

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10. Francisco Pascasio Moreno, Antropologia y arqueología. Importancia del estudio de estas ciencias en la República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Pablo E. Coni, 1881), 29. 11. In her introduction to this volume, María Mercedes Andrade discusses the theoretical implications of this operation of resignification and appropriation (through recontextualization) that is part of the logic of the collection. 12. Moreno, Reminiscencias, 27–28. 13. Andermann, The Optic of the State, 52. 14. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 156. 15. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 121. 16. Moreno, Reminiscencias, 26. 17. Jens Andermann, “Fronteras,” in Ficciones y silencios fundacionales, ed. Friedhelm Schmidt-Welle (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2003), 126, emphasis in the original. 18. Sam Slick, a native, “consintió en que hiciéramos su fotografía, pero de ninguna manera quiso que midiera su cuerpo y sobre todo su cabeza. No sé por qué rara preocupación hacía esto, pues más tarde, al volver a encontrarlo en Patagones, aun cuando continuamos siendo amigos, no me permitió acercarme a él . . . y un año después . . . le propuse que me acompañara y rehusó diciendo que yo quería su cabeza. Su destino era ése” (Moreno, Viaje, 105–6) [agreed to be photographed, but under no circumstance did he allow me to measure his body and, above all, his head. I do not know for what strange concern he did so since later on, when I met him again in Patagones, even if we were still friends, he would not let me approach him . . . and one year later . . . I proposed him to go with him and he rejected my offer saying that I wanted his head. That was his destiny]. Indeed, Sam seems to be an original kind of friend. From Moreno’s account, we can tell that Sam was aware of the classificatory logic associated with the measuring of the skull. After his death, the narrator explains how he proceeded: “averigüé el paraje en que había sido inhumado y en una noche de luna exhumé su cadáver, cuyo esqueleto se conserva en el Museo Antropológico de Buenos Aires; sacrilegio cometido en provecho del estudio osteológico de los Tehuelches” (Moreno, Viaje, 106) [I found out the place where he had been buried, and during a moonlight night I exhumed his corpse, whose skeleton is now preserved at the Buenos Aires Museum of Anthropology; (it was) a sacrilege committed for the benefit of the osteologic study of the Tehuelches]. It looks like Sam had some good reasons for not trusting his “friend” Moreno, and his misgivings were not as “strange” as the narrator, who seems surprised but is undoubtedly cynic, suggests. 19. About this episode, see Andermann, Mapas, 126; Molloy, “De exhibiciones,” 147–48; Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Geografías imaginarias (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editoria, 2003), 119–20; Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe, The End of the World as They Knew It (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press: 2008), 90–91; and Rodríguez, Un desierto, 128–29. 20. Molloy, “De exhibiciones,” 147. 21. Susana Bandieri, Historia de la Patagonia (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2005; repr. 2nd ed., 2009), 117. 22. Moreno, Viaje, 469. 23. Moreno, Reminiscencias, 50. 24. Ibid., emphasis added. 25. Moreno, Remniscencias, 261–62. 26. Jens Andermann has briefly discussed the case of Inacayal, a Tehuelche Cacique who was also sent (together with his clan) to Moreno’s museum: “Lodged at the museum . . . the natives were submitted to anthropometric measurements and photographic sessions, so as to collect the anatomical evidence of their evolutionary proximity to ‘prehistoric man.’ On entering the museum, Incayal . . . had become a specimen, a living sample of the hombre fósil [fossil man]. Upon his death in 1888, his skeleton, brain, scalp, and death mask were preserved and put on display alongside the other exhibits of ‘indigenous anatomy’” (Andermann, The Optic of the State, 55). This is another good example of the metonymic effect of continuities in the discourse of the collection. 27. Moreno, Reminiscencias, 263. 28. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 31.

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29. Moreno, Reminiscencias, 33–34, emphasis added. 30. Moreno’s use of the word desaparecidos is also significant if read today in the light of David Viñas’s powerful question: “los indios, ¿fueron los desaparecidos de 1879?” (Viñas, Indios, ejército y frontera [Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1982], 12) [were the Indians the disappeared of 1879?]. Viñas was the first intellectual who openly criticized the glorification of the Conquest of the Desert that the 1976–1983 military dictatorship had imposed (it was during the dictatorship that the celebration of the centennial of this military victory took place). This has led other researchers to question the La Plata Museum’s modes of exhibition. The photographer Xavier Kriscautzky affirms that “la diferencia entre este museo y la ESMA [Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada] es que acá quedó todo registrado” (quoted in Daniel Badenes, “Restos humanos en el Ciencias Naturales Museo de La Plata,” Fundación Ilam 43 [September 2006]: n.p., http://www.lapulseada.com.ar/43/43_museo.html [accessed July 25, 2015]) [the difference between this museum and the ESMA (Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics, used a detention center during the dictatorship) is that here everything was recorded]. It is important to point out that today, most of these skulls and skeletons have been returned to the lands of their people thanks to the important and insistent work of a group of social forces. As a result, in a sense, the museum became itself a desert. 31. Moreno, Reminiscencias, 37. 32. Stewart, On Longing, 159. 33. Ibid., 160.

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WORKS CITED Andermann, Jens. “Fronteras: La conquista del desierto y la economía de la violencia.” In Ficciones y silencios fundacionales: Literaturas y culturas poscoloniales en América Latina (siglo XIX), edited by Friedhelm Schmidt-Welle, 117–35. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2003. ———. Mapas de poder: Una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino. Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2000. ———. The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Avellaneda, Nicolás. “Carta-prólogo a Actualidad Financiera de la República Argentina, de Álvaro Barros.” In Proyecto y construcción de una nación (1846–1880), edited by Tulio Halperín Donghi, 499–501. Buenos Aires: Ariel, Espasa-Calpe, 1995. Badenes, Daniel. “Restos humanos en el Ciencias Naturales Museo de La Plata.” Fundación Ilam 43 (September 2006): n.p. http://www.lapulseada.com.ar/43/43_museo.html (accessed July 25, 2015). Bandieri, Susana. Historia de la Patagonia. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2005. Reprint. 2nd ed., 2009. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Halperín Donghi, Tulio. “Una nación para el desierto argentino.” In Proyecto y construcción de una nación (1846–1880), edited by Tulio Halperín Donghi, 31–42. Buenos Aires: Ariel/ Espasa Calpe, 1995. Jagoe, Eva-Lynn Alicia. The End of the World as They Knew It: Writing Experiences of the Argentine South. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008 Livon-Grosman, Ernesto. Geografías imaginarias: El relato de viaje y la construcción del espacio patagónico. Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editoria, 2003. Molloy, Sylvia. “De exhibiciones y despojos: Reflexiones sobre el patrimonio nacional a principios del siglo XX.” In El salto de Minerva: Intelectuales, género y Estado en América Latina, edited by Mabel Moraña and María Rosa Olivera-Williams, 143–55. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2005.

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Moreno, Francisco P. Antropologia y arqueología. Importancia del estudio de estas ciencias en la República Argentina. Buenos Aires: Imprenta Pablo E. Coni, 1881. ———. Reminiscencias del Perito Moreno: Versión propia. Collected by Eduardo V. Moreno. Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 1997. ———. Viaje a la Patagonia austral. Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 2003. Quijada, Mónica. “Ancestros, ciudadanos, piezas de museo. Francisco P. Moreno y la articulación del indígena en la construcción nacional argentina (siglo XIX).” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 9, no. 2 (July–December 1998): n.p. http:// www7.tau.ac.il/ojs/index.php/eial/article/view/1084/1116 (accessed July 25, 2015). Rodríguez, Fermín. Un desierto para la nación: La escritura del vacío. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2010. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Torre, Claudia. Literatura en tránsito: La narrativa expedicionaria de la Conquista del Desierto. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2010. Viñas, David. Indios, ejército y frontera. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1982.

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Chapter Three

Of bayaderas, congaïs, and fumerías “Virtual” Collecting in De Marsella á Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón, by Enrique Gómez Carrillo

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Olga Vilella

For Latin American elites of the so-called Bella Época [Belle Époque], a trip abroad often provided the opportunity to acquire objects that made public display of their familiarity with the cultural capitals of the world. Familiarity, for one, with Paris, that “capital del siglo XIX” [capital of the nineteenth century] that was obligatory pilgrimage of so many travelers from the Americas at the turn of the last century. 1 The object acquired abroad, variously and indiscriminately labeled objeto de arte (objet d’art), was then to be exhibited at home as a visual reminder of the trip itself, signifier of the owner’s wealth and buen gusto [good taste]. In the social context of the nineteenth century, buen gusto was routinely understood as the degree of civilization of an individual. Its opposite condition—incultura, rastacuerismo [lack of culture, rastaqueurism]—was strenuously rejected by bourgeois Latin Americans uncomfortably aware of their marginal position among Europeans, as in the often-quoted judgment by Rubén Darío: “a mi entender, el rastacuerismo tiene como condición indispensable la incultura; o, mejor dicho, la falta de buen gusto” 2 [in my view, rastaqueurism has as its necessary condition the lack of culture, or better yet, the lack of good taste]. Notwithstanding that qualifying “a mi entender” [in my view], the notion that “buen gusto” and “cultura” were one and the same circulated freely among the elites in Latin America in the nineteenth century. The purported benefits to the nation of collective notions of buen gusto, for instance, lie at the heart of Ariel by José Enrique Rodó, one of the most 49

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influential texts of turn-of-the-century Latin America and an impassioned defense of el buen gusto as a “rienda de firme criterio” [a firm rein on the discernment] of the individual. 3 It follows that the consequences of lacking buen gusto were dire. A newspaper crónica, published in a Mexican newspaper in 1881, fulminated against one of the author’s “ricos compatriotas” [rich compatriots]:

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que cuando viaja . . . va derramando el oro por todas partes, para hacerse ver como un Creso o empleándolo en baratijas, y si por casualidad entra a un Museo de pinturas y ve las copias que allí se ejecutan y la multitud de compradores extranjeros, compra una o dos de las de menos mérito y de menos costo; más bien por imitación que por gusto y se dirige en seguida a proveerse de media docena de cromos de pacotilla y litografías iluminadas que todo junto valdrá ochenta o cien pesos y regresa a México orgulloso de transportar una carga de objetos de arte que muestra a los demás, dándose sus humos de muy ilustrado y de que sacó provecho del viaje. 4 [who, when he travels, . . . goes around spilling gold everywhere in order to make himself look like a Croesus, or spending it on knickknacks, and if, by chance, he enters a painting Museum and he sees the copies executed there and the crowd of foreign buyers, he buys one or two of the least worth and cost; more in order to imitate them than because of his own (good) taste and he then immediately supplies himself with a dozen worthless prints and illuminate lithographs that, all together, are worth eighty or a hundred pesos. And he goes back to Mexico, proud of transporting a load of objets d’art that he shows to others, putting on airs of being very educated and having taken advantage of the trip.]

The inference is obvious: truly cosmopolitan travelers spared no expense to bring home the very best copies available for purchase at “un Museo de pinturas” [a painting museum]. Mexican bourgeois newspaper readers of 1881 would have understood “a painting museum” to mean institutions such as the Louvre and its workshops, which functioned in a similar fashion to the ubiquitous museum shop of our day. The ideal collector, the crónica goes on to suggest, functions in opposition to the would-be Croesus, blinded to the lack of true aesthetic value of his “carga” [load] of cheap souvenirs. It is no coincidence that these activities need be carried out during a trip abroad. For this would-be collector of privileged reproductions, the provenance of the object is essential, not necessarily its exchange value or even its authenticity. In this, elite Latin American travelers were not alone: plaster cast reproductions of classical sculptures and copies of important paintings in European collections, such as the Louvre’s, made up the initial collections of many early American museums, from New York to Santiago, Chile. 5 If collecting and exhibiting objetos de arte was a desirable activity but the trip abroad the province of a fortunate few, what options were then available to those members of the Latin American middle classes desirous to make a

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public display of their buen gusto but lacking in funds necessary to travel abroad, those hopeful, would-be participants of the experience of seeing and being seen often imbricated in the cultural practice of collecting? For crucial to the activities of the collector, then as now, is the public recognition of one’s own discernment, a concept already implicit in the crónica, with its understanding that the traveler acquired objects abroad in order to display them. The derisive use of commercial terms (transports and load) is a measure of the censure awaiting the unsophisticated traveler, owner of the “docena de cromos de pacotilla” [the dozen worthless prints] once home among friends. Only the acquisition of an object properly vetted by buen gusto could guarantee the resulting pride of ownership in the mechanically reproduced replica. Questions of authenticity as the hallmark of the collectable are new to the practice of collecting. As Walter Benjamin demonstrated in his studies of mechanically reproduced works of art, copies work to validate originals, the originals whose “existence” is located in a time/sphere of its own. 6 The fact that the original will remain always distant, however “close it may be,” in Benjamin’s celebrated phrase, would not have hindered the activity of collecting in the nineteenth century once the owner’s discernment—el buen gusto—and the placement of the item in a collection had released the aura of the original. Benjamin may have written in expectation of the day when mechanical reproduction had rendered the aura of originals meaningless; for nineteenthcentury collectors—like their twenty-first-century counterparts in museum shops everywhere—the aura of an original only heightened the desirability of the replica. Paradoxically, this function works to neutralize the oncehoped-for democratizing power, in Benjamin’s estimation, of the copy. For whether in museum workshops of the nineteenth century or in the museum shops of the twenty-first—and the catalog and Internet commerce that are its successors—the misappropriation of the replica often renders it a stand-in of the auratic original. 7 As Benjamin further noted, “The situation into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work, but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie.” 8 For the purposes of this study, I suggest that this sort of depreciation of landscapes noted by Benjamin also extended to those landscapes that passed in review, as it were, before the readers of crónicas de viajes [travel chronicles], a depreciation that created an illusion of accessibility that made possible the textual appropriation of foreign landscapes. As a leisure activity, this makes the popularity of travel writing among turn-of-the-last-century readers contemporaneous with the dawn of both the tourism and the film industries in Latin America. Leisure activities

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that in their beginnings partook of the typically nineteenth-century notion that all of the world could be gathered, as it were, under the totalizing sweep of the eye. It is in this context that this study proposes the consumption of travel writing as a form of virtual collecting for those middle-class Latin Americans devoid of economic privileges but still eager to share in the collecting activities that seemed to be the inevitable result of a trip abroad. In order to do so, I examine how De Marsella á Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón by Enrique Gómez Carrillo (Guatemala, 1873–1927), the first in a trilogy of Asian crónicas by the author, deployed textual strategies of selection, organization, and display similar to those used in museums and world fairs. The consumption of the work of a cronista viajero [traveling chronicler] such as Gómez Carrillo seems to function, I propose, as a limited but still very tangible form of appropriation of the aura of the original. Objetos de arte in the context of this study are to be understood as both the crónica that re-creates the experiences resulting from the trip abroad and any object acquired as a result of the journey. Both the crónica and the privileged object depicted within are often conflated in the act of writing. The process of transforming the crónica into the objeto de arte is triggered by imbuing the text with all of the qualities inherent to the process of acquisition that is at the heart of the experience of collecting. As with other travel crónicas by Gómez Carrillo, the text reactivates and involuntarily democratizes the original experience by allowing it “to meet the beholder . . . in his own particular situation.” 9 The book thus stands in for the trip not taken, the museum reproduction not acquired, a reproduction all the more desirable for having been already vetted by the connoisseur, in this case, the traveling chronicler, el cronista viajero. Located within a text that is reminiscent of a rambling stroll through a series of displays set out for leisurely inspection, the type of object exhibited in De Marsella á Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón is often a visual cliché, a replica of objects and images first disseminated by world fairs—another activity much to the taste of the times—and European collectors and art merchants, like the Goncourt brothers in France. 10 Consonant also with the notion of a stroll through a privileged cultural landscape, the narrative Gómez Carrillo often adopts the stance of a guide, one of the positions the cronistas adopted, according to Aníbal González, as they sought to appropriate from European literature those elements necessary to promote a modern literature of their own. In Gómez Carrillo, that stance rendered his crónicas “depósitos enciclopédicos de sabiduría instantánea” 11 [encyclopedic deposits of instant wisdom] in González’s judgment, not only about the ways of the [Parisian] world but also about exotic realms.

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However, unlike other guías [guides] of modernismo abroad, notably Rubén Darío, there seldom seems to be any cultural anxiety on display in the Gómez Carrillo text. During his first trip to Paris, for instance, Darío portrayed a visitor agape (“badaud”) at the marvels of the Universal Exposition of 1900: “¿A qué se ha venido, por qué se ha hecho tan largo viaje, sino para contemplar maravillas? En una Exposición todo el mundo es algo badaud” 12 [What have we come here for, why make such a long trip if not to contemplate wonders? At the Exhibition, everyone is somewhat badaud]. The narrative Gómez Carrillo, on the contrary, was most often portrayed as resolutely removed from any display of provincial amazement. 13 A wily practitioner of the type of cultural journalism still prevalent in our day, he was a master at seizing the moment in order to make an elaborate demonstration of an aesthetic appreciation of the fashionable, in ways that appeared far removed from the cultural anxieties that often marked his Latin American peers. In so doing, the Guatemalan seemed to lay claim to a uniqueness that placed him twice removed from the objects of his gaze—the colonized peoples of Asia in this trip—and the reader at home in Latin America, a place, unlike France, with which he had alleged maternal ties, Gómez Carrillo never claimed as his own. When tensions marked his experience abroad in this trip, he was able to dismiss them by resorting to a gaze deferred that affirmed his claim to cultural superiority over subject matter and audience, all in uneasy pursuit of the modern literary market. 14 In line with this position, De Marsella á Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón privileges at every moment that which is exotic— Asian landscapes, a temple dancer in Ceylon, an androgynous opium smoker in Saigon—over the concrete evidence of the increased industrialization of Asian nations that parades before the eyes of the narrator, a tension that results in a text at times marked by contradictions. However unstable the text at times, temple dancer and opium smoker remain firmly embedded in the text as privileged objetos de arte to be admired and owned, their acquisition facilitated by the deployment of a narrator’s gaze deferred. The result is a form of catalog that allows for the vicarious participation in the act of collecting, safe perhaps in the knowledge that in exhibiting one’s familiarity with these objetos de arte, a contemporary reader would not incur in ridicule, like the hapless Mexican rastacuero [rastaquouère] of the 1881 crónica. Gómez Carrillo “ve [y] juzga” 15 [sees (and) judges]: for Rubén Darío, that was the secret of the success of his friend and colleague. To see and to judge, to select in order to display, is of course the task—and the privilege— of the collector. Texts such as De Marsella á Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón reproduced cultural experiences then available to very few and provide us, today, with another approach to the topic of collecting in Latin America at the beginning of the last century.

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“EL PRÍNCIPE DE LOS CRONISTAS” [THE PRINCE OF CHRONICLERS] Despite the suggestion that it was possible to travel from Marseille to Tokyo in the time required to read this particular set of crónicas—a suggestion perhaps grounded in the appreciation for increased rates of travel of the 1900s—it would take Gómez Carrillo three volumes to recount his travels in Asia. The one under study was first published in 1906, soon after the unexpected victory of Japan over Russia at the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War (1904–1905)—a fact that no doubt added newsworthiness to the text— by Garnier Frères, possibly the most important publisher of books in Spanish at the turn of the last century. It is perhaps indicative of the importance of the Spanish-language market for the editorial house that at the time (and well into the twentieth century), their offices in Paris employed dozens of expatriate Latin American and Spanish writers as translators and authors, chief among them Gómez Carrillo and another cronista whose work has also lapsed into oblivion, the Puerto Rican Luis Bonafoux (1855–1918). 16 Other crónicas apparently conceived during this particular trip, such as “Danza bayadera” [Bayadera Dance]—alternately titled “Danza de bayadera” and “Danza de la bayadera”—would be published in other volumes at a later date by the prolific author. It is, in fact, nearly impossible to ascertain with accuracy the number of editions and dates of publication of much of the work of Gómez Carrillo, whose Obras completas were published between 1919 and 1923 in a staggering twenty-seven volumes while the author was still alive. Much of it is not in circulation today. However, at the turn of the twentieth century, few cronistas enjoyed a wider readership among Latin Americans than “el príncipe de los cronistas” 17 [the prince of chroniclers], as he was invariably termed by the print media of the day. Variously vice-consul of El Salvador and consul of Guatemala and Argentina in Paris, Gómez Carrillo arrived in Paris as Latin American newspapers became more cognizant of the commodity value of the crónicas and sought to “modernize” their product by including cronistas among their contributors. 18 His name at the bottom of a crónica, or simply the initials E. G. C., soon became familiar to readers throughout Latin America and Spain, while a great deal of Parisian-derived cachet soon surrounded his persona. His many exploits created an image of a modern-day “‘condottiere,’ “D’Artaganan a ratos y a ratos peregrino de aventura” [a “condottiere,” at times D’Artagnan and sometimes a pilgrim in search of adventure] according to an early biographer, if the reality was at times more prosaic: “[ca. 1900] era la época en que Carrillo hacía publicar en los periódicos inverosímiles artículos contra Estrada Cabrera para salir después desafiando a los autores. Combinación despreocupada que le permitía obtener dádivas del dictador de Guatemala” 19 [(ca. 1900) was the period when Carrillo had implausible

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newspaper articles published against Estrada Cabrera, only to later challenge the authors. A carefree combination that allowed him to obtain handouts from the Guatemalan dictator]. But perhaps the most renowned quality that surrounded Gómez Carrillo was the recognition his persona seemed to elicit from among the Parisian literary circles. As Darío would later reminisce, almost wistfully,

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llegado en pleno hervor simbolista, Gómez Carrillo había ya conocido a todos los dioses, semidioses y corifeos del movimiento. Era amigo de Verlaine, de Moreas, de Reynaud, de Duplessis, de todos los concurrentes a las comidas y reuniones de La Plume. 20 [arrived in the midst of the symbolist effervescence, Gómez Carrillo had already met all the gods, demigods, and coryphaei of the movement. He was a friend of Verlaine, of Moreas, of Reynaud, and of Duplessis, of all those present at the dinners and meetings of La Plume.]

No badaud this, Gómez Carrillo seemed to be the one Latin American recognized by the metropolis. Whether this recognition was indeed true is still open to question. 21 In his lifetime, however, it was accepted as an incontrovertible fact, one factor that probably accounted for his enormous prestige among the Latin American reading public. The ubiquity of the Gómez Carrillo persona, as self-reported in crónicas where he often appeared on intimate terms with le tout Paris—as he no doubt would have phrased it—made the Latin American reader participant of a highly desirable experience: the experience of being at home in a sophisticated European milieu. This experience was heightened when Gómez Carrillo, an inveterate traveler, set out to re-create the incursions of the European traveler-writer, à la Pierre Loti (1850–1923), with whom Gómez Carrillo was often compared in print and one of the European writers who helped disseminate the Orientalist discourse at the turn of the last century. 22 Before landscapes and peoples purportedly more exotic than his own, the Guatemalan Gómez Carrillo was able to adopt the position of the European observer, no doubt in part due to the seeming ease with which he had penetrated Parisian intellectual circles. A great deal of readerly goodwill probably accompanied Gómez Carrillo as he set out on this particular trip aboard the Sydney, an ocean liner with an itinerary similar to those of the popular “Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company,” familiarly known as “the P&O”: Marseille–Egypt–Suez Canal–Ceylon–Singapore–Vietnam–China–the Korea Strait and finally Japan. 23 Lazy days spent lounging by the liner’s railing, the seascape, the frequent port excursions—brief and touristy—all are re-created as if in long, panoramic camera shots. In fact, the culturally savvy Gómez Carrillo would establish a connection between traveling and the cinema very early in the twentieth century, perhaps one of the first Latin American cronistas to do so.

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In his crónica, “La psicología del viaje” [The Psychology of Traveling] he would counsel,

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En pueblos muy tranquilos, en villas viejas y casi muertas de países muy distantes, cuando la sombra invade la calle es cuando los interiores revelan algo de su misterio. Deteneos entonces ante las ventanas, deteneos ante las puertas de las tiendas, y veréis las escenas familiares desarrollando sus lánguidas cintas cinematográficas al resplandor de las antiguas lámparas patriarcales. 24 [In very quiet towns, in old and almost dead towns in very distant countries, when shadows invade the street, that is when the interiors reveal some of their mystery. Stop then before the windows, stop before shop doors, and you will see familiar scenes developing their languid cinematographic films, under the light of antique patriarchal lamps.]

As an injunction to would-be travelers, the image contrasts an exotic interior, lit by the glow of Aladdinesque “lámparas patriarcales” [patriarchal lamps] in a sort of early Hollywood “Arabian Nights” stage set and an undifferentiated exterior of “villas viejas y casi muertas” [old and almost dead towns], a textual node that juxtaposes a then-modern allusion to film with the trope of the interior so characteristic of nineteenth-century modernista aesthetics. The final destination of the historical Sydney may have been the commercial entrepôt of Yokohama, Japan; in the textual re-creation of this particular trip, however, the reader was meant to be transported to the atemporal, ahistorical Orient. In fact, the whole of De Marsella á Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón is permeated at times by a sense of déjà vu. The narrative is not so much about the trip or even the revelation of something “new” that had not been described by Loti & Co. but rather the opportunity to see what others had already seen and to bring back the souvenir, in the literal French value of to remember by. A revealing textual depiction of the act of acquisition of a privileged souvenir abroad actually makes an appearance early in the text. The Darío prologue begins with the words He aquí que un buen día oigo en mi antesala una voz conocida; luego estrecho la mano del amigo sonriente y complicado que me dice: “Aquí le traigo á usted un álbum de amores torturados, una oración thibetana [sic], una estampa de Utamaro.” Es Gómez Carrillo que vuelve del Japón. 25 [And, lo and behold, one fine day I hear in my vestibule a familiar voice; I then shake the hand of the smiling complicated friend who says: “Here I have for you an album of tortured loves, a Tibetan prayer, a print by Utamaro.” It is Gómez Carrillo who returns from Japan.]

In the hands of Darío, the description of the estampa illustrates how the souvenir mutates into an objeto de arte:

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Doy las gracias á Gómez Carrillo por su regalo. Hojeo mi álbum de eróticas epilepsias; desenrollo la oración thibetana [sic] que está en caracteres rojos . . . y admiro la estampa de Utamaro. Juntos hemos admirado, con el querido Enrique, á Utamaro y Hokusay y á todos los artistas nipones que nos revelaban los Goncourt; mas esta estampa tiene para mí un valor precioso, el ser traída desde el imperio del Medio, por el compañero que ha tenido la suerte de ver con sus ojos de artista el Yoshivara, los puentes de bambú y las lindas muñecas todas sedas y genuflexiones y sonrisas, que apenas he podido yo amar en los biombos, abanicos y lacas de los ichi-banes de occidente, y en las secciones exóticas de las exposiciones universales. 26 [I thank Gómez Carrillo for his gift. I browse through my album of erotic epilepsies; I unravel the Tibetan prayer in red characters . . . and admire Utamaro’s print. Together with dear Enrique we have admired Utamaro and Hokusai and all the Japanese artists that the Goncourts revealed to us; but this print has for me a precious value because it was brought from the Middle Empire by the friend who had the luck to see, with his artist’s eyes, the Yoshiwara, the bamboo bridges, and the pretty dolls, all silks and curtsies and smiles, that I have only been able to love in the folding screens, fans, and the lacquers of the Ichi-bans of the west, and in the exotic sections of world fairs.]

It is nearly impossible to ascertain whether the Darío estampa was truly one in a series by famed Japanese painter and woodblock-print designer Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) or simply a print in the style of Utamaro, of the type popular with European travelers of the time. 27 The origin of the estampa, in fact, is largely irrelevant, for as with many other works of this kind, prints are precisely “designed for reproducibility.” 28 Much like the “copias que allí se ejecutan” [the copies made there] in European museum workshops, its value instead lies in its provenance: “traída desde el imperio del Medio, por el compañero que ha tenido la suerte de ver con sus ojos de artista el Yoshivara” [brought from the Middle Empire by the friend who had the luck to see, with his artist’s eyes, the Yoshiwara]. No Latin American traveler of the nineteenth century could have asked for more, an object imbued with all the qualities of the visual clichés of the Orient—“el Yoshivara, los puentes de bambú y las lindas muñecas todas sedas y genuflexiones y sonrisas” [the Yoshiwara, the bamboo bridges, and the pretty dolls, all silks and curtsies and smiles]—chosen moreover by an actual traveler with the discerning gaze of an artist [“con . . . ojos de artista”]. Gómez Carrillo’s Japanese trilogy functions at times in a similar fashion as the gift of the estampa functioned in the Darío prologue: as “virtual” collections of Oriental reproductions de buen gusto made available to middle-class consumers unable to purchase their equivalent abroad and intent on expanding their “cultural” horizons. Much as it is a collector’s task to see and to select in order to display, Gómez Carrillo, experienced traveler, friend of Parisian intellectual elites, hombre de buen gusto, “ve [y] juzga” [sees and judges], in order to select from amidst the undifferentiated Asian landscapes

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the lone image that will be transformed by the narrative into an unique objeto de arte. Again, as with the reproductions of European museum workshops, the fact that the image is a replica—and a replica, moreover, mediated through the privileged activity of a trip abroad—only serves to heighten its desirability. Just as the “ideal” collector of the 1881 newspaper crónica was meant to seek guidance from the European museum workshop and its trove of properly vetted replicas, the reader—and would-be collector—of these crónicas is not alone in this task. Guidance is available from the narrative Gómez Carrillo, much as he himself had been guided in turn by those who came before him. In a letter to Darío, quoted in the prologue, Gómez Carrillo laments, on his arrival in Yokohama,

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Al principio . . . la sorpresa es lamentable. ¡No es lo que habíamos soñado! ¡No es lo que habíamos visto en los cromos! Pero luego los ojos se acostumbran. . . . Es el Japón de Loti, querido Rubén, el de Loti y el de Kipling, el de Lafcadio Hearn y el de Parcival Lowel [sic]. Es un Japón de étagère. 29 [In the beginning . . . the surprise is deplorable. This is not what we had dreamed of! This is not what we had seen in prints! But then the eyes become accustomed. . . . It is Loti’s Japan, dear Rubén, Loti’s and Kipling’s, that of Lafcadio Hearn and of Percival (Lowell’s). It is the Japan of the curio cabinet.]

Faced with the dismaying reality of an Orient that does not conform to expectations, balance is restored by reproducing that which has been already recognized by Loti and Rudyard Kipling, Lafcadio Hearn and Percival Lowell, and all other Western travel writers who preceded him. Thus, in one stroke, the narrative Gómez Carrillo not only claims for himself the authority of veteran Oriental authorities in this, his first trip to Asia, but he further imbues the physical, historical Japan with the condition of replica to be displayed. The “Japan of the curio cabinet” of this text can be understood only in relation to the japoneries to be found among the shelves of museums and world fairs of the West. Its desirability rests precisely in its reproducibility, in how closely actual Japanese landscapes reproduce that which is already known and collected. The action of stripping away the layers of modernity, like the task of selecting from among all the merchandise available to the traveler in Europe—some of it in danger of being “cromos de pacotilla” [worthless prints]—involves the negotiation of the act of seeing. Despite the promise implicit in the title, the first stops in the textual itinerary—organized in a similar fashion to the historical one, the better to promote the illusion of travel—show little in the way of exoticism. Port Said, Egypt, and “India,” in fact, are disappointingly modern, the result, the text claims with no apparent irony, of their status as English colonies, as in the “Indian” portion of the trip, where the narrator blithely concludes, “Sin necesidad de ir al centro de la

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india [sic], yo podría después de pasar dos días en Ceilán, decir lo mismo” [Without the need of visiting the center of India, I could say the same after spending two days in Ceylon], in the process of describing the English colonization of India as its “regeneration” [La India regenerada]. Untroubled by the revelation that the Indian subcontinent was never actually visited, the text goes on to negotiate objective reality through the same means that will eventually reproduce the “Japan of the curio cabinet” of the text: the gaze deferred. 30 A gaze deferred will become, literarily, the only recourse open to the narrator as an alternative to the evidence before his eyes:

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Á medida que las palmeras de Colombo van perdiéndose á lo lejos entre los vapors azules del horizonte, la noción exacta de la realidad que acabamos de ver desaparece de nuestra memoria. Diríase que materialmente una mano borra, una por una, las sensaciones de vida, de comercio, de modernidad. Ya de las amplias calles llenas de tiendas y de las avenidas palaciegas, nada vemos. Pero en cambio las cúpulas ruinosas de las pagodas, los muros roídos de los palacios, las colinas llenas de piedras dispersas . . . lo que es la leyenda brillante, en suma, toma, en nuestro recuerdo, ó mejor dicho, en nuestra imaginación, proporciones inmensas. 31 [As the Colombo palm trees are lost among the blue vapors of the horizon, the exact notion of the reality that we have just seen disappears from our memory. One could say that one hand physically erases, one by one, the sensation of life, of commerce, of modernity. We see nothing of the wide streets full of shops and of palatial avenues. Instead, the ruined domes of pagodas, the corroded walls of palaces, the hills full of scattered rocks . . . what in sum makes up the brilliant legend, takes in our memory, or rather in our imaginations, immense proportions.]

That stubborn “nada vemos” [we see nothing] acts to neutralize “vida . . . comercio . . . modernidad” [life . . . commerce . . . modernity] in favor of the stasis required for the proper admiration of the work of art. Those ruined copulas, those corroded palace walls, those dispersed stones could all very well be housed in a museum. Enter la bayadera [the temple dancer] and la joven anamita que acababa de fumar su última pipa [the young Vietnamese woman who has finished smoking her last pipe]. Never really perceiving them as human, the text seeks to mutate temple dancer and opium smoker into privileged Oriental replicas of objetos de arte, stripped of all context of the culture that produced them, passively open to inspection by the would-be collector. Much like the artifacts of primitive cultures located in Western museums of the turn of the century, the reader is meant to understand them merely as aesthetic objects. 32 The stance adopted by Gómez Carrillo in his Asian travels, albeit with a different purpose, was one familiar to Latin American readership, accustomed as it was with the appropriation of exotic landscapes and peoples by

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writers such as Francisco Pascasio Moreno in his quest to incorporate Patagonia into the modern Argentine discourse, for one, as discussed in the previous chapter. In the Gómez Carrillo crónica, however, enough traces remain of the cultures that produce them so that in subjecting them to a “collector’s” close scrutiny, the narrative Gómez Carrillo is forced to deploy narrative strategies that neutralize their cultural ambiguity. A first reading of the crónicas suggests that both temple dancer and opium smoker are to be understood as static objetos de arte to be admired and owned. Even the actual placement of these crónicas within the volume carries the suggestion of inanimate objects resting within ornate display cases, as if both temple dancer and the young Vietnamese opium smoker occupied separate jewelry cases within the coffer that is the book-artifact. A slim volume of five by seven inches, the hunter-green cloth cover of the 1906 edition of De Marsella á Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón, its title in silver cursive, is reminiscent of a small jewelry box. The words “París” and “Garnier Hermanos” in smaller type on the lower section of the cover could stand in for a chic French jeweler’s name. Within the coffer that is the text, the two crónicas stand out for their detachment from the remainder of the collection. Considerations of historical context do not mark either “Danza de bayadera” [“The Temple-dancer’s Dance”] or “En una fumería de opio anamita” [“In a Vietnamese Opium Den”], unlike other crónicas in the volume, which require, for one, familiarity with sociopolitical events of the period for their understanding (“La catedral rusa de Tokio” [“The Russian Cathedral in Tokyo]), “El espíritu público después de la guerra” [“Public Spirit after the War”], “La religión de la espada” [“The Religion of the Sword”], “Sadda Yacco” [“Sadda Yako”]). A second group appears to be the product of a voluminous consumption of print media by the author (“Suntuosas evocaciones” [“Sumptuous Evocations”], “En el estrecho de Corea—El alma sentimental del Imperio de la Mañana Apacible” [“In the Korean Straits—The Sentimental Soul of the Empire of the Peaceful Morning”]). Yet another ostensibly reports on conversations with guides or among fellow travelers, particularly as these advance the main organizing principle of the text: detaching the façade of modernity from the atemporal Orient (“Ensueños de libertad” [“Dreams of Liberty”], “Yokohama” [“Yokohama”]), an operation that the narrative Gómez Carrillo appeared to have carried out for the most part with phenomenal success, given his long-standing reputation as a cronista of foreign lands. Formal considerations also distinguish “Danza de bayadera” and “En una fumería de opio anamita” from the remainder of the crónicas in the text. In contrast to the panoramic film vistas at work elsewhere in the collection, these two texts deploy almost cinematic close-ups of their subjects. Moreover, the narrative spaces the temple dancer and the opium smoker occupy are dimly lit and cluttered, similar to the rooms of nineteenth-century mu-

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seums, where display cases were arrayed almost to the ceiling, almost and tantalizingly beyond view. 33 Finally, on the margins of “life [and] movement,” the spaces both dancer and opium smoker inhabit are given spatial limits solely by the act of narration; it is as if outside their jewelry cases, there was no reason for their existence. The figures seem to have been located within the collection primarily because they were recognized and selected among all other possible objects available on display by the discerning gaze, “los ojos de artista” [artist’s eyes] of the collector-narrator. “RECINTO DE COLECCIONISTAS” [REALM OF COLLECTORS]

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Presented as a result of a two-day port call in Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), “Danza de bayadera” offers the reader a first glimpse of that Orient that will eventually (re)produce “un Japón de étagère.” The text begins abruptly, with no indication of how the narrator has arrived at this particular temple, the lone non-Asian present. Except for a brief mention of a local guía, “cicerone” in the 1919 version, the narrative Gomez Carrillo is himself on display as the consummate guide. It is as if this sort of access were simply routine for the Gómez Carrillo persona, “el Loti castellano” [The Spanish Loti]. 34 As Gómez Carrillo approaches the temple, the lines between civilization and the space the temple dancer occupies are sharply demarcated: Habíamos andado cerca de dos horas. Después de las calles floridas en que los europeos construyen sus bengalows [sic] paradisíacos á la sombra de las palmeras, encontramos el barrio indígena con sus vías estrechas, con sus casitas bajas, con sus techos enormes. Y luego, nada, ni una vivienda, ni una luz; nada más que la verdura, las móviles arquitecturas de los árboles, el follaje espeso, las cúpulas palpitantes. Al fin, entre las hojas, una puertecilla. 35 [We had walked for nearly two hours. After the flower filled streets in which Europeans build their paradisiacal bengalows (sic) under the shade of palm trees, we find an indigenous neighborhood with its narrow streets, its low little houses, its enormous roofs. And then, nothing, not a single house, not a single light; nothing other than greenery, the mobile architectures of the trees, the thick foliage, the palpitating domes. Finally, among the leaves, a small door.]

The traveler has progressed, by degrees, from the safe world of European habitation to “native” territory and thence into a dividing strip of darkness beyond which exists another realm: a strange space of “móviles arquitecturas de los árboles” [mobile architectures of trees] and “cúpulas palpitantes” [palpitating domes]. The last step has him enter through a small aperture, “una puertecilla,” where he presumably must adopt a bowed, almost reverent stance in order to penetrate into the museum-like seclusion of “un patio interior” [an interior courtyard]. Beyond the door, in the darkness, is the realm of timelessness, of the ahistorical Orient. Here, surroundings are diffi-

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cult to ascertain, human forms indivisible. In an otherwise static scene, “Torsos humildes cubiertos de camisas blancas . . . torsos aún más humildes completamente desnudos . . . algunos suntuosos trajes de seda y cuatro ó cinco mantos amarillos de sacerdotes de Budha [sic]” 36 [Humble torsos covered in white shirts . . . even humbler torsos, completely naked . . . a few sumptuous silk gowns and four or five yellow Buddhist priests’ capes] are noted from among the audience as markers of class and caste and, presumably, cultural specificity. Much like the musical overtures of the early silent cinema, music bursts into the scene with a prelude of the action to come: Una música angustiosa, de una monotonía y de una tristeza infinita . . . vagaba en el aire, sin que uno supiera de que rincón salía. . . . De pronto silenciosa cual sombra, apareció la bayadera. 37 [A distressing music, of infinite monotony and sadness . . . wandered in the air, and one could not know which corner it came from. . . . Suddenly, silently, like a shadow, the temple dancer appeared.]

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While this yet-unrecognized score plays, the temple dancer remains frozen in place. In line with the modernista obsession with filling every available space, the accumulation of signifiers takes over in the guise of ethnological explanation. 38 Set at the heart of the crónica, the section echoes—as with the Darío estampa—the power of language to transform the temple dancer into an objeto de arte: ¡Las bayaderas! En Banares la Santa y en otras ciudades de las riberas del Ganges, las hay que son graves y suntuosas sacerdotisas. Las hay servidoras del dios Siva, que tienen algo de sagrados en sus cuerpos de bronce y que, al aparecer ante las multitudes absortas, determinan milagros de adoración. . . . Las hay también que en los palacios de los maharadjahs [sic] hacen revivir, con el prestigio fabuloso de sus danzas, el esplendor abolido de las antiguas cortes indianas. . . . Las hay, en fin, que viviendo del ejercicio de su arte, recorren las grandes capitales del mundo y modifican . . . á medida que viajan y que aprenden, sus nativas armonías. La nuestra, que acaba de aparecer en este patio de Colombo, no pertenece á esas altas castas. No es ni una joya sagrada, ni una flor de suntuosidad. Es la bailadora popular, la planta indígena, el fruto de la tierra. Su piel de bronce no fué nunca macerada entre esencias, y las uñas de sus pies no han sido doradas sino por el sol. Ninguna influencia sabia adultera su arte instintivo. Ningún ritual mide sus pasos. . . . Tal como es, humilde y divina, hecha, no para divertir á los príncipes, sino para completar la embriaguez voluptuosa de los marineros malabares y de los trabajadores cingaleses; tal como es y tal como se presenta esta noche . . . parece digna hermana de las místicas devadashis de otro tiempo. 39 [Temple dancers! In Banares (Varanasi) the Holy One and in other cities on the shores of the Ganges, there are some who are grave and sumptuous priest-

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esses. There are some who serve the god Siva, who have something sacred in their bronze bodies, and who, it seems, perform miracles of adoration before amazed multitudes. . . . There are some also who, in the palaces of the maharajas revive, with the fabulous prestige of their dances, the abolished splendor of ancient Indian courts. . . . There are some who, finally, living by the exercise of their art, travel through the great capitals of the world and modify . . . as they travel, their native harmonies. Our own, she who has just appeared in this courtyard in Colombo, does not belong to these high castes. She is neither a sacred jewel, nor a sumptuous flower. She is a popular dancer, an indigenous plant, a fruit of the soil. Her bronze skin has never been steeped in scents and her toes have only been gilded by the sun. No wise influence adulterates her instinctive art. No ritual measures her steps. . . . As she is, humble and divine, made not for the entertainment of princes but to complete the voluptuous drunkenness of Malabar sailors and Cingalese workers; as she is and as she performs tonight . . . she seems a worthy sister of the mystical devadasis of old.]

Neither “flor de suntuosidad” [sumptuous flower] nor “grave y suntuosa sacerdotisa” [grave and sumptuous priestess], this bayadera is a “fruto de la tierra” [fruit of the soil], an acknowledgment perhaps of the distance between the professional artists who tour the great capitals of the world and this native Colombo performer. Like the Utamaro estampa, however, her provenance is impeccable: “La . . . que acaba de aparecer en este patio de Colombo” [She who has just appeared in this courtyard in Colombo]. Prolepsis of the transformation to come, the bayadera will become, by the conclusion of her performance, “digna hermana” [worthy sister] of the devadasis, the female “servants of the god” of ancient Hindu tradition. “Despues de las flores” [After the flowers] that accumulate at her feet at the conclusion of the performance, “vienen las ramas” [follow the branches]: Manos de bronce, temblorosas y ardientes, alárganse con cautela para depositar hojas de palmeras y follajes de canela. El ídolo dorado parece así, al fin, en un zócalo vegetal que la impide dar un paso. 40 [Bronzed hands, trembling and burning, stretch out cautiously to deposit palm leaves and cinnamon boughs. The golden idol seems to rest, finally, on a vegetal pedestal that hinders her from taking a step.]

No longer a “mística davadashi” [mystical devadasi], she has been transformed into a “ídolo dorado” [golden idol], immobilized in its “zócalo vegetal” [vegetal pedestal] open to the collector’s scrutiny. Furthering the image of an objeto de arte in the process of being scrutinized are the various meanings of the word “zócalo” in Spanish, here, plinth or pedestal. At this juncture, the body shifts yet again:

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El cuerpo siempre palpitante, se yergue de nuevo, cual en un principio, retorciéndose en anillosas espirales. Los brazos que se alzan ondulando, parecen subir, subir sin cesar. ¡Es la serpiente sagrada de la India! La música, que encuentra al fin su verdadero empleo, redobla su penetrante, su angustiante, su exasperante melancolía. Y alucinados por el ritmo, acabamos por no ver, entre ramas y flores . . . sino una bella serpiente cubierta de pedrerías, una serpiente de voluptuosidad, una serpiente de oro que danza. 41 [The body, always palpitating, raises itself up again, as in the beginning, twisting in ring like spirals. The arms that rise undulating, seem to climb and climb endlessly. It is the sacred serpent of India! The music, which finally finds its true purpose, redoubles its penetrating, anguished, exasperating melancholy. And, hallucinated by the rhythm, we end up not seeing, among branches and flowers . . . anything but a beautiful serpent covered in precious stones, a serpent of voluptuousness, a golden, dancing serpent.]

In its final transformation, the golden idol is transformed into a golden, dancing serpent. As a replica, this particular one is desirable, the text suggests, by its association with the visual cliché of a cobra swaying to the music of “snake-charmer’s” flute—“¡Es la serpiente sagrada de la India!” [It is the sacred serpent of India!]—symbol of an Orient culled from within the pages of a Baedeker tourism guide. By deploying a strategy that presages the willful “nada vemos’” [we see nothing] that will be the narrator’s last image of Colombo, the narrative Gómez Carrillo has imposed his reality onto the scene before him: “acabamos por no ver . . . sino una bella serpiente” [we end up seeing nothing . . . but a beautiful serpent.]. The eroticism—and humanity—of the Colombo temple dancer’s performance is neutralized by transforming the woman at the center of it into a souvenir, albeit a luxurious and exotic one. Thus transformed, the temple dancer has mutated instead into any of the objetos de arte to be found in the “ichibanes de occidente y las secciones exóticas de las exposiciones universales” [Ichi-bans of the west and the exotic sections of world exhibitions] invoked by Darío in the prologue. And the narrator is its collector. Another two-day port call took the Sydney to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), then the capital of French Indochina. The purported Parisian ambiance of the city is one of the few surprises the narrator allowed himself to betray in the textual evocation of the trip: “La más grande de mis sorpresas en las escalas de Extremo Oriente ha sido Saigón. . . . La realidad, hela ahí: estáis en París, no habéis salido de París” 42 [The biggest of my surprises in the stops in the Far East has been Saigon. . . . Reality, here it is: you are in Paris, you have not left Paris]. That an Asian backwater—to nineteenth-century eyes—like Saigon, would out-Paris any Latin American capital no doubt must have come as a surprise even to the usually imperturbable Gómez Carrillo. It was

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here, in the “París en Indochina” [Paris in Indochina], that Gómez Carrillo reportedly had an opportunity to visit an opium den. “Opium den” is a linguistic construct that very few Latin American bourgeois readers of the day would have had trouble visualizing, though the construct—then as now—is saturated by any number of visual clichés informed by popular culture. Once again, as in Colombo, the traveler in “En una fumería de opio anamita” finds himself moving in darkness:

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Al principio sólo vimos, en la penumbra, las manchas blancas de las esteras. . . . Las mismas luces que, en el fondo de la estancia, ardían en el altar de los abuelos, ante un dragón rojo, parecían somnolentes en la palidez quieta de sus llamas. —Creo que nos hemos equivocado—murmuró alguien. Pero nuestro guía nos tranquilizó, asegurándonos que era imposible confundir aquellas casas. 43 [In the beginning we only saw, in the darkness, the white stains of the mats. . . . The same lights that, in the back of the room, burned on the grandparents’ altar, before a red dragon, seemed asleep in the quiet paleness of their flames. —I think we have made a mistake—someone murmured. But our guide reassured us, assuring us that it was impossible to confuse these houses.]

Once again, an interior charged with private overtones—those “altares de los abuelos” [the grandparents’ altar]—is transformed into a site of public performance. Once again, as in Colombo, the performance about to begin is heralded by a sensory experience. In this instance, however, it is not “la música angustiosa” [anguished music] of the Colombo temple but the smell of opium. “Á veces creíamos sentir emanaciones de tabaco rubio de Oriente; pero en el acto otras esencias acariciaban nuestro olfato con suavidades de miel, de sándalo, de canela y de te [sic]” 44 [Sometimes we though we perceived the scent of the blond tobacco of the East; but immediately, other scents caressed our sense of smell with the softness of sandalwood, cinnamon, and tea]. All of these—Egyptian tobacco, sandalwood, cinnamon, and tea—are coded as scents emblematic of the Orient and presumably more familiar to the Latin American reader of this crónica than the aroma of an opium pipe. The scent of opium—if once strange, now described in familiar terms— contributes to the Orientalism of the scene. As in previous occasions, visual clichés are deployed in order to establish its “radical objectivity”: Cuando, al cabo de algunos minutos, nuestros ojos se acostumbraron á la semiobscuridad, vimos que la mayor parte de las esteras no estaban vacías. . . . Eran chinos flacos, de rostros inteligentes. . . . Todos vestían los amplios pantalones negros y los pitjamas (sic) lustrosos. . . . Inmóviles, con los ojos cerrados y los brazos en cruz, parecían figuras de cera. . . . Sólo allá en el

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Olga Vilella extremo del aposento, . . . descubrimos, al fin, una humareda blanca. Era una joven anamita que acababa de fumar su última pipa. 45 [When, after a few minutes, our eyes became accustomed to the semidarkness, we saw that the majority of the mats were not empty. . . . They were thin Chinese men, with intelligent faces. . . . They all wore wide black pants and shiny pajamas. . . . Static, with closed eyes and crossed arms, they seemed like wax figures. . . . Only there, at the edge of the room, . . . we finally discovered white smoke. It was a young Vietnamese woman who had just smoked her last pipe.]

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Among this mass of undifferentiated bodies, clad in the same black costumes, the gaze closes in on one image: a young Vietnamese female (“una joven anamita”) in the act of finishing the smoking of an opium pipe. At first, the reader is led to believe it is this one particular circumstance that has in fact attracted the narrator’s attention: the sight of a lone opium smoker—and female to boot—who has just then finished smoking an opium pipe while all the others are sunk in a drug-induced stupor. A brief break in the text, however, followed by a trio of questions bracketed by ellipses, directs the reader’s attention elsewhere. “Pero, ¿era, realmente, una anamita? . . . ¿Era una muchacha, una congaï? . . . ¿Ó era una adolescente más bien?” 46 [But was it really a Vietnamese woman? Was it a young girl, a Congaï? Or was it perhaps an adolescent?]: En Europa la duda habría sido imposible. Todo, en aquella aparición de lánguida belleza, decía la femenilidad. El cuerpo delineábase en finas ondulaciones bajo la seda obscura, y el dibujo del rostro era de una pureza impecable. . . . En los dedos de los pies, lo mismo que en los de las manos, brillaban sortijas de plata sin ninguna piedra preciosa, y en los tobillos, en los brazos, en el cuello, argollas, cadenas y collares amontonábanse. 47 [In Europe, doubt would have been impossible. All in that apparition of languid beauty signaled femininity. The body was outlined in fine undulations under the dark silk, and the contour of the face was of impeccable purity. . . . On her toes, as on her fingers, shone silver rings without precious stones, and on her ankles, on her arms, her neck, were piled bracelets, chains, and necklaces.]

Adrift in a suddenly sexually ambiguous territory, the narrator resorts to splitting the self. “—Es una mujer, no cabe duda—murmuró alguien” 48 [“It is a woman, no doubt,” someone murmured], an asseveration that works just as well in casting doubts on the sex of the young opium smoker. Once doubt has been successfully registered, another anonymous male voice is allowed to emerge, further contributing to the tone of sexual ambiguity in the crónica: “pero otro nos hizo recordar á los adolescentes color de ámbar que la víspera anterior nos habían sorprendido, en el teatro anamita, representado papeles de sacerdotisas, de princesas y de cortesanas con todas las gracias y todas las

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perversidades de las mujeres más felinas” 49 [but someone else reminded us of the amber-colored adolescent boys who, the evening before, had surprised us in the Vietnamese theater, playing the part of priestesses, princesses, and courtesans with all the graces and all the perversities of the most feline of women]. The body of the young opium smoker thus becomes a stand-in for all those “adolescentes color de ámbar” [amber-colored adolescent boys], the memorable cross-dressing male performers of the previous evening. That vision acquires a “radical reality” of its own, freeing the narrator to stare at will at the body of the young opium smoker, like the temple dancer, another performer of sorts. The safe anonymity of a dark street—“cuando la sombra invade la calle” 50 [when the shadows invade the street]—invoked in “La psicología del viaje” is not even required in this environment, although it is of course present in the dim confines of the room. The narrator is liberated from social conventions to stare, an act that under different circumstances, that is, among social equals, would be frowned on but that under the exigencies of his craft and the conditions of travel is even expected. After all, as Darío had remarked in another context, “¿A qué se ha venido, por qué se ha hecho tan largo viaje, sino para contemplar maravillas?” [What have we come here for? Why make such a long trip if not to contemplate wonders?]. If the narrator has been seduced by sight, by that vision of “lánguida belleza” [languid beauty], then the clincher to his attraction is the indifference of the figure before him: El guía mismo, escogido como árbitro, tuvo que confesar su ignorancia, exclamando: ¡Quién sabe aquí esas cosas! Y luego, en la lengua del país, interrogó con gran respeto á la fumadora, sin obtener ya, no sólo el favor de una respuesta, pero ni siquiera el desdén de una mirada. 51 [The guide himself, chosen as a judge (on the question of the opium smoker’s sex) had to confess his ignorance, exclaiming: “Who can know here about such things!” And then, in the language of the country, he interrogated the smoker with great respect, without obtaining neither the favor of an answer or a disdainful smile.]

The inability to engage the young opium smoker, conversely, her/his refusal to participate in her own objectification, allows for the transformation of his/ her eyes into a Coromandel screen of sorts onto which the narrator is allowed to project a multitude of images: ¡Oh, aquellos ojos! ¡Aquellos ojos de ensueño y de misterios, de voluptuosidad y de tristeza! . . . Contemplándolos largo tiempo, comprendí los arcanos del opio. 52

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The gazing into the young opium smoker’s eyes is not only likened to the effects of the opium, but in typical modernista strategy, it soon surpasses it: “¡Aquellos ojos! Yo me asomé á ellos, como á un pozo de infinito, con espanto y beatitud” 53 [Those eyes! I peered into them, as into an infinite well, with horror and beatitude]. No self-effacing narrator this, in this instance the language of the crónica mimics the action of a standing observer peering intently into the features of a prone body. One “se asoma” [peers into] at a window or a balcony, at a well or a hole in the ground, but always from a superior vantage point. As with “Danza de bayadera,” the images projected onto the screen of the young opium smoker’s eyes have a great deal to do with the familiarity with Asian material cultures on display at art merchants and world fairs: En su fondo flotaban las visiones del ensueño asiático. Y eran, en barcas de jade, entre sederías rutilantes, princesas del Yunam que corrían en busca de amorosas aventuras por los piélagos glaucos de sus mares; y eran piratas heroicos luchando en sus frágiles sampans [sic] contra las naves formidables del emperador; y eran dragones tutelares, de escamas de mil colores, que aparecían á la luz de la luna para ofrecer á las vírgenes entristecidas invencibles talismanes; y eran palacios grandes como pueblos, palacios de filigrana, con techos de oro, con muros cubiertos de esteras bordadas, palacios llenos de músicas, de perfumes, de galanteos; y eran, allá, muy en el fondo, muy en el fondo, bajo las aguas del pozo, minúsculas pagodas milagrosas. 54 [In their depths floated visions of Asian dreams. And there were, on jade boats, among sparkling, shining silks, Yunnan princesses who went in search of amorous adventures in glaucous seas; and there were heroic pirates who fought in their fragile sampans against the formidable navy of the emperor; and there were tutelary dragons, with scales of a thousand colors, who appeared under the moonlight to offer sad virgins invincible talismans; and there were palaces as big as towns, filigree palaces with golden roofs, walls covered in embroidered tapestries, palaces full of music, perfumes, gallantry; and there were, deep down, deep, deep down, at the bottom of the waters of the well, minuscule, miraculous, pagodas.]

This is yet another catalog of delectable chinoiserie, the narrator its collector: from the wide circle drawn by the “princesas del Yunam” [Yunnan princesses] to the exquisite “minúsculas pagodas milagrosas” [miniscule, miraculous pagodas] resting, as in a downward spiral motion, at the bottom of the “pozo infinito” [infinite well] of the young opium smoker’s eyes. As an example of the Gómez Carrillo prose at its most effective, the passage has the dreamy quality of a fairy tale for adults.

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As it approximates its conclusion, the crónica must deal with the question of the homoerotic attraction at the heart of the text: the frank acknowledgment of the power of the cross-dressing performers of the previous night to destabilize the presumably heterosexual narrator and his companions; performers of which the opium smoker is but a replica. The next passage moves toward neutralizing the sexually charged scene: Poco á poco la pregunta inicial sobre el sexo de la fumadora llegaba á transformarse en mi mente en otra interrogación más angustiosa relativa á la naturaleza misma de aquel ser de ámbar y de humo. Ya poco me importaba estar ó no seguro de que realmente tratárase de una congaï. Lo que quería saber si era una realidad ó un fantasma, una criatura humana ó una sombra. 55 [Little by little, the initial question concerning the sex of the smoker transformed itself in my mind into another anxiety-ridden question about the very nature of that being of amber and smoke. Little did I care to ascertain whether she was truly a Congaï (a young female) or not. What I wanted to know was whether she was real or was a ghost, a human creature or a shadow.]

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The question of whether this is a male body apparently ceases to matter once the young opium smoker is transformed into a being of “ámbar y humo” [amber and smoke]. A final textual shift, however, ends the crónica on a note that echoes the very sexual ambiguity that it purports to allay. The conclusion sends the reader back to that first admission of the power of appearances to deceive (“nos hemos equivocado” [we have made a mistake]) of the opening passage: “Hay una suerte de mujeres soñadoras que se llaman hadas, en latín strigæ, las cuales se alimentan de adormideras negras, llamadas opio.”. . . Sí, eso era. . . . Des femmes songereusses nourries de pavots noirs. . . . Eso era, sin duda . . . 56 [“There is a type of dreaming women called fairies, in Latin strigæ, who feed on the black poppy plant called opium.” . . . Yes, that was it. . . . Des femmes songereusses nourries de pavots noirs. . . . That was it, no doubt . . .]

That last phrase, “eso era, sin duda . . .” [that was it, no doubt . . .], duplicates the “no cabe duda” [there was no doubt] of the beginning and with very similar results. It functions as a reiteration of the sentiment: “¡quién sabe aquí esas cosas!” [who can know here about such things!]. The more the narrator seems to affirm the sexual identity of the figure before him as female—that double insistence on “mujeres soñadoras/des femmes songereusses,” the elliptical “eso era, sin duda . . .” [that was it, no doubt . . .]—the more the reader is invited to believe that the young opium smoker is, indeed, a young male, one of those “adolescentes de ámbar” who linger so temptingly in the memory of the traveler. Never conclusively resolved, the question of the opium smoker’s sex is left open as a sort of textual wink to the reader. The narrative Gómez Carrillo, heterosexual privileges firmly in place, instead is

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freed to hint at sexual transgression, in the process of acquiring yet another item in a memorable catalog of objetos de arte. CONCLUSION It is one of the hallmarks of the Gómez Carrillo prose—and perhaps one of the reasons for his enduring popularity with the Latin American middle-class reading public—that in the period just prior to the opening of leisure travel for the Latin American middle classes, he rendered the exotic, even the transgressive, accessible, without stripping one iota of its purported mystery. As a strategy, it seems to have been a conscious choice on the part of an author who had advised,

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Un artista del viaje debe figurarse que escribe para personas que ya conocen el país que describe. Esto evita los detalles baedekerianos. Además tiene que creer que su público es culto y que sus alusiones y sus evocaciones históricas o legendarias son comprendidas. 57 [A travel artist must imagine that he is writing for people who already know the country described. That way he avoids Baedeker-like details. Besides, he must believe that his public is educated and that his allusions and historical or legendary references are understood.]

No doubt, legions of middle-class Latin American readers were effectively gratified by the assumption that they “ya conocen el país que describe” [already know the country described] if their daily reality was otherwise. In texts like De Marsella á Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón, the strategy seems to delve deeper. That “público culto” [cultured audience] is invited to share cultural and class codes that place a premium on the acquisition and display of privileged replicas. These shared assumptions add another level to the text as a virtual catalog for would-be collectors marooned at home by economic circumstances. When the “object” under scrutiny—be it the city of Yokohama, a temple dancer, or a sexually ambiguous opium smoker—threatens the stability of the text by betraying traces of the culture that produced it, a balance of sorts can be restored by resorting, through a gaze deferred, to that which is already known: a Japan “de étagère,” “una serpiente de oro que danza” [a golden dancing serpent], a Coromandel screen, their provenance vouched for by el buen gusto of the collector-narrator. NOTES 1. With its focus on the experience of the Parisian bourgeois in the metropolis, the term is Walter Benjamin’s in “París, la capital del siglo XIX,” Iluminaciones II , prol. and trans. Jesús Aguirre (Madrid: Taurus, 1971), 170.

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2. Rubén Darío, “La evolución del rastacuerismo,” in Obras completes. Crítica y ensayo, ed. M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez (Madrid: Afrodísio Aguado, 1950), vol. 1, 348–49. 3. José Enrique Rodó, Ariel , ed. and intro. William F. Rice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 46–47. 4. “La exposición artística de 1881,” in La crítica de arte en México en el siglo XIX, ed. Ida Rodríguez Prampolini (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1964), vol. 2, 82, emphasis in the original. 5. Internationaler Verband zur Bewahrung und Förderung von Abgüssen, “Metropolitan Museum of Art,” http://www.plastercastcollection.org/de/database.php?d=lire& id=172(accessed September 9, 2015). The 2010 Web page of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile, for one, acknowledged the many copies that were located in an earlier inception of the museum in the nineteenth century, which gave it the popular name of “El museo de las copias” [The Museum of Copies]. That information has been removed from the present iteration, which concentrates instead in the building’s architecture—inspired by the Petit Palais in Paris—and concludes with the renovation work that was effected after the 2010 earthquake. 6. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 220. 7. A situation that led museum historian Kenneth Hudson to wax wry in 1987 that “so successful have the [the Metropolitan Museum’s] commercial ventures been, the Museum might now rightly be considered an annexe to what, taking our courage in both hands, we will call the Shop.” See Kenneth Hudson, Museums of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 57. 8. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 220. 9. Ibid., 221. 10. Brothers Jules (1830–1870) and Edmond (1822–1896) Goncourt, writers, critics, printmakers, painters, collectors, and marchands, are credited with the introduction of Japanese art in France in the nineteenth century. See Jane Turner, The Dictionary of Art (New York: Grove, 1996), sv “Goncourt.” 11. Aníbal González, La crónica modernista hispanoamericana (Madrid: Porrúa Turanzas, 1983), 166. González, who considers Gómez Carrillo one of the “ends” of modernismo, posits the enormous popularity of his crónicas as the popularization of the movement, which left traces in Latin American popular culture. González offers a keen reading of “La psicología del viaje” in chapter 3 of his book. 12. Rubén Darío, “París, 20 de abril de 1900,” in Obras completes. Viajes y crónicas, ed. M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez (Madrid: Afrodísio Aguado, S.A., 1950), vol. 3, 387. 13. In a similar situation as Darío’s, faced with the sort of Latin American displays that usually drew panegyrics from Latin American visitors, Gómez Carrillo described them: “ingenuas y primitivas con sus sillas de montar en cueros erizados de pelos, con sus hamacas, sus telas sin carácter y sus botellas misteriosas” (Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Sensaciones de París y de Madrid [Paris: Garnier Frères, 1899], 167–72) [naive and primitive, with its saddles covered in bristles, its hammocks, its indistinct textiles and mysterious bottles]. 14. For a description of the quest of modernistas to conquer the expanding literary market of the nineteenth century, see Ángel Rama, Rubén Darío y el modernismo (Caracas: Alfadil Ediciones, 1985). 15. Enrique Gómez Carrillo, De Marsella á Tokio, prol. Rubén Darío (Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1906), 81. 16. Pura Fernández, “La editorial Garnier de París y la difusión del patrimonio bibliográfico en castellano en el siglo XIX,” in Tēs philiēs tade dōra (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1999), 606. 17. The term is quoted in Rubén Darío, “Enrique Gómez Carrillo,” in Obras completas. Semblanzas, ed. M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez (Madrid: Afrodísio Aguado, S.A., 1950), vol. 2, 995. 18. González, La crónica, 75.

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19. Quoted in María Luisa Bastos, “La crónica modernista de Enrique Gómez Carrillo o la función de la trivialidad,” in Relecturas (Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1989), 57. 20. Darío, “Enrique Gómez Carrillo,” 995. 21. While Fernández echoes the idea that Gómez Carrillo was intimate with the Parisian literary establishment in her article, for example, Bastos points out that a French attendee of the dinners at La Plume referred to him as “a Portuguese poet” (Bastos, “La crónica modernista,” 56). 22. In line with Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 72, this study designates as Oriental and Orient all discourse that seeks to acquire a “radical reality” the more it repeats itself. 23. David Howarth and Stephen Howarth, The Story of P&O: Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company , rev. ed., ed. Stephen Rabson and Peter Mayle (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), 36. 24. Enrique Gómez Carrillo, “La psicología del viaje,” in Obras completas. Vistas de Europa (Madrid: Editorial Mundo Latino, 1919), vol. 6, 18. 25. Rubén Darío, “Prólogo,” in De Marsella á Tokío, by Enrique Gómez Carrillo (Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1906), vii. 26. Ibid., vii–viii, emphasis added. 27. Turner, The Dictionary of Art, sv “Kitagawa Utamaro.” 28. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 224. 29. Darío, “Prólogo,” ix. 30. Gómez Carrillo, De Marsella á Tokio , 69. 31. Ibid, 81, emphasis added. 32. Much like the Benin bronzes, for example, acquired by the British Museum, a few years before this particular trip, and meant to be admired as “works of art.” See Hudson, Museums of Influence , 38. 33. Ibid., 27. 34. Darío, “Enrique Gómez Carrillo,” 996. 35. Gómez Carrillo, De Marsella á Tokio , 73. 36. Ibid., 74. 37. Ibid. 38. Bastos, “La crónica modernista,” 61. 39. Gómez Carrillo, De Marsella á Tokio, 74–75, emphasis added. 40. Ibid., 78, emphasis added. 41. Ibid., 78–79, emphasis added. 42. Ibid., 107–8. 43. Ibid., 113. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 114, emphasis added. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 114–15. 48. Ibid., 115. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 17. 51. Ibid., 115. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 116, emphasis added. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 117, emphasis added. 56. Ibid. 57. Gómez Carrillo, “La psicología del viaje,” vol. 6, 15.

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WORKS CITED

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Bastos, María Luisa. “La crónica modernista de Enrique Gómez Carrillo o la función de la trivialidad.” In Relecturas: Estudios de textos hispánoamericanos, 51–73. Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1989. Benjamin, Walter. “París, capital del siglo XIX.” In Iluminaciones II. Prologue and translation by Jesús Aguirre, 170–90. Madrid: Taurus, 1971. ———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 217–51. New York: Schocken, 1968. Darío, Rubén. “Enrique Gómez Carrillo.” In Obras completas, Vol. 2. Semblanzas, edited by M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez, 994–97. Madrid: Afrodísio Aguado, S.A., 1950. ———. “La evolución del rastacuerismo.” In Obras completas, Vol. 1. Crítica y ensayo, edited by M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez, 348–54. Madrid: Afrodísio Aguado, 1950. ———. “París, 20 de abril de 1900.” In Obras completas, Vol. 3. Viajes y crónicas, edited by M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez, 379–93. Madrid: Afrodísio Aguado, S.A., 1950. ———. “Prólogo,” in De Marsella á Tokío: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón, by Enrique Gómez Carrillo, vii–xiii. Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1906. “La exposición artística de 1881.” In La crítica de arte en México en el siglo XIX, Vol. 3, 1879–1903, edited by Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, 81–125. Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1964. Fernández, Pura. “La editorial Garnier de París y la difusión del patrimonio bibliográfico en castellano en el siglo XIX.” In Tēs philiēs tade dōra: Miscelánea léxica en memoria de Conchita Serrano, 603–12. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1999. Gómez Carrillo, Enrique. De Marsella á Tokío: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón. Prologue by Rubén Darío. Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1906. ———. “La psicología del viaje.” In Obras completas, Vol. 4. Vistas de Europa, 7–35. Madrid: Editorial Mundo Latino, 1919. ———. Sensaciones de París y de Madrid. Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1899. González, Aníbal. La crónica modernista hispanoamericana. Madrid: J. Porrúa Turanzas, 1983.

Howarth, David, and Stephen Howarth. The Story of P&O: The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. Rev. ed. Edited by Stephen Rabson and Peter Mayle. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994. Hudson, Kenneth. Museums of Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Internationaler Verband zur Bewahrung und Förderung von Abgüssen. “Metropolitan Museum of Art.” http://www.plastercastcollection.org/de/database.php?d=lire&id=172 (accessed September 9, 2015). Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile. http://www.mnba.org.ar (accessed May 5, 2010). Rama, Ángel. Rubén Darío y el modernism . Caracas: Alfadil Ediciones, 1985. Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel. Edited and introduced by William F. Rice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929. Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. Turner, Jane, ed. The Dictionary of Art. New York: Grove, 1996.

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Chapter Four

“That heteroclite assembly” Collecting, Modernity, and the “Savage Mind” in De sobremesa María Mercedes Andrade

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The relations of power whereby one portion of humanity can select, value, and collect the pure products of others need to be criticized and transformed. This is no small task. —James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern” The “bricoleur” addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavors. —Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind

Studies of Latin American modernismo have often addressed the role assigned to objects within texts that belong to the movement. 1 Nonetheless, the notion of collecting itself, which may provide a privileged vantage point from which to analyze many of the writings of the modernistas, has mostly gone unnoticed. Although collecting, both as a recurrent theme and as a strategy that the authors apply in writing their texts, is central to the aesthetics of modernismo, a sustained discussion of the topic is still lacking. 2 Against this omission, in the following pages I discuss the theme of collecting in José Asunción Silva’s novel De sobremesa (written in 1895, published posthumously in 1925) and in some examples of his poetry in order to argue, through the analysis of the works by this particular author, for the relevance of reading modernista works through the lens of collecting. This perspective is in tune with that of Andrew Reynolds, Olga Villella, and Shelley Garrigan, who have also shown the centrality of the collecting in modernista aesthetics. For my part, rather than providing a historical analysis of the practice of 75

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collecting in nineteenth-century Latin America, I intend to show that the notion of collecting and the figure of the collector are crucial for an understanding of the novel. Given the role of collecting in the formation of nineteenth-century bourgeois European culture—its cultural, political, ideological, and aesthetic implications—and given the fact that modernismo has long been understood as a sort of coming of age of Latin American literature, the idea that De sobremesa can be read as a reflection and a mise-en-scène of the act of collecting seems of particular interest. My argument is that in De sobremesa, the act and the theme of collecting provide a paradigm for the construction of certain hybrid and unstable aesthetic, cultural, and personal notions of identity. As I explain in what follows, collecting is a recurrent theme in a novel that frequently enumerates and describes the objects that its protagonist amasses. Furthermore, collecting is also an activity that the novel enacts, as Silva brings together in his text a variety of literary themes and motifs in such a way that the novel becomes itself a collection of heterogeneous elements. For that reason, De sobremesa is not only a novel that displays a thematic obsession with material culture but, in a sense, also a novel about collecting, both literal and figurative, and that, through its own performing of the act of collecting, outlines the possibilities of a porous and mutable notion of selfhood that goes beyond fixed models of identity. For the sake of clarity, a brief summary of the novel’s plot can be useful. The protagonist of the novel is José Fernández, a Europeanized dandy who returns to his unnamed native Latin American country after years abroad. During an after-dinner conversation with intimate friends who have gathered at his home, Fernández accepts their invitation to read from his diary, which chronicles his stay in Europe. There, Fernández describes his adventures in various European cities and narrates episodes of a life of excess and sensual pleasure. According to the diary, his life changes unexpectedly once he encounters Helena, a fifteen-year-old girl, whom he glimpses from a distance in a Swiss hotel. Fernández becomes obsessed with the girl, who begins to symbolize for him the purity and spirituality that he feels he lacks as a person and as a poet. He searches for her throughout the Continent until he discovers that she has died of tuberculosis, after which Fernández contracts a strange nervous malady. Once he recovers, he returns to his country, disenchanted and skeptical. From a formal point of view, one may argue that the act of collecting permeates the novel, which may be read as a collage that brings together heterogeneous elements from various sources. Some parts of the novel, for instance, are written in accordance with the conventions set by a romantic tradition that praises the purity of the beloved woman. Such is the case when Fernández first sees the young girl (“por primera vez en mi vida bajé los ojos ante una mirada de mujer” 3 [for the first time in my life, I lowered my eyes

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before a woman’s gaze]) or when he throws a bouquet of flowers through the girl’s open window, and she returns the gift with another bouquet of white roses, which Fernández keeps as a treasure. However, in order to speak about Fernández’s love for Helena, Silva also turns to that antecedent of romanticism, the tradition of courtly love, as well as to Spanish mystical poetry, quoting both Dante and San Juan de la Cruz. 4 While such elements may still be reconciled with a romantic aesthetic, other episodes of the novel are more akin to fin de siècle bohemian and decadent sensitivities. Such is the case of the depiction in the novel of the protagonist’s relationship with Lelia Orloff, a Parisian cocotte with whom he has a torrid love affair. Fernández recounts how he had been seduced by “las caricias lentas, sabias e insinuantes de aquellas manos delgadas y nerviosas, la lascivia de aquellos labios que modulaban los besos como una cantatriz de genio modula las notas de una frase musical” 5 [the slow, wise, and insinuating caresses of those thin and nervous hands, the lust of those lips that modulated kisses just as a talented singer does a musical phrase], and the novel emphasizes the decadent and luxurious atmosphere of the woman’s home. References to his lover’s lesbianism and an episode of violent rage in which Fernández attempts to kill Orloff and her lover are more suited to the fin de siècle decadent style. The same can be said of the protagonist’s love affair with “la divetta” Nini Rousset, for whom Fernández feels a simultaneous attraction and contempt, to the point that he suddenly feels the urge to strangle her. 6 Additionally, in a perhaps unexpected manner, in De sobremesa certain supernatural themes coexist with a marked interest in the positivistic scientific culture of the time. Coincidences that point to supernatural correspondences abound in the novel, as when Fernández finds a butterfly on a white bouquet of roses that is identical with the one he had seen in the bouquet Helena had given him but this time in the room of a courtesan, an ominous repetition that he interprets as a warning and that causes him to flee from the woman’s room. 7 Alongside such events, which suggest the influence of an otherworldly force in the protagonist’s life, scientific discourse is also accorded an explanatory value in other episodes of the novel devoted to medicine and psychology. After his encounter with Helena, Fernández visits two doctors, Sir John Rivington and Professor Charvet, both of whom try to cure him of his obsession with the young girl. The two doctors provide a physiological explanation for his nervous malady that ultimately locates its origin in the repression of his sexual drive: Rivington suggests that he find the girl and marry her, while Charvet believes that his nervous affection is the result of the protagonist’s “capricho” 8 [whim] of remaining sexually abstinent until he finds the girl. These medical explanations of Fernández’s nervous ailment are never proven wrong, and they are allowed to pose a challenge to the

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mystical and supernatural interpretations Fernández himself makes of his own situation. 9 Another seemingly incongruous element in the novel is Fernández’s political analysis concerning the future of his country, which he condenses into a political, economic, and social project outlined at the beginning of his diary. In this section of the novel, Fernández’s utopian project brings together many recurrent themes of the nineteenth-century essay tradition in Latin America, as he appeals to notions of progress and the need to civilize the people of his country. Apparently sympathetic with liberal ideas, Fernández plans to increase his personal wealth and that of his country by exporting some of the many raw materials produced in his land. Once he has accomplished this, he plans to travel across the United States in order to “indagar los porqués del desarrollo fabuloso de aquella tierra llena de energía” 10 [inquire into the reasons of the fabulous development of that land full of energy] and to return to his country and gain political power, by force if necessary. He plans to impose free trade and to foster mining, agriculture geared toward export, and industrial development. Beyond being a reference to the situation of Colombia during the period known as the “Regeneration,” imposed by President Rafael Núñez, Fernández’s language reminds one of Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo. Turning to the nineteenth-century trope of civilization versus barbarism, Fernández writes about creating “un partido de civilizados” 11 [a party of civilized men], made up of those who believe in science and are free from superstition. He also plans to support an “inmigración civilizada” 12 [civilized immigration] so that the newcomers may mix with “las tribus salvajes” 13 [the savage tribes] that inhabit parts of the country. Although, unlike Sarmiento, Fernández imagines that his immigrants will come from all over the world, the resemblance makes it possible to read this fragment as a reference to such nineteenth-century essay pieces that, like the Facundo, attempt to set the foundations for the emerging Latin American nations. 14 The novel’s thematic eclecticism makes De sobremesa a heterogeneous and unclassifiable text. Although at times this has been considered a flaw of the novel, this eclecticism may also be read as an enactment of the type of collection that the novel itself addresses as a topic. De sobremesa is a text that collects and juxtaposes various possibly contradictory themes and motifs in a manner that actually resembles the way the act of collecting is portrayed within the novel itself. As a topic, collecting figures prominently in the novel. From its opening lines, which give a thorough description of Fernández’s drawing room before actually introducing any of the characters, interior spaces and the objects that are contained in them provide more than a mere decorative background, and, instead, they are used to characterize Fernández. Thus, the novel devotes considerable attention to the things that Fernández accumulates in his current home and in his previous apartments in London and Paris. Although the emphasis on material objects characterizes

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the entire novel, the following fragment, part of a long description of what Fernández must pack for his move from London to Paris, functions as a case in point:

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me he quedado sorprendido del número de objetos de arte y de lujo que insensiblemente he comprado en estos seis meses. . . . Tú irás a adornar el vestíbulo del hotel en París, enorme vaso etrusco que ostentas en tus bajos relieves hermosa procesión de ninfas, y por sobre las cabezas de carnero que forman tus asas, las orquídeas del trópico . . . ; os cruzaréis en guerrera panoplia sobre la partesana, cincelada como una joya, vosotras, espadas árabes de polícromas empuñaduras . . . ; contra lo desteñido de vuestros matices moribundos, antiguos brocateles pesados, sonreirán los dos cuadros de Gainsborough y de Reynolds. 15 [I am surprised by the number of art and luxury objects that I have senselessly bought in these six months. . . . You will adorn the vestibule of my Paris hotel, you enormous Etruscan vase that boast in your bas-reliefs a beautiful procession of nymphs, and above the horns of the ram that make your handles, the orchids of the tropics . . . ; you will cross each other in war-like panoply above the halberd, chiseled like a jewel, you, Arab swords of multicolored hilts . . . ; against the faded of your dying hues, you heavy antiques brocades, the two paintings by Gainsborough and Reynolds will smile.]

Throughout the novel, the narrator mentions—and often lists and describes—porcelains, jewels, articles of clothing, marble and bronze statuettes, furniture, brocades, silks, tapestries, wines and liqueurs, silverware, antique books, paintings, rare flowers, mineral samples, and so on. Such meticulous enumerations tell the reader that Fernández is, above all, a collector, the lord and master of a private space in which, with taste and ability, he brings together precious and dissimilar items. Fernández is also a collector in more metaphorical ways. He is portrayed as a womanizer, a collector of women, who registers his many conquests in his diary. Aside from the already mentioned love affairs with Lelia Orloff and Nini Rousset, the novel repeatedly (one might say anxiously) exhibits Fernández’s abilities as a seducer who writes down in his diary his success in making various women his own. 16 Additionally, Fernández collects personalities and professions as he constantly moves from one activity to the next. One may characterize him as a poet, although in the narrative that frames the reading of his diary, Fernández insists that this is not his only identity: “No, Dios mío, yo no soy poeta . . . [. . . É]se tiquete fue el que me tocó en la clasificación. . . . El vulgo les pone nombres a las cosas para poderlas decir y pega tiquetes a los individuos para poderlos clasificar. Después el hombre cambia de alma pero le queda el rótulo” 17 [No, my God, I am not a poet . . . (. . . T)hat is the label that was assigned to me in the classification. . . . People give names to things in order to be able to say them and fixes labels on individuals to be able to classify them. Then the man changes his soul, but

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the label remains]. Even if one were to accept Fernández as a poet, one must note that the poet’s alleged identity is portrayed in the novel as perpetually shifting in such a way that the poet and the collector become synonymous. In the initial pages of his diary, Fernández explains how, from his early youth, he has been guided by one goal, “poseerlo TODO” 18 [to possess it ALL], and has consequently alternated between periods of fiery sensual activity and periods of reflection, isolation, and artistic creativity. He narrates how, at the age of twenty, he had spent a year away from society, “desprendido de toda preocupación material, libre de toda idea de goce” 19 [unattached from all material preoccupations, free of any idea of pleasure], devoted entirely to meditation and philosophy. Afterward, he had returned “al torbellino del mundo” 20 [to the whirldwind of the world], letting himself be carried away by “una pasión loca por el lujo en todas sus formas” 21 [a mad passion for luxury in all its forms]. Fernández then seems to correct himself, as he characterizes himself as an “adorador del arte” 22 [adorer of art] and an art collector. However, he also calls himself a scientist, a speculator, a gourmet, and a man of the world. At other points in the novel, Fernández describes himself as a philosopher and ascetic in an isolated cabin in the Swiss Alps but also as a bohemian addicted to opium and chloral. He is a soldier, a geologist and a botanist, a mystic, a sybarite, an art collector, a businessman, a hacendado, and a sociologist. Fernández’s figure is connected in the novel to his capacity to transform constantly and his ability to collect within himself contradictory attributes. His personality, which he describes as “proteica y múltiple, ubicua y cambiante” 23 [protean and multiple, ubiquitous and shifting], brings together dissimilar elements, “contradictorios impulsos múltiples” 24 [contradictory, multiple impulses], which he faces “armado de una voluntad de hierro” 25 [armed with a will of iron]. Throughout the novel, Fernández is a collector who amasses not only material things but also experiences and personalities. In this way, collecting functions as the model on the basis of which he builds his unstable, mutable sense of selfhood: Fernández is himself a collection, and his ever-changing identity arises from this trait. Such an interpretation of Fernández is consistent with James Clifford’s explanation of the role of collecting in the development of modern Western notions of the self and is one that C. B. Mcpherson before him had described as a “possessive individualism.” 26 As James Clifford explains, “collecting has long been the strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture, and authenticity.” 27 For him, following Mcpherson, in modern Western culture the notion of identity is closely connected to that of the collection: “the idea that identity is a kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, memory, experience) is surely not universal. . . . In the West, however, collecting has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture, and authenticity.” 28 The figure of the collector, that individual who participates deliberately in the act of accumulating possessions,

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becomes then an emblematic character in Western culture, and the private collection becomes a locus that evidences the construction of the self through possession. The fact that Fernández is identified as a collector implies that the objects with which he surrounds himself stand in metaphorical relation to him. To begin with, given the connection that Silva tends to establish between the act of collecting and modernity, Fernández’s possessions characterize him as a modern man. Such identification of collecting and modernity is visible elsewhere in Silva’s work, such as in the poem “Taller moderno.” There, Silva describes the objects in a modern poet’s studio in the following terms:

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Por el aire del cuarto, saturado de un olor de vejeces peregrino, del crepúsculo el rayo vespertino va a desteñir los muebles de brocado. 29 [Through the air of the room, saturated with a strange smell of old things the afternoon ray of the sunset fades the brocade furniture.]

The poet continues to describe the objects in the room, which include a piano, a painter’s easel, a bust of Dante, a Chinese vase decorated with “arabesques,” a Spanish coat of armor, and a colonial altarpiece. These items have been assembled in the room, one can surmise, because of their artistic effect and perhaps as a form of inspiration. It is worth noting that some of these objects appear to attest to the poet’s own culture or ancestry, such as the coat of armor and the altarpiece, while others seem to be there for their exoticism, such as the Chinese vase. Other items, like the brocade furniture, the piano, and Dante’s bust, signal a connection with high European culture. In general, one may say that the things assembled in the room share an air of exoticism, whether in virtue of their antiquity or of their belonging to distant cultures. Although Silva refers to these objects as “vejeces” [old things], the poet has accomplished an air of “modernity” in his workshop by bringing them together in one space. This collection of objects, which, as Sylvia Molloy would put it, have been “plundered” from the European archive, summons what the poem refers to as “modern” by virtue of their heterogeneity. 30 Modernity, as represented in this poem, is accomplished through the juxtaposition of dissimilar objects. 31 Similarly, in De sobremesa, collecting is associated with the protagonist’s modern (and foreign) lifestyle. His guests describe “el comfort refinado, el lujo enervante de esta casa” 32 [the refined comfort, the enervating luxury of this house], which is at odds with the customary way of life of his social circle. Fernández has traveled through Europe, is familiar with the modern world, and in this process has acquired tastes and consumption habits that are foreign to his environment. 33

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Aside from signaling the character’s modernity, Fernández’s collections are a reflection of his personality since, like him, they are “protean and multiple.” This becomes clear in Sáenz’s description of the contents of Fernández’s desk the previous day:

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un vaso de antigua mayólica lleno de orquídeas monstruosas; un ejemplar de Tíbulo manoseado por seis generaciones, y que guardaba entre sus páginas amarillentas la traducción que has estado haciendo; el último libro de no sé qué poeta inglés; tu despacho de General, enviado por el ministerio de Guerra; unas muestras de mineral de las minas de Río Moro, cuyo análisis te preocupaba; un pañuelo de batista perfumado que sin duda le habías arrebatado la noche anterior en el baile de Santamaría al más aristocrático de tus flirts; tu libro de cheques contra el Banco Angloamericano, y presidía esa junta heteróclita el ídolo quichua que sacaste del fondo de un adoratorio en tu última excursión y una estatueta griega de mármol blanco. 34 [a glass of antique majolica full of monstrous orchids; a copy of Tibulus, perused by six generations, and which kept between its yellowed pages the translation you have been making; the last book by I do not know which English poet; your appointment as general, sent by the War Ministry; some mineral samples from the mines at Río Moro, the analysis of which worried you; a white cambric handkerchief that you had doubtless snatched the night before, at Santamaría’s ball, from your most aristocratic flirt; your checkbook from the Anglo American Bank. And that heteroclite assembly was presided by the Quechuan idol that you took from the bottom of a shrine in your latest excavation, and a Greek statuette of white marble.]

Given the importance of the act of collecting in the characterization of Fernández, the contents of this desk merit closer scrutiny. Fernández’s desk is a meeting place where objects from his own culture meet with others that are foreign and distant, just as was the case in the modern poet’s studio. The majolica vase brings to mind the fusion of Arab and Spanish elements in the culture of Spain and may function as a reference to the protagonist’s cultural background. This vase, however, is filled with orchids, which are specifically associated in the novel with the character’s native land. By an act of defamiliarization, these flowers are described as “monstrous,” alluding to the savagery and voluptuousness that, as I will explain below, the text frequently associates with Latin America. 35 The book of Latin poetry, perused by six generations, gives a sense of cultural legacy and of family traditions as well as of the character’s erudition. However, it is worth noting that Fernández is in the process of translating this book, which would speak of an adaptation and reinterpretation of the ancient text, bridging the gap between past and present, between the foreign and the native. The latest book by an English poet indicates to the reader that Fernández is informed of what happens in the foreign literary scene, a characteristic that identifies him as a modern writer. His participation in the capitalist economy could also be constructed as a sign

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of modernity and of a faith in progress and liberalism, while the handkerchief reminds us of his abilities as a seducer. Additionally, the appointment as general characterizes Fernández as a man of action who is physically involved in the destiny of his country. Although earlier in the novel he had claimed to have abandoned his political civilizing project, which could be put into place only by force, this fragment suggests otherwise. The appointment as general also signals the themes of action and violence that, as I discuss below, are important in Fernández’s characterization of himself while simultaneously pointing to the historical connections between collecting and violence. 36 In a way that resembles the case of the orchids, another American element, the Quechan idol, appears in the above fragment as something mysterious and exotic, thus establishing a distance between the protagonist and the indigenous world: the description does not suggest an immediate identification with the “native” but rather defamiliarizes it as monstrous and/or exotic. This might indicate a lack of identification (of behalf of the protagonist and of the text itself) with the indigenous or, as I discuss later in more detail, a new assessment of it. However, at this point it is worth noting that the idol is placed next to the Greek statuette in a way that equates them and allows both of them preside the “heteroclite assembly.” They, as vestiges of ancient cultures, share the same air of mystery and exoticism. Moreover, if, as I have argued, the objects on Fernández’s desk characterize him, they indicate not only his ability as archaeologist and scientist but also the coexistence of the American and the European as aspects of his personality. In any case, the Greek statuette, as a metonymical image of Western culture, is not the only one allowed to rule over the collection, just as in “Taller moderno” objects from various cultures were allowed to coexist in order to evoke modernity. The most salient trait of the items on Fernández’s desk is their surprising heterogeneity and the impossibility one encounters when attempting to classify them in a coherent manner. While Fernández’s friends express their alarm before this apparent chaos, he assures them that he is perfectly capable of holding together the variety of interests and activities that these objects represent without falling into madness. At this point, and in order to be able to establish a contrast between the mode of collecting exemplified in Silva’s novel and the way collecting has been theorized in other modern, European texts, it is useful to consider how collecting in European modernity has overwhelmingly been associated with notions of order and of rationality. A recurring narrative in Western accounts of collecting is that objects are dislocated and brought into contact with others according to the criteria that the collector imposes in a process that establishes a new order and endows the objects with a new meaning. 37 James Clifford has pointed out that such a practice of collecting, particularly as it pertains to objects from other cultures, is connected to a “redemptive metahistorical narrative” according to

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which Europe’s mission is that of rescuing, valuing, and saving those objects. 38 Thus, for Clifford, “turning up in the flea markets and museums of nineteenth-century Europe, these objects are destined to be aesthetically redeemed, given new value in the object system of a redemptive modernism.” 39 One must also keep in mind that collecting is a central element in the process of European colonialist expansion, as objects from other cultures are classified, cataloged, and valued scientifically and/or aesthetically by the Western collector. 40 Additionally, collecting constituted an important aspect of the development of bourgeois subjectivity and of nineteenth-century bourgeois notions of privacy, private property, and good taste. 41 If one analyzes the private, nineteenth-century bourgeois collection, it is clear that it may be systematic in character, as in those collections in which objects are selected for their similarity or organized scientifically, or it may be more eclectic and less strict, as in the nineteenth-century fashion of decorating private, “artistic” interiors with bibelots. 42 In both cases, however, objects in the collection are ordered according to a certain rationality and are integrated into the aesthetic and intellectual education of the individual. 43 In an analogous way, James Clifford points out that modern European collecting models can be characterized as “pedagogical”: “the self that must possess but cannot have it all learns to select, order, classify in hierarchies—to make ‘good’ collections.” 44 Additionally, such “a ‘proper’ relation with objects (rule-governed possession) presupposes a ‘savage’ or deviant relation.” 45 Fernández’s collections are clearly of the deviant type, and the fact that they are characterized as “heteroclite” indicates as much. Although in the text the objects he accumulates are allegedly held together by the character’s willpower, it is clear that they are not geared toward the creation of an organized whole. Fernández’s collections, in their lack of order and hierarchy, evidence an improper, “savage” relation toward objects, if we follow Clifford’s terms. Chaotic and libidinal, Fernández is a “bad” collector. Instead of a desire for order, his collections reveal the character’s overwhelming sensuality and his excessive energy, of which the protagonist’s willpower is a sign. In fact, the character’s literal and metaphorical collections stand in proximity with what the novel itself identifies as the sensual and instinctive nature of the protagonist as well as with his expressed desire to “possess it all.” Collections in De sobremesa also deviate from the norm, whether of scientific collections or of the more eclectic bibelot collections that decorate private homes, in the way in which they erase the difference between self and other. While the European collection is brought together by a (Western) subject that assembles objects that are deemed rare or exotic, De sobremesa problematizes such distinctions in various ways, first among them by assigning the role of a collector to a non-European subject. 46 In this manner, Silva’s text reinterprets the European theme of collecting and reinscribes it within a

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Latin American context, and symbolically attributes to the protagonist the power that the modern European tradition of collecting would have in reality denied him. Beyond Silva’s intentions, this gesture undermines the distinction between an active Western collector and a passive non-European object. Additionally, Silva’s collections evidence a refusal to establish a distinction between a subject’s culture and foreign ones. As has been shown above, in Fernández’s house objects from various cultures, his own included, are assembled without assigning any of them a clear privilege. Just as in “Taller moderno” a Spanish coat of armor and an altarpiece coexist, Fernández’s home displays a Spanish coat of armor and a “vieja vajilla de plata marcada con las armas de los Fernández de Sotomayor” 47 [an old silver dinner service engraved with the coat of arms of the Fernández de Sotomayor]. These items, which allude to the character’s own historical and cultural tradition, cohabit with the foreign and the rare. My view is that, in turning to the European theme of collecting and the collection, as well as when collecting is enacted in his texts, Silva is both quoting and reinterpreting a topic taken from the European cultural archive. His attitude can be likened to that of the bricoleur, as portrayed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind, when he describes this character, a representative of the “savage” mind, as one who takes preexisting elements at hand and recombines them according to his needs. For Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur “has to turn back to an already existent set made up of tools and materials, to consider or reconsider what it contains and, finally and above all, to engage in a sort of dialogue with it and, before choosing between them, to index the possible answers which the whole set can offer his problem. He interrogates all the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury is composed to discover what each of them could ‘signify.’” 48 The mixture of themes and styles that characterizes Silva’s novel (and many other modernista texts), or the eclectic decor of the modern workshop and Fernández’s house, can thus be viewed as examples of the activity of a bricoleur modernista who simultaneously borrows elements from preexisting traditions and reinterprets and modifies them. In De sobremesa, the desire to possess it all, the energy, sensuality, and strength attributed to Fernández, all of which are expressly connected to his activity as a collector, are also associated explicitly with his Latin American background. Specifically, Silva contrasts those attributes related with the character’s Spanish ancestry with those that correspond to his Latin American origin. This becomes clear when Fernández describes himself as the result of two opposing lineages: “dentro de mi alma luchan y bregan los instintos encontrados de dos razas, como los dos gemelos bíblicos en el vientre materno” 49 [within my soul the opposite instincts of two races fight and struggle, like the biblical twins in their mother’s womb]. His paternal lineage is of Castilian origin and is associated in the novel with Catholicism

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as well as with a secluded, monastic, and spiritual attitude. 50 The character’s maternal side, in contrast, is associated with the Latin American landscape and with a vital, wild, and instinctual way of life. His mother, according to the novel, comes from a race of llaneros, those rebellious and savage cowboys who fought and defeated the Spaniards during the wars of independence. In Fernández’s account, “el abuelo materno era un jayán potente y rudo que a los setenta años tenía dos queridas y descuajaba a hachazos los troncos de las selvas enmarañadas y allá en las llanuras de mi tierra cuentan todavía la tenebrosa leyenda de estupros, incendios y asesinatos de los cuatro Andrade, los salvajes compañeros de Páez en la campaña de los Llanos” 51 [the maternal grandfather was a potent, robust, and rough man who at the age of seventy had two lovers and could uproot with his axe the trunks of the tangled jungles, and there, in the plains of my homeland, they still tell the terrifying legend of rapes, arson, and murder of the four Andrades, the savage companions of Páez in the Llanos independence campaign]. In fact, in historical terms, this “race” of llaneros is actually mestiza and thus does not exclude the Spanish element, but this is not the point that Fernández is making in his description: according to the text, the llanero (in the same way as Sarmiento’s gaucho) is conceptually linked to the American continent and, in this description, is opposed to the Spanish both literally, that is, in his political sympathies, and in his temperament, given the alleged primacy of the instinctual, the virile, and the wild in his personality. It is evident that by formulating the dichotomy between the Spanish and American elements, Silva is recurring to the now well-known trope of civilization versus barbarism that is prominent in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, a dichotomy that, albeit formulated somewhat differently, has its best-known representative in the work of Faustino Sarmiento. One may perhaps reject Silva’s identification of the Latin American element with all that is savage and uncivilized and regard it as a colonized appropriation of European models. While this interpretation is tempting, what is most interesting in Silva’s use of this opposition, however, is the way in which he resignifies and assigns a new value to the two elements: in the first place, the Latin American heritage of the protagonist that is portrayed as wild and unrestrained is valued in positive terms since it is associated with Fernández’s capacity for action, his ability to excel in all fields, and his willpower that allows him to exist in the midst of contradictions. Although Fernández claims that in his soul these two tendencies compete, it seems rather that those instincts associated with his Latin American origin are the ones that have triumphed in the same way that his ancestors defeated the Spaniards. Fernández’s activity as a collector is the very proof that the libidinal aspect of his personality has won: he is a “savage” collector, a passionate bricoleur, a figure that destabilizes European models for an orderly activity

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of collecting and that symbolically endows the Latin American subject with the agency for a new type of collecting. I refer to the type of collecting proposed in De sobremesa as “savage” both because it stems from those allegedly “wild” traits of Fernández that in the novel are associated with Latin America (and that the novel ultimately defends) and because, following Lévi-Strauss, it can be viewed as an instance of the “savage” mind at work. 52 Adding yet another level to the discussion, one might also turn to another archetypical image of the savage in Latin America, namely, that of the cannibal. In this sense, one may see in the ethos and aesthetics of collecting that Fernández proposes a prefiguration of the type of “cannibalistic” aesthetics of appropriation that Fernando Pérez Villalón discusses in his chapter in this volume in relation to Oswaldo de Andrade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto” of the 1920s. Moreover, it is important to note that, as Carlos Jáuregui has shown, the figure of the cannibal becomes one of the “metáforas claves del surgimiento discursivo de Latinoamérica en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX . . . y una herramienta de identificación y auto-percepción de América Latina en la modernidad” 53 [key metaphors for the discursive emergence of Latin America in the second half of the nineteenth century . . . and a tool for the identification and self-perception of Latin America in modernity]. The cannibal, initially a trope for Latin American alterity, becomes in the twentieth century a model for hybrid identities, 54 and this is prefigured in the kind of bricolage that De sobremesa exemplifies. 55 Additionally, it is worth noting that, in the novel, the “nonsavage,” “spiritual” Spanish elements are understood as representing an ideal that can never be achieved. Thus, at the end of the novel, Fernández expresses his acceptance that his search for Helena, which in the novel is synonymous with a spiritual search, has resulted in failure. It is undeniable that in the novel a nostalgia for that other, spiritual tendency is also expressed. At the end of his diary, Fernández exclaims, “¿Muerta tú, Helena? . . . No, tú no puedes morir. Tal vez no hayas existido nunca y seas sólo un sueño luminoso de mi espíritu; pero es un sueño más real que eso que los hombres llaman la Realidad” 56 [You dead, Helena? . . . No, you cannot die. Perhaps you never existed and are only a luminous dream of my spirit; but it is a dream that is more real than that which men call Reality.] The possibility of attaining the wholeness that she represents is in fact undone, precisely as Fernández expresses his nostalgia, in a move that simultaneously speaks of the need for an ideal and establishes the impossibility of achieving it. The protagonist’s desire to “possess it all,” viewed under this light, is a sign both of his vigor and of his lack, of a desire for completeness that remains forever deferred. But although at the center of the new notion of self that the text proposes one can infer the awareness of a loss, one can also read De sobremesa as a novel that proposes that, beyond that spiritual search and desire for order, stability, and

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completeness, a desire that ultimately shows itself as a chimera, what actually triumphs is that active and sensous engagement with the world, a life of excess, of contradiction and disorder that is held together by an act of will. And the materialization of this attitude is the collection. EPIGRAPHS Clifford, James. “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern.” In The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 213. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, 19.

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NOTES 1. See, for instance, Rosemary C. LoDato’s Beyond the Glitter (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999). See also Nancy La Greca’s “Erotic Fetishism in the Short Prose of Almas y cerebros (1898) by Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–1927),” Ciberletras 16 (January 2007): n.p., http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v16.html (accessed March 1, 2011), and Matías Ayala’s “El interior en el modernismo,” Estudios Filológicos 41 (September 2006): 7–18), among others. 2. Allusions to the topic of collecting abound in modernismo. To mention only a few, consider Rubén Darío’s “La emperatriz de la China” and Los raros, as well as Julián del Casal’s “Neurosis” and Mi museo ideal. As far as collecting at a stylistic level, in his classic analysis of modernismo, Max Henríquez Ureña indicates that writers of the movement recurred to Spanish, symbolist, parnassian, realist, naturalist, and romantic formal models (Breve historia del modernismo [Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962], 10). This suggests to me that modernista texts can be read as collections of various styles. 3. José Asunción Silva, Obra completa (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977), 155. 4. Ibid., 161, 156. 5. Ibid., 135. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 166. 8. Ibid., 187. 9. For more on the use of medical discourse in De sobremesa, see Benigno Trigo, “La función crítica del discurso alienista en De sobremesa de José Asunción Silva,” Hispanic Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 133–46. 10. Ibid., 141. 11. Ibid., 142. 12. Ibid., 144. 13. Ibid. 14. One can also point to similarities between Fernández’s utopia and José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel , although Rodó’s text appeared later. Rodó’s analysis of the strengths of North American culture resembles Fernández’s, although, unlike Silva’s character, his ultimate aim is to criticize it. 15. Silva, De sobremesa, in Obra completa, 185. 16. On one occasion, Fernández even brags about how he manages to seduce three women at the same party: Consuelo, a childhood friend whom he moves with sentimental childhood memories (Silva, Obra completa, 227); a German baroness whom he seduces with his knowledge of Nietzsche (ibid., 230); and an Italian countess who is impressed with his knowledge of pagan Latin culture (ibid., 231). 17. Ibid., 113. 18. Ibid., 129, emphasis in the original. 19. Ibid., 130.

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20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 131. 23. Ibid., 178. 24. Ibid., 132. 25. Ibid. 26. C. B. Mcpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 27. James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1988), 218. 28. Ibid. 29. Silva, “Taller moderno,” in Obra completa, 27. 30. Sylvia Molloy uses the metaphor of plunder in order to refer to the relationship between Latin America and European culture and states that “the plunder of the European archive affects all genres in Spanish America” (At Face Value [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 16). 31. Rubén Darío had already expressed a similar idea when in his essay “La literatura en Centro-América” (1888) he uses the term “modernismo” as synonymous with “modern” and defends a notion of modernity that incorporates the old. Speaking of the Mexican Ricardo Contreras, Darío highlights “el absoluto modernismo en la expresión, de manera que es un clásico elegante, su estilo compuesto de joyas nuevas de plata vieja, pura, sin liga” [the absolute modernism of expression, in such a way that its style, composed by new jewels made of old, pure, unalloyed silver, is an elegant classic] (quoted in Max Henríquez Ureña, Breve historia del modernismo [Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1962], 156) [translation]. 32. Silva, De sobremesa, in Obra completa, 115, emphasis in the original. 33. The discussion between Fernández and his friends concerning his way of life is part of the larger theme of the dichotomy between tradition and modernity, which is visible elsewhere in Silva’s work. In the short article “El paraguas del padre León,” the topic is incarnated in the opposition between an old priest, Father León, who represents colonial traditions, and an elegant couple on their way to the opera, who represents “la Bogotá de hoy” (today’s Bogotá) (Silva, Obra completa, 256), which he describes as cosmopolitan and refined. 34. Silva, De sobremesa, in Obra completa, 112. 35. The reference to orchids also calls to mind Jean Des Esseintes’s collection of flowers in J. K. Huysmans’s novel À rebours (a novel that I mention here because of the importance it had for Silva), a text in which these flowers are presented as monstrous. Such an allusion connects Fernández to European decadent themes (Joris Karl Huysmans, Against the Grain [À rebours], intro. Havelock Ellis [New York: Modern Library, 1930]). 36. I thank the anonymous reader of the manuscript for suggesting the connection between collecting and plunder at this point in my discussion. 37. For a more complete characterization of the act of collecting and its relation to notions of order and rationality, see, among others, Walter Benjamin, “The Collector,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999). 38. Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” 215. 39. James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 202. 40. A literary example of how Western ideas about collecting are associated with the control a European subject establishes over foreign objects can be seen in À rebours. In this novel, the Duke Jean Des Esseintes isolates himself from the world and makes his home a collection of exotic objects over which he establishes a dominion in his attempt to reject nature. In his quest to mortify and humiliate nature, at one point he collects “rare plants of high-bred type, coming from distant lands” (Huysmans, Against the Grain [À rebours], 84), which have been chosen for their “monstrous” and “barbaric” aspect (ibid., 88) and which are kept alive by a complicated heating system. In this way, Des Esseintes intends to become the “master” (ibid., 89) of a natural world that is there to be dominated and subjugated by him. It is not irrelevant, for the purpose of this text, that his plant collection includes a Colombian anturium and the catleya

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from Nueva Granada, flowers that are emblematic of Fernández’s country. Latin America thus appears in the novel as a barbaric object that is dominated by the collector. 41. As Peter Gay notes, in nineteenth-century Europe, a period of world exhibitions that saw the rise of the antique shop, there was an increase in the commerce of objets d’art and objects produced for domestic use. Along with this phenomenon, the idea that good taste is a sort of knowledge gained strength (The Pleasure Wars [New York: Norton, 1998], vol. 5, 47). Consequently, knowing how to choose objects that demonstrate good taste becomes an important task for members of the bourgeoisie as they define their identity. 42. According to Janell Watson, bibelots can be objets d’art, “knickknacks,” valuable antiques, or even industrial “garbage” accumulated in the home for decorative purposes (Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 17). 43. As Janell Watson has pointed out, the private collection of bibelots becomes prominent in nineteenth-century Europe with the development of bourgeois culture. Although such collections do not follow notions of systematicity characteristic of scientific collections, for her they can be distinguished nonetheless from merely chaotic accumulation: “accumulation is irrational, sensuous, libidinal. Collecting is orderly, intellectual, purposeful” (ibid., 40). Although the nineteenth-century interior may appear to modern eyes as dense and overwrought, this is because “we no longer appreciate nor even understand such complex arrangements, which are usually less chaotic than they appear to us” (ibid., 42). 44. Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” 218. 45. Ibid., 219. 46. Although for some this may a sign that the modernistas simply identified with Europe, I do not believe it to be the case in this text. On more than one occasion, the protagonist of De sobremesa expresses his awareness that he is not European and, furthermore, that he is not accepted by them: “para mis elegantes amigos europeos no dejaré de ser nunca el rastaquouere” (Silva, De sobremesa, in Obra completa, 225) [for my elegant European friends I will never stop being the rastaquouere]. 47. Ibid., 110. 48. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 18. It is worth noting that Lévi-Strauss’s use of the term throughout this book has the express goal of questioning the idea that the “savage” is in any way inferior to “civilized” European cultures. 49. Silva, De sobremesa, in Obra completa, 176. 50. This Spanish lineage must not be confused with the image of “modern” Europe that appears in the text, which is embodied in the novel by France and England. 51. Silva, De sobremesa, in Obra completa, 177. 52. It is worth noting that Lévi-Strauss’s use of the term “savage” is meant to question the alleged superiority of Western thought, and it is part of his attempt to show that Western and “primitive” or “savage” modes of thinking are not opposed but parallel. 53. Carlos Jáuregui, Canibalia ( Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2008), 15. 54. Ibid. 55. I want to thank the anonymous reviewer of this chapter for suggesting the possible relationship between bricolage and cannibalism, as discussed in Jáuregui’s work. 56. Silva, De sobremesa, in Obra completa, 242.

WORKS CITED Ayala, Matías. “El interior en el modernismo.” Estudios Filológicos 41 (September 2006): 7–18. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, based on German version edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999. Camacho Guizado, Eduardo. “Prólogo.” In Obra completa, by José Asunción Silva, ix–lv. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977.

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Clifford, James. “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern.” In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, 189–214. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. ———. “On Collecting Art and Culture.” In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, 215–51. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Gay, Peter. The Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience; Victoria to Freud. Vol. 5. New York: Norton, 1998. Henríquez Ureña, Max. Breve historia del modernismo. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962. Huysmans, Joris Karl. Against the Grain (À rebours). Introduction by Havelock Ellis. New York: Modern Library, 1930. Jáuregui, Carlos. Canibalia: Canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2008. La Greca, Nancy. “Erotic Fetishism in the Short Prose of Almas y cerebros (1898) by Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–1927).” Ciberletras 16 (January 2007): n.p. http:// www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v16.html (accessed March 1, 2011). Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. LoDato, Rosemary C. Beyond the Glitter: The Language of Gems in Modernista Writers Rubén Darío, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, and José Asunción Silva. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999. Macpherson, Crawford B. [C. B.] The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. http://www.merriam-webster.com (accessed December 15, 2011). Molloy, Sylvia. Acto de presencia: La escritura autobiográfica en Hispanoamérica. Mexico, City: El Colegio de México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996. ———. At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel. Valencia: Editorial Prometeo, 1910. Silva, José Asunción. Obra completa. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977. Trigo, Benigno. “La función crítica del discurso alienista en De sobremesa de José Asunción Silva.” Hispanic Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 133–46. Watson, Janell. Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Chapter Five

Postcards, Autographs, and Modernismo Rubén Darío on Popular Collecting and Textual Practices Andrew Reynolds

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Hay más filosofía que la que se cree en esos pedacitos de cartón. —Rubén Darío, “Reyes y cartas postales” [There is more philosophy than we are led to believe in these small cardboard fragments.] By 1902 . . . homes without postcard albums to view were as incomplete as those without television sets today. —William Duval, Collecting Postcards in Colour

Mexican modernista José Juan Tablada wrote that “el coleccionador no busca sólo el goce de la posesión, sino persigue también el estímulo de la misteriosa aventura. . . . De lo contrario, bastaría ser rico; pero al comprar en bloque y de una vez, se sacrificarían todos los placeres sucesivos y diseminados en el tiempo que la palabra ‘colección’ implica” 1 [the collector not only seeks out the joys of possession, he also aims for the stimulus of a mysterious adventure. . . . Otherwise, it would be enough to be rich; but when purchasing in bulk all at once, one sacrifices all of the successive and disseminated pleasures that the word “collection” implies]. Collecting postcards exemplifies a “mysterious adventure” for both the collector and, as explored in this chapter, the modernista writer who took the time to correspond with admirers. Tablada speaks of the market-based practice of collecting and of how buying in bulk takes away from the pleasure and adventure of collecting. 93

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However, wealth is not a prerequisite to postcard collecting. The economic feasibility of the postcard made it possible for anyone to become a collector, and it also provided the general public with access to central cultural figures, allowing personal texts from famed personalities into the homes of the population at large. Postcards, as Margarita de Orellana writes, possess an “acervo especialmente valioso para la investigación social, pues constituyen un testimonio del gusto de una época” 2 [heritage particularly valuable for social investigation because they constitute a testimony of the taste of an era]. This “taste of an era” viewed in postcard production, transmission, and collecting conveys a popular sentiment intersected with the cultural and artistic elite of the period. Postcards also tell the story of nations and their geography, architecture, and ethnography. The format reveals individual choices wrapped up with visual and textual production that reflects mass culture as well as personal relationships. They combine the benefits of a capitalist authority that is evident in the variety and accessibility of the postcard with an explicit sustaining of increasingly democratic and open societies through facilitated communicative and textual practices available across social spheres. Rubén Darío’s validation and utilization of the postcard as a format that facilitates communication, cultural exchange, creativity, and textual production points to a larger thematic played out in the decades of modernismo: that of the increased emancipation of the literary in Spanish American public life during the period. As expressed in the chapters by Olga Vilella, María Mercedes Andrade, and Shelley Garrigan in this volume, modernismo engaged, in both their literary and their critical texts, notions of collecting. Immersed in the social modernity of the turn of the nineteenth century, writers of the movement confronted the material realities of the expanding modernization in Latin America to enrich their revolutionary aesthetic. In addition, modernistas brought literature into the streets on a daily basis due to their journalistic production and became public figures through their official political appointments and unofficial close relationships with heads of state and other political authorities. 3 Through their actions, both on and off the newspaper, book, and magazine page, they emitted a longing for literary centrality in the cultural life of the region, and, to a wide extent, their longing was largely fulfilled. Jacques Rancière’s notion of aesthetics situates this public centrality of the literary, circulated across Spanish America by modernista figures during the turn of the twentieth century as “a distribution of the sensible”—the sensible being culture and art existing in a logical and law-based society that rejects such circulation. 4 This distribution is a political schema that Rancière titles a “dissensus” or “a perturbation of the normal relation between sense and sense.” 5 This perturbation lies between the empirical, objective-based sense of the law and the aesthetic senses. The aesthetic dissensus that leads to greater distribution provides all with the ability to break free from the ethical

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structures of the law that are based on discrimination between what Rancière calls the “class of sensation” that relies on “need and desire” and the “class of intelligence” consisting of those competent enough to comprehend the dynamics of the political. Rancière formulates “the politics of aesthetics . . . as a refiguration of the forms of visibility and intelligibility of artistic practice [that] intervenes in the distribution of the sensible.” 6 In contrast to other social philosophers who criticize the hierarchy of the aesthetic experience based on class and leaving no political or public space for aesthetics among all, Rancière argues that “aesthetic ignorance” or appreciation for the thing because of its beauty without taking into account social, ethical, and labor-based contexts has been available throughout history. 7 This redistribution of the sensible where all are able to break down the discriminatory dichotomy between the “class of sensation” and “class of intelligence” drives aesthetic ignorance into the heart of public life by equalizing power relationships precisely due to the aesthetic sensibilities of all. Wider aesthetic distribution, for Rancière, results in true democracy “the qualification of those who have no qualification” according to the system of ethical law.” 8 This equality in aesthetic ignorance requires continual dissensus between the demos and those “who act as if they were the people”—those who come into being because of the rupture and breakdown in the unequal distribution of the sensible. 9 The postcard and other textual practices of the modernistas—such as the journalistic crónica—facilitate this distribution of the sensible through literary dissemination and personal participation and propagation of popular communication forms. 10 In the case of the postcard, this participatory gesture permits all to have a part in an aesthetic ignorance and indulgence as they collect, consume, produce, and enjoy the postcard format and all that is entailed in the discourse. The insertion of a continual stream of literary content into the public consciousness assisted in the breaking down of class differences as they relate to Rancière’s ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Indeed, Spanish America, with the booming textual industries of the newspaper, magazines, and the postcard at the turn of the twentieth century, brought the aesthetic to a greater part of the region’s citizenry than ever before. The perception of the public, as Ángel Rama has shown in his book La ciudad letrada [The Lettered City], was infused with an institutionalism informed by the revolutionized world of letters of the turn of the twentieth century, which resulted in an unimpeded access to the literary and its most prominent figures. 11 Modernista use of the postcard and an interest in the aesthetic dissemination that accompanied the format as shown in Darío’s crónicas explored in this chapter confirms their interest in a wide distribution network that expanded the sensible across the Hispanic world. The postcard intersects notions of public and private, a tension evident in modernismo from its inception. In his classic analysis, Julio Ramos con-

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ceives that the public exterior exhibited in the crónica genre obliterated the private or interior poetics of the movement. Although Ramos writes that the exterior or “always contested” journalistic texts “besiege” the poetics of the movement, I would argue that the fragmentary and the rupture in the literary through genres like the crónica and, arguably, the discursive format of the postcard, incorporated poetic verse into their modalities insomuch that modernista poetics also form part of an “exterior” and that formal boundaries between the interior and exterior are fragmented during the period. 12 Jan-Ola Östam helps clarify this liminal status of the postcard by describing its “semi-public” status. He writes that the postcard is produced privately but is also exposed to “overhearers,” thus revealing its text and stripping it of its private epistolary foundation and in turn revealing the poetic, the private, indeed the interior nature of the text. 13 The modernista postcard is also highly accessible to poets and their followers alike, facilitating brief requests for verse and the subsequent production and return of poetry. This literary exchange, not to mention the artistic representations and commentary produced on the postcard that is also transferred by post and that often contains poetic verse, opens Ramos’s closed interior poetics to the general public. The postcard, however, provides additional layers of literary openness to the region. It allows consumers a choice in a vast world of postcard formats and images, and, even more importantly, it gives the public an outlet for their own poetic production and reception. This poetic exchange was widely used by modernista writers and their admirers, Rubén Darío being perhaps the most open about the format and its potential as one willing to correspond with those who requested verses for their own private collections and consumption. In fact, the literary during the modernista period, due to the sharp rise in journalism and serialized formats of the text, became a de facto public institution. The greater part of literary production was journalistic and massproduced in newspaper form and therefore consumed daily by an expansive reading public. Consequently, modernista writers became celebrities in their own right and were well known and often cited and recited in the Hispanic world. Modernistas infiltrated the public spheres on a constant basis through their verses and their regular newspaper crónicas. This popularity resulted in a seamless modernista integration into the popular collecting and communicative practices that accompanied the postcard. The writers often received postcards requesting lines of poetry, they themselves often had their own postcards made with images and photographs to identify the sender, and they used the format for their personal correspondence. 14 The example of the postcard demonstrates how modernismo was not an aloof literary movement but one that dialogued and intersected with quotidian and popular practices of the period. Figures 5.1 and 5.2 demonstrate that modernistas used the format to communicate with one another. Whether it is a long note to Darío

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requesting the addresses of intellectuals abroad as is the case of Rufino Blanco Fombona’s note or a quick message from Amado Nervo with the note “Fraternalmente, Nervo” 15 [Fraternally yours, Nervo], writers of the movement were adept users of the social media of the period. At times, their brief correspondence took a literary turn. Leopoldo Lugones addressed Darío in this way during his stay in Mallorca: “¡Seguramente, verá el agua cuando corre y los pastos cuando los dobla el viento! Esto es triste; quizá más que triste, causa indecisión. Aquí nosotros para ver belleza natural nos queda el recurso de cerrar los ojos, consiguiendo de este modo el reposo solitario. Leopoldo en este momento, es el sumiso hijo del trabajo y nada más” 16 [Surely, you will see the water as it flows and the grasses as they are bent by the wind! This is sad; or rather, it causes indecisión. Here, in order for us to see natural beauty, we can resort to closing our eyes, and accomplishing in this manner, solitary repose. At this moment, Leopoldo is the humble son of work, and nothing more]. When it came to textual practices and evolving textual formats such as the newspaper, magazines, serial novels, advertising, and the postcard, the modernista movement was completely immersed. Moreover, they actively used such practices to further their influence in the literary field and expand their prestige within Spanish America and across the Atlantic. Postcards, highlighting the consternation that existed between the public and private, the lightning speed of the telegram and intellectual letter writing, a high literary institution and a revolutionalized transnational literary field, found themselves at the intersection of the transformations of the turn of the twentieth century. The material form of the postcard, its repetitive transmission, and the way that it converted writing into an accelerated practice situates the medium as an innovative textual practice where the maelstrom of cultural change would meet and condense. Darío and other modernistas recognized this condensation, and it became a central point of contact for their own personal and literary purposes. 17 The postcard, as a site of tension between the popular, art, and systems of production, became in a sense a touchstone for the communicative practices of the time. The incorporation of the postcard as a theme for literary exploration in Darío’s texts demonstrates the modernista ability to take everyday practices and transfer them into the sphere of literary production and creativity. Modernistas, due to their journalistic careers, were experts in the incorporation of everyday trivialities into their texts. Enrique Gómez Carrillo perhaps said it best when he described himself as “director de conciencias ligeras” 18 [director of lighthearted sensibilities] and “doctor en ciencias frívolas” 19 [doctor of frivolous sciences]. However, modernista writers rarely treated their quotidian topics with complete levity and frivolity. Their texts were deliberately infused with a literary stylization that marked them as aesthetic renderings, a production that sought after literary influence and that continuously referred back to poetic imagery

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and form implying a refined sense of communication. As is the case with the postcard, modernistas recognized the impact of everyday topics and wrote extensively on the societal impact of such themes as popular dance, music, theater, fashion [both feminine and masculine], the occult, tourist destinations, public drunkenness, and myriad other themes. Modernista writers, as producers of a highly revolutionary corpus of verse, were also experienced cultural critics who did not hold back in publicly expressing their views on the routine and seemingly mundane and then widely disseminating the texts in newspapers and even later publishing them in attractive book forms by prestigious editorial houses in Spanish America, Spain, and France. Publicly coming to terms with popular practices like the postcard manifests the fragmented character of the modernista writer and his intentional foray into the public and popular spheres referred to earlier. Darío, in “La tarjeta postal” [The Postcard], published in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación in 1903, discusses the complexities of the mass emergence of the postcard and ties the phenomenon to the pace of modern life. Darío’s crónica begins with a personal anecdote explaining his repeated reception of postcards requesting autographs. He explains that these postcards come in all shapes and sizes and how he has, with pleasure, responded to the continuous solicitations. He recounts that, at times, young women will return his response asking him not to send the card in an envelope but to ensure that the postage stamp is on the postcard itself. This particularity in postcard correspondence attests to one of its fundamental attributes: its popular collectability. Darío admits to the fact that “hay ya colecciones famosas, y ejemplares y series que, en la bolsa especial e internacional del artículo, adquieren exorbitantes precios” 20 [there are already famous collections, models, and series that demand exorbitant prices in the special international collectables market]. Darío, as one of the most prestigious writers of the Hispanic world at the turn of the twentieth century, found himself in the midst of this revolutionary discursive practice. Postcard discourse, for JanOla Östman, includes “the picture, the text, the stamp, the sending, the receiving, the mediatization, the posing, the appreciation, the response with another postcard—all of these are one.” 21 This multilayered discursive production that accompanies the postcard must also necessarily include the practices of collecting. The collectability of the postcard accompanied their popularity and widespread use since the inception of the medium in Austria in 1869. 22 For this reason, postcard series of all types were issued and sold, not solely to be used for correspondence but also for hobbyists to add to their collections. Modernista literary culture did not escape this popular practice and actively participated in its dissemination. The Revista Moderna de México began a postcard series in 1904 consisting of “Máscaras de reputados literatos americanos” [Portraits of renowned, American men of letters] with “Viñetas de Ruelas, de Gedovius, de Montenegro” [Vignettes of Ruelas, of

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Figure 5.1. Rufino Blanco-Fombona, Postcard to Rúben Darío

Gedovious, of Montenegro], 23 and popular illustrators of the period 24 (see fig. 5.2). The magazine used their publication to market the postcards supplying a preview of each work before its release: “Nuestros lectores podrán

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convencerse, por las viñetas que iremos publicando en la ‘Revista,’ del gran valor artístico de estas tarjetas” 25 [Our readers will be convinced of the great artistic value of these postcards through the vignettes that we will be publishing in the “Revista”]. The focus on “artistic value” and the serialized release of the series by the literary magazine attests to a postcard popularity that spans the cultural field of the period. From the stereotypical and the kitsch to postcards that were produced with an aristocratic aesthetic in mind, the postcard attests to the dramatic intersection of high and low culture that is symptomatic of the cultural dynamic at the turn of the twentieth century. A consequence of the popularity of the “cartoncitos rectangulares” [small cardboard rectangles] is the dramatic decrease in letter writing. Darío continues, “No se puede menos que lamentarlo, cuando se vuelven a leer esas cartas que nos han llegado de los siglos precedentes y que contienen tantas anécdotas, tantas impresiones, tantas ideas, tantas revelaciones picantes” 26 [The least one can do is lament when one returns to read letters from previous centuries that contain so many anecdotes, so many impressions, so many ideas, so many spicy revelations]. The literary and creative qualities inherent in epistolary writing, lost in part due to the postcard, is the price paid for the expansion of the postal service and the revolutionary and efficacious postcard. Darío writes that “es cierto. La vida actual . . . hace imposible la correspondencia epistolar. . . . Pero todo tiene su compensación, antes y después de lo que demostrase la palabra emersoniana. Si antes se recibía una carta, hoy se reciben cincuenta tarjetas postales. La emoción que produce la

Figure 5.2. First postcard from La Revista Moderna series Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

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llegada del cartero es repetida” 27 [it is true. Contemporary life makes epistolary correspondence impossible. But everything has its compensation, both before and after Emerson employed the term. If before one received a letter, today its fifty postcards. The emotion produced when the postman arrives is multiple]. Using Emerson’s classic essay “Compensation” as a point of departure, the poet extols the brief and repetitive nature of the postcard. Emerson, in his text, explores the justice of duality inherent in humanity. To the American writer, for every good there is a bad, every sunset is “compensated” by an equally spectacular sunrise, every crime is met by an equally compensating punishment, and so on. This universal law, a “dualism [that] underlies the nature and condition of man,” informs Darío’s approach to the loss of epistolary writing that has been “compensated” by popular postcard discourse. 28 Although he laments the decline of the letter, according to the poet the postcard makes up for this epistolary downfall due to is repetition, sentimental value, and aesthetic qualities. In the case of postal communication, the renowned and prestigious modernista clearly endorses the popular form of the postcard over the more traditional letter and, consequently, the sentimental over the intellectual, the fleeting over the unhurried and ponderous. Accordingly, Darío celebrates the emotive consequence of receiving correspondence that is multiplied thanks to this new form of communication. The production of the postcard image and its visual aesthetic qualities also had a profound effect on the reception and transference of communication. “Además” [In addition], writes Darío, “la tarjeta postal puede llevar, como he dicho, el paisaje, la reproducción del lugar en que se encuentre la persona amada; y ahora que la fotografía también está adoptada como un uso elegante, y que uno mismo se puede hacer a su gusto sus tarjetas postales, la comunicación, si escasa por la palabra, es más elocuente por la imagen” 29 [the postcard is accompanied, as I have stated earlier, by the landscape, the reproduction of the place of residence of the beloved; and now that the photograph and its elegant use has also been adopted and one has control over the design of the postcards, communication, even if scarcely appropriate a word for the occasion, is much more eloquent due to the imagery involved]. For Darío, the photographic image, a powerful novelty at the beginning of the twentieth century that transformed the visual culture of the period, is a focal point of the postcard’s discursive power. Equating photography to language and the speech act, the poet highlights the significance of the photo to the relatively short text produced on the postcard. The object as a whole is more eloquent because of its visual component. It also adds to the creativity and level of fashion that is inherent in the communicative mode. In fact, in his text, Darío refers to varying levels of fashion employed by postcard correspondence. First, he states that “la moda de la tarjeta postal ilustrada, o artística, aumenta cada día más” 30 [the fashion of the illustrated or artistic postcard increases daily]. This design-centered “fashion” connects the aes-

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thetics of the postcard with popular and mass culture exemplified in special collections and series that “adquieren exorbitantes precios” [acquire exorbitant prices]. Second, he focuses on how the postcard has revolutionized the fashion of sentimental writing. He enthusiastically writes that “la tarjeta postal fotográfica es el ideal de la correspondencia sentimental y amorosa” 31 [the photographic postcard is the ideal sentimental and amorous form of communication]. He adds that it is “por ley de la moda” 32 [by the law of fashion] that letter writing that explicitly expresses the feelings between lovers is inadequate. The symbolic representations inscribed on a postcard fills in an important gap in amorous correspondence: “Aún la cartulina misma, con el simbolismo de sus flores, o de sus figuras, suele decir más que un largo pliego. . . . Mientras más tarjetas llegan, más aumenta la colección y más enciende la hoguera el rendido amador que ‘declara su llama’” 33 [Even the small card, with the symbolism in its flowers and figures, tends to say much more than a long letter. While more postcards arrive, collections increase and the furnace of love that “declares its flame” by the surrendered lover is all the more enkindled]. Incorporating “la moda” into this postcard analysis emphasizes its kitsch sensibilities. In demonstrating the use of the postcard together with personal anecdotes and implicit endorsement of the genre, Darío situates himself in the midst of the mass culture and collecting fads of the period. It also shows his interest in the transforming social and communication norms as they were continually being developed at the time. In this way, the poet writes for a popular audience immersed in the new print and information technologies on the American continents. Addressing readers’ intimate relationships, Darío is converted into an advice columnist who muses on the power of the postcard and its repeated use in correspondence between lovers. In an additional text on the postcard format, “Reyes y cartas postales” [Kings and Postcards], an essay included in Darío’s 1908 book edition Parisiana, he writes, “La tarjeta postal, en estos momentos, es una de las más animadas expresiones de la actualidad. Sus comentarios gráficos de los más notables sucesos serán más tarde inapreciables documentos. Pintan el estado de ánimo, el humor, la opinión de la generalidad” 34 [In these moments, the postcard is one of the most animated expressions of the present. Its graphic commentaries of the most notable events will later serve as priceless documents. They paint a frame of mind, humor, and an opinion of generality]. Darío describes the postcard, through its graphic representations, as a transmission of the events of the period. In fact, many modernista attitudes held in relation to the communication industry can be paralleled to characteristics of postcard production of the time. In José Martí’s well-known prologue to Perez Bonalde’s “El poema del Niágara” [The Niagara Poem], he writes that “el periódico desflora las ideas grandiosas. Las ideas no hacen familia en la mente, como antes, ni casa, ni larga vida. Nacen a caballo, montadas en relámpago, con alas. No crecen en una mente sola, sino por el comercio de

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todas” 35 [the newspaper deflowers grandiose ideas. Ideas do not congregate in the mind like before, nor have homes, nor enduring lives. They are born upon the backs of horses, mounted on a flash of lightning with wings. They are not born by one mind only, but by the commerce of all]. Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, in his inaugural text of Revista Azul, refutes the idea that his publication should identify with a particular “programa.” He states that “nuestro programa se reduce a no tener ninguno. No ‘hoy como ayer y mañana como hoy . . . y siempre igual. . . . ’ Hoy, como hoy; mañana de otro modo; y siempre de manera diferente” 36 [our program can be reduced to the fact that we have none. Not “today like yesterday and tomorrow like today . . . and always the same. . . . ” Today, like today; tomorrow in another form; and always in a different manner]. The fleeting materiality of the postcard with its industrial production apparatus that ensured its wide variation and innumerable series situates the format in a modernista framework that ironically frees literary, creative, and personal expression while complicating that same expression due to the restrictions of the market, a market that requires continual payment, a confining space for textual production, and extratextual graphics that potentially alter or supplement textual meaning. Modernistas faced this same restrictive freedom in their journalistic production as the crónica genre provided them with space for continuous literary expression, which consequently also resulted in editorial restrictions, including the extratextual ephemera of the newspaper page. In “Reyes y cartas postales,” which Darío calls a “tímido ensayo filatélico” 37 [timid philatelical essay], the Nicaraguan provides a detailed summary of the postcard series that preceded the arrival of the Italian royal couple Vittorio and Elena Emanuele to Paris. He describes the event and the accompanying widespread publication of postcards surrounding the event as an abundance of the format’s production as never seen before. He then dedicates the remainder of his essay to a detailed description of the postcard varieties. Emphasizing the effect of the postcards to the public vision of the Italian family, Darío expresses that puede decirse que no había en el pueblo una completa idea de la transcendencia del acercamiento de los dos jefes de Estado. La Prensa aclaró las cosas, y entonces, los autores de tarjetas, ilustrados por los periodistas, comentaron e ilustraron a su vez el acontecimiento. Cuando los reyes llegaron circuló ya una buena cantidad, y en los días de su permanencia la venta fue crecidísima. 38 [It is safe to say that this people did not have a complete idea of the transcendence of the meeting between the two heads of state. The press clarified the details, and then postcard writers, inspired by journalists, provided commentary and illustrated in their own way the events. Upon the royal arrival a good number were already in circulation, and during their stay sales figures rose sharply.]

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Postcards, along with some support by the press, prepared the public for the king and queen’s arrival and reception. Darío’s commentary points to the power of postcard images of the period to affect popular judgment and shape public sentiment of current events. In addition, postcard creators are viewed by the poet as “autores” that design the postcard images as well as produce the text and commentary that accompany the card. Darío offers an example of the textual commentary that exemplifies the intersection of popular speech and the depicted event. In Paris at the time, the saying “T’en as un oeil!” [Nothing gets past you!] was a popular refrain in everyday conversation. According to the poet, “Eso no quiere decir nada y se aplica para todo. Es un término de compadrería parisiense” 39 [This does not mean anything and is applied to everything. It is a phrase of Parisian camaraderie]. He then describes how one postcard image places the king’s head surrounded by mountains of decorative macaroni with the annotation “T’en as un Macaroni” [Nothing gets past the Macaroni], referring to the king. Darío also connects the numerous postcard series dedicated to the royal visit with popular inventions and practices of the time. He describes postcard themes including motor racing, aeronautics, popular dance, and even bicycle riding in “el círculo de la muerte” [the circle of death], along with postcards that are “picantes e incisas” [risqué and biting]. The thematic of royalty and official state business together with cultural affairs open only to the elite of France are popularized and democratized through the postcard, although Darío, in a sense a member of this elite in his own right, calls many of these representations “clisés fotográficos” [photographic clichés] and admits that the images and textual features “han popularizado la imagen del rey, y hecho admirar la belleza de esa reina, por todos puntos encantadora” 40 [have popularized the image of the king and have caused the admiration of the queen’s beauty, enchanting in every way]. The modernista sees the kitsch and cliché in this mass popularization and production of the postcard and openly admits the authority of the popular will expressed in the postcard varieties. He views the postcard as a mover of public determination and propaganda that expresses the waves of quotidian and Parisian culture. It is this culture that Darío desires to depict to his Spanish American readers, who were themselves experiencing a rampant popularization of the postcard. In the end, Darío also views the popular postcard as a format that is beneficial for the represented figures, that disseminates a certain image and prestige among a vast public. He ends the article with the following anecdote: “Víctor Manuel vuelve de París y se encuentra con su amigo Guillermo: ‘¡Dichoso tú, primo! ¿Cuándo me toca a mí? . . . ’ Hay más filosofía que la que se cree en esos pedacitos de cartón” 41 [Victor Manuel returns from Paris and meets with his friend Guillermo: “How fortunate you are, cousin! When is it my turn? . . . ” There is more philosophy than we are led to believe in these small cardboard fragments]. Darío, in a bid to uncover the popular and everyday textual

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practice of postcard production and correspondence, sheds light on a modernista practice often overlooked by critics: the repeated and systematic interaction with the quotidian. Modernista writers convert the everyday into causes for literary and philosophical concern. The transaction between the poet and the popular opens up the modernista movement to expanded readerships and textual venues. This is easily seen through Darío’s engagement with newspapers and magazines from every Spanish American nation, the United States, France, and dozens of Spanish venues together with the publishing of political pamphlets and the postcard and album requests discussed in this chapter. 42 The epistolary exchanges between the Nicaraguan poet and his admirers feature this direct linkage with the popular that goes beyond literary production. This extension of the literary to the everyday actions of modernista poets helps to establish the connection between literary production and personal contact and relationships. One example of this is the oftenreceived request for autographs and lines of verse. One example of such a request for what Maria Minellono titles “la poesía de circunstancia” [the poetry of circumstance] is this fragment of a letter to Darío from María Josefa Sierra: El objeto de ésta es pedirle tenga la amabilidad de firmarme la postal que adjunto le envío. En mi álbum se encuentran las firmas de casi todos los grandes artistas y famosos escritores del mundo pero me falta la suya por la que he ansiado siempre no habiendo tenido hasta ahora la oportunidad de conseguirla. . . . El mejor lugar de mi álbum está vacío esperando su digna y valiosa firma. Espero no me dejara desairada y me la enviara lo más pronto posible contentando de esa manera el corazón de su más ardiente y entusiasta admiradora. . . . ¿Llegaré a tener el inmenso placer de tener un pensamiento y su firma en una de mis postales? . . . ¿Seré tan dichosa? 43 [The object of this letter is to request your kindness in signing the enclosed postcard. My album contains the signatures of almost all great artists and famous writers in the world, but I am lacking yours that I have always desired and which, until now, I have not had the opportunity to acquire. . . . The finest spot in my album is empty awaiting your worthy and valuable signature. I hope that you will not leave me unsatisfied and that you will send it as soon as possible in order to satisfy the heart of your most fervent and enthusiastic admirer. . . . Will I achieve the immense pleasure to have a thought and your autograph in one of my postcards? . . . Will I be so lucky?]

The sentimentality and adoration toward the Nicaraguan is evident as the young María Josefa and her album await the postcard response. The young woman expresses the pleasure and luck that would come from the response of an autograph and verse. She also alerts the poet to his privileged place among the most renowned cultural producers of the period. The desire expressed by the young author, as well as the rhetorical questions that she poses, attests to her deep affinity toward her own collection and the apparent

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need to acquire Darío’s response. This letter situates the postcard as a collectable form of communication accessible to all and Darío’s inscription as a highly desired acquisition for popular audiences. In addition, Cuban writer Francisco García Cisneros wrote the following request: “Rubén, si U. me enviara a vuelta de correo, una estrofita dedicada a la Srta Mercedes Urioste—mi prometida—para su álbum, me vería tan enorgullecido, como él que posee un cofre antiguo, un verdadero gobelino” 44 [Rubén, if you would send, via return mail, a small verse dedicated to Miss Mercedes Urioste—my fiancée—for her album, I would be so proud, like one who possessed an ancient coffer, a true Gobelin]. The transference of meaning from Darío’s lines of verse to sacred and antique objects demonstrates a level of prestige and authority not only in the literary world but also in the personal lives of scarcely known Cuban lovers. Requests for autographs and poetry placed modernistas at the whim of readers, and the subsequent transference of the poetic by means of postcards openly exposed these private requests. Autographs and postcards became concrete representations of a public inheritance of modernista verse, an inheritance that in turn led to the canonization and consecration of writers such as Darío, Guitérrez Nájera, and Martí in the literary field of the period. Often overlooked in modernista criticism, the public acceptance and fame in Spanish America of modernista writers was a widespread and decades-long occurrence that resulted from public practices such as responding to autograph requests and postcard correspondence. These open textual productions exposed modernista verse to a public that consumed letters on a rapidly increasing scale. Library readerships were higher than ever, book imports and sales expanded greatly, newspaper and magazine production in some areas of Spanish America was similar to that of the United States and Great Britain, and education reforms resulted in increased literacy rates across the region. 45 Accordingly, poets grew in fame and favor with this newly formed reading public: a favor that modernista writers used to their advantage as they brought Spanish America to the forefront of Hispanic literature, surpassing peninsular literature in influence and prestige. It truly was an “inversa conquista” 46 [inverted conquest]—as Manuel Díaz Rodríguez put it—in terms of cultural production and literary innovation. It was also the economical nature and simplicity of the postcard format that led to this facilitated intersection between writers and their fans. Naomi Schor underscores the complex nature of the collectability of the postcard along with its value as a textual object when she discusses a “secondary metonymy”: “The metonymy of origin is displaced . . . by a secondary metonymy, the artificial metonymy of collection.” 47 The metonymy of origin is found in the object itself and the memory of place produced in the collected postcard. For some, the metonymy of collection is of supreme importance, and, instead of an “artificial” one, it produces a very real emotive

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response. This allusion is found in the letter to Darío as María Josefa repeatedly expresses the importance of the poet’s postcard in her album, in this case exceeding the importance of his lines of verse. Schor, though, seems to overreach in her expression of a “displacement” of origin by the artificial metonymy that collecting entails. Postcards and their collecting have as many motives and personal articulations as people who keep and collect them; both origin and collectability seem to intersect and are not mutually exclusive to postcard acquisition. The postcard as a site of individual subjectivity fits well into the mold of modernista ideology of individual creation and use. This and not the collectability of the format intrigued Darío most about postcard discourse. His writings on the subject only briefly discuss the collecting aspect of the format and instead focused on the rhetoric of the images and captions of the postcards themselves and the revolution in communication promoted by the postcard. One more text of Darío’s that discusses the discursive and material natures of the postcard is “Psicología de la postal” [Psychology of the Postcard], also published in his anthology of crónicas, Parisiana. He begins his short essay, Sobre mi mesa de labor, un buen montón de tarjetas postales, de España y de la América Latina. Son envíos para el consabido autógrafo. . . . El curioso colmo me hace fijarme en los asuntos de las otras tarjetas, y, a través de ellos procurar ver la personalidad de mis desconocidas y amables amigas lejanas. Hay en esos cartoncitos ilustrados, las más variadas figuras en que sospechar diversos caracteres y espíritus. 48 [Upon my desk there is a good-sized mountain of postcards from Spain and Latin America. They all request the usual autograph. . . . The curious pile causes me to notice the matters of the other postcards, and through them I attempt to divine the personalities of my unknown feminine interlocutors and amiable faraway friends. In these illustrated cards one finds the most varied images that hint at diverse characters and spirits.]

In this text, Darío “reads” the popular mindset of his admirers. This focusing in on the “buen montón” of postcards simultaneously illuminates Darío’s popularity and his ability to project his distinction through the rather mundane task of postcard analysis. The selecting of the postcard also construes the communicative format as influential, as a symbolic gesture of the poet’s importance across the Hispanic world—“de España y América Latina.” 49 At the same time, these autograph seekers, myriad followers who are anonymous to the crónica text’s readership, are also placed at center stage as subjects worthy of the poet’s attention, their postcard inscriptions mattering—gaining additional authority through widespread publication in newspaper format. The remainder of “Psicología de la postal” consists of vignettes describing in detail a handful of selected postcards and attempting to discern,

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from the content, personal attributes of the poet’s young female correspondents. In these descriptions, Darío gives meaning and preference to the visual elements of the postcard. For example, he writes, “Esta otra envía una escena de campesinos amores. Mas su pasión rural más bien se me asemeja al elegante idilio de un soñado Trianón, de un refinado hameau en donde marquesas pastoras llevan cayados adornados con sedas y flores. Todo esto es también muy equívocamente sentimental, muy siglo XVIII” 50 [This other sends a scene of country lovers. Nevertheless, this rural passion seems to me to depict an elegant idyll of a dreamlike Trianon, of a refined hameau where pastoral marchionesses carry staffs adorned with silks and flowers. All of this is most certainly sentimental, it is very eighteenth century]. A reccurring theme throughout all three analyzed crónicas in this chapter, the importance of the iconographic elements highlighted by the modernista demonstrates a cultural sea change that increasingly shifted toward visual stimulation. The consumption of the postcard allowed the general public to choose and adjust the imagery of the format for personal use. Although Darío’s crónica is hyperbolic in its descriptions and precipitates a humorous look at his female admirers, it also points to the additional layer of interpretation involved in postcard reception that is brought about because of the visual element of the text. Postcard discourse depends on this cycle of triple production and reception. First is a round of printing that is extraneous to the postcard consumer who subsequently produces a different product when he or she adds written text that is separate from the image and annotations of the original printer. Finally, the postcard travels through the processes of the postal service, adding additional textual and iconographic content through adhesive and inkbased postal stamps. The receptor then possesses a discursive gift, layered with meaning and intentionalities, the original consumer playing only a partial role in the production of the text. Darío, in this crónica, brings to light only one shade of interpretation that accompanies the reception of the postcard yet also demonstrates that the iconographic side of postcard printing also has the ability to form a central role in the intentions of the sender. In focusing on the visual as a text to “read” the sender’s intentions, Darío explores the shifting nature of textual production during the period. As photography was becoming more and more a part of everyday life, the postcard provided an opportunity for the general public to disseminate, collect, and individually express themselves through images. A discursive mode that was previously reserved for the elite and artistic classes, the image, in part because of modalities like the postcard, became an inexpensive, durable form of representation available to the masses. Nevertheless, this visual expression, though Darío seems to give it weight and authority to perceive authorial intention like any other work of art, is controlled by an ever-expanding capitalist marketplace that subjects consumers to the choices and offerings of

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the market at any particular moment in time. Hence, Darío, in his rather poetic divining of the intentions of his female admirers, looks past the industrial limitations of the postcard and its market-based production, which is only influenced by consumers in their choice to purchase the product. Instead, he shows the personal didacticism involved in postcard correspondence and the layers of symbolic messaging involved. Also touching on the pedagogical nature of the postcard, Geo. Courtain, a French author writing for the Costa Rican magazine Páginas ilustradas, states that due to the popular format, the study of geography

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ahora es un estudio risible y sabroso: todas las dificultades se han vencido . . . y se lo debemos a la tarjeta postal. Y no para aquí: es una historia del arte, pero una historia popular, por otra parte más atrayente que los léxicos fastidiosos; una historia en que las formulas huecas fueron reemplazadas por el aspecto mismo de la belleza. La tarjeta postal es, pues, la educacionista ideal, simpática—¿es esto un defecto?—pero perfecto, absoluta, completa. 51 [now is a rich and effortless study: all of its difficulties have been overcome . . . and we owe it all to the postcard. And it does not stop there: it is a history of art, but also a popular history, it is more attractive than fastidious lexicons; a history where empty formulas have been replaced by the very concept of beauty. The postcard is, then, a sympathetic and ideal educator. Is this its deficiency? Perhaps, yet perfect, absolute, and complete.]

Darío, as frontrunner of the modernista movement, endorsed and inevitably participated in the popular communication of the postcard. The format, ideal for short messages, economical for the writers who struggled materially, and aesthetically pleasing and creative, embodied the modernista foray and involvement into the popular cultures of the turn of the twentieth century. The facilitation of the “distribution of the sensible,” returning to Rancière’s term, through postcard use, collection, and commentary on the communicative mode is one example of modernismo’s engagement with the public sphere. The uniting of this “historia popular” into the literary practices and critical commentary of Spanish America’s preeminent author is demonstrative of continual popular and public engagement. This connection and preoccupation reinforces a modernismo willing to be centered in popular discourse while also using the postcard genre to their advantage in forwarding a position of prestige in the literary field of the period. Supporting and propagandizing the collecting of postcards with his own signature and then reveling in the efficacy and goodness of the format, Darío and his movement is placed in an effective position to advance literature in the public and popular spheres and become an increasingly recognizable face and name while doing so. The postcard, an “educacionista ideal,” is a convincing lens for viewing public engagement of the modernista leader that opens the door to other areas of textual production, such as journalism, magazine and book

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production, and oral and epistolary discourse, where members of the movement engaged Spanish American audiences in a similar manner.

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NOTES 1. José Juán Tablada, quoted in Francisco Montellano, “Editores de ingenio y audacia,” Artes de México 48 (1999): 26. 2. Margarita de Orellana, “El poder de la memoria fugaz,” Artes de México 48 (1999): 7–8. 3. Rubén Darío held several state-sanctioned posts in Europe, including Nicaraguan ambassador to Spain. He was also intimate friend with President José Santos Zelaya. Poet Amado Nervo was an international Mexican diplomat and represented the country in Europe and South America. Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo was a strident defender and representative for dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera, and Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera was intimate friend with Porfirio Díaz. 4. Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Autumn 2009): 1. 5. Ibid., 3. 6. Ibid., 5. 7. For example, Rancière mentions Pierre Bourdieu as one whose aesthetic hierarchy of the sensible allows little room for aesthetic sensibilities outside of certain social strata. 8. Ibid., 10. 9. Ibid., 11. 10. The crónica modernista is an inclusive prose genre that is comprised of book and artistic reviews, reaction to news and social events, poetry in prose, short stories, and other commentary produced by modernista writers in newspapers and magazines from approximately 1880 to 1930. Many crónica book anthologies were published by the writers during their lifetimes. For more on the genre, see Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities, trans. John D. Blanco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Susana Rotker, La invención de la crónica (Mexico City: Fondo de cultura económica, 2005); Aníbal González, La crónica modernista hispanoamericana (Madrid: J. Porrúa Turanzas, 1983); and Andrew Reynolds, The Spanish American Crónica Modernista, Temporality and Material Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012). 11. Ángel Rama, The Lettered City , trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 12. Ramos, Divergent Modernities , 107. 13. Jan-Ola Östman, “The Postcard as Media,” Text 24, no. 3 (2004): 429. 14. As seen in figure 5.1. 15. Although it has recently come to light that there may have been romantic sentiment between Nervo and Darío, this postcard’s sole text is its message “Fraternalmente, Nervo.” An additional postcard with a rather mundane message in the Archivo Rubén Darío begins with “Mi querido Nervo” [My dear Nervo] and ends with this warmhearted salutation: “Esperando verle pronto, quedo su muy affmo Rubén Darío” [Hoping to see you soon, I remain your very affectionate Rubén Darío]. I am not advocating that this is further evidence of anything but a close friendship between the two poets, but it may add a bit of insight regarding their correspondence (Amado Nervo, Postcard manuscript [n.d.], Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Archivo Rubén Darío, http://www.ucm.es/info/rdario/docs/doc1186/documento1186.html [accessed September 28, 2010]). 16. Leopoldo Lugones, Postcard manuscript to Rubén Darío (1913), Universidad Compultense de Madrid, Archivo Rubén Darío, http://www.ucm.es/info/rdario/docs/doc1186/documento1186.html (accessed July 3, 2014). 17. Susana Rotker, in her important text La invención de la crónica, says the following on the theme of “condensation” in literary practices during modernismo: “Para definir el espacio de condensación es perfecto el modo en que Rubén Darío describe al símbolo: ‘Como Naturaleza sabia, formas diversas junta.’ Y es en este sentido, de unir formas diversas, donde los modernistas intentaron—no siempre con éxito—la dualidad como sistema, la escritura como

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tensión y punto de encuentro entre los antagonismos” (La invención de la crónica [Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005], 53) [To define the space of condensation we turn to the perfect way in which Rubén Darío describes the symbol: “Like wise nature, joining diverse forms.” And in this sense, it is in the uniting of diverse forms where modernistas attempted— not always successfully—the duality as a system, writing as tension and point of contact between antagonisms]. 18. Enrique Gómez Carrillo, “El arte sutil del maquillaje,” in El reino de la frivolidad (Madrid: Renacimiento, 1923), 98. 19. Enrique Gómez Carrillo, “Las sibilas del bulevar,” in El tercer libro de las crónicas (Madrid: Editorial Mundo Latino, 1921), 152. 20. Rubén Darío, “La tarjeta postal,” in Crónicas desconocidas, ed. Günther Schmigalle. (Berlin: Edition Tranvia; Managua: Academia Nicaraguense de la Lengua, 2006), 234. 21. Östman, “Postcard as Media,” 424, emphasis in the original. 22. After the postcard’s inception in Austria, the medium quickly spread throughout Europe. The postcard arrived in the United States in 1873 and was in regular use throughout Spanish America in the early 1880s. 23. “Tarjetas postales artísticas de la ‘Revista Moderna,’” Revista Moderna de México 2, no. 5 (July 1904): 738. 24. See figure 5.2. 25. “Tarjetas postales artísticas,” 738. 26. Darío, “La tarjeta postal,” 239. 27. Ibid., 239–40. 28. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation,” in Essays: First Series, September 3, 2009, site editor Jone Johnson Lewis, http://www.emersoncentral.com/compensation.htm (July 27, 2015). 29. Darío, “La tarjeta postal,” 240. 30. Ibid., 234. 31. Ibid., 240. 32. Ibid., 234. 33. Ibid., 235. 34. Darío, “Reyes y cartas,” 77. 35. José Martí, “Prólogo al ‘Poema del Niágara” de Juán A. Pérez Bonalde,” in Ensayos y crónicas , ed. José Olivio Jiménez (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004), 64. 36. Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, “Al pie de la escalera,” Revista Azul 1, no. 1 (May 6, 1894): 2. 37. Darío, “Reyes y cartas,” 78. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 80. 40. Ibid., 79. 41. Ibid., 84. 42. Dario’s textual production is vast. Like other modernistas, he published a seemingly endless supply of newspaper crónicas, founded numerous literary magazines, and has a long list of poetry and prose book publications. As for political tracts, in 1899 Darío published a short pamphlet on Spain’s Republican president Emilio Castelar that was later included in the first edition of España Contemporánea (Madrid: Mundo Latino, 1899). 43. María Josefa Sierra, Carta manuscrita (July 20, 1908), Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Archivo Rubén Darío, http://www.ucm.es/info/rDarío/docs/doc2380/documento2380.html (accessed September 28, 2010). 44. Francisco García Cisneros, Carta manuscrita (March 16, 1895), Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Archivo Rubén Darío, http://www.ucm.es/info/rDarío/docs/doc973/documento973.html (accessed September 28, 2010). 45. There are several statistics that affirm this rise in literary audiences. For example, Adolfo Prieto states that Argentina in 1882 had a population of over 3 million and that there were 224 periodicals in circulation, placing the country third in the world for periodicals per capita (El discurso criollista [Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1988], 35). Although literacy rates were higher in Argentina than other Spanish American countries, in the early twentieth century Buenos Aires had a literacy rate of 96 percent among thirteen-year-old youth (ibid.,

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42). Another way of getting an idea of the extent of Spanish American readership is through the mere amount of publications at the time. Rubén Darío published in over fifty publications in literally every Spanish-speaking country in the hemisphere during his career. Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera collaborated with thirty-eight publications in Mexico City alone (Ana Elena Díaz Alejo, “Prólogo,” in Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859–1895), ed. Yolanda Bache Cortés et al. [Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995], 15). 46. Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, Camino de perfección y otros ensayos (Caracas: Ediciones Nueva Cádiz, 1908), 77. See Alejandro Mejías-López’s recent work The Inverted Conquest (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009) for an excellent book-length treatise that explores the modernista rise to authority in the transatlantic literary field of the period confirming Díaz Rodríguez’s maxim “inversa conquista.” 47. Naomi Schor, “Cartas Postales,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 200. 48. Rubén Darío, “Psicología de la postal,” in Obras completas. Parisiana (Madrid: Mundo Latino, 1917–1919), vol. 5, 119. 49. Emphasis added. 50. Darío, “Psicología de la postal,” 120, emphasis in the original. 51. Geo Courtain, “La tarjeta postal,” trans. Daniel Ureña, Páginas Ilustradas: Revista Semana 3, no. 118 (October 28, 1906): 1893.

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WORKS CITED Blanco-Fombona, Rufino. Postcard manuscript. 1904. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Archivo Rubén Darío. http://www.ucm.es/info/rdario/docs/doc1657/detalleimg/index2.html (accessed September 27, 2010). Courtain, Geo. “La tarjeta postal.” Translated by Daniel Ureña. Páginas Illustradas: Revista Semanal 3, no. 118 (October 28, 1906): 1891–93. Collecting Postcards in Colour: 1894–1914. Edited by William Dûval (Poole: Blanford Press, 1978), 21. Darío, Rubén. España Contemporánea . 1st ed. Madrid: Mundo Latino, 1899. ———. Postcard manuscript to Amado Nervo. 1908. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Archivo Rubén Darío. http://alfama.sim.ucm.es/greco/rd-digital.php?search=349 (accessed July 3, 2014). ———. “Psicología de la postal.” In Obras completas. Vol. 5. Parisiana, 119–21. Madrid: Mundo Latino, 1917–1919. ———. “Reyes y cartas postales.” In Obras completas. Vol. 5. Parisiana, 77–84. Madrid: Mundo Latino, 1917–1919. ———. “La tarjeta postal.” In Crónicas desconocidas, edited by Günther Schmigalle, 233–40. Berlin: Edition Tranvia; Managua: Academia Nicaraguense de la Lengua, 2006. De Orellana, Margarita. “El poder de la memoria fugaz.” Artes de México 48 (1999): 6–15. Díaz Alejo, Ana Elena. “Prólogo.” In Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859–1895): Mañana de otro modo, edited by Yolanda Bache Cortés, Alicia Bustos Trejob, Belem Clark de Lara, Ana Elena Díaz Alejo, and Elvira Lópe Aparicio, 7–18. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995. Díaz Rodríguez, Manuel. Camino de perfección y otros ensayos. Caracas: Ediciones Nueva Cádiz, 1908. Dûval, William, ed. Collecting Postcards in Colour: 1894–1914, with the assistance of Valerie Monahan. Poole: Blanford Press, 1978. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Compensation.” In Essays: First Series. September 3, 2009. Site editor Jone Johnson Lewis. http://www.emersoncentral.com/compensation.htm (accessed July 27, 2015). García Cisneros, Francisco. Carta manuscrita. March 16, 1895. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Archivo Rubén Darío. http://www.ucm.es/info/rdario/docs/doc973/documento973.html (accessed September 28, 2010). Gómez Carrillo, Enrique. “El arte sutil del maquillaje.” In El reino de la frivolidad, 97–102. Madrid: Renacimiento, 1923.

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———. “Las sibilas del bulevar.” In El tercer libro de las crónicas, 127–56. Madrid: Editorial Mundo Latino, 1921. González, Aníbal. La crónica modernista hispanoamericana. Madrid: J. Porrúa Turanzas, 1983. Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel. “Al pie de la escalera.” Revista Azul 1, no. 1 (May 6, 1894): 1–2. “King of Italy in Paris.” New York Times, October 15, 1903, 9. Lugones, Leopoldo. Postcard manuscript to Rubén Darío. 1913. Universidad Compultense de Madrid, Archivo Rubén Darío. http://www.ucm.es/info/rdario/docs/doc1186/documento1186.html (accessed July 3, 2014). Martí, José. “Prólogo al ‘Poema del Niágara’ de Juán A. Pérez Bonalde.” In Ensayos y crónicas, edited by José Olivio Jiménez, 59–78. Madrid: Cátedra, 2004. Mejías-López, Alejandro. The Inverted Conquest: The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. Minellono, Maria. “Un álbum de tarjetas postales: Pesía, lectores y prácticas sociales en la literatura de ‘entre siglos.’” Boletín de la Academia Argentina de Letras 72, nos. 289–290 (2007): 155–210. Montellano, Francisco. “Editores de ingenio y audacia.” Artes de México 48 (1999): 24–30. Nervo, Amado. Postcard manuscript. n.d. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Archivo Rubén Darío. http://www.ucm.es/info/rdario/docs/doc1186/documento1186.html (accessed September 28, 2010). Östman, Jan-Ola. “The Postcard as Media.” Text 24, no. 3 (2004): 423–42. Prieto, Adolfo. El discurso criollista: En la formación de la Argentina moderna. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1988. Rama, Ángel. The Lettered City. Translated by John Charles Chasteen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Ramos, Julio. Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Translated by John D. Blanco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Rancière, Jacques. “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge.” Critical Inquiry 36 (Autumn 2009): 1-19. Reynolds, Andrew. The Spanish American Crónica Modernista, Temporality and Material Culture: Modernismo’s Unstoppable Presses. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012. Rotker, Susana. La invención de la crónica. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005. Schor, Naomi. “‘Cartas Postales’: Representing Paris 1900.” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 188–244. Sierra, María Josefa. Carta manuscrita. July 20, 1908. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Archivo Rubén Darío. http://www.ucm.es/info/rdario/docs/doc2380/documento2380.html (accessed September 28, 2010). “Tarjetas postales artísticas de la ‘Revista Moderna.’” Revista Moderna de México 2, no. 5 (July 1904): 738.

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Chapter Six

Delmira Agustini, Gender, and the Poetics of Collecting

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Shelley Garrigan

Subversive, subjective, exhibitionistic, masked, erotic: the captivating poetic legacy of Delmira Agustini (1886–1914) keeps generating critical interpretations that reflect as much the complexity of her work as the changing landscape of literary scholarship. Product in part of the privileged literary context of the Novecientos montevideano [Generation 900 of Montevideo] and the progressive political and social reforms of José Batlle y Ordóñez (1903–1907, 1911–1915), which, as Carla Giaudrone and Patricia Varas have observed in respective studies, allowed for otherwise marginalized subjectivities to achieve artistic validation, Agustini’s writing has been framed as a type of metapoetic response to the modernista legacy—one that acknowledges the depth of its impact only to appropriate it, distort it, and expose its inherent limitations. From the prologues to her published books to the most recent proposals in scholarship, direct links to her gender abound in the literary criticism that addresses Agustini’s poetic legacy. 1 Indeed, support for the argument that Agustini’s identity as a woman must factor into the analyses of her work is as undeniable as it is overwhelming. The fact that Agustini personalized her poetry; that she played with different gender masks; that she self-identified as “Nena” in personal written correspondence; that she wrote as a woman from within the domains of a male-dominant literary, social, and political tradition; and that the remnants of her personal life now form an inextricable component of her literary legacy all lead critics to use sex and gender as primary platforms when embarking into an exploration of her work. This is not to say that there is no variety in opinion among these discussions; even within the generalized agreement that Agustini’s writing entails feminine 115

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subversions of dominant literary icons and themes, the precise nature of her “femininity” has been recently interpreted in a number of different ways. 2 This chapter offers an exploration of Agustini’s poetry—and her implicit proposals with regard to gender—from the perspective of collecting. Like many of her modernista counterparts, Agustini’s lyrical subjects are, I argue, figurative collectors. As María Mercedes Andrade has observed, the inherent connections between coleccionismo (as a practice, as a lifestyle, and as writerly pose) and modernismo run on multiple levels. 3 On the one hand, there are the character-collectors that appear in works such as Eduardo Wilde’s satirical “Vida moderna” [“Modern Life”], Darío’s “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China” [“The Death of the Empress of China”], 4 and, as Andrade has thoroughly investigated, José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa [AfterDinner Conversation]. On the other hand, there are a number of modernista literary works (poems, stories, crónicas) that feature the collector’s subjectivity more subtly in the form of a contemplative, possessive, and/or desiring gaze. Read collectively, literary works such as Darío’s “De invierno” [“In Winter”], “El reino interior” [“Interior Kingdom”], “Un retrato de Watteau” [“A Portrait by Watteau”], “Era una aire suave” [“It Was a Soft Air”], and “Coloquio de los centauros” [“The Centaurs’ Colloquium”]; 5 Casal’s “Elena” and “La agonía de Petronio” [“Pretronuis’s Agony”]; and Martí’s “Los abanicos en la exposición Bartholdi” [“The Fans at Bartholdi’s Exhibition”] 6 together sketch out the parameters of the collector’s mode of seeing the world—of articulating a sense of self around the edges of exquisite, palpable, arranged, and displayed things. This point of view opens up not only a space for negotiating the seam that runs between the exterior surroundings and the private, interior self but also a way of connecting the vital, sensual experience of materiality to the artistic search for a new, more profound level of literary expression. Agustini’s assumption and modification of the collector’s point of view provides a means by which to write her way through and past conventional literary icons, styles, themes, and boundaries. From José Asunción Silva’s José Fernández to the lyrical subjects that traverse the poetry of Rubén Darío, Julián del Casal, and José Martí, the figure of the modernista collector that surfaces repeatedly in modernista poetry and prose not only embodied the confusion, ecstasies, and conflicting forces of high culture and marketplace that largely characterized this era but also proposed a specific model of masculine desire that, despite its association with a form of dandyism and decadence, managed to retain somewhat of a connection to traditional patriarchal culture by relegating his female subjects to the realm of displayed objects. 7 Anchored in the realms of interior adornment, sense, and desire, the feminine characters such as Silva’s Helena and Darío’s Carolina (from “De invierno”) or Chinese empresses that adorn the interiors of modernista literature are quiet and unassuming, serving to

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link their poet-admirers to their own respective fantasies of accessing or possessing. Agustini, however, occupies and shifts the contours of the collector’s profile in her writing. In her well-known essay “Cisnes impuros” [“Impure Swans”], for example, Sylvia Molloy refers to Agustini’s appropriation of Darío’s iconic/symbolic swan in terms that also precisely describe the conceptual transition from object to collected object through the emptying of its prior meaning associations and its resignification according to a new logic. Theoretically speaking, that which distinguishes a collected object from any other is first its removal from (and the complete or partial erasure of) prior contexts and then its re-placement into a new code of meaning. 8 Comparing Agustini’s “Nocturno” [“Nocturne”] to Darío’s “El cisne” [“The Swan”], Molloy explains the subtlety and force with which the Uruguayan poet rewrites the cisne dariano in terms that also perfectly describe the collector’s vocation:

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En cambio, los dos poemas de Agustini no descartan, no reemplazan: se empeñan, en cambio, en resemantizar tanto el ícono como el encuentro emblemático con Leda. Rompen con Darío pero usan su texto, no lo desechan: vacían signos para cargarlos de otra pulsiones. 9 [On the other hand, the two poems by Agustini do not dismiss, do not replace: they insist . . . on resemanticizing both the icon and the emblematic encounter with Leda. They break with Darío but use his text, they don’t reject it: they empty signs in order to charge them with other urges.]

In Delmira Agustini, Sexual Seduction, and Vampiric Conquest, Cathy Jrade also frames Agustini’s poetry as a metapoetic and sexually charged response to the strong patriarchal legacy represented by the male modernistas and Darío in particular: As she tears herself away from the limitations that had been set for her, she imagines herself fragmented . . . by the pursuit of independence and vitality. At the same time, however, she speaks up and declares her sense of self and voice by rewriting Darío, appropriating the iconic swan of modernismo, and activating, energizing and sexualizing the passive, domesticated, subservient female figures of his poetry. 10

Building on Molloy’s and Jrade’s observations, then, I propose that this emptying and recodification of the swan and other modernista icons and formulas is a figurative and performative act of collecting. By demythifying and personalizing the swan as in the examples above, Agustini replaces the ritualistic, distant mode of contemplation not just of the male poet but also of the male collector. Darío’s “observador externo” [external observer] cedes to Agustini’s self-implicating “witness,” and while the former guides us through lyrical scenes that are “already constructed,” Agustini lyrically per-

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forms the unsettling act of construction of those very scenes. 11 She indulges in a vocabulary that expresses the rawness of the collector’s hunger and exposes it to the reader, thus replacing Darío’s tranquil, contemplative collectors with ones who stain, blur, terrorize, and eroticize. Although she does not explicitly identify this connection in her critical edition of Delmira Agustini’s Poesías completas (1993, 2006), in her “Prólogo” [“Prologue”] Magdalena García Pinto also sketches out strong parallels between modernista writing and collecting. On the one hand, she makes brief mention of how the “modernista spirit” made its imprint not only on the intellectual, political, and artistic debates and products of the moment but also in the physical space of the urban center. There, in the signage and interior/exterior spaces of the city, writes García in Poesías completas, the visual imprint and “ondulating lines” of Art Nouveau made its mark on the local architecture of Montevideo in such a way that displayed the culture of appropriation, influence, and creative interpretation that describes the artistic atmosphere of the era. 12 On the other hand, citing Pedro Salinas’s study of Rubén Darío, García Pinto also describes modernista writing in general in terms analogous to collecting. For example, she likens the ancient mythological references in modernista writing in general to the figure of the “bricoleur fin de siecle”: Esto es, el material poético que alimenta y configura una buena parte de estos poemas está constituido por fragmentos de otras creaciones artísticas transformados por la imaginación antirrealista y antinaturalista en su expresión más amplia. Estos fragmentos recogen en bricolage elementos provenientes de la cultura helénica, del siglo XVIII francés a través de la visión de los parnasianos franceses, elementos de la estética simbolista y prerrafaelita del xix, y elementos de la estética barroca transfigurados desde las artes plásticas. 13 [The poetic material that feeds and configures a good number of these poems is constituted by fragments from other artistic creations that are transformed by antirealist and antinaturalist imagination in their broadest expression. In the form of bricolage, these fragments pick up elements from Hellenic culture, from the French eighteenth century through the vision of the French Parnassians, from elements from symbolist and pre-Raphaelite aesthetics from the nineteenth century, and from elements of baroque aesthetics transfigured from the plastic arts.]

In the gathering, emptying, and rearranging of fragments and borrowed pieces from Greek and French poetry, the content and stylistic choices made by modernista writers also reflect the collector’s attitude toward “things”— that paradoxical way of using radical otherness (in the form of inanimate, impenetrable objects) to carve out and map the contours of the interior self. Far from simple repetition, this poetic “show” of figurative borrowing, rearranging, and re-presenting a series of inherited images, themes, and techniques was a key component of the modernista aesthetic.

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There is a certain mode of desire expressed by modernista lyrical collectors—one expressed in terms of conquering, attaining, possessing, “fixing” the lyrical object—that merges with traditional patriarchal values. 14 Yet Delmira Agustini’s poetry engages dynamically with the collector’s voice in such a way that remaps the confrontation between subjectivity, desire, and the outer social world into unexplored terrain. By exploring her poetic journey from the lens of collecting, a new dimension or experience of desire comes to surface. Agustini does not simply “feminize” the collector but rather uses the collector’s mode of subjectivity—so predominant in modernista verse—to push the boundaries of lyrical expression and remap the contours of self, other, and language onto a restless, dynamic, and permanently unfinished landscape. Far from “fixing” the subject/object positions, as in her Darían counterpart, Agustini’s lyrical collectors uproot, empty, and recodify both the agent and the recipient of desire. There is something in the collector’s experience that allows her to theatricalize the inherently mobile, form-changing nature of human desire. And part of what Agustini brings to the collector’s spectacle of things is her willingness to write her way past the comfort of surfaces and into the murky depths of inner cores: through a kind of raw and radical proximity, her lyrical subjects reveal themselves to be as deeply implicated in the collector’s transformative gaze as their lyrical objects. She uses the collector’s experience as a way of performing writing in a way that is perhaps not only “feminine” but also a precursor to the postfeminine in its implications. A brief summary of the poetic legacy that surrounds the modernista lyrical treatment of exquisite objects will provide a useful entryway into this aspect of Agustini’s work. The modernista/decadentista obsession with beautiful things—which, as Andrade points out while referencing James Clifford and C. B. Mcpherson, goes hand in hand with the emergence of the modern subject—was nonetheless hardly unique to the late nineteenth century. As Carlos Javier Morales points out in “Ética y estética en ‘El reino interior’ de Rubén Darío” [“Ethics and Aesthetics in ‘El reino interior’ by Rubén Darío”], the equation between beauty or access to beauty and morality can be traced backward from the romantics and Emmanuel Swedenborg’s nineteenth-century “law of correspondence” directly to ancient Greece. 15 What is unique to modernista verse and Darío in particular, claims this critic, is the poet’s radicalization of the presumed symbiosis between aesthetics and ethics, in which access to and the transmission of beauty becomes a “moral” end in itself. According to this point of view, which also approximates that of the French symbolists, the singular beautiful object stands in analogous relationship to the beauty of the world, and Darío writes from the standpoint of one who oscillates between seeking and possessing that unique ability to both perceive and transmit the hidden associations that link thing to essence in the form of poetry.

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On a darker note, in his reading of Baudelaire, Jean-Paul Sartre reveals the metaphysical rejection and deep sense of anxiety revealed in poems such as “Correspondences,” proposing that the poet sought not a fulfilled type of transcendence in his lyrical exploration of surroundings but rather “to find in each reality a fixed non-satisfaction, an appeal to another thing, an objectified transcendence.” 16 Indeed, Sartre’s quoted selection of Baudelaire’s L’art romantique [Romantic Art] (1868) presents the exquisite “thing” (in this case, a poem) as indicative not of fulfillment or satisfaction but rather of a perpetual state of condemned longing:

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Our insatiable thirst for everything which is beyond and which is revealed by life is the most living proof of our immortality . . . ; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, these tears are not proof of excessive enjoyment; they are much more the sign of an irritated melancholy, a nervous postulation, a nature exiled in an imperfect world which would like to take possession at once on this very earth of a revealed paradise. 17

In a radically different context but along a similar vein, Susan Stewart, in On longing, privileges the metaphor of the souvenir as a way of understanding the exquisite object and its role in the performance of desire and subjectivity. 18 The souvenir, as this critic describes below, corresponds well with what has often been understood as the modernista’s aesthetic and existential rejection of the present moment: “authentic” experience becomes both elusive and allusive as it is placed beyond the present lived experience, the beyond in which the antique, the pastoral, the exotic, and other fictive domains are articulated.” 19 In both Baudelaire’s expressed anxiety for possession of a “revealed paradise” and the idea of authenticity or “authentic experience” as expressed by Stewart, I argue there are two correlations with modernista writing: first, the apprehension regarding the limited capacity of language (e.g., as found in Darío’s “Yo persigo una forma” 20 ) to express what lies beyond it, and, second, the use of exquisite and foreign objects to extend the boundaries of the viewing/writing self. The result is a curious negotiation among the realms of self, space, and time in modernista literature. In some cases, the very same cathartic extension of boundaries experienced by the lyrical or fictional collector leads to the latter’s ultimate annihilation, as the self disperses, stretches, and becomes too porous before its surroundings to survive, such as in the character of José Fernández in De sobremesa. Survival would entail the renunciation of the collection (as did Des Esseintes in Against Nature) or even the destruction of the collected piece (as in Suzette’s figurative “execution” of the Asian bust in “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China”). Here, the collector’s vocation is revealed as potentially violent, dangerous—it blurs the boundaries of self and other in such a way that proves ultimately unsustainable for both. The collector’s is a tale in which survival depends on

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failure and tautology: if he completes the collection, the story ends; if he does not, the story of longing and acquisition endlessly repeats. One of the fundamental ways in which Agustini’s lyrical subjects play with the collector’s position is precisely by exploring different modes of relating to the exquisite object so as to blur the boundaries that otherwise “order” the exchanges and interactions between self and other. In other words, there is a distinct attitude of trespassing in Agustini’s poetry that ultimately both edifies and deconstructs her lyrical subjects. An exploration of her lyrical treatment of exquisite objects reveals a distinct engagement and reevaluation of boundaries, which can be read both as a response to the social, political, and artistic contexts from which she wrote and as a profound writerly commitment to expanding the parameters of expressive possibility from the shadows of the strong modernista legacy. This poet’s figurative trespassing across the boundaries of various types of forms manifests in a variety of ways in her poetry, including, for example, the attempted animation of inanimate or inhuman displayed objects. In “Nardos” [“Spikenards”], for example, the dreaming lyrical subject, intoxicated by the thick perfumes of the flowers emanating from a Chinese vase on the piano, follows their beckon, crosses a threshold marked by “amplias puertas” [wide doors], and enters into a metaphorical space that allows her to “hear” and respond to the “strange language” of their speech: Muchas cosas me cuentan, muchas cosas, Las flores de ópalo en su extraña lengua; Cosas tan raras y hondas, tan difusas En el fondo de sombras de la sala, Que he llegado a pensarme un gran vidente Que leyera en la calma de las cosas Formidables secretos de la vida! 21 [They tell me many things, many things / the opal flowers in their strange tongue; Things so rare and deep, so diffuse / in the shadowy back of the room that I have come to think of myself as a great clairvoyant who reads in the calmness of things Formidable secrets of life!]

In this example, Agustini’s lyrical subject holds the gaze that is able to penetrate the apparent calm of the exquisite display and to expose or allude to the deep, secret-holding subtext or interior cavity—the “formidables secretos de la vida” that constitute a recurring theme in the international landscape of late nineteenth-century writers, including Darío, Wilde, and Baudelaire. 22 Similarly, in “Mis ídolos,” the lyrical subject, wandering through the sanctuary of collected objects that she adores to the point of submission and succumbing to the hypnotic “drunkenness of incense” generated by their

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collective presence, receives a “new idol,” which, in a gust of spring wind, shatters its competitors with its “almost human” presence:

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Surgió un ídolo nuevo, palpitante e inmenso! Y eran sus divinas pupilas casi humanas Y sus divinos labios reían a la vida. 23 [There appeared a new idol, palpitating and immense! And its divine pupils were almost human and its divine lips laughed at life.]

In both “Nardos” and “Mis ídolos” [“My Idols”], the ghostly speech of the inanimate objects leads the lyrical subject to access a dimension of experience that pushes or extends the boundaries of self and poetic expression. In “Nardos,” the lyrical subject, struggling with the lack of clarity of the flower’s speech, uses a series of interrogatives to navigate the depths of the realm of sleep and search its “caverns” for the strange, mysterious, and fertile source of life: “Las cavernas del sueño: decid, flores, / ¿No serán . . . el oasis . . . de la vida?” 24 [The caverns of sleep . . . could they be . . . the oasis . . . of life?]. In “Mis ídolos,” after constructing an altar for her new idol and making it an offering of flowers, the lyrical subject experiences a figurative state of “opening” that collapses the distance between longing and fulfillment: “Y le adoré con ansias y le adoré con llanto!” 25 [And I adored it with longing and I adored it with tears]. Here, interestingly, the placement and display of the new ídolo—meticulously highlighted in this poem—leads not to fulfillment but rather to a renewed sense of longing. Although radically different from the composed and distant gaze offered by Darío, this is the disposition of the collector par excellence as expressed indirectly in the quotation from Baudelaire: acquisition serves not so much to satisfy as to renew and fuel the very same sense of longing that psychoanalytic theory proposes to be the basis of subjectivity itself. In “Mis ídolos,” the silence and tranquility of the lyrical subject’s initial state of contemplation as she lay surrounded by her temple of objects has been ruptured, and her passionate new offering—in which she substitutes one of flowers for her opening physical heart—points toward a state of cathartic bursting of blood and tears, a new state of being and consciousness, 26 or the generative place of writing and creation itself. Here, the poet suggests an alternative to the collector’s tautology: there is a sense of both personal loss and ecstatic creation in the radical proximity of self and other. Her use of the vocabulary and imagery of the interior human body—“mi corazón que abría / Como una flor de sangre”—stages an intimate merging not only of self/other but also of writer/reader, and her conclusion of the poem with the lyrical subject in a state of adoration, longing [“ansias”], and tears substitutes the boundary of the solid artifice for the receptive, transformed liquid image and the complacency of possession for the suggestion of a renewed and continued sense of restlessness.

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Agustini’s lyrical resistance or refusal to respect the limitations of finite boundaries manifests in other poems as well. In the last four stanzas of “A una cruz” [“To a Crucifux”], for example, the lyrical subject, on witnessing an eroticized unification of heaven and earth in the formation of a cross, experiences a cathartic burst and change in form from a “hostile,” “marble” solid to an all-inclusive, reflecting liquid. In the wake of a surge of inner “harmony” experienced by the gazing lyrical subject, the outer (surface) and the inner (blood and tears) substances of self are inverted—the marble surface becomes the inner “supreme statue” of the soul, and the released liquids become the remainders of a former self in which the boundaries of the individual have extended to the collective:

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Así lloré el dolor de las heridas La embriaguez opiada de las rosas . . . Arraigábanse en mí todas las vidas, Reflejábanse en mí todas las cosas! . . . 27 [In this way I cried the pain of the wounds and the narcotic intoxication of the roses . . . All lives took root in me, All things were reflected in me! . . .] 28

Notice, as well, the repeated ellipsis in this stanza, which both extends the resonance of the verses and invites the reader, in a curious folding of positions, to occupy the lyrical subject’s perspective as witness at the beginning of the poem. Here, the lyrical subject’s bursting forth and figurative death releases the “supreme statue” of the soul to the heavens. The unintentional poetic triptych found in “La estatua” [“The Statue”], “Plegaria” [“Prayer”], and “Cuentas de mármol” [“Marble Beads”], published in consecutive books and listed here in chronological order, stages a unique progression in the lyrical subject’s exploration of boundaries through the contemplation of beautiful objects. 29 While Marcella Trambaioli has already eloquently explored Agustini’s poetic treatment of statues as a subversive, eroticized response to the preferred poetic icon of Parnassian aesthetics, here I propose to build on that reading by exploring these poems from within the parameters of the collector’s gaze. By doing so, Agustini’s lyrical performances emerge not only as subversive or reactive—as reactions against the heavy impositions of the Hellenic legacy of beauty and form that dominated the poetry of the era—but also as edifying a specific alternative—as performing, lyrically, the appropriation, emptying, and recodifying of an absolute Other in a metapoetic effort to rescript the subject/object positions from an alternative point of view. In “La estatua,” the “sovereign silhouette” of a statuesque figure contrasts sharply with the “greatness that sleeps in its form,” and its metonymical connection to a “new race, superior to the human” confronts the stark reality of its inability to move and lack of soul (“Dios! . . . Moved ese cuerpo, dadle

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un alma!” 30 [God! Move this body, give it a soul]). Through a series of imperatives that, in typical modernista fashion, commands the domain of looking [“Miradla,” “Ved,” “Vedlo”], the lyrical subject guides the gaze of the readers into a twist on the traditional modernista voyage of aesthetic appreciation by means of an invitation to see through and past the conventional, unquestioning appreciation of inherited artistic forms. 31 Here, rather than using the statue as a generative place for artistic expression, the lyrical subject contemplates the frozen dormancy of a promise of greatness that is never fulfilled. While, as both Jrade and Trambaiolli have observed, this poem exposes the statue as a failed expression and thus constitutes a type of poetic manifesto against the limits of Parnassian aesthetic ideals, it also features the impenetrable boundary of the statue in such a way that highlights the lyrical subject’s new, dissatisfied, and hungry mode of looking. Read from the collector’s perspective, “La estatua” occupies what can be considered the first stage in the collector’s methodical dance of appropriation: the recognition (and ultimate rejection) of the absolute, inaccessible otherness of the contemplated object. Read intertextually with “La estatua,” “Plegaria” effectively illustrates the next step in the collector’s process of appropriation as the distance between lyrical subject and contemplated object is significantly reduced: the lyrical subject changes positions, the accusatory tone of “La estatua” gives way to compassion, and the declarations of “La estatua” give way to a frame marked by interrogatives. Framed within a set of “pleadings” in which she asks Eros (and her readers) if he has ever felt pity for statues, the poem guides the viewer/reader’s eye through a detailed contemplation of the various physical components of a statuesque form, identifying various anatomical parts (“bocas” [mouths], “hombros” [shoulders], “frentes” [foreheads], “manos” [hands], “ojos” [eyes], “cabelleras” [heads of hair], “labios” [lips], “sexos” [genitals], “plantas” [plants]) and pairing each of these with a specific expression of sensorial lack: 32 Eros: acaso no sentiste nunca Piedad de las estatuas? ... Piedad para las manos enguantadas De hielo, que no arrancan Los frutos deleitosos de la Carne ... Piedad para los ojos que aletean Espirituales párpados: ... Nunca ven nada por mirar tan lejos! Piedad para las pulcras cabelleras ... Que nunca airea el abanico negro,

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Negro y enorme de la tempestad; . . . 33 [Eros: did you never by chance feel pity for statues? ... Pity for the hands gloved with ice, that do not pick the pleasing fruits of the Flesh ... Pity for the eyes that flutter spiritual eyelids: ... They never see anything for looking so far! Pity for the tidy heads of hair ... that the black fan never airs the black and enormous fan of the storm . . .] 34

In contrast with “La estatua,” here the lyrical subject simultaneously and paradoxically entertains both an ironic deconstruction and a type of empathetic identification with the statue by naming and giving voice to its frustrated and senseless subjectivity. She juxtaposes the senseless, dormant coldness of the statue with the passion of an abysmal hunger and thirst (“Un vampiro de fuego / con más sed y más hambre que un abismo” [A fire vampire / with more thirst and hunger than an abyss]) and in the cathartic moment of the poem commands Eros to imbue it with life (“Apúntale tus soles o tus rayos!” [Direct to it your suns or your rays]). The result is a curious sense of identification between the lyrical subject and object and also the hint of potential for a cathartic merging that appears more thoroughly developed in “Cuentas de Mármol.” Published posthumously in 1924, 35 “Cuentas de Mármol” features the lyrical collector’s completion of the dance of appropriation, emptying, and resignification by occupying and writing from the perspective of the statue. The transitions in subjectivity that began first with the lyrical collector as an external observer in “La estatua” and then shifted to compassionate witness in “Plegaria” come full circle, yet this time merging the points of the view of subject and object. Now, the statue speaks, and that voice, like its opposite (the collector), also privileges that feeling of longing as a site of enunciation: Nevad a mí los lises hondos de vuestra alma; Mi sombra besará vuestro manto de calma, Que creciendo, creciendo me envolverá con Vos; 36 [Snow on me the deep lilies of your soul; my shadow will kiss your cloak of calm, that growing, growing will envelop me with you;] 37

The first two verses of the poem establish the lyrical subject’s dilemma as a “marble statue” with a “head of fire,” a contradiction that remains unre-

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solved in the poem that follows: “Yo, la estatua de mármol con cabeza de fuego, / Apagando mis sienes en frío y blanco ruego . . .” 38 [I, the marble statue with a head of fire, / extinguishing my temples in cold and white imploration. . .]. 39 As Cathy Jrade points out, the blend of sexual eroticism and references to religious or divine love in this poem creates a powerful lyrical composition in which the “destinies” of lyrical subject and object “weave together in what the lyric voice presents as her submission and exaltation.” 40 In addition to the merging or weaving together of subject and object, however, this poem hinges on a show of lyrical restlessness—a state of perpetual yearning expressed repeatedly in Agustini’s poetry. 41 The anaphora toward the end of the poem (“Luego será mi carne en la vuestra perdida . . . / Luego será mi alma en la vuestra diluida . . . / Luego será la Gloria . . . y seremos un dios!” 42 [Then my flesh will be lost in yours . . . / then my soul will be diluted in yours . . . /then it will be glory . . . and we will be a god!]) 43 emphasizes a future point of fulfillment, an interweaving of subject/object, and the adjectives at the end of the verses bind that quest to a renunciation of self [“perdida”/“diluida”]—to a dissolution of boundaries that serves paradoxically as both a breeding ground for new horizons in poetic expression and the outer boundary of the subject’s current ability to express. This figurative crossing of thresholds or trespassing that Agustini’s lyrical collectors exercise becomes particularly charged when it occurs in the realm, space, or body of the beloved or eroticized Other, who, in the poems mentioned in what follows, may appear sleeping or dead and resting in the lap of the desiring lyrical subject. In poems such as her famous and oft-cited “El vampiro” [“The Vampire”], the same agent that “invokes” the dolor in the other also identifies with the experience of that pain: En el regazo de la tarde triste Yo invoqué tu dolor . . . Sentirlo era Sentirte el corazón! ... Yo que abriera Tu herida mordí en ella—¿me sentiste?— Como en el oro de un panal mordiera! 44 [In the lap of a sad afternoon I invoked your pain . . . To feel it was to feel your heart! ... I, who would open your wound, bit into it—did you feel me?— as if biting into the gold of a honeycomb!] 45

In these verses, the range of sensation invoked is so excessive as to transcend the boundaries within which the strict pleasure of sexual union

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would remain fixed, and the bridge or point of identification between the lyrical subject and object is pain. 46 In this way, both figures in “El vampiro” experience something parallel to what Bersani in his brief analysis titled Baudelaire and Freud describes as the loss of self. As this author explains one of the Freudian definitions of the “pleasure principle,” the transgression of a certain threshold of sensation constitutes the fundamental link between pleasure and pain. The excess of stimulation that one experiences in pain leads to the “shatter[ing] [of] a certain stability or equilibrium of the self,” or posits a threat to the boundaries of identity. 47 And it is precisely when such boundaries of individuality are weakened that the sublimated “union” as such occurs—that is, when each body is immersed within and subjected entirely to the service of the senses. 48 Also linked to the charged realm of mutuality in feeling in this poem is the figurative erasure of both the vampiric lyrical subject and its victim. The victim turns pale, closes [his] eyes, and senses the proximity of death: Palideciste Hasta la voz, tus párpados de cera, Bajaron . . . y callaste . . . Pareciste Oír pasar la Muerte . . . 49 [You grew pale even your voice, your waxen eyelids, were lowered . . . and you grew silent . . . You seemed to hear Death pass . . .] 50

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For the lyrical subject, in turn, the loss of self is expressed in the form of the concluding interrogatives, which cast a strong shift in tone in the poem as the strong, imposing position of first stanzas collapse into a crisis in identity: ¿Por qué fui tu vampiro de amargura? ¿Soy flor o estirpe de una especie oscura Que come llagas y que bebe el llanto? 51 [Why was I your vampire of bitterness? Am I a flower or the stock of a dark species that eats wounds and that drinks tears?] 52

Cathy Jrade has well explained Agustini’s defiant assumption of the imposed patriarchal stereotype of the monstrous female that was so prevalent in the nineteenth century and put this poem in context with other modernista approaches to eroticism and darkness. 53 At the same time, however, the doubling of positions notable here between the lyrical subject and object occupy a kind of seam that paradoxically merges gender articulation with gender dissolution. In other words, Agustini may not limit her lyrical subjects to imitating masculine modes of expression of desire or reasserting feminine dominance, but rather use them to deconstruct both the masculinized “active” and the feminized “passive” domains in order to construct a

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lyrical alternative—a crease or fold in which the boundaries that define both ultimately dissolve. In The Metastases of Enjoyment (1994), Slavoj Žižek identifies a theoretical analogy between the erotic, monstrous encounter and writing itself. Agustini’s is arguably a language that, in effect, “kills, breaking through the skin surface to cut directly into raw flesh—in short, by means of a word whose status is that of the Real.” 54 In other words, the poet exposes and rejects the conventional boundaries of desire in which, like reality itself, the Lover’s body remains tolerable so long as the desiring subject’s relationship to it remains external—mediated by the skin that conceals the profound reality of its vital organs. The skin that her lyrical subject penetrates here operates as language does, by covering the grotesque and intolerable substance of things and bodies in such a way that relating to it becomes possible only through its encasement. A language capable of disrupting such a precarious relationship to reality, then, can only be that which ruptures, deforms, fragments—it penetrates the surface and both reveals and releases the hidden, fecund inner stuff that lies within. 55 Agustini’s lyrical collectors do not rest well; they neither passively contemplate the landscape of the other’s body nor accept their own “monstrous” sense of longing without self-interrogation. Here, the sadistic thirst of the lyrical subject uses the lyrical object to turn back onto itself, to see itself as the object would see it, and then to question its own nature. In this and several other examples of Agustini’s poetry, the frequent use of interrogatives and suggestive punctuation such as ellipses merges the poem’s conclusions with a sense of opening, of being unfinished, of a subjective and poetic restlessness. 56 In this sense, the strong expression of desire in these poems moves through and beyond the erotic realm by harnessing eroticism’s drive toward possession and acquisition to an irrepressible mobility, an urge for release beyond the contours of both body and language, and demonstrates the lyrical subject’s abilities to trespass the conventional limits of gender, space, language, and the subject/object division: La intensa realidad de un sueño lúgubre Puso en mis manos tu cabeza muerta; Yo la apresaba como hambriento buitre . . . Y con más alma que en la Vida, trémula, La sonreía como nadie nunca! . . . ¡Era tan mía cuando estaba muerta! 57 [The intense reality of a gloomy dream put your dead head in my hands; I grasped it like a starving vulture . . . And with more soul than in Life, trembling I smiled at it like no one ever did! . . . It was so mine when it was dead!] 58

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Notice, again, how the urgency of the lyrical voice’s desire reaches a peak when the desired object is at its most passive and closed state. In the case of this poem and several others (“Tú dormías” [“You Slept”], “Tu boca” [“Your Mouth”], “En tus ojos” [“In Your Eyes”], “Con tu retrato” [“With Your Portrait”], “Para tus manos” [“For Your Hands”], “El silencio” [“Silence”], “Tres pétalos a tu perfil” [“Three Petals for Your Profile”], “Fue al pasar” [“It Was in Passing”], “Día nuestro” [“Our Day”]), it is important to note that the fragmentation of the lyrical “tú” is a distortion that to a certain extent evades—or at least renders less immediate—gender identification. 59 Given the strong feminine lyrical presence in so many of her poems, such as her muses, metaphors, and winged creatures, as Gwen Kirkpatrick observes, the ways in which she also plays with, downplays, or avoids gender referents perhaps fail to attract the same critical attention. 60 Rather than echo previous readings of this aesthetics of fragmentation from the lens of the femme fatale, 61 however, I am more interested here in Agustini’s undoing of the anchors between desire and gender—her way of performing the act of “othering” her desired objects to the point of viewing them as collected things:

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Engastada en mis manos fulguraba Como extraña presa, tu cabeza; Yo la ideaba estuches, y preciaba Luz a luz, sombra a sombra su belleza. 62 [Mounted in my hands, your head gleamed like a strange jewel; I designed cases for it, and I valued its beauty light for light, shadow for shadow.] 63

In the passage above, the lyrical subject contemplates the metaphorically severed head of the desired other and describes it as if it were an exquisite jewel. While the allusions to the iconic Salomé are undeniable, as Ana Peluffo has eloquently investigated, there is also a specific staging of the collector’s gaze in play. The symbolic transition from object to collected object— which, as mentioned, entails divesting or emptying the object of its original context and rescripting it into a new point of view is enacted here, as well as the collector’s association between the fragment-turned-exquisite object and the infinite. 64 The gaze of the lyrical subject metaphorically severs and “collects” the other. Beyond a simple act of symbolic castration, the viewing subject uses the head of the lover to gaze, appreciate, and dream and in this state of reverie to stumble into the threshold of the Other’s inner landscape. Faced with the endless depths of this unknown horizon, however, the lyrical subject experiences fear and anxiety and then suspends the poem once again in ellipses: Cuando en tu frente nacarada a luna, Como un monstruo en la paz de una laguna, Surgió un enorme ensueño taciturno . . .

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¡Ah! Tu cabeza me asustó . . . Fluía De ella una ignota vida . . . Parecía No sé qué mundo anónimo y nocturno . . . 65 [When on your forehead, made pearly by the moon, an enormous taciturn fantasy sprang forth like a monster on the tranquility of a lagoon . . . Ah! Your head scared me . . . From it an unknown life flowed . . . It seemed . . . to be I know not anonymous and nocturnal world . . .] 66

In Agustini’s evasion of strict or easily identifiable gender referents through the strategic fragmentation of the Other’s body, several implications with regard to collecting are put into play. First, there is the rendering of equivalence between the other’s body and what Baudrillard calls the collector’s “unique object.” 67 In the case of the unique object, the collector experiences attraction not to a series or string of objects, not to accumulation, but rather to the irreducible, unique qualities of the “special” object. The fixation on the special object, in turn, displaces the mode of desire that is inherent to sexual drive and transposes it into the realm of play. Curiously, the same fixation on the unique love object that theoretically “puts the object on par with an animate being” in collecting occurs in these poems, only in the reverse: 68 that which was animated (the Lover in whole form) is severed/ deanimated/objectified, and then reanimated—not as itself but rather as an integral, “serialized” component of the lyrical collector’s fantasy. By theatricizing the collector’s relationship to the beloved unique object, Agustini’s lyrical subjects play with the intimate boundaries of self and other in such a way that both occupies the domain of the erotic urge and moves beyond it in the perpetual displacement of fulfillment or completion notable in these poems—a characteristic that is also in symmetry with the collector’s logic. 69 In most of the poems named above, the fragmented desired object serves not to fulfill, satiate, or satisfy the lyrical subject’s desires but rather to bring them into contact with a distant horizon perhaps best described as the realm of the Sublime, be this expressed in terms of transcendence (in the form of stars) or a terrifying glimpse into the “abyss”: Y yo caigo, sin fin, en el sangriento abismo! 70 —— De la sombra y la luz, tus ojos graves Dicen grandezas que yo sé y tú sabes . . . Y te dejo morir . . . Queda en mis manos Una gran mancha lívida y sombría . . . Y renaces en mi melancolía Formado de astros fríos y lejanos! 71 —— Fondos marinos, cristalinas grutas Donde se encastilló la Maravilla;

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Faros que apuntan misteriosas rutas . . . Caminos temblorosos de una orilla Desconocida; lámparas votivas Que se nutren de espíritus humanos Y que el milagro enciende; gemas vivas Y hoy por gracia divina, ¡siemprevivas! Y en el azur del Arte, astros humanos! 72 [And I fall, endlessly, into the bloody abyss] 73 —— [Of the darkness and the light, your serious eyes say splendors that I know and you know . . . and I let you die . . . A great, livid, and dark stain / Remains on my hands . . . and you are reborn in my melancholy / formed from cold and distant stars!] 74 —— [Marine backgrounds, crystalline caverns in which Wonder was enclosed in a castle lighthouses that point toward mysterious routes . . . trembling roads of an unknown shore; votive lamps which consume human spirits and which the miracle ignites; live gemstones and today by divine grace, always alive! and in the azure of Art, human stars!]

Notable in these and several other of Agustini’s poems is the tendency of her lyrical collectors to merge fragments or singular objects with suggestions of infinite extension in the form of abysses, stars, or distant horizons. 75 While the recurrent metaphorical horizon that appears in Agustini’s poems in the form of eyes, lakes, astral references, or abysses constitutes the space of longing and self-projection for the viewing lyrical subject, the use of the fragment or body part as a figurative bridge to infinite spaces attests to the “capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience,” 76 or to reach beyond the social and linguistic confines that bind them. 77 Yet rather than extend the boundaries of the self for purposes of edification, she uses the collector’s gaze to deconstruct both self and Other. Unlike the modernista collector’s tendency to focus on possession for the purposes of self-extension, 78 Agustini’s lyrical collectors use their objects first to conjure an ecstatic sensorial experience into which the self, the other, and their respective boundaries are renounced and then to transpose these merged, cathartic entities (as seen in the metaphors of the “sonrisa de cuatro labios” 79 [smile of four lips] the “almas trenzadas” [braided souls], the “intricado nudo” [intricate knot], and the “locos enredos sobrehumanos” [crazy superhuman knots] in the poem below) into new, unexplored forms and spaces in which the conclusions and implications are left provocatively open: Su idilio fue una larga sonrisa a cuatro labios . . . En el regazo cálido de rubia primavera Amáronse talmente que entre sus dedos sabios

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Palpitó la divina forma de la Quimera. En los palacios fúlgidos de las tardes en calma Hablábanse un lenguaje sentido como un lloro, Y se besaban hondo hasta morderse el alma! . . . Las horas deshojáronse como flores de oro. Y el Destino interpuso sus dos manos heladas . . . ¡Ah! Los cuerpos cedieron, mas las almas trenzadas Son el más intricado nudo que nunca fue . . . En lucha con sus locos enredos sobrehumanos Las Furias de la vida se rompieron las manos Y fatigó su dedos supremos Ananké . . . 80 [Their idyll was a smile of four lips . . . In the warm lap of blond spring They loved each other in such way that between their wise fingers the divine form of Chimera trembled. In the glimmering palaces of quiet afternoons They spoke in a language heartfelt as weeping, And they kissed each other deeply, to the point of biting their soul! The hours fluttered away like petals of gold, Then Fate interposed its two icy hands . . . Ah! the bodies yielded, but tangled souls Are the most intricate knot that never unfolds . . . In strife with its mad superhuman entanglements, Life’s Furies rent their coupled hands And wearied your powerful fingers, Ananké . . .] 81

This poem reflects the restlessness and sense of excess in Agustini’s poetry that manifests in the form of her frequent use of ellipses: the poem seems to spill out from its own seams. Her lyrical subjects do not, however, remain external observers to their own spectacles. The figurative merging of lyrical subject and object produce repeated references to a “superhuman race” (another variant of which appears in the image of the “locos enredos sobrehumanos” above) and represent the materialization of future possibility. 82 Curiously, Susan Stewart in theoretical terms views collecting as a metaphorical type of gestation: “Maternity’s generation of the series—that is, the generation of the object and object relations—is an incorporative gesture; and it is in the interdependence of the elements of the series that their regenerative power resides.” 83 While, with this observation, Stewart draws an analogy between the sense of interdependence that marks both the mother–offspring relation and that of the series of objects placed together into an intentional collection, I argue that it is precisely the generative power of this figurative merging—be it between bodies, genders, or texts—that forms a powerful thematic core in Agustini’s writing. She rejects the cool, removed mode of contemplation of her modernista counterparts as well as the final and definitive self-annihilation proposed by decadentista lyrical collectors by creating a unique metaphor for

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what lies beyond—for the product of this interminable but mutual restlessness and longing that plays such a central role in her writing. Read together, several of the poems that contain variations on the fusion/liquidation of self–other and the consequential engendering of an “other race” (“Otra estirpe” [“Another Race”], “El vampiro,” “Supremo Idilio” [“Highest Idyll”], and “Visión” [“Vision”]) suggest that it is the autonomous, clearly defined, gendered body that represents the gestational, prebirth state: Da a las dos sierpes de su abrazo, crueles, Mi gran tallo febril . . . Absintio, mieles, Viérteme de sus venas, de su boca . . . ¡Así tendida soy un surco ardiente, Donde puede nutrirse la simiente, De otra Estirpe sublimemente loca! 84 [Give to the two cruel serpents of his embrace my great feverish stem . . . Pour for me absinthe, honeys from his veins, from his mouth . . . Stretched out in this way I am a burning furrow, where the seed of another Race sublimely insane, can be nourished!] 85 Amor es milagroso, invencible y eterno; La vida formidable florece entre sus labios . . . Raíz nutrida de la entraña del Cielo y del Averno, Viene a dar a la tierra el fuerte fruto eterno Cuyo sangriento zumo se bebe a cuatro labios! 86 [Love is miraculous, invincible, and eternal; life, which is formidable, flourishes between its lips . . . The root that is nourished by the bowels of Heaven and Hell, comes to give the land the strong eternal fruit whose bloody juice is drunk by four lips!] 87 Yo esperaba suspensa el aletazo Del abrazo magnífico; un abrazo De cuatro brazos que la gloria viste De fiebre y de milagro; será un vuelo! Y pueden ser los hechizados brazos Cuatro raíces de una raza nueva: . . . 88 [Suspended I waited for the flapping of wings of the magnificent embrace; an embrace of four arms that glory dresses with fever and miracle, it will be a flight! And the enchanted arms can be four roots of a new race: . . .] 89

While gender indicators (explicit and implicit) are present in these poems, they do not survive the figurative merging of self and other that takes effect in the collector’s longing, desiring gaze. Although I agree in part with the abundant critical interpretations of these poems as assertions of female empowerment, I also see Agustini’s ruthless confrontations of thematic, linguis-

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tic, and lyrical limits, boundaries, and self–other distinctions as equally applied to her own lyrical subjects. In this light, she uses her lyrical collectors to expose and transform the “thingness” of gender itself. Her blatant disregard for boundaries includes those of “femininity,” or at least femininity as traditionally defined. The new race is “super” precisely in its rejection of precursors, of any sort of fixed identity. On another level, connecting to one of Cathy Jrade’s illuminating proposals, Agustini’s lyrical collecting also provides a metacommentary on the creative process and writing itself. Theoretically, both Mieke Bal and Susan Stewart view collecting and writing as parallel discursive modes. Both are products of longing. Both entail the appropriation of “things” (events or lyrical themes, subjects, styles), the emptying of their prior meanings and subsequent realignment into another logic. Both manipulate historical time in the sense that each of their “beginnings” is a retrospective act, the enactment or materialization of a new perspective on something (or some thing) that has already inevitably happened. And in each of these modes, the resulting transformations that occur after the reassignment of meaning impact both the arranging agent (the narrator or lyrical subject) and the “objects” that they appropriate in mutually transformative ways. It is not just her lyrical subjects who occupy the collector’s gaze but also the author herself: her poems are at the same time elaborations of a unique artistic vision and components of a series of intertextual dialogues. In this brief investigation, I view Agustini’s work in conjunction with the cultural and lyrical anxiety that manifests in the figure of the fin de siglo collector and explore the ways in which she uses this form of subjectivity to propose an alternative direction for poetic expression. The mobility, the restlessness, the tireless trespassing of boundaries and the complex way of simultaneously articulating and deemphasizing the self–Other divide is a disposition that she shares with the modernista collectors. With this reading, I propose to nuance the much-repeated “femininity” of Delmira Agustini’s writing with the idea that, taken together, the multiple ways in which Agustini’s poetic discourse points beyond itself defies attempts to fit her work into the mold of any conclusive form of identity. In this light, the “feminine” nature of Agustini’s writing is a claim that she appears to anticipate, overarticulate, and qualify at the same time. Or, perhaps, the “feminine” nature of her poetic voice may be identified as such only with the caveat that it repeatedly dislocates from its own qualifiers. NOTES 1. Delmira Agustini, Poesías completas [Complete Poems], ed. Magdalena García Pinto (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000). In addition to the frequent treatment of this topic in recent literary scholarship, Magdalena García Pinto’s edition of Agustini’s complete works contains numer-

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ous quotations from literary critics contemporary to Agustini, many of which display overt attempts to reconcile her sex, her gender, and her status as a writer. Just a few examples are Unamuno: “Qué extra-femenino, es decir, qué hondamente humano es esto!” (ibid., 264) [How ultrafeminine, in other words, how profoundly human this is!]; Darío: “Y es la primera vez que en lengua castellana aparece un alma femenina en el orgullo de la verdad de su inocencia y de su amor, a no ser Santa Teresa en su exaltación divina” (ibid., 223) [And it’s the first time that a feminine soul, other than Saint Theresa in her divine exaltation, appears in Castillian language, with pride in the truth of its innocence and love]; and Manuel Medina Betancourt, in his prologue to El libro blanco (Frágil) [The White Book (Fragile)], by Delmira Agustini (Montevideo: O. M. Bertani, 1907): “A veinte años llenos de candor florecidos en un cuerpo y en un alma de mujer, no se le puede pedir la sabiduría de los impecables” (quoted in ibid., 93) [One may not ask for faultless wisdom from twenty years full of flowery candor in the body and soul of a woman]. 2. Cathy Jrade, Delmira Agustini, Sexual Seduction, and Vampiric Conquest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); Ana Peluffo, “De todas las cabezas quiero tu cabeza: Figuraciones de la ‘Femme Fatale’ en Delmira Agustini” [“Of All Heads I Want Yours: Figurations of the ‘Femme Fatale’ in Delmira Augustini”], Chasqui 34, no. 2 (November 2005):144. In her recent groundbreaking book, for example, Cathy Jrade argues convincingly and eloquently that Agustini’s much-explored “desired object” is actually writing itself and that “the masculine other is the figurative Darío” (Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 100). Ana Peluffo sees Agustini’s appropriation of the iconic figure of Salomé as more in line with the painterly, “anti-mimetic and anti-sentimental aesthetics of the paintings of the Avant Garde” than the traditional femme fatale proposed by Darío, Casal, and the legacy left by traditional European academy paintings (Peluffo, “De todas las cabezas,” 144). In her renowned essay that provided a turning point in critical understanding of Agustini’s work, Sylvia Molloy identifies the lyrical dialogue that runs between Darío and Agustini’s poetry, detailing the latter’s demythification of the “reino interior” [interior kingdom] eroticization of the swan symbol, and bold recasting of feminine sexuality (“Cisnes impuros” [“Impure Swans”], in Poses de fin de siglo [Fin de Siècle Poses] [Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia Editora, 2012], 153–69). Gwen Kirkpatrick, concurring with Peluffo regarding affinities between Agustini and the avant-garde movement, focuses on two significant stylistic details in Agustini’s and Herrera y Reissig’s writing: the quality of being unfinished and a fascination with locating and subverting aesthetic boundaries (“The Limits of Modernismo” [Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2009], http:// www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/the-limits-of-modernismo-delmira-agustini-and-julioherrera-y-reissig/html [accessed July 27, 2015]). Agustini’s work has also been read in the context of the androgynous aesthetic ideology proposed by modernista literature in the form of dandyism, which proposes an ironic reflexion on gender as a performative construct. See María José Bruña Bagado, Delmira Agustini (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), and Tina Escaja, Salomé decapitada (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), and “Modernistas, feministas y decadentes,” Ciberletras 13 (2005): n.p., http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v13/escaja.htm (accessed July 27, 2015). 3. See chapter 4 by Andrade in this volume. According to Andrade, “the notion of collecting itself, which may provide a privileged vantage point from which to analyze many of the writings of the modernistas, has mostly gone unnoticed. Collecting, I propose, is not simply a recurrent theme in the texts of Silva and other modernistas, but rather a strategy that guides the organization of their texts. However, although collecting, both as a recurrent topic and as a strategy performed in their texts, is central to the aesthetics of modernismo, a sustained discussion of the topic is still lacking.” 4. Eduardo Wilde, “Vida moderna,” in Prometeo & cía, http://www.biblioteca.clarin.com/ pbda/cuentos/prometeo/b-264209.htm (accessed September 9, 2015); Rubén Darío, “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China,” La República, Santiago, March 15, 1890. 5. Rubén Darío, “De invierno,” in Páginas escogidas, ed. Ricardo Gullón (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1988), 53; “Era un aire suave,” in Páginas escogidas, 61; “Coloquio de los centauros,” in Páginas escogidas, 67–78; “El reino interior,” in Antología poética, ed. Arturo Torres Rioseco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 96; “Un retrato de Watteaau,” in Azul (Buenos Aires: La Nación, 1905), 113–14.

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6. Julián del Casal, “La agonía de Petronio,” in Poesía completa y prosa selecta, ed. Álvaro Salvador (Madrid: Verbum, 2001), 115, and “Elena,” in Poesía completa y prosa selecta, 124; José Martí, “Los abanicos en la exposición de Bartholdi,” Portal José Martí,http:// www.josemarti.cu/?q=node/372 (accessed July 27, 2015). 7. Tina Escaja, “Modernistas, feministas y decadentes” [“Modernists, Feminists, and Decadents”], Ciberletras 13 (2005): n.p. at http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v13/escaja.htm (accessed July 27, 2015). See Tina Escaja’s explanation of the two groups of women writers who distinguish themselves during this period—one rejecting and one embracing and making strategic use of the aesthetics of modernismo: “Un segundo grupo de escritoras no ‘refracta’ sino que ‘refleja’ la estética del modernismo, adoptando, a veces transgresoramente, las prácticas poéticas de esa estética. La dificultad de escritura de mujer en los parámetros misóginos decadente-modernistas ha sido señalada, entre otros críticos, por Sylvia Molloy, quien argumenta que: ‘women cannot be, at the same time, inert textual objects and active authors. Within the ideological boundaries of turn-of-the century literature, woman cannot write woman’ (Female 109). No obstante, autoras como Delmira Agustini en Uruguay, o su predecesora Mercedes Matamoros en Cuba, lograron expresar una poética personal desde las prácticas excluyentes del modernismo” (n.p.) [A second group of writers doesn’t ‘refract’ but rather ‘reflects’ the modernist aesthetic, adopting, sometimes transgressively, the poetic practices of that aesthetic. The difficulty of women’s writing in the decadent-modernista misogynist parameters has been pointed out, among other critics, by Sylvia Molloy, who argues that [. . .] (Female 109). Nonetheless, authors like Delmira Agustini in Uruguay, or her predecesor Mercedes Matamoros in Cuba, managed to express a personal poetic from within the exclusive practices of modernismo]. 8. Molloy, “Cisnes impuros,” 153–69. This proposal incorporates the perspective of various scholars on collecting, including Mieke Bal, Jean Baudrillard, and Susan Stewart. 9. Ibid., 162, emphasis added. 10. Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 26, emphasis added. 11. Molloy, “Cisnes impuros,” 163–64. 12. Magdalena García Pinto, “Prólogo,” in Agustini, Poesías completas, 33. 13. Ibid., 32, emphasis in the original. 14. Molloy, “Cisnes impuros,” 165. 15. Carlos Javier Morales, “Ética y estética en El reino interior de Rubén Darío,” Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana 21 (1992): 495–505, http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ALHI/article/view/ALHI9292110495A (accessed March 12, 2012). 16. Jean-Paul Sarte, Baudelaire (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1950), 178, emphasis added. 17. Ibid., emphasis added. 18. For a related discussion of the question of the souvenir, see chapters 3 and 5 in this volume. 19. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 133. 20. Darío, “Yo persigo una forma,” in Páginas escogidas, 86. 21. Agustini, “Nardos,” in Poesías completas, 118. 22. See, for example, Oscar Wilde’s speech “Principles of Aestheticism,” in Prometeo & cía (Buenos Aires: Jacobo Peuser, 1899); the prologues to Darío’s Prosas profanas, Cantos de vida y esperanza, and El canto errante; and the poems “Élévation,” “Invitation au voyage,” “Correspondences,” and “L’ideal” in Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1982). 23. Agustini, “Mis ídolos,” in Poesías completas, 157. 24. Agustini, “Nardos,” 119. 25. Agustini, “Mis ídolos,” 158. “Y ofrendé al nuevo dios mi corazón que abría / Como una flor de sangre, de amor y de armonía” (ibid.) [And I offered to the new god my heart that was opening / like a flower of blood, of love, and of harmony]. 26. Agustini, “Mis ídolos,” 157. “Así bajo los rostros sombrios y risueños / Yo viví sin vivir, largo tiempo, rezando / O en la rueca tranquila de las horas hilando / Los copos impecables de una seda de ensueños” (ibid.) [In this way underneath the somber and smiling faces / I lived without living, for a long time, praying / Or spinning in the tranquil distaff of hours / The impeccable snowflakes of a silk of daydreams].

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27. Agustini, “A una cruz,” in Poesías completas, 191–92. 28. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 64–65. 29. “La estatua” was published in Agustini, El libro blanco (Frágil) (1907); “Plegaria” was published in Los cálices vacíos (1913); and “Cuentas de mármol” is one section of a five-part poem published in the posthumous collection titled El rosario de Eros (1924). 30. Agustini, “La estautua,” in Poesías completas, 101. 31. Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 40–45. 32. As has been well documented, references to both statues and Eros abound in Agustini’s poetry; see, for example, ibid., 40–45, 109, 126–27, 145–46, 158–61, 178. 33. Agustini, “Plegaria,” in Poesías completas, 258. 34. My translation and that of Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 160–61. 35. Agustini, “Cuentas de Mármol,” in Poesías completas, 275. 36. Ibid., 277. 37. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 167. 38. Agustini, “Cuentas de Mármol,” in Poesías completas, 277. 39. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 167. 40. Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 166. 41. In El libro blanco, see, for example, “Noche de reyes,” “La sed,” “Al vuelo,” “Nardos,” “Mi oración,” “Variaciones,” “Mis ídolos,” and “Misterio, Ven.” 42. Agustini, “Cuentas de mármol,” in Poesías completas, 277. 43. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 167. 44. Agustini, “El vampiro,” in Poesías completas, 186. 45. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 95. 46. Molloy, “Cisnes impuros,” 167. 47. Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 77. 48. Tina Escaja, Salomé decapitada (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001); Patricia Varas, Las máscaras de Delmira Agustini (Montevideo: Maxilibros, 2002); Stephanie E. Balmori, “The Vampire in the Poetry of Delmira Agustini,” PhD diss., Florida State University, 2009, Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations, Paper 1044, http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1224&context=etd (accessed July 27, 2015); Margaret Bruzelius, “En el profundo espejo del deseo,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 46, no. 1 (June 1993): 51–64. For just a few examples of previously published interpretations of this poem, see, for example, Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 99–101; Escaja, Salomé decapitada, 71, 78, 120–22, 126–27; Varas, Las máscaras de Delmira Agustini, 20, 153, 160; and the articles of Balmori, “The Vampire,” and Bruzelius, “En el profundo espejo del deseo.” 49. Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 95. 50. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 95. 51. Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 95. 52. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 95. 53. Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 97–99. 54. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994), 116. 55. Escaja, Salomé decapitada, 127. While Tina Escaja reads the dynamic between the lyrical subject and object in “El vampiro” as a struggle between matter and spirit, I see the bursting and penetrating tendencies in this and the other poems mentioned so far in this chapter more as staging a figurative transformation of matter: from solid to liquid, from static to mobile, from contained to open. 56. Molloy, “Cisnes impuros,” 165; Kirkpatrick, “The Limits of Modernismo.” 57. Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 102. 58. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 102. 59. Escaja, Salomé decapitada, 22. In her book, Escaja identifies fragmentation as a primary aesthetic and unifying principle in Agustini’s work and traces in detail the evolution of this element in her poetry as indicative of both her increasing dissidence and “irreverence” with respect to inherited literary legacies of modernismo and posmodernismo and her empowerment “as a woman and as a writer.” 60. In “Supremo idilio,” for example, the standard romantic scene between roaming gallant and the enclosed female object of desire is reworked into a dialogue of opposing essences.

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Gender is present but remapped into other forms of symbolic oppositions: color (the “figura blanca” in the horizontal plane of the balcony confronts the vertical “erguido” “cuerpo tenebroso” standing beneath it) and space (the symbolic suggestiveness of this confrontation of verticality and horizontality is repeated in verse 45, as spoken by the white figure: “y tiendo a ti eucarísticos Mis brazos, negra cruz!” [And I offer to you my Eucharistic arms, black cross!]). If gender difference is remapped here into terms of color and space, the point of intersection that binds them is the song that they produce: “Alternándose cantan.” With these last two words of the first stanza and also the closing verses of the poem (“Bajo el balcón romántico del castillo adormido / Un fuerte claro-oscuro y dos voces que cantan . . .” [Underneath the romantic balcony of a sleeping castle / A strong chiaroscuro and two voices that sing . . .]), the privileged position of the singular desiring subject is altogether eliminated. 61. See Peluffo, “De todas las cabezas quiero tu cabeza”; Escaja, “Modernistas, feministas y decadentes” and Salomé decapitada; and Hervé Le Corre, “Eros scriptor, letra y erotismo en la poesía de Delmira Agustini,” in Mujer, Creación y problemas de identidad en América Latina, ed. Roland Forgues (Mérida: Universidad de los Andes, Consejo de Publicaciones, 1999), 245–59. 62. Agustini, “Tú dormías,” in Poesías completas, 204. 63. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 106. 64. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996), 95–96; Stewart, On Longing, 43, 65. 65. Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 107. 66. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 107. 67. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 13. 68. Ibid., 94. 69. Both José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa and Huysman’s A rebours prominently feature this aspect of the collector’s personality. 70. Agustini, “Tu boca,” in Poesías completas, 228. 71. Agustini, “Con tu retrato,” in Poesías completas, 241. 72. Agustini, “En tus ojos,” in Poesías completas, 231. 73. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 129. 74. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 144. 75. See, for example, Agustini, “El Austero,” “Astrólogos,” “Racha de cumbres,” “La musa,” and the last verses of “Carnaval.” 76. Stewart, On Longing, 133. In her reading of the souvenir, Stewart identifies the association of collected objects with a distant, “authentic” realm as a response to “the development of culture under an exchange economy.” In other words, the cultural impact of the exchange economy is such that the individual invests excessive value in what lies beyond both the body and the actual lived experience of the present moment. The object, then, becomes both a charged supplement and an indication of lack for the viewing subject. 77. Ibid., 135. 78. In addition to the poems and crónicas mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, see, for example, Julián del Casal’s crónica “El circo oriental” as well as Darío’s “Yo soy aquel que ayer . . .” and “Reencarnaciones.” 79. This image also appears in “Supremo idilio.” 80. Agustini, “El nudo,” in Poesías completas, 202. 81. Translation taken from the website PoemHunter.com, “El Nundo (The Knot),” n.d., http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/delmira-agustini/el-nudo-the-knot (accessed October 1, 2013). 82. Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 42. While several analyses mention the phenomenon of the “superhuman race,” which appears in Agustini’s poetry in the form of a “sublimely insane” race, “another race,” by far the most developed analysis that I have encountered is that of Cathy Jrade. In her analysis of “La estatua,” she writes, “Although this alternative scion fails here, a similar image, that of ‘la estirpe sobrehumana’ (the superhuman race), in ‘Supremo idilio’ (Supreme idyll) of Cantos de la mañana, eventually comes to represent both poetic success and one of Agustini’s answers to Darío’s metaphors of literary paternity.” 83. Stewart, On Longing, xi.

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Agustini, “Otra estirpe,” in Poesías completas, 243. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 145. Agustini, “Supremo idilio,” in Poesías completas, 187–89. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 223. Agustini, “Visión,” in Poesías completas, 236–37. Translated by Jrade, Delmira Agustini, 142.

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WORKS CITED Agustini, Delmira. El libro blanco (Frágil). Montevideo: O. M. Bertani, 1907. ———. Poesías completas. Edited by Magdalena García Pinto. Madrid: Cátedra, 2000. Bal, Mieke. “Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting.” In The Cultures of Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 97–115. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Balmori, Stephanie E. “The Vampire in the Poetry of Delmira Agustini.” PhD. diss., Florida State University, 2009. Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations. Paper 1044. http:// diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1224&context=etd (accessed July 27, 2015). Baudelaire, Charles, and Richard Howard. Les fleurs du mal: The Complete Text of “The Flowers of Evil.” Boston: D. R. Godine, 1982. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Translated by James Benedict. London: Verso, 1996. Bersani, Leo. Baudelaire and Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Betancourt, Manuel Medina. “Prologue.” In El libro blanco (Frágil), by Delmira Agustini Montevideo: O. M. Bertani, 1907. Bruña Bragado, María José. Delmira Agustini: Dandismo, género y reescritura del imaginario modernista. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. Bruzelius, Margaret. “‘En el profundo espejo del deseo’: Delmira Agustini, Rachilde, and the Vampire.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 46, no. 1 (June 1993): 51–64. Casal, Julián del. Poesía completa y prosa selecta. Edited by Álvaro Salvador. Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2001. Darío, Rubén. Antología poética, edited by Arturo Torres Rioseco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949. ———. Azul. Buenos Aires: La Nación, 1905. ———. “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China.” La República (Santiago). March 15, 1890. ———. Páginas escogidas. Edited by Ricardo Gullón. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1988. Darío, Rubén, and Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. Poesías completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1954. Escaja, Tina. “Modernistas, feministas y decadentes: Delmira Agustini, entre la mujer fetiche y la Nueva mujer.” Ciberletras 13 (2005): n.p. http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v13/ escaja.htm (accessed July 27, 2015). ———. Salomé decapitada: Delmira Agustini y estética finisecular de la fragmentación. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. García Pinto, Magdalena. “Prólogo”. In Poesías completas, by Delmira Agustini, 7–40. Madrid: Cátedra, 2000. Giaudrone, Carla. La degeneración del 900: Modelos estéticos-sexuales de la cultura en el Uruguay del Novecientos. Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 2005. Jrade, Cathy. Delmira Agustini, Sexual Seduction, and Vampiric Conquest. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Kirkpatrick, Gwen. “The Limits of Modernismo: Delmira Agustini and Julio Herrera y Reissig.” Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2009. http:// www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/the-limits-of-modernismo-delmira-agustini-and-julio-herrera-y-reissig/html (accessed July 27, 2015). Le Corre, Hervé. “Eros scriptor, letra y erotismo en la poesía de Delmira Agustini.” In Mujer, Creación y problemas de identidad en América Latina, edited by Roland Forgues, 245–59. Mérida: Universidad de los Andes, Consejo de Publicaciones, 1999.

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Martí, José. “Los abanicos en la exposición Bartholdi.” Manuscript dated January 1884. Portal José Martí.http://www.josemarti.cu/?q=node/372 (accessed July 27, 2015). Molloy, Sylvia. “Cisnes impuros: Rubén Darío y Delmira Agustini.” In Poses de fin de siglo: Desbordes del género en la Modernidad, 153–69. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia Editora, 2012. ———. “Introduction: Female Textual Identities, The Strategies of Self-Figuration.” In Women’s Writing in Latin America: An Anthology, edited by Sara Castro-Klarén, Sylvia Molloy, and Beatriz Sarlo, 105–24. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. Morales, Carlos Javier. “Ética y estética en El reino interior de Rubén Darío.” Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana 21 (1992): 495–505. http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ALHI/ article/view/ALHI9292110495A (accessed March 12, 2012). Peluffo, Ana. “De todas las cabezas quiero tu cabeza: Figuraciones de la ‘Femme Fatale’ en Delmira Agustini.” Chasqui 34, no. 2 (November 2005): 131–44. PoemHunter.com. “El Nundo (The Knot).” n.d. http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/delmira-agustini/el-nudo-the-knot (accessed October 1, 2013). Sartre, Jean-Paul. Baudelaire. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1950. Silva, José Asunción. De sobremesa. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1992. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Trambaiolli, Marcella. “La estatua y el ensueño: Dos claves para la poesía de Delmira Agustini.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 50, no. 1 (June 1997): 57–66. Varas, Patricia. Las máscaras de Delmira Agustini. Montevideo: Maxilibros, 2002. Wilde, Eduardo. “Vida moderna.” In Prometeo & cía. http://www.biblioteca.clarin.com/pbda/ cuentos/prometeo/b-264209.htm (accessed September 9, 2015). Wilde, Oscar. Essays and Lectures. Auckland: Floating Press, 1879. Reprint, 2009. Žižek, Slavoj. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London: Verso, 1994.

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Chapter Seven

“I have put all I possess at the disposal of the people’s struggle” Pablo Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet

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Kelly Austin

In “Yo, el malacólogo” [I, the Malacologist]—a part of Pablo Neruda’s memoirs, Confieso que he vivido [I Confess that I Have Lived] finished shortly before his death in September 1973—Neruda recounts the day he decided to donate his seashell collection to his alma mater. With over 15,000 shells overflowing from the bookshelves and falling from tables and chairs, as well as enough books about seashells to fill his library, he boxed up his already famous collection and sent it to the University of Chile. He thought he had sealed its fate: “Como buena institución sudamericana, mi Universidad los recibió con loores y discursos y los sepultó en un sótano” 1 [Like a good South American institution, my university received my collection with speeches and fanfare and buried it in a basement]. Neruda saw his self as multiple, split as an author, a collector—malacologist and bibliophile—as well as a donor, simultaneously a man of public and private pursuits. Indeed, at a crucial turning point in his life, Neruda declared that he planned to dedicate himself to his seashell collection and politics, as poetry no longer interested him: En México el Partido Comunista Mexicano organizó el 25 de Septiembre de 1941 un gran homenaje a Neruda. Juan Larrea, uno de los participantes, cuenta que la serie de homenajes dados a Neruda en México, llevó a éste pensar en dedicarse a la política. En una recepción en casa del pintor Carlos Orozco Romero, Neruda le habría hecho una confidencia: “No sé lo que tú pensarás, Juan. Pero te diré que a mí, la poesía ya no me interesa. Desde ahora pienso dedicarme a la política y a mi colección de conchas.” 2 141

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[In Mexico, on September 25, 1941, the Mexican Communist Party organized a great homage for Neruda. Juan Larrea, one of the participants, recounts that the series of homages given for Neruda in Mexico led him to think about dedicating himself to politics. In a reception given at the painter Carlos Orozco Romero’s house, Neruda divulged in confidence: “I don’t know what you think, Juan. But I’ll tell you that poetry no longer interests me. From now on I think I’ll dedicate myself to politics and my seashell collection.”]

Neruda’s sobering statement, reverberating with irony, both announces new pursuits and simultaneously monumentalizes and trivializes them in comparison with the history of his dedication to poetry. 3 He made this statement in the very month that he published his translation of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Set against the backdrop of a Chile falling under an increasingly xenophobic government, this claim constitutes a piece of Neruda’s life that frames his acts of collecting and translating in a decidedly political manner. What Hannah Arendt asserted in reference to Walter Benjamin, that “Benjamin could understand the collector’s passion as an attitude akin to that of the revolutionary,” 4 echoes sympathetically with Neruda’s attitude toward collecting. As Neruda reflected on his poetic transitions while living in Mexico as consul general—symbolically bound up with his increasingly official dedication to communism and during “a moment of intellectual and artistic splendor” in Mexico 5 —his approach to his collections and his comments concerning them reveal a poet grappling with the dilemmas of how to reconcile his own private act of collecting with communism’s concept of property as well as the question of the value—intimate, aesthetic, commodity, and cultural—of books themselves. And when one sees Neruda’s collections housed at Isla Negra, at La Universidad de Chile, and at La Chascona—now the headquarters for the Fundación Neruda—it is clear that Neruda’s bibliophilia is one of the constitutive, seminal, and traditional points of departure for literary studies of his oeuvre. Neruda’s collection offers concrete evidence of the primary and secondary volumes that he read and recollected. His library testifies to his status as both a reader and a collector of Whitman. Yet, curiously enough, Neruda explicitly links his library—filled with the best editions of the classics, including Cervantes, Dante, and Molière—to his prized seashell collection in his memoir through a section titled “Libros y caracoles” [Books and Shells]. Neruda was an impulsive, diligent, and obsessive collector of everything from glass bottles and mobiles to miniature guitars and mastheads. Neruda’s considerable interest in and collection of various genres, including encyclopedias, books on natural history, travel tales, poetry, and fiction, form the context for his Whitman collection and flesh out the repertoire of his bibliographic resources. For Neruda, his book collection constitutes, in part, an intratextual treasure hunt, one that multiplies the possible incarnations of a figure as colossal as Don Quijote in his numerous

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“Quijotes increíbles” 6 [incredible Quijotes] and leads to a “Whitman innumerable” 7 [“Whitman innumerable”] 8 through the metaphor of his many editions of Leaves of Grass and his creative reworkings of Whitman in his translations and original works. According to Wilberto Cantón, Neruda introduced his friends and colleagues to his Whitman collection via a treasure hunt. Thus, it was within the context of a staged practical joke that the fellow venturers with Neruda— Neruda the communist, Chilean diplomat, and celebrated poet of Latin America—encountered the poet’s first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Neruda pretended that the money he had put aside for safekeeping within the pages of his prized edition of Whitman, the money he had been entrusted with to launch the journal “La gaceta de Chile,” had been stolen: Nunca hubiéramos sospechado que Pablo eligiera para guardar nuestra capital en una primorosa edición ilustrada de Walt Whitman, resplandeciente en uno de los libreros de la sala. Cuando el poeta nos lo reveló todos sonreímos; él se dirigió hacia el libro lo abrió y . . . ¡nada! Los mil pesos habían volado. Congesto febril, Pablo volvía las hojas, registraba las tapas, estropeaba la “camisa.” A gritos pidió que revisaran las bolsas de todos los trajes que había usado en la semana. La casa se puso en movimiento. Él corrió hacia el escritorio, vació los cajones; levantó la alfombra. Vociferaba como nunca lo habíamos visto hacer. Nosotros en silencio sufríamos la angustia del poeta. Nos quebrábamos la cabeza ideando soluciones. De pronto, se me ocurre levantar del suelo el ejemplar marchito de Leaves of Grass [sic] y comienzo a examinarlo detenidamente. Y he aquí que tuve un hallazgo imponderable: con letra muy pequeña, cuidadosa, en un ángulo de la tapa decía: “Véase Bernal Díaz del Castillo, t. II, p. 309.” Acudimos todos al libro indicado, y en la página 309 encontramos otra señal: “Ver Santa Teresa, p. 120.” Y de Santa Teresa nos mandó a Milozc, y de éste a César Vallejo, y de Vallejo a Elizabeth Barret Browning, a Esquilo, a Dante, a Rilke, a Platón, a Rabrindranath Tagore, a Ercilla, a Goethe, a Dostoievski. . . . ¡Fué un viaje por toda la literatura mundial! Al fin, en la página 213 de los Cuentos de Andersen hallamos nuestro tesoro. 9 [We never would have suspected that Pablo would choose to keep our capital in a pristine illustrated edition of Walt Whitman, resplendent in one of the room’s bookcases. When the poet told us, we all smiled; he directed us toward the book and opened it and . . . nothing! The thousand pesos were gone. With a feverish gesture, Pablo turned the pages, looked at the covers, searched the jacket. At the top of his voice he asked us to search the pockets of all of the suits he had worn that week. The house was set in motion. He ran to the desk, emptied the drawers, lifted the rug. He shouted like we had never seen him do before. We suffered in silence the anguish of the poet. We wracked our brains for solutions. Suddenly, it occurred to me to pick up the forgotten copy of Leaves of Grass from the floor and I started to examine it deliberately. And there was an unimaginable find: in a small, careful hand, in a corner of the cover it said: “See Bernal del Castillo, Vol. II, p. 309.” We all went to the book indicated, and on page 309 we found another clue: “See Saint Teresa, p. 120.”

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And from Saint Teresa he sent us to Milosz, and from him to César Vallejo, and from Vallejo to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to Esquilo, to Dante, to Rilke, to Plato, to Rabrindranath Tagore, to Ercilla, to Goethe, to Dostoevsky. . . . It was a trip through all of world literature! Finally, on page 213 of Andersen’s Fairy Tales we found our treasure.]

Amidst the fray surrounding the supposed monetary loss and the ruse, Cantón recognized the still greater value of what had been found—namely, one of Neruda’s personal copies (but a small part of his Whitman collection) of Leaves of Grass, which serves as a record of not only Neruda’s engagement with the poet but also Neruda’s vision of Whitman in relation to the Spanish American and world canons. With clues written in the book margins, Neruda sent his friends from volume to volume, from Dante to Milosz, from Vallejo to Dostoevsky, having hidden the money in a volume of Hans Christian Andersen. In sum, Cantón characterized the value of “nuestro Tesoro” [our treasure] as positioned ambiguously between “capital” [capital] and “un viaje por toda la literatura mundial” 10 [a trip through all of world literature]. Neruda’s feigned dismay at the supposed loss of the capital for the literary journal unveils the material conditions on which a part of literary production depends. Following Marx in the Grundrisse, “when the formation of capital had reached a certain level, monetary wealth could place itself as mediator between the objective conditions of life, thus liberated, and the liberated but also homeless and empty-handed labour powers, and buy the latter with the former.” 11 But Neruda’s deceit aims to dissociate him as much as possible from the endless “circulation of money as capital,” especially insofar as Marx declares in Capital that “as the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist.” 12 As he guides his colleagues through the material artifacts he has collected, artifacts that represent a web of social and artistic exchange that cannot be reduced to economic value, Neruda gestures toward the complications of any straightforward or essential equation between money and capital. This act reveals his hope for a historical change that might revolutionize labor relations by redefining value, even as he highlights his inevitable entanglement in his particular historical moment. And, in part, the treasure hunt invokes Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism: the idea that “value . . . does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as labour.” 13 In this sense, the “mystical quality” of Neruda’s books, to a certain extent, reflects their distance from a value solely based on use-value or even surplusvalue. 14

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Just the same, Marx argues, art “exercise[s] an eternal charm”—a charm he associates with nostalgia for the bygone social conditions under which it uniquely arises and that can never be fully recuperated. 15 This suspended timelessness moves literature—and the books that collect and contain it— away from a value determined solely by “labour-time,” whether it circulates value in relation to the commodity or subsistence, and is likewise distinguishable from the endless movement of capital. 16 And yet, despite the recognition of nostalgia as one aspect of literature’s timelessness, Neruda’s treasure hunt also foregrounds the continual circulation and reconfiguration of literature as creating literary traditions as eternal hieroglyphics. Neruda’s annotations that guided the treasure hunt firmly embed Whitman in a Spanish American tradition that Whitman would certainly not claim as his own, one he decreed as destined to be subsumed within the expanding frontiers of U.S. democracy (despite his exuberant, misspelled calls of camerado). Whitman has been an integral part of this tradition since the inception of the Latin American literary movement modernismo and the first extended commentary on Whitman’s work by Jose Marti in “El poeta Walt Whitman” in 1887. Whimsically likening Leaves of Grass to seashells, as I did earlier, is no wandering association; rather, it is precisely in understanding Neruda’s conception and praxis of collecting that we can most aptly explore his translations of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” with the goal of examining the particularly telling ways he negotiated hemispheric dilemmas with his U.S. literary antecedent. Neruda’s libraries do not simply testify to an almost obsessive desire to collect the works of Whitman but are also artifacts that force readers to come to grips with the very manner in which Neruda reinvents and values the process of collecting, encounters Whitman, and, in so doing, launches an attempt to push the pursuit of collecting from the private to the public sphere. Neruda envisions his collections as a reasonable part of his emerging communism yet does so in daring defiance of socialist norms as well as assumptions about the generally accepted relations between capitalism and accumulation. In the end, both Neruda’s rhetoric and his collecting practices reflect a personal and paradoxical reckoning with wider economic relations and political ideologies. Neruda places his collections within both a colonial heritage and an international communist conviction. When Rita Guibert, in a 1970 interview, criticizes Neruda for accumulating things while maintaining that he is a communist, Neruda spins out from this critique, saying that it is “mostly a myth,” characterizing his chief inheritance as a colonial inheritance while likening himself to Columbus in chains: In a sense we Latin Americans have received a rather bad inheritance from Spain. She could never bear her nationals to be outstanding in any way, to distinguish themselves. As you know, Christopher Columbus was put in

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chains when he returned to Spain. And I think that we got from Spain the reaction of an envious petit bourgeoisie which spends its time brooding over what others possess and it doesn’t have itself. I have dedicated my life to the vindication of the people, and what I have in my house, and my books, are the result of my own work. I have never exploited anyone. But this reproach is never directed against people who inherit large fortunes. It’s never made against writers who come from rich families. They are thought to have a right to greater prosperity than others. On the other hand, when a writer like me has been writing for fifty years, they keep saying: “Look! Just look at the way he lives. He’s got a house by the sea, he drinks good wine!” It’s very difficult to drink bad wine in Chile because almost all Chilean wine is good. The fact is, I couldn’t care less about this chorus of present-day cretins. It’s a situation that in a way reflects the backwardness of our country—the mediocrity of our society, in fact. You told me yourself that Norman Mailer was paid about $90,000 for three articles in a North American magazine. Here, if a Latin American writer were to receive such a reward for his work it would arouse a torrent of protests from other writers, saying: “What an outrage! How shocking! Where will it stop?” instead of everyone being delighted that a writer should be so well paid. Oh well, as I’ve said, these are the drawbacks of socalled cultural underdevelopment. 17

This tellingly post-Columbian comrade first suggests the history of European conquest in Latin America, crucially, only in order to critique Spain’s treatment of Columbus—not to point to a pre-Columbian golden age free of Spain’s intervention but rather to identify himself with the aftermath of the discovery. The inheritance passed on to Latin America by Spain, in part, he says, is one of envy. And Neruda further distances himself from this inheritance by locating the critique of his collecting practices within the “petit bourgeoisie,” anachronistically situated at the time of discovery and conquest. Neruda implies that Columbus was placed in chains out of envy for his perceived possession of the New World. In short, Neruda as collector finds himself in an enviable and precarious position. He must indict his critics for envy and mediocrity while distancing himself from petit bourgeois pretension. He distances himself from those who are “thought to have a right to greater prosperity than others” and at the same time reserves the space to critique those who would declare, “Look! Just look at the way he lives.” And at the same time, he deflates the basis of the petit bourgeoisie’s judgment that good wine is a sign of privilege by locating the good life in the inevitability of geography, mocking the self-important wine connoisseur: “It’s very difficult to drink bad wine in Chile because almost all Chilean wine is good.” In one sense, Neruda embraces the pueblo and patria in like fashion, and in another he symbolically links Chile to one of the markers of civilization, punctuating his statement with an assertion of his own (assuredly worldly, in the implied comparison) refined palate and good taste.

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At first, he seems to fall in line with a long tradition of Latin American reformers by envisioning a progress from “so-called [Latin American] cultural underdevelopment” through following the example of the United States— embodied, in part, in terms of monetary rewards to writers like Norman Mailer—and all that that represents. Neruda contrasts the inheritance of “writers who come from rich families,” which fails to come under attack according to Neruda, with his earned possessions: “[with] what I have in my house, and my books . . . the result of my own work.” Neruda’s “vindication of the people” is better understood when read in response to his self-conscious invocation of “myth.” By pointing to prominent American leftist Mailer’s financial rewards, Neruda places Mailer in the role of the “rich” North American writer—heir to a U.S. patrimony of hemispheric dominance—and in this mythic gesture Neruda undercuts the very system he hopes might save him from the “envy” of his own colonial heritage. Colonial Spain had been driven from the Continent, but she had given over both “envy” and Columbus’s chains to the imperialist United States. These chains, which had and would continue to wound Latin America, included economic inequalities and exploitation, rampant cultural stereotyping, and long-standing historical envies that extended into the realm of literary production and valorization. Mailer may have earned more, but Neruda would turn the tables and collect Mailer and in the process attempt to reverse the exploitative political and literary economy of “discovery” in a manner similar to the one he used to translate Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as his own ars poetica. Neruda boasted that he “discovered [Mailer] in [his] own way,” pointing out that his European translators “had a devil of a time finding out who Norman Mailer was” and claiming that “no one knew about him” until he was mentioned in Neruda’s “Que despierte el leñador,” one of the central poems of Canto general. 18 Neruda sets his own artistic production alongside that of North American writers, particularly Whitman. 19 And yet, once again, reflecting the central conflicts between collecting and communism, he calls for delight from others in the fruits of “my own work,” even as he critiques envy’s personal sense of entitlement, opening a possibility for a new type of work—a type of work that implicates others and himself, that acquires through contradictory modes of creation: creation of wealth, creation of discovery, and creation of unique interpretive stances toward acquisition. And when pressed, Neruda details that he does not possess his possessions. Neruda emphatically declared that his home, books, and collections had, for more than twenty years, belonged to the Communist Party of Chile, to whom he had given them publicly: GUIBERT: Doesn’t this accusation gain weight from your belonging to the Communist Party?

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NERUDA: That’s exactly the strength of a position like mine. A man who has nothing—it is often said—has nothing to lose but his chains. Whereas I am at every moment risking my life, my person, my possessions, my books, my house—I throw all these into the balance to defend the future and justice. My house has been set fire to, I have been persecuted, I have been imprisoned more than once, I’ve been exiled, declared incomunicado, and hounded everywhere by thousands of police. Very well, then. I am not just feathering my own nest. I have put all I possess at the disposal of the people’s struggle, and the house you are now in has belonged for the last twenty years to the Communist Party of Chile, to whom I have given it publicly. I live in this house simply as a result of my party’s decision and the generosity of my party. I am enjoying the use of something that doesn’t belong to me, because I gave it away, along with all my collections and all my books, and everything this house contains. All right, let those who reproach me do the same, or at least leave their shoes somewhere so they can be passed to somebody else! 20 Neruda thus interprets “all I possess” as a gift: “I am enjoying the use of something that doesn’t belong to me.” Neruda “gave it away,” and the party returns the favor. Invoking the famous Marxist phrase, Neruda insists that a “man who has nothing . . . has nothing to lose but his chains,” certainly linking his collections and donations to a future freedom through communism, but also to the possibility of Columbus’s reconciliation with the Spanish crown, a possibility that is ultimately dependent on his dispossession of the New World. Neruda does this even as he obliquely critiques the glorification of the myth of benevolent conquest, represented by the story of Columbus’s life that has been pressed into the door of the U.S. Capitol as a relief. In “risking my life, my person, my possessions, my books, my house” and “all that I possess” he simultaneously acquires “the use of . . . all my collections and all my books.” Moreover, by repeatedly placing at the forefront his role as collector (as donor), Neruda also transforms himself into a visitor to his own collection. He negotiates between the stances of having and not having, of inheriting colonial values and inheriting wealth, and using, possessing, and giving away material culture and cultural property. In this way, he helps to illuminate the paradox inherent in his poetic practice and political critique: his denunciations, on the one hand, of “the emphatically imperialist doctrines of the United States” 21 and his conviction, on the other, that the expansive and expansionist Whitman belonged to Spanish America: “He was our poet.” 22 On the one hand, Neruda’s dilemmas about collecting are in some ways incomparable. On the other, one of the most seminal works on collecting, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” by one of Neruda’s contemporaries, Walter Benjamin, allows one to see Neruda’s collecting

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practices in terms of other modern collectors who are Marxists. Benjamin attests to the urge, on the part of certain modern Marxist collectors and thinkers, to come to terms with the drive toward collecting, the collected objects’ relation to property and capital, and the investment in historical materialism as the foundation for revolutionary potential. Balancing an exploration of Benjamin’s ironic and whimsical canonical ideas on collecting with the wonderfully irreconcilable positions of Neruda, we see that Neruda’s positions constitute an at once peripheral and common collecting praxis and political ideology that reveals the particularities of his investment in materialism. Neruda’s materialism shows a belief in the physical and also displays his materialistic side. In other words, Neruda proposes a reconciliation (at many places incomplete) of personal property with communal property as well as an understanding of the ways this personal accumulation overlaps with his communism. This materialism also sheds light on the varying value Neruda’s collections have on a personal, intimate, or affective level as collections that have a complex relationship with outside standards of judgment on both aesthetic levels and levels of cultural heritage. It brings together the tendencies toward fetishism and reification in his book collecting with the intertextuality and rewriting exposed in his translation and collection practices. The parallels with and divergences from Benjamin’s thought invite a closer look at Neruda’s multiple identities through the lens of the library, at both the personal and world level. An examination of Neruda’s library, in light of the unpacking of Benjamin’s, offers inroads into explaining the role of the poet’s aesthetic choices and the development of his own poetic repertoire through translation. It sheds light on how his materialisms, as evidenced in his collecting practices—in the explanations he gives of how his collecting tendencies develop, in his explanations of his poetic meaning, in his theories about words and materiality, and in his reliance on Marxist inheritances—form the foundations of the various aesthetic agendas in his prose and his poetry. 23 The caprice and method of these forking paths of acquisition point to a mode of producing meaning that lies among the personal poetic production and the particular cultural, political, and institutional contexts of Neruda’s creative choices. In the opening pages of “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin invokes Terentius Maurus: “Habent sua fata libelli” 24 [Books have their own fate]. He quotes faithfully and famously, if partially and anonymously, in order to erase the reader reading (pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli [the fate of books depends on the discernment of the reader]) and, in the gesture of a palimpsestic erasure, in order to highlight a conception of the book as an object with an independent destiny. His citation of Terentius Maurus displaces the unique and original book by adding that copies of books also have their fates and plays on the reader as a determiner of that destiny in order to substitute the collector for the reader. Here Benjamin treats both the reader’s

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comprehension and the collector’s martial grasping as coincident and divergent and his own endeavor to unpack his library as a cunning conquest and a Lilliputian triumph: “collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!” 25 For Benjamin, the book does not reveal in and of itself worlds and destinies, but the revelation occurs in the “marches” undertaken in the “pursuit” of books. The endeavor lies at least somewhere between that of a flâneur and that of a self-ironic military strategist and, thank goodness, has less dire consequences than war. Neruda’s own marches occurred as much within cities as by mail, as the many letters in his archives concerning payments to booksellers attest. The circle of Neruda’s conquests reveals a worldwide pattern of exchange, widening the geographical horizon of the metropole collector conceived by Benjamin. Moreover, the treasure hunt that Neruda devises reveals a much less martial trajectory (even as it reveals the shadow of a communism with a much more martial trajectory) but stages the pursuit of books in a way that lays bare the subtle play of difference between nuestro capital and nuestro tesoro. And although all of the subtleties that Benjamin raises about the relationship between readers and collectors and the destinies of books are at play in analyzing Neruda’s collections, the coincidence of Neruda’s turn toward collecting and communism shifts the context for analysis toward his evolving vision of books, poetry, and the political destiny of the pueblo, even as other worldly contexts inevitably intrude. Benjamin interrogates how “books cross the threshold of a collection and become the property of a collector” by tracing the “history of their acquisition.” 26 In this translation, or crossing, a collection becomes housed, and the nuptial contract of the collector with his collection is sealed by crossing the threshold to infuse history with traditions and paths of passion and possession from the outset. The book is potential property in a collection. Throughout the essay, Benjamin details various ways that a book might transition into a collection and evidence its collectability to the individual possessor and the culture (depending on acknowledgment by each housing and house ling of it). In the case of Neruda, his method of collecting the books in his Whitman collection has a history that speaks to the formulation of Neruda’s personal ars poetica. Whitman is collectible, in part, because he constitutes a volatile foundation for a continental voice—mined, reworked, and translated for Neruda’s emerging politics—as Whitman sometimes represents the voice of an expansionist and capitalist U.S. politic. At the crossroads of monetary and cultural capital, in terms of both physical acquisition and ideological inheritance, carrying Whitman across the threshold involves

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a test of the ritual of personal property in terms of the donor—in this case Neruda, a communist donor, a poet of international stature. From the outset, Benjamin marks the interdependence of personal acquisition and fame (public acknowledgment) and tempers it with a playful tone—the personal production of private property receives the highest accolades: “Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.” 27 Here, writing is a mode of acquiring. Specifically, it is an ostensible mode of (and substitute for) collecting. For Benjamin, the writer acquires through creation, through writing “oneself,” and at the same time he reveals or unveils the social dimension of this activity of collecting; here, the activity is “praiseworthy.” In the case of Neruda, space must be made for translation as an ostensible mode of collecting, even as, in general, both culturally and historically, translation falls below the praiseworthiness of writing. Neruda translates because he is at once “dissatisfied” and pleased with the poems available, and in crossing the threshold from English to Spanish he reveals the potential of the original and the translation to inform one another in the context of his collection, a collection pushed increasingly toward the public sphere. This shift occurs even as he attempts to elevate himself to the status of a collector of merit as well as to the status of a poet of America. Benjamin outlines the personal motivations for collecting as an individual activity but never loses sight of the audience’s judgment of modes of acquisition. In this way, they too create the context of collection as a history of acquisition. Yet “praiseworthy” cannot be read as in any way a straightforward statement. This is to differ from and to take into account Naomi Schor’s assertion in “Collecting Paris” that collecting most closely approximates the work of the author: Among the nineteenth-century social types studied by Walter Benjamin, the collector occupies a privileged place: collecting, rather more than flânerie, is the activity that most closely approximates that of the author in that collecting and especially (though not exclusively) book-collecting involves the retrieval and ordering of things past; collecting provides the link between the bourgeois childhood evoked in Berlin Childhood and the adult project of Das PassagenWerk. 28

But Benjamin’s vision of collection and its relation to the author is more complicated by judgment, both personal and public, than Schor allows, as Benjamin’s example of the writer—of writing as a form of acquiring books—has as much to do with substitution, whimsy, desire, and invention as with retrieval and ordering. Benjamin asserts that the reader might “regard this as a whimsical definition of a writer” and that “everything said from the angle of a real collector is whimsical.” 29 Through various perspectives of whimsy, from rhetorical flourishes to self-irony, Benjamin, as collector,

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undercuts any solid ground for comparison. He reveals that judgment might be turned on its head and come under critique, inserting the possibility for irony into the collector’s activity as well as into the evaluation of that activity. From this horizon, we can appreciate how Neruda models a respectful irreverence that cuts both ways, ironizing both himself and his surveyors. To be sure, Neruda deals with the fact that his zeal for the pursuit of personal property for his collections is seen by most to be at odds with his zeal for communist ideals. He negotiates the discrepancy between collecting and communism through a complex rhetorical strategy, arguing, as he says, from the “angle of a real collector” that he does not possess what he possesses. He has willed it to the people, to the Chilean Communist Party, entailing as much a creative ordering of things past as a desire in trust to the future. The critic chronicling the history of Neruda’s collecting has the challenge of facing both earnestness and irony without allowing either to cancel the other out; Neruda’s notions of “praiseworthy” are at times in sync and at times at odds with those of his audience, and thus the judgment of his collection and collecting practices is unsettled due to the multiple lenses through which they might be viewed. Benjamin points to the possibility that the constructions of unities in cultural history (which offer the appearance of progress rather than an image that might refer to the Messianic era) might be laid bare and come under critique from both the most likely and the least likely of angles: from within the drive to construct an inventory and the complementary drive toward disruptive (and unpredictable) destruction. In contrast, the later Neruda definitely establishes his notion of history on the identification of the oppressed of Machu Picchu with the miners of northern Chile and on the unfolding destiny of communism that will liberate the pueblo. Thus, when Benjamin first questions and praises the way that collectors collect and writers write and then reveals a disjunction between his own definition of writers and the definition of the audience—“ladies and gentlemen” 30 —he offers a blueprint for negotiating the multiple frames of cultural and ideological interpretation that inform our reading of Neruda’s Whitman collection. It begins to unveil what is at stake when theorizing the unity of the Americas and constructing a Literature of the Americas—a literature where more than two Americas meet and where aesthetic strategies collected from Whitman are transformed from tools used to prop up U.S. imperialism to those used to further the cause of international communism. To elaborate the intricacies of this blueprint, it is worth exploring the way that Benjamin injects the chronicling of modes of acquisition with irreverence: “Of the customary modes of acquisition, the one most appropriate to a collector would be the borrowing of a book with its attendant non-returning.” 31 This mode is most “appropriate” but not in a traditional sense. It is not fit and proper. The measure of the collector’s mode is thus split between two

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judgments: “The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books.” 32 Benjamin here draws the reader into his whimsical, if not pessimistic, judgment: a book borrower with “real stature whom we envisage” (emphasis added) is contrasted with a deaf ear turned to “the everyday world of legality.” Benjamin splits the public’s judgment between what “we envisage” and “the everyday world of legality.” The proper collector’s property, when he is fulfilling his “real stature,” does not conform to law (Mosaic law), much less to the letter of the law, convention, or the word. The collector is instead defined by “his failure to read these books.” Nor does Benjamin confine collecting to a certain time period, as he imagines a Socratic dialogue, with Socratic irony, that inquires into tradition and modernity through nonreading: “And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world.” 33 The “non-reading of books” as “characteristic of collectors” is “news” perhaps to the imaginary audience, whose queries are written in playful banter and who find themselves squarely within the realm of readership, and thus in contradistinction to one of the failures that constitute, in part, one of the characteristics of “inveterate” collecting—but it is not a recent phenomenon, according to Benjamin and “experts.” When Benjamin calls on the (in this case purposefully emptied) rhetorical gesture of “experts,” he calls attention to the conventions of argument, without subscribing to the rigor of evidence. In fact, he ends this paragraph with a joke in order to illustrate the attitude of the collector toward nonreading: “Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, ‘And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?’ ‘Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?’” 34 Certainly, returning to the example of the treasure hunt, when “se [le] ocurre levantar [a Cantón] del suelo el ejemplar marchito de Leaves of Grass y comienz[a] a examinarlo detenidamente” [it occurred to (Cantón) to pick up the faded copy of Leaves of Grass from the floor and to begin to examine it thoroughly], his “hallazgo imponderable” [inestimable discovery] is not the poetry therein but the note written in Neruda’s hand leading the group on a trip through a nonreading of world literature. In this sense, the material reality of the books in Neruda’s collection at times supersedes their consideration as intertexts to excavate for signs of influence on Neruda’s oeuvre. His books come to mean both more and less than the richness of the texts housed between the covers. In the treasure hunt, they are both material evidence and symbols of the world canon at Neruda’s disposal, according to the

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whimsy, desire, and method of his collecting practices. As material objects that are part of a collection, they both do and do not fall in line with the bourgeois habits that Neruda eschews. In other words, Neruda measures the philistine in other terms than those of Anatole France, necessarily splitting the judgment of Neruda’s collecting at least doubly. This speaks to the vexed terms of Neruda’s collection as property, terms that were not imagined in Benjamin’s notion of borrowing: Neruda’s explanation that he possesses without possessing, that his collection is not only his own but also communal property, that it is infused not only with his own memories but also with shared collective memories. Neruda’s ambivalence toward his collection complicates and expands Benjamin’s intricate notion of acquisition and possession as having “a very mysterious relationship to ownership” 35: “for a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” 36 The collector has the potential to create “a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness—but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.” 37 For Neruda, his desire, if not always fulfilled, is that the intimate relationship with his collection cannot be confined to himself as an individual but involves a questioning of what is proper and appropriate to him as a collector: to what extent, within his vision of the world, can he claim his collection as personal property? To draw our discussion of Benjamin to a close, it is important to point out that he is concerned with uncovering the “dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order” 38 and that he imbues his own methodology with whimsy and arbitrariness: What I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? 39

With the afterlife of these memories in mind, tracing Neruda’s “collecting” then becomes a process—inevitably incomplete and relying on whimsy—of discovering the peculiar juxtapositions of orders and disorders; of sifting through Neruda’s collection placed on his personal shelves, in his

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various homes, in university libraries (dedicated spaces), and in museums; and of tracing what remains of Neruda’s memoirs of his collections, what remains of the commentary on his collecting practices as well as what remains of his creative retrievals. In this way, the critic “borders the chaos of memories” when she contemplates Neruda’s collection in a way that, through her collection of evidence, might lay bare other horizons than those envisaged by Neruda for his collection, only approaching a faithful rendering of even just the habit of Neruda contemplating his collection in such a way that it could “appear as order.”

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COLLECTING AN ARS POETICA Neruda published his translation of “Song of Myself”—“Pasto de llamas”— in Repertorio americano. Therein, we again see a communist poet whose politics, poetic praxis, and zeal for collection often produce contradictory impulses. Most importantly, perhaps, we see what is to be gained. In other words, as Neruda, via his translation of Leaves of Grass, collects and develops an ars poetica from Whitman, he translates in a way that brings Whitman, Whitman’s poetics, his worldview, and the world’s view of Whitman closer to Neruda’s own. As in the case of Benjamin’s “true collector[,] the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.” 40 In Neruda’s striking translation of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” he radically shifts the emphasis from Whitman’s “I” onto the pueblo and (his own) poetic voice. Whitman’s conglomeration of registers accommodates and assimilates difference within his “me,” “me myself,” and “I.” Contrarily, Neruda’s translation creates distinct and oftentimes vexed resonances that speak to his desire to set forth a voice that harmonizes in hymn-like fashion, elevating all. His call is “to see the people’s level of comprehension raised so that it can penetrate with the poet into all the richness of the interior world.” 41 In so doing, Neruda makes translation choices that—apart from a central movement from individualism to social solidarity—grapple with the place of materialism for a poet whose very art springs from the practice of translation. Moreover, Neruda’s creation does not end with his poetic translation. He returns to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass collection to rework sections that he did not previously translate, plucking pearls for his Canto general. Saúl Yurkievich’s compelling essay on Neruda, “Mito e historia: Dos generadores del Canto general,” places one of Canto general’s sections, “La tierra se llama Juan,” at the extreme end of Neruda’s impulse toward “una poesía utilitaria, herramienta o arma de la revolución, una poesía proletaria” 42 [a ultilitarian poetry, a tool or weapon for the revolution, a proletarian poetry]. In pointing to a “vocabulario reducido” 43 [reduced vocabulary], Yurkievich perceptively chronicles the qualities of Neruda’s verse in this

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section, but he mistakes, in part, their origin. Namely, Neruda employs a literary strategy that both invokes and redeploys Whitman’s discordant diction. In short, what Yurkievich characterizes as some of Neruda’s most invective and vehemently political poetry has a literary genealogy born in part from the sedimented layers of Neruda’s translation and collecting practices. Neruda dialogues with “Song of Myself” to cast Whitman’s catalogs and his poetic practice, especially the variation in tone and levels of diction, in the service of Neruda’s communist conviction. He turns the table and ultimately uses Whitman’s tools to critique the very sympathy for the United States that Whitman creates. He invokes this transformation through a translation of the final line of a series of Whitman’s questions in “Song of Myself”: “have you reckon’d the earth much?” 44 becomes “¿Has pensado que la tierra era mucho?” 45 [Have you thought that the earth was a lot?]—an interrogative that prizes the object of thought over thought itself. Indeed, in the series “La tierra se llama Juan,” the word “tierra” [earth] poetically articulates Neruda’s convictions on such diverse themes as a patria plagued by tyranny, death, and poverty and the earth’s symbolic and material role for the pueblo in terms of communism, collectivization, and inheritance. Neruda’s translations of Whitman’s questions to the reader resurface in “La tierra se llama Juan” in a new form that pluralizes the addressee, using the second-person plural “Habeis” instead of the second-person singular “Has” in the fourth poem of the section, “Olegario Sepúlveda (Zapatero, Talcahuano)” [“Olegario Sepulveda (Shoemaker, Talcahuano)”] 46 : Habéis llegado del sombrío Pacífico, de noche, al puerto? Habéis tocado entre las pústulas la mano del niño, la rosa salpicada de sal y orina? Habéis levantado los ojos por los escalones torcidos? Habéis visto la limosnera como un alambre en la basura temblar, levantar las rodillas y mirar desde el fondo donde ya no quedan lágrimas ni odio? 47 [Have you come from the somber Pacific, at night, to the seaport? Have you touched, amid the pustules, the child’s hand, the rose spattered by salt and urine? Have you raised your eyes through the tortuous steps? Have you seen the beggar woman tremble like wire in the garbage, rise from her hands and knees and gaze up from the bottom where

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there are no more tears or hatred left?] 48

Neruda places the questions not in the mouth of the poet’s persona but in the voice of Olegario Sepúlveda—a man whose lengthy address distinguishes him from one among many in Whitman’s lengthy catalogs. Neruda’s persona questions from a space that dramatizes the aftermath of el gran terremoto [the great earthquake] even as the earth drowned his voice: “Allí grité dos días, / pero la boca se me llenó de tierra” and “una montaña de polvo / enterró mis palabras” 49 [“I shouted for two days, / but my mouth filled with earth” and “a mountain of dust / buried my words” 50 ]. In so doing, Neruda revises the metapoetic stance of his translation of “Song of Myself” to account for an earth that is immeasurable rather than quantifiable, that drowns out calls for help, and that shuttles the poetic voice. Neruda achieves this final displacement when Olegario Sepúlveda asks questions that confront the reader and the poet that go unanswered; he ends with a supplication that Neruda return when he can to reply to the questions that testify to a failure of language on the part of the poet. Neruda both echoes and confronts the efficacy of Whitman’s questions, calling them into question at their limits of articulation and reckoning. Neruda not only copes with the potential for destruction embedded in the land but also reinvokes the hope that Whitman’s promise of land will be fulfilled: Neruda repeatedly responds to Whitman’s Jeffersonian ideal of landownership with his own utopian (communist) gestures “a defender / la tierra del pobre” 51 [“to defend / the earth of the poor” 52]. In short, Neruda rewrites Whitman, carrying on his work of translation, and explicitly names the pueblo as the inheritor of Whitman’s promised land, an inheritance that, although inevitable, is as likely to bury them as to repatriate them. Although “Arturo Carrión (Navegante, Iquique)” [“Arturo Carrión (Seaman, Iquique)”], the fifth poem in the section, is a letter from a sailor to his wife that takes advantage of its epistolary form to give a historically based account of the oppression of the poor and communists from Greece to Chile, land is at the center of his poem. Indeed, Neruda’s poem repeats many of the gestures of the thirty-fourth section of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a section where Whitman addresses the conflict with Mexico (a section excised from Neruda’s translation but unearthed here). It draws, as well, on Whitman’s comments on the war with Mexico that are collected in Whitman’s The Gathering of Forces, a part of Neruda’s own Whitman collection, only to turn these tools against the worldwide oppression of communists while condemning U.S. involvement in the war with Mexico, all the while maintaining an awareness of the complicity of certain Latin Americans in the war. Neruda’s poem cannot simply be read as a realist, historical account since its very rhetoric and form echoes—while simultaneously transforming and questioning—Whitman’s recounting of the massacre by the Mexican army of

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Captain Fannin and his company of Texans after their surrender at Goliad on March 27, 1836:

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Now I will tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth, (I tell not the fall of Alamo, Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,) ’Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men. ... They were the glory of the race of rangers, Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship, Large turbulent, generous, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate, Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters, Not a single one over thirty years of age. The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and massacred, it was beautiful early summer, The work commenced about five o’clock and was over by eight. None obey’d the command to kneel. ... A youth not seventeen years old seiz’d his assassin till two more came to release him, The three were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood. At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies; That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men. 53

Whitman’s “I,” in characteristic fashion, weaves a tale of surrender— boys taken as prisoners of war—in which the defeated demonstrate their heroism and the conquerors demonstrate their cowardice with “the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men” and punctuates his tale with pathos by repeating (almost verbatim) his description of the icy, homicidal scene. In turn, Neruda’s “Arturo Carrión (Navegante, Iquique)” echoes Whitman by numbering the “doscientos setenta y tres muchachos” 54 [twohundred seventy-three young men] killed in Athens, suggesting the hypocrisy of the literary tradition of a country that counts only its own dead, and recognizes only its own survivors. Whitman writes, “Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo.” Moreover, Neruda distances himself from Whitman by constructing the persona “Carrión” and thus places the burden to produce truth on the witness rather than on himself: Cuando me embarqué en el Glenfoster pensé en ti, te escribí desde Cádiz, allí fusilaban a gusto, luego fue más triste en Atenas, aquella mañana en la cárcel a bala mataron a doscientos setenta y tres muchachos: la sangre corría fuera del muro, vimos salir a los oficiales

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griegos con los jefes norteamericanos, venían riéndose: la sangre del pueblo les gusta, pero había como un humo negro en la ciudad, estaba escondido el llanto, el dolor, el luto, te compré un tarjetero, allí conocí a un paisano chilote, tiene un pequeño restaurante, me dijo están mal las cosas, hay odio ... dicen que en Pisagua hay dos mil, yo pregunto qué le pasa al mundo 55 [When I shipped out on the Glenfoster I thought about you, I wrote you from Cadiz, where they executed at will, then it was grimmer in Athens, that morning in the jail they shot two hundred seventy-three youths to death. The blood ran outside the wall, we saw Greek officers with American commanders come out laughing: they enjoy the people’s blood, but there was something like a pall of smoke in the city, the weeping, anguish and mourning were hidden, I bought you a card file, there I met a countryman from Chiloe who owns a little restaurant, he told me that things are bad, there’s hatred ... they say they’re two thousand in Pisagua, I wonder what’s happening to the world.] 56

The passage evokes several historical events of great ideological import for Neruda. First, Neruda’s epistolary persona bears witness to the repression of communist insurrections in Franco’s Spain, and then it testifies to the imprisonment and murder of Communist Party members by the Greek government (trained, in part, by the United States), contributing to the eventual end of the revolution. Next, he bears witness to the results of Chile’s “Law for the Defense of Democracy,” which barred communists from public life, denied them voting privileges, and landed many in prison in Pisagua. Yurkievich is right to assert that the “enemigo es claramente identificado—el imperialismo con sus agentes locales y foráneos—y enjuiciado” 57 [enemy is clearly identified—imperialism with its local and foreign agents—and judged], yet he fails to take into account Neruda’s self-conscious uses of Whitmanian strategies to achieve the aims Yurkievich describes. At the center of Neruda’s epistolary poem is a statement of hope: “fue mejor en Hungría, / los campesinos tienen tierra, / reparten libros, en Nueva York / encontré tu carta” 58 [“it was better in Hungary, / the campesinos have land, / they pass out books, in New York / I found your letter”]. 59 The break of the line after New York points toward Whitman’s Brooklyn in a way that

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attempts to differentiate Neruda’s ideal from that of Whitman’s with his use of a “vocabulario reducido” 60 [reduced vocabulary], when he echoes the essence of Whitman’s article of September 23, 1847, “When Will the War Be Ended?” In this work, Whitman lays out the following communal prophecy:

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Our prophecy from the beginning has been: place 30,000 disciplined troops at Mexico; and as many more on the lines of communication with Vera Cruz and the Rio Grande. Under the protection of these let the peace treaty (which embraces the best part of the citizens, though they dare not speak as matters stand now) establish a government, whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country will find its way, as soon as its owners can be assured it will be free from seizure and forced loans. Agriculture will develop the natural resources of the country, really one of the finest in the world, after all; and the increase of products and of trade will react in the increase of enterprise and of an active and business population from abroad. Then at the end of this will come an increase of printing presses, papers, books, education and general intelligence, and lastly, the happiness of the masses now so sunk in ignorance and superstition. 61

Neruda’s “Arturo Carrión (Navegante, Iquique)” complicates any straightforward historical reading by invoking Whitman and exposing the vested interests of the literary and ideological codes that prop up U.S. imperialism. It signals that Neruda self-consciously and courageously opens his poetry to similar ideological critiques and offers an equally deeply felt conviction that negates the orthodox and globalizing authority of a Whitmanian poetic vision while embedding Neruda’s poetry within the paradoxes of his own collecting practices. By way of conclusion, it is worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s use of the metaphor of the pearl diver to refer to Benjamin as collector in order to stress this chapter’s desire to circumvent a pitfall in the criticism of Neruda’s poetic process: the overlooking of the seminal importance of Neruda’s collecting and translation practices to both his own poetry and his creative translations. Although, in this vein, Neruda’s practice can be conceptualized as, in part, that of the diver—wresting a treasure from the sediment for his prized collection—he is more aptly understood, within the context of this allegory, as a collector of pearls and sediment, for he infuses his own poetry and translations with gems mined to illuminate and rework the history and politics (or sediment) of the literary canon of the western hemisphere.

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A CODA IN A WEAK CADENCE The chorus of voices in this volume is gathered best in the introduction or in reading them side by side through the lenses of our own imaginations and knowledge. María Mercedes Andrade has brought together these perspectives to see if we might look anew at collections and at our own myopias and hyperopias. We can ask things. If we see these pieces together, what can we say about geography? What can we say about the literary individuals who live there? Do we make things when we make things up? Do we make ourselves, or do we see ourselves? How much can we call this collecting? Can we say that someone or some group owns these traditions? What is right when people claim power by keeping things to themselves or displaying them for others? María and the readers asked me to draw connections to the chapters in this volume. I find myself resisting because I feel bound to honor each person’s thought as it stands. I don’t want to frame their thoughts with mine, though this is inevitable, of course. And I think this is one of the things Neruda embodies: the subtleties and pitfalls of human efforts to order. We are impelled, and we stumble, and we triumph—all at once, though it may tend one way or another. I now work at Portland Children’s Museum. One would not imagine the things collected in that basement. We have thunder eggs and human remains. We have dolls, taxidermy, and tiny guns. How would one begin to write about that? I can say that I’m thankful that people do. They theorize, they create literature, they create lists and files—all to approximate what this gathering could mean. I can say that I am grateful to be a small part of seeing and voicing our collective efforts. NOTES 1. Pablo Neruda, Confieso que he vivido (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1974), 228. 2. David Schidlowsky, Las furias y las penas (Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1999), 444. 3. In a comparable fashion, Neruda’s memoirs relate that his friend, Julian Huxley, asked for him on arriving in Chile. The journalist responded, “El poeta Neruda?” [The poet?], and Huxley replied, “No. No conozco a ningún poeta Neruda. Quiero hablar con el malacólogo Neruda” (Neruda, Confieso, 277) [No, I don’t know any poet named Neruda, I want to speak with Neruda, the malacologist]. Neruda’s seashells, his library, and his personae are intimately intertwined with each other, and at the same time their distinction, in the end, relies on the understanding of a joke that rests on his renown as a poet. 4. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” in Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 42. 5. Roberto González Echevarría, “Introduction,” in Canto general, by Pablo Neruda, trans. Jack Schmitt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 4. 6. Neruda, Confieso, 377.

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7. Pablo Neruda, Obras completas, ed. Hernan Loyola (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1999), 684. 8. Pablo Neruda, Canto general, trans. Jack Schmitt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 257. 9. Wilberto L. Cantón, Posiciones (Mexico: Imprenta Universitaria, 1950), 93–94, quoted in Fernando Alegría, Walt Whitman en Hispanoamérica (Mexico City: Ediciones Studium, 1954), 333–34. 10. Cantón, Posiciones, 93–94. 11. Karl Marx, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 272. 12. Ibid., 333–34. 13. Ibid., 322. 14. Ibid., 320. 15. Ibid., 246. 16. Ibid., 339, 341. 17. Rita Guibert, “Pablo Neruda,” in Seven Voices, trans. Frances Partridge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 28–29. All translations of Guibert’s interview are by Frances Partridge. The original interviews remain unpublished at this time. 18. Ibid., 49. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 29. 21. Ibid., 16. 22. Neruda and Vallejo, ed. Robert Bly, trans. Robert Bly, John Knoepfle, and James Wright (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 157. 23. This interpretation follows the lead of Rainer Schulte’s and John Biguenet’s “Introduction” in Theories of Translation, which focuses on the process-oriented methods of interpretation in translation studies in order to revitalize literary studies as a whole: “The methodologies employed by the translator can become a model by which we interpret literary texts in general. Translation thinking is always concerned with the reconstruction of processes, and therefore constitutes a form of dynamic rather than static interpretation. Thus, translation and translation research function as an organizing principle that refocuses the interpretation of a text from a content-oriented to a process-oriented way of seeing texts and situations. Disciplines have had a tendency to separate subject matters that by their very nature are intricately connected. The reconstruction of the translation process reaffirms that interconnectedness, since the problemsolving character of translation forces the translator to include a variety of disciplines and interdisciplines to respond to the specific needs of a text which make a translation possible. In that sense, translation activities are always interdisciplinary and present themselves today as an integrating force in a fragmentary and discontinuous world” (Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Theories of Translation, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 10). 24. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, 61. 25. Ibid., 63. 26. Ibid., 61. 27. Ibid. 28. Naomi Schor, “Collecting Paris,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 252. 29. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 61–62, emphasis added. 30. Ibid., 61. 31. Ibid., 62. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 60. 36. Ibid., 67. 37. Ibid., 60. 38. Ibid.

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39. Ibid., 59–60. 40. Ibid., 61. 41. Schidlowsky, Las furias y las penas, 418–19. 42. Saul Yurkievich, Suma critica (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1997), 247. 43. Ibid. 44. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), 30. 45. Walt Whitman, “Pasto de llamas,” trans. Pablo Neruda, Repertorio americano 922 (September 1941): 265. 46. This particular mode of address finds its antecedent in Neruda’s translation of “Salut au monde.” Whereas Whitman aspires to sing both high and low alike in “divine rapport” and Gregorio Gasman’s translation (a translation housed in Neruda’s library) envisions a liberal fraternity, Neruda’s interpretations and transformations make of Whitman’s poem a worldwide brotherhood of the oppressed. This vision is most striking in the concluding stanzas of Neruda’s translation where he favors a collective “you.” Gasman translates the lines where Whitman calls out to the people of the world with the anaphoric “you” by choosing to switch between singular and plural second-person addresses (“tú” and “vosotros”). Neruda, true to form, purposefully and methodically pluralizes the “you,” consistently calling on a collective “vosotros.” In this way, translation becomes the creative mode through which Neruda establishes a cornerstone of his poetic repertoire and politic (Walter Whitman, Saludo al mundo, trans. Gregorio Gasman [Santiago: Ediciones de Libreria Neira, 1949]). 47. Neruda, Obras completas, 666–67. 48. Neruda, Canto general, 240–41. 49. Neruda, Obras completas, 666. 50. Neruda, Canto general, 240, translation modified. 51. Pablo Neruda, “Jesús Gutiérrez (Agrarista),” in Obras completas, 664. 52. Neruda, Canto general, 238, translation modified. 53. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass, 68–69. 54. Neruda, Obras completas, 667. 55. Ibid., 667–68. 56. Neruda, Canto general, 241–42. 57. Yurkievich, Suma critica, 248. 58. Neruda, Obras completas, 668. 59. Neruda, Canto general, 241, translation modified. 60. Yurkievich, Suma critica, 247. 61. Walt Whitman, The Gathering of Forces, ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), vol. 1, 262–63.

WORKS CITED Alegría, Fernando. Walt Whitman en Hispanoamérica. Mexico City: Ediciones Studium, 1954. Arendt, Hannah. “Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, by Walter Benjamin, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 1–55. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflection. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. ———. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflection, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 59–67. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Bly, Robert, ed. Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems. Translated by Robert Bly, John Knoepfle, and James Wright. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Cantón, Wilberto L. Posiciones. Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1950. González Echevarría, Roberto. “Introduction.” In Canto general, by Pablo Neruda, translated by Jack Schmitt, 1–12. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

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Guibert, Rita. “Pablo Neruda: Isla Negra, Chile, January 15–31, 1970.” In Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert, translated by Frances Partridge, 3–78. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1978. Neruda, Pablo. Canto general. Translated by Jack Schmitt. Introduction by Roberto González Echevarría. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. ———. Confieso que he vivido: Memorias. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1974. ———. Obras completas. Edited by Hernán Loyola. 1st ed. 4 vols. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1999. Schidlowsky, David. Las furias y las penas: Una biografia de Pablo Neruda 1904–1943. Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1999. Schor, Naomi. “Collecting Paris.” In The Cultures of Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 252–74. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Schulte, Rainer, and John Biguenet. “Introduction.” In Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, 1–10. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Whitman, Walt. The Gathering of Forces. Edited by Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920. ———. Leaves of Grass. Edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: Norton, 1973. ———. “Pasto de llamas.” Translated by Pablo Neruda. Repertorio americano 922 (September 1941): 265. ———. Saludo al mundo. Translated by Gregorio Gasman. Santiago: Ediciones de Libreria Neira, 1949. ———. Saludo Mundial. Translated by Pablo Neruda. La Gaceta de Chile 2. Santiago, October 1955. Yurkiévich, Saúl. Suma crítica. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997.

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Chapter Eight

Antropofagia, Bricolage, Collage Oswald de Andrade, Augusto de Campos, and the Author as Collector

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Fernando Pérez Villalón

Philipp Blom’s To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting provides a sort of portrait gallery of eccentric types prone to obsessive accumulation of different kinds of objects: rare books, butterflies, sacred relics, dead human foetuses, teeth, manuscripts, seashells, matchboxes, and plastic cups. For all of them, the ensembles of things amassed during a lifetime, sometimes with a passion that surpassed any other pursuit, were an essential part of what constituted them as individuals: their sense of self was intimately bound with their possessions, even as at times they seemed possessed by them. 1 Neither Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954), one of the protagonists of the Brazilian avant-garde in the 1920s, nor Augusto de Campos (1931–), a protagonist of the Brazilian Concrete Poetry movement, would qualify as members of that group. Unlike Azorín, Honoré de Balzac, Pablo Neruda, or Vladimir Nabokov, they did not distinguish themselves for their interest in selecting, accumulating, and organizing objects. In this chapter, I will attempt to show, however, that their works can serve as instances of a conception of poetry as a sort of collecting, a collage of quotations, found phrases, press clippings, and a montage of verbal snapshots. In Oswald de Andrade, this poetics of assemblage expressed itself in some of the texts of his 1925 book of poems Pau Brasil [Brazil Wood] and in his manifesto of the same title, published a year earlier, as well as in his famous “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928), which proposes a project of appropriation through devouring that has proven very fruitful for twentieth-century Brazilian culture. Augusto de 165

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Campos’s collection of poems Popcretos (created in 1964–1966) radicalizes this aspect of Oswald de Andrade’s poetics by literally constructing texts made up only of found fragments of language and images cut and pasted on the page. This conception of the author as verbal collector can be seen as part of the tradition that Marjorie Perloff has aptly designated “unoriginal genius,” a tradition based on “appropriation, elaborate constraint, visual and sound composition, and reliance on intertextuality.” 2 Perloff traces back this tradition to T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Ezra Pound’s Cantos, connecting them to contemporary American conceptual poets such as Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and Kenneth Goldsmith as well as to Brazilian Concrete Poetry and to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as an instance of citational poetics. I will propose here an alternative lineage of these poetics of collecting that also formulates some of the specific differences that characterize Oswald de Andrade and Augusto de Campos’s works and set them apart from AngloAmerican modernism as well as from the work of contemporary conceptual American poets. These writers’ work can also be understood in connection to Claude LéviStrauss’s famous description in The Savage Mind of mythical thought as a sort of bricolage, invoked in this volume by María Mercedes Andrade and Shelley Garrigan as a key to José Asunción Silva’s and Delmira Agustini’s poetics of collecting. Nonetheless, as opposed to those modernista 3 authors obsessed with fetishized material objects, the tradition that goes from Oswald de Andrade to Augusto de Campos and beyond stresses the material character of language as a thing (along the lines of what Sartre called mots-chose [word-thing]). 4 One could indeed argue, in the light of their works discussed below, that they propose a critique of material collecting, a sort of decollection similar in some ways to what Jerónimo Arellano finds in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Kelly Austin’s chapter in this volume explores Pablo Neruda’s conflictive and complex relationship with the practice of collecting and its links with his poetics. One could perhaps propose a parallel between Neruda’s passion for accumulating objects and his expansive, rhetorical lyricism, strongly based on his gift for sensual metaphors and intent on producing a monumentalized version of Latin American history in his Canto general. Neruda’s exuberant, sometimes splendidly verbose poetry sharply contrasts with the condensed, parodic, humorous version of history proposed by Oswald de Andrade in his Pau Brasil or the extremely rigorous conciseness proposed by Concrete Poets, which deliberately distanced themselves from the more grandiloquent Latin American poetic tradition best represented by Neruda. One could perhaps venture the idea that writers who treasure and accumulate material objects have a tendency for copia, the rhetorical term for the abundant style described in Erasmus’s treatise of the same title, whereas writers who tend

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toward detachment from things are more inclined to brevity and simplicity, to a style stripped of verbal ornaments and rhetorical trappings. Haroldo de Campos, in his preface to Oswald de Andrade’s novel Serafim Ponte Grande, formulates in a highly precise manner the connection between Lévi-Strauss’s description of primitive thought and Andrade’s collage method: A colagem—e mesmo a montagem—sempre que trabalhem sobre um conjunto já constituído de utensílios e materiais, inventariando-os e remanipulando-lhes as funções primitivas, podem se enquadrar naquele tipo de atividade que LéviStrauss define como bricolage . . . , a qual, se e caraterística da pensée sauvage, não deixa de ter muito em comum com a lógica de tipo concreto, combinatória, do pensamento poético. Oswald, bricoleur, fez um livro de resíduos de livros, um livro de pedaços metonimicamente significantes que nele se engavetam e se imbricam, de maneira aparentemente desconexa mas expondo, através desse hibridismo crítico, disso que se poderia chamar uma “técnica de citações” estrutural, a vocação mas profunda da empresa oswaldiana: fazer um não-livro, um antilivro, da acumulação paródica de modos consuetudinários de fazer livro ou, por extensão, de fazer prosa (ou ainda, e até mesmo, de expressão por escrito). 5 [Collage and even montage—to the extent that they work with a set of tools and materials, making an inventory of them and manipulating their primitive functions—may be characterized as the type of activity that Lévi-Strauss defines as “bricolage” . . . , which, while typical of the pensée sauvage (savage mind), also has much in common with the concrete, combinatory logic of poetic thought. Oswald, bricoleur, made a book out of residues of books, from pieces metonymically significant which are telescoped and imbricated in it in an apparently disconnected fashion. But he does so while exhibiting, through that very critical hybridity which could be called a structural “technique of quotation,” the most profound calling of the Oswaldian project: to produce an “un-book,” an antibook, from the parodic accumulation of the habitual ways of making books or, by extension, of writing prose (or even, and also, of written language).] 6

The emphasis placed on metonymical procedures by Campos in his commentary on Andrade’s technique reinforces the contrast with Neruda’s poetry, dependent largely on metaphors. It is of course no coincidence that the critical recuperation of Andrade’s works by Campos frames his work as an antecedent of Concrete Poetry’s experiments in the 1950s: one of the ways in which that movement formulates its poetics is by reference to what they called, following Ezra Pound, their paideuma, a collection of predecessors and literary ancestors. Augusto de Campos also invokes the notion of bricolage when describing tropicalist singer Caetano Veloso’s compositions in a way that could be applied to the poetry he was writing at about the same time (his essay was originally published in 1968). After describing Caetano’s lyrics as an uncon-

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scious homage to Oswald de Andrade (whose work the musician did not know at the time), he writes,

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Há um apresentificação da realidade brasileira . . . a través da colagem criativa de eventos, citações, rótulos e insignias do contexto. É uma operação típica daquilo que Lévi-Strauss denomina de bricolage intelectual: a construção de um conjunto estrutural não com uma técnica estereotipada, mas com uma técnica empírica, sobre um inventário de resíduos e fragmentos de acontecimentos. Em suma, embora ainda se utilize da linguagem discursiva, Caetano não a usa linearmente, mas numa montagem de “fotos e nomes,” numa justaposição de frases-feitas ou numa superposição de estilhaços sonoros. 7 [Brazilian reality is made present . . . through a creative collage of events, quotations, labels, and badges from our context. This operation is typical of what Lévi-Strauss denominates intellectual bricolage: the construction of a structural ensemble not by means of a stereotypical technique, but through an empirical technique, with an inventory of residues and fragments of events. In short, even if he continues to utilize discursive language, Caetano does not use it in a linear way, but as a montage of “pictures and names,” a juxtaposition of common phrases or a superimposition of sound splinters.] 8

It is no coincidence either that the term bricolage is taken from the context of Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of primitive thought as opposed to scientific thought (which for him is embodied in the figure of the engineer, as opposed to the bricoleur). In Andrade’s case, this has to do with an explicit vindication of primitivism, which as we will see below is partially just another version of the European avant-garde’s fascination with the primitive as a critique of Enlightenment values and aesthetics and partially a more complex gesture because of the Latin American context in which it is proposed since in this context it also works as a critique of colonialism (and thus of European avant-garde’s primitivism as a consequence of it). 9 In Campos, by contrast, bricolage is vindicated as a kind of constructive procedure that eludes some of the shortcomings of linear thought and its literary counterpart, a poetry governed by conventional syntactic rules. A notion that comes up frequently together with bricolage is that of montage: in addition to conversing with techniques and procedures imported from the visual arts (cubism, collage, and ready-made), both Andrade and Campos are keenly aware that they are writing in an era where mechanical reproduction of still images (photography), sound (gramophony), and movement (film) had radically reshaped humanity’s relation to the world. Andrade often refers to photography as a model for contemporary poetry, and the Concrete Poets repeatedly invoked Eisenstein’s conception of montage as a fundamental reference for their project. Walter Benjamin famously described montage as a method of historical inquiry in one of the formulations of his way of working in his unfinished Arcades Project: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no

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valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse— these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.” 10 Richard Sieburth has explicitly connected this passage with Sergei Eisenstein and Ezra Pound’s compositional procedures as well as with the didactic discontinuities of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater. For all of them, he writes that “history is not a cumulative, additive narrative in which the uninterrupted syntagm of time flows homogeneously from past to future, but rather a montage where any moment may enter into sudden adjacency with another.” 11 This spatialized version of history has a lot in common with its presentation in collections, galleries, and museums, and it is of course not without risks, as we will see below. Perhaps one fundamental difference between the collections of quotations in Pound’s Cantos and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is that both attempt to gather fragments with the aim of reconstructing some sort of cultural totality (even if both are at times acutely aware of the impossibility of this task), whereas Andrade and Campos seem to start from the conviction that such an enterprise is futile and rather use quotations as a critical tool to expose the absurdity of any totalizing narrative. In Anglo-American modernism, quotation also often has the function of rescuing from oblivion fragments of high culture that are considered precious, in need of salvaging from Europe’s wreckage (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” 12 writes T. S. Eliot), whereas in Brazilian modernism and Concrete Poetry, the line between high culture, mass culture, and popular culture is often deliberately blurred. It was before publishing his best-known works that Oswald de Andrade initiated Brazilian modernism by contributing to organize the Modern Art Week, which took place in February 1922, and scandalized São Paulo’s conservative elites by its bold break with current artistic conventions. Two years later, he would publish his “Manifesto of Pau Brasil Poetry,” wherein he contrasts imported poetry with the new “Pau Brasil” [brazilwood] Poetry, written for export (“Dividamos: Poesia de importação. E a poesia Pau Brasil, de exportação” 13 [Let’s make the division: imported poetry. And Pau-Brasil poetry, for exportation]). This text, less famous and influential than the “Cannibalist Manifesto,” is usually read as a precedent of its poetics of devouring as a mode of appropriation for marginal cultures, but I would argue that its agenda is somewhat more complicated and that it makes visible some of the contradictions of Andrade’s project. For instance, its comparison of poetry to “brazilwood” (Pau Brasil) is far from innocent or uncomplicated: brazilwood was the country’s first export product. It is a tree (Caesalpinia echinata) originally used to produce a valuable red dye and obtained by European colonizers through bartering with the Indians. 14 Poetry is therefore compared to a natural prod-

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uct, the first of several on which Brazilian economy would be dependent throughout its history (including sugarcane, rubber, and of course coffee). This comparison seems to weaken the modernity of Andrade’s argument: why not compare poetry to an industrial product if one wishes to proclaim its modernity? Because, paradoxically, for Andrade, poetry’s modernity derives from its primitivism and because one of the features of the manifesto is a defense of poetry as something that can simply be found be selectively registering Brazilian reality: “A poesia existe nos fatos” [“Poetry exists in the facts”] 15 is the text’s initial phrase. This is not to be confused with a realist or mimetic aesthetic since what Andrade calls “naturalism” is explicitly rejected (“Instituíra-se o naturalismo. Copiar. Quadro de carneiros que não fosse lã mesmo, não prestava” [“Naturalism was instituted. Copy. A picture of sheep that didn’t really give wool was good for nothing”]). 16 Instead, Andrade’s project privileges “O trabalho contra o detalhe naturalista—pela síntese; contra a morbidez romântica—pelo equilíbrio geômetra e pelo acabamento técnico; contra a cópia, pela invenção e pela surpresa” [“The reaction against naturalistic detail—through synthesis; against romantic morbidity—through geometric equilibrium and technical finish; against copy, through invention and surprise”]. 17 The specific means through which this would be accomplished are not explained, and there is indeed a contradiction in the appeal to primitivism and infantile naïveté as a liberation from the constraints of civilization (“Poesia Pau Brasil. Ágil e cândida. Como uma criança” [“Pau Brasil poetry. Agile and candid. Like a child”]) 18 and the “will to modernity” expressed throughout the manifesto as a desire for technical innovation. The acceptance of this paradox as a starting point for Brazilian modernity is one of the manifesto’s most productive intuitions, and it is expressed in its paratactic rather than argumental style. As Roberto Schwartz shrewdly points out, “Oswald de Andrade invented an easy and poetically effective formule to see Brazil. . . . This was obtained through two operations: the juxtaposition of elements from Brazilian colonial and bourgeois realities, and the elevation of this product—disjointed by definition—to the category of national allegory.” 19 But let us see how this project is played out in the poems themselves. The first extended section of Andrade’s collection of poems Pau Brasil (after a couple of prefatory texts, one of which is an abbreviated version of the “Pau Brasil Manifesto”) provides several examples of his techniques of collage, cannibalistic appropriation, condensation, and displaced quotations with humorous and critical intent. As the title of the section indicates (“História do Brasil”), it is concerned with the beginnings of Brazilian history, which it evokes through a selection of quotes from chronicles of the colonizers’ encounter with the new continent. Let us look first at one example:

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as meninas da gare Eram tres ou quatro moças bem moças e bem gentis Com cabellos mui pretos pelas espadoas E suas vergonhas tão altas e tão saradinhas Que de nós as muito bem olharmos Não tínhamos nenhuma vergonha 20 [The Station Girls

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They were three or four maidens very young and very fair With very long black hair trailing down their backs And their shameful parts so high and clean That we from staring at them Had no shame at all.] 21

The text of this poem is an excerpt from a letter written in 1500 by Portuguese knight Pero Vaz Caminha to the king of Portugal, Manuel I. 22 It is considered the first written document about what would eventually become Brazil. The comparison with the original is highly instructive for an understanding of Oswald de Andrade’s technique: he introduces only minimal changes, adding or suppressing a few words here and there to enhance the self-sufficient condensation of the text. He usually retains the originals’ archaic orthography, which reinforces the estrangement and marks the texts as premodern, suggesting to the reader that they are direct quotations. By contrast, he eliminates punctuation marks, divides the quotations into verse lines (the original is in prose), and adds spare titles (often descriptive, sometimes interpretive, as is the case here). 23 Perhaps the most important transformation, however, comes from the change in context and the isolation of the quotations as particularly relevant or charged. The operation of extracting these passages from the continuum of the documents of which they are part in the first place defamiliarizes them, deprives them of their function as testimonies and historical sources or literary prose from a given period, and turns them into contemporary poems that acquire their meaning through their appurtenance to a new sequence, the collection of quotations amassed by Andrade in the first part of his book but also the larger context of Andrade’s book as a whole. The passages also tend to become humorous vignettes because of their naïveté and because of their lack of context (thus erasing the troublingly violent aspects of the discovery and colonization of America). The selection of fragments is far from random or innocent since Andrade consistently chooses passages that express shocked admiration at the New World’s wonders, an attitude that is consistent with the program of his “Pau Brasil poetry.” There is another poem of this section (excerpted from Claude D’Abbeville’s 1614 historical chronicle, written in French) that celebrates the native’s nudity as a sort of prelapsarian innocence, explicitly contrasted

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with the dangers of the finally more depraved European fashions, “Qui ruinent plus d’âmes / Que ne le font les filles indiennes” 24 [which ruin more souls than Indian girls do]. In both cases, nudity is presented as an infantile ignorance of civilization that serves as an antidote for the mental limitations imposed by it (a poem from 1925 not included in this book laments the fact that Europeans eventually managed to dress the Indians rather than being undressed by them). 25 One may certainly read these poems as a critique of the colonial enterprise, as they celebrate the natives’ spontaneity, unfavorably contrasting it with European mores. But the fact remains that Andrade adopts the perspective of colonial conquerors throughout his text, the epigraph of which reads “for the occasion of the discovery of Brazil,” suggesting a comparison between the Portuguese encounter with the New World and the modernist rediscovery of it. Another recurrent theme of the first section of the book as well as throughout the manifesto is that of the territory’s natural riches, of which the poem with that title is a typical example: riquezas naturais Muitos melões pepinos romans e figos De muitas castas Cidras limões e laranjas Uma infinidade Muitas cannas daçucre Infinito algodom Também há muito páo brasil Nestas capitanias 26 [natural riches Many melons cucumbers pomegranates and figs Of various stocks Citrons lemons and oranges A multitude Many sugar canes Endless cotton There is also plenty of brazilwood In these captancies] 27

This poem’s text comes from Pero de Magalhães Gândavo’s 1576 História da província Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil, which it condenses even more radically then the previous example. 28 Between the first enumeration of the many fruits produced by this newfound land and the mention of brazilwood (obviously included because of its reference to the book’s title), a large passage dealing with the (labor intensive) production of cotton and sugarcane is eliminated. It seems as if Andrade wanted to dwell on natural abundance rather than on the exploitation of workers required for the production of those exported goods, thus masking

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the productive and ideological structures that make Pau Brasil poetry possible and naturalizing the Brazilian economic system. The theme of the country’s exuberant abundance of natural riches echoes throughout the book, for instance, in the fascinating poem near the end in Which Andrade quotes from a pamphlet posted on the information board of the ship where he is returning to Brazil from France: “A sua sanidade é perfeita / O clima brando / E se tornou notável / Pela beleza fora do comum / Da sua construção e da sua flora” 29 [A perfectly healthy place / Nice weather / Famous for the outstanding beauty of its architecture and flora]. In this last poem, an invitation for foreign investors to do business in Brazil that is also appropriated by turning it from a document into a poem, the link between the colonial enterprise and modern capital becomes clear (e.g., in the case of the Canadian company Light & Co., which provided electricity and serves as the title of another of the book’s sections, “Postes da Light”). It is not clear, however, what Andrade makes of it: the book’s tone tends to be celebratory, but its cleverness derives from the fact that it does not explicitly take a position. As Benjamin had put it, “I needn’t say anything. Merely show.” 30 Roberto Schwartz has underlined the dangers of this formula when it becomes a stock procedure (something that he claims has happened in the tropicalist appropriation of Andrade’s rhetoric in the late 1960s). Andrade’s treatment of history as a collection of funny anecdotes risks indeed an erasure of history. As Susan Stewart has pointed out, “The collection seeks a form of self-enclosure which is possible because of its ahistoricism. The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection’s world.” 31 Andrade himself seems to have become aware of the risks and shortcomings of his method. His cannibalist manifesto, published in 1928, is already symptomatic of a more critical view of the relation between the local and the foreign, and by 1933 when he writes the preface of his last modernist work, Serafim Ponte Grande (published then but written several years before), he denounces the “valorization of coffee” and “Pau Brasil poetry” as imperialist operations. Andrade had by then entered his explicitly political phase where he would turn to literary realism as a style more suitable for his commitment to the communist cause. It remains up for discussion, however, if in spite of the author’s opinions there is a hidden critical potential in his early writings, perhaps politically sharper than his later production because of their youthful irresponsibility and imaginative invention. I believe Pau Brasil and Antropofagia remain inspiring conceptualizations and practical realizations of the potential inherent in peripheral modernities. They also unwillingly function as a critique of the collecting of objects and its complicity with the colonial origins of capitalism. In his last phase, after World War II, Andrade would go back to his conception of cannibalism

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and attempt to reconcile it with his leftist convictions (he remained critical of capitalism as an economic system in spite of having distanced himself from communist militancy). His academic thesis “The Crisis of Messianic Philosophy” (which he planned to present as part of his candidacy to a post at the University of São Paulo) develops a critique of a system based on private property (which he associates with patriarchal societies) and outlines the utopian vision of a return to matriarchal societies where private property, one of the principles on which collecting’s existence depends, would cease to exist. It was in 1949, a year before the writing of that thesis, that a group of young poets went to visit the by then largely forgotten Andrade. This group included the authors who would then form the core of the Concrete Poetry movement, the Grupo Noigandres: the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and their friend Décio Pignatari. They would later also play a central role in the critical reassessment and reedition of Andrade’s work, which now has the prominent place it deserves in the history of Brazilian literature and has received abundant international attention. The Concrete Poets wanted to go back to the innovative, experimental spirit of the avant-garde, and they combined an interest in foreign modernist authors such as Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, e.e. cummings, and Ezra Pound, with the conviction that Brazilian modernism’s potential was far from exhausted. An essential part of their project was the translation of what they considered the most relevant literary works of all languages and times, and they produced a large body of translation that constitutes a sort of collection in its own right. As Brazilian critic Luiz Costa Lima has pointed out, it is no coincidence that Andrade’s works were reedited in the 1970s: they were perceived then as texts that resisted the authoritarian military dictatorship that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. 32 Paradoxically enough, it was not his committed literature that performed this function but rather his avant-gardist texts that he himself rejected as the banal and irresponsible product of a clown of the bourgeoisie. It was precisely in the dictatorship’s initial year that Augusto de Campos showed his “Popcretos” series in the São Paulo Atrium gallery, together with some Waldemar Cordeiro object-paintings. The text of the show’s catalog describes these series as poems “colhidos e escolhidos / no aleatório do ready made” 33 [gathered and chosen / as an aleatory ready made], an obvious homage to Duchamp (to whom Augusto de Campos would later devote a whole book in 1976, Reduchamp, in collaboration with artist Julio Plaza). Some of the poems in the series consist only of images (the triangular tower of eyes, mouths, and traffic signs of “Olho por olho”); others are composed of letters, syllables, and textual fragments with or without autonomous meaning; and yet others consist of a repeated word combined with images and material textures (“GOLDwEATER”). The series

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is at the same time a consequent development of the Concrete Poetry movement’s earlier explorations and the symptom of a crisis of its initial tenets in the face of the changing political landscape. The preface to the poems explicitly invokes Oswald de Andrade’s Antropofagia as a reference, 34 and their attempt at articulating a critical reaction through the juxtaposition of found fragments is clearly indebted to his montage techniques and to the tradition of unoriginal genius as discussed by Perloff. It was also in 1964 that, in order to commemorate a decade of his passing away, the Concrete Poets dedicated the fourth issue of the Invenção literary review to Oswald de Andrade’s work, and, as Gonzalo Aguilar has pointed out, the dialogue with Antropofagia played a crucial role in the reshaping of their original project as a response to the military dictatorship, which made untenable their commitment to the poem as an autonomous and homogeneous entity produced as a conscious result of formal evolution. 35 The Concrete Poetry movement, somewhat like the modernism of the 1920s, had originated in a moment of political optimism and reliance on progress as a way of improving Brazilian social conditions (the 1950s). The members of the Grupo Noigandres then accompanied enthusiastically the left-leaning reform movement during the early 1960s, but its interruption by a military coup inaugurated for the movement what Haroldo de Campos has described as the “post-utopian” phase. In aesthetic terms, this translated into a more flexible relation to the radical principles proclaimed by their polemic manifestos. This flexibility appears, for instance, in their relinquishing the sole use of the Futura bold typographical font as well as giving up on the organization of words on the page in a geometrical grid. As Augusto de Campos himself declares, Personalmente, pienso que mi ortodoxia inicial . . . cedió cuando ocurrió el golpe militar del 64. Quise reaccionar, asimilé el lenguaje pop y expuse, en la Galería Atrium, en el centro de Sâo Paulo, no sin cierto riesgo, los poemas “Olho por Olho,” “SS,” “Gold(w)eater” y “O antiruido,” que llamé “popcretos,” en diciembre de aquel año fatídico. Cambié los tipos “futura,” emblemáticos de nuestra utopía bauhaus-concretista, por la minianarquitectura de tipos e imágenes recortados de diarios y revistas. 36 [Personally, I think my initial orthodoxy gave in with the 1964 military coup. I wanted to react, I assimilated pop language and showed, in the Atrium Gallery, in the center of São Paulo, not without some measure of risk, the poems “Olho por Olho,” “SS,” “Gold(w)eater,” and “O antiruido,” which I called “popcretos,” in December of that dreadful year. I traded the “Futura” bold typographic fonts, emblematic of our Bauhaus-concrete utopia, for the minianarchitecture of types and images cut out from newspapers and magazines.]

The resort to collage thus has to do with a distance from the search for formal purity and geometrical order that characterized his earlier work and with a

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bricolage procedure where the poet becomes a mere collector of discursive and visual fragments. The poem “SS” provides an excellent example of this kind of work (see fig. 8.1). This poem is a collage of several instances of a duplicated “S,” a feature that evokes several commercial brands (the Esso fuel company and the Gessy soap) but that, as a manuscript note from the time of the poem’s composition provided by the author attests (see fig. 8.2), can also stand for several religious and political acronyms (holy sacrament, holy siege, holy sepulcher, the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s personal militia, and the secret service). One could, moreover, add to the list the signifier/signified pair, whose necessary unity but irrevocable separation is at the center of structural linguistics, semiotics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Augusto de Campos’s poem seems to operate by simply selecting signifiers (or even portions of them), bringing them together and letting the reader determine their possible meanings. Although the selection was far from random or the range of possible meanings completely undetermined (as is proven by the careful list of associations listed in fig. 8.2), the text is undoubtedly a case of the type of infinite semiosis conceptualized by Umberto Eco when studying James Joyce’s work. 37 The superposition of this collection of signifiers brought together into a constellation generates a montage of new meanings and opens up a possibil-

Figure 8.1. Augusto de Campos “SS” Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

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Antropofagia, Bricolage, Collage

Figure 8.2. Manuscript note provided by Augusto de Campos on “SS” Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

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ity of critique without any explicit declaration of intentions on the part of the author. In this case, one of the poem’s central threads is a rather trivial anecdote, the scandal around the monokini (also known as “sem soutien,” bra-less). Starting in the upper left corner, where “olhos voltam a ver” 38 [eyes see again], a phrase that gives meaning to the two small circles next to it, several headlines referring to that topic are brought together, alternating with pairs of the letter “S”: “Novo maiô (uma peça) quase mata” 39 [New onepiece swimsuit almost kills], “Biquinininho: modelo usa e tenta matar-se” 40 [Tiny bikini: a model uses it and tries to kill herself], and so on. Given the historical context in which this poem was composed and shown, there is a clear irony toward the kind of trivial anecdotes given space to by the media and the hypocritical moralism that sees nude breasts as a scandal but fails to stand up against the crimes of a military dictatorship. The juxtaposition of incongruous headlines certainly has a kind of humorous effect (similar to that of Andrade’s historical snapshots), but the insistence on the SS pair also produces an ominous resonance, denouncing the complicity of economic powers ($$) with political repression (Secret Service) while also questioning the commitment to freedom of totalitarian leftist regimes: at the center of the collage, we find the phrase “Torna-se cada vez mas conservador SS o Soviete Supremo” 41 [The Supreme Soviet SS becomes increasingly conservative], and in the lower left corner we see, in tiny print, a phrase commenting on the condemnation of monokini by Soviet and Spanish authorities alike (thus equating Franco and Stalin’s regimes in terms of moral conservatism). In the lower right corner, one can read, “Esse tal de biquinininho e comparável à demencia de certos artistas que acumulam restos de móveis e vassouras para formar uma composição. Não seria isto o malogro de uma cultura?” 42 [This so-called bikini is comparable to the madness of some artists who accumulate leftovers of pieces of furniture and brooms in order to produce a work of art. Isn’t this cultural decadence?]. This quote is not only one more absurd example of the triviality of journalistic discourse: it also becomes a self-reflective comment on the work that includes it, constructed in the same kind of demented way. The author makes no comments; he simply collects these materials and exhibits them, in this case not as valuable objects worthy of admiring contemplation but as despicable detritus that nevertheless, when appropriately combined in a critical constellation, can serve to expose a truth or at least denounce the falsity of mainstream media. As we have seen, both Augusto de Campos and Oswald de Andrade explore the potential of collecting verbal objects as a mode of cultural critique, as a type of devouring that is at the same time similar and radically opposed to the accumulation of material objects that characterizes most collections. In an era marked by the superabundance of consumable commodities but above all of discourses and information, the spareness and precise-

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ness of their compositions and their commitment to antropofagia as a strategy of appropriation, displacement, and rereading of cultural traces remains an invaluable lesson for their readers.

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NOTES 1. Philipp Blom, To Have and to Hold (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2002). For a more extended discussion of material objects and their relation to subjectivity, see Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). 2. Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010),11. 3. In Portuguese, as in English, the term modernismo designates artists who break with the past at the beginning of the century (in Brazil, specifically the movement that gathered around the 1922 Modern Art Week), whereas in Spanish modernismo designates a previous literary movement around the end the nineteenth century. 4. In the essay that opens his What Is Literature?, Sartre writes that “the poet has withdrawn from language-instrument in a single movement. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude which considers words as things and not as signs” (Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman [New York: Harper & Row, 1965], 12). This passage was often referred to by Concrete Poets, who in their most famous manifesto define Concrete Poetry as “palavras-coisa no espaço-tempo” (Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, Teoria da poesia concreta [São Paulo: Ateliê, 2006], 216) [thing-words in timespace]. 5. Haroldo de Campos, “Preface, Serafim: Um grande não livro,” in Serafim Ponte Grande, by Oswald de Andrade (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2009), 19. 6. “Serafim: A Great Un-Book (Selections),” in Haroldo de Campos, Novas (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 212–13. 7. Augusto de Campos, Brasil Rocha Brito, Júlio Medaglia, and Gilberto Mendes, Balanço da Bossa (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1968), 163. 8. Ibid. 9. For a classical account of the place of primitivism in European avant-garde, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 10. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 460. 11. Richard Sieburth, “Benjamin the Scrivener,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 24. 12. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 2014), 46. 13. Oswald de Andrade, A utopia antropofágica (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2011), 61. 14. E. Bradford Burns provides a good summary of this point: “During those first decades [after the discovery], dyewood was an easy export since it grew abundantly along the coast from Rio Grande do Norte to Rio de Janeiro. The Crown established a monopoly over its exploitation and eagerly sold its rights to merchants. . . . The ship captains bartered with the Indians, exchanging trinkets for the brazilwood they cut. This trade was spurred by the welcome the new European textile industries accorded the red dye, and by the end of the sixteenth century about a hundred ships annually sailed from Brazil to Lisbon loaded with the wood” (A History of Brazil, 2nd ed. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], 29). 15. Andrade, A utopia, 59; Andrade, “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry,” trans. Stella M. de Sá Rego, Latin American Literary Review 14, no. 27 (1986): 184. 16. Andrade, A utopia, 61, and “Manifesto,” 185. 17. Andrade, A utopia, 63, and “Manifesto,” 186. 18. Andrade, A utopia, 61, and “Manifesto,” 184. 19. Roberto Schwartz, Que horas são? [What Time Is It?] (São Paulo: Companhia das letras, 2006), 11–12, my translation.

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20. Oswald de Andrade, Pau Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Gobo, 2010), 108. 21. Oswald de Andrade, “The Station Girls,” in The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 137. 22. Pero Vaz de Caminha, “A carta de Pero Vaz de Caminha,” Biblioteca Cervantes Virtual, http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/a-carta-de-pero-vaz-de-caminha--0/html/ffce9a9082b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_1.html (accessed August 15, 2014). 23. In the case of this title, there is also a certain degree of anachronism: the term “meninas” has a more modern ring to it than “moças,” and the French word “gare” normally designates a train station, although here it may also have the sense of a river harbor, which might be more closely related to the original context. 24. Andrade, Pau Brasil, 114. 25. “Erro de português: Quando o português chegou / Debaixo de uma bruta chuva / Vestiu o índio / Que pena! / Fosse uma manhã de sol / O índio tinha despido / O português” (Oswald de Andrade, O santeiro do mangue e outros poemas [São Paulo: Globo, 2012], 119) [The Portuguese’s mistake: When the Portuguese arrived / Under an awful rain / they dressed the indian / What a shame! / Had it been a sunny morning / The indians would have undresssed the Portuguese]. 26. Andrade, Pau Brasil, 111. 27. Vicuña and Livon-Grosman, Oxford Book, 138. 28. The original reads, “Algumas deste Reino se dão tambem nestas partes, convem a saber, muitos melões, pepinos, romãs e figos de muitas castas; muitas parreiras que dão uvas duas, tres vezes no anno, e de toda outra fruita da terra ha sempre a mesma abundancia por causa de não haver la (como digo) frios, que lhes fação nenhum perjuizo. De cidras, limões, e laranjas ha muita infinidade, porque se dão muito na terra estas arvores de espinho, e multiplicão mais que as outras. . . . Tambem ha muito páo brasil nestas Capitanias de que os mesmos moradores alcanção grande proveito” (Pero de Magalhães Gandavo, Historia da prouincia sa[n]cta Cruz a que vulgarme[n]te chamamos Brasil [Lisbon: Antonio Gonsalvez, 1576], 19) [“There are some Portuguese fruits which grow in those regions; namely, many varieties of melons, cucumbers, pomegranates, and figs of several species; there are many grape-vines which produce grapes two or three times a year: all fruits are so abundant because there are no frosts (as I have said) to do them any harm. Of cedrats, citrons, limes, lemons and oranges there is an infinite number, because these thorny trees thrive well in the country and multiply faster than others . . . . There is also much brazil-wood in these Captaincies, on which the inhabitants make a large profit”] (Cortés Society, Documents and Narratives concerning the Discovery and Conquest of Latin America [London: Forgotten Books, 2013], vol. 5, 48–49). 29. Andrade, Pau Brasil, 202. 30. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 460. 31. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 254. 32. Luiz Costa Lima, “Repensando a trajetória de Oswald,” Sopro 34 (August 2010): 2–6, http://www.culturaebarbarie.org/sopro/n34.pdf (accessed August 15, 2014). 33. Augusto de Campos, Viva vaia (São Paulo: Ateliê, 2001), 123. 34. For instance, in the following fragments: “o caos antropofágico brasileiro redestruído pela manchetomania de um anarquiteto. [. . . D]a desintegração do objeto à autoantrouropofagia semântica: moedas comidas. [. . . O]u ‘ver com olhos livres’ (oswald)” (ibid.) [The Brazilian cannibalist chaos redestroyed by the headline-mania of an anarchitect. (. . . F)rom the object’s disintegration to semantic auto-anthropogoldfagy: eaten coins. (. . . O)r “seeing with free eyes” (oswald)]. 35. As Aguilar points out, they key concept in the Concrete Poets’ relation to Oswald de Andrade’s work was antropofagia, understood as the “capacidad de incorporar los materiales más diversos a la voluntad constructiva propia del concretismo. Con esta apertura, los criterios de homogeneidad, evolución, y autonomía entran en una torsión que, ya desde mediados de la década, los hace irreconocibles” (Gonzalo Aguilar, Poesía concreta brasileña [Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo, 2003], 116) [ability to incorporate the most diverse materials to concretism’s constructive program. With this aperture, the criteria of homogeneity, evolution, and autonomy are transformed in such a way that by the mid-sixties they are unrecognizable].

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36. Augusto de Campos, interview by Gerardo Jorge, “Me he esforzado en renovarme,” Revista Ñ, March 19, 2012, http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/literatura/Augusto-CamposAire-Lyon-clip-poemas_0_665333480.html (accessed August 15, 2014). 37. See Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–23. It must be pointed out not only that Joyce was a major influence for the Concrete Poets but also that they had a sustained theoretical interest in semiotics and a fruitful dialogue with Eco over the years. In fact, Eco later admitted that Haroldo de Campos had formulated the notion of “open work” before he himself did (although they were unaware of each other’s work at the time). 38. Campos, Viva vaia, 127. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid.

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WORKS CITED Aguilar, Gonzalo. Poesía concreta brasileña: Las vanguardias en la encrucijada modernista. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2003. Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry.” Translated by Stella M. de Sá Rego. Latin American Literary Review 14, no. 27 (1986): 184–87. ———. Pau Brasil [Paris: Au sans Pareil, 1925]. São Paulo: Editora Gobo, 2010. ———. O santeiro do mangue e outros poemas. São Paulo: Globo, 2012. ———. Serafim Ponte Grande. [São Paulo: Edição Do Autor, 1933]. [São Paulo: Secretaria de Estado da Cultura de São Paulo: Globo, 1991]. São Paulo: Editora Gobo, 2009. ———. “The Station Girls.” In The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman, 137. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. A utopia antropofágica. São Paulo: Editora Gobo, 2011. Baudrillard, Jean. “The System of Collecting.” In The Cultures of Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 7–24. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Blom, Philipp. To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting. London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2002. Burns, E. Bradford. A History of Brazil. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Campos, Augusto de. Balanço da Bossa: Antologia critica da moderna musica popular brasileira. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1968. ———. “Me he esforzado en renovarme.” Interview by Gerardo Jorge, Revista Ñ, March 19, 2012. http://www.revistaenie.clarin.com/literatura/Augusto-Campos-Aire-Lyon-clip-poemas_0_665333480.html (accessed August 15, 2014). ———. Viva vaia: Poesia 1949–1979. São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2001. Campos, Augusto de, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos. Teoria da poesia concreta: Textos críticos e manifestos, 1950–1960. São Paulo: Ateliê, 2006. Campos, Haroldo de. Novas: Selected Writings. Edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. ———. “Preface, Serafim: Um grande não livro.” In Obras completas 2: Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar e Serafim Ponte Grande, by Oswald de Andrade. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1972: 99-127. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Cortés Society. Documents and Narratives concerning the Discovery and Conquest of Latin America. Vol. 5. 1922. Reprint, London: Forgotten Books, 2013. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 2014.

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Gandavo, Pero de Magalhães. Historia da prouincia sa[n]cta Cruz a que vulgarme[n]te chamamos Brasil. Lisbon: Antonio Gonsalvez, 1576. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Lima, Luiz Costa. “Repensando a trajetória de Oswald.” Sopro 34 (August 2010): 2–6. http:// www.culturaebarbarie.org/sopro/n34.pdf (accessed August 15, 2014). Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. London: Faber & Faber, 1986. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Literature? Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Schwartz, Roberto. Que horas são? São Paulo: Companhia das letras, 2006. Sieburth, Richard. “Benjamin the Scrivener.” In Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith, 13–37. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Vaz de Caminha, Pero. “A carta de Pero Vaz de Caminha.” Biblioteca Cervantes Virtua. http:// www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/a-carta-de- pero-vaz-de-caminha--0/html/ffce9a9082b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_1.html (accessed August 15, 2014). Vicuña, Cecilia, and Ernesto Livon-Grosman, eds. The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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Chapter Nine

From the Space of the Wunderkammer to Macondo’s Wonder Rooms The Collection of Marvels in Cien años de soledad

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Jerónimo Arellano

It has been repeatedly observed that writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier revisit the sixteenth-century crónicas de Indias [chronicles of the New World] in novels such as Los pasos perdidos [The Lost Steps] (1953) and Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967). 1 In these readings, the [crónicas de Indias] are generally interpreted as an oddity or quirk of early modern discourse in which the representation of the rare and wondrous predominates over the description of the regular and ordinary. Scholars of early modern culture, however, warn that we can think of these texts as deviations or anomalies only if we remove them from the context within which they take shape—that the representation of the marvelous and wondrous does in fact become institutionalized in sixteenthcentury travel writing and historiographical discourse. 2 Furthermore, looking beyond literary texts, we can argue that wonder (as an affective response) and marvels (as the objects associated with that response) also attain a privileged role in early modern material culture, as the emergence of cámaras de maravillas [cabinets of wonder] or Wunderkammern demonstrates. In a late sixteenth-century wood engraving of the interior of Ferrante Imperato’s Wunderkammer, we see four men standing in a spacious room, staring at a crocodile mounted on the ceiling (see fig. 9.1). A constellation of objects that at the time would have been considered marvelous or wondrous surround the crocodile: shells, corals, mollusks, starfish. Three of the viewers look up to take in the sight. One of them, perhaps Imperato himself, directs a 183

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pointer at the roof. The fourth visitor leans on a wall and contemplates an armoire in which more marvels and curiosities have been placed. The chamber of wonders represented here marks a turning point in the cultural history of collecting practices in Western Europe. In wonder rooms such as Imperato’s, the “collection of Worthies” of the thesaurus and studiolo gives way to a repository of articles valued for their capacity to induce wonder in the beholder. 3 Samuel Quiccheberg first describes the early modern Wunderkammer in his study of museography (1565) as a theater of the world, or theatrum mundi. 4 Three decades later, in his “A Device of the Gray’s Inn Revels” (1594), Francis Bacon advises scholars to keep a “goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion, whatsoever singularity, change, and the shuffle of things hath produced shall be sorted and included” 5 —a recommendation that underscores the popularity of the Wunderkammer as a privileged space of knowledge production at the close of the sixteenth century. 6 Silvia Spitta has suggested that the early modern Wunderkammer appears to contemporary eyes as a form of epistemological disorder akin to one that

Figure 9.1. Wood engraving, interior of Ferrante Imperato’s wonder chamber Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

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Michel Foucault identifies in the “Chinese encyclopedia” of a story by Jorge Luis Borges. 7 According to Foucault, Borges’s chimerical encyclopedia transgresses the boundaries of thought by imagining a site wherein “fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite.” “[T]hings are ‘laid,’ ‘placed,’ ‘arranged’ in sites so very different from one another,” Foucault argues, “that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all.” 8 We will return to Borges’s Wunderkammer shortly; for now, it seems crucial to insist that in early modern culture the heteroclite collections of the pan-European Wunderkammer—containing, among other items, rare “unicorn” horns, stuffed crocodiles, rare plants, miniatures, feathers, anatomical deformities in preserving jars, phosphorescent minerals, and ethnographic objects—become conventional arrangements and forms of display. It is not fortuitous that these collections gain prominence as the first phase of European colonial expansion unfolds: objects taken from colonial territories and misplaced on the epistemological table of early modern Europe create momentous lapses in understanding that the cabinets of wonders of the period attempt to negotiate. 9 As Spitta notes, “beads, tusks, coins, feathers, archaeological artifacts . . . gathered from across the Americas, as well as objects arriving from the East, were all set together on the same plane.” 10 The collection and display of particular objects as wonders or marvels, then, remains intrinsically linked to forms of colonial expropriation and appropriation. The marvels of the Wunderkammer are samples of an “absolute elsewhere” that is meant to be apprehended, conquered, and rendered visible. 11 Taking the space of the Wunderkammer into consideration, we may argue that, in its earliest phase, the world-system depends on more than concepts or ideologies—that it also involves an affective cartography in which the “outside,” or margin, is felt as a space of enchantment. I argue in this chapter that this cartography can be perceived in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad if we shift from a consideration of “the marvelous” as an abstract, decontextualized notion to a discussion of the cultural history of marvels and their trajectories as depicted in the novel. In this context, I suggest that Cien años de soledad is a narrative that not only recollects but also decollects, producing assemblages of fictitious objects that unsettle modes of experiencing feeling and ordering thought. The term decollection is not circumscribed here to a form of deconstruction. I intend this notion to gesture also toward recombination and recodification, toward the creation of new alternatives out of old practices. In García Márquez’s text, I suggest, these processes extend from the retracing of the affective cartographies implicated by the historical Wunderkammer to a consideration of literature itself as a collection of fragments. Along these lines, this chapter contributes to an exploration of an alternative perspective on collecting practices and material culture, sugges-

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tively described by María Mercedes Andrade, in the introduction to this volume, as the countering of “the usual narrative . . . that assigns Europe the role of collector and labels other subaltern cultures, such as that of Latin America, as purveyors of collectible, exotic objects.” 12 In line with essays such as Ilka Kressner’s contribution to this volume, this chapter sees the fictional reconfiguration of collecting practices as the opening of a space for a “postcolonial reinterpretation of the past” 13 to which other artists and writers from Latin America gain access to through distinct yet potentially overlapping routes.

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AFFECTIVE CARTOGRAPHIES A useful starting point for considering the trajectories of marvelous objects in Cien años de soledad is a passage in Alejo Carpentier’s “El camino de Santiago” [“The Highroad of St. James”], a story set between the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula in the early sixteenth century. Here, the story’s protagonist, having recently returned to Spain from the New World, exhibits in an alleyway outside a fairground the marvels acquired during his journey. Note that the emblematic crocodile mounted on the ceiling of Imperato’s Wunderkammer appears here as well: “[D]os caimanes rellenos de paja . . . como traídos del Cuzco . . . un mono en el hombro y un papagayo posado en la mano izquierda . . . un gran caracol rosado . . . collares de perlas melladas, piedras para quitar el dolor de cabeza, fajas de lana de vicuña, zarcillos de oropel y otras buhonerías de Potosí” 14 [Two stuffed crocodiles . . . that looked like they had been brought from Cuzco . . . a monkey on one shoulder and a pink parrot perched on his left hand . . . a large pink seashell . . . necklaces with chipped pearls, stones that could be used to cure a headache, woven belts made from vicuna wool, tinsel earrings and other hawker’s wares from Potosí]. It is precisely this figure, a character returning from the ends of the world with a bag full of marvels, that Cien años de soledad reverses in its opening passages. Reading the mirror image of the map traced in “El camino de Santiago,” Melquíades and his marvels travel from a world “out there”— nebulous, distant—to the peripheral territory of Macondo. As he travels, Melquíades cuts a path through thickets of forest, an allusion to a practice that Jacques Derrida terms arche-writing: Penetration . . . into “the lost world” . . . ; [here] one should meditate upon all of the following together: writing as the possibility of the road and of difference, the history of writing and the history of the road, of the rupture, of the via rupta, of that path that is broken, beated, fracta. . . . The silva is savage, the via rupta is written, discerned, and inscribed violently as difference . . . it is

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difficult to imagine that access to the possibility of a road-map is not at the same time access to writing. 15

If the early modern Wunderkammer attempts to make distant territories tangible and present for European audiences, the collection of marvels in Macondo traces a reverse process of decollection in which a peripheral space gathers the oddities of a distant, fugitive mainland. Instead of botanical specimens, archaeological artifacts, feathers, or snakeskins, what Melquíades brings to Macondo as maravillas [marvels] are technological artifacts: magnets, telescopes, and daguerreotype cameras. Contemplating these marvels, José Arcadio Buendía—the patriarch of a town whose location has yet to be registered on a map—reaches the conclusion that in the metropolis “across the river” astonishing events are taking place: “En el mundo están ocurriendo cosas increíbles. . . . Ahí mismo, al otro lado del río, hay toda clase de aparatos mágicos, mientras nosotros seguimos viviendo como los burros” 16 [“Incredible things are happening in the world. . . . Right there across the river there are all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like donkeys”]. 17 This epiphany sets José Arcadio off on a parodic journey of “discovery” that begins on the margins of the world—at world’s end—and ends nowhere. After traversing an “enchanted region” adjacent to Macondo, José Arcadio’s expedition reaches the nonplace of a grimy sea: “Sus sueños terminaban frente a ese mar color de ceniza, espumoso y sucio, que no merecía los riesgos de una aventura. . . . ‘¡Carajo!—gritó [José Arcadio]—Macondo está rodeado de agua por todas partes’” 18 [“His dreams ended as he faced that ashen, foamy, dirty sea, which had not merited the risks and sacrifices of the adventure. . . . ‘God damn it,’ he shouted. ‘Macondo is surrounded by water on all sides’”]. 19 As Carlos Rincón suggests, the narrative in Cien años de soledad reimagines the world-system from a vantage point that remains at all times grounded in precisely this peripheral, isolated location. 20 We can add that the decollection of marvels in Cien años de soledad overturns the relationship between center and periphery that structures the Wunderkammer as a privileged site of imperial epistemology: José Arcadio’s cabinet of technological wonders underscores the breakdown of the circuits that link the center of the world to its peripheries. But the object of enchantment itself is never left alone in the text or allowed to rest auratically at a safe distance. Instead, what we see in Cien años de soledad is a constant evisceration and rearticulation of marvels. José Arcadio Buendía, for instance, takes the aforementioned artifacts apart and puts them together again—in a wrongfully correct way—or else uses them for purposes for which they have not been designed. When Melquíades makes a public demonstration of the “magic” of the magnet, for instance,

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José Arcadio imagines that this object may be redeemed from its inherent uselessness if it is made to extract incredible quantities of gold hidden beneath the ground: “José Arcadio Buendía, cuya desaforada imaginación iba siempre más lejos que el ingenio de la naturaleza . . . pensó que sería posible servirse de esa invención inútil para desentrañar el oro de la tierra” 21 [“José Arcadio Buendía, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth”]. 22 Later on, José Arcadio imagines that a magnifying glass brought by Melquíades could be refashioned into a weapon of mass destruction. A gigantic magnifying glass, he speculates, could channel solar energy into a blazing beam of fire:

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Un mediodía ardiente hicieron una asombrosa demostración con la lupa gi gantesca: pusieron un montón de hierba seca en mitad de la calle y le prendieron fuego mediante la concentración de los rayos solares. . . . . Tratando de demostrar los efectos de la lupa en la tropa enemiga, [José Arcadio] se expuso . . . a la concentración de los rayos solares y sufrió quemaduras que se convirtieron en úlceras y tardaron mucho tiempo en sanar. 23 [A burning noonday sun brought out a startling demonstration with the gigantic magnifying glass: they put a pile of dry hay in the middle of the street and set it on fire by concentrating the sun’s rays. . . . In an attempt to show the effects of enemy troops, (José Arcadio Buendía) exposed himself to the suns rays and suffered burns that turned into sores that took a long time to heal.] 24

José Arcadio’s experiments, then, give rise to a chamber of technological forgeries, if we understand a forgery as both a falsification of the original and the creation of something new. While underscoring the material dimensions of poiesis as a form of making, these reconfigurations of objects appear to function as an allegory of the resistance of local cultures to homogenizing forces in colonial and postcolonial contexts. As Michel de Certeau notes in L’invention du quotidian [The Practice of Everyday Life], mass culture and technologies are never passively received, nor are subjects defenseless against large-scale disciplinary systems. 25 In Frank Dikötter’s words, de Certeau shows—against Foucault—that “ordinary people are not so much subjected to an insidious form of discipline but capable of resisting by everyday acts of appropriation.” 26 These antidisciplinary practices are given a precise narrative form in the recurrent imaginary permutations of technology in Macondo. Wonder and enchantment emerge at this juncture as charged, ambivalent emotions situated at the heart of a tension between homogenizing processes of technification and the subversive potential of local forms of indiscipline. In turn, these coordinates problematize the customary interpretation of technology as a purely destructive force in readings of Cien años de soledad. 27 Through the forging of foreign technologies, José Arcadio Buendía’s

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Wunderkammer of marvelous machines also inscribes strategies of resistance, ludic appropriation, and reinvention. García Márquez takes this unwriting and rewriting of technology to a hyperbolic extreme in the description of delirious artifacts, conceivable only as fictional machines. These include “una máquina de péndulo que le sirviera al hombre para volar” 28 [“a pendulum machine that would help men to fly”], 29 “la máquina múltiple que servía al mismo tiempo para pegar botones y bajar la fiebre, y el aparato para olvidar los malos recuerdos, y el emplasto para perder el tiempo” 30 [“the multiple-use machine that could be used at the same time to sew on buttons and reduce fevers, and the apparatus to make a person forget his bad memories, and a poultice to lose time”], 31 and the “diccionario giratorio” [spinning dictionary] that José Arcadio Buendía devises when Macondo is ravaged by a plague of forgetfulness:

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El artefacto se fundaba en la posibilidad de repasar todas las mañanas, y desde el principio hasta el fin, la totalidad de los conocimientos adquiridos en la vida. [José Arcadio] [l]o imaginaba como un diccionario giratorio, que un individuo situado en el eje pudiera operar mediante una manivela, de modo que en pocas horas pasaran frente a sus ojos las nociones más necesarias para vivir. 32 [The artifact was based on the possibility of reviewing every morning, from beginning to end, the totality of knowledge acquired during one’s life. (José Arcadio) conceived of it as a spinning dictionary that a person placed on the axis could operate by means of a lever, so that in very few hours there would pass before his eyes the notions most necessary for life.] 33

But why use the term maravilla to describe these fictional artifacts? And why forge these fictional objects against the background of the cultural history of marvel collections? A possible answer emerges through a consideration of the colonial roots of modernity as described by Aníbal Quijano (“Colonialidad y modernidad/ racionalidad” and “Colonialidad del poder”). 34 For Quijano, the geocultural construction of the Americas as a marginal territory constitutes one of the foundations of the processes of normalization and rationalization of modern forms of capitalism. The model of center-periphery that emerges in this process is also the axis around which the Wunderkammer is constructed: early modern collections of marvels, as noted above, entail an effort to assimilate, regulate, and contain the radical alterity of the “peripheries” of the world. Therefore, beyond a parody of colonial collecting practices, the creation of a wonder cabinet of technological forgeries produces a critique of the continuities between coloniality and modernity—a critique of the links between the construction of the colonial “outside” as an exotic wonderland and the conceptualization of the postcolonial periphery as technologically disenfranchised. As noted above, what Cien años de soledad underscores is that

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these cartographies of coloniality/modernity are not merely conceptual models—and, therefore, that the charting of a geopolitics of knowledge cannot fully dismantle them—but also involve a crucial affective dimension. 35 An emotion map of the world-system emerges here in a dual movement: first, in the retracing of trajectories of objects of enchantment from the Americas to Europe, and, second, in the reconfiguration of spaces of wonder as contested sites that may be reinvented, reconvened, and decollected.

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LOOSE PAGES AND PURPLE SCRIBBLES The story of the Wunderkammer, as narrated by cultural historians, takes the shape of a bell curve—a period of emergence and effervescence from the mid-sixteenth century to the late seventeenth century, followed by a gradual decline at the dawn of the “age of Enlightenment.” 36 At this point, it is suggested, new systems of analysis and classification break up the “shuffle of things” 37 of the Wunderkammer into the order of the modern museum. Natural and artificial objects are split into separate collections; the stuffed crocodile mounted on the ceiling of wonder chambers is transferred to a display of taxidermied animals; items previously defined as marvels are relabeled and reclassified. Unicorn horns become narwhal tusks. The chameleon loses its status of natural wonder once scientists prove that it does not feed off the air around it. 38 Long after its historical eclipse, however, the Wunderkammer experiences an afterlife in modern and contemporary culture in the hands of artists and writers who revisit its arrays in order to critique hegemonic epistemological and affective structures. In the early twentieth century, for instance, surrealist artists reassemble cabinets of wonders in the pursuit of spaces that would bring together “elements of reality belonging to categories that are so far removed from each other that reason would fail to connect them.” 39 In the late 1980s, Mario Merz installed a taxidermied crocodile on the ceiling of the Guggenheim, re-creating, according to Patrick Mauriès, “in a quite unexpected way the element that was undoubtedly the most symbolic of the curiosity cabinet . . . in the most distant, or the most real, context: the artificially low ceiling lit by neon.” 40 More recently, Mark Dion has assembled cabinets of curiosities out of urban waste, and Rosamond Purcell reproduced Ole Worm’s famous Wunderkammer on college campuses in the United States (see fig. 9.2). In Los Angeles, David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, explicitly modeled after an early modern Wunderkammer, showcases exhibits that, not unlike José Arcadio’s decollection of marvels, probe the boundaries between artistic invention and scientific fact. What is seldom noted, however, is that the afterlives of the Wunderkammer in modern and contemporary

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Figure 9.2. Neo Museum Wormianum. Installation

culture extend beyond visual culture and into literary texts. Within the latter, the afterlives of the wonder chamber give rise not to delirious or contestatory museums but to chimerical texts that recover the potential of writing as an antidisciplinary practice and as a form of disarray—the passage from Borges cited by Foucault in The Order of Things is a case in point. The story by Borges in which this passage is found, “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins” [“The Analytical Langauge of John Wilkins”] (1951), describes a chimerical system of classification that reorganizes stones according to the following categories: “comunes (pedernal, cascajo, pizarra), módicas (mármol, ámbar, coral), preciosas (perla, ópalo), transparentes (amatista, zafiro) e insolubles (hulla, greda y arsénico)” 41 [“(o)rdinary (flint, gravel, slate); intermediate (marble, amber, coral); precious (pearl, opal);

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transparent (amethyst, sapphire); and insoluble (coal, clay, and arsenic)”]. 42 Metals are also reclassified as “imperfectos (bermellón, azogue), artificiales (bronce, latón), recrementicios (limaduras, herrumbre) y naturales (oro, estaño, cobre)” 43 [“imperfect (vermillion, quicksilver); artificial (bronze, brass), recremental (filings, rust), and natural (gold, tin, copper)”], 44 and so on. The narrator in Borges’s story compares the “ambiguedades, redundancias y deficiencias” 45 [“ambiguities, redundances, and deficiencies”] 46 in Wilkins’s system to the aforementioned “Chinese encyclopedia,” titled Emporio celestial de conocimientos benévolos 47 [Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge]. 48 In this text, animal species are ordered according to the following categories:

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(a) pertenecientes al Emperador, (b) embalsamados, (c) amaestrados, (d) lechones, (e) sirenas, (f) fabulosos, (g) perros sueltos, (h) incluidos en esta clasificación, (i) que se agitan como locos, (j) innumerables, (k) dibujados con un pincel finísimo de pelo de camello, (l) etcétera, (m) que acaban de romper el jarrón, (n) que de lejos parecen moscas. 49 [(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) sucking pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.] 50

Spitta notes that Borges’s passage recalls the “experience we have today when confronted with the cabinets of wonders.” 51 The resonances of the wonder chamber in Borges’s text, however, may be established beyond a reminiscence; “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins” appears in fact to take the surrealist reinvention of the Wunderkammer as a visual grammar of the heteroclite in a new direction, suggesting that a literary fiction can also act as a space that subverts conceptual landmarks through juxtapositions of heteroclite objects. In the context of the present discussion, Borges’s Wunderkammer prompts us to attend to a neglected aspect of Cien años de soledad: the characterization of the practice of writing as a form of entropy, fragmentation, and disarray. For Roberto González Echevarría, Cien años de soledad can be thought of as an “archival fiction” where “important narrative modalities in Latin America . . . are contained and analyzed as in a kind of active memory; it is a repository of narrative possibilities.” 52 What is particularly suggestive about this reading, for our present purposes, is that it remains caught between a consideration of intertextuality as “a clash of texts . . . some of which have a molding and modeling power over others” and the figure of an Archive where such a clash of texts may be analyzed, interpreted, and—perhaps in the future, but only perhaps—dismantled. 53 Following Foucault, González

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Echevarría thinks of the masterstories collected in Cien años de soledad as the mechanisms of a process of “constraining, denying, limiting” and of writing as the handmaiden of “hegemonic discourses which oppress, watch, control.” 54 If writing is complicit with “power and officialdom” the best an “archival fiction” can hope for is critical distance and self-reflexivity—the Archive as watchtower. 55 Within these coordinates, González Echevarría interprets the figure of Melquíades as an avatar of Borges:

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Melquíades stands for Borges, the librarian and the keeper of the Archive. There is something whimsical in García Márquez’s inclusion of such a figure in the novel, but there is a good deal more. It is not difficult to fathom what this Borgesian figure means. Planted in the middle of the special abode of books and manuscripts, a reader of one of the oldest and most influential collections of stories in the history of literature, Melquíades and his archive stand for literature; more specifically, for Borges’ kind of literature: ironic, critical, a demolisher of all delusions, the sort of thing encountered at the end of the novel when Aureliano finishes translating Melquíades’ manuscript. 56

But taking the textual Wunderkammer in “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins” into consideration, we may wonder about the kind of Borges that stands in this abode and about the relationship he establishes with the texts in his possession. Is this the figure of an archivist or collector who watches his texts from a distance, or is it the librarian who forges the texts in his collection? In other words, can the writing of an archive not only recollect but also decollect? In Cien años de soledad, writing certainly appears as the “code” of an archive of masterstories—the encrypted text in Melquíades’s parchments— but it should be noted that it is also represented as an activity and practice. To the coded text in Melquíades’s parchments, then, we may juxtapose not only other images of written texts but also of writing itself, as event and procedure. This takes us away from the Archive and its keeper to the frantic movements of the characters’ hands as they write—compulsively—throughout the text and to the bathrooms and storerooms where these scenes of writing take place in secret: Aureliano scribbling nonsensical verses “en los ásperos pergaminos que le regalaba Melquíades, en las paredes del baño, en la piel de sus brazos” 57 [“on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms”] 58 ; Amaranta hand-writing “cartas febriles . . . dirigidas y nunca enviadas a Pietro Crespi” 59 [feverish letters . . . addressed and never sent to Pietro Crespi] 60 ; Pietro Crespi hiding at the back of his store to write “esquelas desatinadas” 61 [“wild notes”] 62 that no one reads or understands. One of the crucial insights in González Echevarría’s reading is that, given that Cien años de soledad recurrently points to its condition as a written text, we should pay close attention to the representation of writing and textual

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repositories in the novel. And yet, an interpretation of writing as a disciplinary code obscures the minor scenes of writing in which movement and impulse are privileged over decoding and interpretation. Paradoxically perhaps, the representation of writing in these latter scenes underscores its nonhermeneutic dimensions—the fact that writing can operate as a nervous impulse and bodily movement that is always “more” or “less” but never quite equivalent to representation. In turn, these scenes of kinetic writing lead us to a repository where a collection of texts is represented as a heap or a lump, as an archive without an arché: “libros . . . puestos en desorden” 63 [“books . . . placed in disorder”]. 64 The Catalonian librarian in charge of this messy archive, described toward the end of the novel, is seated at a table, wearing only underwear, feverishly covering loose pages with delirious purple scribbles:

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Más que una librería, aquella parecía un basurero de libros usados, puestos en desorden en los estantes mellados por el comején, en los rincones amelazados de telaraña, y aun en los espacios que debieron destinarse a los pasadizos. En una larga mesa, también agobiada de mamotretos, el propietario escribía una prosa incansable, con una caligrafía morada, un poco delirante, y en hojas sueltas de cuaderno escolar. Estaba en calzoncillos, empapado de sudor, y no desatendió la escritura para ver quién había llegado. 65 [More than a bookstore, it looked like a dump for used books, which were placed in disorder on the shelves chewed by termites, in the corners sticky with cobwebs, and even in the spaces that were supposed to serve as passageways. On a long table, also heaped with old books and papers, the proprietor was writing tireless prose in purple letters, somewhat outlandish, and on the loose pages of a school notebook. He was wearing short pants and soaking in perspiration, and he did not stop his writing to see who had come in.] 66

Writing, then, once again as a nervous activity and as a compulsive bodily impulse but with one crucial difference: now this form of writing is linked to the heteroclite order of an archive in ruins. The implications of this form of writing for the decollecting practices at work in Cien años de soledad are outlined later in the text. Wishing to translate the delirious writing of the librarian into Spanish, Alfonso, a minor character in the novel, places a few of the Catalonian’s loose pages inside his pocket. In the depths of Alfonso’s pocket, the Catalonian’s writings mysteriously disappear in a mess of “recortes de periódicos y manuales de oficios raros” 67 [“newspaper clippings and manuals for strange trades”]. 68 When the librarian hears that his writing has mysteriously vanished inside Alfonso’s pocket, he does not become alarmed. Instead, he smiles and states that literature is created precisely so that it may lose its way among fragments: “aquel era el destino natural de la literatura” 69 [“it was the natural destiny of literature”]. 70

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The point of rescuing these minor scenes of writing and messy textual repositories is to insinuate the possibility that the relationship between the masterstories that González Echevarría poignantly identifies may be reconceived as a libidinal economy of assemblage and entropy, of multiplication, fragmentation, and disarray, of mutual contamination and ruination. Evoking a literature made up of fragments and minor genres—the literature of Roberto Arlt or perhaps the “patchwork archive” of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project—this pocket filled with “recortes de periódicos y manuales de oficios raros” allows us to reconceive the clash of texts in Cien años de soledad as an assemblage of fragments. The exploration of early modern collecting practices in Cien años de soledad, I have argued in the first section, gives rise to a decollection of both concrete spaces (the historical Wunderkammer) and the system within which they take shape (the affective cartography of coloniality/modernity). But this practice of decollection through writing can also turn or coil back into the practice of writing itself, as Borges’s passage reveals. For a visual artist, the re-creation of a wonder chamber in the early twentieth century or in the present day produces an alternative space that subverts the way art (Merz, Dion), natural history (Purcell), or scientific information (Wilson) is organized and displayed. For a writer, a decollecting practice such as those noted here gives rise to alternative textual enclaves. In the latter case, the delirious museum gives way to an archive of fragments (García Márquez) or an impossible encyclopedia (Borges). The question of whether we can establish a relationship between the cultural history of the Wunderkammer—explicitly invoked in García Márquez’s novel but not in Borges’s short story—and these chimerical texts turns on issues of recontextualization, misreading, and interpretation. Is Borges in fact aware of the surrealist Wunderkammer as he devises the heteroclite arrangements of his Chinese encyclopedia? Does the science/ fictional decollection of marvels in Cien años de soledad inform the idea of writing as an assemblage outlined above? Perhaps the answers to these questions are somewhat inconsequential if we extend the lesson that an artist such as Wilson or Dion extracts from the Wunderkammer to the writing of literary and cultural criticism. If we think of the arrangement of the Wunderkammer as a critical practice, then the relationship between the transfiguration of the Wunderkammer and the notion of writing as assemblage in Cien años de soledad may be seen particularly fitting because it is ill-fitting, and fertile because of its capacity to introduce an array of dissonances within a corpus of transhistorical resonances. More generally, as far as literary and cultural criticism is concerned, could it be in fact considered of value to strive for the construction of a table or ground on which “it is impossible to find a place of residence” for objects or texts or “define a common locus beneath them all”? 71 Is Foucault’s commentary on

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Borges’s passage, in other words, a lesson in comparative literary and media analysis for which the arrays of the historical Wunderkammer provide a model? But returning to Cien años de soledad one last time, we should note, in closing, that however we choose to define the relationship between the literary transfiguration of the Wunderkammer in the novel and the representation of writing as a form of disarray, these aspects of the novel outline a particular predicament that distinguishes García Márquez’s novel from Wilson’s wonder cabinet or Merz’s installation. In the latter two cases, the confrontation with hegemonic organizational models and entrenched politics of display through a recovery of the Wunderkammer leaves little room for vacillation. As figures of un-self-conscious negativity, the value of these interventions is not only that they unsettle familiar ways of thinking—this is evident—but that they confront reified structures of feeling. This is what Foucault has in mind when, prior to his celebration of the “shattering” of intellectual structures in Borges’s passage, he speaks of a “strange laughter” that the passage incites in the reader, disclosing in this sense an affective and physiological response that resists conceptual assimilation. In Cien años de soledad, however, the potential of a libidinal form of writing that produces particular affective responses—wonder, ravishment, strange laughter—is counterpointed by a retracing of the cultural history of such responses in the context of the colonial and postcolonial Americas. Contemporary artist-scholar Silke Dettmers speaks of the wonder chamber as a space that opens a “multitude of possibilities”; 72 she speaks of the experience of wonder itself as a necessity. Cien años de soledad, on the other hand, retraces in relation to the Wunderkammer and its multiple possibilities an affective cartography of coloniality/modernity in which wonder and enchantment are mobilized as part of systemic domination. Within Cien años de soledad, then, an awareness of the interweaving of the management of emotion (Elias) and the production of space (Lefebvre) in the Americas construes the spaces of enchantment in the novel as haunted, intrinsically conflicted domains. It is precisely because of the existence of these tensions that socalled magical realism in Latin America must be distinguished from the “ethnographic surrealisms” of the West. In Cien años de soledad, the reconstruction of these affective cartographies and José Arcadio’s decollections of objects begin with the promise of forceful forging or rewriting that is never entirely fulfilled. In the end, the Wunderkammer of fictional technologies in Cien años de soledad devolves into a collection of malfunctioning machinery. 73 Surrounded by his broken marvels, José Arcadio comes to see the flow of time in Macondo as a failed mechanism: “¡la máquina del tiempo se ha descompuesto!” 74 [“the time machine has broken”]. 75 Then again, as the characters of García Márquez’s

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novel make abundantly clear, there is no artifact or machine—broken or not—that cannot be properly unfixed.

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NOTES 1. Iris M. Zavala, “One Hundred Years of Solitude as Chronicle of the Indies,” in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, ed. Gene H. Bell-Villada (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 109–26; Selma Calasans Rodrigues, “Cien años de soledad y las crónicas de la conquista,” Revista de la Universidad de México 38, no. 23 (March 1983): 13–16; Mario Vargas Llosa, “Questions of Conquest: What Columbus Wrought and What He Did Not,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1990, 45–53; Claire Emilie Martín, Alejo Carpentier y las crónicas de Indias (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1995); Samuel Serrano, “Las crónicas de Indias, precursoras del realismo mágico,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 672 (2006): 7–15. 2. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Jonathan P. A. Sell, Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–1613 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 3. Philipp Blom points out that “the programme and structure” of the medieval treasury and the late medieval studiolo were fundamentally the same: to assemble a collection of precious and valuable objects that reinforced the social status and prestige of the collector (To Have and to Hold [London: Penguin, 2003], 16–18). “The overwhelming curiosity that made collectors [in the late sixteenth century] hunt not for what was beautiful or emblematic but what was strange and incomprehensible,” Blom indicates, “was still far away” (ibid., 18). Other studies of collecting practices in the early modern period describe a similar transition; see, for example, Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities (Cambridge: Polity Press; Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990); R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr, Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 4. Patrick Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 23. 5. Francis Bacon, “A Device of the Gray’s Inn Revels,” in The Major Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 155. 6. Mauriès notes, “In about 1550, the word Kunstkammer (‘chamber of art’) appeared in German, to be joined soon afterwards by Wunderkammer (‘chamber of marvels’). . . . Quiccheberg uses both terms . . . Kunstkammer, that is, a close chamber filled with objects fashioned with art and Wunderkammer, that is, a collection of marvellous things (id est miraculosarum rerum promptuarium)” (Cabinets, 50). 7. Silvia Spitta, Misplaced Objects (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 6. 8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2002), xvii–xviii. 9. See Spitta, Misplaced Objects, 3-5. 10. Spitta, Misplaced Objects, 6, emphasis in the original. 11. Philipp Blom, To Have and to Hold, 15–16; Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities, 12; Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), 77. 12. María Mercedes Andrade, introduction in this volume. 13. Ilka Kressner, chapter 10 in this volume. 14. Alejo Carpentier, “El camino de Santiago,” in Guerra del tiempo y otros relatos (Mexico City: Compañía General de Ediciones, 1958), 86. 15. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 108. 16. Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (Madrid: Cátedra, 1986), 90. 17. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabasa (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 8. 18. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 96. 19. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 12. 20. Carlos Rincón, “Posmodernismo, poscolonialismo y los nexos cartográficos del Realismo mágico,” Neue Romania 16 (1995), 206.

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21. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 82. 22. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 2. 23. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 83–84. 24. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 3. 25. Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1980). 26. Frank Dikötter, “Objects and Agency,” in History and Material Culture, ed. Karen Harvey (London: Routledge, 2009), 160. 27. It is customary for magic and technology to be thought of as binary opposites in analyses of Cien años de soledad. Jane Robinett argues, for instance, that “García Márquez’s vision of technology is a dark one that points up clearly the kinds of traps technology builds for those who become too dependent on it. . . . Against this perception is set an older view, one that insists on the existence and the value of magic, and the primacy of relationships between human beings and the natural world . . . technology is destructive of magic because it separates human beings from nature” (This Rough Magic [New York: Peter Lang, 1994], 80–96). Similar arguments have been pursued by Jerry Hoeg, “The Social Imaginary/Symbolic,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, no. 4 (1997): 95–110, and Brian Conniff, “The Dark Side of Magical Realism: Science, Oppression, and Apocalypse in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, ed. Gene H. Bell-Villada (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 139–52. 28. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 172. 29. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 78. 30. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 100. 31. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 16. 32. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 139. 33. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 48. 34. Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina,” in Colonialidad del saber y eurocentrismo, ed. Edgardo Lander (Buenos Aires: UNESCO-CLACSO, 2000), 201–46; “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad,” Perú Indigena 13, no. 29 (1992): 11–20. 35. Walter D. Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (2002): 57–96. 36. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities. 37. Bacon, “A Device of the Gray’s Inn Revels,” 55. 38. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 330–31. 39. André Breton, “On Surrealism in Its Living Works,” in Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 302. According to Mauriès, surrealist culture rediscovers “all the variables of the culture of curiosities” of the early modern period “in order to liberate their potential value” (Cabinets of Curiosities, 217). Yet this rediscovery also produces forms of “ethnographic surrealism” in which non-Western cultures and their artifacts are once again mapped out as peripheral sources of enchantment. Against readings that tend to see “magical realism” as part of these exoticizing tendencies (Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999], 76), it is crucial to note how specific texts classified under this problematic rubric confront the distinctions between “inside” and “outside,” center and periphery, on which ethnographic surrealism depends. In a novel such as Cien años de soledad, the space of enchantment in itself emerges as an ambivalent domain linked to the geocultural articulation of coloniality. A recognition of this aspect of the cultural history of wonder and enchantment is entirely absent in the surrealist reinventions of the Wunderkammer. 40. Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities, 232. This emblematic object also appears in Cien años de soledad. When passing through the “enchanted region” outside Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía remembers that in this territory “en épocas pasadas . . . Sir Francis Drake se daba al deporte de cazar caimanes a cañonazos para llevárselos a la reina Isabel” (García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 92) [in times past . . . Sir Francis Drake had gone crocodile hunting . . .

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he repaired them and stuffed with straw to bring to Queen Elizabeth (One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa, 10)]. 41. Jorge Luis Borges, “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” in Otras inquisiciones (Madrid: Alianza, 1997), 157. 42. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” in Other Inquisitions, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 103. 43. Borges, “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” 157. 44. Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” 103. 45. Borges, “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” 157. 46. Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” 103. 47. Borges, “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” 157. 48. Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” 103. 49. Borges, “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” 157–58. 50. Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” 103. 51. Spitta, Misplaced Objects, 6. 52. Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3. 53. Ibid., 10. 54. Ibid., 9. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 23. 57. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 158–59. 58. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 65. 59. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 162. 60. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 68. 61. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 207. 62. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 109. 63. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 490. 64. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 366. 65. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 490. 66. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 366. 67. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 527. 68. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 400. 69. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 527–28. 70. García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude, 400. 71. Foucault, Order of Things, xvii–xviii. 72. Silke Dettmers, “On the Necessity of Wonder,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 7, no. 1 (2008): 42. 73. García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, 154–55, 171–72. 74. Ibid., 172. 75. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 400.

WORKS CITED Avelar, Idelber. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Bacon, Francis. “A Device of the Gray’s Inn Revels.” In The Major Works of Francis Bacon, edited by Brian Vickers, 154–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999. Blom, Philipp. To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting. London: Penguin, 2003. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” In Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, 101–5 Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.

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———. “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins.” In Otras inquisiciones, 154–61. Madrid: Alianza, 1997. Calasans Rodrigues, Selma. “Cien años de soledad y las crónicas de la conquista.” Revista de la Universidad de México 38, no. 23 (March 1983): 13–16. Carpentier, Alejo. “El camino de Santiago.” In Guerra del tiempo y otros relatos, 73–114. Mexico City: Compañía General de Ediciones, 1958. Certeau, Michel de. L’invention du quotidien. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1980. Conniff, Brian. “The Dark Side of Magical Realism: Science, Oppression, and Apocalypse in One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 139–52. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Dettmers, Silke. “On the Necessity of Wonder: How to Explain an Artwork to a Committee.” Journal of Visual Art Practice 7, no. 1 (2008): 37–55. Dikötter, Frank. “Objects and Agency: Material Culture and Modernity in China.” In History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, edited by Karen Harvey, 158–72. London: Routledge, 2009. Dion, Mark. Cabinet of Curiosities. Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, February 24–May 27, 2001. Exhibition. http://www.weisman.umn.edu/exhibits/Dion/index.html (accessed October 10, 2008). Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. 2 vols. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. Evans, R. J. W. [Robert John Weston], and Alexander Marr. Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2002. García Márquez, Gabriel. Cien años de soledad. Madrid: Cátedra, 1986. ———. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabasa. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. González Echevarría, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Hoeg, Jerry. “The Social Imaginary/Symbolic: Technology and Latin American Literature.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30, no. 4 (1997): 95–110. Imperato, Ferrante. Historia naturale di Ferrante Imperato napolitano: Nella quale ordinatamente si tratta della diversa condition di minere, pietre pretiose, & altre curiosità : con varie historie di piante, & animali, sin’hora non date in luce. Venetia: Presso Combi, & La Noù, 1672. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Martín, Claire Emilie. Alejo Carpentier y las crónicas de Indias: Orígenes de una escritura americana. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1995. Mauriès, Patrick. Cabinets of Curiosities. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Mignolo, Walter D. “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (2002): 57–96. Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Polity Press; Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Purcell, Rosamond. Neo Museum Wormianum. 2005. Installation. In Rosamond Purcell: Two Rooms. Exhibition. Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA.

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Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina.” In Colonialidad del saber y eurocentrismo, edited by Edgardo Lander, 201–46. Buenos Aires: UNESCOCLACSO, 2000. ———. “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad.” Perú Indigena 13, no. 29 (1992): 11–20. Rincón, Carlos. “Posmodernismo, poscolonialismo y los nexos cartográficos del Realismo mágico.” Neue Romania 16 (1995): 193–210. Robinett, Jane. This Rough Magic: Technology in Latin American Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Sell, Jonathan P. A. Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–1613. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Serrano, Samuel. “Las crónicas de Indias, precursoras del realismo mágico.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 672 (2006): 7–15. Spitta, Silvia. Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Vargas Llosa, Mario. “Questions of Conquest: What Columbus Wrought and What He Did Not.” Harper’s Magazine,December 1990,. 45–53. Weschler, Lawrence. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995. Worm, Ole. Museum Wormianum. Seu historia rerum rariorum, tam naturalium, quam artificialium, tam domesticarum, quam exoticarum, quae Hafniae Danorum in aedibus authoris servantur. Adornata ab Olao Worm. Lugduni Batavorum [Leiden]: Apud Iohannem Elsevirium, 1655. Zavala, Iris M. “One Hundred Years of Solitude as Chronicle of the Indies.” In Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada, 109–26. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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Chapter Ten

Collecting Revisited (and Left Behind) The Treasure Chambers in Ruy Guerra’s Eréndira and Portugal S.A.

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Ilka Kressner

Collecting is a prominent activity in Latin American films that deal with the legacy of the colonial past. Material culture, which was central to the manifestations and performances of colonialism, is equally vital to a postcolonial reinterpretation of that past. Many films revisit the colonial times with a focus on collected things belonging to a dominant social class: we might think, for instance, of the collections of clocks, silverware, and jewelry in Humberto Solás’s Cecilia [Cecilia] (Cuba, 1982), the assemblage of women’s luxury accessories in the nineteenth-century hacienda in María Luisa Bemberg’s Camila [Camila] (Argentina, 1984), or the flamboyant exhibition of books and material goods in Ruy Guerra’s Fábula de la bella palomera [The Fable of the Beautiful Pigeon Fancier] (Brazil/Spain, 1988). Other films underscore contemporary neoimperialist inclinations, again expressed through belongings. Gerardo Chijona’s Adorables mentiras [Adorable Lies] (1992, Cuba), Jorge Gaggero’s Cama adentro [Live-in Maid] (Argentina, 2004), José Luis García Agraz’s Salón México [Salon Mexico] (Mexico, 1995), and Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga [The Swamp] (Argentina, 2001) present examples of collections of a consumer elite at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Mozambique-born Brazilian director Ruy Guerra’s filmography is a particularly rich source of artistic elaborations on collecting; it spans a wide spectrum of human interactions with commodities in postcolonial contexts. In this study, I propose to analyze the practice of collecting things in Guerra’s films Eréndira [Erendira] (1983) and Portugal S.A. [Portugal Corp.] 203

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(2004). 1 The presentations of collections in the two works allow me to explore diverse ideological implications of the activity. While Eréndira centers, on the one hand, on an obsessive accumulating and, on the other, a rejection of any material possession, Portugal S.A. presents the collection as a discourse in the Foucauldian sense, a sequence of relations of power, which is made—and can therefore be unmade, as Guerra will emphasize—in specific spatiotemporal contexts. In colonial Europe, the collection of curiosities celebrated the encounter with the New World and indirectly contributed to the ongoing aspirations of empire. The colonized other was an object of study; consequently, the First World visitor assumed the role of the active learner. For the collector, the private museum was a signifier of magnificence and “domination of rare and precious things.” 2 Furthermore, it displayed a desire for self-perpetuation through accumulation and classification. But what happens if the collectors are from colonized or formerly colonized countries? In which ways can repetition of a practice in a new context modify the structures that are being replicated? The relations toward former models of collecting are manifold; they may range from an imitating attitude to a forthright refusal of the activity. Collecting may also be understood as a redemptive gesture, as María Mercedes Andrade has explained in the introduction of this volume. It can further be an inclusive practice of an absorption of the remains of the former power in line with Oswaldo de Andrade’s theory of cultural cannibalism. As Rolena Adorno remarks, referring to the broader context of postcolonial cultural reactions to a former model, such an anthropophagous performance may result in “construcciones híbridas nuevas que son mayores que la suma de sus partes y fuentes multiculturales” 3 [new hybrid constructions that surpass the sum of their parts and multicultural sources]. I see examples of such a surplus value in the hybrid, postcolonial presentations of collections in Guerra’s films. The representation of a collection in a new context, informed by a metacritical discussion of its different meanings, opens up a terrain for comparisons and calls for diverse and situational interpretations. The personal archive, filled with objects from other places and times, is in itself ambiguous. As Aleida Assmann reminds us, the private collection states and generates power. 4 One person has the means, time, and experience to select, arrange, and (re-)visit a particular space, carved out from the common sites of social interaction. But critics also elaborate on the feeling of insecurity as a motivation for collecting and detect an urge to build a place of inner control in order to fight a chaotic and absurd outside. In this line of thought, a collection reveals a fear of transience and a void in the life of the collector. According to Assmann, the endeavor of excessive collecting is “bound up with the view that history has reached a standstill, at which point the feeling grows that everything has happened before and can be quoted at

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will.” 5 In such a context, collecting signals a nostalgic or desperate attempt to break the spell of an inhuman arbitrariness. In his Arcades Project, this monumental and encyclopedic archive of quotes, thought images, and descriptions of material things on the verge of disappearing, Walter Benjamin presents two radically opposed meanings of the practice of collecting: on the one end of the spectrum, following Assmann’s interpretation, he states (quoting the surrealist Paul Morand) that “the need to accumulate is a sign of coming death for people as for societies.” 6 Yet Benjamin also redeems the activity by pointing out that it “is an urphenomenon of studying” 7 and that “in collecting the important thing is that the object is taken out of all the original functions of its use.” 8 He emphasizes that the collection, a world in miniature, wrests an object from its context and reorganizes, resemanticizes it according to a different rationality. A new arrangement can “emancipate” an object from its former context without obliterating that context. In this way, the collection may spark curiosity in the observer. It can even become a “pendant to an allegorical fragmentation.” 9 Although Guerra’s films rarely present such positive examples of the practice of collecting, they underscore the semantic polyvalence of the activity. While Eréndira is based on the juxtaposition of opposite examples of collecting (obsessive accumulation versus radical antimaterialist) on a single narrative level, Portugal S.A. operates on different levels and presents cases in point, together with critical metadiscourses about the practice. Through the emphasis on discursivity as a set of shifting cultural practices, Guerra’s second film under consideration underscores the constructedness and therefore changeability of these discourses of collecting. Guerra is known primarily for his innovative work in the Brazilian Cinema novo movement of the 1960s and 1970s. 10 His films, such as Os cafajestes [The Hustlers] (1962), Os fuzis [The Guns] (1964), and Sweet Hunters (1969), have been instrumental for the development of contemporary Brazilian cinema. 11 While his early works, with their frequent mixing of documentary and fictional modes of representation, attest to a neorealist inspiration, his works from the 1980s to the turn of the century, such as Eréndira (1983) and Estorvo [Turbulence] (2000), draw on magic and fantastic elements. With Portugal S.A. (2004), Guerra changes his filmic language once more and portrays a story in a stylish real-life setting that is similar to mainstream Western visual aesthetics. Despite their narrative and thematic heterogeneity, his up to now twenty-two films, made in Africa, Europe, and South America, are all uncompromisingly political. 12 They delve into the causes of social and economic injustice and denounce manipulation and exploitation, as, for instance, violence of the urban subworld (Os cafajestes), paramilitary aggression (Os fuzis), or blackmail and corruption (Portugal S.A.). Collectables may be classic collector’s items (silverware, books, paintings, statues, etc.) or coveted fetish objects (cars, guns, money, books, or jewelry).

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Guerra’s Eréndira (1983) is an adaptation of García Márquez’s “La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada” [“The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother”] from 1972. 13 Based on a real incident, which García Márquez had heard of or witnessed, 14 the short story develops a scene that he had already included in Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967). 15 In the third chapter of the novel, Aureliano Buendía meets a young, nameless prostitute whose fate is highly similar to Eréndira’s: “Dos años antes, muy lejos de allí, [la joven] se había quedado dormida sin apagar la vela. . . . Desde entonces la abuela la llevaba de pueblo en pueblo, acostándola por 20 centavos para pagarse el valor de la casa incendiada” 16 [“Two years before, far away from there, she had fallen asleep without putting out the candle. . . . Since then her grandmother carried her from town to town, putting her to bed for twenty cents in order to make up the value of the burned house”]. 17 Guerra’s free cinematographic postfabulation Eréndira is the result of a joint venture with the editor/cutter Kenouth Feltier and García Márquez himself, who wrote the script for the Mexican–French–German coproduction. 18 The opening image of the film shows two tombstones with the written names “AMADÍS EL GRANDE” and “AMADÍS EL HIJO” [AMADIS THE GREAT, AMADIS THE SON], surrounded by a wasteland of sand, pebbles, and rocks. The shot is accompanied by the sound of wind and of clinking glass. Guerra begins the narration of exploitation and obsessive collecting with a reference to human transience. The names of Eréndira’s father and grandfather underscore the symbolic death of colonial endeavors. 19 In the next sequence, the structure slowly alternates. The grains turn into soap bubbles in a bathtub. The bubbles begin to move and bulge, and the back of the grandmother (played by Irene Papas) surfaces from below. The following scenes show the interior of her over-ornamented house with statuettes, mirrors, portraits, antique furniture, crystal chandeliers, oriental rugs, dried flowers, velvet draperies, and exquisite tableware. This juxtaposition of the spatial opposites of a limitless desert and the grandmother’s crowded treasure chamber will be recurrent throughout the film. 20 Collection becomes a means to repel the void, perceived as a threat. “Freudian psychoanalysis,” writes Jacques Derrida accordingly in Archive Fever, “proposes a new theory of the archive: it takes into account a topic and a death drive without which there would be no . . . desire or . . . possibility for the archive.” 21 However, as Derrida points out, the obsessive remembering and collecting, paradoxically, “incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory as mnēme or anamnēsis, that is, the archive, the documentary or monumental apparatus . . . supplement or memorandum. . . . The archive takes place at the . . . breakdown of . . . memory.” 22 The names of the dead, the origin of the family, should guarantee perpetuation. Yet, following Derrida, contrary to

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the grandmother’s attempts, they only underscore the lack of a secure origin and allude to annihilation. 23 The film camera slowly moves over the details of this bizarre abundance of objects in the house. 24 Sometimes it zooms in on them to such a degree that the viewers are unable to determine what they are. In addition to the extreme close-up shots, the camera is positioned high above the ceiling, presenting the room as a huge container of indistinguishable things. Both camera positions run counter to our viewing habits. Either too close or too distant from the objects, the film lens presents the materiality of the things as a visually overwhelming mass for the viewers. The film’s visual abundance conveys the grandmother’s horror vacui. Her anxiety is first the result of her struggle against the surrounding desert. Furthermore, the profusion of objects is the product of her “horror” to face the possible “void” of her own solitary life. The obsessive accumulation of commodities reveals the solitude and underscores the ultimate elusiveness of the place and hence its inhabitant’s constant disquiet. 25 The house will not provide appropriate shelter. The invisible wind of change has infiltrated its confines and makes the objects move according to its will. As it increases, the glass pieces tinkle, the fabrics and fringes move, the chandelier falls down, and the flames set the curtains on fire. After their home has burned down, the grandmother and Eréndira (Claudia Ohana) embark on their travel, together with numerous remains of the house, including the two coffins of the Amadises and a life-size marble statue of Aphrodite.

Figure 10.1.

Jacinto visiting Boaventura’s stables

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Death and the fetish of the inanimate are a constant presence of the living in Guerra’s version of the story. From now on, the characters will be in motion until the end of the film. Eréndira and the grandmother travel through nameless deserts in search of suitors for the young prostitute, who soon becomes the object of desire of countless men waiting in long, serpentine lines to enter her tent. She meets Ulises, a blond, blue-eyed adolescent who desperately and fruitlessly loves and tries to free her. As Eréndira’s exploitation continues, the tent becomes increasingly embellished, and the cortege of indigenous carriers increases. The end of the film shows the grandmother at the height of her material splendor and dominance in a flamboyant, multistoried red tent. The camera focuses on how she counts her money, plays the grand piano, or lies on a canopy bed similar to the one at the beginning of the film. The collections of mantel clocks and statues display her gilded existence, based on exploitation. The grandmother’s attitude to her servant/sex slave remains unchanged: besides giving orders, she is lost in her solipsistic reveries. Throughout the film, accumulation clearly thwarts argumentation. In an attempt to counter the power of the inanimate and the peril of transience, the grandmother uses yet another strategy besides obsessively collecting and ostentatiously displaying inanimate things. She also transforms her body and the body of her granddaughter into commodities, accumulated in time. The film portrays in detail how the characters bathe, dress, and put on their makeup. The lens lingers on the faces that become mask-like at the end of the process. Guerra puts these scenes with the grandmother’s and Eréndira’s making themselves up next to close-ups on the statues’ faces and moments where the girl winds up the many watches or dusts off the statues and neoclassical columns in the tent. I read this reification of the human body as an attempt to escape from death by mimicking it. Yet again, the grandmother will succumb to the “void” in her life, lurking beyond splendid clockworks or pearl barrettes. The private collection in the intérieur of the tent, built in a desert of no name, will finally dismantle her spatial authority. Eréndira becomes active only after the concluding battle, when her dead grandmother and exhausted lover lie on the ground. Without hesitation, she runs out of the tent, across the beach, to the dunes. Significantly, the film ends with the protagonist’s rejection of a disquieting horror vacui in the grandmother’s house toward a state that I would call an “amor vacui.” The camera shows the girl’s back, from Ulises’s point of view. As she disappears in the distance, her off-scene voice comments, “Iba corriendo contra el viento, más veloz que un venado, y ninguna voz de ese mundo me podía detener” [I was running into the wind, swifter than a deer, and no voice of this world could stop me]. She does not leave footprints. At the sites that her feet touched appear red rose blossoms. After a few seconds, the ground becomes sandy colored again. A strong wind is blowing. The final shot of the film

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shows the dunes without any trace of her. 26 Guerra uses a variety of cinematographic devices to convey the idea of a spatial beyond. The camera remains at a fixed position while Eréndira runs out of focus. Her farewell to the audience comes from an indeterminable space. Since her body has disappeared, her voice is literally “off” the screen. At the end, the viewers are left with an uninhabited landscape. The sound of the wind and the trickling sand remind them that the shapes of the dunes are only momentary. Guerra’s Eréndira does not leave any physical or acoustic remainder. The former subaltern actively chooses not to speak to or about the oppressor and does not impose authority through her own voice. Her last utterance and subsequent silencing allude to her transition to an undefinable site beyond common spatiality. The audience cannot trace her future migration. The body and voice have left the screen and abandoned the very concepts of subjugation and material confinement. On the intradiegetic level, the collection is presented in negative terms as the result of an obsessive accumulation that affirms a neoimperialistic power. Guerra’s Eréndira leaves it behind in order to free herself. Yet the viewers are somehow left behind as well, or in between the ruins of the alluring treasure chambers and the radically transitory site of the desert. Walter Benjamin once again might help to understand such a state in between the materialist collection and the void. In his essay “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin reads the figure of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus as the personification of the “Angel of History”: “His eyes are wide open, mouth agape, wings spread. The angel of history must look like that. His face is turned toward the past. . . . The storm from Paradise drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. That which we call progress is this storm.” 27 Guerra presents the seductive, distorting, and ultimately repressive power of the collection, just to pull his audience out of the film and out of the ruins of a particular past. The viewers find themselves in a position similar to that of Benjamin’s angel, blown away from the grandmother’s treasure chamber of exploitation, yet not entirely in a new space like the protagonist. What they gain in such an in-between space is a critical reflection on the function of the collection as a means of control and a heightened awareness of their momentary site of transition. The political thriller Portugal S.A. displays a markedly different aesthetics to Eréndira. In this film, Guerra reverses the classical vector of the colonialist power scheme: instead of leaving the metropolis for the colony, the neoimperialist as collector comes (returns) to Portugal from Brazil. 28

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Figure 10.2.

Ilka Kressner

Padre Francisco’s chess game

Set in Portugal at the turn of the twenty-first century, the plot centers on a politicoeconomic scandal of a nationwide repercussion. Alexandre Boaventura (Henrique Viana) is an entrepreneur who had formerly been aligned with António de Oliveira Salazar’s half-century regime. After the Carnation Revolution in 1974, his possessions were confiscated. He emigrated to Brazil, where he created a new business empire of a vast scale. A Brazilian citizen, he returns to Portugal after some twenty-five years to reconstruct the recently regained “Grupo Boaventura.” Now the government supports his endeavor as a national cause, given the threat of acquisition of holdings of the National Bank by Spanish investors, which only the magnate seems to be able to prevent. Yet Boaventura’s underlying motif is vengeance. He is stopped from selling off the newly acquired holdings to the Spaniards only by his chief commissioner, Jacinto Pereira Lopez (Diogo Infante). On the background of this political power struggle, the film focuses on Jacinto’s conflicts to satisfy the vested interests of his boss and of his six friends, who all hold influential

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positions in the Portuguese society: that of the prime minister, the leader of the political opposition party, the head of a major labor union, a journalist, a priest who is the trustee of a large economic-financial group, and, finally, Jacinto’s former lover Fátima Rosende (Cristina Câmara), now the boss of a brokerage on the verge of bankruptcy. Portugal S.A. unfolds as a tale of struggle for power that culminates in Jacinto’s decision to put an end to his dependence on others and follow his own ambitions. He ensnares his friends’ different strategic plans, publicly denounces his boss’s breach of promise, and ends up becoming the new prime minister himself after the former minister’s forced resignation. He even gets back together with Fátima. However, underneath the seductive images and apparently happy ending of the film lurks Guerra’s bleak message of the perils of perpetuation of repressive structures of control: the protagonist was able to outsmart the wielders of power only because he had learned his lessons and applied their selfish rules. 29 The collections in the film are mostly Boaventura’s. His vast house with balustrades, large inner patios, and massive terraces would doubtlessly leave any owner of a colonial estate filled with envy. He possesses a stable of thoroughbred racing horses and pedigree dogs, which he shows to Jacinto, while he lectures on his philosophy of entrepreneurship (see fig. 10.1). He carefully stages his employee’s visits and orchestrates his craving for power through the display of commodities. Other objects he collects and consumes are his Havana cigars stored in a massive palisander case. Significantly, in contrast to Boaventura, most other characters either do not smoke or, as in the case of Jacinto, are repeatedly portrayed lighting others’ cigarettes. The priest Padre Francisco (Luis Mascarenhas) is another, less prominent but certainly not less potent collector of material goods. His house is decorated with oil paintings and antique furniture. The centerpiece in his study is a chess game of carved figures and intarsia (see fig. 10.2). Jacinto initially aims to emulate the powerful men’s collections of commodities. The camera dwells on the designer furniture in his house and wealth of wedding gifts of the newlywed couple or swings over the glazed surface of the protagonist’s car yet always ends with a portrayal of his boss’s material wealth. However, such an excessive collecting and displaying of commodities, instead of bestowing power on the collectors (Jacinto and, toward the end, his boss and the priest), only reveal their powerlessness. The present and moreover absent (yearned for) objects have taken control over the protagonist and thus, indirectly, underscore his lack of sway. Besides the portrayal of an absurd excess of collections, Portugal S.A. breaks the alluring spell of material things and the power, emanating from them, through a critical metanarrative. In an almost Brechtian fashion, Guerra repeatedly inserts an “estranging” discourse into the filmic narrative. 30 This critical discourse opens and closes the film and is included on several occasions in the cinematographic narrative. It consists of sequences where

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Padre Francisco reads from Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il Principe (1512). While the audience hears his voice, the camera shows a close-up of the book on the screen and therefore interrupts the filmic narrative. Most of the selected passages from the treatise elaborate strategies to gain and keep power and analyze the weaknesses of the human being, most prominently greed and ambition. As a sign of the subversive counterdiscourse, included in the main narrative discourse, these texts are read by one of the greediest characters, a master of power games in multiple contexts, among them ecclesiastical, economic, sexual, and political. The relevance of the book in the film goes beyond the notion of political unscrupulousness, which is generally associated with Il Principe. In fact, the treatise contains more diverse ideas besides the famous statement that “it is much more secure to be feared than to be loved; because it can be said generally about men that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocritical, and dissimulating, avoiding perils, avid for gains.” 31 Machiavelli had written his text in a time of extreme political instability. As a diplomat serving the Florentine republic, he had witnessed numerous conspiracies and examples of blunt violence, which propelled him to write an essay about a “new” prince through the comparative study of leadership through time. 32 His projected ideal prince is first and foremost rigorous and modest. In his dedication to young Lorenzo de Medici (1492–1519), Machiavelli proposes both wisdom and detachment from material goods as the central characteristics of the new monarch. Instead of presenting Lorenzo with “horses, arms, gold vestments, precious stones, and similar ornaments worthy of [your] greatness . . . I have not found anything in my inventory that I hold more dear to esteem so much as my knowledge of the actions of great men, learned from long experience of modern and long study of ancient affairs.” 33 Through exegesis and critical comparisons of different historic models, the young ruler should be introduced to the concept of innovation. Machiavelli describes the Spanish king Ferdinand of Aragon and Castile (1452–1516) as the politician who comes closest to his ideal of a new prince. For the author, Ferdinand’s strategic creativity, strength of purpose, and modesty allowed him to “think about innovation” 34 in a way no other king did or had done. 35 Viewed in this way, the presence of Il Principe as a typology of innovation and overthrow of an established system 36 is a counternarration to the main cinematographic plot in Portugal S.A. Guerra’s typology of political strategists—the halting protagonist Jacinto, the devious priest Padre Francisco, the neoimperialist Boaventura—could be interpreted as a list of values of “old” princes and principles. The filmic character that most decisively advocates a new and innovative strategy is a secondary character: Jacinto’s mother. She does not belong to the world of the rich her son admires so avidly. In sharp contrast to other spaces of the film, her apartment is small and modest; instead of business attire like all other characters, she is dressed in a washed-

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out blouse and an apron. Yet her critical distance enables her to elucidate Jacinto’s dependence on others. In her kitchen, she comments on his need for others as a result of his inferiority complex: “tens vergonha de mi . . . y de ti” [you are ashamed of me, and of yourself]. She suggests that he should take matters into his own hands. Jacinto does not reply to this comment and reiterates his desire for power and material possession. His conclusion is simply “eu nunca mais quero deixar uma coisa e não poder ter” [never again, I want to have to leave something I would want to have/possess]. The mother responds with a sad smile when she realizes that she is not understood. Just as Machiavelli, the mother is well aware of her own peripheral and solitary position in the class struggle. 37 Yet this detachment from others is a privileged place of insight from where advice becomes possible. The fact that her son does not fully understand it does not take away the value of that lesson on the extrafilmic level. After this sequence, Jacinto moves out of his mansion and, at least partially, leaves material goods behind. In Politics and Philosophy: Niccolò Machiavelli and Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism, Mikko Lahtinen elaborates on the utopian undertone of Machiavelli’s treatise. Il Principe is utopian insofar as it poses the disaster of power and justice from the viewpoint of the people and entrusts the task of changing an unjust society into a better one to a future prince. 38 Similarly, Guerra’s film portrays human greed and social and economic injustices without alluding to a single and straightforward solution. While no intradiegetic character becomes a just “new prince” and while Jacinto’s mother remains alone, 39 the director points toward a change of a consciousness only through the inclusion of the Machiavellistic metadiscourse. Similar to the open end and metanarrative gesture at the end of Eréndira, this mere suggestion to an alternative practice of power may frustrate a climactic denouement of the film. The estranging element, however, can lead to an awareness of the dystopian neoimperialist politicoeconomic structures. In the last sequences of the film, Jacinto is shown without any commodities or collectables. In quick sequences, he is shown driving in a car, walking on a street, and, finally, making love to Fátima in a dark room. His new power is less bound to material things and personalized spaces. Similar to Eréndira (although less radically), Portugal S.A. ends with an individual movement away from a closed space, filled with material goods. The characters leave the collections, presented as a means of spatial and ideological entrapment, and embrace mobility. The viewers, facing the worlds full of collectables and commodities that shape the power relations of Eréndira and Portugal S.A., are invited to criticize and, from there, draft alternative discourses of collection. If the collections travel, Guerra seems to suggest, so should we in our relation to them in order to grasp and mediate mobile discourses of collection.

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NOTES 1. Written by Gabriel García Márquez, Eréndira, directed by Ruy Guerra (Paris: Les Films du Triangle, 1982); Portugal S.A., written and directed by Ruy Guerra (Lisbon: Lusomundo, 2004). 2. Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Exhibiting Cultures, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 50. 3. Rolena Adorno, “Nuevas perspectivas en los estudios literarios coloniales,” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana 14, no. 28 (1988): 12. 4. Aleida Assmann, “Beyond the Archive,” in Waste-Site Stories, ed. Brian Neville and Johanne Villeneuve (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 80. 5. Ibid., 72. 6. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 275. 7. Ibid., 278. 8. Ibid., 1016. 9. Wolfgang Schlüter, Walter Benjamin (Darmstadt: Verlag Jürgen Häusser, 1993), 15. “Melancholische Verrämlichung als Pendant zur allegorischen Zerstückelung.” 10. For an exhaustive biographical account, see the interview “Entretiens avec Ruy Guerra,” in Le “Cinema nôvo [sic]” brésilien, ed., intro., and interviews Michel Estève (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1972), 80–123. 11. David E. Neves, Cinema nôvo [sic] no Brazil (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1966), 39; Randal Johnson, Cinema Novo x 5, Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 1; Jean A. Gili, “Fantastique, magie et réalité dans l’œuvre de Ruy Guerra,” in Estève, Le “Cinema nôvo [sic]” brésilien, 124–27. 12. Johnson, Cinema Novo, 91. 13. The film also borrows from García Márquez, “Muerte más allá del amor (1970),” in La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1972). 14. In his biography García Márquez, Saldivar Dasso refers to the theme as follows: “La historia que más lo [a García Márquez] conmovería fue la de la anónima y escuálida niña a quien . . . conoció por estos lares. . . . [Fue] explotada de forma inclemente por una matrona que él imaginaría como ‘su abuela desalmada.’ . . . Al escritor [su memoria] le iba durar toda la vida . . . : primero lo perseguiría a través de las páginas de Cien años de soledad, luego buscaría acomodo en un guión cinematográfico y finalmente hallaría su propio espacio novelesco en ‘La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada’” (Dasso, García Márquez [Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997], 263–64) [The story that would move him the most was the one of a nameless, skinny girl he had known in these regions. . . . (She was) severely exploited by a matron whom he imagined to be her “heartless grandmother.” . . . To the author, (the memory of her) would last a lifetime: first she would haunt through the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, then he would try to accommodate her in a film script and finally she would find a fictional space of her own in “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother”]. 15. For analyses of the central theme of material collections connected to imperialist intentions in Gabriel García Márquez’s writings, see José Manuel Camacho Delgado, Piratas, marinos y aventureros en “Cien años de soledad” (Sevilla: Arcibel Editores, 2009); Diane E. Marting, “The End of Eréndira’s Prostitution,” Hispanic Review 69, no. 2 (2001): 175–90; and Armado Estrada Villa, El poder político en la novelística de Gabriel García Márquez (Medellín: Universidad Pontifica Bolivariana, 2006). 16. Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004), 145–46. 17. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 54. 18. Significantly, the opening credits do not mention the short story but present the film as based on “un scénario original de Gabriel García Márquez” / “an original script by Gabriel García Márquez.” The opening and closing credits are in French. All dialogues in the film are in Spanish (García Márquez, Eréndira).

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19. Amadís de Gaula was the name of the hero of a sixteenth-century chivalric tale that was influential among the Spanish conquistadores. Many of them compared the wonders of the New World with those described in the book. 20. For an analysis of the spaces in the short story and filmic version, see my Sites of Disquiet (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2013). 21. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 29. 22. Ibid., 11. 23. Susan Stewart describes the nostalgic practice of an obsessive attempt to rebuild the past as follows: “The past [which the nostalgic] seeks, has never existed . . . and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack” (On Longing [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993], 23. 24. Here, my arguments resonate with Felipe Martínez-Pinzón’s description in chapter 1 of this volume of a rhetorical abundance to render an excessive collection; in the case of Eréndira, this abundance is also visual and sonic. 25. In Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco described a real space that had been fictionalized—the castle of William Randolph Hearst, which had become famous as the Xanadu of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane—that is highly similar to the description and showing of the grandmother’s house: “Hearst . . . built his own Fortress of Solitude, which a biographer has described as a combination of palace and museum such as had not been seen since the days of the Medicis. . . . The striking aspect of the whole is not the quantity of antique pieces plundered from half of Europe, or the nonchalance with which the artificial tissue seamlessly connects fake and genuine, but rather the sense of fullness, the obsessive determination not to leave a single space that doesn’t suggest something . . . haunted by horror vacui. The insane abundance makes the place unlivable” (Travels in Hyperreality [San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986], 21). For an analogous argumentation, see also Shelley Garrigan’s interpretation of the failures and tautology of the activity of collecting in chapter 6 of this volume. 26. The endings in the text and film are similar, except for Guerra’s inclusion of the rose blossoms and except for changing a single personal pronoun: in the short story, it is the narrator who tells that no voice in the world could stop her (“la podía detener”). In the film, Eréndira speaks for herself (“me podía detener”). I read the ending of the film as an intensification of the concept of radical openness that has been described in García Márquez’s text. 27. Walter Benjamin, trans. and quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 95, quoted from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), trans. Harry Zohn; original: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 697–98. 28. This is yet another version of the reversal of the vector of the explorer returning from the end of the world with a bag of treasures that Jerónimo Arellano compellingly describes in his essay on Cien años de soledad, included in chapter 9 of this volume. 29. Significantly, the subtitle of the film is “Onde tudo se compra e tudo se vende” / “where you can buy and sell everything” (Guerra, Portugal S.A.). 30. In this respect, Johnson’s description of Guerra’s early cinema (until the mid-1980s) as “profoundly dialectical” (Johnson, Cinema Novo, 92) still holds true for Portugal S.A. 31. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, intro., trans., and notes Paul Sonnino (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 88–89. 32. According to Paul Sonnino, in his introduction to the text, “the prince that Machiavelli is describing is a fantasy prince, a millenarian prince, a redeemer for the worst of times, who is supposed to surpass all the other lawgivers who had ever lived” (ibid., 16). 33. Ibid., 33. 34. Ibid., 107. 35. Surprisingly, while cataloging Ferdinand’s achievements in Europe and northern Africa, Machiavelli does not mention the Spanish conquest of the Americas. 36. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 160. 37. Mikko Lahtinen, Politics and Philosophy (Boston: Brill, 2009), 136. 38. Ibid., 138–39.

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39. Similarly, Louis Althusser elaborates on the ultimate solitude of the thinker in his Solitude de Machiavel (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998).

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WORKS CITED Adorno, Rolena. “Nuevas perspectivas en los estudios literarios coloniales.” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana. 14, no. 28 (1988): 11–28. Althusser, Louis. Solitude de Machiavel: Et autres textes. Edited by Yves Sintomer. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998. Assmann, Aleida. “Beyond the Archive.” In Waste-Site Stories. The Recycling of Memory, edited by Brian Neville and Johanne Villeneuve, 71–84, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. Gesammelte Schriften. 7 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989. ———. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 4. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Camacho Delgado, José Manuel. Piratas, marinos y aventureros en “Cien años de soledad.” Sevilla: Arcibel Editores, 2009. Dasso, Saldivar. García Márquez: El viaje a la semilla, La biografía. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Estève, Michel, ed. Le “ Cinéma novo [sic]” brésilien. 2 vols. Paris: Lettres modernes, 1972–1973. Estrada Villa, Armando. El poder político en la novelística de Gabriel García Márquez. Medellín: Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, 2006. García Márquez, Gabriel. Cien años de soledad. Madrid: Cátedra, 2004. ———. Eréndira. Directed by Ruy Guerra. Paris: Les Films du Triangle, 1982. Film. ———. La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada: Siete cuentos. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1972. ———. Masterworks of Latin American Short Fiction. Eight Novellas. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ———. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Gili, Jean A. “Fantastique, magie et réalité dans l’œuvre de Ruy Guerra.” In Le “Cinéma nôvo [sic]” brésilien, edited, introduction, and interviews by Michel Estève, 124–38. Paris: Lettres modernes, 1972. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder.” In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 42–56. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Guerra, Ruy. Portugal S.A. Directed by Ruy Guerra. Lisbon: Lusomundo, 2004. Film. Johnson, Randal. Cinema Novo x 5: Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984. Kressner, Ilka. Sites of Disquiet: The Non-Space in Spanish American Short Narratives and Their Cinematic Transformations. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2013. Lahtinen, Mikko. Politics and Philosophy: Niccolò Machiavelli’s and Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism. Boston: Brill, 2009. Le “Cinéma nôvo [sic]” brésilien. Edited, introduction, and interviews Michel Estève. Paris: Lettres modernes, 1972. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Introduction, translation, and notes by Paul Sonnino. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996.

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Marting, Diane E. “The End of Eréndira’s Prostitution.” Hispanic Review. 69, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 175–90. Neves, David E. Cinema nôvo [sic] no Brasil. Petrópolis: Editoria Vozes, 1966. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Ramos, Jorge, Nelson Rodrígues, Humberto Solás, Norma Torrado, and Cirilo Villaverde. Cecilia. Directed by Humberto Solás. Havana: ICAIC, 1982. Film. Schlüter, Wolfgang. Walter Benjamin. Der Sammler und das geschlossene Kästchen. Darmstadt: Verlag Jürgen Häusser, 1993. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Volkening, Ernesto. Gabriel García Márquez: Un triunfo sobre el olvido. Bogotá: Arango Editores, 1998.

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Index

Abrams, Philip, 29 Adorno, Rolena, 204 Aguilar, Gonzalo, 175, 180n35 Agustini, Delmira, 6, 8, 115–116, 117, 134n1, 135n2, 136n7, 137n32, 137n59, 138n82, 138n83, 166 Althusser, Louis, 213, 216n39 Andermann, Jens, 4, 28, 36, 40, 46n26 Andrade, Oswald de, 6, 8, 87, 165–178, 180n35, 204 Anglo-American modernism, 166, 169 anthropophagy,. See also cannibalism 42, 204 Antropofagia, 6, 165, 173, 175, 178, 180n34, 180n35 archaeology, 37, 38, 40, 43, 44, 83, 185, 187 archive, 81, 85, 89n30, 150, 192–194, 194, 195, 204, 205, 206 Arendt, Hannah, 142, 160 Argentine Scientific Society, 37 Arlt, Roberto, 195 Assmann, Aleida, 204, 205 aura, 51, 52, 187 autographs, 8, 93, 98, 104, 105–106, 107 Ayala, Matías, 4 Avelar, Idelber, 198n39 Avellaneda, Nicolás, 35, 36 Azorín, 165

Bal, Mieke, 134 Balzac, Honoré de, 165 Bandieri, Susana, 41 Batlle y Ordóñez, José, 115 Baudelaire, Charles, 120, 121, 122, 127 Baudrillard, Jean, 1, 130 Belle Époque,. See also fin de siècle 49 Bemberg, María Luisa, 203 Benedict, Barbara M., 10n6 Benjamin, Walter, 1, 3, 32n44, 51, 89n37, 142, 148–151, 153, 154, 155, 160, 166, 168, 173, 195, 205, 209 Bernstein, Charles, 166 Bersani, Leo, 127 bibelot, 84, 90n42, 90n43 bibliophilia, 141, 142 Biguenet, John, 162n23 Blanco Fombona, Rufino, 97 Blom, Philipp, 165, 197n3 Bolívar, Simón, 17, 22, 29, 30n2 Borges, Jorge Luis, 185, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196 Bourdieu, Pierre, 110n7 Botanical Expedition, 5, 15–16, 17–18, 20–22, 25, 30 Brazilian avant-garde,. See also Brazilian modernism 6, 165, 174 Brazilian modernism,. See also Brazilian avant-garde 9, 169, 172, 174, 179n3 Brecht, Bertolt, 169, 211

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Index

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bricolage, 6, 9, 87, 90n55, 118, 165, 166, 167–168, 175 bricoleur, 75, 85, 86, 118, 167, 168 Bonafoux, Luis, 54 Bourbon Reforms, 22 buen gusto,. See also good taste 31n39, 49, 50, 51, 57, 70 Boussingault, Jean Baptiste, 23 Buffon’s classification system, 19 Burns, Bradford, 179n14 cabinet of curiosities,. See also Wunderkammer xii, 20, 24, 27, 58, 59, 183, 184, 185, 190, 192, 196 cabinet of wonders. See cabinet of curiosities; Wunderkammer Caldas, Francisco José de, 20 Campaña del Desierto,. See also Conquest of the Desert 30n11 Campos, Augusto de, 6, 8, 165, 174–178 Campos, Haroldo de, 167, 174, 175, 181n37 cannibalism, 42, 87, 90n55, 165, 169, 170, 173, 180n34, 204 Cannibalist Manifesto, 87, 165, 169, 170, 173 Cantón, Wilberto, 143, 144, 153 capital, 9, 26, 144, 145, 149, 150, 173 capitalism, 2, 26, 41, 42, 43, 82, 94, 108, 144, 145, 150, 173, 189 Carpentier, Alejo, 183, 186 Casal, Julián del, 5, 88n2, 116, 135n2, 138n78 Certeau, Michel de, 28, 40, 188 chamber of wonders,. See also cabinet of curiosities; Wunderkammer 184 Chibcha people, 19 Chijona, Gerardo, 203 chronicles of the New World, 170, 171 classification,. See taxonomy Clifford, James, 2, 3, 10n6, 10n10, 75, 80, 83–84, 119, 179n9 collage, 6, 9, 76, 165, 167, 168, 170, 175, 176, 178 collecting: and colonialism, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10n12, 17, 24, 25, 84, 89n40, 145, 148, 185, 189, 196, 203, 204, 209, 211, 214n15; and desire, 1, 6, 25, 39, 84, 85, 87, 88, 95, 116, 118, 119, 120;

discursive,. See also virtual collecting; verbal collecting 3, 35, 37, 39, 176; in the Enlightenment, 2, 190; and ethnography, 2, 43, 45, 94, 185, 196; in European bourgeois culture, 2, 4, 84, 90n41, 90n43, 120, 134, 135n2, 145, 146, 151, 154, 204, 206; and gender, 6, 7–8, 59–70, 115–116, 117; and knowledge, 2, 17, 25; lyrical, 119, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134; and national and collective identities, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 17, 17–18, 19, 22–30, 24, 25, 26, 27, 37, 38, 41, 76, 80; and meaning, 1, 3, 4, 5; obssessive, 62, 76, 119, 142, 145, 165, 166, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 211, 215n25; popular, 6, 8, 50, 52, 70, 93–110; and power, 3, 4, 8, 10n10, 15, 19, 27, 28, 29, 53, 89n40, 198n34, 204; private, 35–45, 49, 85, 142, 145, 204; and progress, 17, 27; and rationality, 1, 2–3, 8, 24, 29, 83, 84, 89n37, 90n43, 205; and redemptive narratives, 3, 6, 10n10, 83, 84, 204; in the Reinassance, 1, 30, 197n3; scientific, 2, 5, 15–30, 35–45, 84, 90n43, 195; and subjectivity, 1, 4, 7–8, 8, 76, 80, 82, 84, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122, 131, 141, 165, 204; in Western culture, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10n10, 184, 195, 204; verbal, 8, 80, 81, 83, 84, 89n40, 165, 166, 167, 178, 185; and violence, 6, 8, 18–21, 26, 30n11, 36, 37, 39–40, 83, 120; virtual,; verbal collecting; discursive collecting; lyrical collecting 5, 8, 52–70 colonialism, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10n10, 10n12, 17, 20, 24, 25, 26, 28, 84, 89n33, 145, 147, 148, 168, 170, 172, 173, 185, 188, 189, 195, 196, 198n40, 203, 204, 206, 209, 211 Columbus, Christopher, 145, 146, 147, 148 commodity, 54, 142, 145, 178, 203, 207, 208, 211, 213 commodity fetishism, 144 Concrete Poetry, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 174, 175, 179n4, 180n35, 181n37 Conquest of the Desert, 35–36, 47n30 Cordeiro, Waldemar, 174 cosmopolitanism, 30, 50, 89n33 Costa Lima, Luiz, 174

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Index

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crónica de Indias,. See also chronicles of the New World 183, 197n1 crónica modernista, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71n11, 95, 96, 98, 102, 107, 108, 110n10, 110n17, 111n19, 111n35, 111n42, 116, 138n78 cronista, 52, 54, 55, 60 cummings, e.e., 174 curiosities,. See also cabinet of curiosities xii, 2, 10n6, 10n12, 184, 185, 197n3, 198n39, 204 D’Abbeville, Claude, 171 dandyism, 76, 116, 135n2 Darío, Rubén, 4–6, 49, 53, 55, 56, 57–58, 62, 64, 67, 71n13, 88n2, 89n31, 93–109, 110n3, 110n15, 110n16, 110n17, 111n42, 111n45, 116–117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 134n1, 135n2, 136n22, 138n78, 138n82 Dasso, Saldívar, 214n14 Deas, Malcolm, 32n44 decadence, 77, 89n35, 116, 119, 133, 136n7, 178 decollecting 9, 166, 185, 187, 190, 193, 194, 195, 196 decolonialism, 6–7 deconstruction, 125, 185 decontextualization, 204, 205 Derrida, Jacques, 186, 206 Dettmers, Silke, 196 Díaz Rodríguez, Manuel, 106, 112n46 Dikötter, Frank, 188 Dion, Mark, 190, 195 distribution of the sensible, 5, 6, 94, 95, 109 division of labor in collecting, 3, 4, 6, 186 Duchamp, Marcel, 174 Dussel, Enrique, 6 Eco, Umberto, 176, 181n37, 215n25 Eisenstein, Sergei, 168, 169 Elias, Norbert, 196 Eliot, T. S., 166, 169 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 100, 101 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 166 estampa, 56, 57, 62, 63 ethnographic surrealism, 196, 198n39

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exhibitions, 4, 10n10, 28, 35, 53, 64, 90n41, 116 Expedición Botánica,. See Botanical Expedition fashion, 53, 84, 98, 101, 102, 171 Feltier, Kenouth, 206 Ferrante, Imperato, 183, 184, 186 fetishism,. See also commodity fetishism 149, 166, 205, 208 fin de siécle, 5, 6, 77, 118 Findlen, Paula, 30 Foucault, Michel, 184, 185, 188, 190, 192, 195, 196, 204 France, Anatole, 153, 154 Franco, Francisco, 16, 159, 178 Freud, Sigmund, 127, 206 Gaggero, Jorge, 203 Gama, Ángela María, 21 García Agraz, José Luis, 203 García Márquez, Gabriel, 6, 8, 166, 183, 185–196, 206, 214n14, 214n15, 214n18 García Pinto, Magdalena, 118, 134n1 Gasman, Gregorio, 163n47 gaucho, 41, 42, 43, 86 Gay, Peter, 90n41 genocide, 30n11, 39, 41 Giaudrone, Carla, 115 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 166 Gómez Carrillo, Enrique, 5, 31n39, 45n6, 49–70, 71n11, 71n13, 72n21, 97, 110n3 Gómez, Laureano, 16 Goncourt brothers, 52, 57, 71n10 good taste,. See also buen gusto 31n39, 49, 50, 84, 90n41, 146 González, Aníbal, 52, 71n11 González Echevarría, Roberto, 192, 193, 195 González Stephan, Beatriz, 4 Gónzalez Suárez, Federico, 16 Goudot, Justin, 23 Greenblatt, Stepehn, 10n6 Grupo Noigandres, 174, 175 Guerra, Ruy, 6, 8, 203–213 Guibert, Rita, 145, 147 Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel, 103, 106, 110n3, 112n46

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Index

Hearn, Lafcadio, 58 Hearst, William Randolph, 215n25 Henríquez Ureña, Max, 88n2 heteroclite, 75, 82, 83, 84, 185, 192, 194, 195 horror vacui, 207, 208, 215n25 Howe, Susan, 166 Huysmans, J.K., 89n35, 89n40, 138n69 imperialism, 3, 22, 147, 148, 152, 159, 160, 173, 185, 187, 203, 204, 209–211, 212, 213, 214n15 independence wars in Latin America, 5, 15, 17, 20, 22, 26, 28–30, 85 indigenous people of Patagonia, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46n26, 47n30 Invençao, 175 japoneries, 58, 59, 61 Jáuregui, Carlos, 87 Joyce, James, 174, 176, 181n37 Jrade, Cathy, 117, 124, 126, 127, 134, 135n2, 138n83

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Klee, Paul, 209 Kunstkammer, 197n6 Kipling, Rudyard, 58 Kirkpatrick, Gwen, 129, 135n2 kitsch, 104 LaGreca, Nacy, 5 Lahtinen, Mikko, 213 La Plata Museum of Natural Sciences, 5, 8, 35, 37, 39, 45, 47n30 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 9, 75, 85, 87, 90n48, 90n52, 166, 167, 168 LoDato, Rosemary, 4 Loti, Pierre, 55, 56, 58, 61 Lowell, Percival, 58 Lozano, Jorge Tadeo, 20 Lugones, Leopoldo, 97 Lynch, John, 22 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 211–213, 215n32, 215n35 Macondo, 6, 183, 186, 187, 188, 189, 196, 198n40 Magalhães Gândavo, Pero de, 172 magic, 187, 188, 198n27, 205

magical realism, 196, 198n39 Mailer, Norman, 145, 147 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 174 maps, 16, 25, 27, 36, 40, 186–187 Martel, Lucrecia, 203 Martí, José, 102, 106, 116, 145 Martínez, Manuel, 20, 25 Marx, Karl, 144, 145, 148 marvels,. See also curiosities 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 196 mass culture, 94, 101, 102, 169, 188 Matamoros, Mercedes, 136n7 Matís, Francisco Javier, 16, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25 Mauriès, Patrick, 190, 198n39 Mcpherson, C. B., 2, 80, 89n26, 119, 143, 160, 166, 167 metaphor, 2, 8, 39, 79, 81, 84, 87, 120, 129, 131, 132, 133 Merz, Mario, 190, 195, 196 metonymy, 36–37, 39, 43, 46n26, 83, 106–107, 123, 167 Mignolo, Walter, 3, 6–7, 10n10 Minellono, María, 105 Mitre, Bartolomé, 37 modernity, 6–7, 10n10, 58, 59, 60, 75, 81, 82, 83, 87, 89n31, 89n33, 90n50, 94, 98, 153, 170, 173, 183, 189, 195, 196 modernismo, 4–6, 31n39, 45n6, 53, 56, 62, 68, 71n11, 71n14, 75, 76, 85, 88n2, 89n31, 90n46, 93, 93–97, 98, 106, 109, 110n10, 110n17, 111n42, 112n46, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 127, 131, 134, 135n3, 136n7, 137n60, 145, 179n3 modernism, 84 modernist, 10n10, 174 modernista,. See modernismo modernization, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 54, 94 Molloy, Sylvia, 41, 81, 89n30, 117, 135n2, 136n7 montage, 8, 165, 167, 168, 169, 175, 176 Morán, Francisco, 5 Morand, Paul, 205 Moreas, Jean, 55 Moreno, Eduardo, 36 Moreno, Francisco Pascasio, 5, 30n11, 35–45, 45n4, 46n18, 46n26, 47n30, 60

Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

Index Moreno, Perito,. See Francisco Pascasio Moreno Morillo, Pablo, 15–16, 18–21, 22 Murillo Toro, Manuel, 29 museum, 3, 4, 5, 9, 15–30, 30n11, 31n40, 35–45, 45n4, 46n18, 46n26, 47n30, 50, 51, 52, 57, 58, 59, 61, 71n5, 71n7, 72n32, 84, 155, 169, 184, 190, 195, 204, 215n25 Museum of Jurassic Technology, 190 Museo Nacional de Colombia, 5, 9, 15–30 Mutis, José Celestino, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 25, 31n16 Mutis, Sinforoso, 19, 21, 22

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Nabokov, Vladimir, 165 natural history, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 44, 142, 195 National Museum of Colombia,. See Museo Nacional de Colombia Natural History Museum,. See also Museo Nacional de Colombia 17, 18, 21, 23–24, 25, 29, 30 Neruda, Pablo, 6, 8, 15, 17, 141–161, 165, 166, 167 Nervo, Amado, 97, 110n3, 110n15 Núñez, Rafael, 29, 78 objet d’art, 49, 50, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 90n41, 90n42 objeto de arte,. See ojet d’art Orientalism, 8, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 72n22 Purcell, Rosamond, 190, 195 Páginas Ilustradas, 109 parnassianism, 123, 124 Plaza, Julio, 174 Pearce, Susan M., 2 Perloff, Marjorie, 166, 175 Peluffo, Ana, 32, 135n2 Pignatari, Décio, 174 plunder, 21, 81, 89n30, 89n36, 215n25 postcards, 5, 6, 8, 93–110, 111n22 possessive individualism, 80 postcolonial, 6, 186, 188, 189, 196, 203, 204 Pound, Ezra, 166, 167, 169, 174 Prieto, Adolfo, 111n45

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primitivism, 10n10, 168, 170, 179n9 progress, 10n11, 17, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32n44, 36, 38, 39, 41, 44, 78, 83, 115, 147, 152, 175, 209 property, 1, 2, 84, 142, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 174 Quiccheberg, Samuel, 184, 197n6 Quijano, Aníbal, 189 quotation, 170, 204 Rama, Ángel, 95 Ramos, Julio, 95, 96 Rancière, Jacques, 5, 6, 94, 95, 109, 110n7 rastaqueur, 49, 53, 90n46 reification, 5, 8, 149, 196, 208 Regeneration, 78 replica,. See also reproductions 51, 52, 58, 59, 64, 69, 70 Repertorio americano, 155 reproductions,. See also replica 50, 51, 52, 57, 58, 101, 168 Revista Azul, 103 Revista Moderna, 98 Reynaud, Paul, 55 Rincón, Carlos, 187 Rodó, José Enrique, 49, 88n14 Rodríguez, Simón, 29 Rodríguez, Víctor Manuel, 26 Rotker, Susana, 24, 29, 110n17 Roulin, Desiré, 23 Rivera, Mariano Eduardo de, 23 Rizo, Salvador, 20 Roldán, Mary, 19 Ruz, Mario Humberto, 4 Said, Edward, 72n22 Salinas, Pedro, 118 Samper, Miguel, 29 Santander, General, 17, 23–24 Sarmient, Faustino, 41, 78, 86 Sartre, Jean Paul, 120, 179n4 Schwartz, Roberto, 170, 173 scientific collections,. See collecting Sellen, Adam T., 4 Sevilla, Captain Rafael, 15, 16, 18–21, 23 Schor, Naomi, 107, 151 Schulte, Rainer, 162n23 Sieburth, Richard, 169

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Index

Silva, José Asunción, 4, 6, 8, 75–88, 88n14, 89n33, 89n35, 116, 135n3, 138n69, 166 Solás, Humberto, 203 souvenir, 1, 8, 11n23, 50, 56, 64, 93–110, 120, 136n18, 138n76 Spanish Reconquest, 15–16, 19 Spitta, Silvia, 184, 185, 192 Stewart, Susan, 2, 40, 45, 120, 132, 134, 136n8, 138n76, 173, 215n23 surplus value, 144, 204 surrealism, 190, 192, 195, 196, 198n39, 205 symbolism, 55, 88n2, 118, 119 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 119

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Tablada, Juan José, 93 taxonomy, 2, 9, 19, 41, 45n6, 46n18, 84, 173, 190, 191, 192, 198n39, 204 technological artifacts, 187, 188, 189, 196, 198n27 Thomas, Nicholas, 3, 10n12 Trambaiolli, Marcella, 123, 124 translation, 6, 82, 141, 142, 143, 145, 147, 149, 150, 151, 155, 156, 157, 160, 162n23, 163n46, 163n47, 174, 193, 194 travel writing, 35–42, 51, 52, 55, 142, 183 turn of the twentieth century,. See also fin de siécle 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 109, 136n7 Unamuno, Miguel de, 134n1 Universal Exposition, 53 use value, 3, 144, 205

Utamaro, Kitagawa, 56, 57, 63 Varas, Patricia, 115 Vaz Caminha, Pero, 171 war, 5, 9, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 26, 27, 28–30, 32n44, 35–36, 45n4, 150, 157, 158, 159 Watson, Janell, 90n42, 90n43 Welles, Orson, 215n25 Whitman, Walt, 142–144, 145, 147, 148, 150, 152, 155–156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163n46, 163n47 Wilde, Eduardo, 116 Wilde, Oscar, 121 Wilson, David, 190, 195, 196 wonder room,. See Wunderkammer world fairs, 52, 57, 58, 68 Worm, Ole, 190 Wunderkammer, 1, 2, 6, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197n6, 198n39 value, 1, 2, 8, 9, 25, 50, 54, 57, 75, 84, 86, 100, 101, 106, 138n76, 142, 144, 145, 149, 154, 195, 198n39, 204 Veloso, Caetano, 167–168 Verlaine, Paul, 55 Yurkievich, Saúl, 155, 156, 159 Zea, Francisco Antonio, 22, 23, 24 Zelaya, José Santos, 110n3 Žižek, Slavoj, 128

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About the Contributors

Copyright © 2016. Bucknell University Press. All rights reserved.

María Mercedes Andrade is associate professor of humanities and literature at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Her research focuses on comparative approaches to modern literature, culture, and theory from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. She is the author of La ciudad fragmentada: Una lectura de las novelas del Bogotazo (Ediciones Inti, 2002) and Ambivalent Desires: Representations of Modernity and Private Life in Colombia, 1890s–1950s (Bucknell University Press, 2011). She is currently working on a manuscript on the voice of objects in Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood. Jerónimo Arellano is assistant professor of Latin American literature and culture at Brandeis University. He is the author of Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America (Bucknell University Press, 2015). His current work focuses on new cultures of emotion and emerging aesthetic paradigms in contemporary fiction and on the cultural history of screenwriting in Latin America. Kelly Austin lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She is currently a guide for Delve Readers Seminars at Literary Arts, and she leads creative writing workshops for Write Around Portland as a volunteer. Shelley Garrigan is associate professor at North Carolina State University. She specializes in nineteenth-century Latin American material culture studies and cultural studies and intersections of economy and culture in the Hispanic world, among others. Her book Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments and the Creation of National Identity was published with the University of Minnesota Press in 2012. She is currently working on transnationalism as 225 Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

226

About the Contributors

expressed in Jewish migrations within the twentieth-century Mexican context.

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Ilka Kressner is associate professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish American literature, film, and photography, her research interests include intermediality (relations between text, image, and sound), conceptions of space in art, and ecocritical studies. Her scholarship and teaching examine Spanish American literatures from a variety of cultural and national contexts, often from a comparative perspective. She is the author of Sites of Disquiet: The Non-Space in Spanish American Short Narratives and their Cinematic Transformations (Purdue University Press, 2013). She has coedited “Walter Benjamin Unbound,” a special issue of the journal Annals of Scholarship, and is currently working on a book project on Latin American travel photography and writings by Jewish émigré artists Ellen Auerbach and Fritz Neugass from the 1950s to the 1970s. Felipe Martínez-Pinzón is assistant professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University. His research works on the junctions between nation, cosmopolitanism, and the tropics in nineteenth-century Latin America. He is the author of Una cultura de invernadero: Trópico y civilización en Colombia, 1808–1928 (forthcoming by Iberoamericana Vervuert) and has coedited the volumes Entre el humo y la niebla: Guerra y cultura en América Latina (forthcoming, Pittsburgh Iili) and Revisitar el costumbrismo: Cosmopolitismo, pedagogías y modernización en Iberoamérica (forthcoming, Peter Lang). Currently, he is working on a book on “cuadros de costumbres” and liberal reform in nineteenth-century Latin America. Fernando Pérez Villalón is a Chilean writer, critic, and translator, PhD in comparative literature from New York University. He teaches in the Language and Literature Department and the Arts Department at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, where he directs the MA in image studies. He has published several books of poetry and object books as well as several critical essays on the relations between poetry, music, and visual arts. He is part of the experimental collective Orquesta de Poetas http://www.orquestadepoetas. cl. Andrew Reynolds is associate professor of Spanish at West Texas A&M University. He is the author of The Spanish American Crónica Modernista, Temporality & Material Culture (Bucknell University Press, 2012) and the coeditor of Behind the Masks of Modernism (University Press of Florida, 2016). Reynolds has recently published articles in Revista Iberoamericana, Decimonónica, A Contracorriente, and Latin American Literary Review.

Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University

About the Contributors

227

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Javier Uriarte completed his PhD at New York University in 2012 and is assistant professor at Stony Brook University. He specializes in Spanish American and Brazilian literatures and cultures from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His research interests include travel writing, war and representation, theories and politics of space and time, and nation and statemaking in Latin America. He has coedited one special issue of Cahiers de Li.Ri.Co. dedicated to Uruguayan literature and titled Raros uruguayos: Nuevas miradas (Université Paris 8, 2010) and is the coeditor of the collective volume Entre el humo y la niebla: Guerra y cultura en América Latina (Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana [IILI], 2014). He has published several articles in books and scholarly journals in the United States, France, Brazil, Uruguay, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Olga Vilella is professor of Latino/Latin American literatures and cultures at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. She holds an MS in journalism from Columbia University and a PhD in Romance languages and literatures from the University of Chicago. Her research interests focus on Modernista journalistic crónicas of the turn of the twentieth century and has published articles on world fairs and museums. See “An ‘Exotic’ Abroad: Manuel Serafín Pichardo and the Chicago Columbian Exhibition of 1893,” Latin American Literary Review 32, no. 63 (2004): 81–98. Dr. Vilella is also interested in cultural productions of the period of the so-called dirty wars of twentiethcentury Latin American and is coauthor of Historical Dictionary of the “Dirty Wars”; a third edition is in preparation for 2016 from Rowman & Littlefield. She directs the Latino/Latin American Studies program at her institution.

Andrade, María Mercedes. Collecting from the Margins : Material Culture in a Latin American Context, Bucknell University