Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America 9780822381099

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Divergent Modernities

A Book in the Series

Post-Contemporary

Interventions and

Latin America in Translation

En Traducción

Em Tradução

Sponsored by the Duke–

University of North Carolina

Program in Latin American Studies

DIVERGENT

MODERNITIES

b

  

Julio Ramos Culture and Politics in

Nineteenth-Century

Latin America

Translated by John D. Blanco

Foreword by

José David Saldívar

Durham and London 

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

Translator’s Preface

vii

Foreword, José David Saldívar

xi

Prologue xxxv

PART I 

The Other’s Knowledge: Writing and Orality in Sarmiento’s Facundo 



Knowledge-(as)-Said: Language and Politics in Andrés Bello



Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 



Limits of Autonomy: Journalism and Literature



Decorating the City: The Chronicle and Urban Experience



 

PART II Introduction: Martí and His Journey to the United States 

Machinations: Literature and Technology



‘‘This Cardboard Tabloid Life’’: Literature and the Masses

 Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo





 



‘‘Nuestra América’’: The Art of Good Governance



The Repose of Heroes: On Poetry and War in José Marti 



Migratories  Appendixes Translations of Three Texts by José Martí Appendix  Our America  Appendix  Prologue to Poema del Niágara Appendix  Index

vi

Contents



Coney Island







Translator’s Preface

‘‘Skimmers of the printed page, halt!’’ To the Anglophone reader, as well as the community of Latin American scholars, writers, and critics who have had as much difficulty tracking down this book as I have had, I would like to point out a number of words and/or phrases that indicate the limits of the translated text before you. Taken together, they constitute a reflection on the untranslatable—a situation undoubtedly encountered by every translator at one point or another, as well as an aporia worthy of some of the most rigorous philosophical investigations of our time. I highlight them not so much because they came to question or interfere with the project as a whole but rather because they formed the basis of my constant engagement and negotiation with Julio in the rendering of Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina: literatura y política en el siglo XIX into English. As Ramos’s work suggests, both the promise and declared failure of translation is intimately woven into the strategies employed by the various groups, intellectuals, discourses, and institutions involved in the historical conjunctures comprising Latin American society in the nineteenth century. The translation of the seemingly transparent word Latinoamericanismo exemplifies this. For while it can easily be rendered as ‘‘Latin Americanism,’’ such a move immediately divests the word of its ‘‘aura,’’ or resonance, as that untranslatable idea belonging solely to Latin America, Latin Americans, or the Latin American ‘‘spirit.’’ On the one hand, this aura is the very thing that Ramos’s analysis would seek to historicize and critique. Yet while this is certainly true, others would contest that it is the literal and artifactual status of the untranslated word—the ‘‘surface level of its inscription,’’ as Ramos would say—by which any analysis (including his own) must in the end be judged. Even as Divergent Modernities wrestles with the (im)possibility of speaking outside that cultural tensor that has come to be known as Latinoamericanismo, Ramos also recognizes the inevitability of being integrated into it, pulled along, perhaps ‘‘reterritorialized.’’ At Ramos’s request, I anglicized the word at certain moments, yet respected its resistance to transparency when its monumental or material quality seemed to be directly invoked.

La escena de escritura is the Spanish rendition of a phrase made popular by French philosophy after , particularly in the work of Jacques Derrida and the Tel Quel group (La scene de écriture). It plays on the triple meaning of escritura as inscription—at once an act of writing, etching letters into a solid surface, and enlisting (as in conscription). While Julio never explicitly links his own use of this phrase to the well-known essay of Derrida’s, ‘‘Freud and the Scene of Writing,’’ his analyses of José Martí share certain affinities with some of Derrida’s concerns. My suspicion, however, is that these affinities have less to do with the likelihood of ‘‘direct’’ influence, and more to do with the shared concern of both writers with Walter Benjamin and his fascination with the Paris arcades project. Conocimiento has been translated at various moments either as ‘‘knowledge’’ or ‘‘the understanding.’’ While the difference between the words for knowledge—ciencia, saber, and conocimiento—has been pointed out by translators in the past, I would merely like to add that conocimiento can also be a translation of Immanuel Kant’s Verstand: ‘‘the understanding’’ that, as a cognitive faculty responsible for providing ‘‘categories’’ or concepts, renders objects of intuition into objects of knowledge. This meaning of conocimiento seems particularly salient in the passages cited herein by Andrés Bello, José de la Luz y Caballero, and other enlightened intellectuals of the period. In these passages, conocimiento does not so much refer to knowledge in a personal, intuitive, or intimate sense (as one knows [conoce] a person or language), but rather in a philosophical sense that harkens back to the Kantian system and the project of enlightened reform. In other instances of ambiguity, I have included the original Spanish word beside the translated text. Finally, the translations of letrado as ‘‘man of letters’’ and literato as ‘‘modern writer’’ have proven to be wholly insufficient, although the first part of Divergent Modernities is dedicated to clarifying both in terms of the relationship of each figure to its respective configuration of institutions, discourses, narratives of legitimation, and social processes. The letrado is characterized by his proximity to the law; for this reason, it has been translated by Javier Malagón Barceló and others as ‘‘lawyer.’’ 1 The letrado can be a lawmaker, lawyer, or public statesman whose educated or enlightened opinion is capable of intervening in matters of state legislation and administration, as well as educational policy. The literato, in contrast, is ‘‘modern’’ insofar as s/he is in every way tied up with the social transformations introduced by modernity and modernization in Latin America and the United States—the ‘‘two cultures’’ divide between the natural sciences and humanities, the rise of the publishing market, explosion of the culture industry, and self-proclaimed autonomy of aesthetics from other fields of inquiry. While a work like Angel Rama’s The viii Translator’s Preface

Lettered City has emphasized the underlying continuity of the Latin American intellectual in terms of his or her control over the means of written representation, Professor Ramos has chosen to stress the outer extremes of their differences in order to better demonstrate their partial overlap in the phenomenon of uneven modernization.2 The original title of this book highlights the clashes and contradictions produced in this partial overlap. The word desencuentro is especially suited to capturing the sense with which the modern Latin American writer confronted and responded to the struggle for legitimacy among competing authorities and discourses in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Desencuentro, literally ‘‘dis-encounter,’’ can be translated best as ‘‘run-in,’’ although the title leaves open the possibility that the run-ins produced by uneven modernity in Latin America could also be reconfigured and projected as a series of run-ins with ‘‘modernity’’ as an overall phenomenon. The genealogy of this reconfiguration comprises one of the main themes of this book. Last but not least, a word or two on translating Martí. I adopted a slightly different approach in translating Martí’s poetry as opposed to his prose. The poetic translations do not confine themselves to a strict word-by-word rendition of Martí’s verse into English. In fact, in certain instances, I weighed in heavily on the preservation (however partial) of rhyme and meter, and thus, have chosen to cite the original verse side by side with the translation. By contrast, I tended to translate the occasionally exasperating convolutions of Martí’s prose as literally as possible in order to preserve the breathtaking sense one receives from the sheer length of certain sentences. Other sentences, presented in the form of ellipses, shift the momentum of the previous passage and prepare the reader for a new proceeding. The decision to include these stylistic features of Martí’s prose may, at times, seem to interfere with the semantic clarity he may have sought to convey. In this respect, the translations depart from the formal coherence of Martí’s earlier translators, whose editions I consulted in the course of editing my own.3 The notes to ‘‘Our America’’ and prologue to Poema del Niágara (appendices  and ) were largely taken from a yellowed and decrepit popular edition of Martí’s prose by José Olivio Jiminez, which I found in one of the few used bookstores in Manila.4 I decided to include them for their usefulness in identifying Martí’s references, many of them cryptic. I would like to thank, first and foremost, Julio Ramos himself for the remarkable joint experience of revising, critiquing, and otherwise engaging with the translations of his work, as well as those of the Martí texts. I would also like to thank Reynolds Smith, and the editorial staff at Duke University Press for working closely with both Professor Ramos and myself at all levels Translator’s Preface ix

of the manuscript. I gratefully acknowledge the first translation of chapter  (‘‘Nuestra América: The Art of Good Governance’’) by Jeff Forte, as well as Sergio Waisman’s first translation of chapter  (‘‘Migratories’’) although any mistakes or errors in the translation of these chapters as well as every other chapter in this book are my sole responsibility. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Marivi, for her insightful comments on parts of the translation, and her endearing support and encouragement. John D. Blanco Notes  For a short, concise bibliography on the figure of the letrado, see Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, ),  ff.  Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ).  See José Martí, The America of José Martí: Selected Writings, trans. Juan de Onís, intro. Federico de Onís (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, ); On Art and Literature: Critical Writings, trans. and ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, ); and Our America: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, ed. Philip Foner, trans. Elinor Randall (New York: Monthly Review Press, ).  José Martí, Prosa escogida, ed. José Olivio Jimenez (Madrid: Novelas y cuentos, ).

x Translator’s Preface

Foreword José David Saldivar

Migratory Locations: Subaltern Modernity and Inter-American Cultural Criticism If we see the formation of the modern world as a unitary global process that has entailed the mutual constitution of cores and peripheries, the project of provincializing Western modernity . . . involves as well recognizing the periphery as the site of subaltern modernities.—Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela The task of subaltern studies [is] to conceptualize multiple possibilities of creative political action rather than requiring a more ‘‘mature’’ political type of formation.— José Rabasa, ‘‘Of Zapatismo,’’ The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital

How is the migratory subaltern subject, in an inter-American politics of location, to be conceptualized as revolutionary and antimilitaristic, Latin American and North American at one and the same time? What are the limits of our modern notions of citizenship, identity, and residence for activist intellectuals involved in intense processes of deterritorialization? 1 How does José Martí’s residence in New York City and the United States (–) map out the boundaries of a ‘‘transnationally local’’ 2 genealogy of modernist discursive practices? It is on these questions that Julio Ramos’s Divergent Modernities—a probing and erudite study of Latin American modernity in general, and on Martí in particular—sheds enormous light. Modernity, as Ramos reminds us, not only involved Martí in ‘‘a superficial, vulgar, and uproarious intimacy’’ with U.S. mass culture (as Martí critically put it in his  chronicle ‘‘Coney Island’’), but also embedded him in an ‘‘uneven modernizing’’ constellation of forces that compelled him to reflect on his mutual participation in and alienation from what Jürgen Habermas has called the public sphere.3 Further, Martí’s crónicas from the urban, geocultural United States of the North (where he represented his ‘‘encounter and conflict with the technological and massified discourses of modernity’’ [p. ], telegraphed to Nuestra América’s South, allowed him to explore and

exploit what Ramos posits as ‘‘the changing, displaced situation of the writer in the capitalist city, in a society governed by new principles of organization that problematized the relation between literature and the predominant institutions of the public sphere’’ (this volume, p. ) that is, the sphere in which political life is discussed openly by all the citizens. Martí’s ruminations on modern cultures in this inter-American context took many forms, including his hybrid and experimental chronicles of daily North American life in the Escenas norteamericanas (North American Scenes); 4 his magisterial prologues, such as the one to the Poema del Niágara by the Venezuelan poet in New York, Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde; his splendid cartographic poetry, written in exile in New York (‘‘Domingo triste’’ and ‘‘Dos Patrias,’’ among others, from Versos Libres); his classic anti-imperialist essays, such as ‘‘Nuestra América’’ (‘‘Our America’’); and his moving translations of American sentimental literature for Appelton House (Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, for example), as well as his sober testimonio (testimony) on war and violence, the Diario de campaña (War Journal). As an émigré in an alien AngloSaxon environment, Martí often took the role of a cultural anthropologist engaged in what James Clifford and George Marcus call the production of ‘‘writing culture.’’ 5 His scores of modern chronicles, prologues, and essays— what Ramos refers to as Martí’s ‘‘minor writings’’ 6—from this point of view, thematize, among other things, the unfamiliar rituals, ceremonies, and daily practices of his host country. While it is undeniable that Ramos’s superb book on Martí’s ‘‘minor writings’’ has received exceptional attention and critical praise over the past decade among Latin American studies scholars from all over the Americas— including Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and the United States, his book’s timely translation into English allows me the opportunity to begin a contrapuntal reading of selected sections of the book so that readers in (North) American studies can better understand the historical significance and critical potential Ramos’s Martí has for developing a new, comparative, inter-American cultural criticism.7 As Fernando Coronil puts it in his powerful introduction to Fernando Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, an introduction to a celebrated book must ensure ‘‘a perspective that, while respecting the integrity of a cultural text, recognizes its provisionality and inconclusiveness, the contrapuntal play of text against text and of reader against author.’’ 8 This introduction follows Coronil’s sage advice by paying tribute to Ramos and engaging in transcultural counterpoint of sorts. It explores the ways in which Martí’s vernacular knowledge produced in metropolitan New York influenced constructions of modern Latin Americanism. My emphasis on Martí’s subaltern modernity, his resistance to the modern xii Foreword

rationality of the enlightened letrados (lettered elites) as well as to the commodification and racialization of U.S. mass culture, might also be labeled the Martí differential—calling for an unevenly developed cultural critique—appropriate to an uneven aesthetic modernity. Subaltern Modernities The philosophical problem of modernity, or what Habermas terms ‘‘aesthetic modernity,’’ 9 is the point of departure for both Ramos’s rigorous exegesis of the nineteenth-century ‘‘enlightened letrado’’ tradition—from Domingo F. Sarmiento to Andrés Bello to José Martí—and his probing diagnosis of the beginnings of a Latin Americanist cultural criticism. To better see why this is so, let me begin by situating the problem of modernity both as a chronological and qualitative concept. ‘‘Modernity,’’ as Habermas reminds us, ‘‘has a long history.’’ Although there is a lot of room for debating modernity’s origins and its celebrated (postmodernist) endings, Habermas starts off his view of modernity as ‘‘an incomplete project’’ by looking at the historical contrasts between the words, ‘‘the ancients’’ and ‘‘the moderns.’’ ‘‘Modern in its Latin form ‘modernus’ was used for the first time,’’ he writes, ‘‘in the late th-century in order to distinguish the present, which had become officially Christian, from the Roman and pagan past.’’ For Habermas, modernity and the modern conjure up ‘‘the consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past of antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from the old to the new’’ (). Raymond Williams, in Keywords, emphasizes something similar, writing that in the English context, ‘‘A conventional contrast between ancient and modern was established before the Renaissance. . . . Modernism, modernist and modernity,’’ he goes on to explain, followed ‘‘in the th and th-centuries, and the majority of pre-th-century uses were unfavourable.’’ 10 If, since the nineteenth century, ‘‘the emphatically modern document no longer borrows [the] power of being a classic from the authority of a past epoch,’’ as Habermas suggests, for modernity ‘‘creates its own self-enclosed canons of being classics’’ (), has the relation between the ancients (the classics) and the moderns lost its ‘‘fixed historical reference’’? What happens when we no longer focus exclusively on Western art in our understanding of modernity’s project? In Divergent Modernities, Ramos, like Habermas before him, asks us to recall Max Weber’s foundational analysis of cultural modernity as the separation of reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into the three autonomous spheres of science, morality, and art.11 In other words, as the homogeneous worldviews of religion and metaphysics broke down, Foreword xiii

scientific discourse, paradigms of morality and jurisprudence, and the production of art in turn became ‘‘unevenly’’ institutionalized. Consequently, with the specialists now controlling cultural symbologies and capital, a gap grew between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. In the Latin American context, Ramos argues, with its uneven division of labor, urbanization, and the incorporation of Latin American markets into the world system or global economy, ‘‘new regimes of specializations . . . at once relieved the letrados of their traditional tasks in state administration and forced writers to become professionalized’’ (p. xl). Ramos is, therefore, interested in analyzing what ‘‘the effects of a dependent and uneven modernization’’ 12 were ‘‘on the literary field’’ (p. xl). To begin such an institutional analysis, Ramos rigorously pursues what he calls a ‘‘double articulation,’’ examining literature ‘‘as a discourse that seeks autonomization’’ and undertaking ‘‘an analysis of the conditions that made the institutionalization of literature impossible’’ (xli). Few inter-American intellectuals, Ramos demonstrates, have been as sensitive to modernity’s ‘‘uneven development’’ and its contradictory implications as Martí, who moved from the apparent enlightened ambience of Nuestra América’s ‘‘republic of letters’’ to Anglo-America’s massified culture industry, while most of the time feeling deeply estranged from both versions. As Martí revealingly put it in a letter to an editor in Mexico: ‘‘the mail leaves from New York to a country of ours: I cover everything noteworthy that has happened: political cases, social studies, theater bills, literary announcements, novelties, and particular aspects of this land. . . . In sum, a Review done in New York on all the things that might interest our impatient and imaginative cultural readers, but done in such a way that it could be published in the daily presses.’’ Martí’s work in New York as a foreign correspondent for Buenos Aires’s La Nación, Mexico City’s El Partido Liberal, Caracas’s La Opinión Nacional, and as a journalist for New York’s Sun, was in Ramos’s words, ‘‘conflictive,’’ opposed to the ‘‘highest’’ and ‘‘most subjective’’ value of poetic discourse’’ (). Ramos begins his genealogy of an emergent Latin Americanism with an examination of what he calls ‘‘enlightened letrados,’’ such as the Argentinean Domingo F. Sarmiento and the Chilean Andrés Bello, and contrasts them with the divergent subalternity of Cuban journalist, revolutionary, and poet José Martí, who the author suggests, inaugurated ‘‘the constitution of a new kind of intellectual subject’’ for the Americas. Part  of Divergent Modernities explores in detail how Sarmiento’s classic Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism () and Bello’s modern notion of ‘‘saber decir’’ (knowledge as eloquence) brought on the destruction of what Ramos describes as (after Angel Rama) xiv Foreword

the ‘‘republic of letters’’ 13—that is, the intimate formation of national literatures and the founding of the modern nation-state. In other words, as Ramos suggests, after independence from Spain, ‘‘a new homogeneity, a national homogeneity that was linguistic and political’’ (p. ) took hold in Latin America. From the start, both modern nationalist discourse and culture turned not only toward Europe and the West, but also toward the North and the United States, and were used by intellectual elites like Sarmiento ‘‘to legitimize [their] claims to authority.’’ Especially in Facundo, Sarmiento’s writing ‘‘represents history as progress, as a modernizing process interrupted by the catastrophe of local caudillo,’’ for to write in this Latin American enlightened context is, as Ramos states, ‘‘to order; to modernize’’ (p. ). Throughout Facundo, Sarmiento ‘‘positions himself,’’ according to Ramos, ‘‘between two competing modes of knowledge’’ (p. )—what he characterizes as ‘‘proper’’ (civilized written discourse) and ‘‘foreign’’ (barbaric orality). In contradistinction to Sarmiento, the Chilean Bello did not privilege in his cultural criticism a romantic and undisciplined scholarship, but instead, ground his views of modernity in the humanist university institution itself, where scholarship was orderly and rationally separated into specializations. That is to say, in its division of the sciences from the social to the humanities, the structure of the Western university is thoroughly modern and Occidental,14 for it divides a ‘‘universal reason’’ into ‘‘faculties.’’ In Ramos’s view, ‘‘Bello’s constant reflections on the task of the university and the place of knowledge in society underlin[ed] the relative autonomy of knowledge’’ (p. ). Yet like his fellow ‘‘enlightened letrado,’’ Sarmiento, Bello envisioned writing ‘‘as a machine of action, as a device that transforms the chaotic ‘nature’ of barbarism [in Latin America].’’ Thus, for Ramos, ‘‘in Bello we find . . . the concept of belles lettres, which postulated ‘literary’ writing as a paradigm of knowledge’’ (p. )—and we might also add, as a paradigm of rationality (where writing and grammar are associated with a will to reason). As the minority discourse theorist David Lloyd has offered in a related context about the modern university, idealist theorists (like Sarmiento and Bello) used theory ‘‘to furnish transcendental grounds to its concepts, and after this fashion the university divides the objects of knowledge into the quasi-permanent or canonical form of the disciplines.’’ 15 It is precisely in Bello’s movement toward what we might term a ‘‘universalist rationality,’’ that is, his attempt to subsume local particulars into Western universals, that we can better begin to understand Martí’s subaltern cultural critique against this universalist idealism. From this perspective, Martí’s  essay, ‘‘Our America’’ (with its hypothesis that ‘‘The European university must give way Foreword xv

to the American university’’), can be seen as a prescient calling for ‘‘differential studies’’ of the Americas—not Bello’s integrated formation of the disciplines, affecting the production of knowledge in the university. For as Ramos correctly puts it, Martí ‘‘speak[s] from the periphery’’ (p. ); his exile in New York not only ‘‘radicalized his situation’’ (p. ), but also as a journalist chronicling everyday life, it embedded him in a new institutional site where he could examine ‘‘the conditions of heterogeneity in the literary subject,’’ as opposed to Bello’s Kantian-like ‘‘unity of the manifold’’ (Lloyd, p. ). As a result, Martí’s ‘‘critique from outside the institutional power spectrum, against the modernizing project’’ (p. ) separated him from the tradition of the enlightened letrados in the Americas. Thus envisaged, Ramos’s Martí is well situated to oppose what the author calls the ‘‘will to rationalization,’’ that is, what his future fellow émigrés to the United States, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, would describe as the enlightenment’s dialectical totalitarianism, with its well-known instrumentalized reasoning.16 Ramos’s Martí gives back, we might say, a ‘‘migratory mobility’’ to the ‘‘enlightened letrados’’’ unity of the manifold, reformulating the constituent parts of the body of knowledge so that its content functions ‘‘differentially.’’ 17 Martí, as a subaltern modernist in New York City, is therefore, almost in spite of himself, a ‘‘properly modern hero precisely because his effort to synthesize discursive roles and functions presuppose the antitheses governed by the division of labor and the fragmentation of the relatively integrated public sphere in which writing of the [enlightened] letrados had operated,’’ according to Ramos (p. xliii). The spirit and discipline of this subaltern modernity assumes clear contours, Ramos emphasizes, in Martí’s boundary-crossing cultural work—his lateral ‘‘minor writings.’’ If modernity ‘‘revolts’’ and ‘‘lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative,’’ as Habermas believes was characteristic of the aesthetic modernity of Charles Baudelaire, Martí emerges as one of the first U.S. Latino anti-imperialist intellectuals who was both in Ramos’s view, ‘‘heroic’’ and a melancholy ‘‘subject profoundly divided’’ (p. ). Ramos’s groundbreaking exploration of this ‘‘profoundly divided’’ Martí, exiled and estranged in New York City, takes up the great bulk of part  of Divergent Modernities. Here, Ramos gives readers not the monumentalized and ‘‘maestro’’ Martí (championed by the letrado ‘‘vocational’’ canon in the universities of the Americas), but the struggling revolutionary, journalist, poet, and translator of sentimental romances trying to make-do in the major capitalist city of North America. Martí’s pragmatic meditations on U.S. national literary and cultural heroes (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and George Bancroft); his horror and amazement at the emergent mass culture xvi Foreword

industry (‘‘Coney Island’’ and ‘‘Jesse James’’), and on the United States’s sheer technological power, engineering, and art (‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’); and his critiques of the cultures of U.S. imperialism (‘‘Nuestra América’’), as well as his testimony on war and death (Diario de campaña), as Ramos writes, were all ‘‘enmeshed in a complex and intense reflection on the crisis and reconfiguration of modern literature’’ (p. ). If Martí’s inter-American cultural work in general, and in ‘‘Nuestra América’’ in particular, ‘‘invert[s] the relation of subordination between intellectuals and people, writing and orality, making the indigenous and subaltern the basis of Latin American identity,’’ does Martí’s own stylistic will to power also denounce ‘‘a sense of the literary as both the adequate and necessary form of expression of Latin Americanism,’’ as John Beverley writes? 18 I will return to this question in Martí’s ‘‘Nuestra América’’ at the end of the introduction, but first let me turn to Martí’s earlier writings, the  prologue to Pérez Bonalde’s Poema del Niágara, and ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ and ‘‘Coney Island’’ from North American Scenes. For Ramos, Martí’s prologue to the Poema del Niágara is at once a profound and symptomatic manifesto on the emergence of ‘‘modern poetry’’ in the Americas, with the ‘‘nostalgia of the great deed’’ as well as the breakdown and erasure of the social conditions that ‘‘had made possible the normative . . . contents of an epic authority in literature’’ (). In such a modernist and modernizing life-world, Martí suggests that modernization entails ‘‘the suffering of modern man’’ in the face of a ‘‘new social state,’’ in which ‘‘all the images that were once revered are found stripped of their prestige, while the images of the future are yet unknown.’’ Further, for Martí, modernity inaugurates an epoch or consciousness characterized by what he lyrically calls the ‘‘blinding of the sources and the obfuscating of the gods.’’ For Ramos, Martí’s minoritized discourse (so reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘‘twilight of the gods’’ and Gabriel García Márquez’s more recently celebrated el otoño del patriarca) ‘‘explicitly relates the new social state [in the Americas]—linked to what Max Weber later called the ‘disenchantment of the world’ as an effect of modern rationalization—to the dissolution of a discursive and institutional fabric of belief that, until the moment, guaranteed the central authority of literary forms in the articulation of the constitutive nomos of the social order’’ (p. ). Consequently, the inter-American poet in aesthetic modernity, for Martí, can only have ‘‘broken wings’’—a melancholic figure caged in the cruel theater of solitude who can merely ‘‘present himself,’’ in Martí’s words, ‘‘armed with all his weapons in an arena where he sees neither combatants nor spectators; nor [sees] any prize.’’ Martí here demonstrates how the life-world has become infected by modernization. All cultural representatives (even Foreword xvii

Martí’s cherished poet) have become ‘‘rationalized’’ under the brutal pressures of economic power and globalized and instrumentalized administered forces. If one had to conjecture the most likely source of Ramos’s insistence on Martí’s claiming our attention, it would be his view of Martí’s ‘‘opening salvo [in his prologue to the Poema del Niágara] to any reflection on the relative disengagement of literature from the private sphere, given his reputation as a political writer’’ (p. xlii). Indeed, Ramos argues throughout part  of Divergent Modernities that ‘‘Martí spoke of politics and life from a specific kind of perspective or gaze, from a locus of [an uneven] literary speech’’ (p. xliii). As an analyst of the emergent hegemonic mass culture in the United States, Martí’s gaze, for Ramos, implies varied ‘‘mechanisms of authorization’’ and a set of socially symbolic ‘‘solutions to the emergent literary field.’’ What were to become Martí’s North American Scenes recounted, in Ramos’s words, ‘‘the multiple aspects of urban daily life . . . [for] they . . . serve[d] as a continual reflection on the place of the one who writes—in Martí’s case, the Latin American intellectual—in the face of modernity’’ (p. xliv). Indeed, Ramos indicates that it is possible to say that much of Martí’s inter-American cultural criticism itself aspired to ‘‘the defense of the ‘aesthetic’ and cultural values of Latin America by placing them in opposition to [North] American capitalist modernity . . . and the economic power of the North American other’’ (p. xlv). As Martí bluntly put it in his chronicle ‘‘Coney Island,’’ ‘‘Such people [of the United States] eat quantity; we, quality (p. ). It is precisely Martí’s insistence on a nationalist articulation of ‘‘Latin Americanism’’ that Ramos wishes to deconstruct. In his contact ‘‘with the regime of the political market’’ and with ‘‘labor’’ and ‘‘urban fragmentation’’ in New York City, however, Martí’s idealist views on aesthetics and what Ramos refers to as Martí’s ‘‘concept of the aesthetic interior’’ undergo a sea change. On occasion, as in his  letter to his friend and editor in Mexico City, Manuel Mercado, Martí reveals his arduous existential struggle with exile, modernization, and urban drudgery: ‘‘I now live by means of commercial jobs keeping secretly to myself, so that no one will see, the terrors hidden in the soul’’ (qtd. at ). Elsewhere, in his poem ‘‘Hierro,’’ Martí adds: ‘‘I have earned the bread: let us make poetry’’ (p. ). If Martí writes with the self-consciousness that Michel Foucault associated with modernity (an insistence that the present represents a clear break with the past, and the role of the poet and cultural critic alike is to reflect on the ‘‘contemporary status of his own enterprise’’),19 Martí, like Emerson and Whitman, as Ramos notes, articulates a self-consciously new domain ‘‘in which the poet encounters the city as the outside’’ (p. ). xviii

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Because Martí’s writings on art and his defense of Latin American cultural values are connected to his career as an inter-American journalist (indeed, in Ramos’s view, Martí ‘‘promoted himself ’’ as an intermediary between the United States and various Latin American groups in Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina), Ramos turns in the second half of Divergent Modernities to a fascinating institutional history between  and  of Buenos Aires’s major newspaper, La Nación, founded in  by Bartolomé Mitre, just two years after he had completed his presidential term in Argentina. As Ramos emphasizes, La Nación employed scores of news correspondents abroad, but no two were more important than José Martí and Rubén Darío, ‘‘who were key figures in the development of the early modernista chronicle’’ (p. ). Among other things, this section of Ramos’s book explores how an uneven aesthetic modernity became dependent on newspapers, and how such a dependence limited what he refers to as ‘‘literature’s autonomy’’ (p. ). Ramos’s hypothesis is that the Latin Americanist critique of modernity was itself ‘‘incorporated and promoted by the emergent cultural industry based on the new journalism of the epoch’’ (p. ). If newspapers, as Benedict Anderson argues, were key institutional sites ‘‘for the formation of new national subjects’’ (p. ) and helped ‘‘subject orality to the law of writing,’’ newspapers, too, paradoxically helped initiate a new literary genre ‘‘tied to the modernist chronicle’’ (p. ). When La Nación in  ‘‘inaugurated the telegraphic service, affiliated with the Paris Havas Agency’’ (p. ), it at once enabled Latin America’s ‘‘community of readers to represent themselves as a nation inserted into a ‘universe,’ articulated by means of a communication network,’’ as Ramos describes it (p. ). To be sure, the telegraph in Latin America ‘‘stimulated the specialization,’’ Ramos writes, ‘‘of a new kind of writer, the reporter, delegated to a new linguistic and commercial object, the news bulletin’’ (p. ). As Martí observed in his Poema del Niágra prologue, ‘‘It is as though we are witnessing a decentralization of the intellect. The beautiful has come to the realm of all people.’’ If, as Darío noted in his Autobiography, La Nación ‘‘was a workshop for experimentation,’’ for Martí, it was also a unique institutional location for examining what Ramos calls ‘‘the conditions of literary modernity,’’ especially its relation with new writers and ‘‘contact and cultivation of a new readership’’ (p. ). While it is undeniable that Martí (like Darío) honed his ‘‘craft of style’’ in newspapers like La Nación, the newspaper, in Ramos’s view, was more importantly a site where ‘‘organic intellectuals’’ 20 in the new culture industry could begin analyzing ‘‘the irreducible aporias of the will to autonomy and the hybridity of the literary subject in Latin America’’ (p. ). Foreword xix

Beginning with Martí in , according to Ramos, La Nación ‘‘establishe[d] a clear precedent, transforming correspondence into the site not only for informative discourse on foreign lands and peoples, but formal and literary experimentation as well’’ (p. ). Martí’s elder, Sarmiento, was one of the first to recognize and champion uncritically Martí’s journalistic writing as a place where the Cuban let ‘‘loose his howls.’’ More conventional readers, however, like F. T. de Aldrey, editor of Caracas’s La Opinión Nacional, chastised Martí for his propensity to experiment freely in his reportages: ‘‘readers of this country want news briefs and political anecdotes and as little literature as possible’’ (p. ). In contradistinction to the more ‘‘refined’’ and ‘‘bourgeois’’ fin de siècle chroniclers—like Gómez Carillo, who in his narrative of strolling the streets of Buenos Aires, El encanto de Buenos Aires (The Enchantment of Buenos Aires), sang the praises of fashion and ‘‘the charm of merchandise’’ (p. ), or Sarmiento, who in his Travels in the U.S. () saw the urban modern city, again in Ramos’s words, ‘‘as a utopic space’’ (p. )—Martí’s representation of the cities of the United States of the North, as he called them, rejects what Ramos refers to as ‘‘the logic of the fetish.’’ Thus, Martí’s capitalist city was explicitly linked, Ramos tells us, ‘‘to the representation of disaster, of catastrophe, as distinctive metaphors for modernity’’ (p. ). Further, for Martí, the city spatialized ‘‘the fragmentation of the traditional order of discourse that the city has brought in its wake’’ (p. ). As Martí characteristically put it, ‘‘Everything [in New York] is mixed [and] melts away,’’ no doubt a reference to what Karl Marx saw in The Communist Manifesto () as the catastrophic process of capitalist modernization, for ‘‘All that is solid,’’ he wrote, ‘‘melts into air.’’ 21 Against ‘‘enlightened letrados’’ like Sarmiento, Martí’s North American Scenes resist ‘‘producing a decorative image of the city’’ and instead, ‘‘record the misery and exploitation generated by the most advanced forms of modernity . . . in the United States’’ (p. ). Martí’s remarkable  chronicle about ‘‘El Puente de Brooklyn’’ (‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’), one of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated engineering accomplishments, is emblematic of the exiled writer’s attempt ‘‘to coexist with and among’’ North American technology. For Martí, Washington Roebling’s monumental bridge, one of the first to use steel in its construction, palpitates, ‘‘throbb[ing],’’ Martí writes, ‘‘a blood so magnanimously in our day’’ (p. ). Almost a hinge between two epochs, the bridge’s cable are also ‘‘like the teeth of a mammoth that in one bite would be capable of decimating a mountain’’ (p. ). Although Martí sensitively ‘‘interprets the apparatus,’’ he also sees this North American modern engineering event as an allegory of modernity, quantification, and modernization. Its arches, xx

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Martí notes, are ‘‘like the doors to a grandiose world which uplifts the spirit,’’ and its half-stone and half-steel construction metaphorically concretizes history’s progress: ‘‘No longer will deep moats open up around walled fortresses; cities instead will be embraced with arms of steel’’ (p. ). If, as Emerson insisted in his  essay Nature, technology itself is an extension of nature, then Martí’s illuminating ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ follows this insight by thematizing engineering and technology as instruments to better serve culture and society. On a more formal and rhetorical level, however, Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ contrapuntally reveals what Ramos terms ‘‘an anxiety . . . concerning the implications of modernization’’ (p. ). Insofar as Martí’s chronicle ‘‘works with emblems, with cultural landscapes,’’ Ramos asks, what are readers to make of Martí’s allusions to the bridge as an ‘‘aerial serpent,’’ its towers seeming ‘‘like slenderized Egyptian pyramids,’’ and to its masses of ethnoracialized workers ‘‘the like [of ] which can be found neither in Thebes nor the Acropolis’’? Are these Western cultural emblems precisely the very symbologies that have been ‘‘displaced by modernization’’? What exactly does Martí (writing in and from the technological languages of the newspaper) ‘‘see’’ in his allegory? He, of course, sees many things—‘‘the resounding dredges’’; ‘‘heroic feverish workers clean[ing] the base’’ of the bridge—and activates a deconstructive illusion of presence for his readers—‘‘By the hand we will take our readers . . . and lead them to see up front’’ (p. ) the bridge itself. In Ramos’s view, Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ allegorizes not only the inter-American chronicler’s ‘‘relationship with technology,’’ but also the subject of ‘‘quantification,’’ a ‘‘corollary to [the] gaze that attempts to geometrically rationalize space’’ (p. ). On this strictly formal level, explains Ramos, Martí allegorizes ‘‘the asymmetry between the discourses tied to technology and literature.’’ As a result, Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ uses the ‘‘struggle of literary discourse’’ to push ‘‘its way through the ‘strong’ signs of modernity’’ (p. ). In the process of ‘‘overwriting’’ this chronicle (Martí’s writing was itself based on the journalist William Conant’s  essay on the Brooklyn Bridge that appeared in Harper’s), Ramos suggests that Martí’s crónica put him ‘‘in the position of a translator’’ (), for Martí, Ramos writes, ‘‘literally seizes a metaphor from Conant [a flying serpent], translates it literally as [sierpe aerea], and uses it to describe a different object’’ (p. , note ). Beyond this literal translation project, Ramos maintains that Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ works ‘‘as a strategy of legitimation that takes into account the ‘idealized’ and ‘mechanical’ languages of modernity as obliterated matter for the supposed ‘exceptionality’ of style’’ (p. ). In other words, Martí’s Foreword xxi

literary modernist chronicle ascends (like the bridge itself ) ‘‘toward apotheosis,’’ Ramos lyrically writes, ‘‘articulat[ing] a spatial hierarchization’’ (p. ). Hence, Martí fantastically explains: ‘‘Seeing them conglomerate to swarm quickly over the aerial serpent, squeezed together, the vast, clean, ever-growing crowd—one imagines seeing seated in the middle of the sky, with her radiant head appearing over the summit and with white hands, as large as eagles, open, in a sign of peace over the land—Liberty’’ (p. ). Martí’s gaze is no longer that of the traditional positivist journalist. Rather, Martí’s hybrid, modern writing verges on what Ramos rightly calls ‘‘a hallucination’’ (p. ), where the chronicler sees a ‘‘swarm,’’ a ‘‘crowd,’’ and an ‘‘aerial serpent,’’ and then immediately imagines seeing in ‘‘the middle of the sky,’’ a ‘‘summit’’ and ‘‘eagles . . . over the land,’’ culminating in a vision of ‘‘Liberty.’’ This epiphanic writing is of great significance, Ramos argues, for Martí’s ‘‘overwriting’’ is ‘‘founded on a model of literary discourse as a dramatic deviation from the linguistic norm(s) in operation,’’ and hence, resists the logic of what we earlier called the ‘‘enlightened letrados’ ’’ universal rationality, a rationality that ‘‘imposes the value of exchange’’ (p. ) and a new statistical reason. Responding to critics of his overly wrought prose style, Martí in  insisted that writers, like painters, work with concrete material (words) and that this intellectual process of labor distinguishes the writer’s production from other kinds of intellectual work. Thus, Martí claims that ‘‘there is no reason that one [writer] would avail of diverse colors, and not another. The atmosphere changes with different zones, as does language with different themes’’ (p. ). Put differently, language too, Ramos writes, is ‘‘stratified by the division of labor.’’ Style, for Martí, ‘‘is the medium of labor that differentiates the writer (as the use of color does the painter) from the social, institutional practices that also use language as a medium,’’ Ramos writes. Literature, in Martí’s words, is itself an act of ‘‘concretizing. . . . Each paragraph must be organized as an excellent machine, and each one of it parts must be adjusted, inserted with such perfection among others, so that if any one part is taken from among the ensemble, it would be as a bird without wing[s], and the parts would not function. . . . The complexity of the machine indicates the perfection of its make’’ (p. ). Briefly, Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ allegorizes not only ‘‘a literary will to style,’’ it does so precisely in a machinelike discourse that ‘‘coexists’’ and ‘‘struggles’’ (as Ramos wryly insists) ‘‘against discursive, antiaesthetic functions tied to the technologized medium of journalism’’ (p. ). It is, therefore, ‘‘the incongruencies and contradictions’’ (concretized in Martí’s North American Scenes) that ‘‘distinguish Martí’s modernity’’ (p. ) from the more famous modernistas of the xxii

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period. Martí reshapes ‘‘fragments’’ and ‘‘remains’’ and refunctionalizes his ‘‘uneven’’ inter-American modernity as a kind of schizophrenic and capitalist ‘‘desiring machine.’’ 22 While Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ summarizes his multiple responses to North American modernization, ‘‘Coney Island’’ () reveals his relentless animus toward North American mass culture, which, I think, has often led to charges (especially among his recent North American readers) that he was a snob, or worse, an arrogant mandarin. These glib criticisms of Martí are in my view entirely wrong, for Martí’s pointed attacks on the emergent nineteenth-century mass culture were just as often directed against Latin American elitists and their ‘‘enlightened letrado’’ cultures. Both North American mass culture (and what Horkheimer and Adorno more precisely termed the ‘‘culture industry’’) 23 and the letrados’ culture in Latin America, it bears repeating, deserved a thorough critique. In contrast to both the canonical letrados’ view of Martí as a clásico, above the fray of the intense historical and political debates of his own time, and the more hagiographic view of Martí as a ‘‘granitelike’’ hero, Ramos’s analysis of Martí and ‘‘Coney Island’’ documents precisely the historical contradictions and social conflicts that the North American Scenes opened up in the domain of modern, inter-American cultural criticism. Ramos first reconstructs the entire North American Scenes as ‘‘an immense urban cartography’’ (p. ), where the capitalist North American city is not only ‘‘a decentered space’’ (p. ), but at the same time is gendered as a ‘‘sleeping woman,’’ where women are either ‘‘masculinized’’ by modernization or take on the role of ‘‘solitary mothers.’’ Tellingly, Ramos writes, the figure of the father ‘‘stands out by [his] very absence; he is nowhere to be found in Martí’s modern landscape.’’ Modernization, the very process that Ramos has been transnationally tracing throughout Divergent Modernities (via Weber and Rama), is his shorthand for a variety of processes and concepts that require further elaboration. Habermas is especially helpful here, for modernization, he explains, is ‘‘a concept . . . that refers to a bundle of processes that are cumulative and mutually reinforcing; to the formation of capital and the mobilization of resources; to the development of the forces of production and the increase in the production of labor; to the establishment of centralized political power and the formation of national identities; . . . [and] to the secularization of values and norms.’’ 24 As Ramos sees it Martí’s ‘‘Coney Island’’ thematizes many of the ‘‘bundle of processes’’ that Habermas explains are cumulative and constitutive of modernization. To begin with, the subject position of the chronicler and cultural thinker in ‘‘Coney Island’’ is, in Ramos’s words, ‘‘a displaced subject,’’ who also happens to be simultaneously ‘‘externally exiled’’ (as a Foreword

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Cuban working in New York) and ‘‘internally exiled’’ (as a ‘‘nostalgic’’ critical thinker from ‘‘a higher spiritual world’’ in a base life-world motivated by ‘‘the flow of money’’) (p. ). One of the earliest results of the United States’s nineteenth-century culture industries, Coney Island, with its ‘‘annihilating and incomparable expansiveness,’’ with its ‘‘colossal houses, as high as mountains,’’ where coarse ‘‘peasants’’ and the ‘‘genteel’’ wealthy mix and drink ‘‘distasteful mineral water,’’ also affords Martí a place where he can begin to look at the historical break between high and low cultures. Interestingly, the high cultural realm is associated with what Martí calls the ‘‘we’’ (Latin Americans), and the low belongs to the ‘‘they’’ (the people of the United States). But Martí’s ‘‘Coney Island,’’ at the same time, reveals the emergent U.S. culture industry to be a place where the dispossesed are routinely commodified, ridiculed, and physically abused. As Martí writes, Coney Island is the place where crowds ‘‘applaud the skill with which a ball thrower has managed to hit the nose of a misfortunate man of color, who in exchange for a measly day’s wage, stands day and night with his frightened head stuck through a hole made in the canvass, avoiding the pitches of the ball throwers with ridiculous movements and exaggerated faces.’’ This ridiculing of a ‘‘misfortunate man of color’’ by the socially constructed ‘‘white,’’ massified audiences of the culture industry is more than just popular entertainment for Martí. Rather, it is also a form closely associated with minstrelsy 25 and white supremacy, where even leisure and entertainment are embedded in a struggle over the politics of popular culture, race, and nation. In other words, for Martí, a radical critic of modern scientific racism (as Roberto Fernández Retamar emphasizes),26 the incorporation of art and entertainment into the marketplace implies, in Ramos’s view, ‘‘a sense of the degradation’’ illustrated for Martí in ‘‘the figure of the abused black performer’’ at Coney Island. That Martí felt especially unsympathetic toward urban mass culture is undeniable. Indeed, as Ramos consistently points out in Divergent Modernities, Martí clearly misjudges mass culture, privileging and ‘‘ideologizing’’ terms such as culture to mean an ‘‘abstract sense of a process of becoming cultivated,’’ while simultaneously criticizing ‘‘culture’s’’ abstract rationalism. Martí preaches, ‘‘In vain do men of foresight attempt, by means of culture and religious sentiment, to direct this driven mass that heedlessly seeks the quick and full satisfaction of its appetites’’ (p. ). The sources of Martí’s concept of culture, Ramos suggests, are to be found in the author’s own experiences with the new, anonymous mass culture in New York and its surroundings, such as Coney Island, where Martí writes ‘‘the marvelous prosperity of the xxiv Foreword

United States of the North’’ and its ‘‘jovial and frenetic’’ crowds extend themselves ‘‘with a more tumultuous order’’ (p. ). It is from his lofty aestheticizing position above the crowds that Martí ‘‘gazes with unfamiliarity at the material baseness of the masses in North America.’’ More significantly for Ramos, Martí in his role as a cultural critic, ‘‘in effect help[s] to formulate one of the grand narratives of legitimation for the wide-open field of the literary enterprise (which continued to function at least until the centennials of the Latin American Wars of Independence)’’ (p. ). By asserting in ‘‘Coney Island’’ the pitfalls of modernization in the capitalist United States of the North and proposing the superiority ‘‘of the aesthetic sphere’’ as a socially symbolic response, Martí’s discourses (as well as those of Sarmiento, José Enrique Rodó, and later after the Porfiriato, the Mexican cultural critics Alfonso Reyes, José Vasconcelos, and the Dominican Pedro Henríquez Ureña) ‘‘from the start [were] compromised by the project to legitimize the cultural sphere’’ (p. ). In other words, the modernist’s uneven rhetoric of crises (what Ramos later calls their Lyotardean ‘‘narratives of legitimation’’) 27 contributed to producing the ‘‘bundle of processes’’ of modernization itself. Ramos’s analysis of Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ ‘‘Coney Island,’’ and North American Scenes leads him to ask if it was a ‘‘coincidence that in the first decades of this century the proliferation of essays’’ by both interAmerican intellectuals like Martí and traditional Latin American letrados alike were ‘‘concomitant to the culturalist’’ project itself ? Did the very ‘‘form of the [modernist] essay represent the ambiguous place of the modern writer faced with the disciplinarian will distinctive of modernity’’ (p. )? If the essay form, as Ramos theorizes, ‘‘mediates between the interior of the beautiful (poetry) and the demands of society’’ (p. ), was this how modern chroniclers ‘‘extended [their social territory as interpreters and public announcers] of the beautiful, first in the chronicle, but later in the essay, as a privileged form of the ‘maestro’ at the turn of the century’’ (p. ) and beyond? Divergent Modernities concludes with a sophisticated exegesis of Martí’s classic, modern,  essay ‘‘Our America,’’ and with two new, supplementary chapters for the Duke edition on Martí’s migratory poetry written in New York City and on his  testimony, War Journal. As in his earlier chapters, Ramos continues analyzing the formation of Latin Americanism, for ‘‘behind every assertion of what is Latin Americanism, there lies a will to power exercised from different positions on the map of social contradictions.’’ Ramos is, therefore, troubled with Martí’s attempts in ‘‘Our America’’ ‘‘to defend us’’ from a ‘‘they’’ who ‘‘would divest us of our self-representation’’ (p. ). Because Martí, among other things, interpellates his Latin American (and we Foreword xxv

might add, his U.S. Latino/a) readers within an androcentric discourse of essentializing ‘‘familial homogeneity’’ and a ‘‘discourse of identity’’ (p. ), his critique of the cultures of U.S. imperialism and everything imported to ‘‘our’’ America (especially the colonizing discourse or the ‘‘tigers within’’ Latin America) necessarily entails, for Ramos, an ideology of the aesthetic and ‘‘the gaze of an aesthetic Latin Americanist subject’’ (p. ). In its ‘‘intensely overwritten prose,’’ and with its saturation of ‘‘telluric’’ figures of speech or tropes, Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’ ends up being, in Ramos’s view, the Cuban’s ‘‘reflection on the discourses that could legitimize and effectively represent the conflicting field of identity’’ (p. ). As an object of struggle over the field of representation, however, Martí’s gaze in the process produces a powerful defense of what we now call after Foucault ‘‘subjugated knowledges,’’ and what postcontemporary Latin Americanist Walter Mignolo terms ‘‘subaltern border gnosis.’’ 28 In other words, Martí offers us in ‘‘Our America’’ a rich defense of everything ‘‘excluded by the letrados,’’ as Ramos emphasizes. From this perspective, Martí’s bundle of ‘‘minor writings’’ constitutes for Ramos an alternative ‘‘Latin Americanist archive,’’ capable of not only intervening into ‘‘the enigma of identity,’’ but also investigating ‘‘the conditions of possibility for good governance’’ in the Americas. Consequently, Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’ involves itself in an analysis of the cultural politics of race, nation, and culture, for cultures that are marginalized (relegated to ‘‘underdevelopment’’) can also contain the grounds for a sober critique of the hegemonic Western norms by which they are judged. Further, ‘‘Our America’’ operates within what Ramos sees as ‘‘the critical intensity of a root knowledge—a knowledge of roots’’—and we might add, as Paul Gilroy suggests of Black British root work in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, as an intercultural knowledge of ‘‘routes.’’ Migratory Routes Routes begins with [an] assumption of movement, arguing that travels and contacts are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity. The general topic, if it can be called one, is vast: a view of human location as constituted by displacement as much as by stasis.—James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century

From my position as an American studies teacher, in a comparative ethnic studies department, I wish to conclude by approaching Divergent Modernities as a valuable book for contributing to and expanding our emergent interAmerican cultural criticism. Ramos’s new Duke edition opens up other spaces (like Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic has accomplished for American studies), xxvi

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and in the process, develops and brings new problems to the forefront of cultural criticism. And to say this is to claim that Ramos’s remarkable study, Divergent Modernities, does for José Martí what the great Black Atlantic has done for nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American modernists like Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright, among others. Of course, Ramos wrote and published his book several years before Gilroy’s was in print, but my point in this last section is to bring both Ramos and Gilroy’s intercultural works closer together as examples of the new, stunning, mapping out of diasporic and migratory, transnational scholarship. Indeed, it is undeniable that Gilroy and Ramos’s works suggest some notable methodological parallels in their philosophically nuanced studies of the ‘‘countercultures’’ of subaltern modernity, and they do so by focusing on specific diasporic and migratory intellectuals within an outer-nationalist framework. More important, Gilroy and Ramos link together some cultural conversations that in Europe, Latin America, and North America have been kept separated by their respective specialist and nationalist gazes. The most crucial conversation, as Gilroy acutely puts it, is about the long and often ‘‘bitter dialogue on the significance of slavery and emancipation in the Western hemisphere. It was very seldom that these two sets of interest were able to touch one another.’’ 29 That is, Gilroy contends that before books such as C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, slavery and modernity had very little to do with each other, for the cultural conversation, he emphasizes, was ‘‘configured in a very Eurocentric way, [and] in a . . . dubious way, because it appealed to some innocent essence of Europe’’ (). In writing The Black Atlantic, Gilroy attempts to show how there indeed were ‘‘a common set of problems’’ (slavery, the Middle Passage, and modernity), and that these problems had been articulated by African American intellectuals and travelers, like DuBois, who had studied in the United States and Germany; Wright, who lived in the United States and yet wrote many of his books about African Americans from Paris, where he was engaged in conversations with intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir; and those who had founded the Presence Africaine, thus dissolving the rigid borders between Francophone and Anglophone worlds. Consequently, as Gilroy explains, a set of philosophical problems ‘‘was being articulated across intellectual and scholarly as well as linguistic and political borders.’’ These subaltern modernists, in Gilroy’s view, ‘‘defied the boundaries that the nation-state puts in its place.’’ Further, they ‘‘marked out the cracks that the nation-state introduces into our thinking of our own history, and I wanted to address that fracture’’ (). Foreword

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Modernity, for Gilroy, thus is both a qualitative and chronological category ‘‘that gets generated through and from the systematic and hemispheric trade in African slaves.’’ Further (‘‘where that becomes a modern experience’’), Gilroy adds, ‘‘it’s not something that belongs exclusively to the blacks involved or their contemporary heirs. It belongs to an expanded understanding of what the modern world is and how it worked. . . . It’s not anybody’s special ethnic property. The experience of catastrophic terror does not become something that its victims can own’’ (). Similarly, throughout Divergent Modernities (and especially in his two new chapters on Martí, ‘‘Migratories’’ and ‘‘The Repose of Heroes: On Poetry and War in José Martí’’), Ramos is interested in examining what it meant for Martí, a migratory, outer-nationalist intellectual, to be one of the first U.S. Latinos confronting modernity and the cultures of U.S. imperialism. As Ramos asks of Martí’s posthumous collection, Versos Libres, written during the s in New York, ‘‘What house can writing found and firmly ground beyond its emphatic promise to do so?’’ (p. ). Does modern writing for Martí ‘‘guarantee the residence and home of the subject’’? (p. ). Here, Ramos focuses on Martí’s ‘‘Domingo Triste’’ (‘‘Sad Sunday’’), a poem about the New York Latino poet’s ‘‘biographical exile’’ that also marks the larger sense of modernity, when a society is now ‘‘governed by the new principles of organization’’ (p. ). Martí therefore, can represent the latenineteenth-century migratory U.S. Latino/a subject as a kind of ‘‘residue,’’ Ramos writes, ‘‘displaced and contained in a receptacle, the shell’’; or as Ramos quotes Martí herein, ‘‘A friend came to see me, and he asked myself / about me; . . . I am the shell of myself, which on a foreign soil / turns at the wish of a wild wind, / vain, fruitless, shattered, broken.’’ For Ramos, Martí thematizes melancholy displacement, inter-American routes, and ‘‘the experience of migratory flux’’ (p. ), where the transnational subject possibly loses itself, becoming ‘‘the shell of myself.’’ But this nineteenth-century U.S. Latino migratory subject, to Ramos’s mind, is also ‘‘the bearer of traces’’ (p. ). Martí’s ‘‘here of plenitude’’ (in the capitalist city of New York) is ‘‘the there of the subject that writes’’ (Cuba)— and vice versa. The emergent U.S. Latino/a subject, in other words, as early as the s, writes on that edge delineated by separation and fracture, and as Martí himself complexly put it in ‘‘Sad Sunday,’’ ‘‘I bear the pain which the whole world observes / a rebellious pain which the verse breaks / and that is, oh sea! the fleeting gull / passing on its way to Cuba on your waves!’’ Martí’s insistence on ruptures and fractures is, for Ramos, key for understanding the slippery signifying chain in ‘‘Sad Sunday.’’ Exile and migration break the subaltern modern poet’s verse. But Martí’s poetic verse (as Ramos xxviii

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acutely phrases it) may at the same time ‘‘break the pain,’’ for poetry is metaphorized here as a ‘‘gull,’’ and hence, can extend ‘‘a lasso, a meeting with the absent land’’ (p. ). Briefly, Martí’s poem, ‘‘Sad Sunday,’’ can only repeat ‘‘something’’ of the migratory poet’s ‘‘originary plenitude’’ in Cuba, for it inscribes in New York ‘‘an image, an echo of experience’’ (p. ). U.S. Latino/a writing is a creature ‘‘of the wind, of echoes,’’ and an echo that is also a result of hemispheric and global forces of terror and empire. It is against the grain of this domestic and global terror that we can better locate Martí’s subaltern modernity, for his ‘‘minor writings’’ is about our modern world and our place in it. Martí’s subaltern modernity—and here Ramos’s Divergent Modernities is especially instructive—is not that of the enlightened letrados, with their rhetorical emphasis on ‘‘reason’’ and ‘‘rationality.’’ Martí does not express the nineteenth-century view of Latin American intellectuals (like Sarmiento or Rodó), who revealed the continent’s barbarism, its ‘‘backwater-ness’’ to its habitat, but rather, through exile, he is forced to become more specialized—first as a news correspondent, then as a translator for Appelton House and a kind of cultural diplomat, and finally as a founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in . Subaltern modernity embeds Martí in a powerful political system (what he famously referred to as being inside ‘‘the belly of the beast’’), where he by necessity worked through and against the various imperial centers (Spain and the United States)—modern centers governing their subaltern peripheries (colonies and neocolonies) primarily for economic reasons. While Spain and the United States’s imperialism for Martí were never equivalent, he nevertheless saw the latter’s empire as implying, for Nuestra América, direct and indirect political and military control. And, of course, in his battle against Spain’s imperialism, he gave his life on May , , at Dos Ríos, Cuba. For Martí, the ‘‘American empire’’ was ‘‘not a contradiction in terms,’’ as Amy Kaplan suggests it has usually been seen by popular U.S. perception and mainline scholarly analyses.30 In his North American Scenes, Martí was particularly sensitive to the terrors and catastrophes of modernity wrought by slavery, the American Civil War, the United States–Mexican War (–), and the United States’s conquests of the territories and indigenous peoples of North America. If the s mark, as Kaplan writes, ‘‘a turning point in the history of American imperialism’’ (), it was precisely at this time that Martí joined the public debates of his epoch between ‘‘self-avowed imperialists and anti-imperialists.’’ Were the acquisitions (in the aftermath of the  Spanish-American War) of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, Kaplan asks, merely ‘‘aberrations’’ of U.S. history and foreign policy? Martí’s ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ read some  years later, indeed challenges Foreword

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the Anglocentric idealist and narrow definition of U.S. imperialism, especially as it was proposed by realists like George F. Kennan,31 who in Kaplan’s words, saw ‘‘imperialism as only the formal annexation of colonies’’ (). Further, Martí’s writings anticipate a more cultural approach to his and our own age of U.S. empire (–), for like, say, the views of historian Richard Drinnon,32 Martí closely links continental and transoceanic expansion. Through the beliefs in the racial superiority of Anglo-Saxons, the superiority of Occidentalism, and the desirability of subjugating nonwhites, the ideologies of empire, as Kaplan contends, brought together ‘‘U.S. manifest destiny with a transoceanic passage to India’’ (). At a time when we are pondering our  years of the cultures of U.S. imperialism (–), we may wish to read Martí’s subaltern modernity as a chronological and relational concept, where in anthropologist Fernando Coronil’s dramatic terms, ‘‘heterogeneous social actors . . . appear on history’s stage as subaltern [subjects], just as there are times or places in which they play dominant roles.’’ Subalternity, as I have been using it in this introduction, ‘‘defines not the being of a subject,’’ as Coronil theorizes, ‘‘but a subjected state of being . . . , a double vision that recognizes at one level a common ground among diverse forms of subjection and, at another, the intractable identity of subjects formed within uniquely constraining worlds.’’ 33 Martí’s ‘‘double subaltern vision’’ is nowhere more visible and moving than in his cogent account of what Ramos calls the formation of the Cuban’s ‘‘soldier-subject’’ in the War Journal, which he kept on his routes from the United States to the Dominican Republic and Haiti on his way to fight for Cuba’s liberation from empire in . While Martí’s War Journal has been a significant ‘‘literary’’ document for twentieth-century Cubans associated with José Lezama Lima’s Orígenes group (‘‘celebrated,’’ Ramos writes, for its ‘‘fragmentary, intense prose’’), [, n. ]), Ramos wants his readers to see the War Journal primarily for its devastating ‘‘critique of violence.’’ And it is precisely through ‘‘aesthetic mediation’’ that Martí believes one can begin to contain what Ramos refers to as ‘‘the ineluctably aggressive energy of the revolutionary forces.’’ Hence, Martí writes: ‘‘The spirit I have sown is that which has spread, across the island; with it, and guided in accordance with it, we will soon triumph, and with the greatest victory, and for the greatest peace. I foresee that, for a little while at least, the force and will of the revolution will be divorced from this spirit—it will be deprived of its enchantment and taste . . . and of its ability to prevail from this natural consortium; [it] will be robbed of the benefit of this conjunction between the activity of the revolutionary forces and the spirit that animates them’’ (p. ). xxx Foreword

The double drives of war and enchantment, for Martí, have to be mediated, separated, and finally integrated. This revolutionary conjunction is the only possibility for survival, dignity, victory, and the ‘‘greatest peace.’’ It is from this subaltern double perspective that we can also end with Robert Fernández Retamar’s contrapuntal insight that ‘‘el moderismo es el primer periódo de la época histórica del imperialismo y de la liberación.’’ (‘‘modernism is the first historical periodization of the epoch of imperialism and liberation’’).34 Ramos’s Divergent Modernities celebrates contrapuntally the vitality, melancholic struggle and the double subaltern vision that Martí wrought as a chronicler, soldier-revolutionary-subject, and radical critic of empire, terror, and violence in the face of the cultures of European and U.S. imperialism. Notes  For an illuminating discussion of ‘‘deterritorialization,’’ see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘‘What Is a Minor Literature?’’ in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), where they use the term to locate the politics of exile in literature and language.  By the ‘‘transnationally local,’’ I mean the border zone where the local and global intersect. See Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Essays on the Coloniality of Power, Subalternity, and Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ).  Public spheres, for Habermas, are both direct and mediated ‘‘critically reasoning’’ conversations between individuals who form public opinion, and thus, influence the political system. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, ).  José Martí’s North American Scenes are a series of chronicles on North American everyday life, especially in New York City. Written between  and  for various newspapers—particularly Buenos Aires’s La Nación, Mexico City’s El Partido Liberal, and Caracas’s La Opinión Nacional—these modern chronicles form what Ramos calls a ‘‘seldom studied’’ and ‘‘fundamental part of Martí’s voluminous corpus’’ (p. xiv). More significantly, Martí’s North American Scenes constitute, again for Ramos, ‘‘a foundational moment in the genealogy of Latin Americanist discourse, as they deploy a series of rhetorical strategies, tropes, and subject positions’’ (p. xlv). See also Susana Rotker, ‘‘The (Political) Exile Gaze in Martí’s Writing on the United States,’’ in José Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey Belknap and Raúl Fernández (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), –.  James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, ).  Julio Ramos’s study, herein, of Martí’s ‘‘minor writings,’’ like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s study of Kafka, relies on a deconstruction of the high art canonical category. Ramos rejects this hierarchic model of the canonical paradigm and instead favors a spatial, ‘‘lateral criticism,’’ in which poetic or minor discourses are variously ‘‘inside’’ or ‘‘outside’’ of the dominant discursive practices of the hegemonic culture.  For critical reviews of Ramos’s Desencuentros de la modernidad, see, for instance, the following:

Foreword xxxi





 



 

 



Rubén Ríos Avila, ‘‘Hacia una crítica lateral,’’ Puerto Rico Ilustrado (cultural supplement to El Mundo),  August , –; John Beverley, review of Desencuentros de la modernidad, Revista Iberoamericana , no.  (): –; Antonio Cornejo Polar, review of Desencuentros de la modernidad, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana , no.  (): ; Luis MillonesFigueroa, ‘‘El surgimiento de la literatura moderna en Latinoamérica,’’ Nuevo Texto Crítico  (): ; María Elena Rodriguez Castro, ‘‘El buen decir y la crítica,’’ Posdata , no.  (); Karen Stoley, review of Desencuentros de la modernidad, Hispanic Review , no.  (): – ; and Oscar Terán, review of Desencuentros de la modernidad, Boletín del Instituto de Historia de la Universidad de Buenos Aires. For an extended reading of Ramos’s work, see John Beverley, Against Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). For an incisive reading of the emergence of this new inter-American criticism as a response to the limits of (North) American cultural criticism from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Richard Rorty, see Paul Jay, Contingency Blues: The Search for Foundations in American Criticism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ). Fernando Coronil, ‘‘Transculturation and the Politics of Theory: Countering the Center, Cuban Counterpoint,’’ introduction to Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), xi. Jürgen Habermas, ‘‘Modernity—An Incomplete Project,’’ trans. Seyla Benhabib, in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, ), . All subsequent page citations appear in the text. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, ). My views here on Weber draw on Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ). Drawing on the cultural work of Angel Rama, Jean Franco, and Noé Jitrik, Ramos’s thesis on the uneven modernity in nineteenth-century Latin America anticipates Néstor García Canclini’s views on twentieth-century Latin America in Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico City: Grijalbo, ), where García Canclini writes ‘‘that we [in Latin America] have had an exuberant modernism with a deficient modernization’’ (). Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ). For a lucid and cogent analysis of this ‘‘Occidentalism’’ for the Americas, see Roberto Fernández Retamar’s foundational ‘‘Nuestra América y Occidente,’’ in Para el perfil definitivo del hombre, d ed. (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubana: ), –. David Lloyd, ‘‘Foundations of Diversity: Thinking the University in a Time of Multiculturalism,’’ unpublished manuscript, . All subsequent page citations appear in the text. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, ). Originally published in Amsterdam in , a good part of the book is based on notes of intense discussions between Adorno and Horkheimer in their exile in Santa Monica, California. If, as Ramos suggests, Martí’s writings are ‘‘minoritized discourses,’’ we might also extend this key insight by saying that Martí’s positions emerged in similar ways as U.S. ethnic and minority positions have emerged—in David Lloyd’s words, ‘‘in differential relation to the unifying tendencies of the state and its apparatus’’ (Lloyd, ‘‘Foundations of Diversity,’’ ).

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 Beverley, Against Literature, .  Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, ), .  See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, ). As opposed to ‘‘traditional intellectuals,’’ Gramsci’s ‘‘organic intellectuals’’ are the new progressive intellectuals needed to organize a new social class.  See Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, d ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, ), . Martí’s allusion to Marx anticipates Marshall Berman’s view that the twentieth century oscillates between modernization and modernism, shattering the public sphere into a multitude of fragments and privatized languages. As Berman puts it, ‘‘To be modern . . . is to experience personal and social life as maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself something at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows’’ (Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity [New York: Penguin Books, ]).  See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, ).  Instead of using terms such as mass culture or popular culture, Theodor Adorno reminds us that, ‘‘in our drafts we spoke of ‘mass culture.’ We replaced that expression with ‘culture industry’ in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme’’ (Theodor Adorno, ‘‘Culture Industry Reconsidered,’’ New German Critique  [Fall ]: ).  Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, .  See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, ).  See Roberto Fernández Retamar’s ‘‘Del anticolonialismo al antimperialismo,’’ in ‘‘Nuestra América’’: Cien Años y otros acercamientos a Martí (Havana: Editorial SI-MAR, ), , where he argues persuasively that Martí ‘‘fue el anti-Gobineau, y con su visión popular, defendió exactamento lo opuesto que el prefascita Frances, la igualidad de las razas.’’ (‘‘was an anti-Gobineau and, with his popular vision, exactly defended the opposite of the French prefascist, the sameness of races’’). Fernández Retamar, of course, is alluding here to Martí’s differential vision of biopolitics in ‘‘Our America’’ (), where he claimed that ‘‘no hay odio de razas, porque no hay razas’’ (‘‘there is no hatred of races because there are no races’’). I thank Fernández Retamar for his helpful conversations with me in Havana, Cuba, in January , and for sharing his most recently published scholarly work on Martí.  Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).  Michel Foucault, ‘‘Two Lectures,’’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, –, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, ), –.  See Tommy Lott, ‘‘Black Cultural Politics: An Interview with Paul Gilroy,’’ Found Object (spring ): . All subsequent page citations appear in the text.

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

Amy Kaplan, ‘‘On Imperialism,’’ in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Oxford: Blackwell, ), . All subsequent quotations will appear in the text.  George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).  Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (New York: NAL, ).  Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . See also José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, ).  Roberto Fernández Retamar, ‘‘Naturalidad y novedad en la literatura martiana,’’ in ‘‘Nuestra América’’: Cien Años y otros acercamientos a Martí (Havana: Editorial SI-MAR, ), .

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Foreword

Prologue

On the subject of prologues, one may well recall a marginally classic text by José Martí: the Prólogo to Venezuelan poet Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde’s Poema del Niágara (). Written as a supplement to another poet’s work, this relatively unknown prologue seems to represent nothing more than a minor text. And yet, it constitutes one of the first Latin American reflections on the problematic relation between literature and power in the modern age. Indeed, could a reflection on the transformation and flux, on the vertiginous temporality distinctive of modernity, be posed in any other way but minor, fragmentary? Published with the (virtually forgotten) poem by Pérez Bonalde, who along with Martí was an exile residing in New York City, the text is quite different from the critical reflections on literature that had been produced earlier by Latin American intellectuals. For example, in contrast to Andrés Bello’s rhetorical or grammatical explications, Martí’s Prólogo does not attempt to submit the particular features of the text to any preestablished norms or unquestionable standards of writing—rhetorical, grammatical, or ideological. Rather, Martí’s reading consists of an intense reflection on the impossibility and devaluation of the earlier conceptualization of literature and the literary: There is no permanent work [obra], because works in these times of reshaping and remodeling are by essence mutable and unsettled; there are no untrodden paths, one can barely glimpse the new altars, as great and open as forests. Everywhere diverse ideas solicit the mind: and ideas are like polyps, like the light of stars, like the waves of the sea. We unceasingly long to know anything that can reassure us; or we are afraid to know of anything that may change [our] present convictions. The elaboration of the new social state has rendered insecure the battle for personal existence and even more the strength for accomplishing those daily obligations which, failing to find open venues, change form and direction at every instant, agitated by the fear of a probable or near misery. With the soul torn thus between contradictory and restless loves; the

concept of literature alarmed at every instant by a new gospel; the once revered images, now devalued and stripped bare, and even the future images left unknown, it does not seem possible in this discord of the mind—this mixed-up life with neither fixed direction, distinct character, nor certain end, this acerbic fear at the impoverishment of the home, and the varied and timid effort we undertake in order to escape it—to produce those enduring and patient works, those extended histories in verse, those imitations of Latin peoples.1 Martí’s prologue reflects on the problems of production and interpretation of literary texts in an unstable society, prone to the fluctuation of values that, until then, had guaranteed the coherence and social authority of writing. Moreover, this text constitutes a meditation on the unfixed place of literature in a world ruled by the discourses of modernization and progress. Is it even possible to write (and read) in such a world? What institutions would guarantee the value and meaning of literary discourse in the new society? Or would the writer flounder in dislocations that nevertheless seemed to be (for Martí) the only stable law in the modern world? Literature had once acted as the model for an ideal national language, relatively homogenized; it designated the place (at times fictitious) where models of subjectification, necessary norms for the invention of citizenship, and symbolic boundaries were projected. Letters had sketched the imaginary map of nation-states on the road to consolidation. Yet the proliferation of prologues written anxiously and obsessively by many of Martí’s contemporaries (above all the poets) evinces the dissolution of codes that had previously assured the paradigmatic place of writing in the fabric of social communication. Alien to what literature might represent for us today—a relatively specialized field, differentiated from other discursive practices as well as from common language—the nostalgia manifested in Martí’s Prólogo responds to the crisis of a cultural system wherein literature, or better yet letters, had occupied a central place in the organization of the new Latin American societies. The remarkable abundance of fin de siècle prologues, many of them marked by a nostalgia corresponding to what Rubén Darío had once called the ‘‘loss of the kingdom,’’ reveals the crisis of the earlier cultural system. At the same time, seen from a different angle, these prologues attest to the proliferation of a new discourse on literature: a discourse that would project, at the very least, the attempt of writers to specify the boundaries and limits of a new authority, a specifically literary locus of speech that would define the roles of an emergent literature apart from the earlier fictions generated xxxvi

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around the project of state building. In these prologues, the relation between literature and the state above all would be problematized; not only as a consequence of modernity, but as the very condition that would render literary autonomization and modernization possible. Martí’s Prólogo examines various fundamental aspects of the modern crisis. He emphatically points out that the new social organization was making the survival of poets difficult, for this organization had, in turn, brought about a world ‘‘where the only art left to us is that of filling up the house pantry,’’ 2 and where the institutions that had until then guaranteed the social weight of writing (i.e., the church and state) had withdrawn, taking with them the charge and traditional authority once bestowed on writers. Martí also insisted on the general divestment of rhetorical and religious codes, the ‘‘devaluation’’ of languages belonging to tradition, both of which resulted in a ‘‘not knowing,’’ in a lack of ‘‘unbroken paths,’’ in ‘‘this blinding of sources and this obfuscation of the gods’’ (p. ). The crisis, concomitant with what Max Weber termed the disenchantment of the world in the processes of rationalization 3 and secularization, had effects that Martí directly attributed to the inefficacy of forms and the exhaustion of traditional modes of literary representation. The Prólogo’s form displays a remarkable verbal agility, an intense poeticization of prose, quite apart from the rhetorical norms of the epoch. It is organized around a key metaphor that represents the writer as a solitary warrior, with neither army nor support. This metaphor is tied to the dissolution of the epic, collective dimensions that once defined literature. With the structures of what had been a relatively organic public space—a space that letters had helped to configure—now disjointed and inchoate, literary practice had become privatized, evoking what Martí called the ‘‘nostalgia for the great deed’’ (p. ) in the poet and literature. Of course, Martí never assumed the privatization of art to be a given; rather, he identified privatization with an exile from the polis that he would forever attempt to supercede through the invention of new interventions and reterritorializations. Hence we see, for example, the affiliative and interpellative nature of his Latinoamericanismo (Latin Americanism). Nevertheless, Martí recognized in privatization one of the driving forces at that time redefining the very forms of literature, and especially, the place of writers and their authority in the face of other institutions and discursive practices. And it was these transformations, in turn, that redefined the possible positions of the writer before the law, another key word in the Prólogo. In the system or ‘‘Republic of Letters’’ prior to Martí—the literary or lettered field that we will see at work in D. F. Sarmiento and A. Bello—the formalization of the Prologue

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law had been one of the essential tasks of patrician intellectuals dominated by the model of the lettered man or letrado. This field and function of literature, which has been explored by Claudio Véliz and particularly Angel Rama, must be set apart from the subject of the Prólogo, which postulates literature to be a discourse critical of codes and the law. The law is here correlated with ‘‘the lessons, laws, and ordinances imposed on him by those who came before’’ (see p. ), or in other words, with the weight of a repressive tradition that obstructed at once ‘‘political liberty’’ and ‘‘spiritual liberty.’’ For Martí, the poet was an exile from the law, and literature was the ‘‘desperate cry of the son of an unknown great father, who asks his mute mother [nature] to reveal the secret of his birth.’’ As nature’s son, like the illegitimate Ishmael of the desert whose name becomes the title of Martí’s first book of poetry (published the same year as his Prólogo), to be a writer is to be displaced from the paternal institution—to be an exile from the polis. Martí’s reflection in the Prólogo cannot be read as a passive document, a transparent testimony of the crisis. Written in a style without precedent in the history of Latin American prose, it elaborates new strategies of legitimation. Beyond the apparent condemnation to silence that seems to be the fate of literature, a never-silent voice gathers weight and density in its act of spelling out the crisis. This voice marks the specificity of a gaze, of a literary authority, that had not until that moment existed in Latin America. Modern literature is brought into being and proliferates, paradoxically, by announcing its death and denouncing the crisis of modernity. Thus, on one level, the prologues of the epoch are only minor or marginal in appearance. On another level, they satisfied a central function in the emergent literary field: not only did they differentiate the new writers from the preceding letrados; these prologues also formed a type of metadiscourse, a cartography wherein the emergent literature would continue to trace and remake the limits of its territory. If one finds that a new literary concept is transformed and rewritten in every prologue, it is because, in modernity, these metadiscourses could never hope to assume the function of normative or prescriptive codes. The prologues by fin de siècle writers are minor fictions, attentive to the conjuncture and demands of the present moment—partial maps where writers attempt to specify provisionally their authority and locus in a society bereft of any overarching code. On the other hand, this does not mean that Martí and his contemporaries would take up the ‘‘exhaustion’’ of codes and the provisional nature of values as a characteristic feature of their discourse proper. To the contrary, before the instability and flux of the modern world, literature for Martí was authorized as an attempt to overcome aesthetically the incertitude and the ‘‘not knowing’’ generated by modern fragmentation. Martí refused to surrenxxxviii Prologue

der himself to the caprices of currents and flows; in fact, he proposed that literature be a way of contesting and superseding them. Before the forms of knowledge privileged by modern rationalization, Martí asserted the superiority of an alternative ‘‘knowledge’’ found in art, capable of even imagining a future harmony. For Martí, the authority of modern literature was rooted precisely in its resistance to the deterritorialized flows rampant in capitalist modernization. What would the alternative ‘‘knowledge’’ of literature entail? What economy of meaning, what system of values, would delineate literature’s autonomy? What other kinds of discourse would occupy the frontiers, the outside of the emergent literary field? For now, let it suffice to say that, in Martí’s view, literature turns its gaze precisely ‘‘there toward what is unknown.’’ Its economy will, at times, assume a way of granting value to materials devalued by the utilitarian economies of rationalization—words, positions, and experiences. If, for the enlightened letrados, writing was a kind of machine that attempted to transform the ‘‘chaos’’ of a ‘‘barbaric’’ nature into value or meaning subordinated to the mechanisms of the law (a proposition dealt with primarily in chapters  through ), for Martí, literature will be defined as a critique of this dominant task of letters in the modernizing project. Literature would look toward turbulence and irregularity, in contrast to the theoretical and formal renditions privileged by the modernizing dream: in Martí’s words, ‘‘A tempest is more beautiful than a locomotive’’ (appendix , ). Against the ‘‘surgeon’s scalpel’’ (appendix , ), an emblem for the official positivism of the epoch, Martí proposes the priority of a ‘‘knowledge bequeathed to me by the gaze of children’’ (p. ). In sum, this knowledge would entail an originary vision: as Martí will argue in ‘‘Nuestra América’’ (), this vision would be the only one capable of representing and understanding the ‘‘primeval’’ American world threatened by the effects and contradictions brought about by modernity (see chapter ). It would be hasty, however, to idealize any claim of literature’s marginality with respect to the state-motivated discourses of modernity and progress. Although the new literary concept served to criticize these latter discourses, it also implied the struggle to reclaim social legitimacy. These strategies would later serve to consolidate the relatively institutionalized basis for literature, beginning with the pedagogical impact of Uruguayan intellectual José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel () following the Spanish-American War of , and the culturalist discourses of Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Alfonso Reyes, and others throughout the early decades of the twentieth century (see chapter ). As we will discover, the critique that literature and its ‘‘marginality’’ would mount against modernity and (foreign) capitalism was, Prologue

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at times, abstract and essentialist; still, it did promise a certain social authority, which in the end attracted even the ruling classes of Latin America, who found themselves threatened by a modernization that brought political and economic dependency in its wake. The modern crisis, a ‘‘dismemberment’’ on which Martí’s Prólogo continually reflects, has been linked to what a number of Latin American critics have called the division of intellectual labor, one of the basic processes characteristic of societies at the turn of the century. At this point, then, it might be appropriate to specify the field from which some of these critical concepts arose; these concepts, to a certain degree, have made our genealogy of nineteenth-century literary discourse possible. From important works by P. Henríquez Ureña to more recent ones by Rama, Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, José Emilio Pacheco, David Viñas Noé Jitrik, Jean Franco, and others, the concept of the division of labor has been used to explain the emergence of modern Latin American literature as an effect of social modernization, urbanization, and the incorporation of Latin American markets into the world economy. Most important, the rise of modern literature has been seen as a consequence of the implementation of a new regime of specializations that at once relieved the letrados of their traditional tasks in state administration and forced writers to become professionalized. Girardot’s invaluable essay Modernismo is exemplary in this regard: in exploring the suggestions made by critics such as Federico de Onís and Rama, Girardot attempts to ‘‘place modernismo in a European sociohistorical and cultural context,’’ which is to say, in the context of ‘‘modernity.’’ 4 His reading, however, does presuppose a new risk. It may in fact be true that in Europe literary modernization, which entailed the autonomization of art and the professionalization of writers, was a primary social process, distinctive of those societies on the threshold of advanced capitalism. Yet in Latin America, modernization in all respects was—and continues to be—an extremely uneven phenomenon. In these societies, ‘‘modern’’ literature (if not the modern state itself ) was not able to rely on institutional bases that would guarantee its autonomy (a subject that will be treated in chapters  and ). With this concern in mind, how would it be possible to speak of autonomy and specialization in Latin America? What are the effects of a dependent and uneven modernization on the literary field? Or is Octavio Paz indeed correct in saying that against the grain of underdevelopment and dependency, literature comes to be an exceptional domain where it would be possible to project a compensatory modernity—a modernity to counteract the unevenness and inequalities brought about by the development of other social institutions? In response to this problematic, Divergent Modernities articulates a double xl

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movement: on the one hand, the exploration of literature as a discourse that seeks autonomization or the specification of its field of social authority, and on the other, an analysis of the conditions that made the institutionalization of literature impossible. To put it another way, this book will explore the uneven modernization of Latin American literature during the period of its emergence. Such an analysis is not posed strictly along sociological lines. If the concept of literature as an institution—a field that has been assigned the production of certain discursive norms and a relative social specificity—is one of the theoretical foundations of this analysis, it must go beyond the study of ideological ‘‘themes’’ or ‘‘contents’’ to pursue the problematic authority of literary discourse, along with the effects of literature’s uneven modernization as they can be gleaned from the very level of its emergent forms. Examining the irreducible aporias that, until today, have confronted literary autonomization may perhaps help to explain the formal heterogeneity of Latin American literature: the proliferation of hybrid forms that overrun the generic and functional categories of literature canonized by the institution in other contexts. For these (among other) reasons, in dealing with the primary impulses behind literary autonomization, I will bypass the predictable point of departure that would begin with the poetic or literary ‘‘interior’’ characteristic of modernism at the turn of the century; we will, instead, proceed laterally, by scrutinizing forms such as the chronicle, where literature would represent (at times anxiously) its encounter and conflict with the technologized and massified discourses of modernity. The formal heterogeneity of the chronicle serves to portray the contradictions confronted by a literary authority and its ever-frustrated attempt to ‘‘purify’’ and homogenize its own territory against the pressures and interventions of other discourses limiting literature’s virtual autonomy. It would thus be difficult to read the modernist chronicle (by Ruben Darío, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Julián del Casal, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, and particularly Martí) either as a merely supplementary form to poetry or solely the modus vivendi of writers at the turn of the century; indeed, it seems that the heterogeneity of the chronicle, the commingling and contact between discourses in the fabric of the chronicle’s form, constitutes one of the distinctive features of this Latin American literary institution. The concept of uneven modernization will also enable us to situate this analysis in the context of certain discussions on the relationship between literature and politics that initially took shape in the nineteenth century. As Peter Bürger has shown, the autonomization of art and literature in Europe was a corollary of the rationalization of political functions in the relatively autonomous territory of the state.5 In other words, the institutionalization of art and literature presupposed their separation from the public sphere, which Prologue

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in nineteenth-century Europe was already developing its own ‘‘organic’’ intellectuals, along with its own administrative and discursive apparatuses. Yet in Latin America, the obstacles that confronted the institutionalization of literature paradoxically generated a literary field whose separation from the political sphere was incomplete and uneven—even today. An unevenly modern literature would thus frequently function as a discourse invested in the task of proposing solutions to political enigmas that overlapped the conventional borders of the institutional literary field. Does this then mean that literature continued to exercise tasks under the auspices of the state at the turn of the century, or that the impulses behind literary autonomization were solely a mask over an anachronistic and traditional system? If Martí’s discourse was not validated by the law as being political in the sense of pertaining to the state, what differentiated the political interventions in his writing from the public authority of the letrados belonging to the previous generations? Questions such as these will lead us through the first chapters of the book, which explore the roles of writing throughout the organizational process of nation-states before the last quarter of the century. As we will see in the reading of Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Facundo, in the politics of language in Andrés Bello, and in the selective analysis of the place of ‘‘letters’’ in education and journalism, writing provided a model, a repository of forms, for the organization of new nations. The relative formality provided by the written word was one of the privileged paradigms for envisioning modernization. This vision would include the submission of ‘‘barbarism’’ to the order of discourses, citizenship, the market, and the modern state. And these initial analyses will enable us to later specify the transformations that made possible the emergence of a fin de siècle literature; a literature that, even in cases of public intervention (for example, journalism), displayed a new labor on language, a new means of authorization, and a new relationship with other discursive practices that seem to us irreducible to the norms of traditional ‘‘lettered’’ communicability. Of course, an exploration into the hybrid nature of the chronicle might seem to be quite an ironic way to approach the will to literary autonomy, commonly identified with the rise of modernista poetry. In a similar instance, given Martí’s reputation as a political writer, it seems at first sight ironic that he would be the one to initiate a reflection on the relative disengagement of literature from the public or state sphere. For many, his ‘‘life and work’’ embody the integrity and synthesis of ethicopolitical imperatives with properly literary demands. In the history of his readings and their canonization, Martí normally appears as an organic subject, as a ‘‘statue of solid granite’’ (as Enrique José Varona declares) who had succeeded in condensing and rexlii

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deeming the experience of modern fragmentation. His politicization thus seemed to make possible a discourse inseparable from life, a literature oriented toward action, an aesthetic subordinated to ethical constraints, and most important, an authority defined by the demands of the public sphere. In this respect, Martí himself becomes a figure of an entirely modern heroism, insofar as through a heroic will he attempts to overcome a series of contradictions that the letrados of the preceding generations did not have to confront. Martí is a modern hero precisely because his effort to synthesize roles and functions of different discourses presupposes various antitheses generated by the division of labor, on the one hand, and (on the other) the fragmentation of what had been a relatively integrated vital sphere, where the writing of the letrados held a public validity and a set of paradigmatic discursive functions. In Martí, the tension between literary discourse and other areas in the fabric of social communication is the negated referent that is to be ‘‘superseded’’ by a heroic will. That very insistence with which Martí sought to distance himself from literary autonomization, which (to a certain degree) determined the modernist project, exemplifies the fact that even in Martí (as opposed to the letrados) writing had already begun to occupy a differentiated place in the public sphere: a locus of speech outside the state, from which literature would never cease to criticize the domination of political, state-sponsored discourses. Martí’s intense politicization, his vision of becoming ‘‘poet in acts,’’ of bringing the poetic word into the center of collective life, seems at times strained, exacerbated.6 Nevertheless, it attempts to respond to what he considered to be the alienation of the poet in modernity: his exile from the polis, his estrangement from even the mother tongue. In fact, the intensity of this vitalism belies the fragmentation and dissolution of the traditional system of ‘‘letters’’ that had until that time been the model of social communicability. Hence, Martí may be one of the first properly modern Latin American writers, even as the heterogeneity of his discourse and the multiplicity of his roles reminds us of the extremely problematic status of this category—the specialized modern writer—in Latin America. At the same time, it would be reductive to aestheticize Martí. When we say that Martí spoke about politics and life from a specific kind of perspective or gaze, from a locus of (an unevenly) literary speech, we do not necessarily negate the political impact of Martí in areas that can hardly be considered purely literary. This study will merely try to specify those mechanisms of authorization that such a gaze would imply: a gaze confronted by the enigmas presented by politics, a gaze that would envision solutions related to the emergent literary field. Once again, Martí’s essay ‘‘Nuestra América’’ is in this respect exemplary. In fact, Martí’s essay, which is even today considered Prologue

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a classic example of Latinoamericanista political and identity writing, becomes a privileged object of this analysis (see chapter ), insofar as it corresponds to the double movement of the hypotheses concerning aesthetics and politics. If this study is not restricted to the reading of more homogeneously literary materials, it is precisely because the category of literature has continued to be a problematic one in Latin America. Hence, in exploring the modern will to autonomization, we must also read the various types of multidiscursive narratives that take on a literary authority in Martí and the fin de siècle writers. The chronicle is one such example. Furthermore, these hybrid forms cannot be considered as isolated and exceptional cases; rather, they highlight the blurring of boundaries, the entirely relative nature of the separation or division among discursive roles and functions distinguishing intellectual production in Latin America, even in the most autonomous or ‘‘pure’’ instances. Yet it would also be a mistake to read this proliferation of hybrid roles either as the trace of an earlier, traditional, harmonious authority, or as an instance of a premodern intellectual field. For even in the most politicized writers, the tension between the demands of the public sphere and the impulses or drives of literature toward a formal autonomy was considerable. This tension forms one of the fundamental bases of modern Latin American literature; it is the germinal seed of discursive forms that have never ceased to propose resolutions to the constitutive contradiction. Without attempting to dissolve that tension, nor accepting at face value those exhortations by many writers for a synthesis, let us rather explore how this contradiction intensifies writing and produces texts. Chapters  and  will deal primarily with these issues. Finally, a word on the second part of this book: it begins with a series of readings around Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas (North American Scenes), then moves toward an analysis of ‘‘Nuestra América’’ (written in New York) and Latin Americanist ensayismo (essay writing) at the turn of the century. The Escenas are a series of chronicles, seldom studied, on North American life— particularly in New York City. Martí wrote them between  and  for numerous Latin American newspapers, particularly La Nación from Buenos Aires, El Partido Liberal from Mexico City, and La Opinión Nacional from Caracas. Taken together, these chronicles form an extensive and fundamental part of Martí’s voluminous corpus. Not only do they recount the multiple aspects of urban daily life in an advanced capitalist society, but they also serve as a continual reflection on the place of the one who writes—in Martí’s case, the Latin American intellectual—in the face of modernity. Behind the representation of the city, behind its machines and crowds, Martí’s discourse at once nurtures and is nurtured by a field of ‘‘identity’’ that emerges in opposition to xliv Prologue

the signs of a threatening, yet at the same time desired, modernity. Despite its subjection to the heteronomous demands of the newspaper, this field of identity is articulated from a certain gaze and an emphatically literary voice; and it progressively takes up the defense of the ‘‘aesthetic’’ and ‘‘cultural’’ values of Latin America by placing them in opposition to capitalist modernity, the crisis of experience, materialism, and the economic power of the North American other. The Escenas constitute a foundational moment in the geneaology of Latin Americanist discourse, as they deploy a series of seminal rhetorical strategies, tropes, and subject positions. Indeed, Martí’s chronicles on North American modernity effectively anticipate what Rodó would call ‘‘our modern literature of ideas,’’ tied to the Latin Americanist ensayismo at the beginning of the century.7 To a certain degree, this Latinoamericanista rhetoric—which presupposes an authority, an aesthetic approach to ‘‘protecting’’ and selecting the component elements of ‘‘our’’ identity—raised the possibility for Martí and many of his contemporaries of resolving the solitude of the writer. Martí had himself lamented this condition in the Prólogo. From the early example of Martí’s ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ and a number of chronicles preceding it (such as ‘‘Coney Island’’), literature in the culturalist essay begins to wield authority as an alternative and privileged mode of speaking about politics. Opposed to the ‘‘technical’’ forms of knowledge and the ‘‘imported’’ languages of official politics, literature is postulated as the only hermeneutic capable of resolving the enigmas of a Latin American identity. Martí was accustomed to saying that literature would never exist unless and until there also existed a Latin America. If identity, for us, is never external to the discourse that names it— and if conversely, the form, authority, and institutional weight of the subject all determine the cut and selection of materials that will compose and represent this very identity—then perhaps we can say today, in recalling Martí, that there can be no Latin America as long as there is no discourse authorized to name it. Literature would be charged with the enormous and, at times, unbearable weight of this representativity. One signature—it is the law of the genre—but the conditions of possibility are always collective. I would like to thank, above all, Margherita Anna Tortora for her support and company, as well as, at times, her respectful distance from this project. I am grateful for the solidarity of and suggestions from various peers at Princeton University, who supported me in more than one sense throughout the early stages of my research and writing. I mention only those who read and commented on parts of the manuscript: to Antonio Prieto, María Elena Rodríguez Castro, Edgardo Moctezuma, Antonio Vera Prologue

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León, Stephanie Sieburth, and Humberto Huergo, many thanks. To Sylvia Molloy and Josefina Ludmer, I am thankful for the rigor and generosity of their readings, as well as for the many conversations spent trying out these ideas. Without the stimulus from Angel Rama, this work would not have continued beyond its initial outlines. Finally, I would like to thank the friendship and dialogue of my colleagues at Emory University, especially Emilia Navarro, Ricardo Gutiérrez, and visiting professors Fernando Balseca, Oscar Montero, and Rubén Ríos. I also acknowledge the support from a fellowship given to me by the Latin American Studies Program at Princeton, which enabled me to travel to Argentina (in July ) for the purpose of consulting La Nación of Buenos Aires. A summer fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a semester-long leave of absence sponsored by the Emory Research Committee in  greatly assisted me in the revision of this book. Notes  José Martí, Obras Completas, vol.  (Havana: Editional Lex, ), –. See appendix , p. .  José Martí, Prólogo. See appendix , p. .  In Weber’s ‘‘Science as a Vocation,’’ rationalization and/as the disenchantment of the world are the terms he uses to replace and expand on the notion of progress and science as constants over the course of human history. ‘‘[Rationalization] means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather, that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted.’’ See Max Weber, ‘‘Science as a Vocation,’’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. Hans H. Geth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, ),  ff.  Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, Modernismo: supuestos históricos y culturales (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), .  See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).  José Martí, Epistolario de José Martí y Máximo Gómez, in Papeles de Martí, ed. Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, vol.  (Havana: Imprenta El Siglo Veinte, ), .  José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (), ed. Angel Rama, prologue by Carlos Real de Azira (; reprint, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ).

xlvi Prologue

PART I

 The Other’s Knowledge: Writing and Orality in Sarmiento’s Facundo

It has been said that during the Latin American wars of independence the Creole elites succeeded in voicing a general consensus—a we that quickly coalesced and gathered momentum around a common enemy (Spain). Yet behind the subsequent inauguration of new governments, fundamental contradictions reemerged on the surface of social life. The new states had to be consolidated, a project that entailed the delimitation of borders and territories, the generalization of authority under a central law capable of submitting particular interests in conflict with one another to the project of a new homogeneity, a national homogeneity that was linguistic as well as political. La República Argentina es una e indivisible, Domingo F. Sarmiento proclaimed in the classic text, Facundo.1 The reality, however, was otherwise: the internal fragmentation brought about by the wars undermined the project of consolidating the national subject, which had been almost always imagined through the tracings of foreign models. After the victory over the ancien régime the chaos had only intensified, as the rigid colonial institutions—and the anti-Spanish consensus—lost their force and legitimacy. Beginning with the s, the activity of writing became a response to the necessity of overcoming the catastrophe of war, the absence of discourse, and the annihilation of established structures in the war’s aftermath. To write, in such a world, was to forge the modernizing project; it was to civilize, to order the randomness of American ‘‘barbarism.’’ 2 In a fundamental autobiographical text of the period, Recuerdos de provincia (Provincial Memoirs), Sarmiento recalls: The day following the revolution, we had to look all around us, searching for what could fill the emptiness that the decimated inquisition, the defeated absolute power, and an increased religious exclusion had all left behind.3 Faced with the absence of new models to follow, Sarmiento’s discourse would turn almost automatically to the North: ‘‘North America has separated from

England without having repudiated the history of its liberties’’ (p. ). The intellectual, for Sarmiento, legitimizes his claim to authority by looking ‘‘all around us, searching for what could fill the emptiness.’’ To fill the empty spaces was to populate deserts, construct cities, navigate rivers, weave networks of social communication. The image of transport, in particular, traverses Facundo as a central trope in Sarmiento’s rhetoric of reconstruction: the trope condenses the project of subordinating the American heterogeneity to the order of discourse, to the rationality (not only verbal) of the market, labor, and ultimately meaning.4 This project, however, raised an immediate problem for Sarmiento: in the absence of such a discursive order in Latin America, it would have to be transported from Europe or the United States. In Sarmiento, the intellectual would have to function as a traveler who could import discourse: he travels to Europe or North America, ‘‘searching for what could fill the emptiness.’’ If, for Sarmiento, ‘‘There are regions too high, whose atmosphere cannot be breathed by those who are born in the lowlands,’’ 5 then the traveler would have to pass from the low to the high, mediating between the inequalities. He goes with the idea that we are on the wrong track in America, and that there are profound and traditional causes for this tendency that must be broken, if we do not want to be dragged into the erosion, the nothingness, and I daresay the barbarism: the inevitable mire into which the remains of peoples and races that cannot endure have sunken, as those primitives, unformed creations that have since passed away from the earth, when the environment had changed. (Facundo p. ) Significantly, the ‘‘baseness’’ (bajeza) described by Sarmiento here figures not only as an effect of the emptiness: it is also the mire of those traditional causes, primitives, unformed (creations), incapable of adjusting to the demands of progress. Thus, in order for the intellectual to lead his people from barbarism, he travels to the highlands. Only he can breathe in those high regions, for he has brought readings with him. Later, he will return with the translated word, full of value in its capacity to serve as a model. If the condition of the journey in Sarmiento is that unevenness, that distance between the high and low, his writing project would be to dissolve that imbalance: to cover the emptiness. This project of leveling presupposes, in turn, the necessity of populating the American desert with the structures of modernity: ‘‘Don’t you want, in the final instance, for us to call on science and industry on our behalf, to call them with all our might, so that they might come to sit among us?’’ (Facundo, p. ) 

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Of course, the transport of meaning generated new imbalances and displacements. In the lucid Notas sobre ‘‘Facundo’’ (Notes on ‘‘Facundo’’)—a work dealing primarily with the significance of quoting in Sarmiento—contemporary novelist and critic Ricardo Piglia examines the epigraph, written in French, that introduces Sarmiento’s Facundo: ‘‘On ne tue point les idées’’ (One cannot kill ideas). Sarmiento contends that this dictum unleashed the spirit behind his writing Facundo, widely considered the founding text of a national Argentine literature. Yet Piglia’s analysis reveals the apocryphal nature of quoting, which opens up a virtual labyrinth of questionable sources at the very root of the Argentine (if not indeed Latin American) canon: ‘‘The most famous quote of the book, which Sarmiento attributes to Fortoul, is according to Groussac, taken from de Volney. But another French writer, Paul Verdevoye, later demonstrates that the quote appears in neither the work of Fortoul nor de Volney, but rather, is attributable to Denis Diderot.’’ 6 The intellectual genealogy in this Borgesian chain of false attributions might even go beyond Verdevoye or Piglia. In any case, Piglia’s point is to show how the mechanism of quoting, which constantly serves to buttress the authority of the narrative voice by displacing it with the voices of European authors, is Facundo’s germinal seed. Yet although Facundo’s founding proposition, attempts to invite the reader into a system of interlocking analogies held together by precisely those European ideas that ‘‘one can never kill,’’ Diderot’s (Fortoul’s, de Volney’s) maxim is nevertheless itself subject to the very same American contingency that the entirety of Sarmiento’s text decries. The following passage by Sarmiento offers a good example: In the L’Histoire de Paris, written by G. Fouchard La Fosse, I find these singular details. . . . Put the scarlet ribbon in place of the crucifix of San Andres, the scarlet vest in place of the red roses; mazorqueros in place of cabochiens; in place of , the date of that society, put  in its stead, the date of this other; in place of Paris, Buenos Aires; in place of the Duke of Bourgogne, Rosas; and you will have the plague visited on us in our day. (Facundo, pp. –) Life imitates the written word. Piglia comments: If Sarmiento was excessive, a little wild, in his passion for culture, it is because for him to know was to compare. Everything acquires meaning if it is possible to reconstruct the analogies between what one wants to explain and something else that has already been evaluated and written about. For Sarmiento to know is to decipher the secret of analogies: resemblance is the mysterious, invisible form, that makes meaning visible. Writing and Orality in Facundo



Culture functions as a repository of examples that can be used as terms for comparison. (‘‘Notas sobre Facundo,’’ p. ) At first sight, it might seem that authority in Sarmiento would have to be rooted elsewhere, in the European or North American ‘‘civilization’’ to which the traveler-intellectual turns. Hence, at certain moments, Sarmiento will speak about barbarism in Argentina as if he has been observing it from a distance, from a strategic speaking position located in Europe.7 This objectifying position taken by Sarmiento can be discerned in his systematic use of European rhetoric and discourses in Facundo’s representation of the American barbarian: And the pastoral life leads us to unthinkingly imagine a memory of Asia, whose plains we imagine always covered here and afar with the outdoor stalls of the Canuck, the Cossack, or the Arab. (Facundo p. ) Here, the (European) figure of ‘‘the oriental’’ is superimposed on the particular circumstances of America. One may observe, however, that the knowledge (conocimiento) that attempts to produce an analogy is imagined. A slippage occurs from the world of designated referents to what Edward Said called an ‘‘orientalist archive.’’ More than a web of known facts about oriental reality, the orientalist archive is a discourse, historically tied to nineteenthcentury expansionism and the constitution of a territory marked by European identity. Paradoxically, this European identity is itself brought about through the exclusion of Europe’s others and the consequent delimitation of a civilized domain. According to Said, we can read such a discourse about the other not in terms of its referentiality, but as an apparatus for the constitution of the European subject who at once produces and is produced by the orientalist discourse. The other, in this sense, is a distinctive aspect of the European imaginary.8 Sarmiento’s recourse to orientalism is significant in that it projects his desire to be inscribed within Western culture and creates a locus of speech, entirely fictitious, from which the emphatically ‘‘civilized’’ subject speaks— outside the space of barbarism (defined negatively as non-European). The quote that indicates the presence of that European or Western identificatory discourse thus tends to obliterate the place of writing that occurs in America, on the West’s other side, where Facundo was in fact produced. But the task of the citation, as Piglia shows, proves how Sarmiento’s work displaces and, to a certain degree, undercuts the very authority of the texts and authors cited as models, that is, exemplars of a future modernity in Latin America. The mimetic process stimulated by the desire to become 

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that civilized other from the highlands, never carries with it the authority of the imitated source. Sarmiento’s citations submit the work of the European other to an inevitable decontextualization, which at times results in involuntary parodies. Piglia explains that at the moment when culture sustains the emblems of civilization before ignorance, barbarism corrodes the erudite gesture. Signs of a practice that one would have to call (as Sarmiento in fact does) savage: these barbarisms proliferate in erroneous attributions, false quotes. (‘‘Notas,’’ p. ) Hence, for Piglia, the distance between Sarmiento and European knowledge is not rooted so much in the affirmation of a difference as it is in the corruption of high discourse in the mouth of the ‘‘poorly lettered’’, so to speak. Sarmiento poorly reproduces that knowledge that he at the same time exalts. At the same time, however, Piglia tends to represent the relation between Sarmiento and Europe, between American writing and foreign ‘‘symbolic capital,’’ in strictly negative terms, that is, in terms of what Europe has and America lacks. Piglia rightly assumes that the Sarmientine intellectual was at the time defined by his capacity to undertake an import-journey, a journey that entailed the intellectual’s mission to import citations from foreign sources. In this respect, Sarmiento’s status as an intellectual stemmed from his activities as translator and importer of paradigms for modern progress. And yet, this leads Piglia to suggest that the distance between Sarmiento and the European library may after all be merely the question of a misquote; a ‘‘wild’’ use of models whose authority nonetheless remains unquestioned. Such a reading operates along the lines of what we might call a binary logic of parody, wherein what is American (or Argentine, in Sarmiento) signifies a blind spot within the Western field of knowledge. Sarmiento’s erratic use of European knowledge would thus appear to parody (involuntarily) the cited model’s plentitude. The logic of parody tends to represent and classify any distinct productivity or field of signification that emerges out of the European model in terms of a lack, or even as an inversion of the (badly) imitated structure, thereby reestablishing the prevalence of mimetic representation that parody had initially sought to dismantle. The inversion of a structure naturalizes its field of operations, reaffirming the hierarchies of the structure in question as the horizon and limit of its critique, without going beyond them. In the same way, parody figures in the logic of mimesis as its inverse, a position that only reinforces the double-bind logic of the model and its other. On the contrary, further analysis shows that Sarmiento not only occupies a subaltern place with respect to the European library, he also manipulates Writing and Orality in Facundo



it. This can be seen in his response to the critical reading by Valentín Alsina of Facundo, in which Alsina laments the lack of Sarmiento’s historiographical rigor. In response, Sarmiento insisted on the spontaneous character of his work. For one thing, he continually refers to the book (which was initially published in periodic newspaper installments, in accordance with the norm of the epoch) as ‘‘the material of life,’’ a collation of notes or briefs that he would reorganize in the future. Moreover, he explains the informality of Facundo in the following manner: A number of inexactitudes ought necessarily to have escaped one’s attention in a work made in a hurry, away from the theater of events, and concerning a topic about which nothing had been written until the present. . . . Perhaps there may be a moment in which, freed from the preoccupations that have precipitated the editing of this little work, I might return to rebuild it according to a new plan, stripping it of all accidental digression and supporting it with numerous official documents, to which I now only make passing reference. (Facundo p. ) Sarmiento’s response to Alsina, in the prologue to the  edition, reiterates his defense, this time appealing to the reader that Facundo be read with all the flexibility that one assumes to be appropriate for an essay: An essay and revelation for myself, of my ideas, Facundo grew from the defects common to every fruit of a momentary inspiration, without the help of documents at hand, and executed without having been well conceived, far from the theater of events, and with the purpose of immediate and militant action. (p. ) Although Sarmiento concedes to Alsina’s criticisms regarding the indiscipline of Facundo, he responds that he will not touch up the ‘‘little work’’, nor eliminate the defects of its civilization, ‘‘fearful that by correcting such an unformed work its primitive physiognomy would disappear, along with the vigorous and willful audacity of its ill-disciplined conception’’ (p. ). It is not difficult to find these same epithets used to describe various forms of barbarism all throughout Facundo. As Sarmiento has often declared, barbarism is primitive, willful, unformed, and ill-disciplined. Yet significantly, these terms are now being used to describe Facundo. In Sarmiento’s refusal to revise Facundo, he establishes a subaltern locus of speech, marginal with respect to the European library: Had this study, which we were not even in any condition to make for our lack of philosophical and historical instruction, been made by compe

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tent observers it would have revealed to the astonished eyes of Europe a new world in politics. (p. ) This subaltern place assumed by Sarmiento becomes the key to authorizing an alternative intellectual practice that emphasizes its difference from European knowledge: Oh! France, so rightly erect for your sufficiency in the historical, political, and social sciences; England, so contemplative of your commercial interests; those politicians of every country, those writers who may boast of being understood! May a poor American writer present before you a book, in order to show you how God has revealed those things that we call evident. (p. ) Of course, Sarmiento’s humility cannot deceive us. The irony is subtle yet evident: from the margin, the ‘‘poor writer’’ reclaims a knowledge (saber) distinct and at times opposed to the European concept of discipline. Contrary to European knowledge, Sarmiento proposes the alternative task of the American writer: Here is an exemplary justice to make and a glory to acquire as an Argentine writer: to upbraid the world and humble the sovereignty of the mighty on the earth, be they called learned men or governments. (p. ) The ‘‘poor American writer’’ may end up undisciplined or unformed but his spontaneity, his nearness to life, his immediate discourse would be necessary in order to represent the new world still unknown to European knowledge (saber). As we will see later, Sarmiento underlined the necessity of being familiar with this entire aspect of American life—barbarism—which in the last instance remained inaccessible to science and official documents. One had to hear the other, the other’s voice, since the other lacked writing. It is precisely this task that a disciplined knowledge, and its importers, had not succeeded in doing; that alternative knowledge—the other’s knowledge— would thus become decisive in the restoration of both order and the modernizing project. For now, suffice it to say that the tendency to read Sarmiento merely as an intellectual responsible for importing a European symbolic capital does not do justice to his complexity as it is reflected in the many contradictions of Facundo.9 In Sarmiento a radical mimetic ideology coexists with a critique of the unmediated importation of European knowledge. Neither does it seem possible to reduce Sarmiento’s difference to the displacement suffered by the European book when it is reworked in a different context by a second hand. Writing and Orality in Facundo



The distance between Sarmiento and his library is not solely a blind spot, an aporia in his Europeanized discourse. Sarmiento is capable of assuming this distance in order to legitimize a different knowledge—half barbaric, he himself suggests, but perhaps for this very reason better prepared to represent what is particular to America: the fragility of civilization in a world dominated by barbarism. In fact, Facundo does not explain the chaos of a recently emancipated society solely in terms of the lack of European discourse. On the contrary, in the historical fable that Sarmiento weaves, the barbarians come to power through the interstitial gap left by the superimposition of imported European models (of civilization and the city) on that particular reality of America, barbarism. Between an imported discourse and the American experience that remained excluded from representation, there exists a space where the seed of contradiction in Argentina takes root and blossoms: In the Argentine Republic two distinct civilizations can be seen inhabiting the same ground: one nascent, that without an understanding (conocimiento) of what is held above its head, is repeating those ingenuous and popular movements of the Middle Ages; the other, that manifests the latest achievements of European civilization. The nineteenth and twelfth centuries exist together: the one within the cities, the other in the countryside. (Facundo, p. ) The antithesis, the binary logic of this discourse, proliferates: low/high, tradition/modernity. But the place of authority, at least in this passage, is not located in either of the two terms. If we were to spatialize this authority, we would say that the subject speaks from the provincial city—between both worlds in juxtaposition—since Sarmiento has already emphasized to us the ignorance of urban knowledge (saber) before the local barbaric reality. He insists that because of this ignorance and lack of mediation between two worlds, the barbarism excluded by culture had come to invade the cities, destroying the level of modernity thus far established. Facundo represents history as progress, as a modernizing process interrupted by the catastrophe of local strongman or boss politics (caudillismo) that had disarticulated the possibilities for unity on a national level. Sarmiento’s work thus constitutes an attempt to control the contingency, the accidental, and the irrational that characterize barbarism, for the purpose of reorganizing a national (and state) homogeneity. But the project of ordering chaos could not be based strictly on either the importation of models or the citations of the European book. A restoration on any level would entail the need to listen to the voice of the other, of the traditions that the modernizing 

   

project—initially mimetic (under former President General Bernardo Rivadavia)—had ignored. One would have to represent what European knowledge and its traffickers (the enlightened intellectuals) were as yet unaware of. To write, for Sarmiento, is to order, to modernize; at the same time, it presupposes a previous step that would serve to overdetermine the virtual modernizing impulse. That step would be the act of writing as transcribing the (oral) word of the other, whose exclusion from (written) knowledge had generated the discontinuity and contingency of the present. To write would entail an act of mediation between civilization and barbarism; the restoration of the city, of a rationalized public sphere, would not be possible without the mutual representation of these two worlds whose friction had interrupted the modern project, giving rise to chaos. Hence, for Sarmiento, there was a need ‘‘to reveal national customs, without which it is as impossible to understand our political characters, as it is to comprehend the primordial and American character of that bloody war that has torn the Argentine Republic into pieces’’ (p. ). Accomplishing the task of reordering the public sphere task would entail the incorporation, not the alienation, of the other. And the first step toward this would be the representation of barbarism in discourse. One would have to listen to the other’s stories, which had remained inaccessible to the knowledge possessed by the lettered intellectual or letrado: The facts are here consigned, classified, proven, documented; what is missing, I tell you, is the thread that serves to bind them as a single fact, the breath of life. . . .(And) it has been left to me to attempt to interrogate the ground . . . ; to hear the revelations of those involved, the depositions of victims, the recollections of the aged, the pained narrations of mothers who see with the heart; it has been left to me to listen to the confused echo of the people, that has seen and not understood, that has been both executioner and victim, witness and actor; left to me the ripeness of the accomplished fact, and the passing step from one epoch to another, the change of destinies for the nation, to cast a glance backward, in a time of fruition, and make of history an example and not vengenace. (p. ) In Sarmiento, two contradictory ways of representing the past are at work: on the one hand, the vision of the oral world of tradition as that which had to be eliminated for modernization (or civilization) to be established; and on the other hand, the vision of this will to rupture as a generative source of new conflicts and anxieties.10 The contradiction between both versions of the past is never completely resolved; hence, the fundamental ambiguity in Writing and Orality in Facundo



the representation of the other.11 Yet in spite of this irreducible ambiguity, Facundo attempts to reconcile the modernizing project with the past. It seeks to ‘‘cast a glance backward’’: to look back (not only toward the future, as in Enlightenment teleologies) in order to give the ‘‘breath of life’’ to the discourse of a new knowledge grounded on the voice of the people, a life that the European book and its forms of classification, recorded events, and documents had not succeeded in incorporating. Sarmiento’s writing would attempt and claim to hear the other, her confused voice, in order to weave a continuity, to take the ‘‘step from one epoch to another’’ in order to fill the gaps in history that obstructed national consolidation. It was precisely this transition that had not yet been achieved in the present catastrophe that writing sought to repair. To hear, then, is the technique of a historiographical practice. And it was literature, as Lionel Gossman shows with respect to European romantic historiography, that would be the discourse most suited to that project of listening to the voice of tradition.20 Sarmiento postulates the possible role of literature among the new nations in the following manner: If the glint of a national literature can shine for a moment in the new American societies, it will emerge from a description of grandiose natural scenes, and above all else from the struggle between European civilization and indigenous barbarism, between the intellect and matter; a formidable battle in America, which would take place in scenes so peculiar, so characteristic, and so far outside the circle of ideas in which the European spirit has been educated. (Facundo, p. ) Literature was the appropriate place for the necessary mediation between civilization and barbarism, modernity and tradition, writing and orality. Therefore, the lack of discipline and documentation tied to spontaneity, to the nearness of life that Sarmiento correlated with literature, might in reality lead toward another kind of intellectual authority, more readily equipped than the learned man of European formation to represent and resolve the disorder. Significantly, from Facundo’s publication onward, its literary function has been constantly highlighted and problematized in order to contrast it with the authority and validity of a ‘‘true’’ or historical discourse. For example, V. Alsina correlated the defects of Facundo with its proliferating literary slippages: I will say that your book, notwithstanding the many things that it may contain deserving admiration, seems to me to suffer from a general de    

fect—that of exaggeration: I believe that it holds much poetry, if not in the ideas, at least in its forms of locution. [Still, it] was not your intention to write a romance, nor an epic, but a true social history.13 (Italics added) The split between poetry (as well as fiction) and true social history generates a foundational tension. Toward the mid-nineteenth century, the dichotomy reveals a certain tendency toward the autonomization of discursive functions. Alsina’s critique signals a new hierarchization within a utilitarian economy of meaning, in which literature is regarded as a devalued mode of representation and subordinated to the political authority of the more modern and efficient forms of truth. Sarmiento’s response to Alsina is entirely ambiguous. As it has already been mentioned, Sarmiento not only assures his critic that he will not edit Facundo; he also assumes the defect of spontaneity, of poetry, to be complementary to his writing of history. Since Sarmiento’s mode of writing does not rely solely on European rationality, it is thus able to listen to the alienated voice of the other—if only to include it in the order of a new discourse. In this regard, the informality, immediacy, and indiscipline of Facundo become the conditions of possibility for any approach to the (oral) barbaric tradition that had to be incorporated by means of representation: Now, I ask: what impressions are left with the inhabitant of the Argentine Republic in the simple act of fixing one’s eyes on the horizon, and seeing . . . , not seeing anything? Because however deep the eyes sink their gaze into that uncertain, vaporous, undefined horizon, and however far it goes, to that degree does the watcher become more fascinated, confused, and swallowed up in contemplation and doubt. Where does that world end, which he desires to penetrate in vain? He doesn’t know! What lies beyond that which can be seen? Solitude, danger, the wild, death. I give you poetry. (Facundo, p. ) The threat, the danger, that the subject (or the nation-state) confronts in Facundo corresponds to the absence of boundaries and structures. The desert is, in effect, the enemy, the problem for which writing seeks a solution. But before this distinctive emptiness of the American landscape, the civilized gaze and rational knowledge necessarily give way. The gaze and authority of poetry begin where a world made representable by discipline ends. In this sense, literature for Sarmiento acts as an exploration of the frontier, a reflection on the limits and outskirts of the law. And yet, one cannot reduce the mode of representation, identified by Alsina as well as Sarmiento as poetry, to a lyricism that at times (sporadiWriting and Orality in Facundo

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cally at best) prevails in Sarmiento’s descriptions. In terms of the other’s knowledge and the representation of barbarism, the tales and narratives that proliferate throughout Facundo are of far greater importance. One may take as an example the remarkable history of Navarro (to be found in chapter  in the second part of Facundo), a civilized man who, pursued by Juan Facundo Quiroga, flees and seeks refuge in the tents of indigenous tribes, eventually becoming an ‘‘other’’; or the tale of Quiroga’s youth and his battle with a tiger (the animal representation of the other par excellence); or the assassination of Quiroga by Santos Pérez in Barranca-Yaco. These tales thematically explore the experience of the border-limit, the ambiguity of subjects trapped between two territories of identity: civilization and barbarism. These characters frequently recount stories of barbarization, as in the tale of the San Luis rancher ‘‘of pure European racial stock’’ who becomes overwhelmed by ‘‘gross native superstitions’’ and the vice of gambling—another key attribute of barbarism. Even more important, these tales are almost always taken from material that Sarmiento had heard. They are tales of the oral tradition,14 bonfire stories that Sarmiento had gathered, collected, in the course of his lifetime. Hence, Facundo may be considered a great repository for vernacular voices, oral tales, anecdotes, and stories of others whose words Sarmiento transcribed and incorporated into his representation of barbarism—as if these other-words could actually indicate the presence of the once excluded and now powerful other, appropriated by writing, within the order of discourse and the rational sphere of human affairs in the city. As if Sarmiento would effect a mediation between the two worlds; as if in the incorporation of the word and the oral story, the writing of the voice would resolve the contradiction that had brought about the chaos. Does this project, then, entail the delimitation of a democratic, dialogic, discursive space, where the voice of tradition would coexist with modern forms of authority? Does representation bring with it the presence of the voice? We must first ask how the voice of the other is represented, and what transformations the popular sources undergo in their transcription. We might also consider the relationship between the represented voice and the writing subject on the formal level of writing itself (syntactical, typographical, or otherwise). The act of re-presentation can never be considered a passive process, insofar as it seeks to contain the other-word, to assimilate the other as an object of discourse. And the insertion and formalization of the voice in writing are ideologically fundamental to Facundo. For Sarmiento, barbarism does not always represent an outside abso

   

lutely devoid of sense or meaning. Although his vision of barbarism is doubtless riddled with contradictions, there are various key elements of Facundo —the character sketches, most importantly—that emphasize the knowledge of the gaucho and pastoral culture. In fact, knowledge (saber and conocer) is a critical word in these classificatory portraits. The barbarian here possesses the power of the word, and he does play a significant role in the production of meaning. The gaucho ‘‘tracker’’ has ‘‘his domestic and popular knowledge (ciencia)’’; the gaucho outlaw has his ‘‘knowledge (ciencia) of the desert’’. The scout or ranger knows (conoce) the marshes and swamps, and only he knows (sabe), and this knowledge is indispensable for the army. It is the bard, however, who possesses a superior traditional knowledge (saber), tied to his original and primitive poetry: [The bard] achieves with candor the same work of chronicling customs, history, and biography, as the bard of the Middle Ages; his [oral] verses will be recorded much later as documents and records on which the future historian will have to depend. (Facundo, p. ) On the other hand, although the bard’s poetry can be considered closest to the source of tradition, it is nevertheless ‘‘weighty, monotonous, irregular, when it is abandoned to the organization of the moment’’ (pp. –). Thus, while the future historian (Sarmiento himself ) must listen to the voice, he must also submit it to the higher form of regular discourse, independent of the inspiration of the moment. Sarmiento positions himself between two competing modes of knowledge. Between the act of ‘‘listening to the confused echo of the people’’ (p. ) and the practice of writing emerges the figure of a transcriber; however, his position in the hierarchized space of discourse is never neutral. In Facundo, the most basic instance in the representation of the other’s ‘‘discourse’’ is the incorporation of the pastoral vernacular word in writing. Yet even in the case of these brief direct transcriptions, the pastoral word appears with signs that mark its distance, its radical strangeness. When Sarmiento assumes the pastoral voice, he systematically employs typographical marks, underscoring the other’s difference: ‘‘Dónde te mias-dir!’’ (p. : ‘‘where are you going?’’), ‘‘es un parejo pangare’’ (p. ), or ‘‘se provee de los vicios’’ (p. ). Sarmiento takes pleasure in citing the vernacular, in beholding the alien word. The emphasis defamiliarizes the voice, placing its currency outside of any habitual context. Sarmiento’s strategy entails the translation of a traditional word for a reader who may not know, but ought to be familiar with, the other: this point returns us again to the importance of Writing and Orality in Facundo



mediation between the two worlds in conflict. But the mediator’s practice is never transparent, and to the contrary, projects the vernacular’s translation and transformation, its placement, in a writerly order. On another level, the distance between the two forms of speech, one proper (written) and the other alien (oral), is reinscribed as the distance between two hierarchized forms of knowledge. For Sarmiento, the other’s knowledge is irregular, confused: it is always subject to an organization of the moment, to a contingency, that prevents it from becoming a universalizing reflection capable of an abstract and general application. The subject in Facundo takes on the oral tale as a source for writing and yet simultaneously displaces it, subordinating the particularity of these voices to a general knowledge. In effect, Sarmiento explicitly defends the necessity of listening to the ‘‘confused’’ voice of the other as it is made manifest in the realm of vernacular poetry. Nevertheless it is important to remember that the utilitarian dichotomy between ‘‘romance and true social history’’ (in Alsina’s words) also tends to regulate and hierarchize the production of meaning in Facundo. Although oral narratives were indispensable to the mediator-intellectual, insofar as they served as alternative documents, they also constituted what one may call a dangerous supplement. Their danger lay in their capacity to contaminate the authentic claim of discourse, stripping it of the rationality and discipline that a modern economy of meaning would require. Moreover, these stories would leave traces of a narrative knowledge in the very space of writing: the residue of that same alien knowledge that writing as an instrument of rationality had sought to overcome. Time and again, Sarmiento’s project to construct an ordered (and ordering) archive of oral tradition encounters this problem: in his attempt to incorporate the other’s knowledge into the civilized or ordered discourse of his own, his history constantly runs the risk of its own barbarization. For this reason, Sarmiento’s irrepressible tendency to narrate—to recount the stories of others—gives rise to considerable anxiety, an anxiety that leads him to consider Facundo a discordant chaos that would itself have to be ordered and purified in the future so that, ‘‘purged of all unpleasant aftertaste the history of our fatherland’’ (p. ) might leave the chaos behind. In response to the threat of its own dissolution, writing attempts to systematize its ordering gesture before those social tensions that overdetermine the composition of the book itself. In other words, writing reacts to the dangerous tendency toward dispersion and the oral trace by demarcating the boundaries of these transcribed stories through commentary. Hence, the par    

ticularity and ambiguity of narrative knowledge is subordinated to the generalizing and universalizing function of an assumedly modern discourse. In the chapter entitled ‘‘Infancy and Youth of Juan Facundo Quiroga,’’ we find an interesting example of how the anecdote as a discursive supplement is subordinated to a generalizing operation. The chapter begins with the tale of a battle between a tiger and the young Quiroga, narrated by Quiroga himself: ‘‘At that moment, I knew what it was to be afraid, the General Don Juan Facundo Quiroga said, recalling this event to a group of officers’’ (p. ). As is common in the telling of stories, the source of the tale is not revealed until the end, and the boundary between the place of the transcriber and the vernacular voice is blurred by Sarmiento’s strategic use of reported speech. At the end of the anecdote, however, Sarmiento emphasizes the division and distance between the two: They called him, also, the Tiger of the Plains, and in truth, this denomination sat quite well with him. After all, phrenology and comparative anatomy have demonstrated the relationship between exterior forms and moral dispositions. (Facundo, p. ) The passage from Quiroga’s tale to ‘‘phrenology and comparative anatomy,’’ or from a particularized contingent description to an abstract and general knowledge, reinforces the distance between two distinct manifestations of authority, placed in a hierarchical relation. The slippage can be evidenced in the paragraphs following the tale of the tiger, when Sarmiento reads the facial features of Quiroga, the details of his physiognomy, as nuances of a wild landscape.16 In the ‘‘heavy shadows’’ of his brow, in the ‘‘forest of hair,’’ in the ‘‘bushy eyebrows,’’ Sarmiento reads the landscape of barbarism. From the particular to the tableau vivant: the proceeding is systematic, and it becomes enmeshed with the very concept of biography that is at work in Sarmiento. The individual, the particular, signifies only in relation to the general picture, which at the same time, makes possible the interpretation of the particular. Writing continually attempts to generate models that will enable any particularity whatsoever to be interpreted—all variety, subjected to a preestablished general idea or concept. Throughout Facundo, the distinctive heterogeneity of barbarism is always subordinated to the paradigmatic character sketches, cuadros that Sarmiento had portrayed at the beginning of the text. ‘‘If the reader recalls what has already been said regarding the overseer of the wagons, s/he will deduce the character, value, and strength of the Cowboy [Boyero]’’ (p. ). ‘‘It is the constant shooting that animates the soldier with war songs, the bard [Cantor] mentioned earlier’’ (p. ). Regarding Writing and Orality in Facundo

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Facundo himself, ‘‘where in the Argentine Republic will you find a type of man closer to the ideal gaucho outlaw?’’ Such examples multiply, reinforcing Sarmiento’s will to subordinate the particular to a model by means of these tableaux vivant, character sketches, which also act as a brake on the tendency of Sarmiento’s discourse toward dispersion, the proliferation of anecdotes, and the particularized knowledge of oral tales, stories of others. The tableau vivant is thus more than simply the appropriate place for listening to the confused and irregular voice of the other; it is an effect of an ordering practice that formally responds to the project of submitting the heterogeneity of barbarism to the order of discourse.17 As Sarmiento would insist, ‘‘intellect has prevailed over matter, art over numbers’’ (p. ). Insofar as the character sketches of the tracker, scout, gaucho outlaw, and bard prove a certain search for originary archetypes by a subject who reflects on Argentine origins, Sarmiento’s work asserts the rationalizing will that motivates this writing. The other had to be represented. But the confusion, the irregularity of the voice was precisely the force that remained resistant to representation. Barbarism comes into representation as representation’s other, the feared outside of discourse. For this reason, it would not be enough to listen to the signs of that dispersed and amorphous reality. One would have to subdue it, exercise the expressive violence of form on the irregularity of the vernacular. For Sarmiento, representing the ‘‘barbarian’’ presupposed the desire to include him, only to subordinate him to the general laws of civilization; the law of a rational and productive labor under the exigencies of the emergent market. The formal procedure of including the spoken word of the other, only to subordinate it to a higher authority, indicates an attempt to resolve a contradiction on which Facundo continually reflects: the lack of law in a society based on the irregularity and arbitrary nature of the caudillo: Society has disappeared completely, only the feudal family remains, isolated, concentrated; and having no unified society, any kind of government has become impossible; municipalities do not exist, the law cannot be exercised, and civil justice has no means of reaching delinquents. (Facundo, –) Barbarism was, in effect, the outside of those disciplined areas of the law. In order for the caudillo to impose his power over the city, he destroyed ‘‘all regularity in the administration. The name of Facundo filled the absence of laws; freedom and the spirit of the city had ceased to exist’’ (p. ). ‘‘The     

barbarian [has violated] all accepted forms, pacts, treaties, formal agreements’’ (p. ). In other words, he violates the space of the written law: What the Argentine Republic needs before all else, what Rosas will never give, because it is no longer his to give, is for life, the property of men, to be independent of the indiscreetly spoken word. . . . There is hardly a country in America that has less faith in a written pact, in a constitution, than the Argentine. (p. ; italics added) Facundo, even as it listens to and submits the spoken word of the other, anticipates this rational order, which as both Max Weber and Nicos Poulantzas have pointed out, recognizes in the realm of the written law a condition of possibility for the modern state’s emergence.18 In this sense, Facundo also satisfies a state function of literature that Josefina Ludmer has examined in the case of gauchesca poetry. Such a genre continually raises and polemicizes the question of authority in the written law: In one of its areas, the genre fulfills the function of reformulating juridical relations, of juridically and politically unifying the nation: Argentine literature has served to satisfy this state function since the independence up until the definitive state constitution in ; the gauchesca genre was suited above all to the integration of rural masses. Hence, the autonomy of literature (its separation of the political and state sphere) is an effect of the establishment of the political and the state as separate spheres.19 Beyond the context of Argentina, the hypothesis concerning the state function of literature seems fundamental in explaining those hybrid places of Latin American writing before . There was a need, as Sarmiento said, to enlighten the state: ‘‘intelligence, talent, and knowledge (saber) will be called on once again to direct the public destiny’’ (p. ). And although Argentina remained overrun by barbarism, and the lettered class or letrados who had been prepared for a public life found themselves ‘‘without the profession of law, without a press, without a tribune, without any public life’’ (p. ), in other countries it was precisely the letrados who had taken upon themselves (as Andrés Bello points out) ‘‘the task of [taking] the force of the law away from tradition.’’ For, Bello adds, ‘‘many of the most civilized modern countries have felt the need to codify [their] laws,’’ and it ‘‘has become necessary to recast this confused mass of diverse, incoherent, and contradictory elements, giving them a consistency and harmony and placing them in relation to the living forms of social order.’’ 20 For Sarmiento, the rationalizing function of writing was not simply theWriting and Orality in Facundo

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matic; it also determined in the proper provisions for the word of the other, for tradition, for contingent knowledge (saber particular), beneath the generalizing authority that orders the law. For this reason, we might say that to write, in Sarmiento, is to modernize. We are not dealing with a metaphor here, or an analogy between the field of discourse and the social order ‘‘reflected’’ by it: this ‘‘social order,’’ ‘‘the rational public sphere,’’ was created (at least in part) by writing. If, at the time Facundo was written, modernization had suddenly been interrupted, if the public sphere had been found lacking and chaos reigned throughout, then writing—by its generalizing and homogenizing operation—remained a fundamental model for the rational(izing) project. In the very heterogeneity of its form, Facundo demonstrates writing’s will to modernity as well as the aporias of the rationalizing project. Notes 



 

 





‘‘The Argentine Republic is one and indivisible,’’ stated Domingo F. Sarmiento in Civilización y barbarie. Vida de Facundo Quiroga (). Although an English translation of Sarmiento’s work exists (Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; or, Civilization and Barbarism, trans. Mrs. Horace Mann [; reprint, New York: Hafner Publishing, ], it lacks the introductory letters, prologue, and third part published in the  and later Spanish editions. Page numbers refer to the Editora Nacional (Madrid: ) edition. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Spanish are mine. A general reading of the various functions of writing in the nineteenth century can be found in Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, ). See also Jean Franco, ‘‘La heterogeneidad peligrosa: Escritura y control social en vísperas de la independencia mexicana,’’ Hispamerica – (): –. Domingo F. Sarmiento, Recuerdos de provincia (; reprint, Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena, ), . Of course, transport and networks of communication together constituted one of the material conditions for capitalist development; hence its emphasis, not only in Sarmiento, but in the works of all the modernizing patricians. As we will see, these conditions at the same time took on the status of icons, or representations of coherence or structure that presented society with a rationalizing discourse. For a semiotics of transport, see Michel de Certeau, ‘‘Railway Navigation and Incarceration,’’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. F. Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –; and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Unizen Books, ). Domingo F. Sarmiento, Viajes por Europa, Africa, y América, in Alberto Palcos, ed., Viajes (Buenos Aires: Hachette, n.d.), . First published in . Ricardo Piglia, ‘‘Notas sobre Facundo,’’ in Punto de Vista , no.  (): . A partial translation of this paper reappears in Joseph T. Criscenti, ed., Sarmiento and His Argentina (‘‘Sarmiento’s Vision’’) (Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner Publishers, ). Regarding Western representations of the savage and barbaric, the work of Hayden White has been of great value. See White’s ‘‘The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,’’ in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,

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 





  



), –. See also Michel de Certeau, ‘‘Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’: The Savage I,’’ in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, ). This point has already been raised in a lucid work by Noé Jitrik, Muerte y transfiguración de ‘‘Facundo’’ (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina, ). See also Jitrik’s introduction to Facundo (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ). The anxiety before change and the rupture of tradition was expressed in singular fashion by Sarmiento’s reaction in Recuerdos de provincia when his sisters uproot a tree, the symbol of tradition: ‘‘the mature age (of the tree) reminds us of all those things that surround us . . . , a tree that we have seen in its birth, growth, and arrival at an old age, is a thing endowed with life . . . that accuses us of ingratitude, and would leave misgivings in our conscience if we had sacrificed it without legitimate motive’’ (p. ). Writing seeks to uproot the tree, but at the same time, must fill the emptiness brought about by modernization. Regarding the ambiguity of Sarmiento concerning the past, see Tulio Halperin Donghi, prologue to Campaña del ejército grande aliado de Sud América, by Domingo F. Sarmiento (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), esp. xix ff. On the representation of the other in European romantic historiography (and literature), Lionel Gossman’s work shows how barbarism, external to discourse, is simultaneously the condition of possibility for historical writing: ‘‘In many respects the tension between veneration of the Other—that is to say, not just the primitive or alien, but the historical particular, the discontinuous act or event in its irreducible uniqueness and untranslatableness, the very energy of ‘life’ which no concept can encompass—and eagerness to repeat it, translate it, represent it, and thus, in a sense, domesticate and appropriate it, can be seen as the very condition of the romantic historian’s enterprise. For the persistence of at least a residual gap between ‘original’ and translation, between ‘Reality’ or the Other and our interpretation of it, is what both generates and sustains the historian’s activity, rather as the condition of history itself ’’ (Lionel Gossman, ‘‘History as Decipherment: Romantic Historiography and the Discovery of the Other,’’ New Literary History  (–): . Gossman, ‘‘History as Decipherment.’’ See also Lionel Gossman, ‘‘The Go-Between: Jules Michelet, –,’’ Modern Language Notes  (): –. Valentin Alsina, ‘‘Notas,’’ in Facundo, by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, ed. Susana Fanetti and Nora Dottor (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller (Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov),’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, ), –. Benjamin’s central hypothesis here is that the oral tale embodies a type of experience and communication that came into crisis with the emergence of modern society. For Benjamin, narration, insofar as it had been used for the transmission of traditional knowledge, is opposed to information. The concept of narrative knowledge, in Jean-François Lyotard, is also opposed to science and the discursive practices of modern knowledge. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), esp. –. Regarding the concept of narrative knowledge in Lyotard, see his The Postmodern (explained to children): Correspondence, –, trans. Don Barry et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, ), –. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass.: ), Valentín N. Volosinov writes about the problems raised by reported speech, as the act involves the appropriation of one source or authority and its autonomy

Writing and Orality in Facundo









 

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by another: ‘‘The author’s utterance, in incorporating the other utterance, brings into play syntactic, stylistic, and compositional norms for its partial assimilation—that is, its adaptation to the syntactic, compositional, and stylistic design of the author’s utterance, while preserving (if only in rudimentary form) the initial autonomy (in syntactic, compositional, and stylistic terms) of the reported utterance, which otherwise could not be grasped in full’’ (p. ); see also chapter , part , ‘‘Exposition of the Problem of Reported Speech.’’ A crucial yet largely unstudied concept in the work of Deleuze and Guattari concerns the activation of ordering or disciplinary processes, specifically significance and subjectification, through the composition of the face and/or the landscape. Facialization effects an alliance or conjuncture between the semiotic displacements produced by signification (that is, the generalized circuit of designated ‘‘signifiers’’ and their incommensurable ‘‘signifieds’’) and the synthetic interpellations (toward consciousness or passion) produced by subjectification. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘‘Year Zero: Faciality,’’ in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). Regarding the tableau vivant, Michel Foucault writes: ‘‘The first of the great operations of discipline occurred with the constitution of the tableaux vivants which would transform the great, confused, useless or dangerous multitudes, into ordered multiplicities’’ (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage Press, ], ). See Max Weber, ‘‘The Nature of Modern Capitalism,’’ in Capitalism, Bureaucracy, and Religion, ed. and trans. S. Andreski (London: George, Allen, and Unwin, ), –; and Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, and Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, ). Josefina Ludmer, ‘‘Quién educa,’’ Filología  ():  n. . Andrés Bello, ‘‘Exposición de motivos,’’ Código Civil de la República de Chile, Obras Completas, vol.  (; reprint, Caracas, ), .

   

 Knowledge-(as)-Said: Language and Politics in Andrés Bello

A common tendency among scholars has led us to frame the relation between Domingo F. Sarmiento and Andrés Bello in terms of a near absolute contradiction. Traditional literary history and its main pedagogical tool, the literary anthology, have insistently represented the relation between the two writers by means of an oversimplified schema that juxtaposes a romantic Sarmiento attached to the spirit of life with the ascetic figure of Bello, guardian of forms. Thus have historians been able to read into their relationship a linear progress from neoclassicism to romanticism in Latin America. Although Bello and Sarmiento were born almost thirty years apart, the polarized representation of their thought within the categories of a (linear) European history remains relativized by, among other things, the  publication of both Sarmiento’s Facundo and Bello’s major poetic work, Silvas americanas, in Chile. The coincidence reminds us that Bello, a dominant figure in the Chilean intellectual arena throughout the years of Sarmiento’s exile in Santiago, did not simply represent a past that the Argentine sought to overcome, thereby affirming some kind of generational succession. To the contrary, it might be more appropriate to say that Bello was Sarmiento’s contemporary and, in many ways, an emblem of the disciplined intellectual whom Sarmiento engaged as a polemical point of reference. In fact, it is certain that Sarmiento began to distance himself from Bello in the s, and even fostered a certain antagonism toward him. For one thing, Sarmiento took issue with Bello’s emphasis on grammaticism in favor of a romanticism that Bello, to a certain degree, rejected. In fact, during this period, Sarmiento began to fashion himself as a possible alternative or other kind of intellectual to Bello, who was then rector at the University of Chile. In his prolific and mystifying self-representations, Sarmiento insisted on the noninstitutional formation of his discourse composed outside the confines of the university: a spontaneous and even undisciplined discourse that (precisely because of its spontaneity and lack of discipline) was more capable of understanding the American ‘‘barbarism.’’ Of course, we must not be mis-

led by such a valorization of spontaneity: we have already seen in Facundo how Sarmiento manipulates this self-fashioning in order to open up a space within the discourses of power. In spite of Sarmiento’s insistence on the importance of listening to the spontaneous and natural speech of the other, his writing is guided by a disciplinarian will that reacts on this spontaneity as the fundamental basis for (his) writing. But let us not reduce the differences. More than anything, it is necessary to show how Bello operates from within relatively institutionalized sites of articulation, a condition that distances him from the more hybrid discourse of Sarmiento. The heterogeneous character of Sarmiento’s writing is thus not solely an effect of the journalistic (hence serial) distribution of his writings; it is also the result of an encounter between multiple subjects and authorities in the utterly uneven space of his discourse. In contrast, Bello buttresses his reputation as a writer of ‘‘general knowledge,’’ a tradition belonging to the encyclopedism of the Enlightenment, with the extensive use of citations that serve to delimit and specify their respective territories, resulting in the creation of relatively homogeneous texts. In addition to this degree of formality to be found in his writing, Bello begins to speak from a position of authority within the university, which he himself had helped to found in Chile (in ). His locus of speech, if indeed authorized as an administrative function for the public sphere, nevertheless establishes a degree of differentiation with respect to other areas of the polis. For Sarmiento, this polis still existed as a lack, an absence that the order of writing sought to fill. In this sense, Bello speaks from a projected modernity, at times idealized by Sarmiento’s markedly uneven mode of writing. With these differences in mind, perhaps one can argue that Bello cannot be considered representative of the Latin American intellectual’s condition in the nineteenth century. In fact, it could be said that the preinstitutional and multiple positions in Sarmiento might be more representative of the intellectual temper of this particular period in history. But while it is true that Bello’s intellectual discipline cannot be taken as a norm, his project of institutionalizing an American knowledge nevertheless ties together many of the objectives shared by Latin American intellectuals prior to Martí. Sarmiento himself points out in Facundo: There is one circumstance that powerfully prepares [Córdoba] for the future. Science is the greatest of all titles for the Cordoban: two centuries of the university have left in the consciousness of the people this civilizing preoccupation, which does not exist in as deeply rooted a way in other provinces of the interior, such that, without changing the direc

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tion and content of its studies, Córdoba can account for not only a great number of cornerstones in civilization, but also the supremacy and cultivation of the understanding as its cause and effect.1 In Cuba from the s onward, we also see the preoccupation with the discipline of intellectual production. José Antonio Saco, a man of remarkable architectonic imagination, proposed the creation of closed spaces for culture, which he defended as the effective antidote to vagrancy. A culture institutionalized in museums, lecture halls, or schools, would provide for the administration of idleness, thereby establishing the grounds for the rationalization of labor and formation of citizenship. Already in , Saco remarks: In order to lessen the number of slackers at the billiard halls, there ought to be provided some places where the people can gather together for their benefit. I cannot contemplate without the most profound sentiment that, despite more than three hundred years of political existence on the island of Cuba, we still do not have one of those establishments that are common even in newer countries, of fewer resources, than ours. We have cause to be amazed that Havana, a populous and enlightened city, with relations that stretch across the globe, lacks an athenaeum [Ateneo]. . . . An institution of this sort has become urgent and necessary.2 For José de la Luz y Caballero—another key figure in the Cuban intellectual field prior to Martí—the project of disciplining and institutionalizing intellectual labor was also essential: A great step forward will have been taken among us for the betterment of education if, with these sentiments reawakened in our hearts and the willingness to make something of the many things that we could do, we establish an institution of education that, founded on a solid material base, would offer all the attractive conditions of stability and duration.3 Luz y Caballero lamented the lack of professionalization among teachers, employing a rhetoric of Protestant history in which the disciplinarian will carried with it a religious undertone: ‘‘In fact, the teaching profession in Cuba is not a profession at all, and if it is not a profession, how can it be(come) a priestly brotherhood?’’ (p. ). One must not, however, confuse this rhetoric with a conservative, pre-Enlightenment ideology. As Max Weber has argued, the concept of the profession as an apostolate contributed to secularization and the consequent disenchantment of the world. The relation between rational labor and religion reappears in the following passage by Luz y Cabellero: Language and Politics in Bello

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[There is] the imperious necessity of tempering, fortifying the souls of their children so that they might redeem their debts with dignity in their industrial, scientific, or artistic careers, so that they might live—I will say this in one word—an eminently religious life of labor; religious, yes, because all labor is the result of an aspiration to one’s betterment, and all aspiration toward one’s betterment is an aspiration toward God. (p. ) In Luz y Cabellero, moreover, religious rhetoric gives legitimacy to ideas that would have sounded transgressive had they been said in another way during this period, in which Cuba was a Spanish colony. In any case, the rationalizing will is the issue at stake, even in those discourses that insisted on a lack of rationalization. Hence, we may approach Bello’s disciplinarian will not necessarily as an exception to the discourses of the time, but as a paradigm for a possible and desired modernization. Which leads us to wonder: why do we find this degree of rationalization in Bello and not in Sarmiento? What would be the social conditions of possibility for this early institutionalization of intellectual labor in Bello? Much of it had to do with the political situation in Chile, where this Venezuelan intellectual had established himself following his return from London in . The contrast between the relative stability of the government in Chile and the internal struggles in Argentina or Mexico until the last quarter of the century is extreme.4 Beginning in the s, the conservative regimes in Chile promoted the consolidation of a national state. Although this did not necessarily bring about the emergence of a harmonic society, it did imply the existence of a national territory where the right to violence could be centralized in the state.5 On the other hand, up until the administrations of Porfirio Díaz (in Mexico) and Julio A. Roca (in Argentina), the local control of provincial strongmen or caudillos promoted the decentralization of power. Hence, the state was not able to consolidate itself as an autonomous apparatus, serving instead as an instrument for caudillos in semi-independent regions (as Sarmiento had pointed out). Within this context, writing was a political, state activity: it crystallized the attempt to produce a model or paradigm for state consolidation. Such a project would entail the creation of a law capable of subduing the arbitrariness of particular interests beneath the blueprint of the emergent res publica. Given the relative centralization and consolidation of the state in Chile, knowledge (saber) gained a certain autonomy from its immediate administration in the public sphere. While this autonomy does not inevitably lead 

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to the independence or pure exteriority of knowledge as a concept, there is no doubt that, in Bello, the production of knowledge had already begun to designate its own sites of articulation in society apart from the public and economic spheres.6 Knowledge begins to demand and delimit its territory in the National University of Chile from the s onward, as can be seen from the high degree of rationalization and specification that, in turn, reflected the national centralization of education. On first analysis, the relative autonomy of knowledge in the university could be questioned in the following manner: although the intellectual production had begun to be fragmented into specialized fields (while still contained by the university’s centralization of knowledge), it had to be subordinated to industrial concerns. Such would be the argument often forwarded by Sarmiento, Saco, and even Luz y Caballero. Bello, on the other hand, would begin his  speech on the foundation of the University of Chile with a difference in mind: One desires to satisfy first of all the following necessity, which has been felt more since, given our political emancipation, we have been able to open the door to useful forms of knowledge: creating the bases of a general plan that would embrace these forms of knowledge, inasmuch as they pertain to our circumstances, in order to propagate them successfully throughout the country, and to conserve and advance their teaching in a fixed and systematized way, that would permit, however, the progressive adoption of new methods and of successive advancements made by the sciences.7 One need not search in Bello for the idea of the university as the refuge for a disinterested culture or ‘‘knowledge for the sake of knowledge’’—ideas that José E. Rodó, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Alfonso Reyes, and Ricardo Rojas all proposed throughout the early decades of the following century in opposition to positivism. For Bello, the idea of a completely autonomous knowledge (as literature would come to represent itself later in the century) was not even a concept, much less a possibility. Nevertheless, already in Bello we see a critique of pragmatism at work that becomes significant in relation to the emerging will to autonomy in the intellectual sphere: Without a doubt, the university will not confuse the practical applications with the operations of a blind empiricism. And secondly, as I said earlier, the cultivation of the contemplative understanding that has drawn back the veil from those secrets of the physical and moral universe, is in itself a positive result and of great importance.8 Language and Politics in Bello

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The moment that this distance between the ‘‘contemplative understanding’’ and practical life is asserted, the intellectual sphere in the process of becoming differentiated faces the need to legitimize itself as a separate domain in the space of the social. In other words, one of the fundamental indications of autonomization, albeit still at an early stage, is the emergence of a metadiscursive practice that articulates and designs strategies of legitimation for the emergent discourse. Bello’s constant reflection on the tasks of the university and the place of knowledge in society underline the relative autonomy of this knowledge. In a society where knowledge was found to be institutionally undifferentiated, legitimacy was grounded on the identity between intellectual discourse and its ties to the public sphere. Regarding this point, Jean-François Lyotard has argued: Scientific knowledge is in this way set apart from the language-games that combine to form the social bond. Unlike narrative knowledge, it is no longer a direct and shared component of the bond. But it is indirectly a component of it, because it develops into a profession and gives rise to institutions, and in modern societies language-games consolidate themselves in the form of institutions run by qualified partners (the professional class). The relation between knowledge and society . . . becomes one of mutual exteriority.9 This relation of exteriority generated the necessity for what Lyotard called narratives of legitimation, which as we have seen in Bello, were used to consolidate the authority of these emergent fields of knowledge in society. Such rationalized narratives attempt to explain, in part, the functionality of these new immanent fields of knowledge. Yet contemplative understanding in Bello is still represented as a precondition and tool for state consolidation. Autonomy, therefore, must be understood in a relative sense with respect to the creation of academic disciplines; for even as these subdivisions of knowledge were granted their respective authorities and objects of study, knowledge as a state apparatus had to act as a supervising organ for the public sphere: The government, the legislature, and all forms of public administration need to call [the disciplines of knowledge] frequently to their aid; and nothing useful or important can be understood, without which it should first be submitted to and ordered by science.10 Intellectual labor may not be independent of the public sphere, but neither are the two identical: intellectual labor satisfies a higher function in the administration of the public sphere, a function that crystallizes in the 

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university as a type of metainstitution, whose task it will be to reflect on the roles and operations of other institutions. The university claims legitimacy in terms of the consolidation and maintenance of the national state, or in Bello’s words: ‘‘All paths by which any member [of the university] purports to direct his or her research, any study of the university’s alumni, must converge at one center: the native land [ patria].’’ 11 But this call for functionality in no way contradicts the degree of specification in the division of intellectual labor. For this reason, one must not conflate the ideological function that always accompanies strategies of legitimation (even the most rationalized forms of knowledge in Europe or the United States) with the as yet undifferentiated position of discourse before the public sphere. Doubtless the autonomy achieved was extremely relative, but one must nevertheless note the degree of specification and even spatialization of intellectual labor in the university, over and above the state. What was the place of letters within the relative institutionalization of knowledge? What concept of literature is at work in Bello? If a concept of writing as a device that transforms the chaotic nature of barbarism (and generates the public sphere) prevails in Sarmiento, in Bello we find that other dominant model of literature prior to Martí and his fin de siècle: the concept of belles lettres that postulated literary writing as a paradigm of knowledge(as)-said (saber decir), an active labor on language (in its natural state) for the transmission of any form of knowledge or understanding (conocimiento): [T]he propagation of knowledge [saber] is one of the most important conditions [of belles lettres], because without it letters would offer us no more than a few points of luminosity amidst the darkest shadows. (p. ) For Bello, literature overdetermined by rhetoric was to be a repository for forms, a means for the production of nonliterary, nonaesthetic effects, tied to the project of rationalizing both the public sphere and national language (as we will later see). Such a concept of literature as a medium for nonliterary operations is inscribed in the intellectual sphere that Bello called the ‘‘republic of letters.’’ While it may indeed be said that a certain degree of specialization (synonymous, in this case, with rationalization as the division of knowledge) has been projected onto the tasks and discourses belonging to the public sphere, all intellectuals (doctors, scholars, tacticians, and politicians) under the republic of letters nevertheless share the same basic idea of language: as the common authority of eloquence. And although there was a certain amount of divided labor within this type of intellectual field, it was still unaware of the Language and Politics in Bello

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fragmentation of knowledge that by the end of the nineteenth century would differentiate, for example, the practice and authority of a poet from that of a scholar or historian, even in Latin America. Bello had earlier conceived the interior of the intellectual domain, already in the process of becoming differentiated within the public sphere, as relatively homogeneous: The sciences and literature bring with them compensation for the tasks and vigilance consecrated by them. I do not speak of the glory that illustrates the great scientific conquests; I do not speak of the aura of immortality that crowns works of genius. At best one can only be permitted to hope for these. I speak of the pleasures more or less elevated, more or less intense, that are common to all levels of the republic of letters. (p. ) There is no need to idealize the relative homogeneity of this world, in which meaning and unity or organicity were the effect of the restrictive economy and exclusions deployed by the republic of letters. Few could enter into this enclosure of elevated activities, clearly opposed to manual labor. Saco makes this last point clear: ‘‘Intellectual labor must not be measured by the same scale as mechanical labor, since the latter being almost always severe and arduous, does not produce the pleasures of the former.’’ 12 Nevertheless, the constitution of a sphere is not produced solely as a negative process, in this case, by means of its opposition to and exclusion of manual labor. A sphere or field of knowledge is also consolidated by means of incorporative, inclusive operations of identification that determine the common ground shared by each component of the field. In the republic of letters, one such operation of identification was eloquence, evidence of an enlightened mind, as an a priori condition of possibility for any type of intellectual practice whatsoever. In this system, belles lettres did not constitute an activity with a field of immanent authority; on the contrary, it served as the formalization of eloquence. The association of knowledge with an exacting form of writing and speech based on eloquence (hence, knowledge-(as)-said) thus tied literature to grammar—a fundamental problematic in Bello. For Bello, eloquence was one of the bases of general education. Knowledge-(as)-said was the main assumption behind the project of discipline and rationalization in the emergent society. In his explanation of the tasks of the different faculties of the new university, Bello expounds the place of literary study in the following manner: [It is to be] that literary department that possesses in a peculiar and eminent way the quality of polishing customs, which refine language, 

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making it a dependable, admirable, diaphanous transport for ideas . . . ; which, through the contemplation of ideal beauty and its reflections in works of genius, purifies the taste, and reconciles the inexpressible laws of reason with those rapt audacities of fantasy; which, while initiating the soul in the most intense studies, [these being] a necessary aid or supplement to beautiful literature, and an indispensable preparation for all the sciences, for all the careers of life, forms the primary discipline of the intellectual and moral being, [and] posits the eternal laws of understanding with the objective of directing and supporting the student’s steps and peeling back the many profound layers of the heart, in order to preserve it from the ill-fate of misdirection, to establish on solid ground the rights and duties of man.13 Letters, hence, do not imply a private or privatized activity. Letters polish, purify, and refine language, submitting the misdirection of fantasy—of everything spontaneous, for that matter—to the regular course of reason. Above all, letters here provide the necessary conditions for the execution of the law. Bello never ceases to emphasize that this education for citizens is a project of discipline and ordering through language. He is not proposing an alternative order to that of science, as later intellectuals (beginning with Martí) will do; he is articulating a concept of letters as a labor on language—‘‘indispensable for all sciences.’’ Such an operation on language forms what Bello calls ‘‘the primary discipline’’: it forms subjects contracted or conscripted to the power of the law.14 In fact, letters would provide the necessary structure for a rationalized sociability, for the formation of citizens: If general instruction were considered indispensable to all those who do not live by mechanical labor, without the final aim resting on the literary profession, we would not so frequently see persons of other classes who, not having received the cultivation of their intellect beyond knowledge of primary letters, or perhaps not having dedicated a considerable part of their most precious time to collegial instruction, cannot be shown decorously in light of the social contract; in a sense they tarnish it, and neither can they exercise, as they ought, the rights of the citizen, and the duties that they are called to do in the service of communities or in the administration of justice.15 Underlying this text, emphatic in tone, is Bello’s polemic against the technical or professionalist notion of education that already existed in intellectual circles. Bello’s polemic entails a defense of letters (even as eloquence) in an epoch of an emergent pragmatism, with Sarmiento as its most wellLanguage and Politics in Bello

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known ideologue.16 Bello did not accept the critique that was launched particularly against poetry—which for Sarmiento, Saco, and later Eugenio María de Hostos, came to be a luxury in a world desiring rationality.17 Although Bello did not accept this rejection (which at once implies a certain detachment of poetry from practical life), he defends the place and importance of letters in terms of the (rationalist) project of social modernization. For Bello, letters—as the paradigm of eloquence—were a way of adjusting language to the necessities of the modern project. Letters provided the necessary preliminary knowledge that would form discourses to be both effective and useful. Above all, letters were an instrument for the formation of disciplined subjects; subjects of the law, subordinated to the general order and even capable of administering it. More than a mere indication of prestige or distinction, letters and eloquence comprised a paradigm of rationality: by their formalized character, both were capable of directing the projects of a new society in its struggle to order ‘‘chaos.’’ It may be said that we have overestimated the role of knowledge-(as)-said. In a world that began to be ruled by productivity, it was to be expected that eloquence would play a minor role, limited to revealing the distinction or prestige of the speaker. This is, in effect, one of the functions that eloquence came to satisfy from the nineteenth century onward. Bello pointed out the importance of ‘‘that indispensable sign of culture in which, in a progressive society, no individual who does not belong to the most wretched classes should be found lacking.’’ 18 The social place of eloquence in Bello’s plan, however, would not be limited to the ostentation of a symbolic capital to be flaunted by the individual subject.19 Until the violent antirhetorical reaction of writers like Manuel González Prada, Martí, Darío, and the fin de siècle literary field, eloquence was as much a means of social authority through letters as it was a model for teaching and learning the logic of rationality in a world where saber decir (knowledge-(as)said) was the condition of possibility for knowledge (saber) itself, and where knowledge would project the consolidation of modern society.20 In contrast to Europe, where modernization had already been incorporated into the fabric of society, with rationalized discourses independent from the general order of knowledge-(as)-said, letters in Latin America continued to function as the medium for the modern project until the final decades of the century. The uneven dispersion of modernization in Latin America enabled traditional, nonorganic discourses to persevere and even proliferate, at times acquiring new functions in the greater capitalist economy, even as the new republics sought to free themselves from Europe and Europe’s hegemony over scientific knowledge. Such is the paradox that, to a great degree, com

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prises the intellectual field prior to the s. In a world that lacked a more or less universal incorporation of rationalized discourses, where intellectuals had already begun to suspect the risks of dependency and importation, letters continued to serve as the standard model of a desired modernity. The effectiveness and importance of eloquence cannot be seen as an indication of backwardness with respect to Europe, where knowledge-(as)-said had already lost its paradigmatic character from the beginning of the (nineteenth) century. Rather, knowledge-(as)-said in Latin America has to be analyzed from the perspective of an uneven and unequal deployment of modernity, in which one form of traditional authority (eloquence) acquires a different function. Eloquence, in this case, continued to work as an agent of rationalization—a rationalization that would eventually displace it. One conclusion that can be derived from our analysis is that the concept of the modern episteme as the fragmentation of general knowledge into multiple fields of immanence cannot be applied to the nineteenth century in Latin America. This does not necessarily mean that a general knowledge, or classical episteme, remained in place either. In contrast to both, the uneven and unequal dispersion of modernity and modernization will oftentimes lead us necessarily to question the categories of European historiography. To take Saco as an example, even among the most pragmatic and rationalizing intellectuals who lampooned the florid eloquence of the writing class, one can nevertheless find in him the relation between letters and the modernizing will. In Saco, the enlightenment provided by letters goes hand in hand with the project of disciplining the other and rationalizing labor: They will find in [the act of ] reading a consolation against annoyance and a refuge against vices. . . . If we had Athenaeums and reading rooms many people would respond to them, and instead of wasting their time, and perhaps their money as well, they would enjoy there the purest of pleasures, displaying their understanding and rectifying their hearts. These examples would produce a healthy effect on the popular masses, and with the relish for reading and study having been successfully defended, many would pass from ignorance to enlightenment, from idleness to work, from vice to virtue.21 Enlightenment is concomitant with the imperative to work, with productive labor; it is a means for counteracting vagrancy, a way of incorporating the other into the territory of rationality. Thirteen years before Sarmiento’s Facundo, Saco wrote: ‘‘it is necessary to take the masses away from barbarism’’ (p. ) because ‘‘is there any doubt that ignorance engenders vices and crime, even as the enlightenment represses and diminishes them?’’ (p. ). Language and Politics in Bello



As I had suggested earlier, the disciplinarian will that overdetermines Bello’s concept of literature is also tied to grammar: ‘‘The grammar of a language is the art of speaking it correctly, that is, in a way that people who have been instructed speak it.’’ 22 Once again, we find in Bello the key opposition between orality and writing.23 Grammar is not simply an indication of the subject’s social class; it acts as a normative apparatus that imparts the laws of knowledge-(as)-said, following the example of ‘‘people who have been instructed’’ (those who have access to letters). For this reason, grammar as a pedagogical tool would occupy an intermediary position between (nonreflexive) speech and the rationality of writing. From letters, grammar abstracts the laws capable of disciplining and rationalizing the popular use of a language. In Bello’s  prologue to Análisis ideológico de los tiempos de la conjugación castellana (Ideological Analysis of the Tenses in Castilian Spanish Conjugation) he writes: Few things can better provide the understanding with an exercise suited to developing one’s faculties, to make them agile and nimble, than the philosophical study of language. It has been believed without justification that the learning of a language is exclusively the work of memory. One cannot construct a speech, much less translate one idiom into another, without scrutinizing the most intimate relations of ideas, their accidents and modifications so to speak. This type of study is not so devoid of attraction as might think those who have never become familiar with it past a certain point. In the subtle and fleeting analogies on which the choice of verbal forms (and more might be said of other aspects of language) depends, one finds a prodigious chain of metaphysical relations, linked in an order and precision that will surprise anyone who considers that the true and only artifice of all languages is indebted entirely to popular usage. The meanings in the inflections of verbs immediately present a chaos, in which all seems arbitrary, irregular, and capricious; but in the light of analysis, this apparent disorder is made clear, and one sees in its place a system of general laws, which are even capable of being expressed in rigorous formulas that can be combined and broken down like those [formulas] of an algebraic idiom.24 (Italics added) The light of analysis abstracts a superior and totalizing order from the apparent chaos in any given particular use of language. Thus, we have the identification of grammar with rationality, a kind of algebraic idiom in its ideal or optimal form. This grammar would be purified through reflection and distanced from the arbitrariness that distinguishes illiterate orality. The spoken usage of a language (according to Bello) is nonreflexive: hence its tendency toward disorder. For this reason, the object of grammar—usage—can

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not act as an appropriate model: the model must instead be ‘‘the uniform and authentic custom of the educated people,’’ that is, people formed by letters.25 The opposition between orality and writing, between the contingency of a spontaneous usage and the rationality of discourse, is clear in Bello: ‘‘In the footnotes I call attention to certain corrupt practices of popular speech among Americans’’ (p. vi). Popular speech is spontaneous, which is to say external to the structure of discourse, and must be subordinated—as in every instance that involves the natural—to the order of the artifice. At bottom, the authority of the grammaticizing (as opposed to grammaticized) subject is founded on two presuppositions: the ‘‘popular’’ as a manifestation of barbarism, and ‘‘natural language’’ as a contingent matter or unformed substance that demands subjugation by the instruments of rationality. In the face of chaos, before language in its natural state, grammar foresees the transformation of its raw material into value. Grammar submits spoken language to the control of writing, even as technology is to consolidate the key project of submitting natural raw material to the regime of productivity and the market in other areas of Enlightenment ideology. Bello’s philosophy of language became the object of an ardent polemic that raged in Chile throughout the s, a polemic in which the Argentine Sarmiento would eagerly participate. For Sarmiento, grammar was a retrograde activity, contrary to the ideal of modernization. In , in one of his populist moments (the ambiguity of which we have already discussed), Sarmiento points out: The sovereignty of the people holds its entire value and prevalence in the idiom; grammarians are like the conservative senate, created in order to resist the people’s will, to preserve routine and traditions. In our judgment, they are (if they may pardon us for the bad word) a retrograde, stationary party, in a vocal and outspoken society.26 Later, he added: We would have agreed much more throughout our polemic, had we better defined our philosophical principles. We believe in progress, which means we believe that man, society, language idioms, nature itself, moves inexorably toward perfectibility, that for this reason it is absurd to set our sights backward, and search in the past century for models of language, as if it were at all conceivable that a language could have come to its perfection during an epoch in all senses uncivilized, which is what our antagonists claim; as if languages, the expression of ideas, do not move along with the ideas themselves; as if in an epoch of social Language and Politics in Bello



regeneration, the idiom bound to the past could escape toward innovation and revolution.27 Sarmiento’s defense of a popular sovereignty is relative. We have already seen in the earlier reading of Facundo how the ‘‘confused voice’’ of the other is subordinated to the order of writing. In any case, Sarmiento’s attacks may explain Bello’s oftentimes defensive tone, which occludes the fact that in his insistence on the importance of grammar (and saber decir), Bello appeals to that very same notion of progress that Sarmiento defends. For Bello, the stakes on the question of orality were not only limited to academics. In the Spanishspeaking American world, it would be necessary to control orality in order to stop the tendency toward linguistic dispersion. What Bello feared was the possibility that the Spanish idiom would fragment into multiple American dialects and tongues, as had occurred with Latin following the expansion and dissolution of the Roman Empire: The greatest evil of all, one which, if it is not cut off, will come to deprive us of those unappreciated advantages of a common language, is the flood of neologisms in [linguistic] construction that inundates and obfuscates a great part of what has been written in America; when the structure of the idiom is altered in the process, these neologisms tend to transform [the idiom] into a multitude of irregular, licentious, barbaric dialects; embryos of future idioms, which given a length of time for their elaboration would reproduce in America what had occurred in Europe in the dark age, and the corruption of Latin.28 This Enlightenment intellectual responds with terror to that which lies outside the totalizing structure. Yet Bello’s defense of grammar does not necessarily presuppose a conservative force, as Sarmiento would argue. Bello defends the unity of a language, as it would cultivate the incorporation of the dispersed territories of America into the order of the market and other modern institutions: Our America will reproduce in little time the confusion of languages, dialects, and gibberish, the Babylonian chaos of the Middle Ages; and ten regions will lose one of their most powerful ties to fraternity, one of their most crucial instruments for correspondence and commerce.29 And again, ‘‘one of the most inconvenient obstacles to which commerce among different regions is subjected will be diminished in proportion to the fixity and uniformity that languages [lenguas] acquire.’’ 30 Consequently, the knowledge-(as)-said that grammar explicates and teaches cannot be consid

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ered a traditional discourse proper; its function is organic in accordance with the modern impulse, the will to incorporate the American dispersion into an order or common currency both linguistic and mercantile. Moreover, this modernizing function of grammar is bound to the project of consolidating the public sphere, which as we have already seen, was the primary focus of Sarmiento’s writings as well. According to Bello, if the dispersion of Spanish in America had continued, Chile, Peru, Buenos Aires, Mexico, would each speak its own tongue, or better yet, various tongues, as had happened in Spain, Italy, and France, where certain provincial idioms would dominate, but live side by side with various others, hindrances opposing the diffusion of enlightenment, the execution of laws, the administration of the state, the national unity. A language is a living body: its vitality does not consist of the constant identity of elements, but the regular uniformity of functions employed by these elements, a uniformity from which proceed the form and the character that distinguish the language from all the rest.31 Following the metaphor of a language-body, Bello here suggests something quite significant: language has uniform functions (at least under ideal conditions), just like the state. In fact, for Bello, the unity of language is also the basis for the consolidation of the nation-state. A national language regulated by letters would act as more than a supplementary instrument for the passive transmission of the law’s contents; it would trace the map where the borders and hierarchies of the state territory are written, where the intonation of barbarism would be subordinated to the rigor of the law. In this cleansed language, this purified tongue that has been rationalized and administered by grammar, subjects would move within the space of the law instituted by the order of the letter and the power of the lettered class or letrados.32 Notes  Domingo F. Sarmiento, Civilización y barbarie. Vida de Facundo Quiroga (Madrid: Editora Nacional, ), .  José Antonio Saco, La vagancia en Cuba (; reprint, Havana: Cuadernos de Cultura, ), .  José de la Luz y Caballero, Elencos y discursos académicos, ed. Roberto Agramonte (Havana: Editorial de la Universidad, ), . The text is from the s.  On the process of the relative Chilean pacification, see Tulio Halperín Donghi, Contemporary History of Latin America, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), –; and Marcos Kaplan, Formación del Estado nacional en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores, ).

Language and Politics in Bello

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





    

 



For Weber, the modern state is constituted as the ‘‘monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.’’ This centralization of violence, at the same time, generates the relative autonomy of the state from regional persons or interests within the territory. Weber adds: ‘‘Everywhere the development of the modern state is initiated through the action of the prince. He paves the way for the expropriation of the autonomous and private bearers of executive power. . . . The whole process is a complete parallel to the development of the capitalist enterprise through gradual expropriation of the independent producers. In the end, the modern state controls the total means of political organization’’ (Max Weber, ‘‘Politics as a Vocation,’’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills [New York: Oxford University Press, ], ). Even in Bello, there are fairly clear indications of professionalization, or the representation of knowledge as productive labor, specific to a given economy. Bello was one of the first Latin American intellectuals to seriously reflect on intellectual property rights. He published two texts on the rights of authors in which he defended the legislation—that is, the rationalization—of intellectual property: ‘‘Property of what kind? Of the personal possession kind, probably. That is to say that the punishment of those who contravene the law by violating literary property would be the same as that which the legislation in effect imposes on theft. But this is still too vague. The law, in our judgment, ought to put forth the indemnification of the perjurous person, along with a public vindication’’ (Andrés Bello, ‘‘Derechos de autores,’’ in Antología, ed. Pedro Grases [Barcelona: Seix Barral, ], ). The concept of originality, which for Bello is the determining variable for the economic value of a literary work (in a wide, premodern sense), emerges long before the nineteenth century; however, Bello’s importance lies in his project to legislate and institutionalize this concept. In this sense, Bello anticipates the struggle for the professionalization and rationalization of intellectual property (already specifically literary) that intellectuals like José Martí, Rubén Darío, or Miguel Cané would bring to a head almost half a century later. Andrés Bello, ‘‘Establecimiento de la Universidad de Chile’’ in Obras completas, Opúsculos literarios y críticos, ed. Comisión Editora de las Obras completas de Andrés Bello (Caracas: Ministerio de Educación, ). First published in . Andrés Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado en la instalación de la Universidad de Chile,’’ in Obras completas, p. . Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . Bello, ‘‘Establecimiento de la Universidad de Chile,’’ . Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado en la instalación,’’ . Saco, La vagancia en Cuba, . For Saco, however, the exclusion of manual labor had dangerous effects in Cuba; with the depreciation of manual labor among whites, blacks gained control over the productive base of society. The paradox is significant: even if one might indeed defend the exclusivity of higher activities, one would also have to recognize in the workers the support of production and productivity; hence, blacks, the others for Saco, would have too much power. Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado en la instalación,’’ . In Bello, moral discipline (provided for by the study of letters) is corollary to the concept of the good citizen, subject of the law. As Peter Bürger has shown, the French Enlightenment does not make of literature a reflection of the moral norms of a new bourgeois order; rather, literature produces and formalizes norms of behavior. ‘‘As philosophical critique, literature examines the claim to the validity of norms; as belles lettres it promotes the internalization

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 



 



of norms’’ (Peter Bürger, ‘‘Literary Institution and Modernization,’’ Poetics  []: ). Regarding literature as a ‘‘standard of behavior’’ as it operates in Fernández de Lizardi, see also Jean Franco, ‘‘La heterogeneidad peligrosa,’’ Hispanoamérica – (): –. Bello, ‘‘Discurso en el aniversario de la Universidad de Chile en ,’’ in Obras completas, Opúsculos literarios y críticos, . ‘‘In a new country, where every kind of progress has been brought to fulfillment, instead of scholars and doctors the community needs men prepared for industry’’ (Domingo F. Sarmiento, quoted in The Development of Education in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, by Charles Henry Shutter [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ], ). Saco, in La vagancia en Cuba, declared: ‘‘When I ask for the substitution of useless existing professorships for new ones, it is not with the exclusive objective of forming experts. . . . This would be achieved by establishing a priori professorships in those sciences that would more closely reflect the present condition and future prosperity of the island of Cuba: by teaching them, not abstractly, . . . but with the intention of directing them to certain particular branches [of Cuban society], and stripping them of all useless questions that torment the spirit, all extravagance that only serves to brightly illuminate the classrooms and academic halls’’ (p. ). In Eugenio María de Hostos, after the heyday of Bello and Sarmiento, we see a more advanced degree of rationalization in pedagogical discourse: here, the notion of belles lettres or knowledge-(as)-said as a device that endowed teaching with authority no longer applies. Rationalization, in this later, positivist period, displaced letters from their central role in education. See Hostos’s ‘‘El propósito de la Normal’’ (), in which he insists on scientific education and the preparation of specialized teachers. Even in Hostos the rhetoric of the American world as anarchy and chaos is present. But already in Hostos, in contrast to Bello, pedagogy’s response to barbarism can be distinguished from the cultivation of belles lettres. As Pedro Henríquez Ureña indicates in his prologue to this edition, Hostos ‘‘resolutely exiles the poets from his interior republic, if they will not agree to serve, to construct, to uplift hearts’’ (Eugenio María de Hostos, Antología, ed. Eugenio Carlos de Hostos [Madrid: Imprenta, Litografía, y Encuadernación, ], ). In the prologue to the second edition () of the novel La peregrinación de Bayoán ()—one of Hostos’s few literary works— Hostos speaks of the literato (now negatively specified) as ‘‘a vagabond of fantasy, corruptor of sensibility, corruptor of reason, and dangerous social influence.’’ And he adds that belles lettres are the pastime of the idle. Hence, he demonstrates how literature, already in the s, had begun to differentiate itself from rationality, a fact made definitive in Martí’s aesthetic ideology at the beginning of the s. Bello, ‘‘Discurso en el aniversario,’’ . Even for the Hostos of La peregrinación de Bayoán, to do literature was a way of acquiring public authority. In his prologue of , he excuses himself from his work outside the limits of a rational discourse (see p. ). He also adds that ‘‘For the [composition of the] work I owe the authority of my word in my country’’ (Eugenio María de Hostos, La peregrinación de Bayoán [San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, ],  and , respectively). This search for public authority and power by means of letters also figures into the novel as a significant theme. Foucault has shown the importance of knowledge-(as)-said in the classical episteme: ‘‘Knowledge . . . is like a language whose every word has been examined and every relation verified. To know is to speak correctly, and as the steady progress of the mind dictates. . . . The sciences are well-made languages, just as languages are sciences lying fallow. All languages must therefore be renewed; in other words, explained and judged according to that

Language and Politics in Bello



  

        



analytic order that none of them now follows exactly; and readjusted if necessary so that the chain of knowledge may be visible in all its clarity, without any shadows or lacunae. It is thus part of the very nature of grammar to be prescriptive, not by any means because it is an attempt to impose the norms of a beautiful language obedient to the rules of taste, but because it refers to the radical possibility of speaking the order of representation itself ’’ (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan M. Sheridan [New York: Vintage Books, ], ; translation modified and italics added). Saco, La vagancia en Cuba, –. Andrés Bello, ‘‘Gramática castellana,’’ in Obras completas, Opúsculos literarios y críticos, . For Bello, as for Sarmiento, the lack of writing and literature is a distinctive trait of barbarism. Literature, then, differentiates Latin America from Africa and Asia. In Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada, particularly in the chapter entitled ‘‘La ciudad escrituraria,’’ Rama shows the importance of the opposition to orality as one of the strategies of the lettered class, or letrados, in acquiring their authority. Rama studies the exceptional case of Simón Rodríguez as an intellectual who attacks the exclusivity of a writing culture, a writerly exclusivity. Andrés Bello, prologue to ‘‘Análisis ideológico de los tiempos de la conjugación castellana,’’ in Obras completas, Opúsculos literarios y críticos, –. Andrés Bello, prologue to Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos (Paris: Andres Blot, ), ix. Domingo F. Sarmiento, ‘‘Ejercicios populares de la lengua castellana,’’ in Sarmiento en el destierro, ed. Armando Duroio (Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer, ), . First published in . Domingo F. Sarmiento, ‘‘Raro descubrimiento!’’ in Sarmiento en el destierro, . Bello, prologue to Gramática, vii–viii. Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado en la instalación,’’ . Bello, ‘‘Gramática castellana,’’ . Bello, prologue to Gramática, viii. Nicos Poulantzas shows that the modern state, which has systematized—if not discovered— grammar and orthography, inscribes them within networks of power: ‘‘This discourse [of the state] must always be heard and understood, even if not in a uniform manner: it is not enough that it be uttered as an incantation. This presupposes that, in the various codes of thinking, the state itself is overcoded: that it serves as the frame of reference within which the various segments of reasoning and their supporting apparatuses find homogeneous ground for their differential functioning. Thus, the capitalist state installs a uniform national language and eliminates all other languages’’ (Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, and Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller [London: Verso, ], ). For Poulantzas, the relation between the national language and the consolidation of the state is not merely instrumental: ‘‘The constitution of the modern nation resides, finally, in the relation between the modern state and language. It is sufficient to simply say that the construction of a national language by the modern state cannot be reduced to a problem of the social and political usage of this language, nor can it be reduced to the normalization and standardization of the language by the state, or to the destruction of dominated languages at the heart of the nation-state that it implies. The national language is a language profoundly reorganized by the state in its own image and structure’’ (p. ). See also Michel de Certeau et al., Une politique de la langue: La Révolution française et les patois (Paris: Editions Gallimard, ).

   

 Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters

In the previous chapters, we sketched out the condition of intellectuals prior to José Martí in order to show how the rationalization of labor—including the subdivision of general knowledge into differentiated subjects and modes of representation—remained, at bottom, only a project. Modernization represented a utopia that, hypothetically speaking, would be brought about by the degree of formality conveyed by writing in a world lacking (yet at the same time desiring) scientific knowledge: a utopia where intellectuals increasingly recognized the danger of becoming dependent on countries that monopolized this modern knowledge. In the republic of letters, writing was assigned the authority to extend its domain over the contingency and anarchy of the represented world; it was authorized to create a system in a society where representation meant the ordering of the chaos, orality, nature, and barbarism that was America. From this, we can see that between letters and the modernizing project that found in writing a standard model for rationality and a repository for forms, there existed a relation—not simply of reflections or similitude, but of identity. The city—emblem of this desired modernity—came to exist as the virtual site of the future: ‘‘Futuram civitatem inquirimus’’ [We are on a search for the future city], Cuban educator and philosopher José de la Luz y Caballero had said, and added: ‘‘Yes, gentlemen, the future, since although by my years I am to be considered a man of the past, by my struggles and aspirations I live in the future and for the future.’’ 1 To be of the past, to be inscribed in a tradition that had become objectified; and to propose a change, even radical, with a blind hope in the future: Luz y Caballero’s self-fashioning exemplifies the teleological vision guiding the patricians of the modern impulse in Latin America. In this future and desired modernity, Luz y Caballero claims that the division of labor [would be] the principal motivation behind the march of industry and science in what is essentially a century of progress. Without a doubt the subdivision of labor has achieved prodigious

results, particularly in the British Kingdom; and perhaps amongst the immense advantages that it has carried along in its wake, no achievement has been more beneficial to the cause of the sciences than the great attack on and rectification of encyclopedism, which has invaded modern education.2 For Luz y Caballero, the future had its particular geography. To speak from Cuba was to be situated in a past whose future had already been actualized elsewhere, in England or the United States. From the perspective of the ‘‘future,’’ the intellectual’s gaze guaranteed the rectification of a deficient tradition. In this instance, however, Luz y Caballero did not foresee that with the advent of this division of labor—when encyclopedism had exploded and fragmented into multiple, specialized fields of immanence—his specific mode of intellectual authority would lose its privileged place in the public sphere. This relation with tradition and modernity would change radically with Martí and his fin de siècle, within a cultural system where literature would problematize its relationship with the will to rationalization. In doing so, literature would come to legitimize its sphere along two lines: as a defense of tradition, a tradition that it would at times invent; and as a critique of the modernizing project. At the same time, the literary field would develop its own discursive apparatuses, emancipating itself from the traditional confines of letters and the lettered class or letrados. In this chapter, I want to examine how knowledge-(as)-said (saber decir) came to lose its authority, and how the intellectual field known as the republic of letters was fragmented in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The chapter contains three parts: first, I look at how the place of letters was in a general sense transformed in the sphere of education, precisely as literature became autonomous from the external, overdetermining authority of rhetoric. Next, I examine the change in the relationships between politics, literary discourse, and the modern writer or literato. These changes would affect even (and most of all) Martí, who along with Manuel González Prada would seem to be among the last public writers, closer to the hybridity of Sarmiento than the literary purity of Darío. Finally, I try to highlight some points that will help us chart the gradual disengagement of letters from the institutions that had until then ensured their social authority; a crisis evidenced by the emergence of literature as a modern discourse. Literature and Education The change suffered by letters in education throughout the last decades of the past century is revealing. Let us recall that for Bello letters, more than an 

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autonomous discourse acted as a vehicle for the formalization and distribution of heterogeneous objects of general knowledge (conocimientos): The propagation of knowledge [saber] is one of the most important conditions [of progress], because without it letters would offer no more than a few luminous points amidst the deepest shadows.3 Letters would thenceforth act as a paradigmatic element of education. In accordance with Bello’s project, the College of Humanities at the University of Chile was charged with the task of training teachers.4 Interestingly enough, although the study of letters had already become autonomous from the College of Law in Chile by , it had set out toward the propagation of knowledge, under the banner of knowledge-(as)-said, without any precise pedagogical methodology. In response to this paradigmatic role of letters in education, intellectuals such as Juan Bautista Alberdi, Sarmiento, and Luz y Caballero launched their critique against encyclopedism, proposing instead a program for rigorous and practical specialization, well before the turn of the century. But even these critiques, inspired by a marked pragmatism, were not articulated from a pedagogical discourse proper. Toward the s, significant changes in the place of letters in education began to take effect. The situation of Puerto Rican pedagogue Eugenio María de Hostos, founder of the Normal School of the Dominican Republic (Escuela Normal de la Republica Dominicana) in , is exemplary: in accordance with the period in which positivism came to be the corrective ideology of education in many areas of the continent, Hostos insisted on the rationalization of pedagogy, attacking the vestiges of religious education along with encyclopedistic ‘‘eloquence.’’ Before focusing on some of the more important features of pedagogical discourse in Hostos, it might be appropriate to briefly trace the trajectory of his intellectual development, for in many ways, Hostos would serve as a counterpoint to the emergence of the fin de siècle writer or literato. Like Martí, González Prada, Gutiérrez Nájera, and Eugenio Cambeceres, Hostos began his intellectual profession as a man of letters; yet in contrast to them, Hostos determinedly sought to evade literature. In the very act of articulation, his writing will rigorously attempt to obliterate any mark or trace of literariness whatsoever, any kind of evidence of style as the measure of value among fin de siècle writers beginning with Martí. Hostos’s first work, however, was a novel—La peregrinación de Bayoán (). It was written in the form of an intimate diary, a mode of writing that Hostos never entirely abandoned, even throughout the period of his positivist fervor.5 Behind a superficial nativism, the novel in sum follows a young Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

colonial Caribbean writer’s itinerary of desire—a desire to inscribe himself, by means of writing, into the ‘‘public space’’ [publicidad ] of the polis in Spain. The writer’s ultimate aim (which the character Bayoán often emphasizes) is to contribute to the independence of his native island, Puerto Rico. From this brief summary, one can already gauge the investment of Hostos’s novel in the figure of the writer. To write, in La peregrinación, is a way of assuming authority, a way of reaching the power entrusted to the word in the republic of letters: I saw that the conquest of a literary name is the conquest of power. Power that I lacked that would unhesitatingly serve my forgotten, harassed, enraged country. . . . The public judgment . . . was what I needed . . . to authorize my entrance into active life, an arduous thrust into a difficult battle in which I longed to become engaged.6 These words, from the prologue to the second edition of Hostos’s novel (released in Chile in ), indicate the close relationship between letters and politics that remained dominant until the s. Nevertheless, the prologue as a whole represents such a concept of literature as a thing of the past. In this same prologue, Hostos shows that La peregrinación ‘‘is the only one of my literary works that I regard with pride and [that] I can read without the pious sadness that I have for works of the imagination’’ (p. ). In other words, the prologue is a kind of manifesto in which Hostos decidedly turns against his own intellectual formation in favor of ‘‘logical men’’: There are too many artists of the word in the world, too many adulators of form, too many empty spirits that know only to obey the law of proportions, and I did not wish to be one of so many talkers who, even as they fill their surroundings with sonorous words, are radically incapable of achieving what is most lacking in the world: logical men. (p. ) ‘‘Artists of the word,’’ ‘‘adulators of form’’ and ‘‘proportions’’: are these not some of the characteristics that the fin de siècle literatos, particularly the modernists, claim as their own, in their emphasis on form and their selfreflections? Paradoxically, Hostos’s diatribe against those involved in the literary profession only serves to foreshadow the future authenticity of a literary subject, albeit in a negative sense. Opposite this subject a ‘‘logical man’’ is conceived as an agent of new, properly modern, discourses of rationality. The ‘‘logical man’’ is thus a contemporary of the other, as it is the other who makes possible the logical man’s existence; an other that the ‘‘logical man’’ will, in 

   

turn, reify and delimit in the realm of ‘‘the traditional’’ and ‘‘useless’’—of that which remains external to discipline and, hence, rationalization. Let us examine the inscription of the subject in the above quotation— ‘‘and I did not wish to be one of so many talkers.’’ The conjunction (‘‘and’’) syntactically joins what it semantically disjoins or distinguishes from the subject-position—namely, ‘‘artists of the word.’’ The subject unifies and reaffirms his identity as a separate entity by means of his emphatic disavowal of ‘‘them,’’ the ‘‘artists of the word.’’ This proceeding is brought to its conclusion in the following quotation: ‘‘Letters are the business of the idle or of those who have already finished their lives’ labor, and I had much to do (trabajar)’’ (p. ). The subject-position is a product of an incision that places the activities of letters and rationality in radical opposition. ‘‘They’’ are the ‘‘vagabonds of fantasy’’ (p. ), ‘‘corruptors of sensibility’’ (p. ), ‘‘dangerous social influences’’ (p. ), and ‘‘corruptors of reason’’ (p. ). It was certainly not the first time that the writer (above all, the poet) was figured as a ‘‘vagabond of fantasy.’’ Bello had long before suspected that certain modes of writing—poetry in particular, which he identified with eroticism—ran the risk of crossing the boundaries of rationality and sociability.7 But if one were to examine Bello’s corrective reading of Cuban José María de Heredia’s poetry, it can be shown that Bello still conceived of eloquence, ‘‘the laws of a severe taste,’’ as a way of controlling and disciplining the dangers of imaginative ‘‘spontaneity.’’ 8 For Hostos, however, the rationality of the ‘‘logical man’’ does not depend on a knowledge-(as)-said, saber decir; instead, Hostos is led to emulate science as a paradigm, as much for its methodological rigor as for its applicability. And through a reversal or negative of the ‘‘logical man,’’ the emergence of a literary space is brought into being, in a dialectic that distances literature from an earlier system of letters, now dominated by the will to rationalize. It is thus possible to think of Martí’s first book of poetry, Ismaelillo (), as a foundational text for literary modernization—not only for its attention to language, which entails the rewriting of notably traditional forms, but also because Ismaelillo’s poetic practice is produced from a discursive field that has been rendered discrete from the disciplinary discourses of rationalization. Ismaelillo presupposes an other knowledge—that of the ‘‘child,’’ that of the oneiric vision—as the locus of the specifically imaginary, tied to leisure, which in this instance serves as a ‘‘refuge’’ from a ‘‘punishing’’ rationalization. From this place, at once created and excluded by rationalization, the new literary subject speaks; s/he upholds informality, indiscipline, and at times, even transgression and madness as ideals. Although it would be rash to accept, even in an abstract sense, the radicality of this other knowledge, Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

for now let us merely point out its distinctive opposition to a rationalization that paradoxically produced it. When Martí says, ‘‘A tempest is more beautiful than a locomotive,’’ 9 his statement foreshadows the catastrophe of rationality, even as it belies the exclusive apparatus, set in motion by rationalization, that had produced these new marginal zones in the first place. Historically, then, the alternative domain of modern literature (not coincidentally identified with poetry since Bello, as poetry was the first literary mode that had separated itself from ‘‘practical’’ life) 10 was not invented by the new specialized writers or literatos. The same impetus behind rationalization, the one that had negated the authority of letters, generated by means of exclusion the very space devalued by Hostos: the space out of which the literary subject would emerge. This subject would find a voice through the contradiction and critique of rationalization; this voice would be charged with a ‘‘spiritual’’ value precisely in a disenchanted and mercantilized world. Hence, the ‘‘crisis’’ of literature that Martí and his contemporaries voiced is entirely relative: one might even argue that their exhortations on behalf of the literary domain acted as a vehicle for the legitimation and proliferation of their own project. More than a crisis of literature, the negation of a knowledge-(as)said and the authority of an earlier system of letters represented the condition of possibility for the emergence and autonomization of the modern writer. Their paradoxically modern discourse was generated by rationalization, and yet, authorized to be its critique. We will later see how the ‘‘margin’’ that was literature, at least in Latin America, was not always limited in practice. The literary critique of modernization would allow literature to widen its influence over public life, particularly after  and the emergence of Latin Americanism. Precisely by means of its claim of autonomy from economic power, literature would become the fundamental vehicle for an anti-imperialist ideology, defining the Latin American ‘‘being/identity’’ through its opposition to the modernity of ‘‘them’’: the United States or England. In the s, however, this power of marginality had no solid institutional basis. Although the fields of rationality and literature emerge together in the play of definitions and exclusions imposed by rationalization, institutionally speaking, they are clearly hierarchized. The ‘‘logical man’’ would prevail in education, which would in turn continue to modernize—thus relieving the family of its public duties, and opposing both the church (which still claimed its ancient dominion over ‘‘knowledge’’) and the encyclopedism of the enlightened letrados. This is the dual front faced by Hostos in ‘‘Proposal for a Normal School’’ (), a speech that he delivered in the pedagogical institute (Santo Domingo) that he had himself founded: 

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Must we reestablish an artificial culture that scholasticism is still attempting to resusticate? Must we continue to suffer owing to this monstrous education of human reason . . . ? Must we seek the standard that ought to be followed in the direction that the Renaissance gave to a moral and intellectual culture? That is none of our concern. We are to be our own men . . . , useful men in all activities of our being, and not men forever leaning on the form from which the Greeks and Romans derived their necessities in their literature and science. . . . We are for thinking, not expressing.11 The critique of the concept of letters and education inherited from Bello (with whom Hostos, from the beginning of his residency in Chile, was no doubt familiar) is evident here. In Bello, there is no disjunction between thinking and expressing: saber decir, the mastery of expression, is the condition of rational activity, a condition that overdetermines even the distinction between a ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’ idea, between a ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’ citizen. In contrast, Hostos proposes ‘‘a true teaching: that which does away with historical theses, partial methods, artificial proceedings. This teaching would exclusively address the subject of learning, which is human reason, and the object of learning, which is nature, [this teaching] favors their interlinked articulation’’ (pp. –). Hostos suggests a scientific education, similar to what we see in ‘‘The Scientific Education of Women,’’ where he insists on the necessity of controlling and reifying the discourse of women—or for that matter, poets—whose marginality with respect to ‘‘logical man’’ was often feminized.12 The imagination—a feminine attribute—is for Hostos dangerous, prone to barbarism. It is important to show that Hostos continues to work from within an Enlightenment and modernizing rhetoric whose key figure is the antithesis civilization/barbarism. He continues to operate from within a discourse about Latin America as the site of chaos; a representation, in the final instance, based on the idea of an order that is assumed to have been achieved outside or elsewhere. Latin America is portrayed as lacking that modernity that positively defines Europe or the United States. And education, as was the case for the Enlightenment patricians, would need to extend the domain of ‘‘civilization’’ and incorporate ‘‘barbarism’’: Anarchy, which is not a political fact, but a social state, was in all things, as it was in the juridical relations of the nation; and it was in teaching and in the personal and impersonal instruments of teaching. . . . It was an indispensable task to form an army of teachers who, in all the reFragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

public, would militate against ignorance, against superstition, against cretinism, against barbarism.13 Like Sarmiento and Bello, Hostos postulates the submission of the barbarous ‘‘exterior’’ to the ‘‘order’’ of discourse. Yet the very ‘‘interior,’’ the structured space of discourse, has been transformed, exploding both the will to rationalize and the formerly state-invested task of writing into different territories, often formed by conflicting authorities. Above all, Hostos did not accept the undifferentiated and multiple character of the traditional letrado: The exemplary patriots who had desired to complete the restoration of rights of the native land . . . : or their well-merited efforts are negated in the confusion of anarchic passions that, in the lack of an order and system, are prevented from completely reaping the fruits of their venerated labor. (p. ) Instead, Hostos advocates an education with ‘‘rational order in the curriculum, [and] a reasoned method in teaching’’ (p. ). Distinct from the earlier intellectual field, for Hostos, access to the order of writing does not guarantee the authority of the didactic statement. Education was modernized even as it expanded its domain in the new nations, to the point of becoming an ideological apparatus of already consolidated states. And with this movement, education also becomes unhinged from the exterior authority of rhetoric or knowledge-(as)-said, autonomizing its field and generating a specifically pedagogical method, with immanent norms of validation. In Hostos, the figures of modernizing rhetoric continue to operate, although they are not articulated from within the same institutional fields that constituted the relative indifferentiation of the republic of letters. The modernizing project would entail, in part, the professionalization of teachers, which for many modernists would be another limit-figure of the literary subject. But of even greater significance than this professionalization (proposed by Luz y Caballero twenty years earlier) would be the constitution of a specifically pedagogical discursive field that would enable the voice of new ‘‘professionals’’ to be articulated and heard. This pedagogical discourse, dominated by a positivist ideology (almost always more pragmatic than its appeal in Hostos), would deny the emergent literary subject any entrance or position into the scholarly apparatus, eclipsing the development of literature as an academic discipline until the first decade of the twentieth century. Doubtless this was due to the still-pervasive identification of literature (outside the literary field) with the traditional system of belles lettres and rheto

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ric, both of which had become radically discredited for their questionable authority and imprecise applicability. Regarding the literary subject’s lack of authority in education at the turn of the century, it would be helpful to recall the entirely belated establishment of literary departments in Latin America. In Mexico, for example, the first course that can be properly called literary was not instituted until , under the Facultad de Humanidades de la Escuela de Altos Estudios (College of Humanities of the School of Higher Studies),14 following the demotion of positivism (the ideology of Porfirio Diaz’s administration) in the first years of the revolution. After various frustrated attempts in Argentina, the first courses of literature to be separated from the curriculum of law did not achieve any continuity from term to term until after . Let us briefly examine the history of the Facultad de Filosofa y Letras de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (College of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires).15 After the Rosas period, the university was reconstructed in the s under the administration of Juan María Gutiérrez (–). The study of letters became important within the Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Sociales (College of Law and Social Sciences), although it was not until  (under the directorship of Vicente Fidel López) that an attempt to create a ‘‘College of Humanities and Philosophy’’ was undertaken. The school would offer higher degrees in letters, a category that even at that time was still dominated by classical studies and had very little to do with the concept of the literature-aesthetics that would begin to take shape in that decade, outside the university.16 Rooted in the already discredited concept of belles lettres (which López himself epitomized), the project for the department failed that same year. In , there was another attempt to create and organize the college, this time including a number of specialized philologists. The initial effort, frustrated in , proposed to institute courses in Latin American history and literature, including sources for a national culture, which would thence come to be reified into a professional object of reflection and study. In , Norberto Piñero and Eduardo L. Bidau, secretaries of the university, once again took up the project of reorganization. They wrote: It is often repeated that the College of Philosophy and Letters is a superfluity, (that) it does not respond to any practical end and is opposed to the tendencies of the country—because it would distance itself from the forces of industry and would demand increased expenses only to render useless a number of men, who would be found to be disoriented, outside the general movement of society: because the future and the greatness Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

of the nation is in the railroads, in the colonization of lands, in cultivation on a grand scale. . . . These are, in synthesis, the arguments brought forth in different ways against the study of philosophy and of letters in a special department. Precisely because wealth, the benefits of fortune, industries, the longing for opulence and business transactions must all be developed . . . it is necessary to spread the high philosophical truths [conocimientos], the arts and letters, lest the people’s character diminish and they see the accumulation of material interests as the final good.17 We can read Piñero and Bidau’s history not only as a transparent document, referring strictly to the situation of literature in the university, but also as a text that in its very documentary or descriptive format presupposes the distinct authority of literature and its emergence in education. Once again, we find here the opposition between literature and modernization, although the significance it once carried in Hostos has been inverted: the division now indicates, in , a separate place for literature within the scholarly apparatus. The distance between the subject and the emblems of modernization (‘‘industry,’’ ‘‘utility,’’ ‘‘railroads,’’ ‘‘colonization of lands’’) is marked—a revealing distance, as it has everything to do with a history produced by the university administration itself. In opposition to ‘‘material interests,’’ the text proposes the study of literature as a compensatory function in its ability to moralize. Hence, by means of a newly crystallized rhetoric, the defense of the aesthetic in education— which will later be one of the basic tenets of Arielism—is announced: With perfect reason one no longer believes (or believes very little) in the moralizing effects of common education, of middle instruction, and of professional instruction, because in this sense instruction is an instrument that can be employed now for the good, now for the bad; but higher instruction certainly moralizes, when it has no objective other than itself, when it signifies science for the sake of science and art for the sake of art, when it is sought out of love for the truth and beauty. Indeed, in such a case, a feeling as form has stopped being a utensil for it to become an object of art. They are very rare, those disinterested lovers of the beautiful and the true, so as to hardly constitute an infinitely reduced chosen class. . . . Nevertheless, how important it is! The advantage of increasing or forming them amongst ourselves is no less real. (p. ; italics added)     

The ‘‘disinterest’’ of ‘‘art for the sake of art’’ cannot be confused with an asocial posture. ‘‘Disinterest,’’ art’s autonomy from ‘‘practical reason,’’ is what guarantees literature’s authority as a new place for a moral judgment, which has been displaced from education, now oriented toward the realization of ‘‘practical ends.’’ Hence beauty, precisely because it is not ‘‘useful’’ (a utensil), compensates for the destabilizing (amoral) flux of money and an ‘‘empty’’ life of reigning ‘‘materialism.’’ Beauty, experienced by a select ‘‘minority,’’ redeems capitalist ‘‘massification.’’ This rhetoric anticipates the emergence of Arielismo, in which the literary subject tied to the defense of the Latin American ‘‘spirit’’ against the ‘‘material’’ power of ‘‘them’’ would succeed in displacing positivism from its governing role in education, thereby effectively institutionalizing literature as the ‘‘margin,’’ as a critique of modernization, particularly after the publication of José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel in . In , however, this literary discourse, which to some degree had already been crystallized through its rhetoric, was still subordinate to the realm of positivist pragmatism in the university and state apparatuses. Thus, we find one of the distinctive features of the development of Latin American literature at the turn of the century: although the concept of autonomy in literature—which has specified its language (‘‘style’’) and outlined its narratives of legitimation (the critique of modernity)—is already in operation, its discourse still lacks the institutional basis that would enable the social unification of its territory. Hence, the radical dependence of literature on the press (as we will later see) at the turn of the century. Even so, the assertions by enlightened administrators from the University of Buenos Aires demonstrate that the tendency toward autonomization superseded the limited field of modernist poetics. The impulse of literature toward autonomization was not the exclusive patrimony of a literary vanguard; a vanguard initially distinct and radically opposed (as Noé Jitrik believed) to the most central and centralizing zones of official culture).18 One need only mention in passing that Piñero and Bidau’s text was published in , the same year that Darío’s Azul was published in Chile. Such a coincidence shows that official culture was not, after all, a homogeneous block. If Piñero and Bidau’s text is any indication, one would be led to wonder whether Darío’s inscription in the Argentine scene of writing did, in fact, mark a radical rupture; that is, to what degree did it actually represent a threat to the dominant values? 19 There were indeed debates on Darío’s ‘‘decadentism,’’ as Groussac and Rodó’s criticisms demonstrated. These were criticisms that Darío knew well how to incorporate, beginning with Cantos de vida y esperanza (). But one would be assuming too much to say that in the Buenos Aires Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters

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of the s, the diatribes of the most conservative critics (like Calixto Oyuela or Rafael Obligado) against the new poets could be considered representative of the general taste of the emergent middle class. In any case, the project of founding the school in  also failed; in fact, it was not until  that it was finally consolidated. Doubtless we owe its foundation to the effort of intellectuals who defended the specificity of literature within the field that Ricardo Rojas would call the ‘‘new humanities.’’ 20 Beyond its prior devotion to the study of rhetoric and ancient culture, the ‘‘new humanities’’ was projected to be the axis of a ‘‘national reconstruction,’’ contributing to the ‘‘purification’’ of the national language and ‘‘spirit’’ in that period of intense immigratory flux. On the other hand, the specialization of the study of law—from which ‘‘letters,’’ still burdened with the weight of oratory, had not succeeded in emancipating itself—was a priority of the greatest importance. Hence, in , the College of Law and Social Sciences was organized, excluding ‘‘letters’’ from its field of authority. With the execution of this plan, the study of law became autonomous from the paradigm of eloquence and knowledge(as)-said, stripping the traditional instruments of the letrado from authority over legal discourse. In this respect, the disengagement of legal studies from letters paradoxically stimulated the institutionalization of modern literary studies as a separate domain.21 In his memorandum of , the director of the new law school stated: The College of Law and Social Sciences has reformed its plan of studies, dividing into two years the teaching of the philosophy of law, which until now had been achieved in one; this reform can only be considered transitory, while it attains a more fundamental [one] . . . The preparatory course of this faculty has not been able to be completed in this year because Congress has suppressed the literature program . . . Our greatest desire is that the creation of the College of Philosophy and Letters be completed so that the curriculum of law may limit its teaching to those topics of its derivation.22 (Italics added) The discourse of law was thus rationalized, even as the state was in the process of consolidating itself. The education of the letrados was also disciplined, reducing its sphere to what was specifically legal. Thus, the paradigmatic role of eloquence as a means of formalization and a standard for measuring the value of lettered discourse collapsed: ‘‘truth,’’ at least in principle, had become independent of the mode of expression. Paradoxically, this break between letters and the law made possible the emergence of the Fa

   

cultad de Letras (College of Letters) in  within a reconfiguration of the public sphere and the political as apart from literature.23 Beginning with this split, literature emerges as an academic discipline.24 Literature and the Public Sphere Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the relation between literature—or letters, more specifically—and the public sphere in Latin America had, in general, never been considered problematic. In these recently emancipated societies, writing was a rationalizing practice, authorized by the project of state consolidation. As an example of literature’s belated autonomization from legal discourse, it would suffice to recall that it was still possible for Martí, writing in Guatemala in , to read a legal, ‘‘civilizing’’ document as an instance of literary discourse: In spirit, the legal code is modern; in definition, clear; in reforms, sober; in style, energetic and limpid. The erudite, enthusiastic, and literary statement will always be the example of legislative thinkers, and the pleasure of men of letters.25 This quote indicates the validity of a concept of literature that was beginning to lose its authority, even in Martí’s work. In a number of ways, this text is a singular one, since by the end of the s, Martí had already distanced himself from the constrained quality of his first writings, profoundly marked by a legalistic rhetoric of allegation.26 It is not by pure coincidence that the earlier texts were written when Martí was a law student; a profession that he practically never had the opportunity to practice. Instead, Martí almost always preferred the vicissitudes of the publishing market—particularly in newspapers—over work for the state bureaucracy. To return to the above quote, Martí’s reading of the Guatemalan ‘‘new codes’’ allows us to recall the close relation that once existed between the law, the administration of power, and the authority of letters. In the period prior to the unification and autonomization of the nation-states, letters were politics. Letters foresaw the ‘‘code’’ that made it possible to distinguish ‘‘civilization’’ from ‘‘barbarism,’’ ‘‘modernity’’ from ‘‘tradition,’’ hence marking the boundaries of the desired res publica in opposition to American ‘‘anarchy’’ and ‘‘chaos.’’ It cannot, therefore, be considered circumstantial that in this earlier period, the letrados were called on to write the legal codes. Letters were not simply the vehicle for the construction of a legal, external, and representable ‘‘object’’ (like right, justice, and so forth); by means of their codiFragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

fied character, they were precisely the model for that object’s formalization and constitution. In their very labor on language, and their ideal of a rationally administered language, letters were a disciplinary device. As we have seen with Bello, they were necessary for the constitution of subjects under the law. The relation between the public sphere and literature became problematized in the last two decades of the century. As nation-states were unified, a specifically political discursive sphere emerged, tied to government administration and legitimation, and autonomous from the relatively undifferentiated ‘‘knowledge’’ (saber) of the republic of letters. P. Henríquez Ureña lucidly remarked on this process when he referred to the importance of the division of labor that reorganized the intellectual field at the turn of the century: Born from peace and the application of the precepts of economic liberalism, prosperity has had an easily perceptible effect on intellectual life. A division of labor has begun. Men of intellectual professions have taken on themselves the task that they have chosen, and have abandoned politics; lawyers less so by custom, and after the rest. The helm of the state has passed into the hands of those who practice nothing but politics.27 In line with the concept of a new division of labor, Henríquez Ureña explains the emergence of a ‘‘pure literature’’ in Latin America as an effect of the rise of ‘‘intellectual professions’’ that were to be separated from state administration. Henríquez Ureña’s thesis has come to be foundational with respect to the literary history of modernism, insofar as the importance of this concept of professionalization has been borne out in more recent studies by Jean Franco, Noé Jitrik, Angel Rama, Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, and José Emilio Pacheco.28 Nevertheless, although the concept of the division of labor is fundamental to our understanding of the emergence of the literary field, we already find in Henríquez Ureña the risk (still present today) of reducing the change in the relationship between literature and society (and the state) to a simple question of employment. Which is to say, it is often thought that in contrast to the ‘‘civil’’ writer or letrado, the ‘‘modern’’ writer or literato does not work for the state, or comes to occupy a subaltern place in state administration (as David Viñas argued).29 And that, given this displacement, the writer is incorporated into the market and becomes professionalized. The analysis of what Rama called the ‘‘socioeconomic circumstance’’ of modernism 30 is a necessary one, yet it does not entirely explain the process through which an authority and a literary locus of speech emerged in the societies of the period. It is essential to recall that the incorporation of writers into the market—initially by means of freelance journalism—was not an exclusive feature of the modernists. For example, Fernández de Lizardi, in the 

   

first decades of the century, had made a living by writing.31 This was also the case for many gauchesca poets, like Hilario Ascasubi, who (while being a political cadre) specialized in writing poetry commissioned by the political parties.32 Sarmiento, during his years of exile and after his presidency in Argentina, earned his keep by writing. In , Bartolomé Mitre (not long after his presidency) wrote the following to a friend: I’m going to become a printer to resolve the difficult problem of living. . . . For five months out of the year I make money as a senator, and for the rest of the year [I earn] a salary of  pesos. . . . I appeal to the labor of the pen and of letters. . . . In any case, I have the energy to work, I don’t feel any bitterness for beginning once again my [old] career, becoming in my country what I once was before exile.33 Although it is certain that incorporation of cultural goods into the market had been systematized by the turn of the century, it is without a doubt that from the start of the nineteenth century, with the development of journalism, there already existed areas of intellectual labor structured by the networks of economic exchange. Latin American capitalism was not born at the turn of the century, and the world of ‘‘letters’’ cannot be represented by means of a metaphor of courtly patronage, or an analogy between the nineteenth century and European feudalism.34 More than a question of employment or professionalization and the commercialization of writing, the emergence of a negatively derived notion of ‘‘pure’’ literature (a notion that we will scrutinize shortly) that contrasted with the state function of letters was the result of a restructuring in the fabric of social communication. This event shook the systems of authorization on which all literary production depended before the turn of the century. Not only did the place of writers with regard to the state (which had begun to develop its own ‘‘organic’’ administrators) fundamentally change;35 the relation between statements, literary forms, and semiotic fields (presupposed by a literary authority and differentiated from political authority) had also undergone a transformation. Unlike the law of the letter that held sway throughout the republic of letters, the meaning and social function of the literary statement was no longer guaranteed by political institutions and the political; instead, these statements began to be produced from a site of articulation that now possessed its own norms and authority. They were produced from the place of literature as a social institution, which had not yet, however, consolidated its material conditions of existence (as we saw with respect to education). Hence, the impurity of Latin American literature in this period, given its uneven modernization. In fact, if Henríquez Ureña did well to touch on the Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

crucial task of explaining modernism as connected to the problematic relation between literature and politics, his notion of ‘‘purity’’ nevertheless lends itself to misunderstandings, in part because of a generalized tendency that associates it with the ideology of art for art’s sake. Let us examine this contrast briefly. The concept of literary ‘‘purity,’’ signifying the strict separation of literature from other discourses and social practices, may have had some validity in Europe. As Peter Bürger has shown, art (literature included) reached its greatest autonomy beginning with the aestheticism of mid-nineteenth-century France.36 Bürger reads the history of the aesthetic sphere in relation to its struggle to consolidate and purify a territory, eliminating from its interior any mark of external interpellation. Although, for Bürger, the autonomy of the aesthetic had already been conceptualized by the end of the eighteenth century—in Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schiller, for example—the political still guaranteed the aesthetic sphere’s social legitimacy. But in the French art for art’s sake (which following Gustave Flaubert’s formula, entailed the creation of a content out of form—a style, in the modern sense), the separation of the aesthetic from political ‘‘contents’’ designated the moment of greatest institutional autonomy for the aesthetic. The aesthetic was then able to achieve the complete elision of any vestige of heteronomy, thus purifying its immanent field or territory.37 According to Bürger, the moment of ‘‘purity’’ for the aesthetic subject later became the object of a critique against the institution of art that constituted the avant-garde movements: through the introduction of desublimated materials into the ‘‘interior’’ space, the avantgardists believed they were dissolving the opposition of art to ‘‘life’’—an opposition on which their autonomy was nonetheless founded. For Bürger, therefore, the avant-garde’s attack on art as an institution was itself an institutionalized impulse. Was there some degree of ‘‘purity,’’ in Bürger’s sense, that can be attributed to the rise of modern Latin American literature? To begin with, one must admit that the will to autonomy was inescapable. More than a literary ideology, this will was tied to the tendency toward the specification of the literary field in general. Under this will to autonomy, we will see figures as diverse as Julián del Casal (and later Darío) and Martí: all of whom, at first sight, would seem to occupy irreconcilable positions. For example, in his reading of Cuban José Fornaris’s poetry, Casal questions the possibility of writing patriotic texts in the style of a civil poet, even in a Spanish colony. ‘‘The modern poet,’’ Casal writes, ‘‘is not a patriot, like Quintana or Mickievicz, who only laments the misfortunes of the native land.’’ 38 And he adds: 

   

I believe that it is still possible to be what these writers, whom I have just mentioned, were, as the most popular of our poets has been; but in order for the accoutrement of ideas to have some artistic value, the form is in every case the only thing that redeems certain extravagances, and that which has come to its maximum degree of perfection in our day. (p. ; italics added) It may be thought that this passage bespeaks nothing more than Casal’s limited ideological position. Yet if that were the case, the reading that Martí makes of José M. Heredia would remain inexplicable; here, Martí points out that ‘‘for poetry, which is an art, one cannot be apologetic for that which is patriotic or philosophical; [poetry] must be as resistant as bronze and must vibrate like porcelain.’’ 39 And again, in a text by Martí about Francisco Sellén, we are confronted with the same idea: ‘‘It is not the poet who starts the tortoise walking . . . nor he who puts politics and sociology into verse. . . . Poetry is poetry, and not a putrid stew, nor is it a rehearsal of flutes, nor is it a rosary of blue beads.’’ 40 In fact, the tendency toward autonomy is one of the impulses that organizes the field at the turn of the century—even in the case of Martí, the most ‘‘public’’ writer among them. Yet, while the notion of ‘‘purity’’ did indeed emerge, concomitant with a generalized will to autonomy in the nineteenth century, it nevertheless remains inoperative as an overarching explanation of Latin America’s fin de siècle, particularly with regard to the emerging yet somewhat ambiguous distinction between literature and politics. For example, Darío himself seems to emblematize a literary ‘‘purity’’ (in opposition to the ‘‘political’’ function of literature) in works such as Azul () and Prosas profanas (); yet he significantly changes his concept of poetry in Cantos de vida y esperanza (). Doubtless, he did this in response to Rodó’s criticism regarding the ‘‘artificiality’’ of his first books:41 todo ansia, todo ardor, sensación pura y vigor natural; y sin falsía, y sin comedia y sin literatura. . . : si hay un alma sincera, esa es la mía. La torre del marfil tentó mi anhelo; quise encerrarme dentro de mí mismo, desde las sombras de mi propio abismo. all anxiety, all ardor, sensation pure and natural vigor; and without falsity, Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

and without comedy and without literature . . . : if there were a sincere soul, it would be mine. The ivory tower tempted my longing; I wanted to be enclosed within my very self, among the shadows of my own abyss.42 At this stage of his poetic trajectory, Darío criticizes the ‘‘abyss’’ of the interior. As Theodor Adorno notes, this kind of autonomy—autonomy in its most radical form—is separated from the ‘‘human,’’ since it tends to make of art an ethically empty object and distances the object from even the communicative function of language.43 Rodó himself suggested as much in his critique of Darío. Hence, in Rodó’s opinion, the Darío of Azul or Prosas profanas would never come to be a great representative poet. In contrast to Darío’s aestheticism, an exemplary poet ought to give voice to the Latin American subject, a subject for which there is no place in Darío’s early poetics. In the cited poem (significantly dedicated to Rodó), Darío assumes Rodó’s position by criticizing ‘‘literature,’’ now opposed to ‘‘sincerity’’—the subjective attribute par excellence.44 Even in Darío, then, the ‘‘purist’’ aestheticism was never dominant. For this reason, Rama in La ciudad letrada points out that it would be fitting to revise this common place, with particular reference to the modern writers [literatos], since it is they who have been often imagined as withdrawing from all political activity, enclosing themselves in ivory towers, and devoting themselves to their artistic vocation. They did indeed accompany the division of labor as a matter of course; and they made of their artistic production a profession that demanded fundamental skills and even strange technical idiosyncracies. . . . But this concentration in the reduced sphere of their labor—language and literature— . . . did not remove them from political life.45 This quote condenses one of the key arguments of Rama’s invaluable work. In matters that concern the turn of the century, for Rama, the distinctive aspect of the Latin American literary field (in contrast to Europe) is its close relationship with politics, even after the relative specialization of the modern literary writers or literatos. Although Rama maintains (from his first readings on Darío) the concept of the division of labor, he at the same time rejects the notion of ‘‘purity’’ in Latin American literature: This double perspective, in which there was specialization, at times to the point of reaching the absorbed passion of Darío, and simultaneously 

   

the generalized participation in the public forum, where personal destiny was otherwise frequently played out, has not been sufficiently evaluated. (p. ) The political, public participation of writers (escritores), and the ‘‘ideologizing function’’ of literature, which continued to claim authority as a prescriptive discourse for society, led Rama to conclude the following: [In] the s the political vocation of writers was alive, and in fact boundless, through a model of literature (at first sight French) that empowered the long ‘‘redemptivist’’ [redentorista] tradition of the American man of letters. (p. ) Rama’s reading takes up and eventually takes apart the false debate on the (in)significance of modernism in Latin America: on the one hand, he denies the notion of ‘‘purity’’ postulated by the heirs of modernism (beginning with Henríquez Ureña); and on the other hand, he criticizes the diatribes of a certain type of sociology that has tended to read modernism (in Darío, above all) as an instance of aestheticism and purity, and that refuses to grant any importance to modernism due to its lack of political engagement. Rama modifies the core of both readings, which are only apparently antagonistic, rejecting the valorizations and the very efficacy of the concept of ‘‘purity’’ or aestheticism in Latin America. Still, although Rama at times insists on the dialectic between the tendency toward autonomization and the ethicopolitical imperatives that continued to work on literature, he also tends to reduce the discursive heterogeneity unleashed by this double impulse to an insistence on the prevalence of the second term—politics—over the first—autonomization. In the historiographical ‘‘narrative’’ of La ciudad letrada, the reign of politics, even at the turn of the century, represents the viability of the ‘‘long redemptivist tradition of the American man of letters’’; a category—that of the letrado—that forms the conceptual base of the book. In other words, for Rama, even the fin de siècle writer continued to be a letrado, and in this (Gramscian) sense, an organic intellectual of power.46 The problem with successfully evaluating the impact and implications of literary autonomization, with distinguishing between the civil writer (letrado) and the modern literary writer or literato, is partly rooted in the imprecision in conceptualizing ‘‘politics,’’ which is at times as much an ‘‘ideologizing’’ will on the part of writers as it is an activity tied to the ‘‘public forum’’ or state administration. The concept of the letrado historically does not reduce its semantic field to the specific activity of a lawyer or agent (writer) of the Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

law. But in La ciudad letrada, it would seem that this is the dominant meaning of the concept, which thereby comes to describe the relation between intellectuals and bureaucracy, from the consolidation of the Spanish empire in America up until the twentieth century. One implication of Rama’s study is that the letrado from colonial times was an organic intellectual in a public arena dominated by a blind cult of the authority of the letter. Perhaps this concept of the letrado can be useful when one describes the state function of letters in the years following formal independence from Spain. Yet the assumption of the relation between literature, politics, and power as the result of a continuity in a ‘‘long ‘redemptivist’ tradition of the American’’ letrado, which Rama sees as formed in the remote colonial epoch, registers a marked historicism that obscures the radical changes that doubtless occurred at the turn of the century, if not earlier. Rama’s narrative represents the field of power, the literary field, and their mutual relation in terms of the permanence of relations and structures in a historical bloc lasting more than two centuries. For example, while Rama considers a variety of writers as diverse as Rodó and Sarmiento within the category of the letrado, based on the (biographical) fact that they occupied public positions, he downplays the transformation of the place of the literato-intellectual before the changing configurations of power. To believe that Rodó as well as Sarmiento were letrados because the ‘‘ideologizing function’’ was at work in both, or because both were public servants, does not take into account the different discursive fields that grounded their respective interventions. In fact, these fields were traversed by different subjects, different modes of authorization (even when both Rodó and Sarmiento, as people, came to occupy public positions). In Rodó, a specifically aesthetic authority is at work, while Sarmiento speaks from a relatively undifferentiated field, authorized in the rationalizing will and in state consolidation. The aesthetic subject in Rodó, nonetheless, does satisfy an ‘‘ideologizing function.’’ It postulates a definition of a Latin American identity in opposition to the economic rationality of an other: in this postulation, an ‘‘ideologizing function’’ unfolds. But Rodó’s critique of modernity in Ariel assumes a specifically aesthetic sphere as a discursive field, a fact that at once significantly shapes his ideology. Of course, it may be hypothesized that this autonomy of the aesthetic in Rodó is the condition of possibility for his antiimperialism and concept of Latin America as a sphere of ‘‘culture,’’ autonomous from and opposed to ‘‘their’’ economy. In any case, Sarmiento does not assume this differentiation between discursive fields: he speaks from the rationalizing will that marks precisely the boundary of the aesthetic subject 

   

in Rodó. This leads us to assert that between Sarmiento (and the letrados) and the fin de siècle writers including Martí, González Prada, and most clearly Rodó, there lies a gap, crucial to the differentiation between a literary field and a lettered field, and consistent with a radical change in the relation between intellectuals, power, and politics. As Arnold Hauser has noted, the category of ‘‘intellectuality,’’ a concept initially tied to literature, emerged toward the middle of the century in Europe as an effect of the depoliticization of an area of the bourgeoisie; up until that time, letters had been tied to institutions of liberal ‘‘publicity.’’ 47 In Latin America, the liberal polis also underwent a transformation at the turn of the century. We are able to think of the writers of that epoch as our first modern intellectuals, not because they were the first to work with ‘‘ideas,’’ but because certain intellectual practices, above all those tied to literature, began to be constituted outside the sphere of politics and frequently in opposition to the state, which had already rationalized and autonomized its sociodiscursive terrain. In other words, even Martí and González Prada, insofar as they are considered intellectuals, maintain a relation with the state quite distinct from that of Sarmiento or, more appropriately, Bello. For the latter two, writing was still an activity tied to the law, organic in relation to the liberal ‘‘publicity’’ in the process of being formed. At this point it might be useful to specify the problematic concept of politics, for its tendency to signify at least two types of distinct social practices. As Nicos Poulantzas has shown, one feature of the modern state proper is the relative autonomy of the bureaucratic and legal spheres, both of which constitute the field of the political. The institutions that fall within these spheres serve to centralize power in the state. This centralization of power is distinct from social struggles that constitute politics.48 Many years before, González Prada emphasized this distinction when he affirmed that: [The] governmental machine does not function for the benefit of nations, but for the profit of dominant factions. . . . Given the insufficiency of politics to achieve the greatest good for the individual, the controversies and battles over forms of government and governers, remain relegated to the second term; or in sum, they disappear. The social question subsists, the great question that the proletariat will resolve by the only effective means—revolution.49 The social question, for González Prada, was the battle in which the intellectual who now represented himself or herself in alliance with other Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

areas outside dominant culture intervened against the political, conceived as a state practice or hegemony.50 Martí and Politics From the early s, one can easily see Martí’s attempt to distance himself from state politics. To the intellectuals, he says: ‘‘Stop living like filthy scavengers, nailed to the posts of the state.’’ 51 And in Amistad funesta (), a novel that continually reflects on the necessity and limits of art’s autonomy in society, the narrator remarks: [The] possessors of intellect, sterile among us because of their poor direction, and who in order to survive make their intelligence abundant, dedicate their knowledge with exclusive zeal to political combat . . . thus producing a disequilibrium between the empty country and their excessive politics. Or, pressed by the urgencies of life, they serve the strong governor who pays and corrupts them.52 Although we would not want to reduce the transformation of the relation between literature and politics to a simple question of job positions (or ‘‘professionalization’’ in the sense of Viñas), it is necessary to recall that it was precisely through literature’s will to autonomy from the political that Martí was able to positively see the emergence of a literary market, separated from the institutions of the state. In one of his extraordinary letters to his Mexican friend Manuel A. Mercado, Martí writes in : But nor can the idea [of instituting a publisher of Spanish American books in New York] cease to interrupt my thoughts unbeckoned. For this I have been made, now that the action in more vast fields has not been given to me. For this I am prepared. In this I have force, originality, and practice. This is my path. I have faith in it, and I enjoy it.—Everything ties me to New York, at least for a few years of my life: everything ties me to this cup of venom:—You do not know it well, because you have not battled here as I have battled; but the truth is that every day, as dusk arrives, I feel like food churning in a stomach that forces me to go on, that transforms my soul into volcanoes, and urges me to escape from myself. All that I am shatters and falls apart. . . . The day that I might write this poem!—Well, in any case: everything ties me to New York: the consequences of political errors of our country;—the nearness to this my land, which knows not of me, and for which I die;—my reluctance to leave in the hope of experiencing new adventures, with my life     

that admits of no hope slung over my shoulders;—the even greater repugnance for living in countries where I bring no practical art nor even one mechanical right to life, except a little intelligence, which in these countries is overabundant, and which only allows me to eat when it can be transformed into rent or sale for use by the government, a prohibited act for a foreigner:—everything, especially the natural consequences of five years of living around a central area, ties me for now to New York.— As for other lands, you already know why I do not think to go there. A literary market still does not exist in those places, nor is there any need to have one. In the political market I have no place. In the judicial market good lawyers abound. I already know that out of pure servitude and humility, one always has to obtain one’s bread. But my instruments of labor, which are my tongue and my pen, would either have to remain in the same bind in which they are here, or they would have to be used in pro or con to local issues in which I have neither the right nor the will to enter—issues in which, as had occurred to me in Guatemala and in Venezuela, not even silence is allowed me.53 (Italics added) This letter seems essential. Martí’s extended residence in New York, from  to , is generally explained in relation to his political activism and his work in the emigrant communities, which would in effect form the base of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, founded in . Without detracting from this explanation, which is entirely valid for his final years in the city (when Martí returned to active politics, after his initial clashes with separatist organizations), this letter allows us to elaborate on the interpretation of Martí’s New York experience. The relationship between the subject—the ‘‘I’’ about whom Martí speaks, who longs to write his ‘‘poem’’—and the city has changed. ‘‘All that I am shatters’’ (‘‘Todo yo estallo’’); and later, ‘‘I collect all of my own little pieces from the ground, and I put them back together and walk about with them as if I were alive.’’ This experience of fragmentation, more than an expression of Martí’s actual exile, registers a radical change in the relationship between the subject and modernity. If the city (in Sarmiento, for example) had served as an emblem for a desired modernity, for a rationalized public sphere, in Martí, the city is the site where the ‘‘I’’ becomes violently fragmented; the site where the poet (even in his own city) is an exile par excellence. At this conjuncture, poetry would be a response to fragmentation, as Martí will write in the prologue to Flores del destierro: These that I offer, are not finished compositions: they are, alas! notes of images written in haste, and lest they escape me, amidst the restless crowd of the streets, amidst the noisy and captivating roar of the train Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

tracks, or in the urgent and inflexible to-do of a business and trade office bureau—[they are] a dear refuge for the condemned.54 As we have seen in the letter, however, the city itself—the site of the ‘‘literary market’’—is preferred by Martí to dependency on the traditional world. The city, in the very movement that generates such a ‘‘crisis,’’ an ‘‘alienation,’’ or ‘‘exile,’’ is nevertheless the condition of possibility for the intellectual’s autonomy from traditional institutions, an autonomy that was indispensable for the modern intellectual (in contrast to the letrado or ‘‘civil’’ writer). We will later take up the itinerary of the subject-Martí in New York, when we look at Escenas norteamericanas (North American Scenes) in the second part of this book. For now, let it suffice to point out the profound change in the relationship between the city—the space of power—and the writer, who represents himself as (and to a certain degree was) a marginal and subaltern figure. As a wage laborer, as a dominated subject, he will seek to affiliate himself with other marginal groups from the city: As if when all suffer, when all bleed, [ . . . ] will I be like a king, with my feet on the radiator, reading rhymes and Tyrean themes that take me away like a magic spell, with a heap of patches, and a suit of patches, and all of me patches, for which my peers admire me, my peers, who cry and bleed, because I know so much about . . . ? About their sufferings: that is what I want to know about, that I might patch, mend, and repair them. This, my friend, is my literature, my wild [salvaje] literature.55 The writer has, in effect, been repoliticized in this knowledge of suffering. As a wage laborer, marginal with respect to the central place that the letrado occupied at the heart of the affairs of the city and power, the intellectual is repoliticized in the critique of the political. And at the very root of his decentered place, he establishes alliances and affiliations with the margins of the dominant culture. In Martí, the poet comes to be an agent in a savage (salvaje) practice. It is a practice tied to the devaluation implied by the ‘‘suffering,’’ the ‘‘ugliness’’ of life; a practice that, from the beginning of the s, will yank him and his discourse to areas unforeseen or at times emphatically excluded by the will to autonomy. In this respect, at least one area of Martí’s contradictory discourse can be situated on the other side of the will to institutionalize literature—a will that, for all purposes, tended to make of the aesthetic (as the sphere that lay at the farthest distance from life) a compensatory place, a ‘‘refuge.’’ As Martí had already seen, in the final instance this refuge would affirm and agree with the very capitalist logic from which 

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it had sought to be separated.56 To put it another way, when Martí proclaims in , ‘‘To approach life—I have here the object of literature,’’ we must not believe that within this statement there still dominates a traditional, undifferentiated letrado subject, anterior to the distinctive autonomization deployed by modernity. On the one hand, by , Martí (in Venezuela) was already defending the specificity of ‘‘style,’’ a defining gesture of the literato and the will to autonomy inasmuch as style would become a response and critique against the dominant authority of ‘‘letters’’ at the time.57 Concurrently, however, we find in him alliances, intersections of authorities, antiaesthetic voices, the configuration of which comprises a critique against the tendency to institutionalize ‘‘the beautiful.’’ Bien: yo respeto a mi modo brutal, un modo manso para los infelices e implacable con los que el hambre y el dolor desdeñan, y el sublime trabajo; yo respeto la arruga, el callo, la joroba, la hosca flaca palidez de los que sufren. Respeto a la infeliz mujer de Italia, pura como su cielo, que en la esquina de la casa sin sol donde devoro mis ansias de belleza, vende humilde piñas dulces y pálidas manzanas. Very well: I respect in my own brutal way, a gentle way for the unhappy; I dismiss those who disdain hunger and pain, and sublime labor; I respect the wrinkle, the callus, the humpback, the sullenness flaccid paleness of those who suffer. I respect the unhappy Italian woman, pure as her sky, who on the corner of the sunless house where I devour my anxious longings for beauty, humbly sells sweet pineapples and pale apples.58 A civic poetry? Better yet, a disarticulation, already in the s, of the modernist obsession with gold, a highly ornamental sense of style, a kind of Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

symbolic capital, that literature gradually accumulates, above all in its lexical labor. It is also another Europe that appears in Martí’s poem: not that of luxury and wealth, but of the immigrant laborer. Significantly, the subject in the poem is constituted by means of an opposition between an interior— the space in which he writes—and the street. The subject, in the spatial arrangement of the poem itself, remains half caught by the will to autonomy: the ‘‘anxious longings for beauty.’’ But from within this interior, which delimits the place of the subject, one sees precisely what is other than beauty: ‘‘the wrinkle, the callus, the humpback, the sullenness / flaccid paleness’’ and ‘‘sublime labor.’’ 59 This ‘‘labor,’’ mentioned in passing, does not remain inscribed in the Enlightenment rhetoric of rationalized ‘‘productivity’’: it is, in fact, the Enlightenment’s negative, its underside. More important, the notion of labor is also juxtaposed to the idleness of the interior where the poetic subject sits. In other words, even as the subject writes from within the interior and thus presupposes a literary logic, the mechanisms of production for this logic are re-presented and divested of authority in the same movement. This (self-)critique of the literary subject from within his figuratively separate sphere of autonomy draws attention to itself in the irruption of devalued words (again in contrast to the glitter of modernist gold) and creates a minor tone that effectively sabotages the established machinery of style. The tone conspires with the systematic relativization of the image’s power to seduce or impress (‘‘flaccid paleness,’’ ‘‘pure as her sky’’) in order to obliterate its aura. This critique, therefore, cannot be read in relation to a traditional, civil literary practice. At the risk of being redundant, the critique presupposes the symbolic capital of literature, if only to reject it; it presupposes an ‘‘interior’’ from which writing, even as it asserts its inevitable distance from ‘‘life,’’ attempts to leave, in its proper space, traces of the other. In this way, the poem relativizes the distance and power of literature’s autonomy, negating the exclusivity of the ‘‘interior,’’ the ‘‘anxious longings for beauty,’’ both of which nevertheless act as the poem’s field of signification.60 Given this perspective, it is neither by coincidence nor partiality that Cintio Vitier has lucidly compared a number of Martí’s Versos libres with César Vallejo’s avant-garde work,61 particularly with regard to their remarkable treatment of language. Of course, in Vallejo, the critique of literature as an institution will be a dominant impulse. Martí only offers us small fissures— at times exceptional—where we can nonetheless identify, on the one hand, an(other) field of (relativized) authority involving the literary subject and the ‘‘interior’’; and on the other hand, a critique of this presumed authority, through the divestiture of its exclusive apparatuses. 

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These small fissures enable us to identify some of the contradictions that determine the complex of Martí’s discourse. Far from being an organic subject—which is to say, a locus where we would be able to identify the hegemony of one type of authority—Martí must be seen as a convergence or coexistence (never a synthesis) of at least three positions vying for supremacy: . The affirmation of autonomization (in the notion and treatment of ‘‘style’’) in its opposition to traditional taste and ‘‘letters,’’ as well as to the ‘‘logical man’’ of rationalization. . The recognition early on, and certainly in the context of Martí’s privileged position in New York, that the autonomization of the aesthetic in its most radical form brought with it the risk of reifying and appropriating literature into the very heart of the dominant culture as a prized object (decorative in function) for the bourgeois ‘‘interior.’’ . The conflict between these two aforementioned drives is complicated when we are forced to recognize also that in Martí’s critique of autonomization, he frequently employs a civil, traditional rhetoric (often configured in terms of an abstract cult to ‘‘utility’’ and ‘‘action’’) in order to criticize the detachment (or distance) that autonomy has established. This tendency is, at times, concomitant with his critique of ‘‘developmentalism’’ and social ‘‘modernization’’ when he appeals to traditional cultures in a mélange of discourses and modes of writing that are sometimes archaic. In Martí’s critique of modernization (both literary and socioeconomic), he works with fragments of traditional codes, which however, do not imply their organicity with respect to their traditions proper. One must insist on the conflicted nature of literature, the political, and politics in Martí, because it is perhaps this conflict—correlative to the modern distinction between life and literature—that lies at the heart of the complexities surrounding his politicization, even his voluntaristic vitalism, which demands a supplementary and accessible place for the ‘‘word’’ in ‘‘life.’’ To be a ‘‘poet in acts’’ will be the trajectory of desire that brings Martí to a discourse of war,62 and to the absence of both discourse and the act, in a heroic death. Martí had himself been emphatic about this. But one must still explore the foundations of his vitalism and cult of action. Would such an analysis bring about a depoliticization of Martí? On the contrary, I am interested in specifying the conditions of his politicization. The dilemma is that when one asserts the relation between Martí and politics, it almost always serves as a stark contrast to the relation of the modern Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

writers to politics in modernism. Martí oftentimes becomes identified or associated with the traditional intellectual field. In fact, it is the vision of a civic Martí that prevails, as in Henríquez Ureña: The social transformation and division of labor dissolved the traditional bind between our public life and our literature; Martí was, of course, the great exception; in this he was closer to the generation that preceded him than to his very own.63 And Rama, whose work has in many ways enabled us to reevaluate the question of ‘‘modernity’’ in Martí, adds: And if it is true that Martí was closer to the preceding generation (and also to those following, of this century), it was because of his peculiar enclave: his operational field, along with the Cuban colony still orbiting around the defeated and anachronistic Spanish empire, both corresponded to his conception of the poet’s place. In the poet, Martí sees an apostle of the civil cause.64 Rama’s parenthesis is significant: in some ways, Martí’s ‘‘civility’’ approximates that of the generations following him, their aesthetics of engagement. But Rama does not explore this possibility. Rather, he identifies Martí’s politics with the civil, with what Rama will later call the ‘‘redemptivist vocation of the letrado’’: ‘‘It is Sarmiento with whom Martí can be compared in this respect.’’ 65 Hence, we lose sight of the fragmentation of that form of social communication once held together by the ‘‘civil.’’ Likewise, we forget the concomitant emergence of the autonomous intellectual as the condition of possibility for Martí’s politicization. While critics generally accept the fragmentation of ‘‘letters’’ as the distinctive feature of modernism, they nevertheless continue to present Martí as a kind of anachronism. This organic type of reading, since the turn of the century, has represented Martí as a fully integrated subject, whose heroism consisted precisely in his capacity to overcome fragmentation. As early as , Cuban Enrique José Varona, in a speech entitled ‘‘Martí and His Political Work,’’ asserts that Martí ‘‘spoke in order to act,’’ that ‘‘the dreamer hid a true man of action’’: Here is the profound chord of his soul and this constitutes the perfect unity of his life. Martí the poet, writer, orator, professor, consular official, journalist, agitator, conspirator, statesman, and soldier was not at bottom ever anything other than Martí the patriot.66 (Italics added) 

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This reading, so similar to Martí’s self-fashioning in its ability to integrate fragments, exemplifies the constitutive process of the hero; a process in which Martí himself doubtless participated. As Varona states: Yesterday, he was seen as a conjunction of rare and juxtaposed qualities. Today, before our eyes, his life appears to us made of a sole block of indestructible granite. (p. ; italics added) Thus, the hero in modernity—characterized by what Martí termed at various times ‘‘the nostalgia for the great deed,’’ 67 or (in other words) the loss of a collective, epic subject—is the locus of a condensation where the atomization of the social is compensated. We can call this moment the will to integration, which is at work in Martí when he privileges the immediacy of action over the derivative character of discourse. This very same will is present in his readers when they insist on seeing in him an equilibrium, even in the most exasperated moments of his vitalism.68 Hence, the point cannot be understated: ‘‘discourse’’ remains as the erased referent by the cult of ‘‘action,’’ leading us once again to the fragmented field in which Martí operates, and to the conflicts that never cease to produce signification in his work. Martí’s place in the literary field, a field from which he also distances himself, nevertheless grounds the conditions of/for his politicization. This implies, in turn, that in Martí’s work, the literary subject (as opposed to the civil subject) is fundamental, be it directly as a mode of authorization (at times, even a kind of Latinoamericanismo, or Latin Americanism), or indirectly as the site of an ‘‘alien’’ interior presupposed and erased by his discourse of war. But what is a discourse of war? For Martí, it was above all a response to the inactivity of the ‘‘interior,’’ which culminates in his illuminating Diarios de campaña. This final testament of Martí’s life documents the poet’s astonishing return to his native country (from the city); to the origin, where the letter joins the bullet to deny, if only in the dehierarchized silence of death, the distance between discourse and life. Perhaps it is enough to recall that when Martí arrived at the highly radicalized tobacco centers of Key West (Cayo Hueso), already with the intention of unifying the revolutionary movement, the artisans (many of them anarchists, doubtless suspicious of his intellectualism) asked him, ‘‘How could you, a literary man [literato], lead our revolution?’’ 69 Politicization, in Martí, is the will to overcome such a division of labor. It is the will to produce a discourse, a critical space, where the ‘‘interiors,’’ fields of immanence detached from one another by rationalization, might sustain a line of flight,70 a place for new encounters. The will, totalizing in the case of Martí, operates by means Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

of unifying categories, frequently nostalgic. In any event, it constitutes a response to modern fragmentation and not a kind of intellectual authority that preceded it. In light of that fragmentation in the field of knowledge and communication in capitalist society, Lyotard remarks with great skepticism that the salient feature of postmodernity is the dissolution of the distinctive nostalgia for totalizing metanarratives 71 that characterized the modern (so emphatic in Martí). Against the ideal of integration and communicability that Habermas proposes (as a response to the colonization of the life-world),72 Lyotard argues that any organic, unitary postulation of a discourse is always dominated vertically (which is to say, hierarchically) as a terrorism of power. This assertion belongs to an interesting debate on postmodernity, which however, remains problematic when applied to Latin America. Perhaps it may be that the terms of this debate around fragmentation and the specialization of discursive subjects—a debate that implies an interrogation of the modern and rationalizing notion of autonomy—may not be entirely valid when applied to Latin America. This is due, in part, to the uneven character of modernization, autonomization, and the very professionalization that led to the emergence of a Latin American literary subject. Over the course of this chapter, we have pointed out that modernization in Latin America had indeed brought with it both the fragmentation of the communicative system that we have associated with ‘‘knowledge-(as)-said’’ and the republic of letters—thus giving rise to a literary subject, initially defined negatively or by exclusion from the sphere of legal knowledge or the law. Yet the ‘‘interiorization’’ of a specifically literary sphere of knowledge did not succeed in being institutionalized. Perhaps today, this concept of the uneven modernization of the literary subject may help to elucidate the formal and functional hybridity of literature in Latin America, in contrast to the degree of discipline in other areas where modernization was more systematic and consistent. In the particular case of Martí, this heterogeneity was not premodern, especially since he at times takes literature to be an object of his criticism. But the heterogeneity of authorities that are at work in Martí’s discourse have everything to do with the aporias that this ‘‘modern’’ subject confronts in the process of his institutionalization. The lack of sovereignty possessed by the literary subject over his own territory—a subject whose hegemony over a discourse would, in principle, indicate his point of greatest institutional participation—made the confluence of authorities in Martí possible. This heterogeneity dissolves in its ambiguous borders any kind of synthesis or equilibrium between the 

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demands of the emergent aesthetic subject and the ethicopolitical imperatives that relativize his autonomy. The heterogeneity of Martí’s discourse is conflicted: it is characterized by struggles between emergent, or at times residual, authorities. In either case, these authorities are irreducible to the discursive and functional homogeneity that defines the republic of letters cut short by modern rationalization. In a somewhat different context and at a different conjuncture, this heterogeneity is also a significant theme in the postmodern poetics of Europe and the United States, which criticizes the hegemony of distinctive institutionalized subjects in modernity under advanced capitalism from a variety of diverse antidisciplinarian positions. In other words, if modernity was defined (as Weber saw it) by a tendency toward the separation and bureaucratization of distinct autonomized forms of knowledge, postmodernity would come to register a critique of that rationalization; a critique, above all, by means of a poetics (not solely literary) of contamination in the modern fields of immanence. This contamination projects the dissolution of exclusive power, of the ‘‘strong will,’’ through which autonomous, disciplined subjects of modernity have taken shape.73 One noteworthy case would be the entrance of ‘‘mass culture media’’ into the realm of art (and vice versa), as these media had earlier constituted one of modern art’s exteriors par excellence. In various ways, Martí’s critique of the ‘‘interior,’’ his exasperated attempt to overcome the limits imposed by the division of labor, actually anticipates some aspects of the postmodern debate. Such an overlap is possible, partly, because the fragility of the Latin American literary subject, who was not able to institutionalize his autonomy in the field of literature, generated these fissures—this ‘‘weak ontology’’ (following Gianni Vattimo’s formulation)—which from the origins of an uneven modernization have relativized the ‘‘purity’’ (even on a formal level) of Latin American literature. We need to return to a fundamental fact in the history of Latin American discourses: the unevenness of modernization and the displacements suffered by discursive formations in Latin America resulted in appropriations irrepresentable to categories of European or North American history. This was the case with literature as an institution in Latin America, in which the lack of material bases, and the travel routes of Western cultural centers to their peripheral zones, made possible the emergence of an intensely heterogeneous discourse, always open to infiltration. We must now delve deeper into the nature of this discursive heterogeneity in the literary journalism at the turn of the century: the modernist chronicle. Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

Notes   





 

  



José Luz y Caballero, Obras, vol. , Elencos y discursos académicos (Havana: Editorial de la Universidad, ), . José Luz y Caballero, ‘‘Informe sobre la Escuela Náutica,’’ in Obras, vol. , Escritos educativos (Havana: Editorial de la Universidad, ), . First published in . Andrés Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado en la instalación de la Universidad de Chile,’’ Obras completas, vol. , Opúsculos literarios y críticos (Caracas: Ministero de Educación, ), , . First published in . ‘‘The College of Humanities, not content with observing the Normal School closely and monitoring its progress, nor with the inspection of other schools in Santiago, has become dedicated to the revision of texts, lesson books, and programs’’ (Andrés Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado por el Rector de la Universidad de Chile en el Aniversario de ,’’ in Obras completas, vol. , Opúsculos literarios y críticos (Caracas: Ministero de Educación, ), . Hostos’s passion for autobiography, witnessed in his diaries written throughout his life, is not to be conflated with the literary individualism of the epoch. In Hostos, to write about the I was a mode of self-discipline, not personal ‘‘liberation.’’ Thus begins Eugenio María de Hostos in his  Diario (Diary): ‘‘Let us moderate the imagination by directing an attentive gaze every night or every morning to the bottom of this chaos that accompanies me; let us exercise [the power of ] reflection once again; let us moralize. In the same way that this brief work of the moment has calmed the neuralgia, so should the ordered task of my rationality in my darkness calm me, so do I want it to calm my most intense sufferings’’ (in Antología [Madrid, ], ). Here, the individualization of writing also serves as an aspect of the rationalizing, disciplinary project: autobiographic writing as the colonization of the imaginary. Eugenio María de Hostos, prologue to La peregrinación de Bayoán (Puerto Rico: Instituto de Cultura Puertorrigueña, ),  and  respectively. First published in . ‘‘And might I, gentlemen, pause to mention in passing . . . the most magical of literary vocations, the scent of literature itself, the Corinthian capital, if I may say so, of cultured society? And above all, might I pause to allude to the instantaneous excitation, which has brought forth on our horizon this constellation of brilliant youths who cultivate poetry with such ardor? I will say with naïveté: there is error in their verses; there are things that reason castigates and severely condemns’’ (Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado,’’ ). Immediately afterward, Bello quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: ‘‘It is essential that art be the rule of the imagination that transforms it into poetry.’’ Andrés Bello, ‘‘Juicio sobre las poesías de José María de Heredia,’’ Obras completas Opsculos literarios y críticos, vol.  (Caracas, ), . José Martí, ‘‘Prólogo al Poema del Niágara,’’ in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . The disengagement of poetry from practical life began long before the turn of the century, initially through poetry’s exclusion from the ideal forms of rationalization. The devaluation of poetry in Sarmiento or Saco are examples of this disengagement. Toward , however, the ‘‘useless’’ space of poetry begins to be filled with certain social functions, particularly those tied to the defense of a specific use of luxury. Regarding this development, it would be appropriate to recall the debate between Pedro Goyena and Eduardo Wilde in Argentina (). Goyena still defended poetry as an originary form for national consolidation, while

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 

 



   





Wilde responded to him in the following manner: ‘‘The principal reason for this poetic decay is that in the market, it is not poetry but cured skins that are valued, as is proven by the fact that leather is sold at ever more expensive prices than verses and that it better satisfies the demands of the body’’ (Eduardo Wilde, ‘‘Sobre poesía,’’ in Tiempo perdido [Buenos Aires: Ediciones Jackson, n.d.], ). Therefore, Wilde argued, ‘‘poetry, like luxury, enters into the category of superfluous things’’ (p. ). ‘‘Poetry is a disease of the intellect, an abnormal state of thinking; yet, like the fantastic, it retains the beauty of illusions and the use-value of luxury’’ (p. ). Not surprisingly, the Goyena/Wilde debate revolved around Estanislao del Campo, whose work Fausto has been analyzed by Josefina Ludmer as an example of the disengagement of gauchesca poetry from its previous ‘‘state function,’’ an indication of literary autonomization. Eugenio María de Hostos, ‘‘El propósito de la Normal,’’ in Antología (Madrid, ), –. Eugenio María de Hostos, ‘‘La educación científica de la mujer,’’ in Conciencia intelectual de América: Antología del ensayo hispanoamericano, ed. Carlos Ripoll (New York: Las Américas, ), –. First published in . Hostos, ‘‘El propósito de la Normal,’’ . See Alfonso Reyes, ‘‘Pasado inmediato,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ),  ff. First published in . Reyes also discusses the dependence of the study of law on ‘‘literature’’: ‘‘laws seemed to be an approximation to letters, which had no academic refuge’’ (p. ). He also points out that the ‘‘scientific’’ study of literature emerged when ‘‘Rhetoric and Poetics, understood in the traditional manner, no longer supported the air we breathe’’ (p. ). In the section entitled ‘‘The Pedagogical Apparatus’’ in chapter , we will take up this problematic on the emergence and political uses of the new humanities in Mexico and Argentina at the turn of the century. On the general development of this institution, see Tulio Halperín Donghi, Contemporary History of Latin America, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ). See Ricardo Rojas, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Documentos del decanato (–) (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, ),  ff. Norberto Piñero and Eduardo L. Bidau, Historia de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, in Anales de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, vol.  (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Martín Biedma, ), . Noé Jitrik, Las contradicciones del modernismo (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, ), esp. ‘‘Ruptura y reconciliación.’’ At the same time, it would be erroneous to suggest that Darío came to affirm the values of the dominant culture. It would perhaps be more appropriate to say that in , there already existed a literary field that was relatively autonomous and institutionalized, which made the relative success of Darío in Buenos Aires possible. Ricardo Rojas, La restauración nacionalista (; reprint, Buenos Aires: Librería de la Facultad, ). This text, commissioned by the Ministry of Education, marks the beginning of the reform in Argentine education that would displace positivism, and establish literature and history (both critiques of the ‘‘modernized’’ present) as dominant discourses, tied to an emergent nationalism within the oligarchy itself. In Mexico as well, Reyes recalls the situation of literature in fin de siècle education when he points out: ‘‘The men of before believed themselves to be practical; they pretended that history and literature only served to embellish juridical documents with metaphors or reminiscences . . . and it has yet to be said that, although the true poets (the radiant pleiad of modernism, from which the greater stars still shine) did not follow suit, the students inclined to

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

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write verses had a propensity to confuse poetic material with oratory. And the oratory faculty came directly from the College of Law’’ (Alfonso Reyes, ‘‘Pasado inmediato,’’ –). Anales de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, vol.  (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Martín Biedma, ), . Ibid., vol.  (),  ff. Ironically, literature emerges as a university discipline by criticizing specialization, legitimizing itself on the basis of an auratic concept of ‘‘culture’’ as a sphere wherein the ‘‘integral man’’ who has been fragmented in modern daily life by specialization can be reconstituted. This concept of ‘‘culture’’ is essential to Ariel, a work that would have tremendous influence over pedagogical practices in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Although literature becomes institutionalized as a kind of antidiscipline, the emergence of a reflection on the methodology of literary instruction becomes evident around the turn of the century. As we will see in later chapters, this discourse set out to dismantle the instrumentalist notion of literature as a medium invested in the paradigm of eloquence and saber decir. In ‘‘Pasado inmediato’’ (‘‘The Recent Past’’), Alfonso Reyes mentions ‘‘scientific’’ study (as opposed to the study of letters as oratory), ‘‘which came to be one of the battlegrounds for the centennial youth’’ (p. ). See also José Enrique Rodó, ‘‘La enseñanza de la literatura,’’ in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Antonio Zamora, ), –; and Pedro Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘Aspectos de la enseñanza literaria en la escuela común,’’ in La Utopía de América (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), –. We will take up a further reading of these texts in chapter . José Martí, ‘‘Los Códigos Nuevos,’’ in Nuestra América (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . First published in . The reference here pertains to El presidio político en Cuba (The Political Fortress in Cuba), published in Spain () as a memoir of Martí’s imprisonment in Cuba the year before; and also the prevalent rhetoric of allegation throughout La República española ante la Revolución cubana (The Spanish Republic Prior to the Cuban Revolution), a serial published in Madrid () while Martí was studying law in Zaragoza. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Las corrientes literarias en la América Hispánica (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), . See Angel Rama, Rubén Darío y el modernismo (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, ) and his prologue to Poesía, by Rubén Darío (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ); José Emilio Pacheco, prologue to Antología del modernismo (–) (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, ); Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, Modernismo (Barcelona: Montesinos, ); Noé Jitrik, Las contradicciones del modernismo (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, ); and Jean Franco, La cultura moderna en América Latina (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, ), –. David Viñas, ‘‘De los gentlemen-escritores a la profesionalización de la literatura,’’ in Literatura argentina y realidad política (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ),  ff. Rama, Rubén Darío y el modernismo. See Jean Franco, ‘‘La heterogeneidad peligrosa: escritura y control social en vísperas de la independencia mexicana.’’ Hispanoamérica – (): –. See the letter from Hilario Ascasubi to Justo José Urquiza requesting payment for Ascasubi’s poems. The letter is included in Jorge B. Rivera, ed., El escritor y la industria cultural (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ): ‘‘In sum, general sir, I have fulfilled my promises and the command of Your Excellency to deliver ten thousand lines of my poetic verse without having received any compensation to the day’’ (p. ).

   

 Letter from Bartolomé Mitre to Wenceslao Paunero, in La Nación: Un siglo en sus columnas, special edition,  January , p. .  This seems to be a key metaphor in Jaime Concha’s reading of Darío’s work (and modernism) as caught up in a literary ideology tied to an ancient aristocracy. See Jaime Concha, Rubén Darío (Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, ). A similar reading of Darío is presented in François Perus, Literatura y sociedad en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, ).  For the distinction between the traditional and organic intellectual in the work of Antonio Gramsci, see ‘‘The Intellectuals,’’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, ).  Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).  See also Pierre Bourdieu, ‘‘Intellectual Field, Field of Power, Habitus,’’ in Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson, trans. Claude DuVerlie (New York: Columbia University Press, ). On the concept of autonomy, see P. Bourdieu, ‘‘Campo intelectual y proyecto creador,’’ in Problemas del estructuralismo, ed. Jean Pouillon et al. (Mexico: Siglo XXI, ), –; and P. Bourdieu, ‘‘The Field of Cultural Production, or the Economic World Reversed,’’ Poetics  (): –.  Julián del Casal, ‘‘José Fornaris,’’ in Crónicas habaneras, ed. Angel Augier (Santa Clara, Cuba: Universidad Central de Las Villas), .  José Martí, ‘‘Heredia,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, – ),  [hereafter OC, followed by volume and page number]. First published in .  José Martí, ‘‘Francisco Sellén, poeta cubano,’’ OC, vol. , .  ‘‘There is no doubt that refinement in the poetry of Azul and its author ‘diminishes’ both from the human perspective’’ (José Enrique Rodó, ‘‘Rubén Darío,’’ in Obras completas de José Enrique Rodó, ed. Alberto José Vaccaro [d ed.] [Buenos Aires: Ediciones Antonio Zamora, ], ).  Rubén Darío, ‘‘Cantos de vida y esperanza,’’ in Poesía (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ).  Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (Boston, Mass.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ).  For a detailed analysis of the relationship between Darío and Rodó, see Sylvia Molloy, ‘‘Serdecir: dácticas de un autorretrato,’’ in Essays on Hispanic Literature in Honor of Edmund L. King, ed. Luis Fernández and Sylvia Molloy (London: Tamesis Books, ), –.  Angel Rama, The Lettered City, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), –.  Once again, this distinction refers to Gramsci’s contrast between the ‘‘organic’’ intellectuals of one system and the ‘‘traditional’’ intellectuals of a historically earlier one. See Gramsci, ‘‘The Intellectuals.’’  ‘‘[The] cultural elite, and especially its literarily productive section . . . saw itself cut off from the social class of which it had hitherto been the mouthpiece and it felt completely isolated between the uneducated classes and the bourgeoisie’’ (Arnold Hauser, quoted by Jürgen Habermas, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, th ed., trans. Thomas Burger [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ], ). In relation to the argument presented here, see especially chapter , ‘‘The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.’’  ‘‘We shall introduce at this stage the distinction between the juridico-political superstructure of the state, which can be designated as the political, and political class practices (political class struggle), which can be designated as politics’’ (Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, ed. and trans. Timothy O’Hagan [London: New Left Books, ], ).

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Manuel González Prada, ‘‘El intelectual y el obrero,’’ in Horas de lucha (Callao, Peru: Tipografía Lux, ), . See also his ‘‘Antipolíticos,’’ in Anarquía, th ed. (Lima: Editorial P.T.C.M., ). González Prada’s article ‘‘El intelectual y el obrero,’’ in effect, conceives of the new intellectual as a laborer, a concept quite distinct from the ‘‘redemptivism’’ of the civil patricians: ‘‘The same good is achieved by planting wheat in the fields as by sowing ideas in minds; there is no hierarchical difference between the thinker who labors with the intellect and the worker who labors with his hands.’’ He later adds: ‘‘Intellectuals serve as light; but they must not make people blind, most importantly during these tremendous social crises where the arm executes what has been conceived in the head’’ (p. ). José Martí, Cuadernos de apuntes, OC, vol. , . José Martí, Amistad funesta, OC, vol. , . José Martí, Cartas a Manuel A. Mercado (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónomo de México, ), –. The letter is dated April , . José Martí, prologue to Flores del destierro, in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . This collection of poems was found in Martí’s notebooks (Cuadernos) and published posthumously, although Martí had already written a prologue for publication. A number of these texts seem to be contemporaneous with the Versos libres (also published posthumously, although some of them had been dated from Martí’s residence in New York during the early s) in their treatment of urban themes. José Martí, OC, vol. , . See Herbert Marcuse, ‘‘The Affirmative Character of Culture,’’ in Negations, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, ). First published in . We will explore the notion of ‘‘style’’ at work in Martí at the end of chapter . For now, let us merely note that Martí here emphatically defends ‘‘style’’ as a specifying trademark of literariness (as opposed to the language of the cabinet) in the wake of criticism from the more traditional intellectuals who voiced their opposition in the first edition of Revista Venezolana, published in Caracas in . ‘‘Style’’ is the hallmark of what Foucault called a ‘‘discourse society’’: ‘‘The uniqueness of the writer, who ceaselessly opposes himself to the activity of any other subject who speaks or writes, the intransitive character that he concedes to his discourse, the fundamental singularity that he has long attributed to ‘writing’ [écriture], the asserted dysymmetry between the ‘created work’ and whatever other use one makes of language as a linguistic system: all this is manifested (and moreover tends to be carried out in the realm of praxis) in the affirmation of the existence of a certain ‘discourse society’ ’’ (Michel Foucault, ‘‘The Order of Discourse,’’ in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan M. Sheridan [New York: Pantheon Books, ]; translation modified). In Martí’s case, it is important to point out that his defense of ‘‘style’’ as the distinguishing feature of literary specificity is carried out against a civil notion of literature that still prevailed in the more traditional areas of the literary field. José Martí, ‘‘Bien: yo respeto,’’ in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . The original date of its publication is unknown, but on a thematic level, it bears a marked resemblance to ‘‘Estrofa nueva’’ from the Versos libres (which are dated from the early s). Theodor Adorno correlates the irruption of ‘‘the ugly’’ in modern art with a critical impulse to autonomy and an attempt to desublimate art’s aesthetic ‘‘aura.’’ See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,  ff. Darío’s sonnet ‘‘De invierno’’ from Azul is a good example of the emblematic ‘‘interior’’ asserted by poetry in its movement toward autonomization and privatization. In Martí, the

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interior is already established as a locus of speech, although his poetry also insists on looking outward and working with desublimated matter or materials that have precisely been erased by the interior at work in Darío. Cintio Vitier, ‘‘Martí futuro,’’ in Temas martianos, ed. Cintio Vitier and Fina García Marruz (Río Piedras, Cuba: Huracán, ),  ff. On Martí’s discourse of war, see chapter . Ureña, Las corrientes literarias, . Rama, Rubén Darío y el modernismo, . Angel Rama, ‘‘La dialéctica de la modernidad en José Martí,’’ in Estudios martianos, ed. Ivan A. Schulman et al. (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Universitaria, ), . Enrique José Varona, ‘‘Martí y su obra política,’’ in Archivo José Martí, vol. , nos. –, – , . Martí, ‘‘Prólogo al Poema del Niágara,’’ . In Amistad funesta, the artistic Juan Jerez ‘‘carried . . . in his pallid features the nostalgia for action’’ (Martí, OC, vol. , ). The problem of (the ‘‘interior’’ subject’s) alienation from action is the driving force behind the Versos libres, as we can glimpse from the poem ‘‘Medianoche’’ (‘‘Midnight’’): ‘‘And I, woe to me! A prisoner in my cage/the great battle of men do I see!’’ The poem deals primarily with the progressive privatization of the literary subject, who in Martí’s work, frequently appears in a negative light. For example, Vitier insisted: ‘‘This dualism between art and life, which Julián del Casal represents for us, is entirely different [otra] from the antithesis that Martí overcomes’’ (Cintio Vitier, ‘‘Martí futuro,’’ ). Martí tries to resolve the contradiction, but this conflict between drives is the very basis of his discourse. Sotero Figueroa, editor of Primera jornada de José Martí en Cayo Hueso (New York: Imprenta América, ), wrote: ‘‘The initiative of the aforementioned workers (who proposed Martí as a possible leader of the movement) did not obtain any general consensus: some veterans of the ten-year epic struggle admired in Martí the eminent orator, but did not consider him as the chosen one who would lead the Cubans to the land of the free. Some factory-workers believed that Martí was simply an extraordinary man of letters, but not the expert pilot most suited to guiding the ship of revolution through the waters of liberty’’ (p. ). The term is taken from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, and is closely related to their concept of deterritorialization. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), esp. chapter . Trans. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘‘Response to the Question: What Is the Postmodern?’’ in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). ‘‘A reified everyday praxis can be cured only by creating unconstrained interaction of the cognitive with the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements’’ (Jürgen Habermas, ‘‘Modernity: An Incomplete Project,’’ in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster [Washington, D.C.: Bay Press, ], –. On the debate between Lyotard and Habermas, see Richard Rorty, ‘‘Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,’’ in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ), –. On the ‘‘weak ontologies’’ of postmodern discourses, see Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). See also Eduardo Subirats, ‘‘Transformaciones de la cultura moderna,’’ in La polémica de la posmodernidad, ed. José T. Martínez (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, ), –.

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 



Limits of Autonomy: Journalism and Literature

If we posit the heterogeneity of the Latin American literary subject in relation to the phenomenon of uneven modernization, we expose ourselves to various criticisms. The first problem has to do with the risk of falling into a kind of binary logic that would tend to define Latin American difference, at times parodic, in relation to its ability to displace European models (for instance, instead of Ariel, Caliban). Such a logic would inscribe Latin American ‘‘being’’ within an ideologized margin. The problem with this kind of reading, a common one these days, is rooted in the assumption that the European or Western canon somehow implies the inscription of an origin, guarantor, and measure of purity or homogeneity. Following this argument, what is Latin American (or Third World for that matter) would, as an effect of its ‘‘derivativeness,’’ come to displace and dismantle the originary purity of what is Western, even as it (voluntarily or involuntarily) represented, recited, or simulated the logic and function of First World codes. Would it not also be possible to think of the (European) origin, the referent displaced by a parodic (Latin American) representation, as a site forever traversed by contradictions; where, for example, literature from its emergence was never governed by an institutional homogeneity, but rather, by a critical impulse against truth and disciplinary formation? The first reading, as we have already indicated in the previous chapter, somewhat resembles Peter Bürger’s view of the avant-garde in Europe.1 Bürger’s institutional approach enabled us to oppose the emergence of the Latin American literary subject—through the double articulation of the will to autonomy and the institutional impossibility of literature—to the stability or purity of the literary subject that (particularly in France, according to Bürger) succeeded in controlling external interpellations by instituting and purifying an interior field. Now we ask ourselves: was such a purity given, even in France, the degree of institutional stability of which Bürger speaks, a stability that the avant-garde would later dismantle? Or could it be that Bürger, in order to emphasize the critical moment of the avant-garde, elided

the contradictions of the earlier (institutional) system? Would it not be valid to read Charles-Pierre Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (which Bürger, curiously enough, rarely mentions) as a fundamental fissure in the very surface of the pure, institutionalized subject? Does not Baudelaire or (later) Arthur Rimbaud indicate, in their schizoid fugues, a violent departure from the aesthetic terrain: a flight from the distinct segmentations (and privatizations) mapped out by modern discourses and institutions? Wouldn’t these ruptures assume, from the very beginning, an insistent critique against the mutual exclusivity of the terms art and life: the originary antithesis, for Bürger, between autonomization and the institutionalization of the aesthetic? To approach the issue from another angle, perhaps one might say that the origin itself contained salient features of a parodic or antiaesthetic derivation, which would lead us to question any kind of historical, linear narrative in the first place, even in Europe. For us, the distinction is crucial: it would oblige us to reconsider the postulation of Latin American difference as the parodic effect of a First World plentitude. The question, then, is: if it is possible for even an inhabitant, say a writer, of the First World to produce a ‘‘minor’’ literature—a condition that Deleuze and Guattari have certainly postulated 2—and if every North, in the heart of its territory, betrays the scars of its own South (its South Bronx, let’s say), then how would it be possible to pose the question of essential difference? 3 If we recognize the heterogeneity of even the European literary subject; if we accept and ideologize even a concept of literature, in Europe, as the critique of truth (following other European critics),4 one is nevertheless still confronted with the irreducible particularity of Latin American literature. For now, let us set aside the binarism of parody and its tendency to ideologize the margin, yet still try to specify the historical conditions of the contradictions elided by the binarism itself. In this chapter, we propose an analysis of the relation between journalism and literature in the final decades of the nineteenth century.5 We will explore, in particular, the transformation of the site of literature as it is played out in one of the principal newspapers of the time, La Nación of Buenos Aires. For it is here that we find a number of foreign correspondents—Martí and Darío, among others—who were key figures in the development of the early modernist chronicle. We would like to focus primarily on the conditions that led to the dependence of literature on the newspaper, and examine how such a dependence limited literature’s autonomy. The chronicle, in this regard, will become a privileged site for scrutinizing the condition of heterogeneity of the literary subject. We will later look at the function of literary discourse in fin de siècle journalism, as well as the importance of a certain notion of Journalism and Literature

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the aesthetic as a mode of representing, decorating, and domesticating the changing nature of cities at the turn of the century. Such a notion reveals the process by which the marginality and critique of the modernization deployed by literary forms were incorporated and promoted by the emergent cultural industry, based on the new journalism of the epoch. The Problem of the Reading Public Notwithstanding the considerations we have given to the contradictions and marginality of even European literature, it is evident that, in Europe, literary discourse was founded on institutional supports, particularly in education and the publishing market. In Latin America, this development was again uneven, limiting the will to autonomy in literature and promoting the dependency of literature on other institutions. For example, the development of the novel in England and France from the end of the eighteenth century (a period of increasing democratization in writing) was concomitant with the emergence of a literate sphere or reading public—public in the modern sense, that is, tied to the market. This public was initially cultivated by the press and later by a publishing industry whose growing autonomy from the newspaper was consolidated in the book market (in the second half of the nineteenth century). But in Latin America, even up until the beginning of the twentieth century, no such publishing market had as yet been established. Hence, some functions of the novel in Europe—for instance, its representation (and domestication) of a new urban space—would only appear in Latin America by means of (literary) forms considered marginal or minor in Europe. An example of this is the chronicle, tied in a general sense to the journalistic medium. The lack of a reading public constituted a fundamental preoccupation in the literary field at the turn of the century. In Amistad funesta, a newspaper serial novel written by Martí for New York’s El Latino-Americano (), the narrator points out the following: To use spoken and written language: that is what they teach them, as the only method of survival, in societies where the delicate arts, which are born from the cultivation of the idiom, do not have the sufficient number of consumers, much less connoiseurs, who might compensate for the fair price of these exquisite undertakings, the intellectual labor of our privileged spirits.6 How could there be a literary subject if the subject’s society did not recognize the specificity of his or her authority? Given this situation, it is not 

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entirely coincidental that Martí himself, while in New York, would manifest a constant interest in the development of the publishing market (even for poetry), as well as in other means of subsistence practiced by North American intellectuals, many of them already professionalized: And what an immense variety of materials the well-read remark on— and what an honest way of life they have given to those peoples of letters—and what an abundant and remarkable reward is obtained from the lectures by the audience! Well might they accomplish such a thing in Caracas, the arrogant poets, diligent men of letters [letrados], and severe critics; and people would go to hear them, because at such little cost would they acquire useful knowledge.7 In order to understand the growth of the reading public, and the mercenary and professionalist response that the new writers or literatos frequently proposed, one must situate the writers within the intellectual field in which they operated. Many of the new writers arose from the new middle classes, without any symbolic capital, which was otherwise guaranteed by oligarchic filiation. These fin de siècle writers (Martí, Gutiérrez Nájera, and Casal, in the s), who defended the market and professionalization, were set in opposition to the most conservative sector of the field, which insisted on a civil concept of literature. A good example of the more conservative writers, in the Argentine context, can be found in Calixto Oyuela, whose criticism of professionalization indicates a predominant ideology at the turn of the century: The writer, the artist, the man of science, if such is what we can truly call them . . . ought to etch in their hearts, above all, the musarum sacerdos of Horace, entirely opposed to the vulgar tendencies of the literary mob. . . . Far from denying what legitimacy exists in the vigilance and defense of the rights and interests of authors, I believe that such associations with that one exclusive professional goal in mind, will result (through the natural tendency of things) in a degeneration and adulteration of the ideal and of intellectual labors, as well as the disastrous propagation of a detestable modern plague: industrial literature. . . . [The] true artist must always profoundly distinguish between the muse and the business deal.8 Of course, Martí, Gutiérrez Nájera, and later Darío would emphatically distance themselves from the other key position in the fin de siècle field: what could properly be called industrial literature, which many of the new writers would identify with the emergence of a new kind of journalism, dominated by reporters and serial writers. To take an example, while Julián del Casal Journalism and Literature

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rejected this other kind of media intellectual, dominated by an orientation toward industry, even he recognized the market as an inevitable means of subsistence for the new writer: Modern artists are divided into two large groups. The first is formed by those who cultivate their faculties, as the laborers their fields, in order to speculate with their products, selling them always to the highest bidder. These are the false artists, courtesans to the crowds, a type of hypocritical vendor merchant, which posterity—a new Jesus—will one day cast from the temple of art with blows. The second is composed of those who deliver their productions to the public, not for the sake of earning their applause, but their money, with the objective of taking shelter from the miseries of existence and conserving a certain amount of [their] untamed independence, which they need in order to live and create. Far from adapting themselves to the tastes of the majority, they strive even harder for the majority to adapt itself to the tastes that are their own.9 Thus, the professionalist position presents itself as a dual front: it distances itself from the strictly mercenary journalist, and at the same time, recognizes in the market both a means of subsistence, and the possibility of founding a new locus of speech. Thus, the modern artist would acquire a certain intellectual legitimacy that would not be subordinated to the exclusive, traditional apparatuses of the republic of letters. Still, this alternative locus of speech, concomitant with the emergence of a new type of intellectual authority, was as yet quite unstable in the early s. In Mexico, for example, Gutiérrez Nájera complains in  that: In Europe, literature is a career entirely formed, as disciplined as the military career, since in it one ascends through a rigorous ranking, from the private onward, with the exception of those in the militia. The same can be said of those in letters, [as] they assume the blue ribbon. Their writings, like all merchandise, suffer the law of supply and demand.10 For Gutiérrez Nájera, given the lack of a public capable of sustaining the ‘‘demand’’ of the new ‘‘merchandise,’’ ‘‘it [was] essential that government attend to the development of the sciences and letters with just and discrete measures’’ (p. ). It is perhaps fitting to add that the plea for protection was directed to the authoritarian government of Porfirio Díaz. Such testimonies multiplied toward the end of the century out of the desire for a publishing market, even with a recognition of the market’s limitations.11 Once again, although we cannot reduce the problematic of the emergence of the literary subject (as well as a discursive field) to a question of 

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jobs, it would be equally reductive to deny the impact that the market—or its absence—exercised on the very constitution of literary discourse. Sylvia Molloy has suggested as much with respect to the image of the general public that is at work in Darío’s poetry, conditioning his self-fashioning and labor on language.12 Martí in New York: The Writing Market With regard to the problematic of the reading public, the significance of Martí’s situation in New York (in particular, during the early s) merits some attention. Let us recall his letter to Manuel A. Mercado, in which Martí explains his reasons for remaining in New York: Everything ties me to New York. . . . As for other lands, you know why I don’t even think of going there. No literary market exists in any of them, nor are there reasons to have them. . . . [My] instruments of labor, my tongue and my quill, would either remain in the same [state of ] trepidation that they experience here, or they would have to be used for or against local issues that I have neither right nor will to enter. . . .13 One cannot understate this mundane aspect of living for Martí. Martí’s representation as a hero—the creation of an aura that he himself cultivated— frequently prevents us from an understanding of his own life. And more important for us, the heroic aura that surrounds Martí precludes an explication of what made his discourse and its politicization possible. This politicization, as we have already seen, presupposes Martí’s contact with the regime of the market, with labor, with an urban fragmentation that would at times lead him to ally himself with marginal zones of capitalist culture and to change his concept of the aesthetic interior. The occupations that Martí took up in New York were many and varied. Especially in the first years after his arrival in , until approximately , when his work for newspapers was already sufficiently established so as to guarantee him a salary, the daily struggle of the exiled writer was arduous. Martí’s displacement in New York, his relative proletarianization even, can be explained only partially by the condition of exile. In fact, both Gutiérrez Nájera and Julián del Casal, while living in their respective countries, felt confronted with a similar dilemma and often represented themselves as exiles. Still, it is quite certain that Martí’s New York exile radicalized his situation: in contrast to Gutiérrez Nájera or Casal, Martí could not live by writing alone. In , he pens the following letter to Mercado, his correspondent in Journalism and Literature

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Mexico, who would later obtain a slot for Martí in the official newspaper of Porfirio Díaz, El Partido Liberal:        ’ —          —lest I be delivered into the wretchedness of exile without occupation and in order to alleviate the bitter task of being a cultivator of Spanish letters. (p. ) In another letter, he adds: I don’t know if I have already said that I now live by means of commercial jobs, and that, as I am lacking in money (if not means) I labor in a foreign land in order to earn it, something like having been transformed [in New York] from a thoroughbred of the plains into a beast of burden. And yet, what an amazing flight home every day—keeping secretly to myself, so that no one will see, the terrors hidden in the soul. (p. ) Home/alienated labor: the opposition marks a break in the history of the notion of privacy, a crucial one for literature. Literature folds back on itself into that interior, away from the reified world of labor. In the earlier discourse of the Enlightenment, writing was an invocation to labor. In contrast, Martí, during precisely the period of the aforementioned letters, delimits poetry’s domain in opposition to that outside of labor: Ganado tengo el pan: hágase el verso, y en su comercio dulce se ejercite la mano, que cual prófugo perdido entre oscuras malezas, o quien lleva a rastra enorme peso, andaba ha poco sumas hilando y revolviendo cifras. I have earned the bread: let poetry be made, and in its sweet commerce let the hand work— a hand that, however lost a fugitive it be in the dark underbrush, or as one dragging behind him an enormous weight, has until recently been adding and spinning numbers.14 Poetry is the site of an alternative commerce. Moreover, it seems emblematic that in those years, Martí’s poetry insistently comes to locate the scene of writing in the night, in an interior, always after work. This sense of having 

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been freed from the day implies the literary subject’s will to autonomy, his distantiation from the rationalizing and instrumental logic that defines the modern social order. Hence, in order to understand the density and specificity that the interior claims for itself, one would need to determine what is outside. The chronicle, thus, can be read as a discursive domain in which the poet encounters the city as the outside. As we will soon see, Martí sought an alternative to alienated labor sold at the trading table in the early s. He continued to promote himself as an intermediary between the United States and various Latin American groups, especially in Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina. The mediator function is already at work in his translation for Appleton House, which faced with the absence of a publishing industry in Latin America, produced books for the growing Hispanic public—not only in New York, but in Mexico and Havana as well.15 We can also read Martí’s work for the newspaper La América (between  and ) in terms of the strategies of the intermediary/translator. La América, as a number of Martí’s contributions show, was published in New York for the Hispanic community; but it was also a much larger commercial project. It circulated in various Latin American countries, where it served as a showcase for the most recent advances of North American technology, and acted as a general liaison in a network of trade and commerce.16 This can be seen, for example, in advertisements for the most varied and at times somewhat unusual inventions, which Martí covered for the newspaper.17 It was a fait accompli that Martí would not last long in this post: in , he had conflicts with the publishers and was once again committed to looking for alternatives. In , he writes Mercado: I have considered the prospect of becoming a publisher for cheap and useful books, for education and whatever might help it: books that could be made here [New York] in accordance with the nature and necessities of our peoples and countries, the kind that they can obtain by applying [the knowledge] themselves. These books could be sold in Mexico primarily, with the smallest margin of profit.18 This project, for Martí, represented the potential of developing an independent publishing industry, outside the reach of rapacious publishers— perhaps Appleton, one might suspect. Although the project did not go very far, the first book that the new enterprise launched was Ramona, the translation of a novel by Helen Hunt Jackson: ‘‘Ramona is very interesting to me, and perhaps the basis of my independence’’ (p. ). Prior to the publication Journalism and Literature

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of the book in , Martí had already succeeded in selling , copies in Buenos Aires (p. ). He published a second edition that same year, which quickly sold out. The most effective means of subsistence through writing, however, was journalism. From the beginning of the s, Martí, who was working as a foreign correspondent for Caracas’s La Opinión Nacional (–) and La Nación of Buenos Aires (–), had recognized the attraction that the new U.S. press held for the Latin American reading public. Martí describes to Mercado his utilitarian merchandise, superior for its importance, the chronicle: I have imagined myself seated at my table to write, throughout the whole month, as if I were here publishing a review: the mail leaves from New York to a country of ours: I cover anything noteworthy that has happened: political cases, social studies, theater bills and literary announcements, novelties, and peculiar aspects of this land. . . . In sum, a Review, done in New York on all the things that might interest our impatient and imaginative cultured readers, but done in such a way that it could be published in the daily press. . . . For little, I propose to give much; something of value not because of me, but because it speaks of the interesting, new, and vivid. (p. ) The chronicle emerges as a showcase for modern life, produced for a cultured reader longing for a foreign modernity. Certainly, this gesture of advertising the modern, tied to the ideology and form of the travelogue (an extremely popular genre among patricians), does not entirely define Martí: in fact, he will bring the chronicle to unhoped-for realms, transforming it into a critique of the intermediary, incorporative gesture of the cosmopolitan traveler—the import journey. This critique notwithstanding, the traveler’s mediation between a foreign modernity and a desiring public makes possible the emergence of the chronicle—even for Martí. In the quotation above, then, we find indications of a fundamental conflict: writing in the newspaper as something of value not because of me. On the other hand, poetry, contrary to the newspaper, is projected as the ‘‘refuge of the outlawed.’’ 19 In other words, in contrast to the Enlightenment men of letters (letrados), journalistic labor is for Martí conflictive, opposed to the ‘‘highest’’ and ‘‘most subjective’’ values of poetic discourse. Yet, at the same time, the newspaper represented a way of life much closer to those ‘‘instruments of labor, which are my tongue and my pen,’’ as Martí described it, than to the buying and selling (or governing) of imported information. By , Martí had already been published in over twenty newspapers, although it appears that not all of them respected the author’s copyrights that Martí demanded.20 

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If we have emphasized this mundane aspect of Martí’s life, we have done so with a twofold purpose. First, to highlight the fact that, in modernity, even heroes are subject to the laws of exchange; frequently, it was precisely this subjection that triggered a critical discourse that later led Martí and others to fashion themselves an image of purity and heroism. But more important still, to point out the fragility of the institutional basis supporting the fin de siècle literary field—a fragility that forced literature (not only the literato) to depend on external institutions in order to consolidate and legitimize a domain of authority in society. Once again, this brings us to the heterogeneity of Latin American literatures, particularly at the turn of the century. Journalism and Nation Building And yet, this heterogeneity—even in the hybrid form of journalism—does not correspond to a discursive heteronomy. A crucial aspect of the modernist chronicle is that although it expresses a literary dependence on the newspaper, it nevertheless does not constitute a kind of free-for-all ‘‘melting pot’’ of hybridity. Rather, the chronicle reflects a discursive field contested by competing subjects or authorities. In this field, the will to aestheticize appears, at times, even more emphatic in the newspaper than in poetry itself. Thus, the uneven autonomization of Latin American literature must not be confused with the continuation of a traditional (heteronomous) discourse motivated by the ‘‘civilization/barbarism’’ dichotomy. Without a doubt, aesthetic authority is one of the generative forces of the fin de siècle chronicle, all the more so as other authorities and functions sought to limit its aesthetic autonomy. Moreover, it is necessary to consider the limit implied by journalism for literature in terms of a double function. On the one hand, journalism relativizes and subordinates the authority of the literary subject. Yet at the same time, this concern for a discrete demarcation between the proper field of the literary subject and other discursive functions (tied to journalism and the emergent urban cultural industry) paradoxically made it possible to conceive the interior domain of modern poetry and poetic subjectivity in Latin America. In other words, within the very confines of the newspaper and in opposition to it, the literary subject brings himself into being, and this at the precise moment of confrontation with the antiaesthetic zones of journalism and mass culture. In this sense, the chronicle was ironically a condition of possibility for poetic modernization. If poetry, for the modernists (Martí included, at certain moments), is the literary interior par excellence, the chronicle represents and thematizes the exteriors, tied to the city as well as the newspaper itself, which the interior obliterates.21 Hence, the chronicle as defined by its Journalism and Literature

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reflection on the conflict of authorities may be read as the process of production for this later reified, purified poetic interior. Literature’s dependency on the newspaper, then, could suggest some kind of continuity with respect to the field of the republic of letters, in which journalism had been a quintessential medium. But then there arises the following question: doesn’t the intense participation of fin de siècle writers in journalism (a participation that, in Martí’s case, surpasses his involvement with all other positions of the intellectual or writer) prove the civil character of their writing, their integral and organic role (in the Gramscian sense) in the public sphere, as well as their affinity with the previous model of the letrado or publicist? After all, as shown earlier, the difference between the lettered (letrado) field and the literary (literario) one following the s cannot be solely established in relation to the market factor, since long before the turn of the century, writing (in newspapers) was already subject to the laws of economic exchange.22 How, then, can one differentiate Martí’s journalism and the modernist chronicle from the earlier system of publicity? What had journalism been before? Briefly, one can say that between the period of emancipation and the consolidation of nation-states all the way to the last quarter century, journalism had been the basic means of distribution for writing. And as we saw in the readings of Sarmiento and Bello, writing was the model, in its ordered and ordering tendency toward common sense,23 for a rationalized public sphere. Journalism, then, would not represent a conflict for literature, given precisely the nonexistence of a specifically aesthetic authority endowed with some degree of autonomy. Under the system of the republic of letters, it was the site where the rationality, enlightenment, and culture that separated civilization from barbarism was debated. Hence, it would be possible to think of the journalism of that (previous) period as the site where the polis—the public sphere—was formalized along the lines of rationalization. Journalism had been critical for the production of a sense of nationality, what Benedict Anderson calls an imagined community.24 In his history of the formation of national subjects, Anderson emphasizes the importance of writing for the regulation and delimitation of the national space. Journalism produces a public on which, at least in the beginning, the images of the emergent nation are formed. The newspaper is not only a consolidating agent of the market, a fundamental aspect of the modern concept of the nation; the newspaper also contributes to the production of a field of identity, a national subject, initially inseparable from the public reader(ship) of the newspaper. In Latin America, for Anderson, the lack of a communication network among different areas of the continent—the fact that newspapers would localize, in 

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a reductive manner, their image of the public—in part explains the impossibility of the project to unify the continent under a common state, as the United States had done. Anderson’s thesis aside, during the period between approximately  and , the newspaper was a generator of new national subjects in another way. It not only solidified the feeling of rationality—an order implying stability and the delimitation of nationalities—but also enabled that order to extend across the insubordinate and illiterate areas of barbarism. Transforming the barbarian into a reader, subjecting his orality to the law of writing (we have already seen this in Bello and Sarmiento), was one of the projects tied to the will to generate a national space. Journalism, then, was a pedagogical invention basic to the formation of citizenship. The pages of José Antonio Saco on journalism in La vagancia en Cuba (Report on Vagrancy in Cuba) are illuminating (regardless of the fact that they were written in colonial Cuba). Let us recall that, for Saco, writing was a tool for the rationalization of labor, another condition of possibility for modernization. Saco points out: When the necessary funds are gathered together, and education is spread throughout the entire island, how different will the luck of her inhabitants be! Then, and only then, can the subjects of knowledge and the understanding be popularized, no less useful to agriculture and the arts, as to the domestic and moral order of our rustic population. I will not ask for this, that professors or professorial chairs be set up in the fields. A newspaper, that perhaps as an outlet for essays could be established in some spot, a newspaper, I repeat, in which moral maxims would be published, and good counsel regarding the domestic economy, the important discoveries, the machines and improvements in agriculture, the methods of acclimatizing new animal breeds and of perfecting those that we already have; in a word, all that one might consider necessary for the progress of the branches that constitute our wealth, would contribute overwhelmingly to the prosperity of the island. . . . A newspaper of this nature being the most reliable vehicle for spreading the knowledge of things, and improving on the customs of the rustic population, there can be no doubt that it ought to be under the auspices of the town and city councils and patriotic societies. Its publication could be assigned to two or more individuals belonging to the locale, or outside of it, the cost of print being taken from its funds, and having a suitable number of copies [of the newspaper] distributed freely among the rural folk. . . . Certainly the distribution of this paper would be inconvenient; Journalism and Literature

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but the difficulty will be equalized, given the proper mediation by the rural priests, or the army captains, who will easily be able to distribute it every Sunday in the parish where the parishioners congregate. It would be useful, when after the mass [the newspaper] would be read outside the church in a loud voice, by a respectable person, because in this way a greater interest would be given it; it would become the topic of conversations; the most learned would clarify the doubts of the less intelligent; and the attention of all having been absorbed by such a recommended object, many of our farmers would no longer spend their Sundays around the gambling table, or delivered up to other dangerous pastimes.25 The newspaper was to be a means of incorporating the other, a means of rationalizing labor. Once again, Saco’s imaginary architectonics merit attention. The church and its traditional intellectuals are given a new function, contributing to the extension of modernity. But a problem immediately arises: how would writing incorporate an illiterate public? At this moment, the function of the mediator becomes clear: s/he would be a kind of educator who reads the newspaper aloud for the illiterate community. In other words, thanks to these intermediaries, writing would become capable of extending its domain beyond the reduced world of the local urban public. This was, no doubt, one of the key functions of the gauchesca poet in Argentina, where poetry produced by men of letters (letrados) was transformed into a kind of newspaper of/for illiterates: a newspaper for ‘‘barbarians’’ (at the different moments that overdetermine the development of the genre, from Bartolomé Hidalgo to José Hernández) who were interpellated by different subjects seeking to dominate the emergent field of national identity. Toward the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the place of the newspaper in society changes within a wider transformation in the field of social communication. As nations consolidated themselves, autonomizing the political sphere into new states capable of generalizing their jurisdiction, the concept of the public underwent a number of significant transformations. These came about, in part, as a result of a new division of labor, concomitant to the transformation of those threads that articulated the discursive fabric of the social. Such restructuring, as Jürgen Habermas has shown, affected in particular the relation between the public and private.26 The emergence of a new field of privacy, which comes to be set in opposition to the reified communication of the social, was crucial to the emergent modern literature. Within this transformation of the public and private realms, journalism plays an important role: it rationalizes its medium, it differentiates its 

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political-state functions. To put it another way, the newspaper had earlier served to bring the rationalizing will into being, thus satisfying a state function. Now its relation to the state changes: despite the fact that the newspaper neither refrains from assuming political positions (at times openly partisan) nor stops being ideological, we begin to see the newspaper’s tendency to distance itself from public affairs, now properly located within the jurisdiction and concerns of the state.27 In order to trace the itinerary of the newspaper’s relative estrangement from the state, it would be appropriate to examine the case of La Nación, without a doubt the most modern and modernizing newspaper of the period, where Martí as well as Darío, among others, published the greater part of their chronicles. This will enable us to later approximate the place of literature in journalism at the turn of the century and take up again the problem of the newspaper’s heterogeneity as it is reflected in the chronicle. La Nación of Buenos Aires In contemporary societies that find expression through technologies of communication, at times quite complex and refined, it would perhaps be difficult to understand the importance that a simple newspaper could have in the organization of the life-world of societies at the turn of the century. For example, the travel itinerary of any piece of news before  between London, Paris, and Buenos Aires would strike us as unbelievable today. That year in Buenos Aires, La Nación inaugurated the telegraphic service, affiliated with the Paris Havas Agency, and announced in headlines that the distance between Europe and Argentina would be forever reduced. Before that year, any information, even commercial, arrived in the form of letters by boat fifteen days after its departure from Portugal, making stops in Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo before arriving in Buenos Aires.28 Only a few years after the installation of the telegraph, newspaper editors were saying: Six years ago, before La Nación inaugurated the first European telegraph system that has ever existed in the Río de la Plata, the events of European countries, in whose life we participate so closely, in a community [tied] by blood . . . , by thought, no less than by reciprocal interests in commerce and industry, came to us when they had run their course along with more than the necessary time for them to have been forgotten. . . . Today this no longer happens: information that affects intercontinental interests in one way or another arrives at the precise moment that it is required.29 Journalism and Literature

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In general, the historians of the period—the epoch of Latin America’s incorporation into the global economy, as Argentine historian Tulio Halperín Donghi has shown 30—do not give much attention to the importance that the new means of communication had in terms of social modernization. It has been overstated that the press contributed to the articulation of local and even international markets, and that the newspaper in some way remains an archive of quotidian practices in those societies. Yet the absence of more or less rigorous histories of journalism, the development of which has often been the object of narratives and anecdotes from journalists themselves, is striking. Even so, it is nevertheless possible to argue that the development of the press in the nineteenth century—as the modernizing patricians had foreseen—was a condition of possibility for the modernization and social reorganization that characterizes the fin de siècle. In terms of our objectives, we must limit ourselves to one aspect of such a reorganization, particularly in the area that concerns the change in the relation between the newspaper and public life. A paradoxical effect of the newspaper, even as it was rationalizing its medium, was the development of a certain literature tied to the modernist chronicle. As described earlier, La Nación was founded in  by Bartolomé Mitre, two years after serving his presidential term. To a certain degree, the newspaper continued the project of its predecessor, La Nación Argentina, edited by José María Gutiérrez. During Mitre’s presidency, La Nación Argentina had practically been an official organ of the Liberal Party—a role that lasted until , the year dominated by Mitrism. It is necessary to stress the prior state function of La Nación Argentina because Mitre—already under Sarmiento’s presidency—founded La Nación specifically with the objective of initiating an independent press, autonomous from the state. Here, Mitre explains the necessity of reformulating the role of the press: Today the combat has ended. Yes, it has indeed ended, and we are triumphant in all questions of national organization, which have been resolved or which are well on the way to a solution that cannot change. Nationality is a fact and an indestructible right, accepted and applauded by her very adversaries in other times. . . . The great contest is over. . . . La Nación Argentina was the battle. La Nación will be an advocacy. . . . With the nationality having been founded, it is necessary to propagate and defend the principles by which it has been inspired, the institutions that are its base, the guarantees that it has created for all, the practical ends that it seeks, the moral and material means that have placed [the newspaper] in the service of those ends.31 

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In effect, the national territory was considered relatively consolidated under the power of a central, state-governing law, whose authority, at least in principle, was accepted by distinct dominant groups. The press, which up until that point had been a key element for the centralization and delimitation of the nation, and hence tied to the politics of the state, now had to reformulate its functions. It is evident that La Nación, particularly until , would continue to be a good example of political journalism, a journalism of opinion (characteristic of traditional public life). The newspaper, in spite of Mitre’s claims in that first editorial, initially constituted a party organ: a means of anti-Sarmiento dissidence in the Liberal Party, which would lead Mitre to attempt a coup d’état against Nicolás Avellaneda soon after the  presidential elections. The newspaper became the mouthpiece of the emergent Nationalist Party, behind the eventual split of the Liberal Party into mitristas and alsinistas-autonomistas in Buenos Aires. Thus, the newspaper continued to be conscripted by institutions of the political field. Throughout the next two decades, the political and partisan function of the newspaper remained dominant. Of equal weight in this period, however, would be its progressive modernization, in terms of print technology as well as the rationalization and specification of its new social functions—primarily tied to information and commercial advertising. While these new functions, which were concomitant with the emergence of new journalistic discourses (and forms of writing), would not entirely displace the traditional, partisan function of the press, the modernization of the newspaper would demand a certain autonomization from the political. In , after Mitre’s incarceration (for the frustrated coup d’état just mentioned) and the consequent sequestration of La Nación, the newspaper would undergo a significant transformation. A newspaper writer recounted that epoch of change: Since [the  sequestration,] La Nación took the lead among all the other newspapers in Buenos Aires. Its administration gave a commercial character to the enterprise, [which had been] until that time exclusively political; and the daily paper, without ceasing to maintain its colors, entered into a more solid terrain, as it was now channeled into the current of information from which it had been separated, and which is the principal source on which journalism feeds.32 Enrique de Vedia, Mitre’s nephew, came to be the new driving force behind the newspaper. Vedia recognized that in order to survive as a commercial enterprise, the newspaper had to become autonomous from the most Journalism and Literature

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immediate political events of the day. If the newspaper, as Mitre had himself projected, was going to serve as a catalyst for modernization, it had to move beyond the limited sphere of the party. The paper had to reach an increasingly heterogeneous audience; it had to become an advertising agent for sectors that might well be politically antagonistic. La Nación began to proclaim its objectivity, hence deploying a strategy of legitimation that emphasized its will to autonomy and modernization. Beginning with Vedia’s editorship, the newspaper submitted itself to a new division of labor. Initially, the owner-editor (in this case Mitre) was a producer and writer, even as he personally supervised the very printing of the paper, in a setup that could be typically regarded as artisan. And certainly, the fact that the production of the paper would be carried out in Mitre’s own house (until ) indicates that the spaces of privacy and work were not yet fully differentiated—a contrast to the later period of professionalization, marked by a significant split between the private and public life of the subject. During Vedia’s tenure, these aforementioned tasks began to undergo specialization. This change was particularly salient in the distribution—and in the very discourses—of journalism. Information progressively acquired importance in the newspaper, as the space for advertisements expanded and became technically modernized. Still, in , Mitre was able to publish his Historia de Belgrano in installments, each of which occupied a third of the immense first page of the newspaper’s Folletín (serial) section. Yet this type of discursive indifferentiation from the previous period of journalism had already begun to change. The predominance of partisan editorials throughout the s also diminished, especially with the new informative discourse that was already starting to be the newspaper’s specialized function. To a certain degree, these effects had to do with the process of autonomization of the press within a larger transformation in the fabric of social communication. This transformation of the social fabric is crystallized in precisely the emergence of the press as a medium for a new mass culture: a function opposed to its earlier political utility. Habermas describes the autonomization and relegitimation of the press: Only with the establishment of the bourgeois constitutional state and the legalization of a political public sphere was the press as a forum of rational-critical debate released from the polemical stance and able to concentrate on the profit opportunities for a commercial business. In Great Britain, France, and the United States at about the same time (the s) the way was paved for this sort of transition from a press that     

took ideological sides to one that was primarily a business. The advertising business put financial calculation on a whole new basis.33 For Habermas, the passage from a press of opinion—which brought the reasoning, discussion, and privacy inserted into the public of the liberal era into existence—toward a properly commercial and organic press for an emergent consumer society, marks a fundamental change in the history of capitalism. The shift in the press crystallizes and promotes a radical transformation in the relation between the private and public in a society increasingly dominated by the developing culture industry, along with a concept of the public that excludes the discussion and participation that (for Habermas) characterized communication in the liberal period of the European bourgeoisie. Social communication, the field of the public sphere dominated by the culture industry, is thus constituted as the sum of pseudoprivacies in a fragmented and reified life-world.34 Habermas’s history of the concept of the public and its changing relationship with the private sphere is a valuable source, particularly for its exceptional theoretical grasp of the history of journalism, a field dominated by empiricism. A nostalgic idealization of social communication in the liberal era of capitalism, however, becomes evident in his sometimes emphatic critique of the culture industry, typical of the s (and the Frankfurt School tradition from which Habermas had started and later broke away). To this, the following question must be posed: what social agent determined the consensus, the ratiocination, in the spaces of discussion (that is, the press, clubs, etc.) of the liberal era? For whom did the consensus apply, and what use or abuse of power did the consensus serve? Finally, what social groups—or for that matter, other communicative games—did reasoning exclude or suppress? The transformation of social communication was quite uneven in Latin America: we would be mistaken to assume the European model, which traces the passage from the liberal era to advanced capitalism, as an explanation for the transformations at the turn of the century. For example, even throughout the last two decades of the nineteenth century, La Nación continued to be an extremely hybrid newspaper, which preserved vestiges of traditional journalism even as it radically modernized its discursive and technologized organization. More in the tradition of French journalism than that of the emergent North American yellow journalism, La Nación never limited its function to the transmission of information. Neither can its discursive organization be discussed in terms of a culture industry distinctive of advanced capitalism. Still, we cannot underestimate the kind of modernization proposed by the newspaper, not only as the periodical’s entrepreneurial project, but as a Journalism and Literature

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model of transformation for Argentina in general as well—very much along the lines of the developmentalist ideology of Mitre himself. In terms of the rationalization of newspaper discourses, the inauguration of the telegraph service was decisive. It enabled the community of readers to represent themselves as a nation inserted into a universe articulated by means of a communication network that contributed greatly to the systematization of the international market of the period. For La Nación, the telegraph quickly began to supply commercial communiques, supplemented (beginning in ) by biweekly bulletins that announced new products ready to be exported to Europe. In and of themselves, these novel advertisements, which filled almost half of the newspaper throughout the s, served as a showcase for the most modern agricultural implements—as well as objects of wealth and luxury—from English, French, and North American companies. The newspaper thus became an essential intermediary between foreign capital and the commercial sectors of Buenos Aires, the latter of which were becoming increasingly more powerful. The telegraph’s capacity for transmitting information also had significant effects on the rationalization of newspaper discourses. It stimulated the specialization of a new kind of writer, the reporter, delegated to a new linguistic and commercial object: the bulletin. When ‘‘Sansón Carrasco’’ recalled the changes that the newspaper underwent under Vedia’s leadership, he indicated in reference to Emilio Mitre (a reporter and son of the patrician) that: The traveler was dedicated to studying English journalism . . . and little by little continued to introduce to the great Argentine daily paper the reforms that he believed necessary. . . . A practical spirit, like Vedia, Emilio Mitre has cast aside the rubbish in order to replace it with substance, giving to the bulletin the importance that it deserves.35 This specialization, at the same time, tended to problematize the legitimacy of letters in the new journalism. As another newspaper writer explained: Journalism and letters seem to agree with one another like the devil and holy water. In fact, the essential qualities of literature are a forceful conciseness, inseparable from endless labor, the elegance of forms. . . . The good journalist, on the contrary, cannot allow his pen to be lost in the fields of fantasy.36 Today, the antithesis between journalism and literature would seem to us a given. In the s, however, this distinction between literature and the use of a specifically journalistic language was relatively new. The antithesis indicated the fragmentation of discursive functions presupposed by the     

modern literary subject, who emerged precisely in the ‘‘field of fantasy’’ and labored in the ‘‘elegance of forms.’’ Under the earlier system, the intellectual was a publicist and the newspaper was the place of letters, operating as an extension to the order of writing. But in the s, that undifferentiated lettered intellectual and his function began to be questioned, even as letters and writing shattered into practices—at times antagonistic—that competed for authority within a new division of labor on language. Along with this change came the relative dissolution of the class exclusivity of writing, in a system where (thanks, in part, to the market) writers of the new middle classes proliferated.37 A relative democratization of writing was brought about, described by Martí in  as follows: With the descent of the lofty heights, the lower plains have risen to an equal level, which will make passage through the land much easier. The individual geniuses turn out to be less, because they continue to lack the smallness of those convolutions that had once elevated their writing to such a great degree. And as everyone continues to learn how to harvest the fruits of nature and to hold her flowers in their estimation, the old masters touch the flower and the fruit less, and the new peoples who were before the mere cohort of those venerators of the good harvests, more. It is as though we are witnessing a decentralization of the intellect. The beautiful has come to be the realm of all people.38 In contrast to many of his contemporaries (with perhaps the exception of González Prada), Martí frequently looked on this reorganization with optimism, as an opening up of intellectual domains. But his positive vision of journalism was not the norm in the literary field of the period. Although Latin American literature at the turn of the century depended on the press for its distribution, the new writers often represented (even in the newspaper) their own opposition to the uses of writing that journalism was in the process of instituting. Ironically enough, they generally represented journalism as one of the essential reasons for the crisis of literature. Mexican writer and intellectual Justo Sierra wrote: The newspaper [is the] book’s matador (the matador of Notre Dame), that continues to make of literature a report, that transforms poetry into a chemical analysis of the poet’s piss.39 Gutiérrez Nájera contended that: In this case, as in many, the telegraph has lied. This great talker, this winged and subtle reporter, does not wait for the news to be confirmed Journalism and Literature

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for it to be transmitted . . . and does not repair the damage that its stammerings, its mistakes, its bad spelling can produce. It is industrial, commercial. . . . The telegram has neither literature, nor grammar, nor spelling. It is brutal.40 Darío added: The task of a literary writer [literato] in the daily paper is overwhelmingly burdensome. First, the jealousy of the journalists. The reporter feels usurped, and for a reason. The literary writer can make a report: [but] the reporter cannot possess that which is simply called style. . . . In sum: the literary writer should be paid . . . for quality, the journalist for quantity; the former for art, for ideas, the latter for information.41 And Casal exclaimed: Yes! Journalism, as we still understand it to be, is the most nefarious institution for those who, neither knowing how to place their pen in the service of small causes nor valuing at all the ephemeral applause of the worthless crowd, feel possessed by the love of art, but [it is a love] of art for art’s sake, not the art that dominates in our society.42 Anticipating some of the topics in the critique of mass culture, which today serves to legitimize a great deal of high intellectual production, González Prada himself observed: For the multitude that cannot or does not want to be nourished by the book, the newspaper satisfies the only cerebral nutrition available: thousands and thousands of men have their newspaper, which they keep every day, like a good friend, bearer of news and advice. Where the volume has not succeeded in penetrating, the feature page has easily slipped through. . . . However, journalism has not ceased to produce great liabilities. It spreads a literature of clichés or stereotypes, it favors the intellectual idleness of the crowds, and kills or puts to sleep individual initiatives. There abound minds that cannot function until their daily paper delivers to them a jolt: a kind of electric lamp, which is only lit when the current is discharged from the central office.43 To a certain degree, the new antagonism is a consequence of the competition brought about by the rise of new writing authorities, and the struggle of traditional intellectuals (in the Gramscian sense) against organic writers in the new information market. In Habermas’s terms, this conflict was a 

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contest between the journalism of private writers and the public services of mass media: The relationship between publisher and editor changed correspondingly. Editorial activity had, under the pressure of the technically advanced transmission of news, in any event already become specialized; once a literary activity, it had become a journalistic one. The selection of material became more important than the lead article; the processing and evaluation of news and its screening and organization more urgent than the advocacy of a ‘‘line’’ through an effective literary presentation. Especially since the s the tendency has become manifest: the rank and reputation of a newspaper are no longer primarily a function of its excellent publicists but of its talented publishers. The publisher appoints editors in the expectation that they will do as they are told in the private interest of a profit-oriented enterprise.44 One might conclude, at least for now, that this progressive displacement of ‘‘high’’ writers from their central place in the newspaper created tension between a new journalism that had grown increasingly specialized during the s and the literatos, above all the chroniclers, who continued to depend on the newspaper. At first sight, then, it would seem that literary journalism in Latin America during the last two decades of the century represents an instance of a traditional discourse and authority, which had entered into the period of the newspaper’s modernization; the chronicle would thus seem to be a residual form, tied to an earlier system of letters and displaced, in part, by the emergent information market in the newspaper.45 This would lead us, once again, to see the relation between literature and the market (in the newspaper) along the lines of a crisis, in accordance with the self-representation of the fin de siècle literary writers. As Gutiérrez Nájera described it: The chronicle, ladies and gentlemen, is in these passing days, an anachronism. . . . The chronicle—venerable Nao of China—has died in the hands of the reporter.46 In fact, such complaints of the literatos in the new fin de siècle newspapers were systematic, formulated, in general, in terms of the crisis of literature in a society governed by productivity and efficiency—all of which found an emblem in the power of a new monster: technology.47 The crisis, in a sense, corresponded to what was in effect a reorganization of the intellectual field and a redistribution of powers belonging to different discourses within the fabric of social communication. But as we have hinted at earlier, Journalism and Literature

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the crisis was also a rhetoric legitimizing the emergence of new writers from within the greater transformations of the intellectual field. From the perspective of journalism, the question would be whether there actually was a displacement of literary authority in the newspaper and the new market; or if to the contrary, this literary authority—albeit limited by other discursive functions at work in the newspaper—proliferated in the turn-of-the-century press, often as a critique of the market and emergent mass culture. In examining the place of letters in La Nación, the displacement of certain traditional forms merits some attention, for it coincides with the modernization of the newspaper medium and its languages (which were already relatively oriented toward commercial publicity and information). To cite an example, throughout the s, the chronicles or conversations of Aben Xoar (Arabic for ‘‘son of the conversation’’) had occupied a privileged place on the newspaper’s front page. These older chronicles, rooted in regionalism or costumbrismo, also provided a space for local literary texts as well as translations, less frequently, of European classics, according to the norms of the dominant taste in the (still) ‘‘big town’’ [ gran aldea] of Buenos Aires. This type of writing—also tied to the limited world of the club, a fundamental institution in the traditional system of letters—faced a crisis in the newspaper’s phase of modernization. At the beginning of the s, the space of Aben Xoar (or similar forms of regionalist costumbrismo) shrinks, while journalistic information expanded. At the same time, however, new forms of literature and new translations of European authors gained importance, leading to a change in the literary orientation of the newspaper and its readers. In , one of the writers for La Nación commented: The household pseudopoetry in the columns of a daily paper—one must not confuse it with the inspired writings of genius. Its life [is] limited to the narrow circle of the Club: Today for you, tomorrow for me, lasts for as long as it takes for the chroniclers [in the style of Aben Xoar, presumably] to remember it. . . . This literature attacks the human organism, paralyzing the circulation of blood. Reading it makes us suffer along with Byron, Schiller, and Hugo, who inspired [these poets], who cannot imagine that from them have come forth such offspring.48 This kind of debate, launched from within the newspaper’s opposition to the institution and traditional taste of the club, is significant in understanding the change in the place of letters during the period. In fact, from 

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the beginning of  (when Aben Xoar disappears from La Nación) onward, it will become more difficult to find that type of household literature in the newspaper. Yet literature does not entirely disappear. To the contrary, La Nación progressively becomes a showcase for the most recent intellectual production in Europe. Throughout the s and s, the newspaper’s pages will include contributions from the newest Latin American writers (not only Argentines) of the period, like Martí and Darío. Of course, it is impossible to fix the literary ideology of the newspaper, forever hybrid. In the s, for example, European writers like Victor Hugo, Alphonse Lamartine, Théophile Gautier, Heinrich Heine, Edmondo de Amicis, Alexandre Dumas, and later Émile Zola, were frequently featured. But starting in , the first page of the newspaper included a translation of Edgar Allan Poe (‘‘Berenice’’), who until then was practically unknown throughout the continent. And some years later, in , Martí published his ‘‘Oscar Wilde’’—a work that occupied more than a third of the immense front page of La Nación—in which he describes the emergence of a new literature in England and Europe.49 Indeed, La Nación was transformed, albeit unevenly, into a place for the literary vanguard of the epoch, in the same movement as it technologized its material and discursive production—crystallizing, in more than one sense, the process of modernization in Buenos Aires at the turn of the century. One may be tempted to think that in spite of the evident promotion of the new literature in the newspaper, the relation between journalism and literature was merely contingent, and that the newspaper was simply a means of distribution for a literature lacking in institutional bases. Such was the case, at least in part, as we have earlier tried to show. Still, the relationship is much more complex, and constitutes a privileged object of analysis of the interaction between the emerging literary field, the market, and the mass culture of the modern city. Only in the web of these relations can journalism be understood. For instance, in the case of Darío, for whom journalism clearly constituted a problem, La Nación was not simply the means of access to a new public and a new salary that would render possible a certain economic autonomy from state politics. La Nación, as Darío recalls in his Autobiografía (Autobiography), was a workshop for formal experimentation: Before embarking for Nicaragua [in ] I was informed that I would have the honor of meeting the great Chilean Don José Victoriano Lastarria [in Valparaíso]. And it was in this manner: for a long time I had as a keen aspiration [the hope of ] being a foreign correspondent for La Journalism and Literature

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Nación of Buenos Aires. I must emphasize that it is in this newspaper where I understood in my own way the craft of style and that at that time my masters of prose were two very different men: Paul Groussac and Santiago Estrada, aside from José Martí.50 (Italics added) It seems almost impossible to imagine Darío as a cross between Groussac, Estrada, and Martí. In any case, we are more interested in what Darío points out here about the newspaper as a place for learning the craft of style. Let us recall that style was the very specifying mechanism of the literary during that period, frequently placed in opposition to unstylized, mechanical discourses of modernization (in Darío’s words, the reporter cannot have what is simply called style). Thus, the relation between the newspaper and the new literature was not strictly negative, as the chroniclers postulated in their discourse of crisis. The newspaper was a condition of possibility for literary modernization, although it also brought into being the limits of literature’s autonomy. Hence, the fin de siècle newspaper (La Nación, above all) may be a privileged site for studying the conditions of literary modernization, not only because of its positive relation with the new writers, who found recourse in an alternative place apart from traditional institutions; but also as a means of contact and cultivation of a new readership. The newspaper simultaneously condenses the irreducible aporias of the will to autonomy and the hybridity of the literary subject in Latin America. What exactly, then, was the place of new writers in the newspaper? Why does the newspaper promote the proliferation of modern literature, in the full swing of an epoch characterized by the rationalization of the newspaper’s technology and discourses? The Correspondents At this juncture, it might be appropriate to return briefly to Martí’s entrance into Buenos Aires’s La Nación in . Similar to his earlier involvement with La Opinión Nacional in Caracas, Martí was hired by the Argentine newspaper as a press correspondent from New York. In fact, many turn-of-the-century literatos, especially the chroniclers, found a space in the new press of the period by writing letters from foreign cities, which others would later edit in the form of books of chronicles. Such was Darío’s situation, as well as that of Argentine Enrique Gómez Carrillo—a chronicler par excellence (along with Amado Nervo in Mexico), who also wrote for La Nación (from the end of the s). Many chroniclers, of course, were not correspondents. Even if chroni

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clers were writing from their own cities, however, the rhetoric of travel (the mediation between the local public and foreign cultural capital) in various ways authorized and modeled many of their chronicles. This can be seen in the other influential chroniclers of the epoch: Gutiérrez Nájera and Casal. An explanation of those conditions in which the correspondents emerged and operated may help to elucidate the conditions of possibility for the modernist chronicle in general. Martí was not the first press correspondent for La Nación. According to the newspaper editors themselves, the first properly modern correspondent was Emilio Castelar from Spain, right in the period when the newspaper was amplifying its international web of communication with the new telegraph: The electric telegraph, which by means of a transatlantic cable anticipates for us day by day the index of the universal chronicle, has been for the first time applied by La Nación to the daily press in the Río de la Plata. And today, the authoritative and eloquent word of Castelar . . . relates, amplifies, and comments in a rich and abundant style about ideas, events that the telegraph transmits to us in a quick and dry language.51 The value of this brief note is not simply documentary. It enables us to underscore yet again the degree of differentiation and specialization in the concept of labor on language and writing within the newspaper’s administration itself. Opposed to the machinic language of the telegraph (let us recall Gutiérrez Nájera’s complaints, among others), the newspaper itself nurtured the proliferation of other discourses, which would come to supplement telegraphic information. Hence, it would be impossible to assume as such the insistence with which the literatos blamed information for the death of literature; an alibi that, on the other hand, represents an instance of the entirely ideologized originary opposition between art and mass culture, perhaps until today definitive for the modern aesthetic subject. The reverse side of this assertion regarding the crisis of literature in the newspaper is that chroniclers widened their field in the press precisely in the era of the telegraph. Clearly, one might be led to believe that Castelar in no way was a literato in the modern sense, and that to the contrary, from , he was the paradigm of the civil writer that the new literatos—Martí, Gutiérrez, and Casal— dismantled, above all in terms of their project to renovate prose. But beginning with Martí, under the administration of Mitre y Vedia, La Nación in  establishes a clear precedent, transforming correspondences into a site not only for informative discourse on foreign lands and peoples, but formal and literary experimentation as well. In , Sarmiento himself recognized Journalism and Literature

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in Martí’s correspondences a new labor on language: when Sarmiento asked Groussac to translate the Fiestas de la Estatua de la Libertad (Festivals regarding the Statue of Liberty) into French, he wrote: ‘‘In Spanish, nothing is as it seems when Martí lets loose his howls, and after Victor Hugo, France has not presented anything of this resounding din.’’ 52 Sarmiento’s other readings on Martí’s chronicles in La Nación are also significant in terms of the role the correspondent plays (here, the anxiety of influence is particularly sharp, although from the perspective of the father or model preceding an emergent subject): Don José Martí lacks one thing in order to be a publicist, now that his style has increasingly rid itself of ties or forms, precisely because he makes use of the entire arsenal of colloquialisms and catchphrases of the language, [both] archaic and modern, Spanish and Americanized, in accordance with what the most brusque movement of ideas may require, in a field more vast, more open, more subject to violence and to new atmospheric currents. But he has not received the inspiration from the people in the United States of America, where he lives, to regenerate and educate himself [as they do].53 Immediately after, Sarmiento defines the tasks of the press correspondent: How should a correspondent for South America write of the United States, bearing in mind that the correspondent of the daily paper is still somewhat more elevated than a reporter, another high functionary of knowledge . . . ? The correspondent is not our consul, who must sustain from afar who or what of his native land passes through there, rubbing elbows with foreign interests. He ought to be our eye, which contemplates the human movement where it is most accelerated, most intellectual, most free, most guided toward the heights of society, to be able to communicate this to us, in order to correct our extravagances, to show us the right way. (p. ) Sarmiento identifies the task of the correspondent along the lines of the import journey, which in various ways had been the means of authorizing his own discourse. In effect, the intellectual in Sarmiento had been a traveler, destined—due to the lack of modernity in his own society—to be a guide to foreign surplus: the traveler-intellectual points out the right way toward modernity. The correspondent also (according to Sarmiento) had to fulfill his 

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role as intermediary, thus legitimizing his discourse in terms of the modernizing project. But from Martí onward, as we will have the occasion to see in our reading of his North American Scenes, modernization has become problematic. Although Martí’s chronicles recognize in the import journey a condition for their authority and value for La Nación, they also constitute a critique of the modernizing project. A critique not only of the United States as an emblem of desired modernity for Sarmiento (and for the Mitrist developmentalism of La Nación), but of the very legitimacy of the patrician intellectual that Sarmiento epitomized.54 For now, let us concentrate on this central aporia in the constitution and very materiality of discourse in the chronicle. Although by means of the chronicle the literato seems to have found his place in the new newspaper, the writer also here remains subject to external interpellations (like those of Sarmiento), which among other things exacerbates and threatens his will to autonomy. In the chronicle, the literato had to inform, from within a field of discursive competition where informing would already represent a differentiated form antagonistic to literature. In other words, while neither the telegraph nor the reporter silenced the emergent literature, without a doubt information (among the chroniclers) constituted an other activity to literary practice. For example, the editor-owner of La Opinión Nacional, Fausto Teodoro Aldrey, in  demands of Martí: Among other things, I must notify you that the public has expressed its annoyance because of the extension of your latest reviews on Darwin, Emerson, etc., since the readers of this country want news briefs and political anecdotes, and as little literature as possible.55 (Italics added) In another letter from the same year, the editor adds: With respect to your letters I must own that the readers—for the most part—desire them to be more informative and less literary. . . . Of the telegraphic notices from everywhere, you may take part in discoursing in diverse manners, and attempt to divide them into two or more reviews. . . . The literary issue of which you speak does not seem to me befitting. I know the country and for the past twenty years I have been a newspaper writer in it. I have relied on the literatos for a long time now in order to edify and utilize them as a tool for editorial enterprises in all branches of the press, and I have spent thousands of pesos in the undertaking of Journalism and Literature

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this project. . . . I don’t want to have anything to do with them. They are a literary rat pack . . . and they bite. (pp. –; italics added) To inform/to make literature: the opposition is crucial and its historical significance, long after the turn of the century, cannot be reduced to the site of writing in the press; rather, it is an indication of the struggle for power over social communication that has characterized the modern intellectual field since the emergence of the culture industry. And the newspaper (before film, radio, and television) was its fundamental medium at the turn of the century. Certainly, Martí rarely criticized directly the emergence of information as new merchandise for the emergent culture industry. He even spent many years writing for Charles Dana, director of the New York Sun,56 which was one of the principal antecedents to the yellow press of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Even so, this struggle between authorities and discursive subjects, between the will to autonomy and external interpellations, is definitive for the heterogeneous space of Marti’s chronicles. Let us pause briefly, with a passage from one chronicle written for La Opinión Nacional that may well be read as a self-reflection on the conditions and struggles that define the genre: What does the cable, much less the correspondent, have to do other than—in an act of what may seem the tenacity of the pen or the affect—to faithfully reproduce the echoes of the country from which the word rises on wing, winds through the deep sea, witnesses the blue forests and the pearly fields of the ocean’s bosom, to arrive at last in the New York station, where hungry mouths on the bottom floor swallow telegrams that are given each morning to new readers about what was happening a few hours earlier in Europe? 57 This is a good example of a discourse that subverts its own assertion: the correspondent ought to faithfully reproduce, inform, but the very nature of his or her writing denies any norm of transparency in its referential or informative execution. The object of the statement is in itself revealing: Martí presents the process of telegraphic communication, from Europe to New York. The theme is technologized communication itself. The form of description, however—which displaces its object until the very end of the statement—is emphatic in its stylization, that characteristic feature of the literary that is exactly what Aldrey wanted to dispose of in his newspaper. In order to be able to speak in a newspaper, the literato adjusts himself to its exigency: he informs, and even takes up information as a privileged ob

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ject of his reflection. But, in the act of informing, he overwrites: he writes over the newspaper in a kind of palimpsest, which he continually reads even as he undertakes the task to verbalize in an entirely emphatic manner—a characteristic that the news bulletin did not possess.58 The chronicle, then, as an exercise of overwriting, highly stylized in Martí, is at once a newspaper and literary form. It is a heterogeneous yet not heteronomous discursive site: stylization (already noticed by Sarmiento in his reading of Martí) presupposes a literary subject, a literary authority, a highly specified gaze. The chronicle assumes this specified gaze, yet it is a gaze without a proper space; a gaze that is subordinated, limited, by other authorities that converge (in conflict with one another) in the chronicle. Thus, from a formal perspective, the chronicle may represent and even thematize the work of a literary subject (stylization) as well as the limits of his autonomy (information). If poetry ideally represented the interior of fin de siècle literature par excellence, in the sense that it constituted a field of immanence, purified or purifiable against external interpellations, then the chronicle in its (always contested) formal nature represents the struggle of authorities, a discursive competition, presupposed by the poetic interior. The interior, the field of identity for a subject (a literary subject, in this case), would therefore only acquire meaning in opposition to the exteriors that limit it, besiege it, but which also are the conditions of the subject’s possibility as they demarcate the outer limits of his domain. The limit or boundary is not strictly negative, as the modernists of the antiaesthetic space in the newspaper claimed. The boundary enables us to recognize the specificity of the interior: the emphasis on style (a device that specifies the literary subject at the turn of the century) only holds weight in inverse proportion to the antiaesthetic places in which it is at work. The chronicle was not a mere supplement to poetic modernization, an idea that dominates nearly all the historiography of modernism; rather, it was (in the literary subject’s encounter with other fields) the condition of possibility for a new degree of consciousness and self-reflexivity in this subject, well on the way to autonomization. Notes  See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).  Gayatri Spivak, in a brief commentary on Fernández Retamar, suggests that the place of Caliban also remains inscribed in Shakespeare’s work, in a symbolic field entirely European,

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in which otherness or the margin accomplishes nothing more than the consolidation of the identity of civilized Europe. See her ‘‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,’’ in Race, Writing, and Difference, special issue of Critical Inquiry , no.  (autumn ): . The abstract, ahistorical assertion of literature as an antidisciplinarian discourse or a critique of truth is one of the key ideologies for different poststructural (and) deconstructive positions. The instability of the literary subject is hypostatized and assumed in the abstract, as an absolute model for transgression. This kind of ideologization of the literary margin assumes that literature, far from the conjunctures in which it has been historically produced, is by definition a critique of power. See, for example, Jacques Derrida’s reading of Stéphane Mallarmé in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. A number of previous works on this topic have been essential to the theme of this chapter: Angel Rama, Los poetas modernistas en el mercado económico (Montevideo: Universidad de la República, ), included later in his Rubén Darío; David Viñas, ‘‘De los gentlemen-escritores a la profesionalización de la literatura,’’ in Literatura argentina y realidad política (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ); Noé Jitrik, ‘‘La máquina semiótica/la máquina fabril,’’ in Las contradicciones del modernismo (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, ); Carlos Monsiváis, A ustedes les consta. Antología de la crónica en Mexico (Mexico City: Biblioteca Era, ); and Aníbal González, La crónica modernista hispanoamericana (Madrid: Porrúa Turanzas, ). José Martí, Amistad funesta, in Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –),  [hereafter OC, followed by volume and page number]. José Martí, in OC, vol. , . Calixto Oyuela, ‘‘Asociaciones literarias,’’ from his Estudios literarios, the above fragment of which is found in Jorge B. Rivera, ed., El escritor y la industria cultural: El camino hacia la profesionalización (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ), . Julián del Casal, ‘‘Folletín: Crónica semanal,’’ in Crónicas habaneras, ed. Ángel Augier (Santa Clara, Cuba: Universidad Central de Las Villas, ), . Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘La protección de la literatura,’’ Obras. Crítica literaria, vol. , ed. E. Mejía Sánchez, comp. E. K. Mapes (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ), . See also Rubén Darío, ‘‘La vida literaria. A propósito de los últimos dos libros del general Mitre,’’ in Escritos inéditos de Rubén Darío, ed. E. K. Mapes (New York: Instituto de las Españas, ), –. Sylvia Molloy, ‘‘Conciencia del público y conciencia del yo en el primer Darío,’’ Revista Ibéroamericana – (): –; and Sylvia Molloy, ‘‘Voracidad y solipsismo en la poesía de Darío,’’ Sin Nombre  (): –. José Martí, Cartas a Manuel A. Mercado (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ),  [hereafter CMM]. José Martí, ‘‘Hierro,’’ in Versos libres, Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . As Martí mentions to Mercado, his translation of a novel by Hugh Conway for Appleton— published under the title Misterio—circulated in Havana and Mexico: ‘‘I sent him . . . a novel that I had translated, and in Havana at least, innumerable people have bought it. . . . As for the book, I don’t lend to it any more importance than what it has for me: a mouthful of bread. It may one day be considered great, but for me, in spite of my prose, it remains a dirty trick. El Nacional has been announcing it in big letters’’ (Martí, CMM, ). Buenos Aires’s La Nación, for example, received and reprinted La América articles written by

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Martí. Until the present day, a complete collection of La América has yet to be gathered, although some of its individual releases can be found in the Biblioteca Nacional in Havana. Volume  of Martí’s complete works (OC ), published in , contains many of these advertisements, fascinating because they are exemplary of Martí’s emphatic stylization, at work in even the most unsuspected of places. Martí, CMM, . Prologue originally intended for Flores del destierro, Obra literaria,  (see note ). ‘‘And the number of newspapers publishing my letters has surpassed twenty, with praises for which I am grateful, but all of which are offered freely, and like Molière, [the publishers] take them freely where they find them’’ (Martí, CMM, ). One might add that, in New York, Martí closely followed Mark Twain’s struggle (which included other writers on the way toward syndicalization) for the formalization of international laws on intellectual property. In other words, already at work in Martí is the modern notion of the writer as a producer, as a ‘‘cultural worker’’ (following the common expression). Regarding this dialectic between the exterior—tied to an emergent urban culture—and the interior of the aesthetic subject, one might easily point to Darío’s sonnet ‘‘De Invierno’’ (‘‘On Winter’’) in Prosas profanas. The following verse is particularly exemplary: ‘‘I enter, without making noise; I take off my gray overcoat’’ (‘‘entro, sin hacer ruido; dejo mi abrigo gris’’). The entrance into the interior enclosure can be seen as a process of purification for the subject who comes from outside, contaminated. The chronicle, on the other hand, assumes a movement in the opposite direction. Yet it is also certain that at the turn of the century, the position of the writer in the market changes significantly. With respect to this change, a letter from Bartolomé Mitre y Vedia (editor of La Nación, who later censored Martí’s first correspondence to the Argentine press) to Martí is entirely revealing: ‘‘A youth speaks to you, who probably has much more to learn from you than you from him, but insofar as he deals with a commodity—and please pardon the bluntness of the word, for the sake of exactitude—which seeks a favorable placement in the market that serves as a base for his operations, he tries, as it is his right and obligation, to come to an agreement with his agents and correspondents abroad regarding the most convenient means of giving to them the full value of which they are deserving’’ (in Papeles de Martí, vol. , ed. Gonzalo de Querada y Miranda [Havana: Imprenta El Siglo XX, ], ; letter dated September , ). Martí’s response is equally significant: ‘‘I write for people who must love me’’ (Nuestra América [Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), ]. Martí attempts to erase—with a rhetoric of love—the impersonality of the market. As Mitre y Vedia remind him, however, Martí was in reality writing for a reading public, within the communicative context where participants did not share a primary space for discussion that was not mediated by the market. This will be one of the greatest differences between Martí, along with the fin de siècle literary journalists, and the publicists from the republic of letters. For the latter, journalism still served to consolidate a localized, relatively organic, public domain, which materialized by means of a common language shared by the writer and his/her readers. In contrast, the public of Martí comes to be a mass, and the editor, basically, a merchant. Ramos is using ‘‘common sense’’ in the Kantian sense of the word, that is, common sense as a sensus communis, a ‘‘community of sense,’’ wherein there exists a sense of ‘‘commonness’’ along the lines of an unspoken and assumed consensus. Trans. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, ).

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José Antonio Saco, La vagancia en Cuba (; reprint, Havana: Cuadernos de Cultura, ), –. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, th ed., trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ), in particular chapters  and  on the transformation of the public sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. Regarding the change in function of the press, see Juan Bautista Alberdi, Cartas sobre la prensa y la política militante de la República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Estrada, ). The following exploration on the history of La Nación (–) is based, above all, on research conducted at Harvard University, the Biblioteca del Congreso Argentino, and the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires in . Other histories that were consulted include Oscar Beltrán, Historia del periodismo argentino, (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena, ); and Juan Romulo Fernández, Historia del periodismo argentino (Buenos Aires: Librera Perlado, ). The Artes y letras en La Nación de Buenos Aires (–) guide, edited by Beatriz Álvarez et al., was also quite useful. La Nación,  July , . Tulio Halperín Donghi, Contemporary History of Latin America, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), –. Bartolomé Mitre, ‘‘Nuevos horizontes’’, La Nación,  January , . La Nación,  February , . Habermas, Structural Transformation, . An important work on the history of the public/private relation is Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Sansón Carrasco (pseudo.), ‘‘El coloso de la prensa argentina,’’ La Nación,  February , . ‘‘Notas literarias: el periodismo y las letras,’’ La Nación,  November , . The access of new subjects to writing is, in part, a corollary of what Benjamin called the situation of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. The newspaper, in different ways, eliminates the aura and exclusivity of writing, even as it makes possible the emergence of new authors. See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, ). José Martí, ‘‘Prólogo al Poema del Niágara,’’ in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . Justo Sierra, Viajes, En tierra yankee, in Obras completas vol.  (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ), . Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Obras inéditas: Crónicas del Puck, ed. E. K. Mapes (New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, ), . Rubén Darío, ‘‘La enfermedad del diario,’’ in Escritos inéditos, ed. E. K. Mapes (New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, ), . Julián del Casal, ‘‘Bonifacio Byrne,’’ in Crónicas habaneras, ed. Angel Augier (Las Villas: Universidad Central, ), . Manuel González Prada, ‘‘Nuestro periodismo,’’ in Horas de lucha (Callao, Peru: Tipografía Lux, ), . Habermas, Structural Transformation, –. ‘‘Residual’’ refers to the well-known essay by marxist scholar and critic Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, esp. . Trans. Gutiérrez Nájera, Obras inéditas, –. We will analyze the relationship between literature and technology in chapter  of this book. ‘‘Recuerdos de la semana: Reflexiones periodísticas,’’ La Nación,  March .

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         

Martí’s significant ‘‘Oscar Wilde’’ is reproduced in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), –. Rubén Darío, Autobiografía (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Marymar, ), . La Nación,  January , . Domingo F. Sarmiento, letter to Paul Groussac, La Nación,  January , . Domingo F. Sarmiento, Obras. Páginas literarias, vol.  (Santiago, Chile: Imperos de Gutenberg, –), . Martí’s ‘‘Nuestra América’’ can be read along the lines of a critique of this kind of legitimacy bestowed on the intellectual importer. See chapter  in the second part of this book. Letter from Fausto Teodoro Aldrey to José Martí in , included in Papeles de Martí, . Noemí Escandell has recently recovered (and translated into English) some of Martí’s texts on art, published in the New York Sun. See Escritura , no.  (): –. Martí, OC, vol. , . Throughout North American Scenes, Martí represents his own undertaking and reflects on the production of chronicles. His frequent point of departure is a reading of the reports that appear in the New York newspapers. Hence, many of Martí’s chronicles act as montages of different news items that he reads, each in conjunction with another. Chronicles represent news items, and in representing them, reflect on their relationship with informational discourse. An exceptional instance of the chronicle as the rewriting of informational discourse can be found in the last sketch that Martí wrote for La Nación in , ‘‘El asesinato de los italianos’’ (‘‘The Assassination of the Italians’’), about a case of ethnocide in New Orleans. The chronicle centers around a deconstructive use of the citation, in which Martí quotes from a report that had appeared in the New York Herald on March ,  entitled ‘‘Armed Mobs Shoot Down Mafia’s Tools.’’ By means of citation, however, Martí inverts the ideological system implicit in the transmission of information, calling the report’s claim to objectivity into question and postulating the innocence of the victims (hence, the dramatic transformation of the title). Moreover, he stylizes the report so as to render it conspicuous; which is to say, he overwrites the report, highlighting the gaze and the literary authority that the cited text does not possess. The chronicle ends in the following manner: ‘‘They took Bagnetto in their arms: his face would not be seen from his wounds: they threw the knot of a new cord around his neck, already almost cold from death: they left him hanging from the branch of a tree: later they will cut off the neighboring branches; and the women will wear the leaves of the branches in their hats, the men in their buttonholes, as an emblem! One takes out his watch: The time has passed quickly: forty-eight minutes. From the flat roofs and balconies the people stared, with theater binoculars’’ (OC, vol. , ).

Journalism and Literature

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 Decorating the City: The Chronicle and Urban Experience

As is often the case, rationalism goes hand in hand with the enjoyment of life since as a general rule, he who thinks rationally discovers in the same thought that the pleasures of life ought to be enjoyed. From another angle, rationalism demands a sober and clear vision of the world, realistic and laid bare, to the effect that rationalism soon discovers how cruelty and abomination obstruct the full enjoyment of life: or indeed that one must erect in the beautiful the abominable . . . in order to obtain the full enjoyment of life, or again one must close one’s eyes to abomination and cruelty, and choose the beautiful so that enjoyment, which has become the aesthetically select, may become possible without interference. Nevertheless, the same denial in one case as in another—that denial being in both the affirmation of cruelty as well as its repudiation—always entails, in spite of the rationalist pretension to an authenticity without cosmetics, an aesthetic masking of the abominable, its hypertrophy or its glossing over: it entails a sleight of hand by means of decoration.—Hermann Broch, Poesía e investigación

In many ways, the chronicle was a weak form of literature for fin de siècle writers. It was a space exposed to contamination, open to the intervention of discourses that, far from coexisting in some stabilized multiplicity, clashed with one another for the imposition of their respective principles of coherence. In the last chapter, we saw how in spite of the protests of the modernists, who (generally speaking) idealized the autonomous and pure totality of the book, the heterogeneity of the chronicle fulfilled an important task in the constitutive process of literature in Latin America. Paradoxically, the encounter with lower and antiaesthetic discourses in the chronicle made possible the consolidation of the emergent aesthetic field. Now, we would like to explore other uses of the chronicle at the turn of the century. Let us examine how the chronicle as a minor form developed strategies for representing capitalist everyday life, which during that period of intense modernization, exceeded the thematic horizon of canonical and codified forms. Of course, this is something that Martí had already pointed out in the Prólogo al Poema del Niágara (Prologue to the Poem of Niágara) in .

For Martí, modernity implied the experience of a vertiginous and fragmentary temporality that annulled the very possibility of a ‘‘permanent work,’’ because ‘‘the works of these times of reconstruction and remodeling are in essence volatile and restless.’’ 1 ‘‘Hence, these small ebullient works’’ (see appendix ), emerging from the modern experience of fragmentation itself, constituted an adequate medium for reflecting on change. Yet we do not propose to idealize either the marginality or heterogeneity of the chronicle. On the contrary, we will attempt to see how the formal flexibility of the chronicle enabled it to become an archive of the ‘‘dangers’’ implicit in the new urban experience; an ordering of daily life as yet unclassified by instituted forms of knowledge. Let us once again take up an earlier question: why, in the full flowering of the newspaper’s rationalization, does the modernist chronicle prosper? What use could the emergent aesthetic subject, highlighted in bold relief (by his anxiety) in the chronicle, have for the modern culture? A Rhetoric of Consumption The chronicle, like the newspaper itself, is a space rooted in cities on the road to modernization at the turn of the century: first of all, because the authority (and value) of the correspondent’s word is based on his or her representation of urban life in some developed society for a designated audience desiring— although at times fearful of—this modernity. Hence, the close relation between the chronicle, specifically its epistolary form, and travel literature, essential to the modernizing patricians. In Martí’s epoch, the travelogue, correspondence as a generic form, was still entirely heterogeneous from a thematic perspective. With an exceptional intellectual intensity, Martí wrote about practically every aspect of capitalist daily life in the United States, as we will later see in his North American Scenes. But toward the s—when Darío, Nervo, and Gómez Carrillo become model correspondents—the demands of the newspaper on the chronicler changes significantly. In this epoch, the chronicler will be above all a guide through the ever-more refined and complex market of cultural goods, contributing to the materialization of a rhetoric of consumption and publicity. Let us examine the following passage: Furniture of all styles—the modern style most outstanding—confirm the search for elegance together with the firm sense of comfort. In all of them you will find the geometric and powerful attribute of the race and a preoccupation with the home. The Chronicle and Urban Experience



It is the display of all that has been achieved in the domestic industry under the influence of domestic concerns.2 There is no need to overanalyze the inflection, the adjectival inclination, the appeal to a certain kind of reader, extremely fin de siècle (bourgeois, refined, and domestic), in order to recognize the emergence of an advertisement rhetoric. Significantly, the author of the piece is Rubén Darío, searching for a rhetoric proper to the Great Paris Exposition of . It was at the exposition that Darío envisioned the realization of one of those utopias woven into the fabric of modernism (without necessarily dominating it): the ideal of a modernity that would be at once capitalist, technological, and aesthetic: Greater in extension than all the previous expositions, one immediately notices in this one the advantage of the picturesque. In the  [exposition] iron reigned supreme—which led [Ioris Karl] Huysmans to write one of his most precious pages—yet in this one, engineering has become more closely united with art; the color, in the architectural whites, in the grey palaces, in the pavilions of distinctive features, strikes a note, in its nuances, the cabuchon facets, and the golds, and the polychrome that prevails, certainly give to the light of the sun or the splendor of the electric lamps, a repeated and varied Arabian-nights sensation.3 Stylization in the chronicle transforms the threatening signs of progress and modernity into a picturesque and aestheticized spectacle. Having obliterated the utilitarian vulgarity of iron, the machine is embellished, painted over, and modernist (lexical) gold is applied to the decoration of the city. At the exposition, a direct antecedent to the modern industry of entertainment, the diatribe of art against mercantilization is suspended. The chronicler is seduced by the promise of his encounter with a new, massified public, whose contact with art will be facilitated by the culture industry. At least within the exposition—within the scene of entertainment and leisure—the market itself was able to cover its utilitarian features, even to the point of opening up a space for the experience of the beautiful in the city. Walter Benjamin observed that world expositions are the sites of pilgrimages to the commodity fetish.4 It might be added, with respect to Darío, that the chronicler is an avid pilgrim: Surrounded in a sea of colors and forms, my soul cannot find anywhere to fix my attention with any concentration. The result is that, when a painting calls you for one direct reason, another and a hundred more shout to you with the impressive reach of their pincers or the melody of their tints and nuances. And in this predicament, you contemplate the many pages of many books, as if they had materialized [at the exposi

   

tion]. A thousand nebulous poems float in the firmament hidden from your mind; a thousand seeds are awakened in your will and your artistic longing.5 In the exposition of art, as in that of other novelties, objects interpellate the consumer in an infernal competition. This is the call of the commodity: ‘‘when a painting calls you for one direct reason, another and a hundred more shout to you with . . . their pincers.’’ The object of art, incorporated into the market, no longer appears as the crystallization of a particularized and original experience. Rather, Darío here celebrates the serial production of beautiful objects, before which the spectator clearly figures as a virtual buyer. And the slippage that follows the call of merchandise is even more revealing: ‘‘in this predicament, you contemplate the many pages of many books, as if they had materialized. A thousand nebulous poems float in the firmament hidden from your mind.’’ Perhaps poetry could be produced en masse as well, like the paintings that seek a buyer. In the chronicles written by Gómez Carrillo, the charisma of merchandise, its lavishness and abundance, is intensified in a rhetoric—still in currency today—where fetishism becomes explicitly erotic: ‘‘the sumptuousness of the shop windows, with the perpetual attraction of the luxurious, of the lustrous, of the feminine.’’ 6 The subject, in the context of this quote, is a strolling passerby in Buenos Aires: In order to prolong the enchantment of the moment I let myself be guided by a friend and I penetrated a shop that, from a distance, did not seem to me anything less than enormous. How surprised I was to find myself suddenly transplanted to the true capital of elegance! Is it Printemps, with its thousand pagan employees and its perpetual rustling [froufrou] of silks crushed by aristocratic hands? . . . Is it the Louvre and its endless display of precious objects? . . . [The store] is all these things together; it is the citadel of women’s fantasies, the cavern where witches have accumulated what makes Margarita’s soul tremble; it is, in a word, the palace of temptations. (p. ) He later adds: It is not in fact a disinterested sweetness, as a museum provides, or as such is noticed in other places. It is a fearful, imperious, titanic desire. How can one resist all that attracts? In general, the objects in shops do not appear before the buyer, but through the glass of the window displays. . . . Here the strangest and most expensive, the most fragile, the most exquisite . . . is within the reach of one’s hands. And the hands, the pale, nerThe Chronicle and Urban Experience

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vous hands, approach, I daresay touch, no, caress, what coquetry covets, and little by little, on contact with that smooth and almost warm something, a sheer rapture takes possession of the woman’s soul. (p. ) Even as the commodity acquires a life of its own—in the erotic palpitation, smooth and almost warm—the consumer loses the exalted soul in his or her rapture. This is, precisely, the logic of the fetish. Even more important, the fetishism of merchandise is represented as an aesthetic experience. The shop substitutes the museum as an institution of beauty, and the stylization so preeminent in the author’s labor on language works toward a consumerist epiphany. In an inflated and grotesque way, we find in Gómez Carrillo one of the extreme consequences of the autonomization of the aesthetic sphere in modern society: the separation of the aesthetic and cultural from practical living predisposes an autonomized, disinterested art to the risk of its incorporation by the very oppressive rationality from which it had sought to become autonomous. In Gómez Carrillo, or earlier in Darío, the aesthetic of luxury as one of the ideologies of autonomization could well have attempted a critique of the utilitarian principle of efficiency and productivity distinctively featured in capitalism. Such an economy would, indeed, touch on the very use of languages stripped of any trace of style: technologized discourses of bureaucracy and the modern (market). Luxury—the aesthetic of excess—in the economy of fin de siècle literature, can thus be read as a subversion of utilitarianism in other forms of discourse, all of which might be called organic discourses of capitalism. But together with this critical impulse of the will to autonomy, the differentiated space belonging to the aesthetic is reified, objectified (in style); it becomes easily appropriated as a consolatory, affirmative activity, as a compensation for the ‘‘abominable’’ of modernization. Stylization, in the poetics of excess and luxury, rejects the use value of the word in the deployment of its will to autonomy; and yet, in doing so, it remains inscribed as a most elevated form of fetishization, where the word is a strict exchange value. One can thus recognize in the jewel, the useless piece of merchandise par excellence a model for production. And this, at the turn of the century, prepared the way for the development of a kitsch art, distinctive for modern mass culture. In her lucid work on the chronicles of Gómez Carrillo, María Luisa Bastos reads an application of modernist style to the necessities of the emergent market of luxury, and interprets this usage as a kind of vulgarization of the initially high, autonomous, and perhaps radical aesthetic of modernism.7 In essence, her interpretation coincides with that of Rama, Jitrik, and Pacheco, who all saw two moments in modernism: the critical and radical 

   

antibourgeois moment, and a second phase, in which modernism, at the beginning of the century, became the aesthetic for dominant groups. The chronicles of Gómez Carrillo, or even better, what he referred to as his applied literature to fashion,8 would come to represent this second phase (which Pacheco recognizes, in the boleros of Agustín Lara). Nevertheless, the postulation of two phases in literary modernity—one initial phase of plentitude, another involuntarily parodic or trivialized in kitsch—establishes a chronology that dissolves the real complexity of the initial moment. Darío, in his ambiguous ‘‘El rey burgués’’ (‘‘The Bourgeois King’’) from Azul, reflected on the danger that threatened his entire work from the very start.9 In it, the inner room of the bourgeois king, seen with a great disgust, overflows with objects of art and wealth. And the poet, with his little musical machine, runs the risk of becoming incorporated as yet another object. Martí himself, who had earlier criticized the will to autonomy in his systematic critiques of luxury and excess, defined one of the possible uses of beauty, of the autonomized aesthetic, in the following manner: The love for art melts and lifts the soul: a beautiful painting, a limpid statue, an artistic performer, a modest flower in a pretty vase, brings smiles to the lips where tears, only moments before, were dying. Above the pleasure of knowing the beautiful, which enhances and strengthens, is the pleasure of possessing the beautiful, which leaves us content with ourselves. Bejeweling the house, hanging the walls with paintings, enjoying them, evaluating their merits, extolling their beauties, are noble enjoyments that give value to life, distraction to the mind and high employment to the spirit. One feels a new knowledge running through the veins when one contemplates a new work of art. . . . It is like drinking from Cellini’s cup an ideal life.10 Here, also, the sphere of the beautiful (as a reified concept) is incorporated into the market as a decorative, compensatory object; critical of utilitarianism, perhaps, but in the final instance affirming instrumental logic and the mercantilization of the world. Literature—in the selfsame critique of modernization deployed by the will to autonomy—is reincorporated by the logic of capitalism as a decorative mechanism of modern and especially urban abomination: the modernist writer as a makeup artist, painting over the dangerous features of the city. Hence, from the first stage on, the assertion regarding the radicality of the will to autonomy, signified by the logic of excess, is an entirely imprecise and untenable one. The chronology (first radicality and later incorporation) serves only to dissolve these contradictions. The Chronicle and Urban Experience

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And it is necessary to be able to speak of the contradictions because already at the turn of the century, the ambiguous relationship between literature (as an autonomous discourse) and power was being debated in a discussion that would continue throughout the twentieth century. The problem is rooted in thinking of dominant culture as homogeneous and static. The field of power, above all in modernity, is fluid and deterritorializing; of course, this does not mean that networks and relations of domination are not established. In order to better explain this fundamental flexibility, its oftentimes contradictory manifestations, and the will to aesthetic autonomy that at once results from and responds to it, we will need to take up again the problem of the chronicle in the newspaper, as well as the relationship between literature and urban abomination. Representing the City What exactly, at the turn of the century, did the city signify? For Sarmiento, as for many other patricians of modernization, the city (almost always in boldface letters) was a utopic space: the place for an ideally modern society and a rationalized public sphere. Thus, in Sarmiento, it is possible to read the concept of civilization—as well as politics—in its etymological relation to the city. Toward the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the concept of the city—which to a certain degree, continued to legitimize the discourse of the chronicle—was problematized, in part by the actual process of urbanization that distinguished many Latin American social formations of the period.11 In Martí, the city will become closely linked to the representation of disaster, of catastrophe, as a distinctive metaphor for modernity. The city, for Martí and his contemporaries (particularly the modern writers or literatos, among others), gives rise to what we might call the catastrophe of the signifier. Martí’s understanding of the city is that it spatializes the fragmentation of the traditional order of discourse, a fragmentation that the city has brought in its wake; and this spatialization problematizes the very possibility of representation: In this turbulent undertow, the natural currents of life no longer emerge. Everything is obscured, disarticulated, ground into bits; one cannot [distinguish], at first sight, virtues from vices. Tumultuously mixed, they melt away.12 In this respect, the city is not simply the background, the scenery in which the fragmentation of discourse that distinguishes modernity would 

   

come to be represented. Rather, it is the space of the city as the field of signification itself that needs to be thought, a space that in its own formal assemblage (that is, with its disarticulations and networks) is enmeshed in the fragmentation of codes and traditional systems of representation as they appear in modern society. From this perspective, the city would not only be a passive context for signification, but also the crystallization and configuration of the very borders, articulations, currents, and aporias that constitute the presupposed field for signification. Of course, the metaphor of catastrophe was not new in its moment of inscription by Martí. It was the enlightened patricians themselves who situated the metaphor at the heart of their rhetoric. To cite an example, in , Sarmiento interprets the effects of an earthquake in Chile: This interests [us] so much more as the tremor is a good stimulant for the public to pay attention to the matter of architecture, the solution to which will bring life relief, if not fortune. If the land wishes to tremble it is a perverse desire for which we must blame neither Providence nor the government. Our only means of confronting the threat is to extinguish the danger by improving the construction of buildings, because if the house does not fall on our heads, a tremor will become an occasion to admire without fear the sublime conflicts of nature. For men, then, a tremor is a question of architecture.13 The slippage from the descriptive to the analytical value of disaster is later followed by a metaphor: ‘‘This matter still interests [us], for tremors come to life at the precise moment that an extraneous revolution is at work in our lives’’ (p. ). Disaster, without a doubt, can be a natural phenomenon, external to discourse; its representation, however, transforms the event into a convergence of different signifieds that chaos—danger, disorder— may bring about at a given conjuncture. Throughout the nineteenth century, catastrophe is the other of rationality par excellence. In its extreme form, it condenses the danger of revolutionary ‘‘chaos.’’ Still, in Sarmiento’s exacerbated faith in the virtual order of discourse (in this case, architectonic), the earthquake fulfills a positive function: it dismantles the previous traditional space, and leads to the reorganization and modernization of cities like Valparaíso and Santiago. Catastrophe problematizes the architecture of the traditional order, and hence, makes possible the construction of the new city, of a desired modernity. In Sarmiento’s historical fable, catastrophe does not constitute an insurmountable fissure. To the contrary, catastrophe indicates the moment of a new foundation where the becoming (devenir) of progress gathers momentum. The Chronicle and Urban Experience

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In Martí, particularly in the Escenas norteamericanas where his reflection on modernity is a central theme, catastrophe is again a key figure. The charge of the metaphor, however, along with its relation to an Enlightenment teleology, has been considerably complicated. In his exceptional chronicles ‘‘El terremoto de Charleston’’ (‘‘The Charleston Earthquake’’) and ‘‘Inundaciones de Johnstown’’ (‘‘The Johnstown Flood’’), the representation of catastrophe presupposes a critique of the enlightenment epitomized by Sarmiento. Let us note, in passing, the role of transport (an icon from the modern order) in the following description: The trains were not able to arrive at Charleston, because the rails had come off their hinges, or exploded, or meandered over their suspended sleepers. A locomotive came running triumphantly forward at the instant of the first tremor, and flew up in the air, and shaking the line of cars hitched to the back of the train like a rosary [it] smacked face down with all its dead machinery. . . . Another one not far away continued whistling happily, the earthquake heaved its weight against [the train] and cast it against a nearby tank.14 Evidently, the catastrophe here no longer promotes the order of the city: as Martí insists, it destroys all signs of modernity (above all, the market). And yet, it also makes possible, by means of the destruction of the city, the return to an origin that progress had earlier obliterated: ‘‘The forests that night were full of town villagers, who fled from the shaken roofs, and who took shelter in the trees, joining one another in the darkness of the forest to sing in chorus’’ (ibid.). Ironically, disaster has given rise to a reencounter with the community, the reconstruction of the chorus. And it is the Blacks (at the height of racial conflicts in the United States in that period) who guide the return of the city to modernity’s other, the forest: ‘‘the horror [of disaster] left the tempestuous imagination of the Negroes burning’’ (p. ). Thus, the return and chorus at the same time imply the restitution of the power of myth and the imagination (proper to literature) that was cut short in the city by the rationalization and its disenchantment. To invent tradition, an origin—to ‘‘remember’’ the past of the city, and mediate between modernity and areas that modernity has excluded or run over: this will be one of the great strategies of legitimation instituted by modern Latin American literature beginning with Martí. For in literature, as Martí suggests in ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ the ‘‘mute Indio,’’ the ‘‘victimized Black,’’ speaks. Literature is, in effect, legitimized as the site of rationalization’s others. 

   

Certainly, it is not only in New York, London, or even the Paris of Baudelaire where the concept of the city crystallizes the problematic of the unrepresentable—the disarticulation, turbulence, and crisis of traditional categories of representation. In many areas of Latin America, the process of fin de siècle urbanization was also quite radical and decisive. As José Luis Romero has pointed out, not all cities changed in a homogeneous manner.15 There were stagnant cities; but particularly in port cities like Rio de Janeiro, Havana, and Montevideo, the transformations were considerable. And above all, in Buenos Aires and Mexico City—axes of fin de siècle literary modernization— the changes were intense, as indicated by the proliferating urban literature of the period, especially in the chronicles and the then-emerging novel. The transformation of the cities was rarely calculated, although particularly in the Buenos Aires of Intendente (superintendent) Torcuato de Alvear and the Mexico of Porfirio Díaz, the influence of the project to rationalize (and before it, demolish) urban space was decisive. Of course, the rationalization of urban space would entail a prior process of demolition, as Baron GeorgesEugène Haussmann succeeded in doing with the Paris of Napoleon III.16 Of Buenos Aires, Romero declares: ‘‘[the city] decided on demolitions, the primary focus of which was the radical renovation of the traditional centers in the big town.’’ 17 These transformations, as Lewis Mumford suggested with respect to the European cities of the nineteenth century, were not simply physical or material: the reorganization and rationalization of urban space ushered in an overall transformation of the epoch’s symbolic regimes.18 Let us examine, in Mexican Federico Gamboa’s  novel Apariencias (Appearances), the figurative slippages in his description of the reconstructed city: It was a street under construction and like most new streets, situated in the fashionable extension of the great city that offers a singular and characteristic aspect: the sidewalks, wide and recently paved; the houses in construction, with their accumulation of materials; the holes, without markings, of doors and windows, like the cavities of antediluvian skulls; the scaffolds, which resemble the rigging of phantom ships; the building sites, closed off by irregular fences in which multicolored advertisements of public diversions and patented medicines can be seen; at a distance a small hollow or hillock that still conserves a green and worn moss.19 (Italics added) Paradoxically, to conserve is here a key word; it is an inserted word, as if to emphasize its ephemerality, in a passage configured by the rhetoric of disaster. In Gamboa, the city is rather an iconoclastic force that reorganizes space, the life-world. The adjective should be taken literally: the city is iconoclastic The Chronicle and Urban Experience

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inasmuch as it takes icons apart, along with traditional systems of representation; it destroys all figures, space as figure, of traditional culture. This is also the main theme in another influential, albeit forgotten, novel of the epoch by Argentine Lucio Vicente López, La gran aldea (The Big Town): ‘‘How things in Buenos Aires have changed in twenty years!’’ 20 For López, and to a certain degree for Gamboa as well, to write was to remember—or invent—the tradition that the iconoclastic force of modernization had dismantled. The rhetoric of disaster is systematically nostalgic, although from different angles and political positions. Fin de siècle testimonies to the crisis generated by urbanization spread. They confirm the tensions unleashed by modernization—at least for literature, along with those social groups identified with the institutions, icons, and symbolic spaces taken apart by urban rationalization. Yet it is indeed remarkable how modernization, in a move against the grain of its demolition impulse, ironically promoted the reconstruction of territorialities, oftentimes erecting in its wake the monuments and masks of a reified tradition. Consequently, even as modernization destroyed the traditional modes of representation and identification, it also fashioned new images, frequently oriented toward the past, as simulacra of tradition and social order in (a compensatory) response to the violent changes that it had effected. This reconstructive and compensatory aspect of modernization can be seen, for example, in the monumentalist historicism that dominates fin de siècle Mexican architecture. The importance that a certain notion of the natural recovers in the modernizing period of Porfirist Mexico acts as an index of this reconstruction impulse as well. Israel Katzman shows: From the year  houses began to be constructed in the fields by the Paseo de Reforma [Reform Promenade], and as the rural ambience began to fade, in  a five-year exemption of the property tax was decreed for those who would allow a garden of at least eight meters to grow in front of their houses.21 In the Buenos Aires of Intendente Honorio Pueyrredón as well, in the s, we see introduced at the height of urbanization numerous recreational spaces and parks in a city otherwise oriented toward technological productivity and efficiency.22 Eduardo Wilde, an exceptional chronicler of the period, comments on the inauguration of the novel Tres de Febrero (Third of February) Park in : Buenos Aires needed you. . . . Along the edge of its center, [there was] not one tree, nor one garden, nor one unasphyxiated place, nor one wide     

avenue: in its small plazas, neither shadow nor coolness, nor vegetation where we could exchange the poison in our lungs for some life.23 Pure air in a polluted city: Wilde not only remarks here on the invention of a natural space in the city, but on one of the functions that his own discourse (in the chronicle) would satisfy in the final decades of the century. Although modernization demolished the traditional systems of representation, causing social tensions, it also fostered the production of images resolving these contradictions; it even fostered a discourse of the crisis, giving weight and authority to the memory of a certain past. To represent the city, which is tantamount to representing the unrepresentable that was the city, by then no longer entailed a mere exercise of recording or documenting change or flux brought about by the city. Representing the city was one mode of superceding it, reterritorializing it. Thus, as Haussmann in Paris—or Carlos María de Alvear and José Ibes Limantour in Buenos Aires and Mexico City respectively—had at the same time demolished and reorganized urban space in accordance with a spectacular and past-oriented monumentalism, while the culture industry (in the newspaper) was able to find in the new literatos agents for the production of reorganizing images of those discourses that the city— and the newspaper itself, in its many other facets—was in the process of dismantling.24 Journalism, Fragmentation, Narrativization The modern newspaper, like no other discursive space in the nineteenth century, embodies the segmented temporality and spatiality distinctive of modernity. It materializes—and fosters—the dissolution of codes and explosion of stable systems of representation.25 The newspaper not only erects the new (the other of traditional temporality) as a principle for organizing its themes, which would be as promotional (in the advertising sense) as they were informative; the newspaper also delocalizes—even in its graphic layout of material— the communicative process. In the newspaper, communication is detached from an immediate context of enunciation, and is thus able to configure an abstract life-world—never entirely experienced by its readers in the field of their day-to-day existence. In this sense, the newspaper presupposes the privatization of social communication, as it epitomizes the submission and submittal of the subject caught up in the process of this privatization to a structure of the general public that tends to obliterate collective experience in ever greater extremes. The newspaper achieved with its layout and ordering of language what the city was doing with its traditional public spaces. ConseThe Chronicle and Urban Experience

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quently, one need do no more than read the newspaper as the representation (on the very surface level of form) of the city’s arrangement: with its central, bureaucratic, or commercial streets; with its small plazas and parks, places of leisure and gatherings. In part, the newspaper can be said to have become a condition of unity for the new city. It is certain that both the city and the newspaper persist in deploying strategies to recompose their territories (spatial and discursive) and articulate the fragmentation. Here the businessperson, the politician, and even the literato communicate with the private subject. In the newspaper, articulations are established that make it possible to envision the ever deterritorializing city as a congruent social space: the urban subject experiences the city not only because s/he walks through entirely delimited areas, but also because s/he reads it in a newspaper that collects and narrates the city’s distinct fragments. But even more important, it seems, is the fact that the newspaper’s formal organization of language (or the modern shop’s organization of things), is traversed by principles of organization that also overdetermine the order of urban space. The logic is profoundly fragmentary, unhierarchized by an accumulation of fragmented codes, in which languages are imposed one upon another, juxtaposed or simply mixed, with discourses of all kinds derived from an unassignable historical proceeding. The newspaper, like the city, is a segmented and derivative space par excellence. On the other hand, fragmentation must not be read solely in formal or descriptive terms. For Benjamin, the form of the newspaper crystallizes the dissolution of the social—of community experience—which he saw incarnated in traditional narrative: Man’s inner concerns do not have such an irrevocably private character by nature. They do so only when he is increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of experience. Newspapers constitute one of many evidences of such an inability. If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (freshness of the news, brevity, comprehensibility, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as does the make-up of the pages and the paper’s style. (Karl Kraus never tired of demonstrating the great extent to which the linguistic usage of newspapers paralyzed the imagination of their readers.) . . . The replacement 

   

of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of existence.26 It would nevertheless be difficult to assign a specific historical place to this type of older narrative communication, nostalgically evoked by Benjamin. In any case, Benjamin’s reading of modern writing (in Baudelaire and Proust, among others) as an attempt to reconstruct an organic communicative project, betrays a clear indication of an ideology that actually propelled intellectual production, above all in this initial phase of advanced capitalism. The problematics of fragmentation are essential to understanding the ideological function of the chronicle in Latin America’s fin de siècle. The chronicle postulates the fragmented temporality of the city and newspaper, even as it systematically attempts to renarrativize—to unite the past with the present. To cite an example, if the Paris Exposition was a spectacle of novelty, Darío’s gesture functions as its reverse, by seeing in every event a fragment to be articulated in a continuity guaranteed by the poetic vision: Parisian fashion is enchanting; but the modern mundane cannot substitute in the glory of allegory or symbol what has been consecrated by Rome and Greece. . . . At night it is a phantasmagoric impression that offers us a white door with its thousands of electric lights. . . . It is the entrance to a country of mystery and poetry inhabited by magic. Certainly, in every soul that contemplates these splendid fairies, there arises a sensation of infancy. . . . Here the modern of the scientific conquest is joined to the ancient sacred icon artistry.27 To impose tradition, archaic experience, the sensation of infancy, on the modern, tied in this instance to technology and the city: this will be the distinguishing mark of the chronicler and the culture industry proper that Darío here describes, and in which he participates. In Martí, however, the event—the fragment of urban temporality—is directly related to journalistic and informative discourse. As we suggested earlier, Martí prepares his chronicles as readings of different news bulletins that appear in the fragmented space of the newspaper. He reads the heterogeneity of the newspaper and, in the same movement, reflects on the problematic of its fragmentation: How can one put together such varied scenes? There in the resplendent solitudes of the Arctic, some valiant explorers turn their heads at last on their pillow of snow; here, in a colossal house, the sacerdotal and mystical chords of exalted music, the most solemn of human arts, reThe Chronicle and Urban Experience

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sound before thousands of absorbed listeners. In the trees, all is green. In the features of every face, all is happy. In Ireland, all is fearful. In San Francisco, the enemies of the Chinese prevail. In the display cases of bookstores shines the monumental work of an ancient of eighty-two years. Around a rich table the Mexicans of New York gather together to celebrate the Gloria Patri. Inflamed masses of people are united to protest against the assassins of the English ministers in Ireland, and against the assassins of the patriots of Ireland by English soldiers. A grandiose festival has transpired. Guiteau now enters his death cell. It is whispered that there will be an important change in diplomatic positions.28 At first sight, it would seem that the trouble only lies in the chronicle’s composition, its syntax. But the problem of the arrangement of news bulletins in the chronicle is ideologically overdetermined, precisely because information is a mode of representation that (as Benjamin has suggested) materializes the problematic of order and communication in modern society. In other words, in rewriting the newspaper’s fragmentary existence, the chronicler takes up the segmented temporality of the city on a strictly formal level. Hence, the city, in Martí’s chronicles, is not solely a represented object but a conjunction of verbal materials, tied to journalism, which the chronicler seeks to dominate in the very process of representation. The chronicler systematically attempts to rearticulate the fragments, narrativize the events, in order to recreate the organicity that the city has destroyed. This will to order and integrate modern fragmentation, in its turn, is semanticized in what we might call the rhetoric of strolling (retórica del paseo) in the chronicle (not only those of Martí). That is, the narrativization of isolated sections of the newspaper and city comes to be frequently represented as the work of a subject who, while walking through the city, traces an itinerary in the discurrence of, or the speaking about, strolling. The stroll orders for the subject the chaos of the city, establishing articulations, junctures, and bridges between disjointed spaces (and events). Hence, we may read the rhetoric of strolling as the on-site position for the principle of narrativity in the chronicle. Strolling and the Privatization of the Urban Subject Beginning with the chronicle, it becomes possible to assemble a typology of the different ways of representing the fin de siècle city. Two types of gazes are predominant. The first, a totalizing one, presupposes the distance of the subject as a condition for representing. As Darío writes: 

   

In the magnificent spectacle seen as an eagle would see it, which is to say, from the heights of the Eiffel Tower, the fabulous city appears in a manner such that it is hard to believe that one is not witnessing the realization of a dream. The gaze falters, but even more the spirit before the overwhelming, monumental perspective.29 In this representation, space is notably hierarchized: from a height, the subject tends to demarcate urban heterogeneity, condensing its multiplicity into the frame of a magnificent spectacle. This panoptic gaze, as Michel de Certeau would say, is at the heart of the professionalized cartography produced by urbanists in the nineteenth century. Its logic presupposes the transformation of the urban fact into a concept of the city.30 Nonetheless, the concept of the city, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century, was problematized as the city progressively became the space of the event, of the contingency unleashed by the capitalist flux. In the above Darío quote, the panoptic gaze falters: its capacity to order is minimal. In the chronicle, walking would be an alternative way of experiencing, and superceding, urban contingency.31 Through the stroll, the chronicle represents (and is fostered by) a new type of urban entertainment, quite indicative of the transformation that the arrangement of space undergoes at the turn of the century. Strolling—indeed the flâneur—became a new cultural institution. In the Argentina of the s, López points out: In sum, I, who had known that Buenos Aires of , [as] patriotic, simple, part marketplace, part-Papal grounds, and part village, now found myself with a people of great European pretension who wasted their time in strolling about [en flanear] the streets, and in which no predestined generals any longer reigned, nor the [old aristocratic] Trevexo family, nor the Berrotaráns.32 Of course, walking around the city, even strolling, was a millenarian activity, doubtless tied to the structure of the public square, center of a relatively organic and traditional city. But as López suggests, strolling had become a distinct form of entertainment, which he himself relates to the modernization of Buenos Aires. Strolling is a kind of entertainment, distinctive of those fin de siècle cities subordinated to an intense mercantilization that aside from erecting productive labor and efficiency as supreme values, instituted the spectacle of consumption as a new form of diversion. The leisure time of the new urban subject becomes mercantilized as well. The Chronicle and Urban Experience

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In México pintoresco, artístico y monumental (Picturesque, Artistic, and Monumental Mexico, ), Manuel Rivera Cambas highlights the class character of the new entertainment, which even threatened to displace the theater as a center for diversion: In actuality, it is the evening stroll [that is] a necessity for the social class that may dedicate itself to respite; in other times, it was not the stroll but the theater that was the favored diversion, solicited by Mexican society.33 Strolling is corollary to the production of luxury and fashion, within an emergent culture of consumption, as Cambas describes: The streets of Plateros include establishments with everything that can satisfy the most demanding caprice of taste or fashion: great shop windows with signs, behind enormous glass walls; a multitude of elegant damsels traverse the streets. (p. ) On the other hand, strolling is not simply a way of experiencing the city. It is, indeed, a way of representing it, of looking at it and recounting what is seen. In strolling the urban, privatized subject approximates the city with a gaze from which s/he sees an object on exhibit. Thus, the windowed display becomes an emblematic object for the chronicler. Justo Sierra remarks: How does one translate the French verb flâner into Spanish? To wander capriciously with the security of not being chased by any inner thoughts, like a fly by a spider; to wander with the certainty of perpetual distractions for the eyes, with the certainty of forever objectifying, of not falling into the power of the subjective . . . ; to wander jostled by people, leaning against the store display windows . . . gazing into the interiors of houses.34 Uncomfortable among the multitude, yet simultaneously exhausted by the interiority, the private subject sets out to objectify, to reify urban movement by means of a gaze that transforms the city into a contained object behind the store display window. In this respect, the shop window becomes a privileged figure for analysis, a metaphor for the chronicle itself as a mediation between the private subject and the city.35 It is a metaphor for the distance between this subject and the urban heterogeneity that the gaze seeks to dominate: a figure that contains the city’s image behind a glass window that transforms the image into an object of consumption. In Gómez Carrillo, the chronicle’s consumerist poetic is even more emphatic. Here, we also note the attraction that creates an impression of 

   

a sumptuousness of the store display windows, with the perpetual lure of the luxurious, the lustrous, the feminine. The chronicler-flaneur, oppressed by urban noise, seeks refuge. In the areas of commerce for wealthy goods (Florida Street, in Buenos Aires), s/he encounters an alternative place: [Florida Street] has been made with exquisite artistry, of what in Europe is the most distinguished, the most animated, the most brilliant, the most modern. . . . And it in fact is, with its innumerable stores of sumptuous amenities, with its golden signs that run across the balconies, advertising suits and gowns . . . with its store display windows full of precious stones, with its numerous art exhibits. And at the same time it is something else, more cheerful and intimate: it is almost a salon in which no one is in a hurry.36 In the activity of strolling, the chronicler transforms the city into a salon, into an intimate space, precisely by means of this consumerist gaze that turns an urban and mercantile activity into an object of aesthetic and even erotic pleasure. The private citizen’s attempt to contain the city, to transform it into an intimate and familiar space, belies the considerable anxiety of the chronicler-flaneur. This anxiety is, in various ways, the drive that brings about both the activities of strolling and writing about the city in the chronicle. The uneasiness of the chronicler-flaneur in the city is founded on the redistribution of urban space in accordance with the opposition between zones of privacy and the public, commercial sector. In the activity of strolling, the private subject departs from a residential zone to become a tourist in his or her own city, in the centers of public space, ever-more commercialized, becoming foreign and alienating to the private (bourgeois) subject.37 Consumption—and the discourses of mass culture that sustain it—will begin to mediate between the two polarized fields of urban experience. Let us take a look at the history of this polarization in the city of Buenos Aires: The commerce of colonial Buenos Aires, to a great degree the product of contraband, came to be realized in the infinity of small living units in the same apartment, as rooms that would lead to the street or hallway. As they continued to extend outward, this system overtook the most important houses, one by one, with units that began to include particular rooms for rent in their construction. But the intensification of activities and the higher volume of markets posed problems of space that forced The Chronicle and Urban Experience

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the living areas to move toward the back [of the buildings], and finally, the entire building had to be used for business. The iron structures enabled the patios to be roofed, through which a wide covered and lighted space could be obtained. Later came the next step, consisting of special constructions for commercial enterprises. Store buildings spreading out along a row were characteristic of the epoch, as much in the city as in the provinces; they had general stores and salons for the exhibition and sale of products.38 The other face of this division of labor that cuts across urban space was the rise of new residential zones. In Buenos Aires, the first properly residential street was the Avenida Alvear around . Residential zones, toward the north of the city, were distinguished by their introversion, which translated their front gardens into facades and defenses. They are mansions to be admired from afar. . . . The spectator can hardly approach them, the iron weight of the Italian or Louis XV grille, the striated garden wall or the balustrade of gray pilasters obscures a clear view. The house may be seen up close only by someone who has access to it.39 The interior, an essential theme in fin de siècle literature, is the space of a new individuality that presupposes the progressive dissolution of public, communitarian spaces in the modern city. In the stroll of the private subject —from the estrangement that his/her tourist gaze over urban space implies— s/he attempts to get away from the interior, in a gesture that, albeit not necessarily critical, in any case reveals the need to reconstruct and consolidate the fields of collective, class identity. The city itself (asserting the reterritorializing capacity of modern power) would provide the means toward the reinvention of the community. This would be one of the functions of both the chronicle and the culture industry in that epoch inaugurating the modern era. Strolling and the Reinvention of Public Space The stroller is a curious subject. S/he sets out to expand the boundaries of his or her private domain in the chronicle. By strolling, not only does s/he reify the flux of the city, turning it into material for consumption and incorporating it into that curious receptacle, or showcase, that is the chronicle; the chronicler-stroller also seeks out, in the touristic digression that individualizes and distinguishes him or her from the urban mass, the signs for a virtual 

   

shared identity in the features of certain others. In response to the solitude of the interior, the chronicler investigates the forms of privacy outside him or her, thus becoming a voyeur, an urban onlooker. In Gutiérrez Nájera, we find the sign of the voyeur: ‘‘I have set out to wander [ flâner] for awhile through the streets. . . . Sad are those who walk around the streets with their buttoned overcoats, looking through the cracks of doors for the fire hearth of home.’’ 40 If the city (and the newspaper itself ) had fragmented and privatized social experience, the chronicle in contrast created simulacra, images of an organic and healthy community. This is the function of orality in the chronicle, which among the mercantilized and technologized discourses of the newspaper, often represented itself as a conversation or familiar chat. An emblematic short story by Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘La novela del tranvía’’ (‘‘The Streetcar Novel’’), offers us a good example of the way in which the chronicler, in his stroll through the city, reinvents a collective space. In this particular instance, the collective space is brought about by means of gossip—a mode of traditional representation, the extreme of nonprivacy.41 The stroller takes a streetcar and ends up in a radically unfamiliar landscape: No, Mexico City does not begin at the Palacio Nacional nor does it end in the Avenue Reforma. I give you my word that the city is much more. It is a great tortoise that stretches its dislocated paws toward the four cardinal points. These paws are dirty and hairy. (p. ) Estrangement, on the outskirts of the city, is projected onto the relationships among the very people inside the streetcar: ‘‘Who might be my neighbor? Surely, he was married, and with daughters’’ (p. ). The subject, throughout the chronicle, does not simply inform us about the city; against the grain of information, he conjectures, invents, and in the final instance, makes of the chronicle a tale, a fiction.42 Here again, we see the antiinformative gesture of the chronicle, which continually violates the norms of journalistic referentiality. Moreover, fictionality is here concomitant with the will to re-create (via gossip) the collective space that had been precisely disarticulated by urban fragmentation and dislocation. In ‘‘The Streetcar Novel,’’ the narrator invents a life for each one of the passengers; he invents story lines with a consistent irony that emphasizes the impossibility of knowing the other’s privacy—which is to say, the growing difficulty of conceiving a vital collective, a shared sphere in the modern city. Given its brevity, we would like to cite one of Gutiérrez Nájera’s chronicles in which the functions of gossip and the voyeur (in response to urban solitude) are even more transparent: The Chronicle and Urban Experience

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Una cita [A Rendezvous] In the mornings I am accustomed to strolling through the sidewalks of the surrounding neighborhood and through the Chapultepec park, a site favored by lovers. This has lent me the opportunity to act as an involuntary witness to more than one amorous rendezvous. Three days ago I saw arrive in an elegant carriage one beautiful unknown madame, dark-haired, with fiery eyes, and a slender and elegant figure. A young man, an adolescent, almost a child, waited expectantly at the entrance to the park. She alighted from the carriage, which the coachman discreetly led away, approached the young man, who was trembling, respectful, flushed as a poppy, demonstrating by his general behavior that it was his first rendezvous, and it would be necessary for the madame to take his arm, which he did not dare offer her. The two lovers both began to walk down the street apart from each other and alone. The couple interested me and I followed them at a certain distance. The madame cried, the boy’s emotion carried him away as the conversation that was transpiring between them became animated. Some phrases reached my ears: they were not two lovers: they were mother and son. Without wanting to, I became aware of an entire history, a true novel that interested me extraordinarily, which forced me to be not only indiscreet, but disloyal, because my curiosity, which had prevailed over my scruples, made me draw ever closer to the couple who, distracted in the telling of their misfortunes, did not notice me, did not hear my steps on the dry leaves of trees, scattered on the ground. That woman was an angel, a martyr; that boy a human being worthy of respect, interest, and compassion, who had sacrificed himself to the repose and respect of society for his mother. There were in that tale two damned souls who deserve to be branded with the executioner’s iron: [the] two men who have sacrificed those two wretched beings worthy of a better fate.43 This drawing ever closer to the other is distinctive of the gossiper’s curiosity. He posits not only a hearing of the other’s life, but a telling as well; a desire to make this life public. The other side, the erased referent of gossip, is urban privacy, the fragmentation of the collective that makes the city an intersection of enigmatic discourses, at times illegible, from the perspective of the privatized subject. Certainly, Gutiérrez Nájera here anticipates some aspects of Julio Cortázar’s ‘‘Las babas del diablo’’ (‘‘Blow Up’’). But if in Cortázar’s story the other is in the last instance an evanescent object, in Gutiérrez Nájera, the danger and rampant sexuality of the city is domesticated in the affirma

   

tion of a familiar structure. Literature—fiction, in this case—still commands the power to posit the reinvention of a stable, organic space, in contradistinction to the danger of the city that unmakes traditional forms of familiarity. On the other hand, the class character of the constitution of any public space whatsoever must be stressed, as it governs the field of identity. Gossip, in the end, does not include everyone. In the very oral quality of the chronicle, which in general continues to be organized as causeries or conversations at the turn of the century, the exclusivity that the voice of the gossip-tale asserts and the anxiety with which the chronicler protects the borders of a reconstituted community are obvious. As Gutiérrez Nájera writes: The poor chronicle, of an animal traction, cannot compete with these lightning trains. And what is left for us, miserable chroniclers . . . ? We have arrived at the banquet during dessert. Should I serve you, young lady, a pousse-café? . . . On the other hand, this moment is propitious for pleasant, wellintentioned conversation and . . . of the future. Oh fickle enchantresses! The fan has come open in your hands.44 Orality—pleasant conversation—may indeed be opposed to the technologized language of information; and even protected as a simulacrum of familiarity, of (a certain) community, within the fragmented project of the newspaper. But, above all, it is an orality that interpellates (not without irony, as in Gutiérrez Nájera) the readers of a social class capable of identifying themselves with this kind of community, epitomized in the pleasant conversation of the club. One must avoid the abstract idealization of spaces of discussion, including their rhetorical models, which are in any case always socially overdetermined. The orality of the chronicle is an inclusive proceeding, a vehicle for the formation of the social subject. Yet this inclusion of a certain kind of other in the chronicle has its exclusive function as well. What would exist outside it, in its exterior? Strolling and the Representation of the Proletarian Exterior The chronicle, in its archive of dangers of modern daily life, foregrounds the problematic of proletarianization in a prominent position, always in sight of the anxiety-ridden chronicler. Even for Martí, who throughout the s supported the struggles of the active union movement in New York, the representation of new social forces is irreducibly ambiguous: ‘‘The Bowery, a Broadway for the poor, had an air of battle [during an  strike]: and many a robust and somber man inspired respect, but also fear.’’ 45 Before the The Chronicle and Urban Experience

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working-class crowd, the police console the chronicler: ‘‘the brown heads of the police emerge from among the black mass’’ (vol. , p. ). ‘‘And rising up from the middle of the crowd, covered in humble blue hoods, are the eminent heads of the city police, who order the mob’’ (vol. , p. ). Before the physical, uncontainable energy of the multitudes, discourse in the chronicle will continually effectuate its own disciplinary mechanisms. For the chronicler, facing an emergent working-class culture, one option was the obliteration of the dangerous body of the other, by means of a decorative sleight of hand. Even around the time of the Independence Centennial, in an Argentina full of immigrants with an emergent union movement, and deeply influenced by anarchism, it was still possible for Gómez Carillo to write the following: And if some doubt seizes me, it would have no more to do with the splendid processions of the little women workers who march, light and rhythmic, in search of some nearby street to la Paix . . . they are the same as ever, they are those of yesterday, they are those of evermore, they are those who, with their genteel coquetries, while away the hours in which wealthy madames sleep; they are the humble temptresses, who pass the time stroking visions of love and happiness.46 In Gómez Carillo, the decorative gesture is exacerbated. Conversely, much of Argentine literature from the s (by authors such as Eugenio Cambaceres and Julián Martel Miró) had related the terror that the new ‘‘barbarian’’—following the rhetoric of the epoch—produced among the elite. Martel’s narrator in La bolsa (The Stock Exchange), after describing the extremely rich interior of the protagonist’s apartment, points out: On the other side of the gilded iron gate, faintly sketched out in the storm, shapeless humps of people . . . ; humps among which the doctor sees illuminated two eyes, like those of a cat, which perhaps belonged to some hungry one of those who wandered through the night . . . with a knife in their belts.47 The phobia does not necessarily contradict the decorative gesture. Rather, the embellishment of urban misery is one of the effects of terror, of the paranoia of a class that in its own modernizing project to eradicate rural barbarism had created new contradictions. It was precisely these contradictions that had begun to relativize their hegemony at the turn of the century. And doubtless, the city was the space of these contradictions in the epoch of the modernist chronicle. In response to these tensions, the chronicle elaborates other ways of 

   

representing the working-class exterior through the figure of the stroller. The almost touristic divagations toward the margins of the city will be another distinct gesture of the chronicler-stroller. In these strolls, the chronicler emerges once again as a producer of images of otherness, contributing to the elaboration of a knowledge about the ways of life for subaltern classes, and thus, serving to neutralize their threat. Let us focus on a chronicle by Eduardo Wilde, ‘‘Sin rumbo’’ (‘‘Aimless’’), significantly titled after Cambaceres’s later novel. ‘‘Walking, walking, I went toward the edge of the city, by the estates. . . . On the outskirts could be seen men and women who once inhabited the center, and whom the city, in its eternal flux and reflux, had thrown out to the edges.’’ 48 The first mark that differentiates the other is his or her lack of property, the lack of an interior that defines the subject who strolls by: Further out, the small houses and ranches are disseminated, with their microscopic and dislocated windows, through which an empty and dispossessed interior may be seen, where a family without genealogy conducts the expediencies of a hungry life. (p. ; italics added) Dispossession and lack of genealogy: beyond a description of the other, the chronicle here fixes the proper field of the subject’s identity. The subject goes to the edge, to the boundary of the city, not to be other, but rather to assert his or her difference; or in other words, to affirm his or her own identity. If the other is, by definition, the outside or exterior of discourse—the contingent-particularity par excellence—in Wilde (as in Sarmiento earlier), we find the functionality of the classificatory tableau, the generalizing scene that condenses and orders heterogeneity and danger: ‘‘All have the mark of misery and vice on their faces and this way of looking like beggars that shocks and saddens’’ (p. ). But even in Wilde, the contingency of the particular resists its transformation by the tableau and stereotype: [A beggar] approached me, asking me for pennies in order to complete . . . a quota destined for his sustenance that day. I had left to see a forever beautiful nature and to resolve ideas in my head, while I reflected various aspects [of my ideas] with my senses. The poor gentleman wholly unsettled everything for me, entirely changing the course of my thoughts. (p. ) Contact with the beggar interrupts and prevents the narrator’s selfcenteredness, disarticulating the generalizing frame, the stereotype, which the stroller invents as a way of ordering the chaos of the increasingly proletarianized city. The Chronicle and Urban Experience

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This disciplinary, ordering aspect of the stroll is significant, as it later becomes a narrative stratagem in the distinctive criminology of the fin de siècle. In La mala vida en Buenos Aires (Criminal Life in Buenos Aires) from , for example, criminologist Eusebio Gómez writes: Now let us enter into the lower foundations of the city of Buenos Aires; let us see how the gentlemen of vice and crime operate: let us surprise them in their sinister machinations; let us pass through the caverns where they gather together to deliberate or enjoy the benefits of their parasitism; let us listen to their conversations; let us examine them in all the details of their personality. It will be necessary to sacrifice many conventions for this, and above all, to master our profound repugnancies; but let us do it, and at the end of the journey, in the intimacy of our self, certainly there will exist for them neither sentiment of hate nor desire for vengeance.49 The rhetoric of strolling, previously formalized in the chronicle, becomes a paradigmatic mode of representation for the dangers of a new urban life. Chroniclers and Prostitutes Perhaps no other social figure of the period incarnates the danger of the proletarianized city like the prostitute. In discourses about the city, the prostitute is a condensation (the Mexican naturalist novel Santa by Gamboa offers us a classic example) of the dangers inherent in urban heterogeneity. As Georg Simmel has pointed out, prostitution is the sign of the impact of the laws of exchange on the most intimate or private zones of modern life.50 In other words, the prostitute represents the intervention of the market into the most protected areas of the interior. Prostitution, far from being an anomaly, may be seen as the model for human relations under capitalism. Discourses on modernity never cease to reflect on this, condensing in the prostitute not only a figure of modern sexuality and a threat to familial, bourgeois living, but the danger of the new working class as well. In a lucid reading of Édouard Manet’s Olympia, Thomas J. Clark traces the relation between the bourgeois culture of Paris, prostitution, and the ideological function—forever tense and contradictory—of impressionism. For Clark, the representation of the prostitute in Manet was a reflection on a deterritorialized sexuality, entirely problematic for the dominant culture not only for the display of nudity (and of prostitution itself ), but also because 

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such nudity was a sign of class.51 The impressionist, in an extremely contradictory manner, would end up covering this nudity, subordinating its particularity (and danger) to canonical and processed forms of the naked body. According to Clark, the radicality of Manet lies in the ambiguity and the aporias that confront the placement of the other in bodily form as the kind of ironic naked body that Olympia represents. In fin de siècle Buenos Aires, prostitution became a problem that threatened even the disciplinary capacity of the urban police. As Gómez Carrillo had himself noted in El encanto de Buenos Aires (The Charm of Buenos Aires), prostitutes appeared in the street, uncontained by the institutional sites of the brothel or rooming house. Hence, the prostitute was one of the privileged objects for the science of criminology, as the proliferation of books like Eusebio Gómez’s La mala vida en Buenos Aires adequately proves. Moreover, as Ernesto Goldar has shown, an immigratory flux of prostitutes impacted fin de siècle Buenos Aires, many of whom were oftentimes involuntarily brought over by the sinister organization Zwi Migdal. This organization administered the trata de blancas (white slave trade) that would explode in the s (and would be essential to the fiction of Roberto Arlt).52 For us, this background is significant: it refers to the obliterated aspects of city life—or better yet, to the city decorated and domesticated by many chronicles of the time. Gómez Carrillo writes: Before lying down I turned to open my window so that I might contemplate the spectacle of the expressive street. . . . The slow coming and going, as slow as it is everywhere, of the caress vendors, suggested ideas of an infinite piety. Ah! The courtesans of the Avenida de Mayo! . . . If only they had something provocative, some perversion, something of the diabolical! . . . But they go, the poor ones, one after the other, without coquetry, almost without sustenance, and when they pause every so often in order to attract a man who may pass by hurriedly or distracted, one notes that the movement of their heads, jerking sidewise, is purely mechanical. From my observatory I see neither their gazes nor their smiles. But I know well what they are like.53 Here, the subject is no longer a flâneur; the site of the gaze is much more secure and protected: an interior from which, once again, the particularity of the object—and its threatening aspect—is erased, producing a generalized scene. The prostitute is a courtesan who inspires piety. Yet in spite of her piety, the subject insists on marking out the distance: from the observatory, the gaze domesticates the street. The Chronicle and Urban Experience

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On the other hand, more empirical than this detached gaze was Gómez Carillo’s strolls to outlying brothels. Gómez Carrillo passed by these as well, such as in a chronicle entitled ‘‘El tango’’: It is a faraway barrio, sordid and almost deserted. On the ground, full of water, the strange lights from public lighting are reflected with a spectral pallor. Along the sidewalk, in essence a path, as one here would say, we walk along in leaps over the puddles. . . . No longer are they the daughters of France, no, neither the subtle and stylized graces as we long to see, but only the natural flowers of the porteño mire and the porteño undulations.54 (Italics added) The chronicler did not need to see a stylized prostitute: stylization (once again the signet of a literary identity) is what his discourse provides to the represented world, dominating it. Over the despicable wretchedness of the city, a map of another city—strictly bookish or bibliographic—is imposed: But the strange, the inexplicable, is that the tango that I see this evening in this low and vile bouge of Buenos Aires is not different from the Parisian tango in any essential detail. The dancers of Luna Park are noticeably more beautiful, wealthier, more gracious, and more airy than those here. The dance is the same. Does such a phenomenon consist of the fact that the influence of Parisian refinement has come to even this wretched and faraway neighborhood? (p. –) It is the chronicler who imposes Parisian refinement, the stylization of a certain literary city on the wretched neighborhood, for: Where is the city? . . . Where is the city? . . . I also ask it myself when, on certain tepid afternoons, I lose my sense of interest, guiding a miniscule carriage without fixed direction through the avenue foliage. (p. ) The city has been erased by an aestheticizing discourse. There are many encounters between chroniclers and prostitutes, not always as sublimated as in Gómez Carrillo. In Darío’s chronicles about Paris (the ideal city), he betrays a certain anxiety: On the right border, throughout the enormous artery of the boulevard, the luxurious vehicles pass toward the elegant theaters. Later on, you have the dinners at the expensive cafés, where the women of the world     

who are highly prized are at work in their traditional job of dazzling the initiates. . . . Near the Magdalena and the Concord plaza is the famous place that would tempt the pen of a writer of comedies. There these madames flourish their magnificent feathers, present the most audacious tunics. . . . Throughout the streets of Fauborg Montmartre and of Notre-Dame-deLorette, a procession of partygoers ascends every night, as cosmopolitan as they are Parisian, aficionados of the Moulin-Rouge and of white nights. No one has any literary and artistic recollections anymore for what was years ago a refuge for artists and writers [literatos]. Besides, the mercantilization of art is already known.55 (Italics added) On the basis of this account of prostitutes with tunics and magnificent feathers, would it not be possible to speak of a modernist prostitution? Certainly, the remarkable thing about this chronicle is how, after describing a prostitute, Darío reflects on the mercantilization of art, one of his favorite topics. He continues: Nocturnal Paris is light [n.] and unique, delight and harmony; and hélas! delight and crime. . . . It knows that with gold everything can be obtained, in the gilded hours of the golden villa, where love transforms this corner of happiness, where some years ago one dreamed dreams of art and loved with less interest. . . . It is said that the artists of today, the same artists, do not care for any more than profit. (p. –) From prostitution to the mercantilization of art: in Darío, the slippage is constant, and forces us to at once suspect the chronicler’s introjection of the prostitute’s condition into his own practice. For is not the chronicle precisely an incorporation of art into the market, into the emergent culture industry? And was not mercantilization, following the idealism professed by many modernists, a form of prostitution? A strange stroll—a schizo-stroll, one would have to add—of the poet Fernández in De sobremesa (After Dinner) by José Asunción Silva, lends weight to the suggestion: It was twenty minutes to twelve when I left for the boulevard and I was confused by the human river that swarmed through it. . . . I walked for a quarter of an hour with a firm enough step and . . . Transparent cards? a The Chronicle and Urban Experience

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boy said to me, putting away the obscene package when I turned to look at him. The light from the windows of a bronze shop attracted me, and walking slowly, as I felt that my spirits had abandoned me, I was about to stop at the entrance to one of them. A pale and flaccid woman, with the face of hunger, her eyelashes and mouth tinged with carmine, made me shudder from head to foot when she touched the trimming of my heavy leather overcoat that enveloped me and a psst, psst, that she directed to an obese and sanguinary Englishman, sounded insidiously in my ears. . . . I later noticed myself in the shop window. . . . It seemed to me that I was a prisoner between two glass walls and that I would never be able to leave. . . . A heavy mist floated before my eyes, a violent neuralgia passed through my head from one temple to the other, like a ray of pain, and I collapsed onto the ice.56 The stroller initially appears protected by a shield that envelops him, that interiorizes him in a heavy leather overcoat. At the foot of the shop’s window, however, his contact with the prostitute shakes him: stripped of subjectivity, he immediately believes himself a prisoner between two glass walls. The metonymic displacement from the prostitute to a prisoner trapped in the window display is revealing. As we have seen earlier, the store window is one of the privileged objects for the stroller: it refers to consumption as a mediation between the urban subject and his world. At the same time, the window is a metaphor by means of which a certain fin de siècle writing (particularly in the chronicle) represents its own subordination to the laws of the market. Fernández’s stroll is doubly significant: it situates the subject trapped by the glass contiguous to the prostitute who sells her services. And this occurs precisely in a novel where the economic exchange of artistic objects and the general issue of mercantilization are fundamental. The complaints—and little obsessions—of the modernists against money were many. On the other side of their frequent and anxiety-ridden claims to purity (in modernity even purity is highly valued, as is the case with the uselessness of luxury), the poet figures as a salaried worker, above all in chronicles. Once the writer—his protective veil broken—recognizes his reflection in the glass showcase, he begins to see himself as an other, at times as a prostitute. Among other things, the decorative assemblage of beauty becomes complicated. Beginning with this moment, the literato, even the chronicler, ceases to be a compliant flâneur. 

   

Martí: The Chronicle and Quotidian Existence The chronicle is a type of minor literature, a fragmentary and derivative form, yet essential to the literary field at the turn of the century. As a minor form, generically imprecise, it enabled the representation of diverse experiences linked to a capitalist field of daily existence that remained excluded from the more stable forms of literary (or artistic) representation. Yet abstractly speaking, it is impossible to postulate the political sign of the minor form. As we have seen in the case of the chronicle, its very lack of discipline, its formal flexibility, actually enabled it to take on a disciplinary function, an emplotment of order for an as yet unclassified quotidian existence. Even so, it is certain that the heterogeneity of the chronicle, at least in Martí, gave the writer an exit from the field of art and high culture. In Martí, these departures resist producing a decorative image of the city. In contrast to the decorative function that the modernist chronicle tends to satisfy, Martí records the misery and exploitation generated by the most advanced forms of modernity during that period in the United States: From the rooftops of the neighboring houses, which are the most common in poor neighborhoods, clusters of legs hang down. From below, from far below, one sees there, in the heights of the seventh floor, a red shirt raising a mug full of beer, like a drop of blood on which another drop of milk has fallen. The moon leaves sulfurous tints on the blond-haired heads, and the pale faces vent their spleen. Searching for cooler bricks to rest on, from one chimney to another the exhausted workers, their hair tangled, mouths drooping, swearing and staggering, wiping the streams of sweat with their hands, as if they were unstitching their entrails, pass by half-naked, like dwarves. On the sidewalk where the children assuage their parched stomachs by throwing themselves facedown on the half-warm tiles, the soulless mothers, weakened by the routine of the house, fatal in the summer, stretch their feet beneath a sickly tree or on the steps of the staircase outside; their eyebrows are caverns; their eyes, embers or prayers; whether their breasts can be seen does not matter to them; they hardly have the strength to silence the pathetic scream of the dying creature wrapped in their skirts.57 Here, the emphatic distance that separates the subject from the represented object, the working-class body, can be compared to the function of distantiation that we had seen earlier—a semantic and ideologically charged estrangement, remarkable in this instance for its grotesque treatment (nothThe Chronicle and Urban Experience

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ing celebratory) of the description. Fragmentation, as a characteristic feature of the other, penetrates the descriptive format itself. But equally extraordinary is the absence of embellishment in the description of misery. The body of the other, a conglomerate of fragments, appears in threatening opposition to the subject, but remains untamed or undomesticated. Misery here is neither picturesque nor docile, in contrast to the rhetoric of strolling in Wilde or Gómez Carrillo. Martí’s chronicles do not decorate, nor do they resolve the tensions of the city; to the contrary, it would seem that the violent fragmentation of the other’s body disperses into the very space of discourse, the secure place of the subject who also seeks to impose a distance. This kind of description went entirely against that of the patrons of stylized prose who prevailed in the realm of the modernist chronicle. Toward , Martí’s first texts about New York (where he certainly was no longer a tourist) record his ambiguous position before marginal cultures and the workers of the city. A position of distance, and even of fear, but at the same time of affiliation: I love the silence and the quietude. Poor [Thomas] Chatterton made sense in his desperate longings for the delights of solitude. The pleasures of cities begin for me when the motives that produce pleasure for the rest begin to disappear. The true day for my soul dawns in the middle of the night. Even though last night in my nocturnal, habitual stroll many sad scenes caused me grief. An old man strolled by silently beneath a streetlamp, dressed in that style that reveals at once the good fortune that we have had and the bad times that are now on us. His eyes, fixed on the people who passed, were filled with tears. . . . He could not articulate even one word. (vol. , ) The stroller seeks out an alternative space in the city, in the solitude of the night. Yet in his search for an empty place—his own—in the city, the subject is interpellated by the gaze of the other. Perhaps it may be possible to read here not only an encounter, but a projection of the subject onto the other as well. It is an other who reveals ‘‘the good fortune that we have had and the bad times that are now upon us.’’ Indeed, these words describe the exiled Martí himself, recently arrived in New York, and from the very first writings, subordinated to the market as a salaried writer. Regardless of his irreducible contradictions, for Martí, the writer is in fact an other, the writer in New York is a worker. And the chronicle is the site where this concept is put into practice. On the other hand, Martí’s nearness to the marginalized areas of the city—to the antiaesthetic material of the city—cannot be explained solely in terms of the personal experience of exile. As pointed out earlier, his relation 

   

is mediated by the struggles at work within the intellectual field: struggles between different positions and literary concepts. In Martí, the rejection of writing as urban decoration assumes a critique of the incorporation of the aesthetic as an autonomous sphere by the culture industry. This critique, however, also finds its support in lower and minor forms of journalism in order to attack a certain type of high intellectual: The history that we continue to live is more difficult to grasp and recount than that which is spit out in the books of ages past: the latter is only for crowning with roses, like a meek and gentle ox; the other, slippery and many headed like an octopus, suffocates those who would try to reduce it to a graphic form. A detail finely perceived of what is happening in the present; [or] the sudden pulsation in time with the human heartstrings, is worth more than those churned-out facts and pyrotechnic generalizations used so often in brilliant prose and oratory. . . . [When] you speak face-to-face in the plazas with the hungry without work, in the omnibus with the needy driver, in the small shops with the young worker, over the fetid tables with the bohemian cigar vendors and polacos [Polish] . . . , then the scenes of fecund horror from the French Revolution will turn to confront you with a terrible reality; and you learn that today in New York, in Chicago, in Saint Louis, in Milwaukee, in San Francisco, there ferments the dark yeast that brought the bread of France to ripen with blood.58 The chronicle offered Martí an (deterritorialized) exit to the street. It enabled him to launch a critique of the book, as well as a reflection on the risks of the autonomous will of literature as a phenomenon of modernity. Thus began Martí’s critique of the interior, now projected onto the most miniscule testimonies of capitalist quotidian existence—testimonies made at times with the very verbal, fragmented, and derivative material of the modern city. Notes  José Martí, Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . On the relation between the chronicle and modern temporality, see Fina García Marruz’s useful reading of the Escenas, ‘‘El tiempo en la crónica norteamericana de José Martí,’’ in En torno a José Martí, ed. Fina García Marruz et al. (Bordeaux, France: Editions Bière, ).  Rubén Darío, Peregrinaciones (Paris: Librería de la Vinda de Ch. Bouret, ), . The chronicles on Paris included in this book initially appeared in La Nación as Darío’s correspondences on the  Paris Exposition.  Rubén Darío, ‘‘En Paris,’’ Peregrinaciones, in Obras completas, Viajes y crónicas, vol.  (Madrid: Frodisio Aguado, ), –.

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 Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-Century,’’ in Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, ), .  Rubén Darío, ‘‘En el gran palacio,’’ Peregrinaciones, in Obras completas, Viajes y crónicas, vol.  (Madrid: Frodisio Aguado, ), .  Enrique Gómez Carrillo, El encanto de Buenos Aires (Madrid: Perlado, Pez y Ca, ), .  María Luisa Bastos, ‘‘La crónica modernista de Enrique Gómez Carrillo o la función de la trivialidad,’’ Sur – (): –.  Enrique Gómez Carrillo’s project to generate an applied literature, a useful art for the emergent culture industry, can be found in a privileged instance in La mujer y la moda. El teatro de Pierrot (Madrid: Mundo Latino, ). Here, Gómez Carrillo points out: ‘‘Fashion is superior to logic, higher than beauty itself ’’ (p. ).  Rubén Darío, Azul (Barcelona: F. Granada y Compañía, ), –.  José Martí, ‘‘Oscar Wilde,’’ La Nación,  December , in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . Regarding the reification of the aesthetic sphere, it is appropriate to recall these words of Benjamin: ‘‘If the concept of culture is a problematical one for historical materialism, the disintegration of culture into commodities to be possessed by mankind is unthinkable for it. . . . The concept of culture as the embodiment of entities that are considered independently, if not of the production process in which they arose, then of that in which they continue to survive, is fetishistic’’ (Walter Benjamin, One Way Street [London: New Left Books, ], ).  See Angel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, ), esp. the chapter entitled ‘‘La ciudad modernizada.’’ See also Rafael Gutiérrez Giradot, Modernismo (Barcelona: Montesinos, ), esp. –.  José Martí, Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –),  [hereafter OC, followed by volume and page number].  Domingo F. Sarmiento, ‘‘Los temblores de Chile,’’ Obras, vol.  (Santiago, Chile: Imprenta de Gutenberg, –).  Martí, OC, vol. , .  José Luìs Romero, Latinoamérica: las ciudades y las ideas (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, ), esp. the chapters ‘‘Las ciudades patricias’’ and ‘‘Las ciudades burguesas.’’  The transformation of Paris after  was a privileged object of study for Benjamin in his (inconclusive) study on the Parisian arcades and thoroughfares. See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-Century,’’ in Reflections. Thomas J. Clark has studied the relation of the Haussmannization of Paris to systems of representation in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ).  Romero, Latinoamérica, p. xx.  On the change in urban structure in Europe since the end of the sixteenth century, Lewis Mumford indicates that the ‘‘new forces favored expansion and dispersion in every direction, from the colonization of the ultramar to the organization of new industries, whose technological perfections cancelled . . . practical as well as symbolic’’ (The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects [New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, ), .  Federico Gamboa, Apariencias (Buenos Aires: Jacobo Peuser, ), –.  Lucio V. López, La gran aldea (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Martín Biedna, ), .  Israel Katzman, La arquitectura del siglo XIX en México, vol.  (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ), .  See Instituto de Arte Americano, La arquitectura de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional, ), –.



   

 Eduardo Wilde, Páginas escogidas (Buenos Aires: Ángel Estrada y Cía), .  In The Painting of Modern Life, Clark writes: ‘‘The city was eluding its various forms and furnishings, and perhaps what Haussmann would prove to have done was to provide a framework in which another order of urban life—an order without an imagery—would be allowed its mere existence. . . . Capital did not need to have a representation of itself laid out upon the ground in bricks and mortar, or inscribed as a map in the minds of its city dwellers. One might even say that capital preferred the city not to be an image—not to have form, not to be accessible to the imagination, to readings and misreadings, to a conflict of claims on its space—in order that it might mass produce an image of its own to put in place of those it destroyed. On the face of things, the new image did not look entirely different from the old ones. It still seemed to propose that the city was one place, in some sense belonging to those who lived in it. But it belonged to them now simply as an image, something occasionally and casually consumed in places expressly designed for the purpose—promenades, panoramas, outings on Sundays, great exhibitions, and official parades. It could not be had elsewhere, apparently; it is no longer part of those patterns of action and appropriation that made up the spectators’ everyday lives. I shall call that last achievement the spectacle, and it seems to me clear that Haussmann’s rebuilding was spectacular in the most oppressive sense of the word’’ (p. ).  This is one of the constant themes in Marshall McLuhan’s work. Haroldo de Campos underlines the importance that the techniques of visual spatialization and titles of the daily press had in Stéphane Mallarmé. See Haroldo de Campos, ‘‘Superación de los lenguajes exclusivos,’’ América Latina en su literatura, ed. C. Fernández Moreno (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, ), .  Walter Benjamin, ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, ), –.  Darío, ‘‘En París,’’ –. In another chronicle about the exposition, he writes: ‘‘And as the spirit leans toward a blessed return to what is past, in the memory there materializes the million themes of history and the reading that relates them to all of these names and places. Love affairs, acts of war, the beauty of times in which life was not exhausted by practical prose and progress as it is today’’ (p. ).  Martí, OC, vol. , .  Darío, ‘‘En París,’’ .  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –.  In the following analysis of the activity of strolling, the works that I have found most useful are Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Flaneur,’’ in Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, ), –. Karlhein Z. Stierle, ‘‘Baudelaire and the Tradition of the Tableau de Paris,’’ New Literary History (): –; Michel de Certeau, ‘‘Walking in the City,’’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, , no. , –; Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, esp. ‘‘The View from Notre-Dame,’’ –; and Sylvia Molloy, ‘‘Flâneries textuales: Borges, Benjamin, y Baudelaire,’’ in Homenaje a Ana María Barrenechea, ed. Lía Swartz and Isaías Lerner (Madrid: Castalia, ).  López, La gran aldea, .  Manuel Rivera Cambas, México pintoresco, artístico y monumental, vol.  (; reprint, Mexico City: Editora Nacional, ), –.  Justo Sierra, Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónom de México, ), .

The Chronicle and Urban Experience





 

    



         



Philippe Hamon, Introduction à l’analyse du descriptif (Paris: Hachette, ). Hamon writes: ‘‘A second metaphor of equal weight in its insistence within the metadiscourse of the text in general and the descriptive text in particular, is that of the emporium-text. The metaphor of the front store window can be considered moreover as a connecting ‘thread,’ beginning with that of the emporium, or vice versa. The emporium is the place where products of labor are arranged and sold as ‘articles’ (the descriptive term, it must be noted, is also the site of a ‘cutting-out’ [decoupage] and ‘working over’ of language): the emporium of the ‘brandnew,’ ‘the latest’; or once again, ‘retail’ ’’ (n.p.). Gómez Carrillo, El encanto de Buenos Aires, . Even Sarmiento, for whom the city had been the site for a desired public order, writes in  about the problem of alienation for the new urban subject in ‘‘Un gran Boulevard para Buenos Aires,’’ in Obras, vol. , –: ‘‘The old Buenos Aires we have relinquished to the vendors, the national government, and to the prisons, hotels, customs house, the dependents and people occupied with trivial matters, working like Negroes, caught up with other occupations’’ (p. ). Sarmiento requests the Intendente Torcuato de Alvear to construct a new boulevard to connect the residential neighborhoods with the center, so that the ‘‘good people may come to walk around from time to time out of curiosity, through this ancient Buenos Aires, with [its] government, with the customs house, with the cathedral, and all types of businesses, shops, and taverns’’ (ibid.). Sarmiento here describes the tourist gaze of the private subject. Instituto de Arte Americano, La arquitectura de Buenos Aires, . Blas Matamoro, La casa porteña (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ), . Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘Las misas de Navidad,’’ in Cuentos y cuaresmas del Duque Job, ed. F. Monterde (Mexico City: Ediciones Porrúa, ), –. ‘‘La novela del tranvía’’ is reprinted in C. Monsiváis, ed., A ustedes les consta. Antología de la crónica en México (Mexico City: Era, ), –. It is significant that many chronicles by Gutiérrez Nájera, Darío, Eugenio Cambeceres, Casal, and even Martí operate along the border between referentiality and fiction. The functional marginality of the chronicle consists of this play along the boundaries of the genre. In fact, many fictions by these authors were originally published as chronicles. Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘Una cita,’’ originally published in El Nacional,  September , and reprinted in ed. Erwin K. Mapes, Cuentos completos y otras narraciones (Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), . Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Obras inéditas: Crónicas del Puck, ed. Erwin K. Mapes, . Martí, OC, vol. , . Gómez Carrillo, El encanto de Buenos Aires, . Julián Martel Miró, La bolsa (Buenos Aires: Guillermo Kraft, ), –. Eduardo Wilde, ‘‘Sin rumbo,’’ Páginas escogidas, ed. José María Monner Sans (Buenos Aires: Ángel Estrada y Cía, ), –. Eusebio Gómez, La mala vida en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Juan Roldán, ), –. Georg Simmel, ‘‘Prostitution,’’ in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Nathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. First published in . Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, –. Ernesto Goldar, La mala vida en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ). Gómez Carrillo, El encanto de Buenos Aires, .

   

    

Gómez Carrillo, ‘‘El tango,’’ in El encanto de Buenos Aires, . Porteño is a colloquial designation for the people of Buenos Aires. Rubén Darío, ‘‘París nocturno,’’ in Obras completas, cuentos y novelas, vol.  (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, ), –. José Asunción Silva, De sobremesa (Bogotá: Editorial de Cromos, ), –. First published in . Martí, OC, vol. , . Jose Martí, Nuevas cartas de Nueva York, ed. Ernesto Mejía Sánchez (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, ), .

The Chronicle and Urban Experience

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Introduction: Martí and His Journey to the United States

Until recently, Latin American literary history has been primarily concerned with the process of consolidating the institution of literature as an academic discipline. Such an undertaking has, for the most part, entailed the demarcation of literature’s domain through a series of incisions and exclusions that privilege the law of ‘‘pure’’ genres (among other norms). Before written materials were allowed to become a legitimate object of reflection and instruction, thereby gaining entrance into literature’s guarded sanctum, they had to be subjected to a meticulous examination, and adapted and incorporated into an economy of ‘‘knowledge.’’ Almost invariably, the means of evaluation for such an economy were derived from European canons. In the best of cases, these institutionally constructed canons held some kind of credible authority where literature had effectively succeeded in becoming autonomized; in securing not only a relatively specialized social authority, but also a set of categories and techniques for working on language, which would differentiate it from other discourses and social practices. To such a disciplinary gaze, delimited by canons, vast areas of nineteenth-century Latin American intellectual production remained invisible; unpresentable due precisely to their unruly heterogeneity, and lack of generic and functional specificity. This has certainly been the case with nineteenth-century travel literature 1—one of the models that granted legitimacy to the fin de siècle chronicle and the epistolary discourse of international correspondents. Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas emerged from this discursive tradition. In Latin American societies following the wars of independence, the journey (particularly to France and England) became one of the basic rituals in the education of the ruling elite. At the same time, travel literature— conveniently published in installments that took the form of letters in the newspapers of the epoch—became one of the fundamental narrative and rhetorical paradigms shaping the proliferating reflections on emerging nations. Exceeding the boundaries of touristic curiosity, by the middle of the cen-

tury, travel narratives had become one of the privileged forms of discourse on modernity in Latin America. Likewise, in the heyday of nineteenth-century European expansion, the voyage occupied a prominent position and had enormous popularity within the system of letters. As Edward Said has lucidly pointed out, the voyage to the peripheral zones of Western culture was an important strategy for the construction of an orientalist discourse, an archive of known facts and tropes about the oriental other that constituted one of the epistemological foundations of nineteenth-century European imperialism: Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically as a topic of learning, discovery, and practice. But in addition I have been using the word to designate that collection of dreams, images, and vocabularies available to anyone who has tried to talk about what lies east of the dividing line. These two aspects of Orientalism are not incongruent, since by use of them both Europe could advance, securely and unmetaphorically upon the Orient.2 Hence, for Said, the configuration of images generated around the other would go beyond any claims to understand a foreign reality, as they served to consolidate Western identity, and legitimate the civilizing mission and expansion of modernity. In terms of Said’s archaeology of orientalism, travel literature written by Latin Americans in the nineteenth century presents us with a paradox: this literature was not generated by or in the name of a European subject who would produce stereotypes and categories for a subaltern and surmountable otherness. To the contrary, Latin American travel literature was produced by intellectuals searching in the modern discourses of the European library for the keys to solving the enigmas and gaps in their own identity. If it is indeed true, as Jean Franco has shown, that nineteenth-century Latin America witnessed a proliferation of European travelers connected to the expansion of markets,3 then the reverse side of the coin is equally significant: namely, the importance of traveling for the Latin American liberal elites in search of models that could order and discipline the chaos, that could modernize and redefine the barbarism that was (for them) the Latin American world.4 Aside from the pedagogical function of the voyage—‘‘the inevitable transformations that travel exerts on the spirit’’—Sarmiento emphasized the relationship between travel literature and the civilizing endeavor: With regard to myself, the idea has become increasingly clear to me so as to assume the character of an indomitable, persistent conviction that 

   

we in America are on the wrong track, and that there are profound and traditional causes that must be broken if we do not wish to be dragged into the erosion, the nothingness, and I daresay the barbarism, an inescapable mire.5 In the discourse of travel narratives, the distribution of space is ideologically determined: ‘‘There are regions that lie too high above sea level, where the atmosphere cannot be breathed by those born in the lowlands’’ (p. ). In Sarmiento, the intellectual was to be a traveler who goes from low to high: his social authority would be legitimized via his ability to mediate between the uneven areas of America and Europe. The traveler-intellectual translates a foreign plenitude with the objective of correcting the wrong track of his own tradition—that erosion that distinguishes his place of origin. In this sense, the voyage for Sarmiento is the very foundation of the authority that validates his work as an intellectual, his intellectual labor. For instance, it would be impossible to imagine Sarmiento’s work as an educator without considering his journeys (commissioned by the Chilean government between  and ) to Europe and the United States. They grounded his pedagogical theory in the  De la educación popular (On Popular Education), the basis of the Argentine educational system after Juan Manuel de Rosas, former dictator of the Argentine provinces (–). The voyage from low to high, from chaos to order, displaces the travelerintellectual and affords him or her a privileged perspective: the ability to write from the future about the chaos left behind. The voyage is a prospective exercise, a displacement to the future that propels the subject beyond the insufficiencies of the present. In his or her curious and wistful review of modernity’s institutions, monuments, and machines, the traveler announces the signs of a future that would reach Latin America when the vestiges of tradition had been overcome. In this symbolic topography, the United States holds a prominent place. Perhaps more rightfully than ancient Europe, the United States stood out as the modern space par excellence—a new society where progress had succeeded in freeing itself from the heavy chains of tradition. Even in Martí’s first chronicles of New York, in , we still find echoes of a utopian vision of the United States. The splendor of life . . . the vision of this new country rising from the ruins of old nations, awakens the attention of thinking men who anxiously seek the definitive elimination of all destructive forces which in the last century had begun to build the foundations for a new era of Martí and His Journey to the United States

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humanity. This could be, this ought to be, the significance of the United States.6 We will soon see how Martí dismantles this rhetoric in Escenas norteamericanas. For now, let us say that since Francisco de Miranda’s ‘‘Viaje por los Estados Unidos de la América del Norte’’ (A Journey through the United States of North America),7 published in –, the utopia associated with the North had been a key trope for the modernizing patricians. For Sarmiento, the New World character of modernity was crucial: the United States, like Argentina, was gifted with an unexplored nature, untouched by cultural erosion. At the same time, the United States constituted a society that, without severing its ties to the best (that is, English) colonial traditions, was not shackled by the weight of accumulated historical experience. Nonetheless, even Sarmiento could not hide a certain amount of discomfort when contemplating the modernity he so desired. During his second trip to the United States, in , he writes the following about New York: Changes of such magnitude have occurred since my first journey, that the part of the city where I now live, the most splendid one, did not then exist. . . . This spaciousness of the streets, this vegetation of trees, ivy, flowers, and iron gates do not cover the stupendous buildings, but rather adorn them; the confusion of cars, buses, trains, people, signs, and billboards leave a strange impression on those who, like us, have lived in narrow streets thirty-six feet across that limit the vision.8 In this New World city, nature embellishes the artifice. And yet, the vegetation, which is controlled and demarcated, does not cover the stupendous buildings. If the expansiveness and urban flow produce a strange impression, it is because certain deficiencies have ‘‘limited the vision’’ of those who ‘‘come from the lowlands.’’ Even in , Sarmiento asserted: ‘‘Let us not stop the United States in their march; this is as much as some people ultimately propose. Let us catch up with the United States. Let us be America, as the sea is the ocean, let us be the United States.’’ 9 Similarly, in Cuba, the influential intellectuals of Martí’s formative years also associated the United States with the modern utopia. Given that Cuba still remained a Spanish colony, the North was one of the models in which liberal discourse, critical of Spain’s sovereignty, found support. But even in a colony where annexation to the United States had been the anticolonial option since mid-century, the debates over North American expansionism were inflamed. To cite one example, soon after the  North American in

   

vasion of Mexico, José Antonio Saco—one of the ideologues for Cuban modernization and a great admirer of the United States (where he was living in exile)—criticizes the annexationist option from a kind of cultural perspective that was to gain importance in the coming years: As far as I am concerned, and lest it be believed that I am attempting to convert any Cubans to my personal opinion, I must frankly own that even though I recognize the advantages that Cuba might gain were it to form a part of the States, deep in my heart I would be left with a secret feeling for the loss of Cuban nationhood.10 Later, he adds: If the country to which we were to add ourselves were of the same origins as ours—Mexico, for instance, assuming that this unfortunate nation could grant us the protection that it lacks itself—then, by an instinctive impulse and as quick as the electric current, Cubans would all turn their eyes to the regions of Anahuac. But, when dealing with a foreign nation, still more foreign to us than others, it would be a strange phenomenon for the Cuban people, by severing themselves in one stroke from their ancient traditions, the strength of their customs, and the empire of their religion and their language, to throw themselves en masse into the arms of the North American confederation. (p. ) Saco’s text against annexation reveals not only a criticism of the United States, but also the fear that Cuba would be annexed to the South of the United States; a fact that would contribute to the expansion of the slave trade economy—the antipode of progress in Saco’s eyes—and the growth of a slave population, which for him as well as many of his liberal contemporaries represented a threat to the nation’s ethnic and social equilibrium. Still, even in Saco, the emphasis on a ‘‘culturalist’’ argument is significant, as a few decades later (beginning with Martí and Rodó’s Arielism) it would become the generative rhetoric behind an emergent concept of Latin America defined precisely in opposition to the United States. As Saco suggests in his reference to ‘‘unfortunate Mexico’’ the North American expansion into Mexican territory starting in  decisively altered the Latin American representations of the United States. In , Chilean Francisco Bilbao stated: We see empires that attempt to renew the old idea of global domination: the Russian Empire and the United States. . . . Russia is far away, [but] Martí and His Journey to the United States

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the United States extends [its dominion] every day in this game of the hunt that is leading them to the South. We already see Latin America’s fragments falling into the Anglo-Saxon jaws of that magnetizing boa that is unraveling its torturous coils. Yesterday Texas, after which the North of Mexico and the Pacific saluted a new master. Today the advancing guerrillas awaken the Isthmus, and we see Panama, that future Constantinople of America, vacillate suspended, its destiny swinging over the abyss and wondering: Shall I belong to the South, [or] shall I belong to the North? 11 Relatively forgotten in this century, Bilbao discussed Yankee individualism in Panama in a forward critique against imperialism that in many ways anticipates post- Latinoamericanista discourses. Bilbao’s rhetoric is entirely significant inasmuch as it inscribes the North/South antithesis; in doing so, the essay articulates a concept of Latin America as a repository for ‘‘aesthetic,’’ ‘‘human,’’ and ‘‘spiritual’’ values opposed to North American capitalist and technological modernity. We/they forms the matrix of an emerging nationalistic subject: it constitutes an antithetical configuration that introduces the opposition between Anglo-Saxon and the Latin race, one of the foundational tropes of fin de siècle Arielism. Bilbao writes: Something of that divine ancient humanity and hospitality inhabits our regions. In our bosoms there is room for the love of the human race. We have not lost the tradition of spirituality that belongs to man’s destiny. We believe and love all that unites; we prefer the social over the individual, beauty over riches, justice over power, art over commerce, poetry over industry, philosophy over texts, pure spirit over reason, duty over interest. In our enthusiasm for the beautiful, we are those who believe we see in art, regardless of its results, and in philosophy, the splendor of the sovereign good. Neither on earth nor in earthly joy do we see man’s ultimate end; and the Black, the indio, the destitute, the unhappy, the weak find in us the respect owed to the title and dignity of being human. (p. ) We shall return to this idea—or discourse—about Latin America. For now, let us highlight the importance of a concept of art in the configuration of a discourse around Latin American identity: a concept differentiated from both the signs of rationalization and a modernity reified in the representation of the North. Specifically, in contrast to the Enlightenment letrados, Bilbao in  presupposes an aesthetic sphere proper (‘‘that which is beautiful,     

regardless of its results’’) whose authority postulates a critique of modernization. In Bilbao, we witness the ontologization of that aesthetic authority that, beyond a limited art purism, claims legitimacy as the essential key to the very definition of Latin American being. Furthermore, in this remarkable critique of the modernizing letrados, we also see how the aesthetic subject, in defining a continental being, incorporates precisely those subaltern areas of experience marginalized by modernization. Bilbao’s passage reveals the double movement that characterizes the formation of modern Latinoamericanismo, inseparable from the development of a literary and cultural authority. This double movement entails, on the one hand, the exclusion and reification of the North (rationalization, reason, industry, interest), and on the other, the inclusion of the distinct others in modernization (the beautiful, disinterest, spirit, tradition, the subaltern) by means of the aesthetic subject’s integrating gaze. A reading of Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’ will show how this rhetoric is honed, constituting one of the critical strategies for the legitimization of modern literature in Latin America. One would be tempted to argue that the representations of the United States changed as the object of the Latin American intellectual’s interest (that is, North American modernity) shifted its political position and threatened the autonomy of Latin American nations. Yet in the case of Bilbao as well as Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas, this explanation is only partially valid and does not elucidate the significance of the gaze, the specificity of the intellectualtraveler’s authority: both of which presuppose a discursive field, a figurative network that guarantees the meaning and coherence of the represented world. The authority of that subject over the form of representation is crystallized in a certain rhetoric, in tropes and figures—ways of cutting through and organizing discursive material. Martí observes: I keep my first impressions vividly alive. The crowds on Broadway; the quietude of the evenings; the character of men; the character of women, even more curious and worthy of notice; hotel life, which will never be understood by us; that dreamy woman, physically and mentally stronger that the young man who courts her; this feverish life, this astonishing movement, this splendid sick people, on one hand marvelously enhanced, on the other—that of the intellectual pleasures—childish and poor; . . . these men, all too dedicated to the matters of their wallets, with a remarkable unawareness of their spiritual matters. It all comes at once and begins to organize itself in this brief narrative of my impressions.12 (Italics added) Martí and His Journey to the United States

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In fact, narrating implies the organization and formalization of materials taken from experience. Even under the banner of referentiality and spontaneity in the travel narrative, here discourse does more than passively present its object: it reveals a distinctive shaping of the object’s outlines. The voyager recounts not only what s/he sees; s/he furthermore insists on pointing out what is missing in the represented world. Driven by economic rationality, they are the ones who do not enjoy intellectual pleasures, unaware of their spiritual matters. On the other side of this represented world—namely, North American modernity—an alternative identity of us takes shape, along with the intellectual and spiritual authority of the one who speaks. In Martí, the subject criticizes modernity and subverts the norms of the travel narrative, which is itself historically linked to the modernizing project from an aesthetic, literary gaze. Thus, we will read Escenas norteamericanas in a twofold articulation: as a lucid testimony to a writing that struggles to coexist with the signs of modernity and as the context in which Martí elaborates his Latinoamericanista thought—the discourse on us that culminates in ‘‘Our America’’ and Versos sencillos. Notes  In this respect, David Viñas’s reading of Argentine travelers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is exceptional. See his De Sarmiento a Cortázar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Siglo Veinte, ).  Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, ), .  Jean Franco, ‘‘Un viaje poco romántico: Viajeros británicos hacia Sudamérica (–),’’ Escritura  (): –.  On the other hand, it is also true that these same Latin Americans traveled throughout regions of barbarism. As suggested earlier, this is the case in Facundo. See also Julio Ramos, ‘‘Entre otros: Una excursión a los indios ranqueles,’’ Filología , no.  (): –.  Domingo F. Sarmiento, Viajes por Europa, Africa, y América, in Obras completas, vol.  (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Mariano Moreno, ), . First published in .  José Martí, Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –), –.  Francisco de Miranda, Diario de viajes y escritos políticos, ed. Mario H. Sánchez-Barba (Madrid: Editora Nacional, ). See, in particular, his description of Philadelphia: ‘‘at last the cleanliness, evenness, and width of the streets, their illumination by night, the vigilance of watchmen posted on every corner for the purpose of well-ordered security [sic], and the police in the city of Philadelphia constitute one of the most agreeable and well-ordered peoples of the world’’ (p. ).  Domingo F. Sarmiento, ‘‘Nueva York: rápidas impresiones,’’ Obras completas, vol.  (Buenos Aires: Luz del Día, ), .  Domingo F. Sarmiento, Conflicto y armonía de las razas en América Latina (Buenos Aires: ), .

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José Antonio Saco, Ideas sobre la incorporación de Cuba a los Estados Unidos (Paris: Imprenta de Panckoucke, ), .  Francisco Bilbao, El evangelio americano y otras páginas selectas, ed. Armando Donoso (Barcelona: Casa Editorial Maucci, n.d.), –.  Jose Martí, Obras completas, vol. , .

Martí and His Journey to the United States

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 Machinations: Literature and Technology

Aside from his solderer, the one-armed man had no mechanical implements other than five or six essential tools. All the pieces of his machines came from the house of one, the living room of another, like the blades of his Pelton wheel: for the confection he used all the old buckets from around the area. He had to switch tasks without respite behind a meter of tubing, or a rusted sheet of zinc which he, with his one arm and the help of his stump, was cutting, turning, twisting, and soldering with his energetic faith and optimism.—Horacio Quiroga, ‘‘The Orange Distillers’’

Machines proliferate throughout Martí’s landscapes. Some of them are useful and easily apprehended: ‘‘How full of inventions [is printing]! What an excess of machines, these steelworkers!’’ 1 Others are ostentatious, bearers of an iconoclastic violence: ‘‘The entire body trembles, disturbed and uneasy, when one travels through this fragile frame, incessantly shaken by a shudder that releases all the springs in the body, like those of a railroad’’ (vol. , p. ); ‘‘And woe be the house, if the railroads take it away!’’ (vol. , p. ). The indications of periodization in Martí’s writing are functional: they belong to the scientific-technological revolution, one of the forces driving North American advanced capitalism. Of even greater significance is the fact that Martí resided in what was perhaps the industrial and commercial capital of the United States: ‘‘in New York [life is] a train with a billowing plume of smoke and fiery entrails’’ (vol. , p. ). In that same era, Thomas Edison strolled through the streets of Paris, commenting on the novelists with irony: the best fictions of the time, he declared, are my own inventions. Not many years before, John Augustus Roebling (a German-born engineer of a Hegelian persuasion) consolidated the prestige of engineering—a prototypical profession in the industrial era— with the design of the Brooklyn Bridge, thereby claiming a place for himself in intellectual spheres. Both figures loomed large in Martí’s imagination: while Edison was a Dantesque figure, a character out of Émile Zola’s novels, Roebling was the poet of a new era. Of the latter, Martí writes, ‘‘As a poem

grows in the mind of an ingenious bard, so grew this bridge in Roebling’s mind’’ (vol. , p. ). The infatuation is emphatic, notwithstanding its consistent ambiguity. Yet among these giants, new ‘‘poets’’ of the modern world and modernity, what would be the place for a writer of letters? Martí posed the question and suggested an answer: ‘‘The noises of cars drown the voices of the lyre. We await the new lyre, that will form chords out of the axles of cars’’ (vol. , p. ). The presence of the machine in Martí is not solely thematic. Neither is it merely an object for representation. Indeed, he is engaged in a constant struggle to coexist with and among them—legitimizing his practice in contrast to the machine, emphasizing his utility. Particularly in the chronicle, writing is represented in competition with the discourses of technology; its use value lies in its capacity to establish boundaries, at times connections. Bridges. Martí often takes up a technical language, stripped of style, when he describes machinery. In those moments, description tends to become concise and elides the traces of the literary subject. Discourse dissimulates its level of depth and presents itself as the graphic details of the machinic body: Nothing other than steel is used in these machines for the rolling pins, axles, and nails. The nuts and bolts are made of a hardened metal; the connection boxes are made of the metal used for firearms; the shaft boxes are constructed apart from the frame, and they are only attached to it by screws, so that if they break, they can be replaced at very little cost, which cannot be done with machines that have the shaft box entirely connected to the frame itself, so when it breaks, the entire frame has to be replaced. The bearings [original in English] grease themselves [automatically]. (vol. , p. ) Martí here transcribes the other language without translating it (bearings: bearings). The intended destination of these descriptions can be assigned: ‘‘for their elementary and easy use it is recommended for those countries where there is no significant number of people in the know about mechanics’’ (vol. , p. ). As we have seen, the press correspondent is a mediator between the modern space and another space lacking in modernity. Here, the metaphor of the correspondent as a display case or exposition is literalized. In fact, in many cases, Martí’s advertisements written for La América (a commercial newspaper in New York) deal primarily with inventions and machinery that could be exported to Latin America.2 This condition in part guaranteed the appearance of the writer-by-trade, a career that gave rise Literature and Technology

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to a subsequent slippage and relativization in the once exclusive domain of writing. To write under the banner of journalism in the second half of the nineteenth century was no longer solely a prestigious, exclusive act, inscribed within the sphere of high culture. The space of writing, now subject to the laws of the market, opened up to the new middle classes. On the surface, this new space of writing has been stripped of style and rendered neutral by the demand of the market for language to be primarily communicative and informative, a space where writing is an instrument by trade. Still, we encounter small fissures, incongruities, foci of intensity— signs of struggle. For instance, in another one of Martí’s advertisements, the Herring Company office (which sold steel safe boxes) is described as a ‘‘curious museum, with its boxes of all sizes and inventions, from one that looks like an elegant sewing box, to those that seem colossal, sculpted from colored rock.’’ 3 Oftentimes, stylization reappears to dramatize the imbalance between the literal and the literary in its emphatic affirmation of the latter practice: And one can see in the newspaper that everything is an attempt to take the telegraphs from the roofs, the threads of electric light from their eminent poles, and have them fall upon the market like drops of fire in which the aerial and pyrotechnic star shatters into multiple telegraph and subterranean lighting companies. (vol. , p. ) Martí’s work of illumination appears in unsuspected places: chronicles, letters, reports, articles, ads—minor texts. It is almost as if the inconspicuous character of the place where Martí’s rhetoric shines brightest is a fundamental prerequisite for the emergence of Martí’s poetic illumination. We will examine this hypothesis later; for now, let us merely note that within a flat, journalistic, technical, or informational discourse, the poetic word refers to and remarks on its foreignness (extrañeza), the dilemma of being forever offsite. This condition can, in turn, be read as a register for the writer’s surprise amid the signs of modernity. This foreignness, the other side of an ambiguous infatuation, would seem to affirm the following remarks by Octavio Paz: ‘‘It is not the machine, essence of modernity, that fascinates [the modernists], but the creations of the art nouveau. Modernity is not the industry, but luxury.’’ 4 ‘‘The modernity that seduces the young poets is quite distinct from that which had seduced their parents; it is not called progress, nor are its manifestations the railroad and the telegraph: it is called luxury and its signs are useless and beautiful objects.’’ 5 Angel Rama offers a historical interpretation of the opposition: 

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Perhaps here, in the ample utilization that the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century conferred to scientific and technical discoveries, as well as in the difficulty of reconverting romantic idealism to the interpretation of transformations brought about by science, one must examine the origin of this rejection on the part of the humanistic sector that led to the split between two modern cultures (to which [Charles Percy] Snow refers). In any case, the nineteenth-century poets did not sing the praises of scientific conquests as the eighteenth-century poets had, as in the example of the discovery of the vaccine. Science and technics were presented as antithetical to poetry until the appearance, ushered in by the twentieth century, of Marinetti, who was also unable to close the fissure that he had created with his futurist visions.6 In Europe, this antithesis was systematized early on in the nineteenth century in the reaction that the romantic aesthetes had launched against the Industrial Revolution (particularly in England).7 In the Latin America of the nineteenth century, however, where the lettered class usually administered the project of reform and progress, the antithesis did not come to be formulated until the last quarter of the century, especially in areas on the road to modernization. Even a classic text like Andrés Bello’s  ‘‘Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida’’ (‘‘Hymn to Agriculture in the Torrid Zone’’), written in England, is a panegyric to technology. Behind Bello’s critique of urban life and his inscription of America as a locus amenus, site of an originary purity, the poem is a song dedicated to agriculture—specifically, the transformation of natural spontaneity into economic or cultural value through the intervention of the machine: el fértil suelo, áspero ahora y bravo, al desacotsumbrado yugo torne del arte humana y le tribute esclavo. Del obstruido estanque y del molino recuerden ya las aguas el camino; el intricado bosque el hacha rompa, consuma el fuego. let the fertile soil now rough and rugged turn to the unaccustomed yolk of human art, and pay the slave’s tribute. From the stagnant pond and the waterwheel Literature and Technology

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let the waters recall the way; let the hatchet break through the tangled forest, let the fire consume.8 Art here is techne. Far from the romantic epiphany of a prediscursive soil, the discourse of the hymn (silva) in Bello is legitimized as the control and exploitation of the jungle (selva), as the converter of American chaos to a rationalized order. At the same time, however, it is clear that the song is about agriculture and not industrialization, with which Bello must have been familiar in the London of the s. Curiously, in Sarmiento’s trip to London in the s, he seems to fixate on the topic of the much-discussed machine: There is nothing that has disturbed me more than the inspection of those foreboding factories that are the pride and the mark of human intellect, and the source of wealth for modern peoples. I cannot see in them anything other than wheels, motors, fulcra, levers, and a labyrinth of small parts, which move in an unknown fashion, to produce what I know to be the results.9 Sarmiento anticipates his sense of estrangement early in the text: ‘‘it is becoming ever more difficult to write about traveling, if the traveler departs from less-advanced societies, only to become cognizant of the societies that are more [advanced]. . . . Anacarsis does not come with his split-eye to contemplate the marvels of art, but at the risk of injuring the statue’’ (p. ). Estrangement, following Sarmiento, is a consequence of underdevelopment; and it is foreignness that the utopia of progress seeks to dispel. As suggested earlier, writing in Sarmiento is defined along the lines of a modern utopia, as a kind of machine that will transform American ‘‘barbarity’’ into the sense and order of ‘‘civilization.’’ The machine is an emblem that condenses the ideal principles of coherence and rationality captured in Sarmiento’s notion of the book. Sarmiento himself explained the bookmachine relation when, in Recuerdos de provincia, he recalled the following words of his teacher Domingo de Oro on Sarmiento’s pedagogical treatise Educación popular (Popular Education): The character of your chronicle had called my attention, in its tendency to translate the theories that have been ceaselessly lampooned into practice, into fact. It seems to me that you conceived of it as a machine in order to force it to work in the sense of industry and mechanical or physical movement. Your book is the machine that gives that same impulse to the intellectual movement, and I daresay to the intellectual and 

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moral industry as well, which in its own time [and] with its momentum will heighten recourse to material and industrial movement.10 In stark contrast, the modernists were the first to articulate the relation of modern literature to modern rationalization in terms of an antithesis. Take Gutiérrez Nájera, for example: ‘‘the asthmatic cough of the locomotive, the bitter shriek of the rails and the whistle of the factories [leave no room] to speak of the Academus gardens, of Aspasia’s festivals, of Pyrrhus’s tree, in the deaf and bland speech of the poets.’’ 11 Or Darío: ‘‘The artist has been supplanted by the engineer.’’ 12 According to Rodó, science ‘‘interpreted with the strict criterion of a school, has at one point succeeded in wounding the spirit of religiosity or the spirit of poetry.’’ 13 What brought about the change in the representation of technology? More than a neutral feature in the landscape of modernization, the machine had (long before the turn of the century) become an emblem of rationalization, of the life-world projected by the powerful discourses of modernity. At the turn of the century, the place of writing—of literature—had changed considerably in the face of the modernizing discourses. As pointed out in the previous section, this change was concomitant with a fissure between the literary field and rationalization, the latter of which had employed letters as a vehicle for formalization up until the s in Latin America. This fissure is the distinctive feature of modern literature, which in this epoch came to be defined as an ambiguous critique of rationalization; as even a defense of ‘‘humane’’ and ‘‘individual’’ values in a world on the way to technologization and massification. The resulting antithesis between the machine and literature thus emerged. And, as we will soon see, this representation of technology is entirely ideologized. The antithesis serves as a mechanism for order, for organizing a complex and contradictory reality: as a motif, the antithesis facilitates the formulation of an outside, the proper place for the threatening machine, in contradistinction to an interior realm where literature and other areas of aesthetic production acquire specificity. Criticism, engaged in the task of defining the fin de siècle literary field by means of the antithesis between literature and technology, takes for granted that its ground of possibility has itself been determined by the very same productive forces from which it distinguishes itself. This self-definition (which also implies a delimitation or division between itself and its other) can be called a literary ideology, an imaginary representation that the components of the field elaborate concerning the real conditions of their production.14 The problem arises at the moment when the antithesis, the organizing binarism Literature and Technology

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of the literary ideology, becomes the organizing mechanism for critical discourse. To cite an example, for Paz, ‘‘technics interposes itself between us and the world, forecloses any perspective for the gaze: beyond its geometries of steel, glass, or aluminum there lies absolutely nothing.15 In opposition to the machine, Paz ascribes to poetry the task of ‘‘discovering the image of the world in what emerges as fragment and dispersion, [of ] perceiving in one the other.’’ Such a project ‘‘would return to language its metaphoric value: to give presence to others. Poetry, the search for others, the discovery of otherness’’ (pp. –). Poetry uncovers that which technology hides; it restores to the gaze the organic, integral landscape heretofore obliterated by the machine. Poetry here fulfills a therapeutic function. Doubtless, the modernist ideologies and poetics carry an ineluctable weight, even today. Without pursuing the two cultures debate, which has always implied a struggle of good against evil, suffice it to say that the antithesis as a motif has been essential to those discourses that literature and the humanities (from the turn of the century) had deployed in an ongoing relationship with modernity. The weight of the binarism displaces a fluid relation, rife with imbalances and contradictions. Contrary to proposing a synthesis, however, let us merely note the contamination inherent in those fields of literature and technology projected by the antithesis as discrete spheres. Let us analyze the antitechnological discourse elaborated by literature not as an aggregate of ‘‘truths’’ about the world, but rather, as a strategy of legitimation for intellectuals who had become estranged from the utopia of progress and modernity. Beyond the emphatic critique against technologization, we will see the machine become a model for a certain fin de siècle literature that paradoxically attempted to rationalize and specialize its own medium of labor.16 Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas constitutes a remarkable archive of discourses on the new experience of technologization. In his representations of New York above all, Martí as a foreign correspondent forecasts the risks of modernization to his Latin American readers. His language, still tied to the Enlightenment, nevertheless begins to disengage itself from the rationalizing will. On the one hand, this development implied the emergence of an aesthetic authority that would (critically) reflect on modernity and its effects; but by the very fact that this new ‘‘gaze’’ has not as yet been codified, instituted, the representation of technology still remains flexible, without polarized value. In other words, the excluding operation of antithesis in Martí has yet to naturalize the cliché of the evil machine—still very much a part of our imaginary landscape today. Let us concentrate on the chronicle entitled ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ which concerns one of the most celebrated accomplishments of nineteenth

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century engineering.17 At the same time, keep in mind that it is no coincidence that this subject is treated in a chronicle. For, as we have seen, this journalistic space in which Martí primarily operates presupposes technologization as a condition of possibility for writing—not only on the level of its subject matter, but on the level of new languages as well. The chronicle begins in the following manner: ‘‘[Through] the Brooklyn Bridge . . . throbs a blood so magnanimously in our day’’ (p. ). The verb, in this instance, appears at the beginning: palpitation is the vital sign of movement, and it indicates the intensity of a flux. The organ contracts and dilates: this double movement is the fundamental semantic basis for Martí’s description of the bridge. The bridge—emblem of modernity—expands the limits of a territory, but it also implies the contraction of another space, until then outside the sphere of communication, almost autonomous. The allusion to fabric is another key trope: in Martí’s text, the Brooklyn Bridge is constructed as a monumental fabric. From the bridge’s appearance, it would seem as if engineering had sought to hide the dimension of its task behind an almost artisanal play in the placement of cables. This artistry was, of course, not simply fortuitous: Roebling was entirely conscious of the need to humanize the bridge, the largest in the world at that time and the first to use steel, an ‘‘ignoble’’ material, in its construction.18 From steel and stone, the apparatus was put together, as if it were a hinge between two epochs, conjoining them. It has already been pointed out that Roebling was a Hegelian. Martí would call the bridge the realization of the eternal in the new. In the chronicle, the fabric of the bridge is crucial: And beneath our feet everything is a fabric, a net, bright with steel: the steel bars are interlaced for pavement and the walls dividing [the bridge’s] five wide levels with the grace and lightness and slenderness of threads: before us it rises up, like a curtain of an invisible cloth lined with long white bands, the four taut walls that hang from the four curving cables.19 ‘‘What spider wove this fabric from border to border over the emptiness?’’ (p. ). The bridge establishes a continuity where before there was only emptiness; it condenses what is scattered and dispersed: Crowded together today as among neighboring work areas from the top to the deep heart of a mountain, are Jews with their sharp profiles and avid eyes, jovial Irish, fleshy and harsh Germans, rosy and strapping Literature and Technology

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Scots, beautiful Hungarians, lavish Negroes, Russians . . . , elegant Japanese, lean and indifferent Chinese. (pp. –) Although the condensation implies a centripetal, unifying impulse, it is also preceded by an incisive, separating force. ‘‘Cables are the sutures of the universe’’ (p. ). The heterogeneous mass is ‘‘crowded together today as among neighboring work areas from the top to the deep heart of a mountain.’’ The landscape is presented as an effect of a violence exercised on nature: in another passage, Martí says of the cables, ‘‘[they are] like the teeth of a mammoth that in one bite would be capable of decimating a mountain’’ (p. ). Palpitation, fabric, landscape: through these interlocking tropes a bridge comes into being. Martí reads, interprets, the apparatus. In his allegory, the bridge opens up unto a new era. The arches of the bridge are ‘‘like the doors to a grandiose world that uplifts the spirit’’ (p. ). Half stone and half steel, the bridge portrays the history of progress on a material basis, the threshold of the liberal utopia: (‘‘No longer will deep moats open up around walled fortresses; cities will instead embrace each other with arms of steel’’) (p. ). On the rather superficial, visceral level of Martí’s poesis, we see how the material opposition (between stone and steel) and its resolution are played out in language. The phonetic contrasts in the original Spanish (o/a) distribute a semantic opposition, wherein the ‘‘o’’ sound corresponds to a metaphorics of constriction or encirclement thrown open by the ‘‘a’’ sound preceding or following it: ‘‘Ya no se abren fosos hondos en torno de almenadas fortalezas; sino se abrazan, con brazos de acero, las ciudades.’’ Martí’s homophonous discourse demonstrates the construction of discursive continuities and bridges. This materialization of the bridge’s function on the level of poetic language is reciprocal; when Martí says, ‘‘[The bridge is] an iron gate between these two words of the New Gospel’’ (p. ), technology is reincorporated into the Bible, signifying Martí’s attempt to subjugate the sign of modernity by means of its inclusion in the book of tradition par excellence. Such an attempt may, indeed, mark a new departure for the modern intellectual; but it also indicates a considerable anxiety. At first sight, technology in ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ does not seem to contradict the world of ‘‘spiritual’’ or aesthetic values. Rather, the ‘‘four great cables [are] strings of a powerful lyre, at last worthy of men, who now begin to hum their songs’’ (p. ). Technology appears as an instrument for the transformation of nature disposed to the service of human beings. This concept of an enlightened history recalls the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Martí read feverishly during this epoch. 

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For Emerson, writing in the period prior to the North American Civil War, technology was an extension of nature; nature, in its turn, was a technological force. In his  ‘‘Nature,’’ Emerson contends that: Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of divine charity nourish man.20 Even in ‘‘The Poet,’’ from , Emerson emphasized the integrity of the nature/technology relationship, notwithstanding an inescapable tension between the two: Readers of poetry see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art were not yet consecrated in the reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great order not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web.21 Although even the poet was capable of overcoming the fragmentation of the landscape brought about by technology, here Emerson highlights a problematic that will lead him to change his position, particularly during the period of intense industrialization following the Civil War. By , his essay ‘‘The Progress of Culture’’ bears a remarkable contrast: It is only in the sleep of the soul that we help ourselves by so many ingenious crutches and machines. What is the use of the telegraph? What of newspapers? . . . the wise man waits for no mails, reads no telegrams. He asks his own heart. . . . Science corrects the old creeds. . . . Yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment.22 Emerson correlates technologization with an intense division of labor that succeeded in displacing ‘‘culture’’ from its governing position in society: In this country the immense production that had to be achieved has generated new divisions of labor or created new professions. Let us consider, in this epoch, all that has brought about, on a national scale, the variety of questions, public and private enterprises, the ingenuity of science, management, practical skills, teachers, each in his own province, the railroad, the telegraph . . . , manufacture, inventions. (p. ) Literature and Technology

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According to Emerson, in spite of progress and the new regime of specialization, ‘‘we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of forgetting Homer . . . , nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Archimedes’’ (p. ). As Rodó will later reaffirm, the Greek is the model of the harmonious, originary man;23 his reinscription in the modern world is a response to the extreme degree of fragmentation implied by the division of labor. Hence, the paradox in the title of Emerson’s essay: ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘culture’’ were in the process of becoming antithetical terms. Until now, this chapter has mainly been based on what Martí sought to express and thematize in the circulation of tropes and a strategy of demonstrating the material world on the level of discourse. From the latter, we have seen that Martí’s discourse on technology does not only operate on the semantic level; on the contrary, form also fulfills an active ideological function that may coincide with the level of the signified (as in the above case), but which remains ultimately isomorphic to it. Indeed, the rhetorical form may actually contradict what is explicitly postulated on the level of subject matter, expressed beliefs. In the following analysis, I want to show how this is, in fact, the case in Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’: behind the apparent exultation voiced by Martí for the advent of the machine, the problematic of the landscape and its technologization is evident, and reveals an anxiety shared by Emerson concerning the implications of modernization. Let us return to the opening line of the chronicle. The first reference to the bridge is the following: ‘‘en piedra y acero se levanta la que fue un día línea ligera en la punta del lápiz de un constructor atrevido’’ (‘‘in stone and steel rises what was once a light line on the point of a daring constructor’s pencil’’).24 Two series of oppositions emerge on the semantic level: rises/what was once stone and steel/light line The first series registers a contrast between two verb tenses, indicating an opposition between a reflexive activity that takes place in the present (se levanta: is risen or rises) and the conclusive and intransitive aspect of the past ( fue: was). From the second series unfolds the relation between the concrete and abstract: ‘‘light line on the point of a . . . pencil’’ introduces by contiguity an intellectual activity opposed to the bridge’s material elements. The segmentation at work here, whereby a series of asymmetries has been generated, may be represented in the following manner: present/past activity/passivity 

   

concrete/abstract matter/intellect This network of oppositions proliferates, determining the distribution of images throughout the chronicle. For example, the present/past division has its corollary in the novelty/tradition relation: in Martí’s essay, ‘‘the horses of young men who cross the bridge will soon take the place of the Trojan’’ (p. ). From the matter/intellect opposition comes that of the artifice/nature (which includes human activity): ‘‘the [bridge] foundation bites into the rock’’ (p. ). This segmentation, in turn, implies a molding process that generates a hierarchizing axiology. In other words, the differentiation of terms across the divisions produced by these four categories creates asymmetrical power relations whereby the first term prevails over the second. Although intellectual labor is putatively the origin of technology, on the semantic level, the first field—present, active, material—figures as the force that displaces the second: past, passive, intellectual. This incongruity between terms that are differentiated along the four categories can be seen in figurative processes, such as Martí’s use of simile. While the chronicle systematically establishes analogies between two things, the first is always the factual analogue on which the imaginary acts. Hence, the bridge is like an ‘‘aerial serpent’’ (p. ). On one level, the bridge/aerial serpent relation corresponds to the concrete/abstract division; however, the process by which this division is established—that is, simile—is significant, as the predominance of simile in the chronicle immediately indicates the supplementary function of the second term. On a deeper level, the ideological function of such figurative processes cannot be underestimated. As suggested earlier, Martí’s writing does not solely presuppose asymmetries generated by modernity, but develops strategies for leveling out the incongruencies as well. Writing may begin with the asymmetries, but its own tendency to a formal order underlines the attempt to fill the empty spaces, to fabricate over discontinuity, to produce a symmetry or equilibrium. To return to the figurative process of simile, in the play of analogies that predominate throughout the piece, the second term is not always an imaginary entity: it is oftentimes, in fact, a citation from the Book of Culture. For example, ‘‘the towers of the bridge seem like slenderized Egyptian pyramids’’ (p. ); ‘‘the cables are fastened onto trowel anchors, by masses of the likes of which can be found in neither Thebes nor the Acropolis’’ (p. ). Martí works with emblems, with cultural landscapes, which in the chronicle fulfill the task of reintroducing various elements found in a canonical culture Literature and Technology

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that has been precisely displaced by modernization.25 The continual biblical allusions, the sacred oratory that at certain moments determines the resonance of Martí’s language, are other examples of representation, citations from the Book of Culture: ‘‘who took the water from its dwelling place and rode on the air?’’ 26 Analogic proceedings, superceding what at first sight seem to be opposing terms, indicate a unifying impulse that attempts to reestablish continuities among the objects of an ineluctably fragmented world. Of course, one need not seek in Martí’s work a poetics of fragmentation. But against the backdrop of a divisive rhetoric, Martí’s writing insists on seeing the harmony, and tries to materialize this harmony through the figurative process of correspondence. For Martí, this was to be one of the tasks for modern literature: to reinstate the lost order, the image of totality, in a fluid and unstable world. And yet, fragmentation is a presupposition of the analogic gaze. The very connective movement that attempts to reestablish ties between things, takes as a given point of departure the fissure and flux that underlies the juncture. Moreover, as we saw earlier, the problematic of fragmentation in the chronicle, tied to the new technologized languages of the newspaper, is not simply a feature of the world seen (and dominated) by the chronicler; fragmentation obtains in the very materiality of his discourse. What, then, does the chronicler in effect visualize? Martí’s chronicle deploys an ensemble of key devices that produce the illusion of presence. In this respect, the chronicle participates in the conventions of referential discourse. The legitimacy of the referential mode is grounded not in the value of the (verbal) work that proceeds by discourse, but in its utility as a bearer of information, in its claim to contain the properties of an object. Reference is authorized in the (illusory) rhetoric of a discursive transparency and in the presence of a subject who sees what he recounts. Such was the system of linguistic norms that proliferated in different genres of writing related to the heyday of information in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the surface, the importance of seeing is played out in ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’: See how the resounding dredges, with concave jaws, descend through four large openings to the bottom of the excavation. . . . See how, in the meantime, those heroic feverish workers clean the base . . . they alternately continue to take down the fences. . . . See how the water pushes out. (p. ) The chronicle puts into play the identification between seeing and reading/writing: ‘‘Raise up with your eyes, readers of La América, the great fastened 

   

structures’’ (p. ). To say it is to see it, Martí insists in ‘‘The Charleston Earthquake,’’ thus articulating one of the basic conventions of the journalistic chronicle. Seeing—the speaker (or writer) claims to be contemplating the referent—is a mechanism of verisimilitude that enables the illusion of presence to be activated. The rhetoric of strolling intensifies this effect: ‘‘By the hand we will take our readers of La América, and lead them to see from up close’’ (p. ). The signature of narrative in the chronicle, delineated as a stroll, incorporates elements of a specific referential genre, the tourist guide, an important substratum of travel literature: Let us call the doors to the New York station. Thousands of men, thronged at the station door, stop us in our tracks. . . . Now the mob has relented: let us leave a cent on the counter of the entrance booth, which is the passage fare; the colossal towers can hardly be seen from the New York station; over our heads, striking against the still unfinished rails of the train station, which have yet to reach the bridge, ponderous hammers resound; pushed by the crowd we hurriedly ascend. . . . Before us five lanes open. (pp. –) Although defined by the narration of a stroll, the descriptive function predominates in the chronicle’s elocution: it refers to the mimetic model presupposed by the chronicle. Hence, it would seem that the value of the word in the chronicle is determined by its capacity to refer immediately to its object.27 Description has not always carried the same discursive or ideological charge. In classical rhetoric, for example, description is the locus in which the orator exhibits his or her mastery of tropes; the function of description in the latter case is not referential but ornamental.28 Georg Lukács, antagonist of description, at the same time affirms its importance to the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly among the first ideologues of literary specialization. For the defenders of pure art and the naturalists as well, description was the workshop for formal experimentation, to the point of disfiguring the very languages that articulated ‘‘the real.’’ 29 So that even in the nineteenth century, the functions of description tended to exceed the restricted economy of ‘‘reality,’’ or what Roland Barthes called the reality-effect.30 Taken to an extreme, description could become the site of stylization, albeit at the risk of displacing the power of narrative discourse in the chronicle.31 As we will soon see, this latter use of description was fundamental for Martí and other fin de siècle chroniclers. For now, let us return to the rhetoric of ‘‘immediacy’’ in the chronicle. If description indeed presupposes (and puts into play) the iconic imperative, Literature and Technology

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doubtless between the object and the descriptive function there arises a network of mediations, an interpretative apparatus, that cannot be explained merely in terms of the gaze and primary mimesis (‘‘to say it is to see it’’). The gaze reads the signifieds that conform to the semantic field of the described object. In this respect, description plays an active role in establishing hierarchies, subordinations, asymmetries, and conflicts between the represented discourses; it registers the impact of the division of labor on discursive production. ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ represents discourses and texts that at their proper historical junctures held a specific relationship with technology. Throughout the piece in general, the vocabulary betrays the ‘‘presence’’ of engineering: caisson, mount, solderer, needlepoints, teeth, bolts, anchorage, chain, and so forth. Of even greater significance is Martí’s treatment of statistical and geometric quantification in the description of the machine: Raise up with your eyes, readers of La América, the great fastened structures that complete the bridge from either side. They are walls that would shut down the passage of the Nile, of hard and white stone, which peak at  feet beyond the high mark: the walls are almost cubic, measuring  feet in height and  in width, and with their enormous weight they strain (as we will now see) four chains, each with thirty-six hooks, that secure the four cables. There at the bottom, of the far backside furthest from the river, lie four irons, each one of , pounds, with a . × . foot surface area, lined with slender teeth, like an octopus with multiple tentacles, or like stars that radiate curved spokes, and these slender spokes connect with the compact mass of the center, . feet in thickness, where eighteen steel links intersect across eighteen oblong openings, placed in two rows of nine parallel columns, and through these wide terminal eyes, which remain below the iron in a double thread, pass these strong bars of  feet in length, secured in two open semicylindrical canals at the base of the iron. Such are the teeth of the bridge from each side. Around the eighteen primary steel links that remained standing like lances of . feet, terminating in an eye instead of a point, waiting for soldiers yet unborn, the blocks of granite are mounted, which seemed like pieces of a mountain, and together with the steel links that continued to be secured by bolts that all at once reach across to the thirty-six terminating eyes of each of the eighteen contiguous interwoven links—as when the fingers of both hands are interlaced.32 In the heterogeneous space of the chronicle, Martí assumes an-other discourse: quantification, corollary to a gaze that attempts to geometrically 

   

rationalize space. In this same passage, however, the figuration and syntactic dislocations proliferate in a writing that dramatizes its literariness as well. The intersection of discourses makes the reading difficult, perhaps to the point of making the description illegible in terms of its referential imperative. Of course, resistence to the referential imperative, which in an implosive manner breaks with the iconic capacity of description, cannot be read as a simple failure on the part of the chronicler. For exactly at the ‘‘blind’’ spot of description, the literary specificity of this writing acquires density and emphasis. This does not mean that the discourse remains inscribed in some kind of solipsistic celebration or intransitivity. Suffice it to say that in the cited passage, the chronicle represents, on a strictly formal level, the asymmetry between discourses tied to technology and literature. The decision to represent something along the lines of one given discourse and not another is never disinterested or passive: it presupposes the struggle of literary discourse that is constantly pushing its way through the ‘‘strong’’ signs of modernity. The machine/quantification relation was consolidated in Martí’s epoch. Quantification, for our purposes, signifies a language identified with the machine; such is the way Martí conceived it. On the other hand, it is evident that quantitative discourse is not an extension of the object made ‘‘present’’ by the chronicler. Martí’s chronicles generally work along the lines of a reading on texts, almost always journalistic. In the case of ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ the reportage on which Martí’s reading was based can be identified: ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ by William C. Conant, published in Harper’s News Monthly Magazine.33 Once again, we find the chronicler in the position of a translator. The sequence of descriptive segments, in both texts, is almost equal. At certain moments, the chronicle seems to refer to the numerous illustrations and diagrams of the original coverage, an essential feature of the ekphrasis that naturalizes the seeing/writing identification. Needless to say, these illustrations are lacking in the chronicle. The multiple and dramatic transformations in Martí’s ‘‘Brooklyn Bridge’’ illustrate the task of the translator. At the point where the description of the apparatus begins to become illegible (in terms of a strict referentiality demanded by the norms of reportage), the emergence of conflicting discourses intersect and intercept the language of the earlier text.34 Martí overwrites, writes over, but the palimpsest of style leaves traces of a transformed matter or material. The rewriting of reportage in Martí represents a technical writing. The marks of this technical writing, literature’s other, that remain on Martí’s paper (on the borders, like displaced remains) refer to the mode of representing and interpreting the world that lends coherence to the cited passage. In Literature and Technology

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this case, the palimpsest implies the terms of a struggle that surpasses the verbal level. The logic of this other discourse is the extreme rationalization of the represented material. Its strategical devices are statistics and geometry.35 Rationalization quantifies experience: it establishes the means for universal value in order to interpret and exchange the elements of a heterogeneous and particular reality. In , Georg Simmel, anticipating one of the privileged themes of Adorno’s criticism regarding the ‘‘regulated world’’ of modernity, correlated this rationalization with the development of a new ‘‘mentality.’’ For Simmel, this mentality, which had arisen from science and a monetary economy, impregnated even the apparently most spontaneous and insignificant aspects of modern daily life: The modern mind has become more and more a calculating one. The calculating exactness of practical life which has resulted from a money economy corresponds to the idea of natural science, namely that of transforming the world into an arithmetical problem and of fixing every one of its parts in a mathematical formula. It has been the money economy which has thus filled the daily life of so many people with weighing, calculating, enumerating and the reduction of qualitative values to quantitative terms.36 Quantification is not oriented toward the object of representation; the object only exists in terms of its interchangeability, its adjustment to the parameters imposed by the measure of exchange. Neither is it oriented toward the subject of representation, who becomes an agent in an anonymous circulation. Quantification places the weight of discourse on the very measure of exchange, in its universalizing apparatus that reduces the specific and heterogeneous. Martí’s writing operates on the other side of such a rationalization, postulating the value of the exceptional word that veers from the linguistic and social norm. If technologization (from the perspective of the emergent literary field) presupposes the massification of language, literature would fold back on the notion of style, by authorizing itself to be precisely the critique of massification. We return again to literature, as Martí conceived it, as a strategy of legitimation that takes into account the ‘‘destylized’’ and ‘‘mechanical’’ languages of modernity as obliterated matter for the supposed ‘‘exceptionality’’ of style. Hence, Martí would privilege another way of seeing: 

   

Seeing them conglomerate to swarm quickly over the aerial serpent, squeezed together, the vast, clean, ever-growing crowd—one imagines seeing seated in the middle of the sky, with her radiant head appearing over the summit, and with white hands, as large as eagles, open, in a sign of peace over the land—Liberty.37 (Italics added) Martí reworks the concept of sight into a hallucination. His discourse departs from a descriptive empirical instance (‘‘Seeing them conglomerate’’), which immediately undergoes a metaphoric transformation. The referential moment of the gaze is minimal. The ‘‘swarm[ing]’’ crowd and the bridge are erased behind the ‘‘aerial serpent.’’ Martí’s illumination begins with this brief moment when the common word (bridge) is obliterated, but not its essential trace. Bridge is assumed as the provision that opens up the possibility for a writerly transformation; the contrast between the referential and the literary dramatizes the literary task. Beginning with this instant, writing ascends toward apotheosis, thematized in the cited passage above as follows: seeing swarm aerial serpent ever-growing crowd one imagines seeing middle of the sky summit eagles over the land Liberty The statement articulates a spatial hierarchization. The point of departure is the bestial low (where creatures swarm). The space below is crowded, full of people squeezed together. Starting with ‘‘one imagines seeing,’’ the space opens up and expands: ‘‘in the middle of the sky,’’ ‘‘white hands . . . open.’’ The bestial is elevated (eagles) and the perspective closes with the moment of highest abstraction, ‘‘over the land—Liberty.’’ The shaping of this brief allegory, which thematizes the opposition between two modes of seeing, can be read as a hierarchization of different ways of representing. The mechanism of illumination (‘‘one imagines seeing’’) is stylization, which generates the sublime ascendancy promised in the task offered by poetic language. The elision of the ordinary word in Martí is represented as an elevation. Stylization is founded on a model of literary discourse Literature and Technology

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as a dramatic deviation from the linguistic norm(s) in operation, evidenced in both the figurative saturation of allegory and the hyper-strained syntax. Martí overwrites, re-marks (on) stylization. The point of departure for and effaced boundary of stylization is the other discourse: the ability to see from the nonliterary and, more specifically, quantitative (in the case of ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’) description. In Martí and the other modernists, stylization is the reverse side of the universality that imposes the value of exchange and the new statistical rationality.38 If the predominance of the exchange medium and its universalizing will emphasize the anonymous character of quantitative discourse, stylization will place the weight of signification on the activity of the subject who imagines seeing. This will to style has been generally interpreted in relation to modernist individualism. For example, for Henríquez Ureña, the will to style ‘‘only pursues originality.’’ 39 The modernist project, for Federico de Onís, consisted of ‘‘being unique and individual, in having an unmistakable voice and style, in searching for the maximum personal originality.’’ 40 The will to style at the turn of the century would thus seem to reinstate the topos of romantic individuality. At times, even Martí openly affirms a poetics of expression 41 with the personal I as the source from which discourse emanates, overflows from the interior onto the world. Poetic verses are ‘‘sliced pieces of my entrails,’’ lava spewed from the volcanic I. The I, better yet the interior realm, forms one of the fields essential to the confabulation of literary space at the turn of the century. Martí writes: [In] the universal factory there is no small thing that does not contain within it all the germs of greater things, and the sky turns and moves along with its tormented days and nights, and man spins and continues forward with his passions, faith, and bitterness; and when his eyes no longer see the stars of the sky, he turns to gaze at those of his soul. Hence the pale and groaning poets; hence that new tormented and painful poetry, a necessary consequence of the times.42 In Martí’s labor on language, stylization would appear here to be the converter or translator of the writer’s individuality; at least that is how modern writers have been read. Yet if it is indeed evident that stylization dramatizes its distantiation, a sense of estrangement and a ‘‘deviation’’ from the (social) linguistic norm, the relationship between style and individualism would have to be qualified in the specific context of modernity. Rodó’s reading of Darío, for example, suggests one of the possible directions for this kind of analysis, notwithstanding the critic’s tacit rejection of stylization: 

   

For you [readers] who, above all, seek in poetry the reality of the pelican myth, the ingenuousness of confession, the generous and truthful abandon of the soul that would deliver itself unto you entirely, relinquish (for the present moment) the harvest of bleeding stanzas ripped from palpitating entrails. Never will the rasping bellow of intense or devouring passion follow from the lines of such a poetically calculating artist. . . . Over the expression of personal sentiment the concern with art will prevail.43 (Italics added) The opposition between art and expression is striking in Rodó’s critique of Darío. In effect, the emergent poetics of artifice, opposed to the still-accepted ideology of expression, registered one of the formative contradictions of the fin de siècle literary field.44 Even for writers most apparently attached to individualism—such as Silva, Casal, and Darío himself—literary activity begins to become a complex, ‘‘calculating’’ practice with an institutional memory that exceeds inspiration or personal expression. Literature deploys a concept of ‘‘museum dreams,’’ 45 wherein even nature, the realm of the spontaneous, only acquires meaning in reference to a codified interpretative sign, archived in the Book of Culture. The interior realm is replete with Greek statues.46 All discourse generates a memory, a version of its past, even as it reciprocally presupposes the task of citation. The modernists, however, were the first to exhibit the Book of Culture as a presupposed archive: reference to a specifically artistic past becomes a thematized device. José Asunción Silva, in De sobremesa (After Dinner), provides us with many examples: ‘‘relieved of her overcoat and hat, which lent her a certain resemblance . . . to the portrait of a princess painted by Van Dyck’’; ‘‘and she rubbed her hands, two little hands, long and pale, with sharp fingernails like those of Ana de Austria in the portrait by Rubens’’; and ‘‘The other silhouette, her own, ingenuous and pure as that of a virgin out of Fra Angelico.’’ 47 Manuel Díaz Rodríguez writes in Ídolos rotos (Broken Idols): ‘‘With her fair-haired beauty, and even her clothing itself, she expressed a similar beauty of such a harmonious conjunction that it made Alberto exclaim as if he were talking to someone: a Botticelli!’’ 48 Stylization here begins with the task of citing, in order to generate a second-degree artificiality. In extreme cases, the system of citations becomes the driving force behind the entire work. In De sobremesa, for instance, the insatiable desire for aesthetic experience comes to motivate the search that frames the story. The protagonist looks for a semiphantasmic woman who has awakened his memory of a painting that he had seen in his childhood. In Martí, the Book of Culture as an imagined compendium of WestLiterature and Technology

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ern sources has not been aestheticized to the degree it has in Casal, Darío, or Silva. As we saw in ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ however, Martí also imposes emblems, topical images (Trojan horses, bestiary, biblical allusions) on the (modern) phenomenon represented in his work. These emblems incarnate a ‘‘tradition’’ in the text: a tradition without assignable origin, a tradition that is perhaps rather driven by the historicist logic of the museum—the most salient cultural institution in the archaeological imaginary of the nineteenth century.49 The codified, topical character of these emblems is functional in Martí: the vertical, subordinative arrangement in his bestiary of serpents and eagles, for example, enables him to create the illusion of a strictly hierarchized system of values juxtaposed precisely to a decodified and fluid world of masses. The ‘‘dream of the museum’’ is the history projected by literature as its own past. It is a way of specifying the domain of literary identity. Stylization, which activates this institutional memory, thus cannot be understood as a simple corollary of individual will, fundamental to the romantic ideology of expression, spontaneity, inspiration, creation, and so on. Toward the final decades of the century, Latin American literature begins to renounce the idea of being an expression or medium. It even begins to develop an ethic of labor and an ideology of productivity, tied to the technological logic of the artifice. From Martí in the s onward, the transformation can be traced strictly in the manner that writers would formulate the subject/style relation. In , following the publication of his Revista Venezolana, Martí responds to a criticism of which he was the primary object of attack: Some have associated the style of some simple productions that saw the light in our last issue with neatness and pulchritude. It is not a defense but a clarification that we here propose. One is the language of the cabinet: the other the agitated parliament. One language speaks an urgent polemic: the other unhurried biography. So, when did pulchritude begin to be a negative condition? The facts only accumulate with the days, and it is force that truth lends to style: the writer has to paint, like a painter. There is no reason that one [writer] would avail of diverse colors, and not another. The atmosphere changes with different zones, as does language with different themes.50 The analogy between writer and painter in this instance cannot be reduced to the topos of ut pictura poesis. The point of comparison is not rooted in representation, but in the material basis of their labor. The painter works with a concrete material, color, which distinguishes his or her work from any other kind of intellectual labor. The modern writer or literato, on the     

other hand, works with an apparently undifferentiated medium: language, a medium for different types of communication. Martí, therefore, would insist on the ‘‘different zones’’ that constitute a differentiated world of language, stratified by the division of labor: ‘‘One is the language of the cabinet: the other the agitated parliament.’’ Style is the medium of labor that differentiates the writer (as the use of color does the painter) from other social, institutional practices that also use language as a medium. Stylization is one of the marks of specificity by which literature, in accordance with the norms of specialization, attempts to delimit a proper territory and an irreplaceable social function. Hence, the double paradox of stylization: it deindividualizes the ‘‘spontaneous’’ or ‘‘inspired’’ language of experience through the individuation of language on the level of form.51 Conversely, stylization as the distinguishing mark of the literary field authorizes literature to be incorporated on an institutional level. As Rodó had suggested (albeit nostalgically), the new interior realm begins to be emptied of its personal referent. One of the functions of this I is to act as the pronoun of the literary (and not personal, or individual) subject. Stylization is one of the processes in which a type of authority takes shape that is no longer legitimized by politics, history, information, or sociology. The legitimacy of this literary subject is grounded in the aesthetic endowment that literature—in accordance with its specific means of labor—would be able to grant society. As Martí contends: To found literature in science. Which does not mean introducing the scientific style and language into literature, which is a form of truth distinct from science, but rather comparing, imagining, alluding, and deducing whereby what is written may remain, it being in agreement with the constant and real facts.52 The ideology of specialization in Martí does not propose a distantiation from life: ‘‘To approach life—I have here the object of literature’’ (vol. , p. ). On the contrary, he represents literature as an efficient and systematic approach to the world. For Martí, literature was a ‘‘form of truth distinct from science,’’ which ought to have a specific, rigorous means of knowing and changing life ‘‘in order to reform it by knowing it’’ (ibid.). In Martí’s view, literature could not be a passive site of confluence among other already specialized discourses. Literature here begins to desire a field of immanence, a discourse (not a medium) capable of actively participating in a society where the segmentation brought about by the division of labor was constantly intensifying. The desire for this interior, as the cited passage indicates, at times presupposes science and technology themselves as models: Literature and Technology

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The whole art of writing is concretizing. The same thing that is happening to the common public with regard to some writers is also perchance happening to these same writers with regard to these complicated machineries, of admirable construction and effect; for their rudimentary, deformed, irregular education, being in some aspects plethoric, in others anemic, if not taxed and weakened, ill-prepares them to understand and esteem these [machines]. The ill-prepared separate themselves from all carefully crafted style bearing transcendental and new ideas, as ignorant travelers distance themselves with a grimace from, or endure with visible disgust, the inspection and explanation of machineries of the most curious and venerable make, the operations of which are, on the superficial or irregular level of instruction, to them [the ignorant travelers] impenetrable. Each paragraph must be organized as an excellent machine, and each one of its parts be adjusted, inserted with such perfection among others, so that if any one part is taken from among the ensemble, it would be as a bird without wing, and the parts would not function, or like the building from which one of its walls has been taken. The complexity of the machine indicates the perfection of its make [trabajo]. Volta’s battery is not the dynamo of today. Nor is Papin’s pot Watt’s machine. Nor is the locomotive of Brooks or Baldwin that of the wooden tracks. (vol. , p. ) ‘‘The complexity of the machine indicates the perfection of its make’’: stylization (the machine) registers the pervasive ideology of work and efficiency in Martí, corollary to specialization. Literature is here represented in the formulation of an other space and the consequent demarcation of that outer space’s inside, an interior realm. The interior, however, contradictorily emulates what it projects as its signs of otherness: the perfection of the work, the immanent rationality of the machine: ‘‘Language has to be mathematic, geometric, sculpturizing’’ (vol. , p. ). Still, in Latin America (and in no case more evident than in Martí), the machine of style confronted a series of insurmountable obstructions. The will to autonomy and specialization emblematized and set in motion by this machine faced irreducible contradictions (as perhaps it does even today) that underlined the incongruities distinctive of uneven modernity. Certainly, the fact that this chapter focuses primarily on a chronicle (‘‘El puente de Brooklyn’’), in order to trace the itinerary of the ‘‘will to style’’ as an institutional device, is not coincidental, and implies a certain irony. If stylization is indeed exaggerated in the chronicle (precisely because in the chronicle, the ‘‘liter    

ary’’ word coexists and struggles against discursive ‘‘antiaesthetic’’ functions tied to the technologized medium of journalism), the heterogeneity of the chronicle on both a formal and institutional level also shows the impossibility of ‘‘purifying’’ the field of aesthetic authority toward the turn of the century. The chronicle cannot be read as merely a ‘‘marginal’’ and ‘‘alien’’ space in literature, but instead, as an area of confluence for competing discourses: heterogeneity was the distinctive feature of this ‘‘literature,’’ notwithstanding the protests of the modernists and the forgetfulness of historians. These incongruencies and contradictions distinguish Martí’s modernity. They determine not only the multiplicity of his social roles, but his own relation to language—a relation that, particularly in his chronicles (as we have seen in ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’), is submitted to a laborious (re)shaping of fragments and remains taken from both modern and traditional forms. These forms are taken from their original sites and given new functions. In this respect, the literary ‘‘machine’’ in the chronicle, beyond the consistency and coherence of the ideal ‘‘machine,’’ was more fittingly akin to the curious apparatus described by Quiroga in the epigraph opening this chapter. A machine of secondhand refunctionalized pieces that the emergent artist ‘‘with his one arm and the help of his stump, was cutting, turning, twisting, and soldering with his energetic faith and optimism.’’ 53 Such are the machines of our uneven modernity. Notes  Jose Martí, Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –), – [hereafter cited by volume and page number].  Some of these advertisements can be found in volume  of Martí’s complete works. Although La América was published in New York, it circulated in Latin America: La Nación, for example, reproduced Martí’s articles.  Martí, OC, vol. , .  Octavio Paz, Cuadrivio (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, ), .  Octavio Paz, ‘‘Traducción y metáfora,’’ Los hijos del limo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, ), .  Angel Rama, ‘‘Sueños, espritus, ideología y arte,’’ prologue to El mundo de los sueños, Rubén Darío (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Universitaria, ), . José Emilio Pacheco adds that ‘‘against mechanization, homogenization, and the uniformity of industrial procedure, against the infinite repetitions and redundancies, poets attempted to underline the unique aspect of experience’’ (‘‘Introducción,’’ in Antología del modernismo [–], vol.  [México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ], xxiv). Along this line of thought, see also Lily Litvak, Transformación industrial y literatura en España (–) (Madrid: Taurus, ).  See Meyer Howard Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (particularly ‘‘Science and Poetry in Romantic Criticism’’) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. For a history of the machine metaphor, see David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen, ), –.

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 Andrés Bello, Obra literaria, ed. Pédro Grases (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .  Domingo F. Sarmiento, Viajes por Europa, Africa, y América, in Obras de D. F. Sarmiento, vol.  (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Gutenberg, –), . First published in .  Domingo F. Sarmiento, Recuerdos de provincia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena, ), . First published in .  Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘El Nacional,  May ,’’ in Obras. Crítica Literaria, vol.  (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ), .  Rubén Darío, ‘‘ ‘El hierro,’ La Tribuna,  September ,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, ), .  José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, ed. Angel Rama, prologue by Carlos Real de Azúa (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . First published in .  The definition of ideology given here is taken from Louis Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, ).  Octavio Paz, Los signos en rotación (Buenos Aires: Sur, ), –.  This is one of Noé Jitrik’s main themes in ‘‘La máquina semiótica/La máquina fabril,’’ in Las contradicciones del modernismo (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, ).  José Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ in OC, vol. , –. First published in .  See Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).  Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ .  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in The Selected Writings of Ralph W. Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, ), .  Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘‘The Poet,’’ in The Selected Writings of Ralph W. Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, ), .  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, in Complete Works, vol.  (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, ), –. On the North American debate around the impact of modernization on culture, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), esp. ‘‘Two Kingdoms of Force,’’ –; Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Want, ); and John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, – (New York: Penguin Books, ).  See Georg Lukács, ‘‘The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics,’’ in Writer and Critic, trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, ), –.  Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ .  Pedro Salinas writes of Darío: ‘‘in Darío vital direct experience and this other kind of experience that Gundolf calls Bildungserlebnis, the experience of culture, are inseparable’’ (La poesía de Rubén Darío [Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, ], ).  Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ .  At least, this is one of the functions commonly attributed to description by contemporary criticism; such an identification, however, underestimates its semiotic possibilities. See Michel Riffaterre, ‘‘Descriptive Imagery,’’ in Yale French Studies  ():  ff.  ‘‘To describe is never [in classical rhetoric] to describe a reality, but to prove one’s rhetorical know-how, to prove one’s book learning’’ (Philippe Hamon, ‘‘Rhetorical Status of the Descriptive,’’ Yale French Studies  []: ).  According to Georg Lukács, ‘‘in dialogue, [we see] the lack of the sober and trivial poetry in daily bourgeois life; in description, the most affected artifice of art refined in the studio’’;



   

 

 







 

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‘‘Narrate or to describe? A preliminary discussion of naturalism and formalism’’ (‘‘Ideal of the Harmonious Man,’’ [see above, note ] –). See Roland Barthes, ‘‘The Reality-Effect,’’ in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, ), –. Raimundo Lida has studied in Darío the ‘‘contemplative aestheticism of description at the base of [Darío’s] refined pictorial impressions, interweaving his prose with that of [Alphonse] Daudet or the Goncourts’’ (‘‘Estudio preliminar,’’ in Cuentos completos, ed. Ernesto Mejía Sánchez [Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ]), xlii). Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ . William C. Conant, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ Harper’s New Monthly Magazine  (December –May ): –. Along with the article, the magazine published engineer Roebling’s blueprints for the bridge. Reportage is an instance of a kind of North American journalism that was developed in the epoch of the scientific-technological revolution. Its function was to mediate between specialized and public knowledge. This kind of journalism also highlights the diversification of written languages in society, as well as the proliferation of new non-‘‘lettered’’ intellectuals assigned the task of administering writing and information. No discursive purity can be presupposed in either of the two texts. The report displays some remarkable ‘‘poetic’’ moments, although poesis is not its dominant function. Martí, for his part, seizes a metaphor from Conant (a flying serpent), translates it literally (‘‘sierpe aérea’’), and uses it to describe a different object. ‘‘Geometry is the language of reason within the universe of signs. It apprehends all the forms at their beginning—at their principle—on the level of a system of points, lines, and constant proportions. Any cleavage, any irregularity, appears to it as the intrusion of evil’’ (Jean Starobinski, ‘‘ et de langage des principes,’’ Preuves  [January ]: ). Georg Simmel, ‘‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’’ in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald M. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . The principal works by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer on rationalization and technologization are found in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, ). Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ . On the other hand, the development of anonymous and rationalized forms of writing in capitalism bypass statistics. On the role of bureaucratic writing, Poulantzas writes: ‘‘Doubtless there has always been a close relationship between the State and writing, insofar as the State represents a certain division between manual and intellectual labor. But the role of writing is completely unique in the capitalist State. From concise indices and footnotes to archives, from a certain standpoint nothing exists in the eyes of the State that is not written, and everything that is recorded in writing always leaves a written trace somewhere. But the technology of writing is quite different in this instance from that of precapitalist States: in the former it is not a writing of transcription, pure trace of the sovereign’s word (real or imagined), a writing of revelation or transcription: writing as a monument. It is an anonymous writing, that does not repeat any discourse but rather becomes the trajectory of a reconnaissance for the purpose of recording various bureaucratic divisions and functions’’ (Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, and Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller [London: Verso, ], xx; translation modified). Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Breve historia del modernismo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), .

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 Federico de Onís, ‘‘José Martí: valoración,’’ in España en América (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Universitaria, ), . First published in .  On the poetics of expression as a romantic ideology or theory, see Meyer H. Abrams, ‘‘The Development of the Expressive Theory of Poetry and Art,’’ in The Mirror and the Lamp, –.  José Martí, Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .  José Enrique Rodó, ‘‘Rubén Darío,’’ in Obras completas, d ed., ed. Alberto José Vaccaro (Buenos Aires: Antonio Zamora, ), .  Once again, the issue concerns a contradiction in a field where these and other literary ideologies coexisted as contending forces. An author (in this case, Martí) may at times act as an agent of both (as well as other) ideologies. Rodó, in the same text on Darío wherein he [Rodó] proclaims himself a modernist, writes: ‘‘Every act of selection brings with it a limitation, an extensive diminution: and without a doubt the refinement of poetry by the author of Azul diminishes it beyond the sight of humans and universality’’ (‘‘Rubén Darío,’’ ).  Salinas uses this phrase of Gustave Flaubert’s to refer to this ‘‘experience of culture,’’ specifically artistic, that mediates between literature and the world. See his La poesía de Rubén Darío, –.  ‘‘Vivid and fluid pastiche would be quite a gratuitous (at times archaeological) diversion for Rubén’’ (Lida, ‘‘Estudio preliminar,’’ xxxvii n. ). Regarding the emergence of pastiche, Darío marks a division between Leopoldo Lugones (and the avant-garde that systematized its use) and Martí. Pastiche is entirely absent in Martí.  José Asunción Silva, De sobremesa (Bogotá: Editorial de Cromos, ), , , . First published in .  Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, Ídolos rotos, in Narrativa y ensayo, selection and prologue by Orlando Araujo (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . First published in .  For a discussion on the museum as the scene and public space of philology and its archaeological method throughout the nineteenth century, see Aníbal González, La crónica modernista hispanoamericana (Madrid: Porrúa Turanzas, ), pp. – (esp. pp. ff.). González opposes the public spectacle of philology in the museum (and its demotion throughout the nineteenth century) with the private ‘‘interior’’ of literature in the domestic space and in fantasy. See also chapter  above, note .  Martí, Obra literaria, .  Thus, the ideal of the ‘‘exception’’ or ‘‘deviation’’ from the linguistic norm becomes an institutional norm. Beginning in the mid-s, Jorge Luis Borges is one of the first to systematically critique the norm of originality. Regarding the paradox of the ‘‘institutionalized exceptionality’’ of literature, Georg Simmel’s interpretation of fashion in On Individuality and Social Forms (pp. –) has been quite useful.  Martí, OC, vol. , .  Horacio Quiroga, ‘‘Los destiladores de naranja,’’ in Cuentos (Mexico City: Porrúa, ). First published in .

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   

Chapter  ‘‘This Cardboard Tabloid Life’’: Literature and the Masses

From whence does one speak? From what nameless social milieu does one write? What are the demands, debts, and compensations crystallized in that moment of silence from which writing springs and disperses? What must be given for one to be able to speak, to have the power to reflect—particularly on the specificity and autonomy of the discourse that one maintains? Ironically, in our attempt to approach the will to autonomy, we have proceeded laterally through the least specialized field of fin de siècle literature: the chronicle. It is as if we had almost eluded the principal point of departure, the ‘‘purity’’ and interiority that poetry claims for itself: Ganado tengo el pan: hágase el verso, y en su comercio dulce se ejercite la mano, que cual prófugo perdido entre oscuras malezas, o quien lleva a rastra un enorme peso, andaba ha poco sumas hilando y revolviendo cifras. I have earned the bread: let poetry be made, and in its sweet commerce let the hand work— a hand that, however lost a fugitive it be in the dark underbrush, or like a person dragging behind him an enormous weight has until recently been adding and spinning numbers.1 We have, instead, moved within the diurnal place of literature, the zone of an other commerce, where one writes in order to earn one’s bread. In this zone the modern writer figures as a salaried employee—his self-deprecatory gestures notwithstanding:

For very little I propose to give a lot; things of value not by my account, but because they will be things of interest, new and novel. What I offer is a useful merchandise, superior for its importance, regardless of how I would have it—[in comparison] to what I ask for in exchange.2 (Italics added). Here, Martí relates to Manuel Mercado one of the conditions of production behind the chronicle: writing is subject to the laws of the market.3 This salaried labor is ambiguously represented as an instance of alienation: as the above example shows, the value of the word in the chronicle elides the possessive mine. Perhaps we can sense in this avoidance the fate to which the literato is more or less resigned—the fact that his words always emerge off-site, outside the territory of his ideal constituency. But what value exactly does this alienation take on? What value does this mine acquire? Literature pricks us with its response: ‘‘I have earned the bread: let us now make poetry.’’ One does not, however, have to accept this interpellation: in criticism, such a move would be tantamount to assuming the literary subject’s self-representation and system of exclusions as the starting point for our critical task. We proceed through the chronicle, a liminal area that betrays the inconsistencies of the project of autonomy brought about by fin de siècle literature. The chronicle, tied to the history of the folletín, is the place occupied by literature in the newspaper. As we have seen, such a place was, in part, subject to the exigencies of the growing culture industry. More important, it was from this section of the newspaper that literature began to insistently announce the project of autonomy—its institutional utopia, to use an oxymoron. This utopia, bound to encounter numerous inconsistencies, nevertheless sought to erase the traces of the place from which it emerged. In order to apprehend its historicity, it would therefore be necessary to examine this place; a place that is at once the site of speech and the object of a corrective practice. For behind the face of a projected utopia, literature’s dependence on the newspaper relativizes and even contradicts its will to autonomy. In our earlier reading of ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ it was shown that stylization—a process that seems to specify the parameters of literature—not only distinguishes literary language from other emergent discourses of the period, it also coexists and even merges with the ‘‘straightforward,’’ ‘‘alienated,’’ ‘‘quantifying’’ language of the other discourses. In fact, in ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ the condition of possibility for the sense of ascendancy achieved by stylization is the baseness (bajeza) 4 of the scene of writing or inscription. This scene of inscription, in Martí’s case, was the technologized world of the newspaper and modern city. This presupposition of a baseness from which 

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the writer must ascend (through stylization) is hinted at in Darío’s statement: ‘‘Martí wastes his diamonds on any old thing. . . . Recall, if nothing more, his correspondences for La Nación.’’ 5 And Martí, in his article ‘‘Oscar Wilde,’’ had written: ‘‘One cannot but hate tyranny as to live under it. Not [in order] to exacerbate the poetic fire, so much as to live among those who are lacking in it.’’ 6 This condition of baseness prevails throughout his extended residence in New York: ‘‘[Here] they do not understand beauty. . . . They do not exhibit beautiful objects, but bury them among other objects.’’ 7 A driving impulse behind fin de siècle literature—and a legitimizing mechanism for literature’s virtual autonomy in society—was its self-representation as a response to the fragmentary and ‘‘antiaesthetic’’ movement of the modern city. Literature, particularly in the overdetermined field of poetry, performs a counter-elision to those objects and discourses that efface beauty: These that I offer, they are not finished compositions: they are, alas! notes of images taken in haste, lest they escape into the unrefined crowd of the streets, into the tumultuous and sudden rush of the trains, or in the urgent and inflexible tasks of a commercial office—a dear refuge of the banished.8 In contrast to poetry, the chronicle thematized the process of elision: the confrontation of literature with the ‘‘antiaesthetic’’ areas of capitalist daily life. In fact, the production of meaning in the chronicle, which served to represent the objects that ‘‘extinguish’’ beauty, begins with this very confrontation. As we saw in ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ the organization of discourse in the chronicle presupposes the struggle of literature in the field of competition established by the division of intellectual labor. In spite of its tangential nature—composed as it is of ‘‘alienated’’ words, objects, and discourses—the chronicle was fundamental to the turn-of-thecentury will to autonomy. The chronicle served as a kind of experimental workshop, where literature could continue exploring and configuring the representation of discourses—discourses that developed and formed their borders or exteriors in relation to one another. They all converged in the new urban experience. With greater insistence than any other discursive space of the period, the chronicle enabled literature to designate and denounce those discourses that comprised its (literature’s) outside: information, technology, commercial reason, and (as we will see in this chapter) the crisis of experience in mass culture.9 If, in poetry, literature speaks of its inner ideal, in the chronicle, literature projects a map of the modern city where autonomy stakes its claim for specificity and difference. Literature, then, was not predicated on the development of its self-consciousness; quite the contrary. The Literature and the Masses

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condition of possibility for an interior, autonomous space was rather the competition for the legitimation of a proper space in society. And it is this space that elicits the need to produce a self-consciousness, a specificity. The struggle for legitimation is the germinal seed of the chronicle. Hence, the chronicle’s tangential and undisciplined form nevertheless constitutes a privileged field for the analysis of those social conditions presupposed by the will to autonomy, by literary modernization in Latin America along with its contradictions and uneven development. This chapter consists of two sections: the first, ‘‘Urban Flow and the Splitting of Pairs,’’ is a reading of Martí’s representation of the city as a destabilizing, fragmentary force in the Escenas norteamericanos, particularly ‘‘Coney Island’’ core of an emerging culture industry.10 The second part, ‘‘The House of Discourse,’’ analyzes the role of the speaking subject in the chronicle—the totalizing will of the aesthetic subject—as a compensatory and corrective response to the effects of urban flow. The reading of ‘‘Coney Island’’ will enable us to explore (in the following chapter) the concept of ‘‘culture’’ (and literature) assumed by the subject as a defense of spiritual values in a massified and commodified city. Martí’s concept of culture will, in many ways, foreshadow the emergence of what Rodó in Ariel would call ‘‘our modern literature of ideas,’’ tied to the Latinoamericanista essay in the twentieth century. Urban Flow and the Splitting of Pairs ‘‘Fourteen years ago,’’ Martí wrote in , Coney Island was ‘‘a heap [montón] of abandoned earth’’ (appendix , p. ). In this version of Coney Island’s past, the ‘‘heap of earth’’ precedes any semblance of order or social significance. This undifferentiated matter, sign of a mute nature, is alien to all artifice; an island, with its back to the city. One might go so far as to suggest that it was almost a nonplace, left outside the parameters of the social space demarcated by the urban landscape. From the perspective of the city, this abandoned earth was an outreach or frontier: an insignificant place, deaf to communication because of the expanse of water separating it from the mainland. Martí will emphasize this aspect of Coney Island’s past in order to highlight the intensity of transformations that shape its present. For at the time that Martí is actually writing about Coney Island—the scene of inscription— the once empty island is filled with the signs of modernity. The descriptions stress the sense of agglomeration, a massification distinctive of the represented world where crowds ebb and flow. Coney Island is now a place on which the city has turned its masses, its machines and discourses, especially its written 

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traces: ‘‘newspapers, programs, advertisements, signs, can be read everywhere’’ (p. ). The ‘‘heap of earth’’ has become a place overflowing with people, dotted with sumptuous hotels [and] commuted by an aeriel railway; sprinkled with gardens, kiosks, small theaters, beer gardens, arenas, tents, innumerable carriages, picturesque assemblies, mobile stalls, auctions, fountains. (p. ) Enumeration, the primary vehicle for description throughout the chronicle, emphasizes the experience of agglomeration. Yet, the juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements in the act of enumeration also casts doubt on the prospect of articulating this new ‘‘community’’ of people, things, and discourses that the city has displaced onto an empty land. In fact, the proliferative quality of discourse in ‘‘Coney Island’’ begins with this questioning of a possible order for the represented world: on what basis might the random experience of massified urban life be organized into a coherent vision? An agglomerate in no way delineates a contained space; to the contrary, in ‘‘Coney Island’’ (as in the Escenas norteamericanas in general) the city appears as an impulse that overruns boundaries, formal limits—forever displacing and configuring them. The city empties out, courses outward, in a perpetual flow. Territorial boundaries are overthrown before the expansive, uncontainable movement of the capitalist city: [What] one finds so shocking there is the size, the quantity, the unexpected effect of human activity, this immense valve of open pleasure upon an immense people . . . , this daily spillage of an extraordinary people onto an extraordinary beach; this mobility, this talent for advancement, this change of form, this feverish rivalry of wealth . . . , this rising tide, this annihilating and incomparable expansiveness, solid and frenetic, and this naturalness in the marvelous; this is what one finds shocking there. (p. ) The city is ‘‘mobility,’’ ‘‘spillage’’: flux. How can it be represented? How can it be contained, if its constitutive impulse is precisely to overrun territories, continents, and perpetuate in protean fashion a constant ‘‘change of form’’? In Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas, representations of the city rarely assume an expository mode of description. In contrast, this collection of chronicles must be read as an immense urban cartography, harnessed at times with the very verbal, fragmented material of the industrial city itself. In this landscape, words—more than the presence of things—bring forth the emblematic intensity of Martí’s allegories. As Fina García Marruz would say, Martí Literature and the Masses

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‘‘thought with images’’ in his North American journalism, ‘‘as if by doing so he wanted to give back this sense of totality that the passage of time seems to steal from us in its flight.’’ 11 And these ‘‘image-objects,’’ which are part of what García Marruz calls a poetics of concretion at work in Martí, shape the allegorical landscape of the city. Such an allegorical landscape was Martí’s response to the fragmentary, destabilizing impulse of the modern city. If we examine the trajectory of some of these image-objects or emblems as they appear in ‘‘Coney Island,’’ one can see how these nuclei form the basis of signification in the chronicle. Transport. Martí’s city is not exactly an instance of chaos. Over the amorphous ‘‘heap of earth,’’ the city imposes its own logic of sense. Different means of communication conjoin with the heterogeneous particularities that form the agglomerate; it is these means that make Coney Island a conjunction of four ‘‘smaller towns . . . united by carriageways, streetcars, and steam trains.’’ 12 At first glance, transport appears to have an ordering function, to create a feeling of unity that the city can impose on the unformed matter. When Martí speaks of the way the ‘‘iron docks . . . advance over the sea upon elegant pillars three blocks in length,’’ the civilizing function of transport here seems to approximate the classical vision of Latin American enlightened oligarchs. In this sense, transport would serve to grant meaning and social value (utility is perhaps the key word) to a brute nature, outside rationality and forever coming into conflict with it. And the sea, the flowing body par excellence, would be the image that evokes this conflict, this interference. Nonetheless, in ‘‘Coney Island,’’ Martí proceeds ironically. He positions himself in a field of signification, an ideological field (‘‘In human affairs, nothing equals the marvelous prosperity of the United States of the North’’ [p. ]); yet he immediately relativizes it, breaks it down, through an implosive force deployed by a minute but crucial semantic slippage: ‘‘Now more than ever, it is certainly true that never a happier, merrier, more wellequipped, more jovial, and frenetic crowd has lived around such useful labor in any other region of the land’’ (appendix , p. ; italics added). The city imposes a network, its order. But ‘‘the rails crisscross like the threads of a lace embroidered by a mad woman.’’ 13 Transport erects a frenetic logic of sense in which everything is displaced, interchangeable: Sea Beach Palace, which is no more than a hotel now, and which was once the famed ‘‘Agricultural Building’’ during the Philadelphia Exposition—transported, as if by the art of enchantment, to New York and 

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re-elevated in its original form, without so much as a splint lacking, on the coast of Coney Island. (appendix , p. ) Faced with the transference and permanent derivativeness of the new site, which belies the absence of the building’s origin, the subject cannot hide his surprise: his shock is the most efficient means of establishing a distance from it. He represents the displacement as a fall from the ‘‘famed ‘Agricultural Building’ ’’—perhaps a symbol of rootedness—to a hotel, site of transit, placed in the fugacity that dismantles the authority of tradition. The irony, always subtle in Martí’s chronicle, is more graphic in the following description of a high-rise: it is Cable, the laughing Cable, with its elevator higher than the Trinity tower in New York—two times higher than the tower of our cathedral— to whose peak travelers climb, suspended by a diminutive cage at a height that gives one vertigo. (p. ) The terms of comparison are asymmetrical, far from gratuitous: the elevator, for one, is described as a ‘‘diminutive cage’’—a machine that diminishes and isolates, or perhaps more specifically atomizes, the person(s) trapped within it. Martí opposes this image to an ecclesiastical structure around which the communitarian space of a more ‘‘traditional’’ society had been constructed. The industrial city is a decentered space. Articulated by modern transport, this space presupposes and reproduces a model of the world as an aggregate, juxtaposed in Martí to the organic coherence of the traditional system.14 Transport is the figure of an order opposed to the hierarchical, subordinative verticality of a society based on tradition. In Martí, traditional society finds its metaphorical paradigm in the figure of the tree, grounded by the root.15 By contrast, transport installs a system of relays, based on continuous displacements and the voracious accumulation of contiguous spaces: like a monster that empties its bowels entirely into the hungry jaws of another monster, that colossal crowd, crushed and compact, mobs the entrances of the trains that moan when they are full, as if tired from the weight, on their way through the solitude that they transform by redeeming it; and they later yield their mixed-up cargo to the gigantic ocean liners . . . that lead to the wharves and sprinkle the tired passengers into a thousand cars and roads like veins of iron, across slumbering New York City. (appendix , p. ) Literature and the Masses

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Thus concludes ‘‘Coney Island.’’ This visionary finale, where the distance of the subject before the material baseness of the represented world is highly emphasized, in many ways condenses Martí’s notion of urban order as a dispersive movement. From train to boat, from boat to streetcar, movement at first appears to find a focal point, a territorial boundary, in the city, represented as a body, an apparent organic unity. The city, however, actually generates an even stronger force of dispersion, so intense that it explodes and breaks down into the ‘‘thousand cars and roads,’’ into the sprinkled crowd. This unrestrained impulse unhinges all ‘‘ties’’ and ‘‘roots,’’ which constituted the basis of Martí’s evaluation of the United States at the beginning of the chronicle: In human affairs, nothing equals the marvelous prosperity of the United States of the North. Whether or not deep roots are lacking in them; whether or not the ties that bind sacrifice and a common suffering are more enduring than those that bind the common interest; whether or not this colossal nation will carry ferocious and tremendous elements in its bowels; whether or not the absence of a feminine spirit, origin of artistic sense and complementary to the national being, will prevail and corrupt the heart of this astonishing people, this is what the times will tell. (p. ) If transport initially exemplified the semantic field of connection, communication, in opposition to the interference of the great bodies of water, the closing fragment of ‘‘Coney Island’’ presents transport as the figure of a new interference, this one artificial and mechanical. Transport traces the lines of a new labyrinth, the industrial city, that severs ties, roots. From the city, and as a response to it, Martí insists on the reconstitution of the center. And it is through this that his New York writing, his discourse about and from the city, acquires the weight of authority. Broken Families. While the city unties familial connections, transport displaces families; hence, another important motif in Martí’s chronicle concerns broken families. The railroads, which empty ‘‘their serpent breast swollen with families’’ (p. ), represent for Martí the limit of the house that attempts to fortify itself against the impact of modernization. The following passage, written some years after ‘‘Coney Island,’’ makes this relation explicit: May they preserve the house, those who want an enduring people! And woe to the railroads if they overrun the house, which will come to be the liver that cleans out all the impurities of life! This cardboard tabloid life we lead today is no good. It is better to live like the Greeks, without win

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dow to the street, nor more than a solitary door in the entire house (OC, vol. , p. ). Outside, the chronicler—a subject of the interior who exits for a stroll— gazes with timidity and estrangement at the atomized masses. In ‘‘Coney Island,’’ Martí stresses the dismemberment of the traditional community. The masses, in effect, act here as an anticommunity. And when Martí attempts to focus on or designate an image of the mass, he turns to that of the broken family—as if in this fractured nucleus he would find the minimal unity of the masses, of atomization. Significantly, in Martí’s chronicle, Coney Island delineates a feminine space. The mass and even the railroad have ‘‘breasts’’ and ‘‘bowels’’ that carry or nurture life. The city itself is represented as a ‘‘sleeping’’ woman. Martí sets up such an association of the feminine body in order to emphasize the deterritorialization of the reproductive organs; for example, witness the ‘‘gigantic cow, milked night and day, fails to produce a fresh twenty-five centimeter glass.’’ (appendix , p. ). There are ‘‘bearded women’’ (p. ), ‘‘a rough Irish woman’’ (p. ), ‘‘strapping German woman’’ (p. ), and ‘‘legions of intrepid ladies and gallant peasants’’ (p. ). The hypollage is by no means accidental: it accentuates the extravagance, the deterritorialization of the represented world where women are masculinized, and men are notably absent or lacking. In this paradoxically feminine space, solitary mothers abound. Families are either broken or in the tension of rupture, delivered by the evils of the city: the poor mothers . . . squeeze their ill-fated babies against their breasts; they seem as if devoured, drained, eaten away, by this terrible disease of summer that cuts down children like the sickle reaps the grain—the cholera infantum. (p. ) In this world of the single, the unpaired, the ‘‘extravagant,’’ the couple is torn apart. Not coincidentally, the figure of the father stands out by his very absence; he is nowhere to be found in Martí’s modern landscape. For when the couple is torn asunder, the minimal unit of meaning, the basis of the social model at work in Martí’s writing, is fractured. As we will see, this model affirmed a sense of historical continuity based on filiation. Thus, the tree that represents the rootedness of a traditional society was at the same time genealogical: ‘‘Everything moves toward unity, toward synthesis, essences come to one being; all existences to the existent: one father is the father of many children: a trunk is the seat of infinite branches.’’ 16 The city doubtless complicated such a notion of continuity and order. Filiations, the Literature and the Masses

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ties that unite parents to children, tradition to the present, are broken by the urban impulse that undoes all codes and territorialities that order life in traditional society. Martí here touches on the topos of the familial crisis, perhaps today all too crystallized in conservative rhetoric. Yet during Martí’s epoch—and overall for any Latin American recently arrived in New York at the turn of the century—the ‘‘crisis’’ must have consisted of an intense experience, much more significant than a simple rhetorical attack on modernization. Martí insisted on this rupture, which indicated for him the elimination of an entire way of living, understanding, and representing the world; a mentality that even throughout his New York years, continued to exercise an influence over his vision of the capitalist city, frequently based on a comparison with his ‘‘world of yesterday.’’ From his  arrival in New York onward, Martí would relate this ‘‘crisis’’ to the transformations of the place of women in industrial society. Women were incorporated into the labor force, into the world of the street. Hence, their deterritorialization, along with (for Martí) their masculinization. Already in his first texts on New York, he writes: Why must such mannish women be seen? Their rapid pace when climbing or descending the stairways, in the street bustle, the certain gesture and the decisiveness in all their actions, their all too virile presence; [these things] divest them of serene beauty, ancient grace, exquisite sensibility that turn women into those superior beings—of which Calderón had said they were a ‘‘small world.’’ (OC, vol. , p. ) We ought to ask these women what the natural end of their inextinguishable thirst for pleasure and distraction is. We ought to ask them whether . . . they might later bring to their home these solid virtues, these sweet feelings, the good sense of resignation, that evangelical power of counsel capable of preserving on high a home shaken by misfortune, and inspire in children the contempt for material pleasures and the love for internal satisfactions that make happy and strong men, as [these things] did to Ishmael. (vol. , p. ) Familial crisis is a reiterated motif in modern literature. In order to appreciate its importance, one need only contrast the broken family at the turn of the century with the function performed by filiation and the family in the previous century. A canonical example can be found in Sarmiento’s autobiography, Recuerdos de provincia (); in this instance, the authority of the subject is based on the imitation and repetition of familial models, them    

selves rarely questioned. Sarmiento writes: ‘‘In the history of the family lies the history of the native land, as its theater of action and its background. To my progeny I am bequeathed; and I believe that by following my tracks, like those of any other down that path, . . . it seems possible to see portrayed this poor America of the South before me.’’ 17 I; family; native land: the synechdochical trajectory is unmistakable. The family as a discursive function in nineteenth-century literature, most particularly the novel—Amalia, Martín Rivas, or María would be basic examples —exceeds the thematization of a social institution. Of course, literature in this period nurtured and was nurtured by a familialism that prevailed in the emergent modern cities. But beyond the obvious thematization of the family, it was essential to the process of narrative modeling, a fundamental mode of organizing literary material. The family, therefore, would come to constitute both a model of the world and a figure or trope for a specifically literary system of representation. It was a structure that ensured the apprehension, the very representation of the heterogeneous mass that comprised the reality of the socius. In this respect, the family was a form of naturalized representation—a representation given validity by the genealogical and filiative claims that conflated a historical continuity with a biological process. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, new fictions began to problematize the construction of an earlier Latin American literature profoundly oriented toward the family. We see in Andrés, the main character in Argentine Eugenio Cambeceres’s Sin rumbo (Aimless) from , a subject ‘‘[who had] fought to the point of death with society, whose doors had shut on him, . . . denying the possibility of happiness in a home and looking on marriage with horror.’’ 18 His sense of impotence, of filiation as an impossibility, is striking, as it is also related in the novel to the crisis of patrimony. After Andrés’s suicide and the death of his daughter, the novel emblematically concludes with a conflagration in the house, the center for an entire world that had lost the sense and possibility of continuity. Even before Cambeceres, Machado de Assis in Brazil radicalized the problem of filiation and the dependence of literature on the familial paradigm. In his  Memórias pósthumous de Brás Cubas (Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas), Machado dismantles familial history as a narrative model that certainly directed his own earlier work; in doing so, he brings the uprootedness of the familial structure to the level of speech and discourse, individualizing the voice of the narrator who is violently cut adrift from the family: Upon reaching this other side of the mystery, I find myself with a small gain, which is the final negation in this chapter of negations: I did Literature and the Masses

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not have children, I did not bequeath to any creature the legacy of our misery.19 In contrast, Martí obstinately insisted upon the power of filiation as a legitimate model in and for history: ¡El Padre No ha de morir hasta que la ardua lucha Rico de todas armas lance el hijo! ¡Ven, o mi hijuelo, y que tus alas blancas De los brazos de la Muerte oscura Y de su manto funeral me libren! The father Must not die until the arduous battle, Complete with every armament, inaugurates the son! Come, my dear child, and may your white wings From the arms of dark Death And her funeral shroud free me! 20 And notwithstanding the claim that Martí’s first book of poetry, Ismaelillo (), demonstrates the early modernization of Latin American poetry, it in fact casts poetic discourse in the form of an allocution by the father to a son.21 How, then, is it possible to speak of broken families? Martí’s insistence on a filial hierarchy must be read as a will to continuity. Beyond the assumed spontaneity of a familial, primary ideology proper to modernity, this will to filiation performs an act of compensation: contrary to a mere (re)affirmation of the family, Martí’s exacerbated will to filiation registers the crisis of the family as an ideology, a structure, or paradigm, as well as the lack of this stable structure in a changing society.22 Martí’s discourse attempts to provide schemas, reconstructions, which at times take on the familial form, precisely in order to redeem the failures of traditional structures before the impulse of modernity. These reconstructions act as a kind of second-degree familial ideology, asserted in the face of its dissolution. Regardless of these efforts, though, the broken family remains an inescapable fact to which Martí responds with a discourse that will serve as a fortification composed of different residual experiences displaced by the new society. To compensate for the loss of the home, Martí will erect a house of discourse. The Sea. The fluid body par excellence, the sea always appears in ‘‘Coney Island’’ as the background, the limit of the social world. Yet its laterality—in 

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itself significant—must not deceive us. As the classical image of flows, the sea ties together all the other semantic nuclei that comprise the chronicle: transport, mass, and the broken family merge together in the field of dispersion that is the sea, the destabilizing impulse of desire. Such a connection between the sea and sexuality is suggested throughout the chronicle: Martí speaks of ‘‘fleshy coasts,’’ ‘‘burning sand,’’ a ‘‘sea [that] caresses,’’ ‘‘shimmering beaches,’’ the ‘‘wet [húmeda] seashore,’’ the ‘‘potent air [of the ocean],’’ and the ‘‘all-too-penetrating air [of the ocean]’’ (appendix , p. ). Bodies, almost naked, ‘‘throw themselves on the sand and let themselves be covered, knocked about, massaged, and enveloped in the burning sand’’ (p. ). Families—which again represent codes, structures—are broken against the oceanside, site of desire: True, any thinker would find shocking so many a married woman walking around without husband; so many a woman strolling by the wet seashore with a scarf around her shoulders, wrapped up in her pleasure and unmindful that the all-too-penetrating air must inevitably wound the flaccid nature of her offspring. (p. ) The shoreline delineates the experience of a limit: the limit of the familiar, of the socially ordered and representable world. The fluid substance of unanchored desire, an amorphous, discontinuous mass that eludes the grasp of discourse, lies on the other side of the limit and family. Let us briefly expand our focus on the reading to examine the significance of the ocean in other areas of Martí’s work. The opposition between the sea and discourse—one that certainly brings to mind the instability of the nature/culture binarism in Martí—is the germinal seed of ‘‘I Hate the Sea’’ from his Versos libres: Odio el mar, sólo hermoso cuando gime Del barco domador bajo la hendente Quilla, y como fantástico demonio De un manto negro colosal tapado, Encórvase a los vientos de la noche Ante el sublime vencedor que pasa:— Y la luz de los astros, encerrada En globos de cristales, sobre el puente Vuelve un hombre impasible la hoja del libro. Odio el mar, vasto y llano, igual y frío

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I hate the sea, only beautiful when it moans From beneath the cloven quill of the masterful Literature and the Masses

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Boat, and like a fantastic demon Under a colossal black mantle cloaked, It stoops beneath the winds of the night Before the sublime conquerer passing by:— And in the light of the stars, encased In crystal globes, over the bridge An impassive man turns the page of a book. I hate the sea; vast and flat, level and cold 23 The initial lines establish a hierarchical opposition: the sea holds value only when it serves to facilitate communication, which dominates the sea by means of transport. The sea, which the speaker hates when it is ‘‘vast and flat, level and cold,’’ moans; that is, it produces a sound, associating it with the voice, with an unformed vocal content. But this voice lies ‘‘beneath the cloven quill.’’ The ‘‘cloven quill’’ opens up a trajectory across or on the ‘‘black mantle’’ of undifferentiated matter in an image that immediately evokes the theme of light and meaning. The boat allows passage across the sea, which along with later images of the sea as a ‘‘treacherous and shifting sand’’ or a ‘‘lethal serpent,’’ contrasts with the stability of solid ground, interrupting its continuity. Lines – reiterate and reformulate the previously sketched hierarchies: the ‘‘crystal globes’’ of the streetlamps are containers or perhaps continental spaces that enclose the ‘‘light of the stars’’ that, like the sea, are characterized by their tendency toward dispersal. And on the bridge, as if tiny in comparison to the vast forces surrounding him, stands a man, illuminated by artificial light: ‘‘over the bridge / An impassive man turns the page of a book.’’ Both the preposition over and the object bridge resonate with the position of the boat over the water in the second line. Finally, the reference to discourse through the image of the book can be connected to the image of transport, which makes the sea ‘‘moan’’ and is composed of a ‘‘cloven quill’’ that plots a course, a trajectory over the water. Both the moving ship and the process of reading suggest the discurrence or chronotope, the proceeding of writing and reading. Transport, in effect, becomes an image of discourse, which should be understood in its etymological sense: to course through, pass through, in an orderly fashion. The ocean obstructs discurrence; in Martí’s words, it is like ‘‘the shifting sand.’’ For this reason, it must be dominated—by means of transport—and transformed into a means of travel and exchange. Only when this objective has been accomplished does the sea become ‘‘beautiful,’’ or more specifically, ‘‘valuable’’ insofar as it has become useful. Its beauty is expressed in its capacity to moan or generate a sound, to acquire a voice that guarantees sense and     

meaning.24 An Enlightenment ideology thus appears to prevail in ‘‘I Hate the Sea,’’ wherein technology (tied to the course of meaning that passes through the pages of a book) functions as a means of mastering the barbarous matter of a mute nature, external to discourse. The act of discourse would establish order in the heterogeneity of nature; for as Adorno and Horkheimer would argue, ‘‘nothing could remain outside, since the very idea of the exterior was a source of fear.’’ 25 From another angle, however, this Enlightenment rhetoric—which refers directly back to the writings of Sarmiento, Bello, Luz y Caballero, and Hostos—serves only as a point of departure and an object of Martí’s critical reflection. For example, at the end of the poem, the sea, which has already become a means of exchange, of ‘‘sense,’’ nevertheless ‘‘leads to a tyrant.’’ But even more striking is the uncontained or uncontainable aspect of Martí’s image-objects: the motif of the sea as an interruption or interference later becomes situated at the very heart of a society entirely directed by its sexual appetite: Odio el mar, muerto enorme, triste muerto De torpes y glotones criaturas Odiosas habitado, se parecen A los ojos del pez, que de harto expira, Los de gañán de amor que en brazos tiembla De la mujer horrible libidinosa: (. . .). I hate the sea, a great dead thing, a sad corpse By sluggish and gluttonous creatures Hatefully inhabited: they are like The eyes of a fish dying of surfeit, As those of love’s slave who trembles In the arms of a horrifying libidinous woman.26 In Martí’s bestiary, the fish are signs of baseness and sexual appetite. The simile between fish and the libidinized social world shows the relation between the sea and sexuality as a new source of interference. It also indicates Martí’s fear that the sexualized world, emphatically identified with the feminine urban masses, would bring with it the reincorporation of the city, of social order, in the area outside discourse, in the sea that is desire itself.27 Desire as the other side of discourse is capable of contaminating the very heart of transport, which occurs in the rowboat of Martí’s Versos sencillos: En el bote remador iba remando Por el lago seductor Literature and the Masses

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Con el sol que era oro puro Y en el alma, más de un sol. Y a mis pies vi de repente, Ofendido del hedor, Un pez muerto, un pez hediondo En el bote remador. In the rowboat I went rowing Upon the seductive lake With the sun that was pure gold And in the soul, more than one sun. And at my feet so suddenly Offended by the stench, I saw a dead, stinking fish, Stinking in the rowboat.28 Again, we see the high/low opposition, which in Martí constitutes an axiology, in the rowboat/seductive lake couplet, as in the sun (and soul) of the first stanza opposed to the feet and fish in the second. In opposition to the aesthetic and economic value of gold, an image associated with the ‘‘higher’’ plane, we find the absence of value in the ‘‘low’’: the abject fish. The axiology initially establishes a stable schemata, but is undermined in the second stanza with the intervention of the fish (low) inside the boat (high). The ‘‘seductive lake,’’ at first subjugated by transport, is nevertheless capable of contaminating the order of discourse (represented by the boat) with its material baseness. Desire, like the fish, is what departs from its proper place and destabilizes the axiology established by discourse. Before the irrational energy of the modern flow, Martí responds with a terror similar to that of children in this remarkably familial scene from ‘‘Coney Island’’: trains . . . enter and exit, emptying their serpent breast swollen with families onto the beach; women rent out their blue flannel outfits . . . ; men, dressed in simpler garb, lead the women by the hand and enter the sea; the children, barefoot, wait on the wet seashore for the roaring wave to wet them, and they escape when it arrives, concealing their terror with laughs. (appendix , p. ) The child is who remains on the edge, at the border of sexual play, which here, once again, disjoins the nuclear family. ‘‘Coney Island’’ is, in many ways, a chronicle about sexuality unleashed 

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by the modern city.29 From the distance that is made possible by the writer’s appall, this text centers on ‘‘this original North American love’’ and the ‘‘immense valve of open pleasure upon an immense people’’ (appendix , p. ). The urban mass is the ‘‘rising tide,’’ the irrational force motivated by the promise of satisfaction for the appetites. In a later chronicle, Martí declared: ‘‘In vain do the men of foresight attempt to direct by means of culture and religious meaning this forceful mass that heedlessly searches for the quick and total satisfaction of its appetites.’’ 30 Hence, the projection of feminine organs on the city: the masses and the city (‘‘slumbering New York’’), overrun by ‘‘iron veins,’’ splice together a field of the irrational, the passional, the vulnerability to desire, with signs of the feminine.31 The woman-mass analogy was a common point of reference for many of the early intellectuals and their experience before the crowd. José M. Ramos Mejía, an Argentine writer who was influenced by the ‘‘psychology’’ of the crowd (an area of study that spread throughout France, particularly after the  Commune) remarked in an explicit manner: ‘‘They constitute the principal nuclei of the multitude: the sensitives, the neurotics, the individuals whose nerves need only be barely caressed, on the surface, by sensation, for them to vibrate. . . . Thus [crowds] are impressionable and fickle like impassioned women, purely unconscious; fiery, but full of fading light; above all lovers of violent sensation, vivid color, noisy music, beautiful men and things of great stature; because the multitude is sensual, aroused and full of lust for the pleasure of the senses. It does not reason, it feels.’’ 32 In fact, from Martí’s perspective, the gendered city progressively ceases to be the site of rationality par excellence. The city erects a social world at the frontier of irrationality, on the border of a sea that swallows up dyadic distributions. And when these pairs are torn asunder, the threat of the pairless, of the unstructured, intensifies. In contrast to the Enlightenment polis, the city in Martí is a destructuring impulse, the annulment of harmony. In this city, ‘‘the rising tide,’’ we see what Martí calls the ‘‘blinding variety’’ proliferate. Its flow dissolves all sense of totality, constituting the unbound force of the particular: [It] tortures science and places the soul in a state of longing and exasperation at finding the essential unity in which, like a mountain at its summit, everything seems to be grasped and condensed. . . . The universe is the universal. And the universal uni-various, is the various in the one. Nature, full of surprises, is all [as] one.33 The city, however, destroys the virtual image of this totality. Far from a representation of an equilibrated world, ‘‘Coney Island’’ Literature and the Masses

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manifests the intellectual subject’s confrontation with the new ‘‘order’’ of the city, with its permanent ‘‘change of form’’ that invalidates all ties, all mediation between the one and the varied. In this fundamental work, Martí expresses his terror before the ‘‘blinding variety’’ that generates the unshackled multiplication of atoms in the masses. Even beyond the insistence on harmony, this terror emphasizes the fragility of the subject before a world that s/he experiences as a substance that resists and, at times, invalidates representation. In one of his ‘‘Impressions of America,’’ Martí further expounds on this ‘‘blurred life, the morbid passion, the ardent and anguished desires of New York living’’: In this turbulent tide, the natural currents of life no longer appear. Everything is obscured, disarticulated, pulverized; virtues cannot be distinguished from vices at first glance. They fade away, tumultuously mixed. (OC, vol. , p. ) The gendered city—flow, turbulence—takes apart the traditional systems of analysis and representation for the world.34 The heterogeneity let loose by the city is blinding. In other words, it is not in the final instance controllable, representable; rather, it is a condition that obscures even the subject’s sense of vision. Thus emerges one of the problems that occupied Martí’s attention throughout his New York period: if the profoundly antiorganic city, with its science and machines, destroyed the older structures, what language would dominate it, represent it, with a frame as yet capable of articulating figures of unity and totality? The House of Discourse To be surprised, alienated, is to begin to understand. It is the activity and the luxury specific to the intellectual. Hence, his definitive gesture consists of gazing at the world with eyes dilated by the feeling of strangeness.—José Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas

Martí would not deliver himself to the deterritorialized flows. Instead he resisted, and asserted his distance. In his discourse, he created forms of subjecting, of reinstating the power of the subject over the threatening heterogeneity of the city. ‘‘Coney Island’’ is the enactment of a confrontation, perhaps to this day irresolute, between the will to totality that constituted the subject and the ‘‘blinding variety’’ set free by modernity—a battle between a subject who is firmly anchored in the compensatory fabric of discourse and the materiality of a world that resists the order of representation. 

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As we have seen, the urban flow, for Martí, constantly breaks structures down. Let us now examine the violence that Martí’s discourse, in its will to order, exercises over the fragmentary flow that drives the city. We will proceed on another level, by focusing on how the subject in ‘‘Coney Island’’ prepares himself or herself for the task of speaking about the city. This will enable us to later explore the concept of discourse and aesthetic culture that Martí at once presupposes and attempts to legitimate. Distance and Condensation. In contrast to the relatively impersonal discourse that comprises much of the Escenas norteamericanas, ‘‘Coney Island’’ is a text saturated with indices that situate and portray the act of enunciation. The signs of identity displace the focus of discourse from the referential world, the city, in favor of the ‘‘here and now’’ of the speaking subject. These markers, for the most part emphatic, serve to embody and position the subject: ‘‘Such people eat quantity; we, quality’’ (appendix , p. ). The weight of self-representation is clear: in response to the depersonalized world of the city, the insistence on fixing the identity of the subject activates discourse as a compensation for the lacunae of the represented world. In fact, the subject reiterates his or her self-representation in opposition to the referential world: ‘‘Other peoples—and we among them—live as [if ] devoured by a sublime inner demon. . . . Not these tranquil spirits, disturbed only by the anxiety to possess a fortune’’ (p. ). The field of the subject is created in his assertion of distance from the other world (‘‘those peoples’’). The reverse side of this self-willed exclusion of the subject from the other is the production of a proper field of identity, of a we, through the interpellation of his or her reader. Martí represents this field of identity as a place autonomous from the commercial laws and instrumental principles that rule the represented world. By this strategy, discursive functions (subject, object, receiver) are semanticized to the point of transforming them into ideological realms of identity that regulate the distribution of meaning and value in the chronicle. Now, this spatial semanticization of discursive functions is complicated at the very moment that we interrogate the location from which the subject speaks (a complication that is further heightened when we ask from whence the chronicler writes, in the newspaper). In spite of the distance asserted by the subject, the ‘‘there’’ that corresponds to the ‘‘they’’ or ‘‘them’’ of the statement is at one and the same time the place where the speaking subject evokes the ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘now’’ of his locution. From this place, the subject includes himself in a we that is simultaneously ‘‘the flock’’ that resides far away, in a place that can only be nostalgically recalled by the exile: Literature and the Masses

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[It] is common knowledge that a melancholic sadness seizes the men of our Hispanic American communities who live there, who seek in vain and do not find; who for however much their senses grant importance to their first impressions, with their eyes enamored, their reason darkened and obfuscated, are possessed by the anguish of solitude in the end, the nostalgia for a higher spiritual world that invades and inflicts them; they feel like sheep without a mother or pastor, astray from the flock; and whether or not it shows in their eyes, the[ir] frightened spirit breaks down in the most bitter torrent of tears, has been broken, because that great land is bereft of spirit. But what a coming and going! What a flow of money! (pp. –) In ‘‘Coney Island,’’ as in other writings by Martí in New York, the subject is represented as an exile. The motif of the broken family—the having gone ‘‘astray from the flock,’’ the crisis of the subject cut adrift from the communitarian structure—reappears in this fragment. Of course, the biographical circumstances of Martí’s life cannot be underestimated: doubtless Martí here refers to the consequent uprootedness of his own exile, which distanced him from the native land for almost his entire adult life. This condition of exile, caught between two worlds, overdetermines the subject position mapped out in his Escenas norteamericanas. More than an account of his travels, these works are an enormous testament to the sense of alienation produced by the experience of exile. As ‘‘Coney Island’’ shows, the Escenas are often addressed to a constituency denominated as we—a we from which the subject is nevertheless estranged. The implicit affirmation of a we behind Martí’s discourse is asserted over and against capitalist modernity; and while it may appear to him as foreign, it is nonetheless the scene of inscription and writing. Yet exceeding the limits of biographical explanation, in this passage the displaced subject is not only a Latin American who ‘‘lives there’’; the subject also speaks of an internal exile of the ‘‘spirit’’ in a society motivated by the ‘‘flow of money’’: ‘‘the[ir] frightened spirit breaks down in the most bitter torrent of tears, has been broken, because that great land is bereft of spirit.’’ We later discover that it is the exile of the thinker: what could be the place of the literato, the artist, and the many other traditional intellectuals 35 in the overcrowded space of the city? Martí transforms the biographical situation of his exile into a representation of the site of ‘‘spiritual’’ or, more specifically, aesthetic activity in modern society. Regardless of the lived experience of the exile (as Martí indeed experienced exile in his life), the modern writer privileges the image of exile in the legitimizing representation of his place in modernity.36 Exile enables the subject to assert his or her capacity to voice those ex

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periences displaced by economic rationality. Exile thus becomes a strategic positioning, an assumed distantiation, which authorizes the critical word of the artist-as-exile in the city. For even at the heart of his own society, the exile is a figure of the claim to autonomy that legitimizes the artist as a critic of modernization. We will later examine this strategy of legitimation at work in the literary subject, who attests to the emergence of a concept of literature fundamental to the twentieth century. For now, suffice it to say that this ‘‘will to distance’’ in part determines the textual organization of many of the Escenas norteamericanas, particularly the perspective of the speaker before the referential world. The following three examples show how this perspective is inscribed in ‘‘Coney Island’’: [The] grains of sand . . . from afar . . . seem like restless higher spirits. [What] one finds so shocking there is the size, the quantity, the unexpected effect of human activity . . . , these restaurants that seen from afar look like lofty armies, these roads that from a two-mile distance are not roads but long carpets of heads. Seen at some distance from the sea, the four populations, radiant in the shadows, look as if the stars that populate the sky had unexpectedly fallen into the seas and had been reunited into four colossal groups.’’ (appendix , pp. –, italics added throughout) Let us highlight three distinctive features of the perspective given to the reader in ‘‘Coney Island.’’ To begin with, the assertion of distance in the first two examples situates the subject over the referential world (that is, over the ‘‘grains of sand’’ and the ‘‘carpets of heads’’). It cannot be understated that the high/low opposition always implies a hierarchy in Martí. In this instance, height determines the site of spiritual superiority. Second, seeing from afar in the three examples indicates the act of representation, the passage from a variety of elements to a global unity: an act that condenses the dispersed set of elements into a given domain. Stars form ‘‘colossal groups,’’ heads form ‘‘carpets,’’ the multitude in transit integrates the ‘‘lofty armies.’’ In the first example, this passage from the multiple to the integrated implies an act of transfiguration, an ascendancy of dispersed matter (for instance, ‘‘grains of sand’’) to a spiritual level. Third, the process of condensation not only depends on the distance and height of the subject’s gaze; it is also an effect of the transfiguration of the particular (or multiple) into the total (the one), which is necessarily mediated by the analogical activity of the subject. What is interesting here is that the subject does not elide the use of connectors like ‘‘seem’’ and ‘‘like,’’ which register the act of condensation; to the Literature and the Masses

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contrary, he flaunts them, thus stressing the figurative aspect of his descriptions. In this way, he leaves signs of passage, from the literal word (‘‘grains of sand’’) to the figurative plane (‘‘higher spirits’’), as if to emphasize the gravity of the subject’s transformative activity. This emphasis positions the subject as the necessary hinge, as the condition of possibility for passage from ‘‘blinding variety’’ to the general frame, the scene, which congeals the movement of the multiple to produce the image of the ‘‘lofty armies’’ or the mass. It is significant that the act of configuration, the slippage from the literal to the figurative, is flaunted: it attempts to illustrate the insufficiency of natural language, too exposed to the power of fragmentation. Such an insufficiency would inevitably give rise to another kind of gaze, capable of integrating the fragmented planes of the modern city into an organic picture. This would be the ideal of Martí’s urban poetics. The act of condensation, achieved by means of the figure or trope, brings the literary subject proper into being. The subject’s virtual power is rooted here: in the violence that his or her gaze exercises on things. This gaze attempts to reduce the multiplicity of the city into a figurative map, perhaps diagrammatic, in which all particularity would remain absorbed by the condensing operation of signs, of these ‘‘image-objects’’ that evoke the allegorical landscape of the city. As Martí would say: ‘‘The entire art of writing is [in] concretizing.’’ Concretion literally involves the accumulation of particles united to form masses. Such was Martí’s project: to direct the movement of the flow, to cut into it and in this way control it, thus compensating for the dissolution of oneness in modernity. Another example presents itself in Martí’s bestiary. In ‘‘Coney Island,’’ the bestiary configures an important area of the allegorical landscape imposed by Martí over the city. Here are some of its elements: train-serpents crowd-anthill exile-sheep we-eagle, butterfly A discussion of iconography here would be pointless. The symbols given in this tabulation are commonplace, crystallized in a culture of biblical tradition, easily accessible to the world in which Martí lived and breathed. In fact, the productivity of the bestiary is rooted precisely in its topical, codified character. The bestiary makes the frame possible, wherein the predisposition of established values contains and subjects the displacement and interchangeability of matter in the represented world. Yet this schema is markedly binary. It is modeled on the minimal unity 

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of the pair or couple, in this case antithetical: the lowliness of urban signs (anthill, serpent) is juxtaposed to the loftiness of signs tied to the field of the subject, the Latin American we, who possesses aesthetic qualities. We/They: Couplings. Confronted with a world where pairs dissolve, caught up in the matter that is de-hierarchized by the flow of the unpaired, the will to repair stands out in Martí’s discourse: Aparejadas van por las lomas las cogujadas y las palomas. Coupled they pass between the hills the crested skylarks and the doves. (p. ) The collocation of this miniature poem in the midst of the crowd of words that comprise ‘‘Coney Island’’ is surprising, even on the level of its graphic arrangement. Surrounded by the machines, the monstrosity, the denaturalized extravagance of the urban world, Martí cites by memory the ‘‘tender verses’’ of Spanish romantic poet García Gutiérrez. Of course, the context in which the citation is given lends the verses an intensity, an enigmatic quality doubtless unforeseen by Gutiérrez. The placement of the citation only serves to rarefy the verses, spiritualize them in their antithetical relation to the secularity of the profane world. It provokes the question: how would it be possible for such fragile lines to persevere in a city such as that described by Martí? The shock of unfamiliarity that Martí introduces through the inclusion of these verses opens a fissure in the rhythmic pattern of the prose—which as mentioned earlier, is marked by an enumerative, accumulative quality. The appearance of poetic verse registers a site of struggle, a pressure point for intense forces in conflict. This contrast can be further elaborated by examining the structure of the verses themselves: they can be semantically divided into two pairs, although both pairs are in turn tied together by the rhyme’s perfect consonance. Together, they thematize the affirmation of the couple, in a rhythmic as well as semantic sense. Martí thus represents the family— a structure taken apart by the city—as a natural order, innate to the open, organic spaces.37 These small verses—with their exalted bestiary, the hills (contrapuntal to both the sea and city), and most important, their ability to pair the plural with random dispersity—present a world external to the city, Literature and the Masses

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one capable of providing what the city destroys. Or, to put it another way, the citation is a thematization of a model of representation that nurtures the subject in ‘‘Coney Island.’’ The staged representation of discourse as a productive activity, albeit on a strictly formal level, supplements that which the city lacks: the couple, structure. Such People Eat Quantity; We, Quality In ‘‘Coney Island,’’ the binary will in the face of modernity proceeds by dividing discourse into two great, totalizing fields. Two sides and one pivot: the antithesis we/they, at the very core of a signification that at once binds and separates the two. If modernity has unleashed a violence that problematizes the relation between subject and the world, the binarism attempts to repair such a relation. From a height that characterizes the perspective of discourse, the subject recognizes the threat of heterogeneity, tied to the urban flow; but s/he tries to reify it in a ‘‘they’’ that condenses and objectifies the violence, thus rendering it controllable. The act of saying ‘‘they’’ brings heterogeneity under rein beneath a reifying practice; in this way, the ‘‘blinding variety’’ of modern experience can be converted into a representable object. This is achieved, first of all, by always using ‘‘they’’ as the pronoun of the absent party on the stage of discourse. For it is precisely by its absence, by the distance that such an objectification allows the subject, that the implied referent of ‘‘they’’ becomes an object and, hence, subjugated by representation. To represent, in Martí, is to control, to subordinate a de-hierarchized matter. The question, then, would arise as to whether or not this subordinating will would effectively succeed in dominating all of the other forces at work in Martí’s scene of inscription (escritura). And we? What would be the content of this pronoun? In contrast to a fixed content or referent, the pronoun is capable of assuming different semantic charges. Let us briefly examine the trajectory of its functions in ‘‘Coney Island’’: [Its] elevator . . . two times higher than the tower of our Cathedral. [They] do not hold censure and shock in high regard, as might those who think as in this land we think. Other peoples—and we among them—live as [if ] devoured by a sublime inner demon. [The] men of our Hispanic American communities who live there.     

[This] original love of the North Americans, in which almost none of those elements that constitute the sentimental, tender, and elevated love of our lands enters in. Such people eat quantity; we, quality. (appendix , pp. –) On close analysis, the fact that the pronoun is used in a relatively loose and detached manner does not mean that it is semantically devoid of meaning. We, in each case, signifies ‘‘Hispanic American communities’’; or more specifically, it signifies the interpellation of the intended listener, the virtual reader of the chronicle, as a member of the Hispanic American community. The speaker (I) incorporates this other ( you, plural)—which is not to be confused with the absolute other, they—into the field of identity that the speaker claims to speak for: our lands. The interpellation attempts to reduce the distance between the subject and the intended listener or addressee; in this respect, it is far from a neutral function in the verbal exchange. Still, the addressee is not represented as a distant, heterogeneous public domain; rather, she or he constitutes a field of identity from which the subject speaks—a domain of identity on which the authority of the speaking subject is based, set in opposition to they, ‘‘the North Americans.’’ Such is the grounding gesture of Latin-Americanism. Granted, the tenuousness of these interpellations is evident. For example, when Martí speaks of ‘‘our Cathedral,’’ to which cathedral is he referring: to any Hispanic American cathedral, to the one in Havana, or the one in Bogotá (where the chronicle was first published)? We, nosotros or perhaps nos-otros, we others, is a constructed unity, condensed (like they) by the subject’s generalizing gaze. Its function in the chronicle is essential: it acts as a device that creates affiliations, a new family, albeit one that is no longer grounded in the notion of a biological continuity. Rather, it articulates a political and cultural domain. Edward Said has discussed this importance of affiliation in modernity precisely as a response, a compensation, for the instability of the familial structure and of filiation as a metaphor for historical continuity: Childless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and unregenerately celibate men and women populate the world of high modernism with remarkable insistence, all of them suggesting the difficulties of filiation. But no less important in my opinion is the second part of the pattern, which is immediately consequent upon the first, the pressure to produce new and different ways of conceiving human relationships. For if biological reproduction is either too difficult or too unpleasant, Literature and the Masses

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is there some other way by which men and women can create social bonds between each other that would substitute for those ties which connect members of the same family across generations? . . . The only other alternatives seemed to be provided by institutions, associations, and communities whose social existence was not in fact guaranteed by biology but by affiliation.38 Referring to the importance of affiliation as an alternative mode of organizing intellectual fields of knowledge (for the most part traditional, as was the case of the literary field), Said adds: [The] affiliative order so presented surreptitiously duplicates the closed and tightly knit family structure that concerns generational hierarchical relationships to one another. Affiliation then becomes in effect a literal form of re-presentation, by which what was ours is good, and therefore deserves incorporation and inclusion in our programs of humanistic study, and what is not ours in this ultimately provincial sense is simply left out. (pp. –) Said is here referring to the metropolitan, university apparatus, which is at work in a concept of culture, entirely nondescriptive, produced by means of the delimitation of a ‘‘high’’ territory that excludes the minoritarian, socalled Third World, subaltern cultures. Of course, this in no way is to be confused with Martí’s handling of the pronominal we. We, in Martí, is the reverse of they, the United States, bearers of economic power. What is excluded from this field of identity in this schema is the power of the metropolis: hence, the function of affiliation is political. In effect, at least in terms of the international distribution of power, Martí seems to speak from the periphery, from a we oppressed by a they. Again, this does not prevent his discourse from also operating by means of an exclusive, binary apparatus. What function, then, does the affiliative, ideologically overdetermined we serve? Affiliation enables the subject to represent himself as an exile, outside the referential world. This distance is necessary, as it guarantees the representation, the imposition of order, on the urban flow. Moreover, the distance asserted by the subject generates a higher opposition between the spirit —tied to the field of identity belonging to the we that legitimates the speaking subject—and the economic and instrumental logic of the city: Other peoples—and we among them—live as [if ] devoured by a sublime inner demon, which drives us to the relentless pursuit of an ideal of love or glory; and when we grasp some level of this ideal that we     

have pursued, with the pleasure with which an eagle seizes its prey, a new urge unsettles us, a new ambition spurs us on, a new aspiration launches us into a new vehement longing, and from the eagle escapes a once-imprisoned free rebel butterfly, as if defying us to follow it and shackling us to its scrambled flight. Not these tranquil spirits, disturbed only by the anxiety to possess a fortune. (appendix , p. ) We, then, does not only signify ‘‘Hispanic American communities’’; it also creates the basis for an affiliation that presents the possibility of being autonomous from the economic flow of the city. In Martí, this space outside the city, this autonomous domain, tied to art and culture, is also represented in terms of an inner experience, which in many texts finds its proper emblem in the figure of the house: Culture demands a certain repose and cleanliness, just like domestic life; otherwise when the orator in the assembly raises his voice charged with reason, or the actor onstage embodies an immortal character, . . . or the father exhausted from work recounts the tales of heroes to the son who leans against his knees—the voice would be drowned by the groan of a machine passing by, the thought would be disturbed by the deafening and insufferable noise that never ceases in the street, or a puff of smoke would enter in through the window, charged with electric sparks. . . . The most worthy of the city distance themselves from the noisy centers, inasmuch as the noise, which has a certain presence and almost makes visible the presence of what produces it—appalls the artistic soul. . . . Private life has lost much of its modesty, and that of the city much of the relative seclusion that it once granted, since this constant intrusion of brutal noise in every act and thought.39 Affiliation is represented in the emblem of the house centered on the figure of the father. At the same time, the house is the niche for ‘‘culture’’ as a defense in the name of ‘‘private life,’’ the voice of tradition—residual experiences that share as a common denominator their displacement by capitalist rationality. The train, formerly an emblem of a modernization desired by the Enlightenment patricians, once embodied a logic of sense as an organizer of the natural ‘‘chaos’’ in a state of barbarism. Yet, in Martí, the train only produces a ‘‘brutal noise’’ that ‘‘[overruns] the voice.’’ The urban rationality envisioned by the Enlightenment patricians brought, in practice, irrationality Literature and the Masses

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instead, against which the new literato will raise an accusatory voice. Culture—now tied more than ever to the experience of the aesthetic—will seek to legitimate its domain by extricating an autonomy for itself, apart from the rationality that rules the urban world. Certainly, in Martí, this interior, this place that has its back turned to the city yet is relentlessly pursued by it, is not the sacred realm of the collector in Walter Benjamin’s essay, who by means of collecting luxurious objects removes them from the sphere of practical life, the world of utility and the market—that ‘‘outside world’’ of people dominated by the crisis of experience and depersonalization.40 Although the house, for Martí, is a representation of ‘‘culture’’ and the aesthetic experience, his interior is presented as a repository of residual traces from a communitarian tradition, transmittable through the epic that the father recounts to the son. In Martí, ‘‘culture’’ will assert its self-representation as the sphere of filiation, in contrast to the fierce individualism and the incapacity or nugatory will of filiation that appears in other Latin American writers of the fin de siècle. In the city, Martí’s subject fortifies the house of discourse. At least, such is the way that the subject represents his task to himself: he produces couples, affiliations; and from this distant and privileged place, he encompasses with his or her gaze the totality that the city has taken apart. From this house that protects him or her from the noise, urban meaninglessness, the voice of moral authority speaks, capable of even appalling and censuring that which others accept as second nature: as Martí had earlier said, ‘‘they’’ are those who ‘‘do not hold censure and shock in high regard, as might those who think as we think in this land.’’ 41 It is this voice that has been most lacking in the outside that constitutes the experience of the urban metropolis. The virtual legitimacy of this voice in the city, over the city, would be based on an assertion of distance and will to autonomy. Thus would the subject socially authorize himself as the redeemer of the ills brought about by modernity. From this interior, the oracle speaks, the oracle who is none other than the voice of the father. The inclusion of the voice cannot be underemphasized, for in the continuity of tradition, the father who ‘‘exhausted from work recounts the tales of heroes to the son who leans against his knees’’ does not hold the same authority in the sphere of writing. Writing, like the train, disjoins. Hence, it becomes an attribute of the other, the world outside; for example, ‘‘newspapers, programmes, advertisements, signs’’ in ‘‘Coney Island.’’ Through the intonation of Martí’s prose, particularly in his journalism, the oral inflection of writing simulates the presence of the orator. Such a strategy would be deployed more systematically in later forms of cultural

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ism, in the pronouncements of the ‘‘old and venerable teacher’’ (no longer the father) that comprise Rodó’s Ariel.42 Notes  José Martí, ‘‘Hierro,’’ Versos libres, in Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –),  [hereafter OC, followed by volume and page number].  José Martí, Cartas a Manuel Mercado (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ), , .  It would also be appropriate to recall the letter (dated September , ) written by Bartólome Mitre y Vedia to Martí after censoring his first correspondence to La Nación in : ‘‘A youth speaks to you, who probably has much more to learn from you than you from him, but insofar as he deals with a commodity—and please pardon the bluntness of the word, for the sake of exactitude—that seeks a favorable placement in the market that serves as a base for his operations, he tries, as it is his right and obligation, to come to an agreement with his agents and correspondents abroad regarding the most convenient means of giving to them the full value of which they are deserving’’ (in Papeles de Martí, vol. , ed. Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda [Havana: Imprenta El Siglo XX, ], ).  The Spanish bajeza contains both the religious and secular meanings of baseness: as both a moral indictment and a condition of ‘‘lowliness,’’ ‘‘commonness,’’ or ‘‘mundaneness.’’ A more apt translation for this word would be the pre-Enlightenment meaning of profanity, as in ‘‘the sacred versus the profane worlds.’’ Trans.  Rubén Darío, ‘‘La insurreción en Cuba,’’ in Escritos dispersos de Rubén Darío, vol. , ed. Pedro Luis Barcia (La Plata, Argentina: Universidad de La Plata, ), .  José Martí, Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .  Martí, OC, vol. , .  José Martí, Prologue to Flores del destierro, in OC, vol. , .  ‘‘Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the ‘true’ experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses’’ (Walter Benjamin, ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’ in Iluminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken Books, ], ).  ‘‘Coney Island’’ was published in La Pluma, a newspaper in Bogotá, on December , , and is reprinted in Martí’s complete works (OC, vol. , –). The reader may recall that Coney Island was one of the first commercialized and managed amusement parks. It is, in this respect, possible to read Martí’s chronicle as a reflection on the emergence of mass culture from the ‘‘high’’ perspective of an emergent literary subject. For a translation of ‘‘Coney Island,’’ see appendix  in this volume.  Fina García Marruz, ‘‘El tiempo en la crónica norteamericana de Martí,’’ in En torno a José Martí, ed. F. García Marruz et al. (Bordeaux, France: Editions Bière, ), .  Martí, ‘‘Coney Island,’’ in appendix , this volume.  Martí, OC, vol. , .  In this sense, the city can be seen as a reduced model of the greater unity of the United States. For Martí—who was writing at the height of America’s territorial expansion westward—this logic of the aggregate, forever in motion, is the law of North American society. See his fascinating chronicle ‘‘Cómo se crea un pueblo nuevo en los Estados Unidos’’ (‘‘How

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a New People Is Being Created in the United States’’), OC, vol. , –. On the railroad as the vehicle of this logic, see Martí’s ‘‘Ferrocarriles elevados’’ (‘‘Elevated Railroads’’), OC, vol. , –. On the metaphor of the tree as a model for the classical world and the book, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –. Martí, OC, vol. , . Domingo F. Sarmiento, Recuerdos de provincia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena, ), –. Eugenio Cambaceres, Sin rumbo (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ), . Machado de Assis, Memórias pósthumas de Brás Cubas (Rio de Janeiro: Ediçoes de Ouro, n.d.), . On the contradictions of privatization from Machado’s perspective, see Julio Ramos, ‘‘Anticonfesiones: Deseo y autoridad en Machado de Assis,’’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies  (): –. José Martí, ‘‘Canto de otoño,’’ Versos libres, in OC, vol. , . ‘‘[The] father-son relationship . . . acquires the characteristics of an obsessive preoccupation in Martí. In the literature of our language, there is no other instance that can approximate [Martí’s] reverential respect for the father, tied to such a tremulous love for the son’’ (Angel Rama, ‘‘La dialéctica de la modernidad en José Martí,’’ in Estudios martianos, ed. M. P. González et al. [Río Piedras: Editorial Universitaria, ], ). In La restauración nacionalista from , Ricardo Rojas comments on the familial ‘‘crisis’’ and proposes literary education as an alternative, compensatory structure: ‘‘As for the family, nothing more can be expected of it. Until now it has done nothing but take away the civic and intellectual forces from the school, with the indifference of the creole home or the hostility of a foreign one’’ ([Buenos Aires: Librería La Facultad, ], ). Martí, OC, vol. , –. Significantly, in ‘‘¡Bien vengas, mar!’’ (‘‘Farewell, Ocean!’’) from Flores del destierro, the image of the son counteracts the interference of the sea, which immediately evokes Martí’s attempt to tie the familial trope to the structure of social meaning, opposed to the ‘‘chaos’’ represented by the sea: ‘‘¡Bien vengas, mar! De pie sobre la roca / Te espero altivo: Si mi barca toca / Tu ola voraz, ni tiemblo, ni me aflijo: / Alas tengo y huire—¡las de mi hijo!’’ (‘‘Farewell, Ocean! Standing on the rock / I await you with disdain: Should my boat touch / Your ravenous wave, I will not tremble, nor will I be beset / I will flee, I have wings—the wings of my son!’’) (OC, vol. , ). See also ‘‘¡Oh nave!’’ (‘‘Oh Ship!’’) and ‘‘A bordo’’ (‘‘On Board’’) in Flores del destierro, OC, vol. . Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘‘The Concept of Enlightenment,’’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, ), . Martí, OC, vol. , –. See, in particular, ‘‘Amor de ciudad grande’’ (‘‘Love of the Great City’’) in Versos libres: ‘‘Se ama de pie, en las calles, entre el polvo, / De los salones y las plazas; muere la flor el día que nace’’ (‘‘One loves standing, on the streets, in the dust / Of saloons and town squares; the flower dies the day it is born’’) Roberto González Echevarría offers an interesting interpretation of this text in ‘‘Martí y su ‘Amor de ciudad grande’: notas hacia una poética de Versos libres,’’ Zona Franca , no.  (April ). Martí, OC, vol. , . See Angel Rama’s reading of these lines in ‘‘Indagación de la ideología en la poesía (los dípticos seriados de los Versos sencillos),’’ Revista Iberoamericana , nos. –  (xxxx): –. For Rama, the rationalizing impulse is the driving force behind Martí’s

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writing. In contrast, this chapter will try to analyze this rationalizing will as the object of investigation and critique for Martí, and not his field of signification. There can be no doubt that the city and desire are always tied together in Martí, as is evidenced once again in the following remarks by Martí on one of his dreams, ‘‘Elementos de un sueño’’: ‘‘Parts of a dream—A disproportionate, sexual dream. A facade of the highest building in New York. When I returned home at night, a tin tube, long and full of curves. . . . In the dream, the house was the woman, and the enormous, growing, defiant, flexible, halferect tube—had changed form’’ (Cuaderno , OC, vol. , ). The dream shows how the city and its signs penetrate even the most profound depths of the interior. Martí, OC, vol. , . ‘‘Iron veins’’ from Martí, ‘‘Coney Island,’’ appendix , p. . The woman-mass analogy was a common point of reference for many of the early intellectuals and their experience before the crowd. José M. Ramos Mejía, an Argentine writer who was influenced by the ‘‘psychology’’ of the crowd (an area of study that spread throughout France, above all after the  Commune), remarked in an explicit manner: ‘‘They constitute the principal nuclei of the multitude: the sensitives, the neurotics, the individuals whose nerves need only be barely caressed, on the surface, by sensation, for them to vibrate. . . . Thus [crowds] are impressionable and fickle like impassioned women, purely unconscious; fiery, but full of fading light; above all lovers of violent sensation, vivid color, noisy music, beautiful men and things of great stature; because the multitude is sensual, aroused, and full of lust for the pleasure of the senses. It does not reason, it feels.’’ Las multitudes argentinas: Estudio de psicología colectiva, d ed. [Buenos Aires: J. Lajouane and Cía, ], –). On the work of crowd ‘‘psychologists’’ in France like Le bon and Tarde, see Susanna Burrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late-Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ). Martí, OC, vol. , . In his essay ‘‘Response to the Question: What Is the Postmodern?’’ Jean-François Lyotard writes: ‘‘I shall call modern the art that devotes its ‘little technical expertise,’ as Diderot used to say, to present the fact that the unpresentable exists’’ (in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ], ). The instability of codes and forms of representation as one of the distinctive features of modernity is also one of the key theses of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), esp. –. Once again, we are using the Gramscian distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals. See note , chapter . Charles-Pierre Baudelaire’s ‘‘Le cygne’’ (‘‘The Swan’’)—written in  and significantly dedicated to Victor-Marie Hugo, the civil poet par excellence—is by now a classic example of art’s exile in advanced capitalism: ‘‘Je pense à mon grand cygne, avec ses geste fous / Comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime / Et rongé d’un desire sans trêve! Et puis à vous . . . Je pense aux matelots oubliés dans une île, / Aux captifs, aux vaincus! . . . à bien d’autre encor!’’ (I think of my great swan, the imbecile strain / Of his head, noble and foolish as all the exiled, / Eaten by ceaseless needs . . . I think of sailors washed up on uncharted islands, / Of prisoners, the conquered, and more, so many more!’’) (Flowers of Evil, th ed., ed. Marthiel and Jackson Matthews, trans. Anthony Hecht [New York: New Directions, ] –, –). On the other hand, Martí distanced himself from the heroism of marginality taken up by Baudelaire as a banner. In

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Martí, poetry offers the ideal of reincorporation into the public sphere: his Latin American ‘‘family’’ crystallizes his attempt to propagate filiation by means of aesthetics. In a chronicle entitled ‘‘Una novela en Central Park’’ (A novelty in Central Park), Martí writes: ‘‘For one to see (the swallows) making their nest is to almost see one’s own mind at work. . . . It was already night, and the following morning would be witness to the miracle. What had the swallows done? [Had they] brought the nest to another branch? Begun a new nest? Suspended love until after having finished the house?’’ (OC, vol. , –). And in another chronicle written that same month, he observes: ‘‘The home [in the city] is a hotel room, whose walls are not at all like those of our houses, within which we love and converse with one another, like living beings, beings from whom the soul cannot be wrested without tearing it away, as one would a tree that has its roots in the soil’’ (OC, vol. , ). Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . Martí, OC, vol. , . Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,’’ in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, ), ‘‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-Century,’’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, ). Appendix , p. . On the importance of the ‘‘voice’’ in Ariel, see Carlos Real de Azúa, prologue to Ariel, in the Biblioteca Ayacucho edition, ix–xxxi; see also Roberto González Echevarría’s invaluable reading of magisterial rhetoric, ‘‘The Case of the Speaking Statue: Ariel and the Magisterial Rhetoric of the Latin American Essay,’’ in The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), –.

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 Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is not as direct as it is with the fundamental social groups, but is, in varying degrees, ‘‘mediated’’ by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the ‘‘functionaries.’’—Antonio Gramsci, ‘‘The Formation of Intellectuals’’

‘‘Coney Island’’ is a minor text, limited in circulation and influence in its time, and practically forgotten today. It did, however, register and participate in some of the fundamental debates of the fin de siècle literary field; a small reminder that the confluence and struggle of contesting discourses that shaped the modern Latin American literary field are irreducible to ‘‘great’’ canonical texts. From the beginning of the s, ‘‘Coney Island’’ served to demonstrate a new concept of ‘‘culture’’ as a defense of spiritual values faced by the market. Such an activity was essential to the specification of the writer’s domain in a changing society. Even at the superficial level of the essay’s tone, as well as the kind of authority that the subject claims for himself or herself, or in the (antithetical) distribution of meaning, ‘‘Coney Island’’ anticipated the emergence of what Rodó would later call ‘‘our modern literature of ideas,’’ 1 tied to the Arielista genre of essay writing at the turn of the century and to Latin-Americanism. Yet in ‘‘Coney Island’’ and other Escenas norteamericanas, the figure of the writer was already portrayed as the ‘‘thinker’’ in the midst of the amorphous materiality of the masses. S/he acted as the cultural critic,2 defender, and in many respects, creator of a superior world—high culture: In vain does the ancient puritanical spirit, cornered by this constant invasion, endeavor to take hold of the reins that are forever slipping from his hands. In vain do men of foresight attempt, by means of culture and religious sentiment, to direct this driven mass that heedlessly seeks the quick and full satisfaction of its appetites.3

Mass/culture: from a height, the critic of modernity gazes with unfamiliarity at the material baseness of the masses, ‘‘the crowd that knows more about appetites than ideas’’ (vol. , p. ). For Ortega y Gasset—the epitome of this modern specialization of massculture criticism in this century—unfamiliarity was the ‘‘definitive gesture’’ and the ‘‘luxury specific to the intellectual.’’ 4 At least it was for a certain type of traditional intellectual struggling to secure a place within the redistribution of social authority (which, in turn, implied the new division of labor), especially on the heels of the emerging culture industry, organically attached to the market by the turn of the century. In effect, the city produced its own ‘‘art.’’ Martí insisted that on Coney Island there were ‘‘fifty-cent museums, where they exhibit human monsters, outlandish fish, bearded women, melancholic dwarves, and rickety elephants, which the advertisement pompously promotes as the largest elephants in the world.’’ 5 There are ‘‘operas sung on café tables’’ (p. ), and ‘‘black minstrels, who could alas! never be like the minstrels from Scotland’’ (p. ). For Martí, this incorporation of art into the market indicated a sense of degradation: [One] absorbed group admires an artist who is cutting a black piece of paper, which he later stamps onto white cardboard, the silhouette of which he wants to portray in this singular manner; another group celebrates the skill of a lady who, in a stall that cannot measure more than three-quarters of a yard, creates curious flowers made of fish skins; with bellowing laughs, others applaud the skill with which a ball thrower has managed to hit the nose of a misfortunate man of color, who in exchange for a measly day’s wage, stands day and night with his frightened head stuck through a hole made in the canvas, avoiding the pitches of the ball throwers with ridiculous movements and exaggerated faces; the bearded and venerable sit heavily on a wooden tiger, or a griffin, or an effigy, or on the back of a boa constrictor, all of which are placed in circles, along with horses, that spin around a central mast for a few minutes to the tune of unorchestrated sonatas played by self-proclaimed musicians. (p. ) Art incorporated into the market here appears overrun by the same laws of disjunction that shape the new urban culture. The figure of the abused black performer, who ironically lives by the aggression of the crowd, is by no means coincidental: for Martí, the market subjects the artist to an intense degradation that is matched by the transformation of the signs of tradition, 

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the Book of Culture (griffins, effigies, boa constrictors), into strange machines for amusement. Incorporation paradoxically serves to unorchestrate the sonatas. Finally, the artist is made into a self-proclaimed social figure. ‘‘Coney Island’’ is arguably one of the first Latin American critiques of the culture industry. Its visionary capacity was, in part, enabled by Martí’s experience in New York, where the debate around an emerging mass culture was already a decisive focal point in the intellectual field during the postReconstruction years. As John F. Kasson points out in his remarkable history of Coney Island: Amusement parks emerged as laboratories of the new mass culture, providing settings and attractions that immediately affected behavior. Their creators and managers pioneered a new cultural institution that challenged prevailing notions of public conduct and social order, of wholesome amusement, of democratic art—of all the institutions and values of the genteel culture. Amusement complexes such as Coney Island thus shed light on the cultural transition and the struggle for moral, social, and aesthetic authority that occurred in the United States at the turn of the century.6 For Kasson, the debate on Coney Island testified to a redistribution of cultural authority, which became particularly threatening for the traditional intellectuals who foresaw their eventual displacement or at least the necessity of relegitimizing their social functions: [Coney Island] emerged as the unofficial capital of the new mass culture and aroused special interest among artists, writers, and critics. . . . The resort raised profound questions in their minds about the nature of crowds, the ultimate influence of this new breed of amusement, and the future of American culture in an urban-industrial age. (p. ) Coney Island indeed helped to displace genteel culture with a new mass culture. (p. ) In Latin America, this redistribution of intellectual tasks occurred more slowly, although the debate among many intellectuals over the new journalism at the turn of the century had already begun to show the tension between two conceptions of intellectual activity: one organic, tied to the market, and another that asserted an autonomy and distance from it. This tension marked the beginning of a division, still prevalent today, between an emergent concept of literature and its twin: intellectual production under the dictates of Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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the culture industry. This other mode of intellectual production paradoxically demarcated the proper field of identity for the modern literary subject—a subject conceived negatively, as the opposite of the culture industry. The ‘‘high’’ intellectual, nostalgic for ‘‘a higher spiritual world,’’ 7 in Martí’s words, represented mass culture as a source of the crises threatening ‘‘culture’’ and spirit in modernity. As we have seen, these crises themselves became institutionalized. The question at stake, then, would be whether the field of mass culture simply brought about this crisis of ‘‘true’’ spiritual values, or whether it in fact constituted one of the conditions of possibility for an aesthetic discourse of crisis. In the latter case, such a discourse would at once serve to legitimize and stimulate the spread of ‘‘high culture’’ at the turn of the century. Of course, such a hypothesis would in no way invalidate Martí’s powerful critique of the reification of daily life in capitalist society; in fact, his early critique of massification is still pertinent today, as is the intensity of his language, which in many ways anticipates some features of Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York. It would be equally naïve, however, to accept the ideologization of terms such as ‘‘culture’’/‘‘false culture,’’ which presupposes an antithetical, all-too-schematic order behind Martí’s critique of reification. Our task, then, would be to take on assertions of his cultural critique as the object of our analysis, as a strategy of legitimation for the literary subject in Martí and the fin de siècle. For Ortega y Gasset, the city was an overcrowded space: ‘‘What was once no problem at all has come to be an almost continuous one: finding a place.’’ 8 Where would the writer fit in? ‘‘Culture’’ held the promise of a specific social domain for the intellectual, granting weight to his or her critique of the spirit’s displacement in the city of masses. In other areas of his New York opus, Martí—deeply affected by the desublimating experience of journalism and salaried labor—developed a critique against this auratic concept of culture. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that such a concept of culture at work in his critique of modernity was not passively inculcated in him; in fact, it appears in one of its earliest Latin American formulations in the Escenas norteamericanas. In his role as a cultural critic in ‘‘Coney Island,’’ Martí in effect helped to formulate one of the grand narratives of legitimation for the wide-open field of the literary enterprise (which continued to function at least until the centennials of the Latin American wars of independence). The legitimation of culture as a critique of modernity was also linked to a widely influential culturalist Latin Americanism that proliferated after  as a response to the expansionism of North American imperialism.     

Culture and the Experience of the Beautiful To begin with, what does ‘‘culture’’ signify? When is its semantic field produced through the exclusion of the ‘‘masses’’? Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, the Diccionario de autoridades (Dictionary of Sources) () registered two principal definitions of the word culture. Its first meaning, close to its Latin roots, refers to the cultivation of land. The second, metaphoric definition signifies the cultivation of mental faculties. The example cited by the dictionary is significant for our investigation: ‘‘It would be a reprehensible thing in man to be inferior in docility and culture to animals, [since] the sovereignty of reason makes him superior to them.’’ By analogy, ‘‘culture’’ is thus tied to the cultivation of the mind, in opposition to a bestial irrationality; however, the semantic field of ‘‘culture’’ as yet does not distinguish among different intellectual faculties. Even the  Gran diccionario de la lengua castellana (Great Dictionary of the Spanish Language) maintains both meanings. Concerning the second definition, culture signifies: ‘‘Result or effect of cultivating the forms of human understanding and of refining oneself through the exercise of the intellectual faculties of man.’’ 9 On the other hand, the  Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua castellana (Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Spanish Language) records the anthropological definition as ‘‘the state of intellectual or material advancement or progress of a people or nation.’’ 10 Even in Rodó’s Ariel, the ambiguity of the term is striking: it can signify the apprehension of a kind of professional knowledge, in the sense of a ‘‘unilateral’’ culture of professions; and it can also be used in an anthropological sense, as in Latin or North American culture. Notwithstanding the field of possible meanings for the word, which is particularly extensive in Rodó’s essay, ‘‘culture’’ begins to be identified with a specific category of ‘‘spiritual’’ and ‘‘disinterested’’ intellectual faculties, which are oftentimes set in opposition to practical life: ‘‘the high and disinterested incentive for action, the spirituality of culture.’’ 11 Culture here designates Ariel’s domain as opposed to Calibán, who is the ‘‘symbol of sensuality and laziness.’’ ‘‘Culture’’ and ‘‘high culture’’ in Rodó’s Ariel is also clearly opposed to the ‘‘disruptive barbarism’’ (p. ) of the urban masses. This use of the concept, in no way descriptive, evidently implied a valorization rife with elitist connotations. Moreover, in Rodó—and even earlier, in Martí—this definition of ‘‘culture’’ at once presupposed a differentiation among distinct categories of intellectual faculties, and indicated a certain reduction of the semantic field of ‘‘the cultural’’ to the realm of disinterested intellectual activity. This realm consisted of the experience of the beautiful and specifically aesthetic facCulturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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ulty.12 As a corollary to art in its definitive opposition to utilitarianism, culture, in this sense of the word, gained currency at the turn of the century. Rodó contends: To the conception of rational life that is grounded in the free development of our nature—and [which] for the most part includes among its final ends that which is achieved in the felt contemplation of the beautiful—is opposed utilitarianism, by which the entire compass of our activity is directed toward the immediate finality of interest.13 Clearly, culture here is not opposed to rationality. To the contrary, feeling for the beautiful comprises a part of ‘‘the higher elements of rational existence’’ (p. ). Culture is the antithesis of the utilitarianism at work in the economics of daily existence; furthermore, it belongs to that sphere of temporality in society that is governed by ‘‘creative leisure.’’ According to Rodó, ‘‘The inner life . . . , life that is comprised of disinterested meditation, contemplation of the ideal, old-fashioned leisure’’ (ibid.), occupies the time of a ‘‘truly rational’’ existence (p. ). The emphasis on rationality betrays Rodó’s attempt to separate any conception of ‘‘the rational’’ from its previous (Enlightenment) identification with bourgeois, utilitarian rationalization, during a period when positivism was still a dominant discourse throughout Latin America. ‘‘True’’ rationality, the opposite of utilitarian rationality, would be found in the domain of aesthetic experience—culture. Predictably enough, poetry became the paradigm of ‘‘culture,’’ as we see in Martí’s  ‘‘El poeta Walt Whitman’’ (‘‘Walt Whitman, the Poet’’): Who among the ignorant maintains that poetry is not indispensable to the people? There are those of such narrow vision, who think that the whole fruit consists of the shell. Poetry, which gathers and disperses, which fortifies or preoccupies so as to lead or cast down the soul, which gives or strips men of faith and need, is more necessary to the people than industry itself, since the latter provides them with a way of surviving, while the former gives them the desire and strength to live. . . . The best, those whom nature anoints with the sacred desire for future things, would in a painful and deafening moment of annihilation lose all motive for overcoming human squalor; and the masses, the vulgar, the men and women of appetite, the plebian, would procreate empty children, elevate to the level of essential faculties those [things] that ought to serve as mere instruments, and drown out the irremediable affliction of the soul, only comforted in the beautiful and the great, in the din of an always incomplete prosperity.14 

   

In this fundamental text, it is important to note the series of antitheses established by the differentiation between the domain of the beautiful and industry: the opposition presupposes the modern notion of autonomy, which would have been unthinkable for the Enlightenment patricians who were thoroughly invested in a utilitarian notion of ‘‘literature.’’ This opposition in Martí’s text leads to another, the one between practical life and contemplation: ‘‘Where will a community of men go, who have lost the faithful practice of thinking about the significance and reach of their actions?’’ (ibid.; italics added). Finally, as we have seen in Martí’s earlier texts, the ‘‘masses’’ reemerge as the outer limit of ‘‘the beautiful’’—the materiality that lacks the gift of culture. An auratic concept of culture thus comes into play, tied to the ‘‘authentic experience’’ of art. Art, in turn, would continue to redefine itself in opposition to the massified experience of capitalist daily existence. Raymond Williams highlights the historical relationship between the rise of ‘‘culture’’ and modernization in his archaeology of culture as a concept: The word [culture] which had indicated a process of training within a more assured society became in the nineteenth century the focus of a deeply significant response to a society in the throes of a radical and painful change. This idea of Culture, it seems to me, is best studied as a response of this kind: the response of certain men, attached to certain values, in the face of change and the consequences of change. The idea of Culture, in fact, is an aspect of that larger and more deeply complex response which men of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made to the Industrial Revolution and its results.15 Our task, then, would be to ask: from what place in society, from what domain staked out in the division of labor that defines modernization, did the concept of culture originate? When Martí, Rodó, and many other modern writers of the period asserted the dangers of modernization and the superiority of the aesthetic sphere (as a response to such dangers), they did it from within the very cultural sphere that they defended and defined. In other words, their discourse was from the start compromised by the project to legitimize the cultural sphere within the modernization that they attempted to ‘‘see’’ or represent. In their assertion of distance (Martí’s ‘‘seeing from afar’’), these intellectuals postulated the possibility of an objective and disinterested view of society. But their representation—perhaps version would be a more appropriate term— was in itself a social construct, also subject to the impact of modernization, which was used in the struggles that comprised the social ‘‘represented’’ Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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world. For representation is always mediated by interests, by the positions such as those occupied by intellectuals like Martí or Rodó in the competition among discourses brought about by modernization. Does this mean that the ‘‘crisis’’ of spiritual values was simply an object created by a biased, ideologically invested representation generated by traditional intellectuals on and from within modernization? In La ciudad letrada (The Lettered City), Angel Rama analyzes the effects of modernization on Latin American cities during the last quarter of the century: [The] problem was larger and circumscribed everyone: the mobility of the real city, its bustling traffic of strangers, its successive constructions and demolitions, its accelerated rhythms, the mutations brought about by new customs: all of these things contributed to instability, to the loss of the past, to the conquest of the future. The city began to live for the sake of an unforeseeable future and [it] stopped living for a nostalgic and identificatory past. Quite a difficult situation for citizens: their dayto-day experience was one of constant estrangement.16 Doubtless, fin de siècle modernization signified an intense transformation of daily life. The experience of estrangement was not merely a fiction engineered by intellectuals affected and frequently displaced by modernization. In fact, it was modernization that once employed the letrados with the essential task of overseeing the project of rationalization, the imposition of order on the ‘‘barbarous nature’’ that was America. Still, one would have to differentiate between these modern transformations (probably experienced and endured by earlier generations) and the representations of these transformations in terms of a crisis. If these transformations did indeed constitute an empirical fact, then what we read in the passionate commentaries written by fin de siècle intellectuals on these changes is not a passive ‘‘reflection’’ of a reality external to discourse and the literary field. The commentary itself, the representation proper, is an activity inscribed into society—an activity that would later reemerge as a represented object. The crisis is thus inseparable from the commentary,17 from representation, and from the projects of the social group (in this case intellectual, literary) that invest the literary subject with authority. In the fin de siècle literary field (as well as in other areas of the intellectual field, in particular the emergent field of sociology), the transformations brought about by modernization became the object of a new discourse, a rhetoric of crisis. To speak of the death of culture, or the crisis of spiritual values, or the marginality and vulnerability of the aesthetic in absolute oppo

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sition to the masses and the market: this entire ‘‘crisis’’ paradoxically led to the expansion of the ‘‘cultural’’ domain, which asserts its autonomy against the ‘‘alienated’’ life of the market and masses. The crisis was—and perhaps still is—a condition of possibility for the emergence of ‘‘culture,’’ at least in the modern sense, which managed to gain a degree of social specificity with respect to other areas and discourses of modernity. The ‘‘crisis’’ became a remarkable narrative of legitimation, imbued with a great deal of charismatic appeal, through which intellectuals displaced from their traditional functions (as former overseers of the rationalizing, modernizing dream) reclaimed their authority. They achieved this by arguing that their voices were autonomous from the market, and precisely for this reason, capable of criticizing the project of modernization. The critique of modernization made the modernization of critique possible, along with the specification of social functions for the writer within the new division of labor. Hence, the importance of the claim to autonomy, the distantiation that authorizes the writer’s power to represent modernization. To see from afar: the ‘‘purity’’ of the literary field, the demarcation of an autonomous domain uncontaminated by the market, was one of the bases for literature’s virtual social authority. Modern writers could speak about the crisis of ‘‘authentic’’ values because they were not subject to the destabilizing flow of the city and market. Such, at least, was the way they represented themselves. They could speak, they had authority, because they were above and outside. The notion of their ‘‘marginality,’’ tied to the topos of the martyrdom and exile of art in capitalist society, enabled the specification of the writer’s place within society, along with the relative extension of the modern writer’s, the literato’s public functions. This legitimation of the modern writer in part accounts for the impact that the essayists of  came to exercise over education; it is also at the very heart of the cultural sphere’s construction of an ontology of Latin American being, opposed to the economic power of ‘‘they,’’ which found one of its first articulations in Martí’s ‘‘Coney Island.’’ Now, to reiterate, did the will to autonomy, which promoted the specification of a cultural domain, imply an antisocial position on the part of writers? The notion of culture’s autonomy with respect to the demands of the market cannot in any way be reduced to the ideology of ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ which exercised only the most precarious influence in Latin America. Martí was eager to propose the social function of beauty: Some may believe that beauty is nothing more than the ephemeral blossoming of a moment, or the exaggerated exhibit of wealth, or a simple intermezzo in the serious matters of life. There where life breaks away Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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from beauty . . . there begins the misfortune and the real unhappiness, degradation, and impoverishment of our actual existence.18 Rodó would distance himself from ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ insisting on the ‘‘realistic function’’ of art in modernity: If you intend to secularize respect for the beautiful, begin by making [people] understand the possibility of a harmonic concert among all the legitimate human activities, and this will be the easiest way of directly transforming the love of the beautiful, for [the sake of ] beauty itself, into an attribute of the multitude.19 (Italics added) If culture is indeed opposed to the utilitarianism that dominates practical life, its functionality is far from lacking. For Martí, ‘‘poetry . . . is more necessary to the people than industry itself.’’ 20 Far from designating an antisocial posture, the will to specify a cultural domain presupposed the socially indispensable character of autonomy for a changing society, prone to crisis. By becoming autonomous from the generative forces of the crisis, culture was able to assert its compensatory value. As we have already seen, Martí related modernization to the progressive inability of traditional, religious images to represent and grant coherence to the world: ‘‘And further, in this time of renovation in the human world, disconsolate eyes full of questions turn to the empty sky, moaning beside the corpses of gods. . . . Living in the city makes [one] wither.’’ 21 Literature, in the face of change, attends to the transformations and necessities of a modern life that invalidates all dogmas; indeed, it can be said that literature presented itself as the only possible religion in the city. As we see in Martí— an avid reader of Whitman—literature reclaimed for itself the empty place in the secularized world left by the gods:22 Literature that announces and spreads the final and joyful harmony of apparent contradictions, literature that, as the spontaneous counsel and teaching of Nature itself, proclaims identity in a peace superior to the dogmas and rival passions that divide and shed blood among communities in their elementary state; literature that inculcates in Man’s terrified spirit a conviction so rooted in a definitive justice and beauty that the penury and squalor of life can neither dishearten nor embitter it, will not only lead to a social state much closer to perfection than any known today, but through the harmonious brotherhood of reason and grace [literature] will nourish Humanity—longing for a sense of wonder and poetry—with the religion that it had hesitantly awaited, since it had known the hollowness and insufficiency of its ancient creeds.23 

   

Here, the insistence on the social function of beauty is clear, although it must not be confused with the indifferentiation or absence of specificity with regard to a definition of the cultural as distinct or set apart from modernization. Already in Martí, the cultural sphere comprises a social domain that defends its autonomy, its specificity, with respect to social functions that are satisfied by other discourses—also subject to the inevitable regime of specialization. Culture was socially indispensable for the notion of autonomous, differentiated being; but it was also opposed to the ‘‘strong’’ discourses of modernization. Culture: The Specialization of the Critique of Specialization Concerning the social role of the writer presupposed by this narrative of legitimation, a question arises: what group was able to organize and preside over the social and discursively specific domain of culture? Like the economy, the state, or science, the sphere of culture as a certain type of ‘‘knowledge’’ required specialized, qualified agencies for administering its separate domains. Defending culture, an act that effectively produced the cultural sphere, became a means for the reactivation of a wide field of traditional intellectuals. In this respect, culture paradoxically acted as an adaptative mechanism; in other words, it facilitated the adaptation of intellectuals to the demands of modernity, particularly specialization (imposed by capitalism as the organizing principle behind different kinds of labor). The paradox lies in the fact that even as intellectuals responded to the division of labor with an insistent will to autonomy, they nevertheless legitimized and represented this autonomy as the condition that made their critique of specialization possible in the first place. In their role as critics of modernity, these intellectuals systematically condemned the fragmentation of the faculties accomplished by specialization. The critical reflection on the division of labor is a prevalent theme throughout Martí’s Escenas; several of his chronicles develop a critique of specialization in North American education. In this regard, one may consider Martí’s critique as an antecedent of Rodó’s aesthetic pedagogy, which claimed that specialization was not only an effect of modernization in the United States, but also in Latin American countries where positivist pragmatism was still dominant at the turn of the century.24 Martí writes: Man: a routine machine, expert in the field to which he is consigned, completely closed off from all understanding [conocimiento], Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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commerce, and sympathy with the human. This is the direct result of a rudimentary and exclusively practical instruction. As there is not enough soul in this gigantic nation, and [we are] bereft of this marvelous junction, everything among these communities catastrophically comes to naught. In spite of all appearances, men in this nation are only united by their interests, by the amorous hate that they hold for one another as they bicker for the same prize. It is necessary for them to be united by something stronger. It is vitally necessary to create a common environment for [these] isolated spirits. . . . It is necessary to rescue these souls from this belittlement. The merchant ought to be cultivated in the man—yes; but so must the priest. . . . The reading of beautiful things, the knowledge of universal harmony, the mental contact with the great ideas and noble feats . . . will vitalize and extend the understanding, . . . and create, through the union of men alike in loftiness, the national soul.25 In Martí’s view, literature would be able to provide modern society on the verge of fragmentation with this mediation with the one, the ‘‘marvelous junction’’ suppressed by atomization. In ‘‘Walt Whitman, the Poet,’’ Martí adds: ‘‘The universities and academies have turned men in such a way that they no longer recognize each other; instead of throwing their arms around each other, moved by the essential and the eternal, they distance themselves . . . through merely accidental differences.’’ 26 The context of this biographical sketch (and the first study of Walt Whitman in Spanish) is significant: ‘‘Walt Whitman, the Poet’’ forms part of a series entitled Norte-Americanos (North Americans) by Martí himself, who since  had been planning a compilation of these chronicles in the form of a book. These biographical sketches were, for the most part, obituary notices (Walt Whitman was an exception). Read together, they constitute a prolonged reflection on the social authority—and sometimes the ‘‘death’’ of authority—of different kinds of intellectuals in a changing society: preachers, politicians, army officers, working-class leaders, engineers, poets, and even figures of the emergent entertainment industry, like Buffalo Bill. The sketches affirm Martí’s constant reflection upon the division of labor and the ensuing crisis of traditional intellectuals in modernity. Perhaps not surprisingly, the poet occupies a central position in Norte-Americanos—because the poet sees the hidden convergence or ‘‘junction.’’ The poet’s discourse—that of the beautiful—articulates the whole, harmonizing the different faculties disjointed and placed in contradiction to one another by specialization. The critique of specialization—by now a prevalent theme in Martí—is 

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one of the fundamental matrices of the Latinoamericanista essay at the turn of the century. This critique of the division of labor practically opens the discussion of the modern crisis that concerns Rodó’s Ariel: When a certain vulgarized and utterly false concept of education, which imagines education to be subordinated exclusively to a utilitarian end, is on the one hand dedicated to mutilating the natural integrity of the spirit by means of this utilitarianism and premature specialization; and on the other hand, desperately tries to banish any disinterested and ideal element from teaching, it does not sufficiently take into account the danger of preparing narrow-minded spirits for the future: spirits incapable of concerning themselves with anything more than the one aspect of reality with which they are immediately confronted, who will live as driven apart by icy deserts from those who within the same society follow their own way of life.27 In the face of fragmentation, the subject of culture recalls the harmony of the Greeks: ‘‘The incomparable beauty of Athens, the undying aspect of the model tied by the hands of the goddess to admiration and the enchantment of humanity, gave birth to that prodigious city that founded its conception of life in the concord of all the human faculties’’ (p. ). Athens is the model of a lost totality that is necessary to recall. In contrast, the modern city is the segmented, atomized space of specialization and urban masses. Although Rodó recalls—or perhaps invents—this harmonious past, he also recognizes its inescapable evanescence in the present: ‘‘In our times, the growing complexity of our civilization dismisses any thought to restore this harmony, only possible among elements of a gracious simplicity’’ (p. ). This critique of the division of labor, already at work in Martí, does not presuppose a concept of culture and literature prior to the regime of specialization. To the contrary, the fin de siècle literary field generated a discourse of culture as a response to modern fragmentation: such a response recognizes its condition of possibility in the intensification of the regime of specialization, in the explosion of discourse and rationality (until then, undifferentiated from ‘‘literature,’’ which acted as its repository of forms) into multiple discursive fields, each with its own apparatuses of formalization. And these apparatuses no longer recognized letters as a model of order. The ‘‘concord’’ promised by literature could not exist prior to specialization: it acted as a reaction to specialization, as a response to the relative displacement of literature from its functions in the administration of traditional society and the realization of the early dream to modernize. Rodó cites Jean-Marie Guyau: ‘‘There is a universal profession, which is Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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that of man’’ (p. ). Literature, pivot of culture, was able to offer a refuge for the total experience of ‘‘the human,’’ which from Martí onward was opposed to the ‘‘routine machine’’ of specialization. By means of its virtual impact on education, literature was able to offer a metaspecialization: its entirely modern function would entail the maintenance of a balance, the organicity of the faculties that as a consequence of specialization, tended toward dispersion in the ‘‘utilitarian’’ regime oriented toward efficiency and productive power. In Ariel ’s characteristically defensive tone, which doubtless registers the nervousness of a discourse struggling to justify and authorize its existence, Rodó comments on the importance of art for education (which in this epoch of transformations was also in the process of reconfiguring its social function): For the anonymous masses the superfluity of art is not worth  ducats. If at all, they respect it as an esoteric cult. And yet, according to the thesis developed in the eloquent pages of Schiller, among all the elements of human education that may contribute to the formation of a vast and noble concept of life, no other encompasses the virtues of a more extensive and complete culture, in the sense of lending itself to the stimulus of all the faculties of the soul toward concordance. (p. ) In effect, Ariel emerges out of (even as it helps to formulate) one of the key narratives of legitimation (and specialization) propagated by literature at the turn of the century. This narrative certainly appears throughout Martí’s work beginning in the mid-s, in part because of his privileged (at least in this respect) residency in New York, along with his contact with the North American literary scene.28 In this narrative, ‘‘culture’’ is conceived as a synthesis of intellectual faculties, a higher form of rationality, capable of articulating fragments disseminated by the division of labor. Once again, we find in this narrative the will to harmony, the distanced and totalizing gaze belonging to a certain kind of intellectual, who in spite of his or her force of will, betrays the insurmountable tendency toward fragmentation through the very insistence of his or her search for totality. A paradoxical mode of becoming specialized, to be sure. And this paradox—the specialization of the critique of specialization—will perhaps clarify the importance of the essay as a form—along with its modernist antecedent, the chronicle—in the elaboration of this strategy of legitimation at once defensive and conducive to the rise of modern culture. It is thus no coincidence that in the first decades of this century, the proliferation of essays was concomitant to the culturalist project; for the form of the essay represents the ambiguous place of the modern writer faced with that disciplinarian 

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will that distinguishes modernity. In its formal organization, the essay oscillates between the expository and argumentative mode, and the poetic image: this ambivalence attests to the paradoxical relationship of writers to specialization, which vacillates between emulation and condemnation. As Georg Lukács would argue, the essay lies somewhere between poetry and science:29 it resists the norm of discursive purity, the order of specialized discourses. At the same time, however, it operates on these discourses; in other words, it presupposes them as the primary material of an integrative (albeit never theoretically definitive) gaze, the gaze of culture. The essay is the form of metaspecialization, a reflection on and critique of specialization. By seizing on other specialized discourses in the modern world, the form of the essay served a mediating function: that is to say, through the activity of interpretation, it mediates between the interior of the beautiful (poetry) and the demands of society. And this mediation was fundamental for writers who, accustomed to reflecting on the lack of an audience capable of reading their specialized discourse, had begun to reformulate their roles in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The modern writer extended his or her social territory as an interpreter and public announcer of the beautiful, first in the chronicle, but later in the essay as a privileged form of the ‘‘maestros’’ at the turn of the century. As an essayist and teacher, the modern writer exercised an influence over society, promising it a direction that only this new metaspecialization (which had already begun to fabricate its own history, beginning with the dawn of humanity) was capable of offering. It is no coincidence that many turn-of-the-century chronicles, especially those written by Martí (‘‘Nuestra América’’ would be the greatest example), would end up in literary histories and anthologies beneath the more noble and prestigious rubric of the essay. Of course, the assimilation of the essay into literature is understandable: as we have seen in ‘‘Coney Island,’’ Martí’s chronicles set forth a concept of culture that, in many ways, gave birth to the essay and the ‘‘modern literature of ideas’’ that spreads among the writers of . There is, however, one crucial difference between the chronicle and the essay, the consequences of which cannot be underestimated, particularly in Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas: in the chronicle, the modern writer was subject to the exigencies of the newspaper. In the emerging publishing market (which the chronicle doubtless fostered in its role as the harbinger of literary modernity), essayists were able to attain a higher degree of autonomy. In contrast to the chronicle’s hybridity, the essay in the form of the book was at least able to assert its distance from the place non grata of the newspaper, virtual backbone of the culture industry in the city of masses. In fact, Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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Ariel registers the institutionalization of an authority that was already at work in Martí, albeit in a more uneven and contradictory fashion. Ariel marks the consolidation of ‘‘culture,’’ and a concomitant decisive change in the relationship between this discourse and power. Thus, in spite of the apparent continuity between the tropes of culturalist discourse in both Martí and Rodó, these writers did not voice their critique of modernization from the same institutional fields. This is not simply a reference to the fact (in itself revealing) that around  the authority of a relatively specialized culture had already crystallized in the institutional site of the book. In contrast, Martí worked amid the heterogeneous and problematic material of the newspaper. Moreover, at the beginning of the century (and particularly during the period of nationalist fervor around the centennials of the independence wars), the relationship between cultural authority and the state changed radically. At this conjuncture, the aestheticizing gaze of the culturalist subject acquired a great deal of importance, as s/he constituted the axis of an anti-imperialist critique that had a strong impact on the official politics of the times. Although we have already seen in Martí the tendency to hypostatize the contents of culture and identify cultural authority as the normative principle of a Latin American ‘‘we,’’ his discourse implied a critique from outside the institutional power spectrum, against the modernizing project that still served to legitimize state politics. By comparison, the influence of Ariel on the educational systems of the continent demonstrated its close relation to the elite groups, which were in the process of debating their various positions in the face of an impending modernization, most of all after . The Pedagogical Apparatus: Culture and Order If the appearance and flowering of the most elevated activities in society that determine high culture demand as an indispensable condition the existence of a substantial and dense population, it is precisely because this importance of quantity, which gives rise to the most complete division of labor, makes the formation of strong controlling elements possible, elements that effectively render the rule of quality over number. The multitude, the anonymous masses, are in themselves nothing. The multitude will be an instrument of barbarism or civilization, depending on whether or not it lacks the coefficient of a high moral leadership.—José Enrique Rodó, Ariel Let us broaden the field of the spirit.—Pedro Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La utopía de América’’

In many ways, the essayists of  repoliticized the strategies of legitimation that fin de siècle literature had earlier elaborated on—the ‘‘interior,’’ the religion of art, the critique of massification and fragmentation. Through the 

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concept of culture—the matrix of Latin Americanism—essayists succeeded in widening the horizon of aesthetic authority, bringing art’s critique against modernization to the very center of political debate and appealing to areas of power whose relation to the modernizing project had become problematized. Obviously, such an activity was already a far cry from the reduced literary field. If the projected literary autonomization of the earlier modernists— and most important, of Martí—implied for them the risk of alienation and public ineffectiveness,30 not to mention a lack of institutional support, the essayists of  were apparently able to overcome this aporia through the aestheticization of politics. On the one hand, in doing so, they ontologized the concept of the interior—the ‘‘house’’ of discourse—which quickly began to fill with the assumed signs of Latin American identity, opposed to the economic world of ‘‘they’’: foreign capital. On the other hand, these essayists reactivated forms of literary and normative rhetoric through education, giving them a new function against social ‘‘chaos’’ and massification. Thus, they were able to claim for the discipline of the humanities a guiding role in the control of a world where a new form of ‘‘barbarism’’ had begun to spread: the working-class ‘‘masses.’’ Yet as Rodó explicitly recognized, these very ‘‘masses’’ were ironically the justification for the need for culture to provide a ‘‘high moral leadership.’’ 31 The interiority of Ariel presupposes the threat of Calibán; ‘‘chaos’’ and ‘‘disaster’’ were the conditions presupposed by the ‘‘broadening of the spirit’’ (p. ). Now, although the normative and disciplinary character of cultural authority was a widespread feature in essay writing, the uses and institutionalization of this rhetoric were not homogeneous among the different Latin American contexts. Once again, it is necessary to distinguish between the tropes of a discursive authority and its specific relation to power at a given conjuncture. If we take the initial debates around the institutionalization of culture in the universities of Argentina and revolutionary Mexico during the period of early nationalism (in the s and s), for example, we find that the differences among contesting forces overdetermine decisive variations in the cultural field’s configuration, above all in the political uses of cultural authority. In centennial Argentina, the modernizing pragmatism that had dominated education since Sarmiento’s presidency (–) became the focus of increasingly intense debates, almost always related to a reflection on the importance of the humanities as a discipline capable of compensating for the crisis generated by modernization. Of course, the project of incorporating and specializing literary studies preceded the foundation of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (School of Philosophy and Letters) in  at the University Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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of Buenos Aires. Although the institutionalization of Argentine literature was tied to the work of Ricardo Rojas (who was the first dean of the faculty and later rector of the university), from the s onward, university secretaries Norberto Piñero and Eduardo L. Bidau were engaged in the task of defending the necessity of literary education in an environment that remained hostile to it: For the very reason that wealth, the fruits of fortune, industries, the pursuit of opulence and commerce might be developed . . . it is necessary to spread the high understanding provided by philosophy, the arts, and letters, lest the character [of people] be diminished and they begin to see the accumulation of material interests as their supreme end.32 Still, it was certainly not until the turn of the century that the concept of education as a compensation for utilitarianism succeeded in consolidating itself. In the s, the heyday of what was called a return to the ‘‘culture’’ of Ariel, the utilitarian and positivist notion of education confronted a great deal of resistance. One of the first ideologues of pedagogical reform was Ricardo Rojas, a man of literary background, who later came to be one of the founders of literature as a university discipline in Argentina.33 In his first important book, La restauración nacionalista (The Nationalist Restoration)—significantly, commissioned by the state—Rojas proposed a general reevaluation of Argentine education, emphasizing the importance of the ‘‘modern humanities,’’ and in particular, history and national literature. As the programmatic title for this book announces, Rojas believed that the humanities needed to ‘‘respond to the crisis of the Argentine consciousness.’’ 34 He attributed the crisis to the effects of modernization, the ‘‘death’’ of traditions, and the influx of immigrants, which in fact had transformed the country. Regarding the role of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in such a ‘‘restoration’’ and national homogenization, Rojas wrote: [The] institution that will render principal services to historical restoration is our Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. It has been the debasement of its purely professional function and the lack of economic viability in its ends . . . that have distanced many illustrious patrons from us (p. ) Some years later, in  (when he was already dean of the faculty), Rojas recalled the history of setbacks in the department and launched into a critique of utilitarianism in education from within the realm of authority consolidated by ‘‘culture’’: 

   

History, philosophy, and art were thus not only recommended, but necessary to a nation of pastoral shepherds: but some of our teachers did not understand it that way. Two of the most influential among them, Alberdi and Sarmiento, had exaggerated the founding doctrine in their predictions, and it is time that we divest them of their authority in all matters wherein they were evidently mistaken. Both were reasonable to speak on behalf of our current utilitarian progress and the need for pragmatic teaching to combat our indigence. But they were mistaken in their notorious disdain for certain disinterested forms of spiritual life. . . . Both contented themselves with believing that banks, markets, wallets, congresses, harvests, technical schools, ports, and railroads were enough to comprise civilization. . . . Without this spiritual disinterest, what remains does not serve anything other than the accumulation of colonies or the increased prosperity of factories.35 The ‘‘divestment’’ of modernizing discourse and positivism highlights the field of polemics that gave rise to the ‘‘new humanities’’—the pedagogical apparatus that would take up as a model the ‘‘disinterested forms of spiritual life’’; that is, the aesthetic authority that literature would develop from modernism onward. Moreover, this perspective—capable of ‘‘divesting’’ even Sarmiento of his canonical authority in the pedagogical realm—was not voiced from a marginal or peripheral position in the social field. Rather, in Argentina, the concept of culture was adapted to the necessities and predominating social currents of the time. In Rojas, culture was indeed opposed to chaos; however, ‘‘chaos’’ was no longer simply an abstract impulse of modernity, but a sign of the emergent working class, nurtured by cultural heterogeneity and the radical politics of immigrants. And one of the arenas in which this struggle was to be played out was the idea of a national language. For Rojas (in The Nationalist Restoration), along with Rodó before him, the purification of the national language was an essential task of culture, especially literature: The issue is that of defending our language in our own house, and defending it from those who come, not only to corrupt it, but supplant it as well. The street belongs to the public domain, and just as the state intervenes in the public domain for reasons of health and morality, so too must it intervene for reasons of nationality or aesthetics.36 House/street: in this rhetoric of culture as a kind of social and hygienic therapy, the opposition is by now a familiar one. And yet, it is important to note how cultural authority is no longer marginalized in relation to the Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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inner field of power relations. In its appeal to the forces of order, the defense of the ‘‘house’’ sallies forth to purify the contaminated, ‘‘sick’’ world of the street, the space belonging to the working-class and immigrant ‘‘other.’’ From a similar perspective, in his  essay Didáctica (Didactics), Leopoldo Lugones added: Given the inferior condition of immigrants, cosmopolitan immigration tends to deform our language with generally pernicious contributions. And this is a very serious issue, since it is through this [deformation] that the disintegration of the nation has begun. A reading of the Tower of Babel is in this respect significant: the dispersion of men began through the anarchy of language.37 Here, the flow of migration unleashed by modernity has become the primary fragmentary, dispersive force. In opposition to the ‘‘anarchy’’ that ‘‘contaminated’’ the very ‘‘foundation’’ of nationality and the mother tongue, culture was postulated as a mechanism of order, the key to homogenization. For Rojas: ‘‘Our goal, for now, ought to be the creation of a community of national ideas among all Argentines, thereby completing a description of a national character that reveals the influence of the land upon us. The anarchy that afflicts us today is a passing thing. It is due to immigration and the weaknesses of our education.’’ 38 Although we find a direct antecedent to this rhetoric in the ethnocentrism of many intellectuals from the s’ generation (such as in Lucio Vicente López’s La gran aldea [The Great Village], Eugenio Cambaceres’s En la sangre [In Blood ], or Julián Martel’s La bolsa [The Stock Exchange]), it was not until the turn of the century that this discourse came to be institutionalized. In a remarkable exposition on the ‘‘epic’’ origin of Argentine literature in gauchesca poetry, the voice of Lugones in the Odeón Theater in  marks the apotheosis of this nationalist discourse in Argentina.39 His speech can be read as an anxious tale about the ‘‘pure’’ origin of Argentine literature, in which the modernist poet takes on the role of a critic of modernity, to propose his or her particular hermeneutic as a privileged, superior approach capable of resolving the enigmas of politics. Curiously (but not surprisingly), at the height of the period that marks the emergence of the new middle and working classes, Lugones’s speech concentrates instead on interpellating large sectors of the oligarchy. In Mexico, too, the concept of culture from the early years of the revolution became crystallized in a rhetoric of crisis and social chaos. As a response to the crisis, the affirmation of culture as a compensatory and therapeutic mechanism acquired authority through the process of its reification in the humanistic disciplines. Of course, it would be misleading here to attempt to 

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establish a symmetrical comparison between the insurrectionary Mexico of the Ateneístas (Athenianists) and the Argentina of the centennial years. It is clear, however, that in both societies, cultural authority and its definitive critique of utilitarianism spread beyond the narrow scope of the literary field, appealing to jurisdictions of power whose relationship with modernization had become problematized. In Mexico as well as Argentina (albeit from distant and contradictory perspectives), even the elite groups began to identify modernization with their imminent subordination to foreign capital. And doubtless, such a problematization of the developmentalist dream only served to increase the authority of the modern writers who had been honing their critical discourse of modernization since the s. Literature at once nurtured and was nurtured by the emergent nationalism and Latin Americanism of the epoch, both of which were based on the discourse of culture generated by the literary field. Yet, on closer examination, it can be seen that although in Mexico these areas of power were indeed nationalistic, they were nevertheless distinct from the Argentine oligarchy. In the radicalized and populist context of the revolution, the discourse of culture would have to confront the necessity of rewriting and, to a great degree, radicalizing its own legacy of Arielismo. As late as , influential Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes recalled the intense crisis that the Mexican Revolution had represented for him. In ‘‘Atenea Política’’ (‘‘Political Athens’’), he writes: I have some right to advise you [plural] on the life of culture as a guarantee of stability in the midst of moral crises. My traveling gear is wellstocked with experiences. Do not forget that a Mexican professor of my age still knows what it is to cross a city besieged by a bombardment that lasted ten consecutive days, in order to pay your respects to a son or brother, and even a husband or father, with grief in your heart and a scholarly book under your arm. Never, not even amid the suffering that to this day cannot be told, did we abandon the Atenea Política.40 The allusion here to the Decena Trágica (the ‘‘tragic ten days’’ in February  that marked Victoriano Huerta’s seizure of power) is intense and emotional; it was there that Reyes’s father, ex-general of the Porfirio regime, died. It was also the point at which the initial projects of reform and expansion, begun in the early years of the revolution and led primarily by the intellectuals of the period, fell apart. Against the ‘‘moral crisis’’ and ‘‘chaos’’ brought about by the revolution, Reyes would assert the redemptive and compensatory power of culture. Still, the relationship between intellectuals and the revolution was more Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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complex. Without minimizing the uncertainty probably fostered by the revolution among citizens belonging to different social classes, it is also evident that for the young intellectuals affiliated with the Ateneo de la Juventud de México (Athenian for the Youth of Mexico, founded in )—Reyes, Alfonso Caso, José Vasconcelos, and P. Henríquez Ureña (who studied law in Mexico) —the revolutionary violence enabled an aperture, an opportunity, favorable to the consolidation of a cultural and literary authority to open—one that would dismantle the institutional network of científicos or positivistic organic intellectuals of the Porfirian regime.41 In a key text entitled Pasado inmediato (The Immediate Past), Reyes establishes an analogy, familiar to the circle of new intellectuals, between the revolution and the battle for power within the literary field: The riots, the dispersed outbreaks, the first steps toward revolution, had begun. Meanwhile, the campaign of culture [also] began to take effect. . . . With the fortitude of positivism broken, the legions of philosophy— led by the light cavalry of so-called anti-intellectualism—resolutely advanced. The cultural scene had experienced its first upheaval.42 Henríquez Ureña also used the metaphor of intellectual war: Among other things, the political agitation that had begun in  did not abate, but rather increased from day to day, before culminating in the años terribles (terrible years) of  and , years that would have marked the end to all intellectual life were it not for the persistence in the love of culture inherent to Latin tradition. While war ravaged the country, and even the men belonging to intellectual groups became soldiers, the attempts at spiritual renovation, albeit somewhat disorganized, continued to move ahead. The fruits of our philosophical, literary, and artistic revolution continued to gradually take shape.43 The belligerent tone in Henríquez Ureña’s piece is striking: the revolution intensified not only the struggles for state power, but the antipositivist war of the centennial generation as well. The revolution redistributed power. The new intellectuals tied to the literary field foresaw the possible ascendancy of their discourses, their new modes of interpreting the reality of a country whose revolution had, in effect, demolished positivist rhetoric (which was aligned with the ancien régime). In Henríquez Ureña’s dissertation for his licentiate in law in , he writes: Among Spanish-speaking nations, especially those of America, which unfortunately suffer from the exclusive influence of France in the realm 

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of culture and ignore the intellectual life of other nations much richer than the French in the variety of orientations and extension of labors, there exists in vulgar fashion the mistaken idea that the university is solely the collection of professional schools that could well indeed exist by themselves. . . . There are those who go even further (the Mexican comtistas [positivists] for example) as to declare that universities are keepers of tradition—perhaps to the point of routine—and enemies of new ideas.44 The argument is familiar: the critique of positivism was a frequent and even distinct theme in the literary field since the s.45 Yet, despite the fact that Reyes and Henríquez Ureña here refer back to a concept of culture that saw its earliest formulations in the epoch of Gutiérrez Nájera and Martí—a formulation later crystallized in the cult of Arielismo—the passages cited above situate us before a struggle for the control of the university domain, something that neither Martí nor his contemporaries could have ever foreseen.46 Henríquez Ureña’s thesis, written at the height of revolutionary turbulence, registers the gradual extinction of the intellectual cadres belonging to the old regime of Porfirio Díaz. In education, this displacement was accompanied by the emergence of a new cultural authority as an alternative to and critique of the pragmatism and specialization that still dominated higher education. Reyes, reflecting precisely on this metaspecialization crystallized in the form of the essay, commented in ‘‘Homilía por la cultura’’ (‘‘Homily for Culture’’): ‘‘The desire to find moral stability in the sole exercise of one technical activity, more or less restricted, without remaining open to the circulation of spiritual currents, leads nations and men to a kind of malnutrition and scurvy.’’ He adds: ‘‘let us reconstruct our necessary unity with a permanent will. This, and nothing else my friends, is the task of culture.’’ 47 Even in La raza cósmica by José Vasconcelos, the Ateneísta debate against positivism was seminal to an understanding of the period: Only a leap of the spirit, nurtured by facts, will be able to offer us a vision that can rise above the microideology of the specialist. Let us then delve into the mystery of events to discover in them a direction, a rhythm, and a purpose. And there where the analyst understandably finds nothing, the synthesizer and creator will illuminate.48 In La raza cósmica, the critique of specialization and fragmentation has gone through yet another transformation, and now brought with it a series of consequences as yet unforeseen by Reyes or Henríquez Ureña. For, in Vasconcelos, cultural authority has become ontologized, constituting the base Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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of a new ‘‘theory’’—that of the ‘‘Latin race.’’ Specifically, the super-vision of culture materialized in the ‘‘total form’’ of the essay came to represent the distinctive attribute of the ‘‘cosmic,’’ ‘‘Latin’’ race, which having reached a higher state of human progress, would succeed in overtaking the limitations of the inferior state of ‘‘Anglo-Saxonism,’’ still dominated by the narrow and segmented gaze of science and technology. For Vasconcelos, the very form of metaspecialization in the essay and the newly established authority of culture together anticipate the finality of utopia in this delirious teleology. In the early years of the revolution, the focus on the Ateneísta ‘‘war’’ against positivism was above all the struggle to redirect education and teaching at the higher levels. Although as Henríquez Ureña had pointed out, through the revolution ‘‘the nation has discovered that it possesses rights, among them the right to be educated,’’ 49 the function that was to be accomplished by the humanities in a country devastated by war was, for the most part, still uncertain. In this respect, the relationship between the state and the Escuela de Altos Estudios (School of Higher Studies), founded in  by Justo Sierra—a bastion of Ateneísmo—is representative of a keen crisis of legitimation that even after the fall of the Porfirian regime (including that of the Comtian positivists or científicos) continued to relativize cultural authority. The School of Higher Studies was the precedent for the Faculty of Humanities at the Universidad Nacional (National University), although the latter did not succeed in becoming established until . At the School of Higher Studies, which was defined as a haven for ‘‘disinterested’’ intellectual labor autonomous from immediate final ends, the ‘‘Subdivision of Literary Studies’’ was founded in  as the first institutionalized department of literature in Mexico. That same year, Reyes, Henríquez Ureña, and González Martínez offered specialized courses in Spanish, English, and French literatures (respectively). In Pasado inmediato, Reyes recalls the transformation of the concept of literature that the School of Higher Studies would attempt to institutionalize. Until that year, Mexican literature in higher education had been a repository of forms tied to oratory and the study of law: ‘‘The men of the past believed in being practical; they pretended that history and literature only served to adorn juridical documents with metaphors or reminiscences.’’ 50 Paradoxically, Reyes proposes the ‘‘scientific’’ study of literature, in opposition to the concept of letters as a recourse to oratory. According to Reyes, this approach ‘‘came to be one of the campaigns of the centennial youth’’ (p. ). Nonetheless, the institutionalization of literature and the humanities was met with resistance by the state. In ‘‘La cultura de las Humanidades’’ (‘‘The Culture of the Humanities’’), Henríquez Ureña wrote: 

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It barely overcame the fall of the ancien régime, and now the school, disdained by governments, orphaned from any defined program, began to live a risky life, becoming the chosen victim for attacks by those who did not understand. Around it [ella] legends formed; the warnings were abstruse; their cooperation, minimal; their retributions, outrageous. . . . All that, for what? 51 ‘‘Culture’’: what for? Although the hegemony of the científicos had crumbled in the intellectual field, the legitimacy of culture-as-discourse did not automatically prevail in conjunction with the revolution. In this respect, ‘‘La cultura de las Humanidades’’ is a foundational text, as it reflects on the history of the humanities and claims to authority for the new university discipline as the domain of aesthetic and cultural authority. Thus, explained Henríquez Ureña, the aporetic situation of the humanities in Latin America at the time: ‘‘The societies of Spanish America, agitated by immense necessities left unsatisfied by our inexperience, gazed with natural suspicion on any orientation that evades practical applications’’ (p. ). But he also insisted on the importance of the humanities and with great erudition recounted the history of humanistic studies, tied to philology in the German university system, where he found the discipline to be impressively developed. The Ateneístas did not retreat. They were, by and large, dedicated to legitimizing their virtual power in the largely uncultivated terrain of the university, which had to reorient itself to the ‘‘disinterested’’ study of ‘‘high culture.’’ 52 Exhibiting his Arielista legacy, Henríquez Ureña declared: High culture is not a luxury: the few who fully reach it are the guardians of the understanding; only they possess the laboratory and subtle secret of perfection in knowledge; only they, the teachers of teachers, know how to set forth certain norms and definite notions to the rest, the professionals, men of higher action, guides for the youth.53 For the Ateneístas as well as Rojas in Argentina (albeit in a very different context, which had more to do with the democratic appeal of the revolution), the humanities served as a source of ‘‘reconstruction’’: a key to order.54 The humanities were to act as the site for a new synthesis. And precisely because of its power to distance itself and proclaim its autonomy from practical life (which must not be confused, however, with a rejection of or independence from it), the humanities would contribute to the cultivation of an inner harmony, necessary for social reorganization. As Henríquez Ureña argued: The humanities, an old stamp of honor in Mexico, must exercise its subtle spiritual influence on the reconstruction that awaits us. Because Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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it is much more than the skeleton of intellectual forms belonging to the ancient world: they are the gift-bearing muse of inner good fortune, jors olavigera for the secrets of human perfection.55 The humanities—with literature occupying the central place—would be the discipline capable of stabilizing the turbulent world of the street.56 When Henríquez Ureña thus speaks of ‘‘inner experience,’’ the point of reference is evidently Rodó’s Arielismo: culture as a fortification to defend the ‘‘authentic experience.’’ What resonance would this language of an Arielist bent carry in the populist Mexico of the revolution? Such a discourse doubtless provoked a general mistrust of the ‘‘elite’’ intellectuals. Reyes recollects: ‘‘The representatives, without knowledge of the school, said that to speak of higher studies in Mexico . . . amounted to dressing a barefoot nation in coattails.’’ 57 In the opening made possible by the revolution, all legitimizing narratives had to popularize and democratize the concept of culture. The public sphere allowed the expansion of the field, on the condition that writers adapt and promote their discourses in agreement with the necessities of the revolution. Yet it must be emphasized that the issue at stake is not a question of opportunism, at least in terms of the field in general, but rather, of the effect that social struggles had on the field and its discourses. The issue concerns the social demands to which the field of culture was forced to respond, renovating and self-criticizing its languages and parameters of valorization. The later Henríquez Ureña, for example, came to severely question the concept of ‘‘high culture’’ that he himself had promoted in the early years of the revolution. In La utopía de América (America as Utopia), in , he writes: Mexico knows what instruments it must employ for the task (of reconstruction) to which it is dedicated; and these instruments are culture and nationalism. But culture and nationalism, to be sure, are not to be understood in the manner of the nineteenth century. They must not be conflated with the [idea of ] culture that reigned throughout the era of capital disguised as liberalism, a culture of exclusive dilettantes, a closed orchard where they cultivated artificial flowers, an ivory tower where a dead science was kept, as in the museums. One must instead imagine a social culture, offered and actually given to all and rooted in labor: learning is not only learning to understand but also learning to act. There must not be any high culture—any high culture would be false and ephemeral where there is no popular culture.58 (Italics added) 

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The corrective gesture of rewriting some of the basic tenets of Arielism is striking. Culture here is no longer an effect of ‘‘creative leisure,’’ but of labor. In what he calls ‘‘learning to act,’’ Henríquez Ureña inverts the contemplation/action antithesis that constitutes one of the fundamental rhetorical forms of Rodó’s aesthetic culture. Even more pronounced, however, is the way in which this ex-disciple of Arielismo undercuts the notion of ‘‘high culture’’ as a haven, a defense against the inevitable approach of ‘‘popular culture’’—another area excluded from the aesthetic field in Ariel. And in response to Rodó’s classicism and Western orientation, Henríquez Ureña proposes a return to the land, because ‘‘the autochthonous in Mexico is a reality’’ (p. ). The nationalist inflection, which gradually assumes cultural authority, would have been unthinkable for the early Ateneístas. The claim of literature as a privileged discourse for the rearticulation of the origin, of the primal characteristics of national identity, was at once a response and an attempt to overcome the aporias confronted by cultural authority throughout the early years of the revolution. The context of La utopía de América further corroborates this conclusion: the text was originally a speech delivered by Ureña at the Universidad de La Plata (University of the Plata region, Argentina) when he was a member of a delegation sponsored by the recently founded Ministry of Public Education in Mexico. Minister José Vasconcelos, a former Ateneísta, presided over the delegation. Culture—no longer marginal or peripheral—had assumed state authority in Mexico.59 Still, an entire process of revising ‘‘the cultural,’’ a process overdetermined by the demands of Mexican society throughout the early decades of the revolution, served to mediate between the fervent Arielismo of the early Ateneístas (Vasconcelos included) and the concept of ‘‘social’’ and ‘‘popular’’ culture propagated by Henríquez Ureña in . At this conjuncture, the height of the nationalist epoch, the humanities were legitimized as the archive of autochthonous tradition: as Reyes declared, ‘‘I want the humanities to be the native vehicle for all that is indigenous.’’ 60 An exemplary instance of this narrative of legitimation can be found in Reyes’s ‘‘Atenea Política’’—precisely the same essay in which he speaks of culture as a response to the ‘‘cataclysm’’ and ‘‘moral crisis’’ at hand: When the smoke of the combatants had cleared, a Mexico transformed found itself before the wondrous spectacle of Mexican being, the national tradition from which the vicissitudes of history throughout the nineteenth century had led us insensibly astray. I speak here of such transformation as a total phenomenon, higher than individual tastes, Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

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or those of political parties or important people, higher still than their leaders. What has come out of the flowering of the nation—the great concern for the education of the people, and the immeasurable development of the plastic arts and archaeology—are movements of perfect historical relation, which are in the process of rectifying the earlier hesitation of misanthropy: movements that are built upon an ancient and transcendent past, in the process of recovering each note of a melody that has transpired across the centuries; movements that are inspired by it, that benefit from [the past] as a supplement to the present, and with this recourse, they cross the mobile sea of the future with leaps and bounds, full of a robust confidence. . . . I am not speaking here of any desire to translate the present in terms of the past, but to the contrary, the past in terms of the present.61 Culture would not only provide an inner order, a compensation for ‘‘moral crises’’; it would also be charged with the task of reconstructing the memory of a past that was desperately needed in a time of rupture. According to Reyes, ‘‘The continuity that is here established is culture, the work of the muses, daughters of memory’’ (p. ). This memory must not be confused with an antiquarian passion: the sense of continuity, the national past, was exactly what the ancien régime, in following in the footsteps of modernization, had intended to efface. Through culture, and its intellectuals, the revolution would seek to recompose (in the words of Reyes) ‘‘the wondrous spectacle of Mexican being.’’ Notes  José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .  The concept of the ‘‘cultural critic’’ is not being invoked here in a neutral, descriptive fashion; following Adorno, the term will be used in this chapter to refer to a type of ‘‘high’’ discourse that claimed legitimacy through the practice of dividing cultural values between the low and high, and criticizing the ills of modern, commercialized society (other examples of the cultural critic include Oswald Spengler and José Ortega y Gasset). See Theodor Adorno, ‘‘Cultural Criticism and Society,’’ in Prisms, th ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ), – . See also Frederic Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), esp. –; and Jorge Aguilar Mora’s reading of Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad, in La divina pareja: Historia y mito en Octavio Paz (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, ).  José Martí, Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –),  [hereafter OC, followed by volume and page number].  José Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de la masas, in Obras completas, vol.  (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, ), .

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       

  

      

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José Martí, ‘‘Coney Island,’’ in appendix , p. . John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, ), . Martí, ‘‘Coney Island,’’ . Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas, . Aniceto de Payer de Puig, Gran diccionario de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Establecimiento tipolitográfico ‘‘Sucesores de Rivadeneyra,’’ ). Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua castellana (Paris: Garnier hermanos, []). Rodó, Ariel, . The concept of ‘‘the beautiful’’ as ‘‘disinterested’’ refers to Friedrich von Schiller (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ), which develops the Kantian notion of an aesthetic ‘‘sphere’’ as the free play of autonomized faculties. Martí doubtless knew Schiller through Emerson and the North American transcendentalists, although by , Luz y Caballero had introduced Schiller into Cuba with the translation of Schiller’s autobiography (reproduced in José de la Luz y Caballero, Escritos literarios [Havana: Ediciones de la Universidad de La Habana, ], –). Rodó, Ariel, . José Martí, ‘‘El poeta Walt Whitman,’’ in OC, vol. , . Raymond Williams, ‘‘The Idea of Culture,’’ in Literary Taste, Culture, and Mass Communication, vol. , ed. Peter Davison, Rolf Meyerson, and Edward Shils (Cambridge, U.K.: ChadwyckHealey, ). See also Herbert Marcuse, ‘‘The Affirmative Character of Culture,’’ in Negations, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, ), –. First published in . Angel Rama, The Lettered City, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), . René Thom points out the subjective character of the crisis in ‘‘Crise et catastrophe,’’ Communications  (): –. José Martí, Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos  (): . The journal does not cite the specific reference. Rodó, Ariel, . Martí, ‘‘Walt Whitman,’’ . Martí, OC, vol. , . In Walt Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass (), he writes: ‘‘There will be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait a while . . . perhaps a generation or two . . . dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place . . . the gang of kosmos and prophets (the poets) en masse shall take their place’’ (in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose [New York: Literary Classics of the United States, ], ). ‘‘El Poeta Walt Whitman’’ should be read in conjunction with Martí’s Prólogo to Poema del Niágara by Pérez Bonalde, where this same narrative of legitimation is at work. The notion of literature as a substitute for religion in modernism is one of the central themes of an important book Rafael by Gutiérrez Girardot, Modernismo (Barcelona: Montesinos, ). Martí, ‘‘Walt Whitman,’’ . Sarmiento is, of course, the canonical example. Less studied, although doubtless a crucial player in the Cuban intellectual scene during Martí’s formative years, is José de la Luz y Caballero, a great admirer of English pragmatism. In his ‘‘Informe sobre la Escuela Naútica’’ (), Luz y Caballero writes: ‘‘But the clamors that are raised against this arrangement have already reached the ears of the commission, clamors for a division of labor, the prin-

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   





         

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cipal motivation behind the essentially progressive industrial and scientific achievements of this century. Doubtless the subdivision of labor has worked wonders, particularly in the Albión suburb, and perhaps among the immense advantages that it has brought about, there is none more beneficial to the cause of the sciences as its frontal attack on and corrective alteration of encyclopedism, which has invaded modern education’’ (in Escritos educativos [Havana: Editorial de la Universidad, ], ). This provision notwithstanding, his text leaves no doubt as to the validity of specialization as a model, which the literatos would begin to criticize in the s. Specialization, for Luz y Caballero, was an essential feature of a desired modernization and rationalization of every aspect of social life. Martí, OC, vol. , –. Martí, ‘‘Walt Whitman,’’ . Rodó, Ariel, . On the concept of ‘‘culture’’ in the United States, see the important essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘‘The Progress of Culture,’’ Letters and Social Aims, in Complete Works, vol.  (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, ), –. First published in . See Georg Lukács, ‘‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay,’’ in Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ); and Theodor Adorno, ‘‘The Essay as Form,’’ in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, ). The latter piece situates the essay between philosophy as a discipline (particularly as it had acquired specialization in Germany) and literary production. See also Roberto Gonzálaz Echevarría, ‘‘The Case of the Speaking Statue: Ariel and the Magisterial Rhetoric of the Latin American Essay,’’ in The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, ). In Cantos de vida y de esperanza (), Rubén Darío responds to Rodó’s criticism in a poem dedicated to him: ‘‘La torre de marfil tentó mi anhelo; / quise encerrarme dentro de mí mismo, / y tuve hambre de espacio y sed de cielo / desde las sombras de mi propio abismo’’ (‘‘The ivory tower tempted my longing; / to shut myself within myself; / and I was hungry for space and thirsty for the sky / From within the shadows of my own abyss’’) (in Poesía [Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ]). From this point on in Darío’s life, his poetry will invoke a marked Latin Americanism and Hispanicism. Rodó, Ariel, . Norberto Piñero and Eduardo L. Bidau, Historia de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, in Anales de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, vol.  (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Martín Biedma, ), . See the study by Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo, ‘‘La Argentina del Centenario: campo intelectual y temas ideológicos,’’ Hispamérica , nos. – (): –. Ricardo Rojas, La restauración nacionalista (; reprint, Buenos Aires: Librería de la Facultad, ), . Ricardo Rojas, ‘‘La Universidad y la cultura argentina,’’ in Documentos del decanato (–) (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, ), –. Rojas, La restauración nacionalista, . Leopoldo Lugones, Didáctica, in El payador y antología de poesía y prosa, ed. Guillermo Ara (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . Rojas, La restauración nacionalista, . Leopoldo Lugones’s speeches on gauchesca literature were published later in a volume entitled El payador (Buenos Aires: Otero, ). Alfonso Reyes, ‘‘Atenea Política,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), . First published in .

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 See Callos Monsiváis, ‘‘Notas sobre la cultura mexicana en el siglo XX,’’ in Historia general de México, vol. , ed. Daniel Cosío Villegas (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, ), esp. – ; Enrique Krauze, Caudillos culturales de la Revolución mexicana (Mexico City: Siglo XX, ), esp. ‘‘La genealogía intelectual,’’ on the Ateneístas; and Leopoldo Zea, El positivismo en México (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), esp. the discussion on the emergence of antipositivism in ‘‘El ocaso.’’  Alfonso Reyes, Pasado inmediato, in Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), . The essay was first published in .  Pedro Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La influencia de la Revolución en la vida intelectual de México,’’ in La utopía de América, ed. Angel Rama (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .  Pedro Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘Universidad,’’ in Universidad y educación (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ), .  For example, see Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘El arte y el materialismo,’’ in Obras, vol. , Crítica literaria (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ), –. First published in . See also Martí’s notes against the Cuban positivists, in OC, vol. , –.  ‘‘Between the world of the university and the independent world of letters there was at that time a bond that shows the educational and social concerns of what we call the centennial generation. This sole feature distinguishes it from the literature prior to it, the brilliant generation of modernism that—indeed—still slumbered in its ivory tower’’ (Reyes, Pasado inmediato, ).  Alfonso Reyes, ‘‘Homilía por la cultura,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), .  José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica (Mexico City: Ediciones de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, ), .  Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La influencia de la Revolución,’’ .  Reyes, Pasado inmediato, .  Pedro Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La cultura de las Humanidades,’’ in La utopía de América, ed. Angel Rama (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .  On the university as a haven for ‘‘higher culture,’’ see Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s licentiate in Universidad y educación (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ), .  Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La cultura de las Humanidades,’’ .  For a criticism of the concept of the humanities in a wider context, see Hayden White, ‘‘The Culture of Criticism,’’ in Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution, ed. Ihab Hassan (Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, ), –.  Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La cultura de las Humanidades,’’ .  Henríquez Ureña describes the revival of classical studies among the Ateneístas toward : ‘‘Once we congregated to read Plato’s Symposium together. . . . For three hours we read, and never had we so completely forgotten the world of the streets, though our reunion took place in an architect’s studio on the busiest street in the city’’ (‘‘La cultura de las Humanidades,’’ ).  Reyes, Pasado inmediato, .  Pedro Henríquez Ureña, La utopía de América, ed. Angel Rama (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .  Vasconcelos’ speech at the opening of the new ministry sheds light on the institutionalization of culture in Mexico: his allegorical imagination elaborates on the blend of Aztec, Buddhist, and classical motifs on the building’s facade. The goal, he states, is ‘‘a culture in which the indigenous flourishes within a universal environment.’’ Vasconcelos asserts that the building, like the ministry itself, brought many artists, including Diego Rivera, into the

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project, thus reflecting the trends of political culture that Mexico would develop in the years to come. The speech is included in Boletín de la Secretaría de Educación Pública , no.  (): –.  Alfonso Reyes, ‘‘Discurso por Virgilio,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), . Reyes’s tactic of adapting the classical humanities to his country’s political climate is revealing. For example, he insists on Virgil’s importance as a ‘‘ferment for the notion of nationhood’’ (p. ). Later, he represents Virgil as a model poet for a rural society: ‘‘Virgil, to be one of us, sings of the small farmers and modest, pastoral landowners’’ (p. ). He was not very far from claiming Virgil as the true poet of the revolution.  Reyes, ‘‘Atenea Política,’’ .

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Chapter  ‘‘Nuestra América’’: The Art of Good Governance

Where is America going, and who will unite and guide her? —José Martí, ‘‘Mother America’’

Let us begin with a brief commentary on the objectives and difficulties of the following chapter: beyond contents of an idea or concept of Latin America in Martí’s classic essay ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ I would like to explore the configuration of a discourse presupposed by Martí’s work that will later provide the foundation for an emergent Latin Americanism. The notion of the ‘‘idea’’ as the point of departure—almost always nonreflexive—for a certain kind of cultural historiography has, in many ways, remained unquestioned. In this type of historiographic narrative, Latin America is often taken to be a field of identity already constituted independently of the ‘‘concepts,’’ like a timeless presence easily designated or even contained by the transparency of ideas only later subject to the vicissitudes of history. It has been the subject of this book to explore the tropes and strategies of authorization that have made possible the mapping, the textual framing, of what is posited as ‘‘Latin American.’’ The premise behind such an undertaking has been that Latin America as an organized, demarcated field of identity does not exist prior to the intervention of a gaze that seeks to represent it. To the contrary, we began with the hypothesis that what is ‘‘Latin American’’ is a field produced and ordered within the very same, politically overdetermined assemblage of the discourses that name—and by naming, generate— this field of this identity. At the same time, however, it is also important to establish some distance from the mythology, very common in recent years, of a pure ‘‘selfreferentiality’’ presumed by language. Such an ideology would lead us to believe that the heterogeneous reality of Latin America, beyond the words that designate it, possesses nothing more than the logical status of a book or fiction. One need not adopt a naive empiricism in order to recognize that

‘‘Latin America’’ exceeds the representations produced by intellectuals about the multiple and contradictory experiences pertaining to the name. Latin America exists as an inescapable problem that demands reflection and rigor: its existence is at least as dense and unshakable as, say, North American politics in the Central American region in recent years. Let us, then, propose a distinction: between the multiple and heterogeneous space of the American landscape, and the different attempts to construct a world, a logic of sense, with these materials, there lies a distance marked by the transformation brought about by a whole confluence of discursive practices; even (or perhaps especially) when these discourses would assert the existence of essential, categorical definitions of their object of study. The value and political character of any reflection on what was ‘‘Latin American’’ is thus not rooted so much in its referential capacity or ability to ‘‘contain’’ the ‘‘true’’ Latin American identity, as it is in the position occupied by each postulation of being in the social or more specifically intellectual field from which the ‘‘definition’’ was articulated. In this sense, Latin America can be seen as a field of struggle wherein diverse postulations and Latinoamericanista discourses have historically sought to impose and naturalize their representations of the Latin American experience, in a battle—at times followed by armed combat—that would decide the hegemonic conditions to be imposed over the meaning of ‘‘our’’ identity. Behind every assertion of what is Latin American, in other words, there lies a will to power exercised from different positions on the map of social contradictions. The analysis in this chapter will concern the position of a Latin Americanist classic, Martí’s ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ within such a contested field. It is always difficult to read a classic with a critical eye. In the case of ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ we are dealing with a classic whose conditions of production have been effaced in the process of its canonization and the passage of time. More than a mere representation of Latin America, this text has come to be an unmediated code wherein different angles and political positions within discordant areas of culture ‘‘recognize’’ their identity. Of course, this description can easily serve as a possible definition of a classic text: a discursive event that, in the accumulation of a history of its readings, assumes enormous power as a referential object, thereby erasing the specific conditions of its production;1 a discourse that in the process of its institutionalization loses its character as a discursive event and assumes the task of projecting the represented world as an unmediated presence. Thus, in the example of Martí, we would continually seem to be reading ‘‘our’’ identity. By means of this referential power projected onto the text by cultural institutions, we feel safe to assume that Martí effectively defines us; it is that easy to accept the 

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transcendence of his ‘‘truth.’’ Moreover, ‘‘Nuestra América’’ frames this projected identity in an undoubtedly critical, anti-imperialist gesture: a gesture that has been incorporated into the very act of saying ‘‘we.’’ But several questions immediately come to light: who are those included, or excluded, by this field of identity? From what position on the map of social contradictions is the solidarity of this ‘‘we’’ declared, asserted? What social authority regulates the entrance of hitherto unidentified materials into this field of identity? Or is it that we all effectively speak through this voice—that of the writer—that speaks of us, that speaks us? It would be necessary to begin with specifying the historical conditions, the political struggles, to which this we was formulated as a possible response or resolution—a we that, to all appearances, exists outside time and contingency. But how would it be possible to explain the artificiality, the norms of this discourse that defines us, when we know that it was designed to defend us, protect us from a ‘‘they’’ who would divest us of our self-representation? Father Martí, true father, storehouse of past appetite and future hunger, reservoir of what keeps us alive! 2 Certainly, the enormous interpellative, inclusive capacity of the Martían family was only in part a result of his canonization. From the opening paragraphs of ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ Martí himself projected a place for his addressee within the field of authorial identity: Those born in America who are ashamed because they wear the apron of the indio, of the mother who reared them; and [those] who disown their sick mother—the scoundrels!—and leave her abandoned on her sickbed. What, then, is a real man? The one who stays with his mother, to cure her of her illness, or the one who puts her to work where no one will see her, [the one who] lives at her expense on rotted lands . . . displaying the written sign of treachery on [his] back? 3 Such is the man you have to be. ‘‘Criticism is the health of nations, but with one heart and one mind’’ (p. ). Either you’re this man—given the undisputed norms of this ‘‘mind’’—or you’re a traitor. The interpellative text predisposes a place for his intended listener within the family. The image of the family, a key metaphor throughout Martí’s work, reinforces and strengthens the interpellation; for although it may be possible to question the conventional categories of the social, it is far more difficult to distance oneself from the ‘‘natural’’ community of family and filiation. Criticism, however, must begin where the metaphor of the family ends, by denaturalizing and explicating the historical character of this authority that determines the The Art of Good Governance

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features of a decidedly inclusive ‘‘we’’ as an effect of the interpellation. Still, how would it be possible to establish a distance from this evocation of the family, the intonation of the father’s voice, which vehemently announces to us (to his ‘‘children,’’ or rather, his readers) that the rejection or even the questioning of familial homogeneity—the space of his authority—will be condemned to silence, to the exclusion with which traitors are punished? Perhaps the polemical and critical discourse of ‘‘Our America’’—which rigorously takes up and dismantles the ‘‘families’’ of other postulations regarding the notion of American ‘‘being’’—provides a response to this question. II The discourse of identity in ‘‘Our America’’ is based on an account of history with which Martí formulates the problematic or ‘‘the Spanish American enigma’’ (p. ) that his own discourse will attempt to resolve. According to this account, the history of America is not a process in which ‘‘being’’ harmoniously and progressively accumulates the essential traits of its identity. Identity is not represented as a totality constituted from time immemorial. On the contrary, the being of America is represented here as an effect of the violent interaction of fragments that tend toward dispersion in random fashion: We were a vision, with an athlete’s breast, a dandy’s hands, and a child’s brow. We were a mask, [dressed] in breeches from England, a Parisian vest, a jacket from North America, and a bicorne from Spain. The mute indio walked slowly around us. (p. ) More than an organic identity, this body—the body of Mother America —has been ‘‘dislocated’’ and ‘‘decomposed.’’ Constructed with the remains of codes, incongruent fragments of conflicting traditions, this body is the product of historical violence, of displacements brought about by ‘‘confused origins stained with blood.’’ 4 Once again, Martí’s discourse situates itself in the face of fragmentation and attempts to condense what is in the process of becoming disperse. His authority, tied (as we will see) to the compensatory strategies of a redemptive gaze, is also grounded in a projection of the future, an aesthetic and teleology that postulates the definitive supersession of fragmentation: the ultimate redemption of an organic America, purified of the stains that darkened its originary plentitude. But this is where the ambiguity of Martí’s teleology becomes evident: history is not seen as the harmonious becoming of a future perfectability, but rather, as a process of continuous battles, a ‘‘suffocating past’’ (p. ) that disperses the body of originary harmony. As Martí would 

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say, ‘‘as in the case of humanity all progress consists in a return to the point of departure.’’ 5 Driven by continuous ‘‘parricidal discordances,’’ history is made of ‘‘ruins.’’ 6 In Martí, the becoming of history is the decomposition of a totality whose organic, originary body has left only fragments behind, remains that must be rearticulated. There is no need to search here for a poetics of fragmentation; fragmentation in Martí produces terror, it sketches the limits of his discourse. Dispersion produces the nostalgia of a subject who sees in the past an incessant unfolding of a catastrophe.7 It is from this catastrophe that he will attempt to refashion the solidity of a foundation, a renewed sense of stability, with the broken, ruined material of historical experience. For Martí, this activity of ordering, or ‘‘fraternalizing,’’ was doubly necessary. Not only would it guarantee the consolidation of good governance— essential to the struggle against the forces of parricide, the ‘‘tigers within’’— but it would also enable the reconstituted family to defend itself against the threat—far from imaginary—of foreign intervention, the ‘‘tiger outside.’’ 8 Once again, the discourse of being would arm itself with the inside/outside dialectic, in a double movement that would serve to at once homogenize the interior—‘‘the house of our America’’ 9—and exclude the powerful ‘‘other’’ whose threat in any case made the consolidation of the interior both possible and necessary. But in ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ ‘‘they’’ does not merely signify the presence of capital and foreign modernity. As Martí himself would say, the ‘‘we’’ that is also a ‘‘we-others’’ [nos-otros] is a place also occupied by tigers, ‘‘others’’ that had until then forestalled the coherence of Latin American being. The question, then, would be: what kind of forces did interior fragmentation imply? III Significantly, in the very gesture that takes up the question ‘‘What are we?’’ in the itinerary of writing as a search for the ‘‘key to the Spanish-American enigma’’ (p. ), ‘‘Our America’’ does not immediately and spontaneously respond to either the enigma of identity or the real threat of North American imperialism. Once the question is posed, the text situates itself before the archive of materials, images, and representations that had been posing this question since the wars of independence. It is this Latinoamericanista archive that had defined the intellectual’s task precisely as an investigation into the enigma of identity and the conditions of possibility for good governance.10 At first sight, it would seem as if Martí’s terror in the face of fragmentation is connected to the will to order, which since Simón Bolívar, The Art of Good Governance

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had defined the modernizing discourse of the patricians. As we may recall, their legitimacy and effective power was rooted in the project of forming enlightened national subjects, a project inseparable from the process of state consolidation. In fact, ‘‘Our America’’ only seems to take up and rewrite the tropes and representational devices of that rhetoric: civilization/barbarism, city/countryside, modernity/tradition; or to use Martí’s own metaphor, ‘‘chaos’’ as an effect of ‘‘the battle between the book and the altar candle [cirial].’’ 11 As we saw in our reading of Bello and Sarmiento, however, for the patricians the power of the letter provided the rationality necessary for the domination of America’s barbarous nature; in this respect, writing contributed to the modernization and civilization of the American landscape. On the other hand, ‘‘Our America’’ inverts this economy of meaning by postulating a realm of the autochthonous, the ‘‘natural man,’’ as the necessary (if somewhat bloodstained and forgotten) foundation for the definition of Latin American being and good governance. Like the letrados, the postrevolutionary elite men and women of letters, Martí represented Latin America as a ‘‘disjointed’’ reality; moreover, in both we find the desired homogeneity of the ‘‘we,’’ posited as a response to the chaos and disarticulation of the state. But contrary to this rhetoric of modernization, Martí would explain this chaos in terms of the false representation propagated by the ‘‘artificial men of letters [letrados]’’ (p. ) whose discourse, delimited by forms of the ‘‘imported book’’ (p. ), excluded the American, autochthonous singularity on which any national project would have to be based. ‘‘The battle is not between civilization and barbarism, but between false erudition and nature’’ (p. ). The reference to Sarmiento is unmistakable. In Sarmiento, we saw how the intellectual represents and legitimizes himself as a traveler and translator who acts as the mediator between the blank page of the desert and the plenitude of the European library. In Martí, the discourse of identity rejects any model based on importation, proposing instead the construction of an alternative library. Against the ‘‘bookish redeemers’’ (p. ), Martí postulates the need for an archive of tradition, an alternative knowledge proper to Latin America: The European university must give way to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught handson; even at the expense of the archons of Greece. Our Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours. . . . Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but the trunk must be our own. (p. ) 

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In this polemical gesture, which methodically dismantles the tropes and mechanisms of authorization at work in the rhetoric of modernization, Martí proposes the authority of a new form of knowledge whose working metaphor can be found in the image of the tree: We can no longer be a people of leaves who live in the air, our crown brimming with blooms, crackling or whirling about, depending on the caprice of the light’s caress, or whether the tempests thrash the tree about and overturn it. The trees must form ranks lest the seven-league giant stride on! It is the hour of retribution, of the united march, and we must go forward in close formation, like silver in the roots of the Andes. (p. ) In Enlightenment rhetoric, the displacement of the journey in the image of transport, which divides the desert and endows it with meaning, was a key metaphor, an icon of the organizing power of discourse. And yet, in Martí, the dominant image of the tree stands precisely in opposition to the force of displacement (‘‘the seven-league giant’’): ‘‘like silver in the roots of the Andes,’’ the tree is tied to the geological, or perhaps more accurately, the pure, elemental, fundament that grounds Latin American being. Deleuze and Guattari have already pointed out the importance of the tree—specifically, the book tree—as the classic emblem of a stable, hierarchizing form of knowledge dominated by the desire for continuity and a firm foundation that, in Martí’s case, would guarantee the notion of a pure, uncontaminated origin (the ‘‘silver in the roots’’).12 But it would be hasty to hypostatize the significance of a trope whose function may vary at different points of conjuncture. Indeed, it would be rather necessary to question the position (and the performance) of such a rhetoric with respect to discourses of power. In Martí, autochthonous knowledge would fulfill a stabilizing function through its postulation of a return to what was most basic and elemental (‘‘the most genital of the terrestrial,’’ Pablo Neruda will say half a century later, in the Heights of Macchu Picchu). And it is precisely this knowledge that, in Martí’s time, would contest the institutionalized state discourses of modernization and progress. Still, this discourse of the autochthonous certainly became a strategy of legitimation that would eventually grant an enormous degree of social authority to areas of Latin American literature, even within the state. This will be the case, for example, with the cosmic race theory forwarded by Vasconcelos, as well as the official indigenismo [nativism] promoted by the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico beginning in . We might also recall a similar situation in Argentina throughout the centennial years: the importance of The Art of Good Governance

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the culturalist nationalism of Rojas and Lugones was in every way tied to the sublimation and appropriation of gauchesca literature, to the point of situating it at the very center of the national literature. During the epoch in which Martí was writing, however, the discourse of the autochthonous did not yet appeal (nor was it addressed) to those in the state; instead, it was a subaltern discourse, critical of power in an epoch still dominated by widespread positivism and social darwinism. As we have seen, this optimism for the order and progress promised by modernization finds its clearest exemplar in the figure of Sarmiento: Let us not hinder the forward march of the United States. . . . Let us catch up with the United States. Let us be America, just as the sea is the ocean. Let us be the United States.13 Although Sarmiento, the obvious emblem of modernity’s civilizing mission in Latin America, has been the key point of reference in the polemics of ‘‘Our America,’’ one must also bear in mind the specific context in which the essay was published. ‘‘Our America’’ appeared in , at the height of the Porfirian regime in Mexico, in El Partido Liberal—an official newspaper of the pro-development state, which had opened the country to foreign capital like no other at that point in history. With these conditions in mind, we might read the discourse of an autochthonous Latin America in ‘‘Nuestra América’’ as an audacious, albeit necessarily oblique critique of the Mexican government’s politics of modernization: Over the heads of some republics the octopus is sleeping. Other [republics], which have forgotten that [Benito] Juárez once went about in a coach drawn by mules, hitch their carriages to the wind, with a soap bubble as their coachman; for poisonous luxury, the enemy of freedom, corrupts the lascivious man and opens the door to the foreigner. (appendix , p. ) The polemic is directed against organic intellectuals, the Comtian científicos of the Porfirian regime, and the positivist notion of knowledge institutionalized in the field of state power. Around the time that ‘‘Our America’’ was published, engineer Francisco Bulnes—one of the more salient Mexican científicos—wrote: Europe and the United States, with their ambitions, are not the enemies of the Latin American peoples; there is no greater enemy to our wellbeing and independence than we ourselves. Our adversaries, as I have 

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already pointed out, are these: our tradition, our sickly heritage, our alcoholism.14 ‘‘Our America,’’ in effect, emerges during a period traversed by the circulation and prevalence of representations of Latin America as a sick body, contaminated by racial impurity and the survival of traditional cultures and ethnicities presumably destined to disappear in the unfolding of progress and modernity. In this context, dominated by official discourses that would respond to the question ‘‘What are we?’’ with ‘‘Let us be the United States,’’ one cannot underestimate the critical intensity of a root knowledge—a knowledge of roots—along with Martí’s rapprochement with cultures decimated by modernization. For Martí, these colonizing discourses were the ‘‘tiger within,’’ the very cause of the ‘‘sickness.’’ In ‘‘Our America,’’ chaos is not the effect of ‘‘barbarism,’’ the lack of modernity: the disintegration of America is produced by the exclusion of traditional cultures from the space of modern political representation. Hence, ‘‘Our America’’ would propose the construction of a ‘‘we’’ from out of the very material excluded by the discourses of modernization and the modernizing state: the ‘‘mute indio,’’ the ‘‘scorned Negro,’’ the peasant marginalized by the ‘‘disdainful city’’ (appendix , p. ). For if the ‘‘natural man’’ is not included in the project of national being, in the space of good governance, ‘‘he will shake it off and govern [it himself ]’’: ‘‘Along comes the natural man, strong and indignant, to overturn the justice accumulated from books because it has not been administered in accordance with the patent necessities of the country’’ (p. ). IV At times, the critique of the ‘‘bookish redeemers’’ in ‘‘Our America’’ seems to indicate a certain anti-intellectualism: ‘‘Neither the European book nor the Yankee book provided the key to the Spanish-American enigma’’; and ‘‘the imported book has been vanquished by the natural man in America’’ (p. ). Martí’s critique of the (imported) letter proposes a more effective alternative: the gaze of an aesthetic Latinoamericanista subject, and the creation of a discourse that could claim an unmediated access to ‘‘the true elements of the country’’ (p. ). Liberated from ‘‘imported forms’’ (p. ), this gaze would be fundamental to the consolidation of good government: ‘‘Natural statesmen emerge from the direct study of Nature’’ (p. ). At the same time, it is also evident that knowledge and understanding (saber and conocer)—the specific discursive tasks proper to intellectuals—are The Art of Good Governance

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key terms throughout the essay. ‘‘To know [conocer] one’s country well and to govern it in accordance with this understanding, is the only way of liberating it from tyranny’’ (p. ). The implication here is that the spontaneity or immediacy attributed to any previous claim regarding ‘‘the country’s native elements’’ was entirely relative, if not impossible. According to the text, the alternative gaze is more ‘‘direct’’ than the artificiality of the lettered word. But when faced with the reality it attempts to represent, a whole series of formal devices, strategies, and forms come into being: a system of mediations that makes possible the production of meaning and demarcation of objects. The economy, the parameters of valorization that regulate this gaze, are questions that remain unresolved. For now, let us merely note that the first step in the itinerary of a ‘‘good’’ representation of American being has been negative: the explicit divestment of authority from other modes of representation. Throughout ‘‘Our America,’’ we find a marked insistence on the necessity and social authority of a certain type of knowledge possessed by a specific type of intellectual. This reveals the intensity of the struggles for power (over the meaning of what was Latin American) in which the text is inscribed. The object of this struggle, for Martí, is the authority over representation—the knowledge (saber)—of what we really are: the key to the enigma. In this sense, ‘‘Our America’’ is more than a ‘‘reflection’’ on Latin America; it is a reflection on the type of discourse that could legitimize and effectively represent this conflicting field of identity. In the process of representing a ‘‘we,’’ in other words, Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’ reflects on and debates the conditions of possibility and norms of ‘‘good’’ representation. As suggested earlier, the primary condition of truth for this representation would be the inclusion of traditional, subaltern cultures (which even then had been subjugated and marginalized by the discourse of modernization) in the space of a ‘‘we,’’ the space of a new politics: The Indian, mute, walked slowly around us, and went off to the mountain, to the summit of the mountain to baptize his children. At night, the scorned Negro sang in the music of his heart, alone and unknown, amid the waves and wild animals. The peasant, creator, blind with indignation, turned on and against the disdainful city, against his own creation. (p. ) Martí’s discourse presents itself as a site of incorporation for all those areas of the American world excluded by the letrados, who had marked off these areas as the dangerous limits of their civilizing mission and desired identity. At first glance, it would seem as if in Martí one hears the voice of the other, of ‘‘barbarism.’’ In his scene of inscription [escritura], which proposes 

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a return to ‘‘the soul of the land’’ (p. ), to the mother, to the margins of civilization—a world of myth, music, and wild nature—it would seem that the distance between knowledge (saber) and traditional cultures is dissolved, that ‘‘the struggle of the book against the altar candle [cirial ]’’ is superseded in a dehierarchizing, zero-sum ‘‘we.’’ It would seem, finally, that the condition of truth is the obliteration of the father’s oppressive law and the restitution of the originary maternal voice at the very heart of ‘‘we.’’ These binarisms, however, are confounded by Martí’s assertion that the others—the ‘‘mute Indian masses’’ (p. )—have no discourse of their own. It is the very history of their exploitation that has generated ‘‘the impolitic disdain for the aboriginal race’’ (p. ).15 Although the subaltern had to be an object of representation and knowledge, s/he could not become a knowing subject: If, in nations composed of both cultured and uncultured elements, the cultured have not learned the art of governance, then the uncultured will govern, through their habit of attacking and resolving doubts with their hands. The uncultured masses are lazy, and timid in matters of the intellect, and they want to be well-governed; but if the government aggrieves them, they will shake it off and govern themselves. (p. ) This mass, insistently addressed in the feminine pronominal (ella), is framed as a dangerous body situated on the other side of the intellect. This ‘‘uncultured’’ body does not possess knowledge: to the contrary, it is the other of knowledge. But precisely in inverse proportion to this body’s silence, the ‘‘intellect’’ that speaks acquires weight and authority. Such a formulation has at least two important consequences. First, that between the one who has the authority to speak and the object that must be represented—the subaltern cultures—there exists a marked distance that serves to establish a relationship of hierarchy and subordination. And second, that this ‘‘higher intellect’’ differentiates itself from the knowledge proper to the modernizing men of letters, insofar as it would be able to represent the ‘‘unknown’’ (the enigma, the other, the forgotten mother), and thereby plays the mediating role between the two conflicting worlds and provides the necessary knowledge for good government. V In terms of an analysis of the subject and the authority presupposed by the representation of a Latinoamericanista ‘‘we,’’ the ‘‘ideas’’ concerning good government in ‘‘Our America’’ are, at bottom, not as decisive as the very articulaThe Art of Good Governance

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tion of the statements within a field of conflicting discourses. In his critique of ‘‘the quill or the colorful word’’ (p. ) characteristic of the Enlightenment intellectuals or letrados, Martí asserts the priority of a ‘‘distilled and sparkling prose, charged with ideas.’’ In other words, he defends the necessity of an unmediated, transparent form of knowledge, rooted in the ‘‘weight of the real’’ (p. ). Obviously, such an assertion belies the highly stylized form of writing deployed by Martí in ‘‘Nuestra América.’’ In addition to privileging the tropological movement of the ‘‘native’’ word, this writing relativizes standards of ‘‘proper’’ syntax, overturning the conceptual economy of argument, and problematizing the ‘‘transparency’’ and the very communicability of discourse. Beyond the question of being simply ‘‘loaded with ideas,’’ this intensely overwritten prose is saturated with tropes. In the discursive movement of the writing, the multiplication and intensification of figurative devices support the literary artistry and authority underlying the essay. As we have seen, such a form finds its principle of coherence in the will to style. Stylization, of course, cannot be read as an individual characteristic belonging to Martí; what we read in stylization is the mark—etched on the very surface of discourse—of a work highlighting the specificity of an alternative and polemical (social) authority.16 Beyond Martí, this authority emerged in Latin America not only in opposition to the ‘‘contents’’ of the modernizing project, but also in defiance of the ‘‘scientific’’ uses of language favored by a state-oriented politics and its various forms of positivism. Hence, Martí’s emphasis on the literary authority at work in representation does not presuppose a distantiation from the social. Rather, the literary quality of the gaze is what guarantees ‘‘the truth’’ in ‘‘Our America,’’ the representation’s claim to political authority. According to this strategy of legitimation, literature portrayed itself as the discourse still capable of representing the origin, the autochthonous, and all those marginalized elements left unrepresented and unrepresentable by rationalizing languages in the service of modernization. In this sense, the very form of discourse in ‘‘Our America’’ fulfills a fundamental political function. While clearly devalued in the utilitarian economy of meaning that regulated state-oriented discourses, this literary language posits itself as an alternative paradigm, as the form to be learned by good statespeople, ‘‘creators,’’ in order to govern the originary world of America, centered in ‘‘the soul of the land’’ (appendix , p. ). ‘‘Throughout the Latin nations of the continent and the sorrowful islands of the sea, the Great Semí is seated astride his condor, sowing the seed of new America’’ (p. ). In ‘‘Our America,’’ a text assembled around the conjugative and condensatory power of metaphor, literature represents itself as the 

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cultivation of this dissemination, the gathering together of seeds scattered over the earth, to recast itself in the form and image of arborescent knowledge. At the risk of being redundant, this America is the space par excellence of the figure, the trope, the tropic of foundation; hence, literature’s claim to priority as an authority in the practice of good government. The tropology of ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ with its ineluctable telluric inflection, was not new for Martí. It refers back to a concept of modern literature— differentiated from belles lettres and state politics—that Martí had been elaborating since the beginning of the s: literature as a privileged hermeneutic, perhaps the only one in a secularized society capable of reconstructing the experience of a lost totality; the only means with which to interpret the obscure signs of originary harmony, dislocated and decomposed by the unfolding of progress and modernity. In the modern era, it is the poet who can mediate among the forces of history, ‘‘the impatient man and disdainful nature’’; or perhaps the ‘‘mute mother’’ who hides ‘‘the secret of birth.’’ 17 We may recall from the previous chapter that in ‘‘Walt Whitman, the Poet,’’ Martí had written: A literature that announces and spreads the final and joyful harmony between apparent contradictions; a literature that as the spontaneous counsel and teaching of Nature itself, heralds identity in a peace higher than the dogmas and rival passions that divide and shed blood among nations in their elementary stages; a literature that inculcates in Man’s terrified spirit a conviction of ultimate beauty and justice so deeply rooted that the penury and squalor of life can neither dishearten nor embitter it, will not only lead to a social state much closer to perfection than any known up to now, but through the harmonious brotherhood of reason and grace [literature] will nourish Humanity—longing for a sense of wonder and poetry—with the religion that had confusedly awaited since it had known the hollowness and insufficiency of its ancient creeds.18 With the power of traditional systems of representations relativized in the ‘‘wretched times’’ of modernity, it became possible for literature to assume this compensatory task: to take in hand the scraps and ruins of experience in order to reconstruct the totality of ‘‘the one,’’ the foundation, the lost origin hidden behind the fragmentation unleashed by the division of labor, rationalizing economics, and the disenchantment of the world.19 ‘‘Nuestra América’’ presupposes this strategy of legitimation: the assertion of the redemptive, auratic power of literature.20 At the same time, however, the essay extended the domain of the literary gaze considerably, enThe Art of Good Governance

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abling literature to apply its hermeneutics to political enigmas and effectively Latin Americanizing its aesthetic critique of modernity. In the prologue to ‘‘The Poem of the Niagara,’’ Martí went so far as to relate the emergence of the new literature to the experience of privatization; he was referring, of course, to a loss of the collective, epic dimensions of life that in traditional societies guaranteed the importance and social influence of literature.21 But ‘‘Our America’’ manifests the attempt to overcome the ‘‘crisis,’’ the alienation from the public sphere that in ‘‘The Poem of the Niagara’’ defines the situation of the modern writer. Through the ars of good government, ‘‘Nuestra América’’ ushers in a repoliticization of literary discourse, an attempt to bring the authority of the aesthetic gaze to the very center of the Latin American public sphere. It was not simply a question of subordinating literature to political imperatives; the issue instead concerned the indispensable place of a literary knowledge in the administration of good government, based on ‘‘the power of the soul in the soil, harmonious and artistic.’’ 22 As a form of resistance to modernization, literature effectively harnessed a defense against imperialism, against the threat of ‘‘they,’’ which signified at once the expansive modernity of the United States and the internally colonizing discourses of the ‘‘artificial letrados.’’ But this defense of ‘‘being,’’ articulated from within the emergent sphere of literature, implied a new frame— hierarchical and subordinative—of the heterogeneous American experience. Driven by a desire for legitimacy, by a claim to public influence, the ‘‘truth’’ of being—in Martí as elsewhere—is the effect of a formidable will to power. Notes  ‘‘One of the greatest risks involved in a study of Martí is to remain under the spell of his work. . . . Even if one does not forget that his work is the testimony of a man who did not separate art from life, speech from action, the richness of this work is such that it alone could absorb all our energies. But to give oneself over to such a singular fascination would not be an act of true fidelity to the spirit of Martí’’ (Cintio Vitier, ‘‘Martí futuro,’’ in Temas martianos, Cintio Vitier and Fina García Marruz (Havana: Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, ), .  Gabriela Mistral, ‘‘Los Versos sencillos de José Martí (Mexico City: Editorial Cultura, ), .  José Martí, ‘‘Our America,’’ see appendix  in this volume, p. .  José Martí, ‘‘Mother America,’’ in Our America: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, ed. and trans. Philip S. Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, ), ; translation modified.  José Martí, prologue to ‘‘The Poem of the Niagara,’’ in appendix , this volume.  Martí, appendix , p. .  The allusion refers to Benjamin’s angel of history, whose ‘‘face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage on wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken

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the dead, and make whole what has been smashed, but a storm is blowing from paradise. It has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress’’ (Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Twelve Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, ), –. The allusion to ‘‘tigers’’ here as well as in Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’ refers to Sarmiento’s portrayal of Argentine boss Facundo Quiroga, ‘‘el tigre de los llanos’’ (‘‘the tiger of the plains’’), as an allegory of barbarism and its opposition to the forces of civilization. Trans. Martí, ‘‘Mother America,’’ . Already in Sarmiento, the question ‘‘What are we?’’ took the form of an investigation (and an account) of an enigma: ‘‘Terrible shadow of Facundo, I shall evoke you, so that in shaking off the bloodstained dust that covers your smoldering ashes you may rise and explain to us the secret life and internal convulsions tearing at the entrails of a noble people. You possess the secret: reveal it to us!’’ (Domingo F. Sarmiento, Civilización y barbarie. Vida de F. Quiroga [Madrid: Editorial Nacional, ], ; first published in ). On the other hand, the account of the enigma is a classic mode of organizing the production of knowledge. In an alternative reading of Oedipus, Foucault analyzes tragedy—no longer as a tale of the subject’s desires and repressions, but rather, as a reflection on the relation between the search for the truth and the imposition of power: ‘‘The role played by the tyrant is not only characterized by power but also by a certain knowledge. . . . Oedipus is the one who manages, with his thought and his knowledge, to solve the famous riddle of the sphinx. [At] every moment he says that he vanquished the others, that he solved the riddle of the sphinx, that he cured the city’’ (Michel Foucault, La verdad y las formas jurídicas, trans. into Spanish by Enrique Lynch [Barcelona: Gedisa, ], ; currently, no English translation available). For his part, Jorge Luis Borges, in ‘‘The Library of Babel’’ (in Ficciones, trans. Anthony Kerrigan [New York: Grove Press, ]), had reflected on the violence and struggles for power implicated in a search for the key to the enigma. See also his ‘‘Poema conjetural’’ on the scholar Francisco Laprida, who in an encounter with ‘‘barbarism’’ at the moment of his death, discovers ‘‘the recondite key of my years . . . / The missing letter, the perfect / form known by God from the beginning.’’ See Jorge L. Borges, El otro, el mismo (Buenos Aires: Compañía Imperosa Argentina, ), –. Martí, ‘‘Our America,’’ . Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘‘Rhizome,’’ in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). Domingo F. Sarmiento, Conflicto y armonías de las razas en América (Buenos Aires: La cultura argentina, ), . First published in . This book by Sarmiento can be read as a classic example of the positivism against which Martí had so intensely contested: ‘‘There is no hate among races,’’ Martí writes, ‘‘because there are no races. Narrow-minded thinkers, thinkers by lamplight, stir up and string together races which the discerning traveler and the cordial observer will find only in the bookstore, not in the justice of nature, where the universal identity of man stands out against the background of his victorious love and turbulent appetite. . . . It is a sin against Humanity to foment and propagate opposition and hate among races’’ (see appendix , ). Nevertheless, in his attack against the concept of racial determinism prevalent in positivism, Martí tends to downplay the struggles and hierarchizing forces that, in fact, operated along the lines of ethnicity. He tends, for example, to hypostatize the concept of a supposedly integrated ‘‘mestiza’’ or ‘‘creole’’ America. Although

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the desire for homogenization and ethnic integration implies a critique of positivist racism, it nevertheless suppresses the factor of ethnicity as an effective means of exclusion and violence in the politics of the modernizing states at the end of the century. Francisco Bulnes, El porvenir de las naciones latinoamericanos ante las recientes conquistas de Europa y Norteamérica (Estructura y evolución de un continente) (Mexico City: Sociedad de Artistas y Escritores, n.d.), . Another influential positivist reflection on the Latin American ‘‘malady’’ was the  Nuestra América (Ensayo de psicología social) (Our America [An Essay in Social Psychology]) by the Argentine Carlos O. Bunge (Buenos Aires: Casa Vaccaro, ): ‘‘All things considered, the malady, our malady, could not be incurable. . . . I have found but one remedy, one single remedy for all our calamities: culture, to attain to the highest culture of the European peoples. . . . How is this possible? Through work’’ (p. ). ‘‘Culture,’’ for Bunge, was synonymous with progress and modernization. The metaphor of the ‘‘malady’’ and sociological cure is a generative nucleus also in Alcides Argüedas, Pueblo enfermo: contribución a la psicología de los pueblos hispanoamericanos (). In Cuba, several years after Martí’s death, Enrique J. Varona set his sights on the ‘‘enigma’’ in a  text entitled ‘‘El imperialismo a la luz de la Sociología’’ (‘‘Imperialism in the Light of Sociology’’). For Varona, the only way to defend Cuba from foreign powers (significantly, he is referring to England and not the United States) was to modernize, to urbanize the countryside, to shoulder the progress that would reinforce imperialist power. This text can also be read as one of the limits of the debate that Martí, already in , took up against positivism and its privileged ‘‘science,’’ sociology. (Varona’s text can be found in the Edición homenaje a E. J. Varona [Havana: Apra, ], –.) In Martí’s ‘‘Mother America,’’ the hierarchy is even more pronounced: ‘‘And when the elements that formed our nations reappear in this crisis of their elaboration, the independent Creole is the one who will prevail and find security, not the beaten indio, justly identified as such, serving as spur boy who holds the stirrup and puts his own foot into it so that he can appear higher than his master’’ (p. ). The polemical character of stylization in Martí becomes even clearer when one reads the rationalizing ‘‘style’’ of Enrique J. Varona in ‘‘El imperialismo a la luz de la Sociología.’’ Varona’s first move in this essay is to specify the position of his discourse within a discipline: ‘‘My theme is imperialism, but studied in the light of sociology; studied in the light of a science whose material is ancient—as are the preoccupations of men who come together to live in society—however new its name and its procedures of investigation may be in the light of a science that today takes first place in the preoccupations of men of knowledge’’ (pp. –). Certain features of this essay are highly emphasized, namely Varona’s taste for statistics, his attempt to avoid any mark of literary ‘‘style,’’ and the rigorous economy of his arguments. These are the very antipodes of Martí. It is not simply a question of variations in personal ‘‘styles,’’ but of ‘‘gazes,’’ parameters of discursive authority that generate contradictory objects (‘‘concepts’’ of Latin America). If Varona insists on speaking from the point of view of sociology, we would also have to say that Martí speaks—and represents Latin America—from the point of view of literature. Martí, ‘‘The Poem of the Niagara’’ (see appendix , p. ) José Martí, ‘‘El poeta Walt Whitman,’’ translated as ‘‘Walt Whitman, the Poet,’’ in On Art and Literature: Critical Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, ), ; translation modified. See also his ‘‘Emerson’’ () in the same volume. In one of his Escenas norteamericanas, Martí writes: ‘‘Science tortures and places the soul in a state of exhaustion and longing for the essential unity wherein everything appears gathered together and condensed, like the mountain at its peak. . . . The universe is the universal.

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And the universal is the uni-various, variation in the one. Nature, full of surprises, is all [as] one.’’ See ‘‘Novedades de Nueva York’’ in OC, vol. , –. Metaphor is the figure privileged by this longing for condensation, the attempt to see the ‘‘juncture’’ between the fragments disarticulated by rationalization and modern temporality.  ‘‘Only bourgeois art, which has become autonomous in the face of demands for employment extrinsic to art, has taken up positions on behalf of the victims of bourgeois rationalization. Bourgeois art has become the refuge for a satisfaction, even if only virtual, of those needs that have become, as it were, illegal in the material life-process of bourgeois society. I refer here to the desire for a mimetic relation with nature; the need for living together in solidarity outside the group egoism of the immediate family; the longing for the happiness of a communicative experience exempt from imperatives of purposive rationality and giving scope to imagination as well as spontaneity. Bourgeois art, unlike privatized religion, scientistic philosophy, and strategic-utilitarian morality, did not take on tasks in the economic and political systems. Instead it collected residual needs that could find no satisfaction within the ‘system of needs.’ Thus, along with moral universalism, art and aesthetics (from Schiller to Marcuse) are explosive ingredients built into the bourgeois ideology’’ (Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy [Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, ]). On the other hand, in Martí, the aesthetic defense of the ‘‘victims of rationalization’’ is presented as a defense of Latin American identity itself. The ‘‘interior’’ of auratic art thus expands the sphere of its action, positing itself as an art of government. This also is undoubtedly an effect of what we referred to earlier as the unequal modernization of institutions and discourses in Latin America: in contrast to Europe and the United States, the modern separation of functions discussed by Habermas did not achieve such massive consolidation in Latin America. Hence, the ‘‘confusion’’ of roles as a distinctive feature, for example, of Martí and fin de siècle Latinoamericanismo.  In ‘‘The Poem of the Niagara,’’ Martí points out: ‘‘And like the man from Auvergne dying in happy Paris, more from the ills of the country than from bedazzlement, where everyone whom one pauses to gaze on goes about besieged with the sweet evil of this century, the poets today—simple Auvergnese in bustling and sumptuous Lutetia—have a nostalgia for the great deed’’ (see appendix , p. ); ‘‘Hence these pale, complaining poets; hence this new painful and tormented poetry; hence this intimate, confidential, and personal poetry, a necessary consequence of the times’’ (p. ). On the privatization and ‘‘psychologization’’ of the modern literary subject as an effect of the dissolution of epic and collective possibilities in literature, see Michel Foucault’s essay on Hölderlin, ‘‘The Father’s No,’’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. and trans. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ). It can be said, however, that Martí resists such a privatization. His Latinoamericanismo, as a reading of the Versos sencillos would demonstrate, is an attempt to overcome the ‘‘alienation’’ of poetry, and to convert literature into the paradigm of collective, national, and continental identity.  Martí, ‘‘Mother America,’’ .

The Art of Good Governance



 The Repose of Heroes: Poetry and War in José Martí

The year  marked the centennial of the death of José Martí. He fell in the heat of battle on May  at Dos Ríos, in the Oriental province of Cuba, several weeks after the beginning of the war against the Spanish colonial army. According to the testimony of those who accompanied him, Martí rode at the head of his troops on a white horse against an ambuscade.1 His corpse, captured and mutilated by enemy soldiers, was buried in a potter’s field and was not recovered by the liberating army until the end of the war. Over  years later, around the radical absence of his body, monuments continue to proliferate, speeches multiply. And they dispute the silence. Martí died for the fatherland. He gave his life for a meaning of justice: the most basic and material condition of his existence for the sake of an idea of a future community. What conditions made such an exchange possible: an exchange between the body of the poet-soldier and the principles of a future fatherland? What discourses intervene to produce an ethic of patriotism, a nexus of identification, the logic that regulates the value of an exchange manifested in the greatest gift of all that a soldier, particularly one who falls in battle, offers his community? 2 Almost two decades before his death (while he was living in Guatemala), Martí wrote to General Máximo Gómez, veteran of the Ten Years War (– ), a passionate letter of introduction. ‘‘Here I live,’’ he laments, ‘‘dead with shame because I am not fighting.’’ 3 Initiating an extraordinary exchange between the young writer and the experienced soldier, the letter situates us before the problematic relation between writing and the exigencies of war. Let us examine the hierarchies that define the subject positions in the letter, beginning with the distant and peripheral place from which Martí expresses his admiration for the military hero’s vitality and vigorous capacity for action. ‘‘It has moved me many times to think about the way you fight in battle. I have written about it, I have spoken about it. . . . in the modern history of war I have not encountered anything similar; neither have I seen it in the ancient.’’ Martí petitions Gómez for information, with the objective of

writing a book on the war and also a biography of the general. The letter thus acts as a double mirror that at once constitutes the figure of the soldier in Martí’s fateful project—to recall from the past a heroism of epic resonance— as it does the intellectual as subject, who is inscribed in the same peripheral site that Martí has marked out for himself. In the double play of who writes and who is written, the writer simultaneously invents the hero and himself. At first glance, Martí places these positions into a hierarchy of unequal and uneven exchange. He recognizes heroism as virile and powerful, while he places himself in the position of what he judges to be the derivative nature (secundariedad) of words—that mediated and passive space of writing—from which he admires and prioritizes the actions emblematized by the healthy and complete body of the military soldier. ‘‘Seriously ill and tightly bound, I think, see, and write,’’ Martí explains, identifying writing with a physical lack, as the contemplative exercise of a subject incapable of military action. ‘‘I will be a chronicler, since I cannot be a soldier,’’ he adds, intending one day to publish ‘‘the hidden feats of our great men.’’ And yet, it is important that we not overlook the multiple layers ( pliegues) of the statement, the negotiation at work in the gesture of recognition granted to that powerful other. For one thing, the chronicler’s gaze and act of writing are postulated as the conditions of possibility for any soldier’s ‘‘greatness’’ inasmuch as that chronicler makes public, by means of writing, the soldier’s ‘‘hidden feats.’’ For another, one would need to explore Martí’s critique of violence, which some years later induced him, in a moment of rupture with the military leaders of the revolutionary movement, to remind Gómez that ‘‘a people is not founded as a military camp is commanded’’ (p. ).4 From the beginning of the s, such a critique would be grounded in the defense of a poetic and spiritual sensibility, which according to Martí, ensured the coherence and meaning of a just war, a revolution inevitably violent yet directed as ‘‘a detailed and visionary work of thought’’ (p. ). In contrast, the closure of that first letter is deeply enigmatic, as Martí bids the general farewell by signing himself ‘‘the sad mutilated one’’ (el mutilado triste). What mutilation does he refer to? The chronic pain that Martí suffered, in part because of the brutality of his imprisonment in Cuba at the age of seventeen (), was certainly not simply metaphoric. But, the dramatic closure of Martí’s letter suggests a cut or fragmentation that can also be read, on another register, as the effect of the tense emergence of a subject profoundly divided, split by the incisive opposition between the priority of action and the supplementarity and suspect passivity of representation: a subject split by the ‘‘abhorrence that I hold for words that are not accompanied by acts’’ (p. ). The Repose of Heroes



The opposition between words and acts—the cut that mutilates, that blocks the possibility and potency of an organic heroic subject—brings to mind the cervantine topos of armas y letras, inscribed througout Latin American history, for example, in the work of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega y Ercilla. In the nineteenth century, one finds it at work in the writings of Simón Bolívar and the Campaña del ejército grande of Sarmiento, who emphatically laments the subordinate role of the chronicler on the field of battle. The ‘‘shame’’ that Martí communicates to General Gómez, however, is more radical in the sense that it inaugurates—precisely in the experience of guilt, out of an ‘‘envy for those who fight’’—the constitution of a new kind of intellectual as subject, whose relation to war and the future fatherland will be mediated (up until the very moment of Martí’s death at Dos Ríos) by an aesthetic autonomization. Let us examine this process more closely. From the start of the s, when Martí resided in New York, his discourse on war was enmeshed in a complex and intense reflection on the crisis and reconfiguration of modern literature. His  prologue to the Poema del Niágara initiated the reflection by identifying the emergence of ‘‘modern poetry’’ with the ‘‘nostalgia of the great deed,’’ and the dissolution of the conditions that had made possible the normative and nomic contents of an epic authority in literature.5 As Martí suggests, such a process entails the ‘‘sufferings of modern man’’ (appendix , p. ) before the transformations of a ‘‘new social state’’ (p. ), in which ‘‘every image that was hitherto revered [is] found dethroned and stripped; and even the images of the future as yet unknown’’ (p. ); it entails an age marked by the ‘‘blinding of the sources and this obfuscation of the gods’’ (p. ). Martí explicitly relates the new social state—linked to what Max Weber later called the ‘‘disenchantment of the world’’ as an effect of modern rationalization—to the dissolution of a discursive and institutional fabric of belief that, until that moment, guaranteed the central authority of literary forms in the articulation of the constitutive nomos of the social order.6 Hence, the poet with ‘‘broken wings’’: a solitary figure in a landscape of ruins, who ‘‘presents himself before us, armed with every weapon, in an arena where he sees neither combatants nor spectators; nor does he see any prize.’’ 7 The crisis of heroism that Martí attributes to the dissolution of epic possibilities in modern literature exceeds the simple question of literary genre. It is, in fact, inscribed in a restructuring of the very conditions of social communication, which according to Martí, were undergoing an intense fragmentation. In Martí’s words, this fragmentation is what brought about the ‘‘dismemberment of the human mind’’ (p. ) and the ‘‘decentralization of the understanding’’ (p. ). An entire symbolic order that had once ensured 

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the articulations of society, the stability of its nexuses, and the effectiveness of social identification was being reconfigured. Such transformations gave a specificity and relative autonomy to literature. As it has been argued in the first part of this book, rationalization subjected an emergent class of intellectuals to a new division of labor, leading to the professionalization of the literary medium and delineating the reassignment of tasks for writers in the public sphere. Perhaps even more important, the autonomization of the literary field generated a new kind of subject, distinct and frequently in competition and conflict with other subjects and discursive practices, all of which in turn demarcated the fields of their own social authority. This literary subject was constituted in a new circuit of communicative interaction that led to the differentiation of newly independent yet overlapping spheres of knowledge comprising the social realm, each of which had its own immanent laws for the validation and legitimation of its statements. Beyond the simple construction of new objects or themes, we are speaking of an emerging discursive authority that was crystallized through the intensification of its labor on language as the decisive element in the elaboration of literature’s specific strategies of social intervention. Its gaze, its particular logic—the economy of values with which the literary subject cuts across and hierarchizes social matter—marked out the limits of that sphere more or less specific to the cultural aesthetic. To recapitulate, the unevenness of autonomization is what produced an irreducible hybridity in the literary subject and made possible the proliferation of mixed forms—the chronicle, the essay— which register, on the same surface of their heteronomous forms and modes of representation, the contradictory drives that set in motion the hybrid subject constituted on the frontiers, in the zones of contact and passage between literature and the demands of other discursive and social practices. Autonomization had effects that, for Martí, were profoundly problematic. Although he welcomed some aspects of the ‘‘decentralization of the understanding,’’ which to a degree implied the democratization of media in an epoch when ‘‘the beautiful has come to be the domain of all’’ (p. ), autonomization encouraged the folding back of the literary subject on himself and the demotion of literature’s social effects. ‘‘Life,’’ Martí writes, ‘‘intimate, feverish, unfastened, impulsive, clamorous life—has come to be the principal theme and, along with nature, the only legitimate subject of modern poetry’’ (p. ): Hence, the pale and groaning poets; hence, this new painful and tormented poetry; hence, this intimate, confidential, and personal poetry, a necessary consequence of the times—ingenuous and useful, like a The Repose of Heroes



song of kinsmen when it springs from a healthy and vigorous nature; dismayed and ridiculous when evoked through the strings of a feeble, gifted feeler. . . . Like women, weak women would seem the men of today, who . . . are likely to exhaust the honey-sweet wine that seasoned the festivals of Horace. (p. ) Martí responded to the folding back of the lyrical subject with marked ambivalence, even with suspicion that the autonomization of interdependent spheres of knowledge reduced literature to a mere state or position of solipsism, a ‘‘weak’’ form of social intervention. His reflection, as we shall see, inscribes the emergence of modern poetry in a drama of virility that feminizes the marginality of literature with respect to ‘‘strong’’ and effective discourses of instrumental rationality. Thus, one finds in Martí, on the one hand, a ‘‘nostalgia for the great deed’’ (p. ) and, on the other, the same emphasis with which he, throughout the prologue to the Poema del Niágara (along with the better part of his poetry, particularly Ismaelillo and Versos libres), transposes the functions of a language of war to the ‘‘battles’’ of the solitary poet. Martí offers us a new kind of warrior: ‘‘he is of those righteous leaders who lead with the lyre’’ (p. ), as if in some way the metaphor of the poet-soldier ensured the vigor and virile will of the subject, thereby compensating for the ‘‘frailty,’’ the derivative quality, and the ‘‘feminization’’ of language, which Martí saw as a special risk of modern poetry. Of course, neither ‘‘femininity’’ nor ‘‘frailty’’ are essential attributes of poetry: we are dealing with a response to autonomization, a reaction that ambivalently associates the new lyrical subject with malleable, weak forms of thought. Such a reaction was motivated by the suspicion that the interiorization of literary language into its own sphere had at least two effects: it reduced the capacity of literature to intervene in public affairs, and in the most radical and nocturnal instances of the lyrical subject’s folding back and over itself, it problematized the relation between an aesthetic drive and ethicopolitical imperatives, since the radicalization of the aesthetic drive tended to collapse the economy of truth that formed the very basis of social communicability. Hence Martí’s reticence in publishing two books of verse, Ismaelillo () and Versos sencillos (), and in deciding to leave unpublished his most extensive work, Versos libres (written in New York during the s and early s).8 ‘‘Before I make a collection of my verse, I would like to make a collection of my actions.’’ 9 Yet he never stopped writing poetry. It proliferated, motivated by the same tensions generated by the autonomization of the literary, by the struggles of an intensified writing set in motion precisely by 

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the double movement of the interstitial subject positioned between dos patrias (two fatherlands)—Cuba and the night—in the memorable poem from Versos libres.10 Dos patrias Dos patrias tengo yo: Cuba y la noche. ¿O son una las dos? No bien retira su majestad el sol, con largos velos y un clavel en la mano, silenciosa Cuba cual viuda triste me aparece ¡Yo sé cual es ese clavel sangriento que en la mano le tiembla! Está vacío mi pecho, destrozado está y vacío en donde estaba el corazón. Ya es hora de empezar a morir. La noche es buena para decir adiós. La luz estorba y la palabra humana. El universo habla mejor que el hombre. Cual bandera que invita a batallar, la llama roja de la vela flamea. Las ventanas abro, ya estrecho en mí. Muda, rompiendo las hojas del clavel, como una nube que enturbia el cielo, Cuba, viuda, pasa . . . Two Fatherlands Two fatherlands do I have: Cuba and the night. Or are the two one? As his majesty the sun retires, silent Cuba, how sad a widow, appears to me, with long veils and a carnation in hand. I know well that bloody carnation trembling in her hand! My breast is empty, destroyed and empty that place where my heart used to be. Now is the time to begin dying. It is a good night for saying farewell. Light disturbs as does the human word. The universe speaks better than man. As a flag calling us to arms, the red flame The Repose of Heroes



of the candle flickers. The windows almost closed in me, I’ll open. Mute, breaking off the petals of the carnation, like a cloud that darkens the sky, Cuba, a widow, goes by . . . The first verse places the subject, initially emphatic, marked by the sign of possession, between two patrias. But how can one have two fatherlands? It would seem that the concept of patria refers to the native country, the place of origin, so longed for by Martí in the course of his exile. If so, neither the duality to which the title refers nor the allusion to the night in the first verse are explained. The origin, by definition, is the only source of identification for a subject; hence, the constitutive paradox of the poem in its assertion of irreducible duality at the very foundation. The paradox is intensified by the unstable division between Cuba—the patria civil, the proper name of an emerging nation—and the night. How can a fatherland be the night, or a night the fatherland? Certainly, night can be a fatherland only in a metaphorical sense, which may lead us to think that the shift between Cuba and the night registers the problematic passage between the proper, univocal name of the political fatherland and a metaphorical designation. The metaphor of a nocturnal fatherland runs through the wider context of Versos libres. For example, we read in ‘‘La noche es la propicia’’ (‘‘Night is timely’’) the following: ‘‘A la creación la oscuridad conviene / . . . la oscuridad fecunda de la noche’’ (‘‘For creation is darkness most suitable . . . the fecund darkness of the night’’). In ‘‘Aguila blanca,’’ Martí writes: Y las oscuras Tardes me atraen, cual si mi patria fuera La dilatada sombra. ¡Oh verso amigo: Muero de soledad, de amor me muero! And dark afternoons attract me as if my fatherland were the ever-widening shadow. O dear verse: I die of solitude, of love am I dying! In the second verse of ‘‘Dos patrias,’’ the brightness of the sun, ‘‘his majesty,’’ is opposed to the darkness of the night, which is associated with the practice of poetry, the second fatherland, of the subject. The subject is placed on the borders that separate two radically distinct modes of naming: he is situated between two fatherlands, two modes of producing sense and meaning, two spheres of legitimacy. Between two laws: on the one hand, 

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the demand for an ethicopolitical denomination—the patria civil, Cuba—and on the other, the metaphorical fatherland of the night—that dark, rebellious practice and nocturnal intensity of the aesthetic drive. The subject emerges precisely there, between the opposed spheres of legitimacy, to enable the passage, the nexus between both laws, attempting to overcome the scission or fragmentation brought about by autonomization. The interstitial subject will be the one to turn the trajectory of poetry around and back, to the center of combat, and from there bring forth the gift of poetry to war. ‘‘Or are the two one?’’ The synthesis, we should perhaps emphasize, appears immediately interrogated. The poem certainly suggests that a synthesis can be employed to overcome the paradox between a political designation and metaphor. The assumption of a synthesis, of binding, of connections, between Cuba and the night may well be the principle that overdetermines the tropological trajectory of the poem, whose configuration deploys, from the third and fourth verses, the metaphorical conjunction of two laws via the condensation of the dark widowed Cuba that appears before the poet at the exact moment when the brightness of the sun, the other law, withdraws. The metaphorical proceeding redistributes the field of oppositions in a double movement: first, it separates Cuba, the political patria, from the brightness of the sun (the king), in order to locate it immediately in the dark reign of the night, the domain of the aesthetic drive—as if the subject asserted, by means of a metaphorical rearticulation, an alternative mode of thinking politics in accordance with the nocturnal drive of an aesthetic legitimacy, opposed to the solar luminosity of the patria civil. Such an assertion can certainly be seen in ‘‘Aguila blanca’’: Oh noche, sol del triste, amable seno Donde su fuerza el corazón revive, Perdura, apaga el sol, ( . . . ) Librame, eterna noche del verdugo, O dale, a que me dé, con la primera Alba, una limpia y redentora espada. Que con qué la has de hacer? Con luz de estrellas! O night, sun of the sad, beloved breast From whence revives the heart its force, Endure, extinguish the sun . . . Free me, eternal night, of the executioner, Or give, that might be given to me, with the first dawn, a clean and redeeming sword. With what must it be made? With the light of stars! The Repose of Heroes



Nocturnal luminosity guarantees the return, the passage of the poet toward combat and the political itself. It is indeed a luminosity designated by the gendered darkness surrounding it, the night that appears in ‘‘Dos patrias’’ as eroticized in that revealing reinscription of the femme fatale who breaks off the petals of a carnation, beneath the window of the solitary subject observing her. Eroticization is crucial: the heart is transposed, with the figurative passage of the metaphorical object (the carnation), from the breast of the subject into the hands of the patria: ‘‘I know well what that bloody carnation trembling in her hand is! My breast is empty, destroyed and empty that place where my heart used to be.’’ More than just a metaphor, then, the bloody carnation is a commentary on the metaphorical procedure, the passage from one patria to another, the night; a reflection on the transformative process of metaphor, designated as a mechanism of articulation, of an amorous exchange between the poetic subject and patriotic ethic.11 The metaphor transports the blood of the heart to the emblem of the patriotic flower. Metaphor guarantees a passage not only between the two spheres of legitimacy separated in the first verse, but also between the body of the subject and principles of the patria. Metaphor acts here fundamentally as an oblational figure of exchange: it is the bearer of a gift on which a patriotic and amorous interpellation is based. And the gift is tied inexorably to death, to the emptiness of the body’s destroyed chest, which nevertheless marks the sublime encounter with the ‘‘all’’ in which ‘‘the universe / speaks better than man.’’ The final verses, in contrast, take up the scene of inscription. The red flame of the candle—another instance of nocturnal light, which condenses within it the color of blood and the flag as it burns brightly—is set forth as the condition that makes writing as a form of combat possible. These final verses, however, come to situate the subject in the interiorized and solitary space from which he sees Cuba ‘‘go by.’’ That is, this interior refers us once again to the space demarcated by the aesthetic autonomization that Martí ties to the solitude of the modern poet. ‘‘Y yo, pobre de mí!, preso en mi jaula, / la gran batalla de los hombres miro’’ (‘‘And I, poor me! prisoner in my cell / The grand battle of men I watch’’), we read in ‘‘Media noche’’ (‘‘Midnight’’) from Versos libres. ‘‘The windows / almost closed in me, I’ll open,’’ the poet adds in ‘‘Dos patrias.’’ But outside the Cuba that goes by is a fleeting line that crosses and darkens the transparent sky: an object in motion, elusive, lost. Far from any synthesis, the movement of the dark line cancels the gift, the epiphany of the encounter. And yet, one must not underestimate the weight, the exasperation, of the attempt, which nonetheless motivates the becoming (devenir), the 

   

movement of desire in Martí’s poetry, even perhaps, as this desire brought Martí to a fate that he heroically confronted at Dos Ríos, between two rivers, in that moment of death for the patria. Although the lyrical subject observes the loss of the object, the evanescence of Cuba as it passes by, this subject cannot account for the multiplicity of positions intertwined within Martí’s discourse. The solitude of the folded subject in Versos libres, along with his exile from the patria civil, evidently finds itself counteracted by the reinsertion of the political into Martí’s life, particularly after his return to active politics in the late s, culminating partly in the interventions centered on the founding of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Cubano) in ; and later, in his discourse on the revolution as a just war. Indeed, Martí’s engagement in the Cuban emancipatory movement would seem to have definitively overcome the isolation and inaction of the subject divided by the paradox of dos patrias, just as his heroic militancy would seem to have overcome the principal opposition between the prioritization of acts and the demotion of the word and representation as secondary, only to place the word in an even more radical silence, in the definitive repose that death concedes to the poet-soldier on the field of battle.12 While he lived, however, his discursive practices were grounded in more than one field of opposition, in more than a resting place of a synthesis capable of overcoming radical gaps and differences; his discourse traverses the borders, the thresholds that separate and with the same movement create zones of contact, points of intersection and passage. Perhaps it would be fitting to recall the passage of the poet in his return to the native land. Martí began to write the Diario de campaña (War Journal), his lucid account of the formation of the soldier-subject, in the Dominican Republic, where he arrived from the United States en route to Cuba in .13 The narrative continues when Martí journeys through Haiti, closing only hours before his death at Dos Ríos. Like no other text written by Martí about war, the Diario de campaña mounts a sharp critique of violence that asserts the necessity of aesthetic mediation, the only kind of mediation capable of containing and granting meaning to the ineluctably aggressive energy of the revolutionary forces: The spirit I have sown is that which has spread, across the island; with it, and guided in accordance with it, we will soon triumph, and with the greatest victory, and for the greatest peace. I foresee that, for a little while at least, the force and will of the revolution will be divorced from this spirit—it will be deprived of its enchantment and taste [encanto y The Repose of Heroes



gusto], and of its ability to prevail from this natural consortium; [it] will be robbed of the benefit of this conjunction between the activity of the revolutionary forces and the spirit that animates them.14 Martí finds the revolution also to be divided by a double drive: by the deployment of an uncontainable and violent activity; and by the ‘‘enchantment and taste’’ of a spirit that needs to be called on to direct action. Is this not the call of the aesthetic (‘‘enchantment and taste’’) in the midst of war? Martí’s insistence on it at various times in the War Journal is only partially explained by his recorded disagreements with General Antonio Maceo, another military leader of the patriotic army, who at one point accused him of being ‘‘a city-bred defender of the obstacles and hindrances hostile to the military movement’’ (p. ). More important, the opposition splits the revolutionary subject; it unleashes the dispute among differentiated positions, all of which need to intervene in the multiple movement toward emancipation. For war, in Martí, is what is outside discourse, both feared and desired: the violent energy to shatter the order of forms.15 Hence, the revolutionary movement required the intervention of another subject, perhaps ‘‘weak’’ and ‘‘malleable,’’ but capable of conjoining and mediating the tendency constitutive of war toward dispersion and destruction; a subject capable of guaranteeing the meaning of justice behind every act of violence. In the vicissitudes of that subject would be inscribed the gift of poetry to war. Notes  

     



Ezequiel Martínez Estrada has collected several accounts of Martí’s death in his prologue to José Martí, Diario de campaña (Montevideo: Biblioteca de Marcha, ),  ff. On the ethic of patriotism, see the lucid history of the topic pro patria mori by Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), –. On the economy of the gift and reciprocity, see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. I. Cunnison (New York: W. W. Norton, ); and Jacques Derrida’s critical reading of Mauss in Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, vol.  of Given Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). José Martí, Epistolario de José Martí y Máximo Gómez, in Papeles de Martí, ed. Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, vol.  (Havana: Imprenta El Siglo XX, ), . This letter, written in New York, is dated  October . See appendix , . Max Weber, ‘‘Religious Rejection of the World,’’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Appendix , . On Martí’s ambivalence regarding the moral value of poetic practice in Ismaelillo, see Enrico Mario Santí, ‘‘Ismaelillo, Martí y el modernismo,’’ Revista Iberoamericana, no.  (): – .

   

 



 

 

José Martí, Cuadernos de apuntes, in Obra literaria, ed. Cintio Vitier (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . ‘‘Dos patrias’’ used to be included in Martí’s posthumous collection of poetry, Flores del destierro, edited by Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda in . In their critical edition of Martí’s Poesia completa (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, ), E. de Armas, Fina Garcia Marruz, and Cintio Vitier identify ‘‘Dos patrias’’ as part of Versos libres (). On love and country, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); and Pierre Legendre, L’Amour du censeur: Essai sur l’ordre dogmatique (Paris: Seuil, ). On Martí’s fascination with death, see Calvert Casey, ‘‘Diálogos de vida y muerte,’’ in Memorias de una isla (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, ), –. In spite of its conjunctural nature, the Diario de campaña has been extremely influential in twentieth-century Cuban literature, particularly since José Lezama Lima and the Orígenes group celebrated the text’s fragmentary, intense poetic prose. The War Journal forms a pivotal point of reference in Lezama’s crucial Latin Americanist essay, La expresión americana (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, ). Lezama celebrates Martí’s will to create an event—a political event, we might add—through the poetic image (). On Lezama’s readings of Martí, see Arnaldo Cruz Malavé, El primitivo implorante: El ‘‘sistema poético del mundo’’ de José Lezama Lima (Amsterdam: Rodolphi, ). José Martí, Diario de campaña (Montevideo: Biblioteca de Marcha, ), . On war as a problematic of meaning and justice, see Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies; and Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Para una crítica de la violencia,’’ in Para una crítica de la violencia y otros ensayos, trans. R. Blatt Weinstein (Madrid: Taurus, ), –.

The Repose of Heroes



 Migratories

What does it mean to write in another country, a country distinct from the one a subject claims as his or her own? Under which register, apart from one’s mother tongue, does the subject recognize himself or herself ? How does s/he move into another language? And what are the borders of the community to which s/he adheres? What remains outside or behind? In a somewhat paradoxical way, this reflection has been brought about by a suggestion by Theodor W. Adorno on exile and dwelling: ‘‘In exile, the only house is that of writing.’’ 1 The implications of the metaphor are obvious enough. For Adorno, in the face of personal, cultural, and juridical fluctuations and displacements produced by journeys and border crossings, writing becomes an effective way to establish a domain, a place of one’s own on the other side of the border. Thus, the house constructed by writing would seem to be able to establish a compensatory place, armed precisely against the grain of external forces, including that of the ‘‘danger’’ of any major or minor contact with a foreign tongue.2 The house of writing shelters the subject—in a complex play of presences and absences in the comings and goings of his or her missives, memories, and fictions of origin—in a decentralized space between two worlds. The subject’s positioning in such an interstitial site calls us to reflect on the problematics of residency and citizenship (in both the juridical and cultural senses of the word). In this brief chapter on Latino writing in the United States, let us suspend from the start that aura surrounding the word ‘‘exile,’’ without skimping over the irreducible differences among the historical forces responsible for different (e)migratory experiences. For the aura of the exiled tends to make distance familiar by conceiving of it as a brief pause or interruption in the becoming of a continuous identity, often inscribing the subject in the fiction of a return to the native land. Even the homeward bound find themselves in a different country. It is also true, however, that the problematic of residency— that zone where juridical identification and interpellated subjectivity intersect—is more obvious in the case of a person inscribed in networks of identi-

fication that are not necessarily amenable or complementary to the project of returning to the native land. In any case, by posing these questions, we situate ourselves before one of the most decisive phenomena of the end of our century: the migratory flux, the emergence of new identity and cultural practices unleashed by the processes of deterritorialization and redistribution of boundaries in the deployment of contemporary globalization. These processes, it seems, call on us to rethink the modern categories through which the Western world, for several centuries already, has conceived the problematic of identity and citizenship. ‘‘In exile, the only house is that of writing.’’ What house can writing found and firmly ground, beyond its emphatic promise to do so? In what way can writing guarantee the residence and home of the subject? Two poems about absence and separation enable us to approach these questions: first, a text by Martí, one of the first intellectuals of the Latino community in New York, and second, a poem by Tato Laviera, a contemporary Nuyorican poet. Although this reflection does not attempt to trace the line of a historical process, it is necessary to suggest, if only in passing, that in their greatly differing positions on the problematic of origin and identity, Martí and Laviera mark two of the possible extremes or boundaries of the Latinoamericanista foundational discourse, its genealogy and pedagogical apparatuses.3 The first poem, ‘‘Domingo triste’’ (‘‘Sad Sunday’’), was written toward the middle of the s, when Martí resided in New York City. Let us briefly recall that he lived there for more than fifteen years, perhaps the key period of his political life and intellectual formation before his death in battle in  at the age of forty-three. ‘‘Domingo triste’’ forms part of the Versos libres, a posthumous book by Martí that records, with a verbal intensity unusual in its time, the complex experience of the poet’s displacement in modernity.4 It is from there that the theme of exile in Martí can be read, beyond the biographical references, as an early reflection on the changing, displaced situation of the writer in the capitalist city—a society oriented toward new principles of organization that problematized the relationship between literature and the predominant institutions of the public sphere. Without losing sight of the greater context in which ‘‘Domingo triste’’ was produced, let us rather examine the identification networks into which the subject inserts himself in the poem: Las campanas, el Sol, el cielo claro Me llenan de tristeza, y en los ojos Llevo un dolor que el verso compasivo mira, Un rebelde dolor que el verso rompe Migratories



Y es ¡oh mar! la gaviota pasajera Que rumbo a Cuba va sobre tus olas! Vino a verme un amigo, y a mí mismo Me preguntó por mí; ya en mí no queda Más que un reflejo mío, como guarda La sal del mar la concha de la orilla, Cáscara soy de mí, que en tierra ajena Gira, a la voluntad del viento huraño, Vacía, sin fruta, desgarrada, rota. Miro a los hombres como montes; miro Como paisajes de otro mundo, el bravo Codear, el mugir, el teatro ardiente De la vida en mi torno: Ni un gusano Es ya más infeliz: suyo es el aire Y el lodo en que muere es suyo. Siento la coz de los caballos, siento Las ruedas de los carros; mis pedazos Palpo: ya no soy vivo: ni lo era Cuando el barco fatal levó las anclas Que me arrancaron de la tierra mía! The bells, the Sun, the clear sky Fill me with sadness, and in my eyes I bear a pain for the compassionate verse to see, A rebellious pain for the verse to break And it is the passing seagull, oh sea That rides upon your waves on course to Cuba! A friend came to see me, and asked after me, After me; in me nothing remains Other than my reflection, like the Salt of the sea kept by the conch on the shore, I am a shell of myself, who in a foreign land Turns about, at the will of the reticent wind, Empty, barren, ripped, broken. I watch men like mountains; as if They were landscapes of another world, I watch the rough Elbowing, the lowing, the burning theater Of life around me: Not even a worm Is now more unhappy: his is the air 

   

And the sludge in which he dies is his. I sense the kick of the horses, I sense The wheels of the carts; the pieces of myself I feel: I am no longer living: nor was I When the fatal barge weighed anchor That tore me from my native land! The first stanza situates the subject at the boundaries that outline a space cut across by a partition: distance, drawn by the sea, between the melancholic subject and the absent place of origin. Significantly, even though the separation from the place of origin—Cuba, in line six—situates the I on a shore, it does not dissolve the subject, but rather, paradoxically marks him as the bearer of an absence, as he who ‘‘bears’’ the pain. That pain is the effect of a loss that, however, ‘‘fill[s] [him] with sadness’’ (‘‘Me llenan de tristeza’’). The first lines of the second stanza restate the paradoxical gesture of the bearer, even though the subject now carries not only an emotion, but also the discarded fragment or residue of an integral, original body: ‘‘ya en mí no queda / Más que un reflejo mío, . . . Cáscara soy de mí.’’ The identity of the subject is represented here as a residue, a remainder of the sea, displaced and contained in the receptacle of the conch. Like the conch, he still transmits an echo, a simulacrum of the sea’s presence, or of an absent yet repeated object. ‘‘Sin fruta’’ (‘‘barren’’), the subject represents himself as an instance of discontinuity that is as devalued as is the derivative existence (secundariedad) of the ‘‘reflection’’ that is the I in line nine: the deceiving simulacrum of the echo, or a remainder from the sea contained by the conch. Residue, simulacrum, discontinuity. In the experience of the (e)migratory flux, Martí’s writing imposes an economy of meaning, arranging places —the here and there—into a hierarchy, a kind of symbolic topography that nevertheless makes the identification of the subject possible. In that topography, the itinerary of the journey traces the history of a loss, a disintegration. S/he who leaves loses and, through contact with the foreign land, runs the risk of becoming an echo, a residue, a simulacrum, or derivative. The (e)migrant is a bearer of traces. And in sharp opposition to the dispossession on which the poem is so insistent, the subject projects the plenitude, the priority, the stability of ‘‘my native land’’ (‘‘tierra mía’’) on the other side of the sea—the essence lost by the (e)migrant subject. Inescapably bound to a telluric and territorializing imagery, that absent essence appears as the very center of identity, constituting the ‘‘capital zone’’ in a manner of speaking, of both the values that regulate the subject positions and the circulation of meaning in the text—not to mention the symbolic map that thereby fixes Migratories



its center and periphery, the interior, the borders, and the other side of the national territory. The discourse on the journey as loss and uprooting thus projects the articulation of a nationalist rhetoric. Still, in spite of the center that is nostalgically postulated therein, the poem is written here—or is it there? The here of plenitude is the there of the subject who is writing. The subject writes only on that shore that is delineated by separation and fracture. What house can be founded for the exile, then, by poetry? The act of writing appears thematized beginning with line four of the poem: ‘‘Un rebelde dolor que el verso rompe / Y es ¡oh mar! la gaviota pasajera / Que rumbo a Cuba va sobre tus olas!’’ The importance of the act of breaking, which opens up a series of key associations throughout the poem, must be emphasized. Nonetheless, the complexity of the syntax displays an irreducible ambiguity: is it the verse that ‘‘breaks’’ the pain, or is it rather that which is broken by the pain? The metaphor that connects the act of writing with the seagull [ gaviota] would tend toward the former, insofar as it suggests that writing casts a lasso, establishes contact with the absent land. It would seem, likewise, that the ‘‘passing seagull’’ is also a passenger seagull; after all, both meanings are contained in the adjectival pasajera. At once substitute and palimpsest of a carrier pigeon, the image of a passenger seagull returns us once again to the act of writing as missive or mediation. Yet there is a blank space in the poem immediately following, which cannot be explained simply by the metric requirements of the stanzas. The blank space literally marks a discontinuity. If we read it as such, as a significant element of the poem, the subsequent lines elaborating the imagery of fragmentation and being as residue acquire another meaning. The image of the conch shell on the shore, for instance, establishes a metaphorical link, a resonance, with the image in the previous stanza of the ‘‘passing seagull.’’ The association can be explained in the manner of a homology: the message is to the seagull what the echo is to the conch. That is, both seagull and conch bear the presence (message, echo) of an absent subject. But the homology can be reversed, to show how the ‘‘reticent wind’’ makes the broken, exiled self ‘‘turn about’’ in the same way that the wind makes the seagull into a passing or fleeting entity. In the logic of the poem, the journey of both the passing seagull and the migrant subject represents a destabilizing movement, a movement that negates the will and autonomy of the subject, opposing the foundation of any roots. Together, the seagull and conch shell, creatures of the reticent wind, elucidate the ambiguity of the earlier verse indicating a break or rupture: ‘‘Un rebelde dolor que el verso rompe’’ (line four). When ‘‘nothing is left / Other than my reflection’’ (‘‘ya en mí no queda / Más que un reflejo 

   

mío,’’ lines eight and nine), poetic verse—like the house of Adorno in exile— sets out to repeat something of the original plenitude that has been lost. It inscribes an image, an echo of the experience. The (e)migrant is thus not the only bearer of absences; separation is constitutive of the very act of writing. And writing returns us to that moment it becomes a creature of the wind, of echoes, of the derivative existence of reflections. The second poem examined here is entitled ‘‘Migración’’ (‘‘Migration’’); it forms part of the book Mainstream Ethics (ética corriente) by Laviera.5 From the start, the title suggests a break, a minimal elision, which anticipates one of its key processes. ‘‘Migration’’: in reference to demographic displacements, both Spanish and English languages generally privilege the prefix—emigration or immigration—which grants direction to the flux. The prefix fixes the coordinates of a map that represents the migratory process as a function of a going to or a coming from, from the beginning or end of the journey. For the territories between which the subject moves, the designation of the direction of the movement in the prefix deploys an opposition between the interior and exterior of the nation, which proves to be fundamental for the demarcation of the territory and, for the same reason, the production of its sense of integrity. Juridically and ideologically, this opposition has ineluctable consequences: for the territory that ‘‘receives,’’ the subject entering its interior is a foreign element, a kind of physical prolongation of the contiguous territory. Such a rhetoric of projected frontiers feeds into an entire tropology of contact and risk, or in the worst of cases, invasion and contagion. In contrast, the distance of the (e)migrant registers, in the very exit and occurrence of the journey, the integrity of the national territory that is left behind and closed by the subject’s departure. On another level, however, the prefix is also important in a more personal sense. For example, for the person who moves, it is not the same to designate oneself as an emigrant as it is an immigrant. The distinction between the ‘‘entrance’’ and ‘‘exit’’ may well set the scene for an identitary drama, which can very well emphasize an identification with the country of origin or the incorporation into the society that is the destination of the journey. Inside/outside, origin/destination: drama of identity, but also narrative of space, the territorializing machine that once again inserts movement into the national symbolic network. The elision of the prefix in the title and throughout Laviera’s poem registers the gesture of a writing that problematizes the notion of the boundary demarcating the integrity of the territorialities, as well as the ideologization of the notions of ‘‘origin’’ and ‘‘destination’’ that map out and fix the movement. But in turn, as in the bulk of his other texts, the elision of Migratories



the prefix in the title applies to another border: that of the mother tongue, coming into contact with another language, English, and generating a tense zone of passage. Once again, this linguistic hybridity leads us to ask about the ‘‘citizenship’’ in which this writing is inscribed. This is not the place to discuss the role that the fiction of linguistic purity has played in the elaboration of discourses on the national identity of Puerto Rico.6 Suffice it to say, for now, that in those nationalist discourses, linguistic contact crystallizes a loss, the verbal mark of a national identity crisis. The crisis is a metaphor for a medical history that presupposes the precedence of a healthy body whose integrity is damaged by contact with the invading body. Laviera responds: los únicos que tienen problemas con el vernáculo lingüístico diario de nuestra gente cuando habla de las experiencias de su cultura popular son los que estudian solamente a través de libros porque no tienen tiempo para hablar a nadie, ya que se pasan analizando y categorizando la lengua exclusivamente sin practicar el lenguaje. the only ones who have problems with the daily linguistic vernacular of our people when speaking of the experiences of their popular culture are those who study only through books because they don’t have the time to talk to anybody, since they are caught up analyzing and categorizing the tongue exclusively without practicing the language.7 In the spirit of Laviera, if we consider language as a practice or performance of identity itself, and not as the effect of an immutable system of norms, we would relativize the power of the metaphor of crisis. That is, incidentally, Laviera’s mainstream ethic; his ‘‘ética corriente’’ (‘‘work-in-progress ethic’’), the subtitle adds ironically. It is the project to configure values—of a 

   

community, of a tradition—armed with the same experience that the migratory stream (corriente) unleashes in its destabilizing movement. How is such an alternative subjectivity constructed? ‘‘Migración’’ is precisely a brief exploration as to how an ethic—an alternative, portable method of judging—is put together. The migrant subject is named in the poem: Calavera, which literally means ‘‘skull’’ in Spanish, but can also refer to someone without good judgment. Like the subject in Martí’s poem, Calavera is located on a shore: New York’s East River, on the extreme Lower East Side. On that shore, also like the subject in Martí, Calavera lets himself go in a process of remembrance, and recites: ‘‘en mi viejo san juan,’’ calavera cantaba sus dedos clavados en invierno, fría noche, dos de la mañana, sentado en los stoops de un edificio abandonado, suplicándole sonidos a su guitarra, pero: sus cuerdas no sonaban, el frío hacía daño, noel estrada, compositor había muerto, un trovador callejero le lloraba: ‘‘cuántos sueños forge,’’ calavera voz arrastrándose, notas musicales, hondas huellas digitales guinando sobre cuerdas. ‘‘in my old san juan,’’ Calavera sang his fingers nailed into winter, cold night two in the morning, sittin’ on the stoops of an abandoned building, eliciting sounds from his guitar, but: its strings didn’t play the cold was painful, Noel Estrada, composer, had died, a troubadour of the streets cried to him: ‘‘how many dreams I’ve forged,’’ Calavera voice slurring, musical notes, deep fingerprints hanging on strings. Migratories



We remember the popular song without hesitation: the lines come from ‘‘En mi Viejo San Juan’’ (‘‘In My Old San Juan’’), a bolero from the s, composed by Noel Estrada in New York. In the last fifty years, this song like no other has become an anthem of Puerto Rican emigration in New York. Emigration, to repeat, because Estrada’s song is a whole anthem of nostalgia, a reminder of the past for a subject whose identity is defined by the hope of a return that never comes: ‘‘Pero el tiempo pasó / mi cabello blanqueó / ya la muerte me llama / y no pude volver al San Juan que yo amé / Puerto Rico del alma / Adiós, adiós, adiós, Borinquen querida, tierra de mi amor’’ (‘‘But time has passed / my hair’s turned white / already death calls / and I couldn’t return to the San Juan I loved / Puerto Rico of the soul / Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, dear Borinquen, land of my love’’). Written as a short homage after the composer’s death, Laviera’s poem quotes Estrada’s song almost completely. In fact, the beginning and end of the song are identical to those of the poem, in which Calavera—a subject astray, without judgment—tries to play Estrada’s notes on the guitar. A subject who is looking to occupy a place on the road: the poem represents not just the act of remembrance, but also dramatizes the complex relationship between the subject Calavera and the classic text—the road to and from the lost community. From the start, let us note that in Laviera’s poem, the relationship between the displaced subject and the origin is presented as the interaction between memory and text. Here, the foundational tropology of the land is not privileged; later, we may see that it is reinscribed, but always in a manner mediated by the quote and pastiche of Estrada’s song. It is as if the origin had always been, for the subject, a saturated discourse, a malleable and permanently unstable form, with which s/he nevertheless establishes (even in pastiche) an intense identification. Laviera’s subject, Calavera, also emerges as a bearer of traces. But in contrast to Martí, the traces for this subject do not delineate the silhouette, the outline of an absent plenitude. The trace is rather the score of musical notes from the song quoted, associated with those ‘‘deep fingerprints hanging on strings.’’ The fingerprints leave the trace of the street singer’s presence as he enacts the sonorousness of the popular classic. Its status as a ‘‘popular classic’’ cannot be underemphasized; for just as the song has been given a representative status by its popularity, so is it embodied, given presence, by the individual street singer. And he, in turn, leaves an impression, the identifying lines of his fingertips, on the notes of the song. The musical notes are thus doubly ‘‘fingerprints’’: they are the traces of both Calavera and every interpreter who has performed the song before him, the silhouette of an archetext that is realized only in the movement of the performer’s fingers. The 

   

generative nucleus of the poem is located in that interaction, in the relationship between the subject ‘‘sin juicio’’ (‘‘without judgment’’) and the path set forth by Estrada. Will the subject accept that path, that manner of judging? Or, to put it another way: how does the subject merge with it, in the itinerary of remembrance toward an origin promised by the song? Calavera sings: ‘‘adiós,’’ andando hacia el east river, ‘‘adios,’’ a batallar inconsecuencias, ‘‘adios,’’ a crear ritmos, ‘‘Borinquen,’’ a ganarle la fría noche, ‘‘querida,’’ a esperar la madrugada, ‘‘tierra,’’ a apagar la luna, ‘‘de mi amor,’’ esperando el sol, ‘‘adiós,’’ caliente calor, ‘‘adiós,’’ calavera lloraba, ‘‘adiós,’’ sus lágrimas, ‘‘mi diosa,’’ calientes, ‘‘del mar,’’ bajando hasta el suelo, ‘‘mi reina,’’ quemando la acera, la carretera, ‘‘del palmar,’’ lágrimas en transcurso, ‘‘me voy,’’ aclimaban las cuerdas, ‘‘ya me voy,’’ y pasaron por sus manos, ‘‘pero un día,’’ y todo se calentó, ‘‘volveré,’’ sin el sol, ‘‘a buscar,’’ y finalmente, ‘‘mi querer,’’ las cuerdas sonaron, ‘‘a soñar otra vez,’’ el frío no hacía daño, ‘‘en mi viejo,’’ el sol salió, besó a calavera, ‘‘San Juan,’’ al nombre de noel estrada. ‘‘goodbye,’’ walking toward the East River, ‘‘goodbye,’’ to fighting trivialities, ‘‘goodbye,’’ to making rhythms, ‘‘Borinquen,’’ to get a step on the cold night, ‘‘beloved,’’ to waiting for the dawn, ‘‘land,’’ to turning off the moon, ‘‘of my love,’’ waiting for the sun, ‘‘goodbye,’’ hot heat, ‘‘goodbye,’’ Calavera cried, ‘‘goodbye,’’ his tears, Migratories



‘‘my goddess,’’ hot, ‘‘of the sea,’’ falling to the ground, ‘‘my goddess,’’ the pavement burning, the highway, ‘‘of the palm grove,’’ tears coming along, ‘‘I’m leaving,’’ the strings caught on, ‘‘I’m leaving now,’’ and passed through his hands, ‘‘but one day,’’ and everything got warm, ‘‘I’ll return,’’ without the sun, ‘‘to look for,’’ and finally, ‘‘my beloved,’’ the strings played, ‘‘to dream again,’’ the cold didn’t hurt, ‘‘in my old,’’ the sun came out, kissed Calavera, ‘‘San Juan,’’ to the name of Noel Estrada. In the transformative process of citation, Laviera’s poem generates a series of displacements. The writing inserts itself in between the lines of the song, disjointing the syntax and meaning of both interpolated discourses with the violence of enjambment.8 The point-counterpoint does not spare the irony produced by the clash between two irreconcilable spaces. On the one side, there lies the landscape of the place of origin, as it is constructed by the melancholic subject of Estrada’s song, with its tropical goddesses and palm groves; on the other, there lies the urban space of the other shore, on the East River, with its pavements and highways. As in Martí’s poem, the subject is located between two shores. The place of origin, however—‘‘mi viejo San Juan’’ —is a quotation, a place grounded in the performance of the song. The quotation dilutes the referentiality of the name: San Juan is thus an object mediated by the lyrics of the song, which negates any claim for the ontological priority of the foundation. Of course, the gesture of quoting, of intoning the name of the place of origin, does not stop being constitutive for the subject who, in quoting and reinscribing the notes of the bolero with his fingertips, experiences an epiphany. By playing the strings, the subject participates in the history of the song repeated in ‘‘choruses in barbershops’’ (‘‘coros en barberías’’), by ‘‘sweet voices distant from Borinquen’’ (‘‘voces dulces alejadas de borinquen’’). The chorus is the ‘‘little piece of the fatherland’’ (‘‘el pedacito de patria’’), which is, incidentally, one of the few moments in which the poem spatializes the notion of community. The homeland is sung ‘‘in barbershops, in nightclubs,’’ because it entails precisely a manner of conceiving identity that slips out of the topographical networks, as well as the solid categories of territoriality and its expressions in telluric metaphors. In Laviera, the root is perchance the quoted foundation, reinscribed by the whistling of a song. 

   

Portable roots, to be used at the disposal of an ética corriente, based on the practices of identity, on identity as a practice of judgment in the journey. Notes  Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, ), . First published in .  Years after his exile in the United States, Adorno remembers the presumed ‘‘risk’’ to his writing by the coexistence with English. He even recalls his need to return to Germany for linguistic (and professional) reasons, postulating a ‘‘special affinity’’ between the linguistic structures of German and philosophical reflection (see Theodor Adorno, ‘‘On the Question: ‘What Is German?’ ’’ New German Critique  [fall ], –). Our question has to do with the writing of a subject who postulates the impossibility of return as a condition of writing itself, as we will see in the poetic practices of Tato Laviera.  Regarding the state of emergency conditions of Latinoamericanista practices and institutional networks toward the turn of the nineteenth century, see chapters  and .  ‘‘Domingo triste’’ used to be included in the editions of a volume of poetry posthumously entitled Flores del destierro. The critical edition of Martí’s Poesía completa (vol. , ed. Cintio Vitier, Fina García Marruz, and Emilio de Armas [Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, ], ) places the poem among the manuscripts of Versos libres, which were also published after Martí’s death.  Tato Laviera, ‘‘Migración,’’ in Mainstream Ethics (ética corriente) (Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, ), –.  Arcadio Díaz Quiñones discusses the problematic of language in ‘‘La política del olvido,’’ in La memoria rota (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, ), –.  Tato Laviera, ‘‘bochinche bilingüe,’’ in Mainstream Ethics (ética corriente) (Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, ), . The criticism of Hispanophilia in Laviera’s writing must not be confused with the affirmation of a colonial politics, which for nearly forty years attempted to impose English as the official language of education in Puerto Rico, nor as a position of assimilation to proper English in New York. With the same intensity set free by the linguistic crossover, Laviera’s poetry written in English subjects dominant language to a labor of hybridization and mixing, particularly in dialogue with the Black English Nuyorican communities: ‘‘melao was nineteen years old / when he arrived from santurce / spanish speaking streets // melao is thirty-nine years old / in new york still speaking / santurce spanish streets // melaíto his son now answered / in black american soul english talk / with native plena sounds / and primitive urban salsa beats // somehow melao was not concerned / at the neighborly criticism / of his son’s disparate sounding / talk // melao remembered he was criticized / back in puerto rico for speaking / arrabal black spanish / in the required english class’’ ().  Enjambment (encabalgamiento) is a poetic device in which the meter of the verse is deliberately extended beyond its parameters, thus throwing the rhythm of the poem out of sync with itself and introducing an unsettling ambiguity between poetic and prosaic form. (Trans.)

Migratories



APPENDICES Translation of Three Texts by José Martí

Appendix  Our America

The presumptuous villager will believe that the entire world is his village, and that as long as he remains as the mayor, as long as he is free to coerce his rival into letting go of his sweetheart, as long as his savings are growing in the piggy bank, then he can accept universal order as a given, unaware of the existence of giants that travel seven leagues in one step, likely to plant their boot squarely atop him; nor does he know aught of the clash of comets in the sky, which hurtle through the air engulfing whole worlds asleep.1 What remains of the village in America must awaken. These days are not for sleeping with a handkerchief on one’s head, but rather, with weapons as a pillow (like the illustrious gentlemen in Juan de Castellanos) 2—weapons of judgment, which will prevail over others. Trenches of ideas, worth more than trenches of stone. There is no prow capable of slashing through a cloud of ideas. An energetic idea, blazing up in its proper time in this world will stop when faced with a squadron of armor-plated soldiers, like the mystical flag of the Last Judgment. The peoples as yet unfamiliar with each other must make haste to be known, as would those who join forces in combat. Those who taught one another the right of force, like jealous brothers claiming the same land, or like the owner of a small house who envies the owner of a greater one, must be fitted together, the way two hands conjoin to form one. If those who under the protection of a criminal tradition, would tear the land asunder and wrest it from the defeated brother—the brother still being punished for his faults—with a saber stained with the blood of their own veins, if they do not want to be called a criminal people, let them return these lands to their brother. No debtor redeems a debt of honor in money, or by slapping someone on the face. And we can no longer be a people of leaves, who live in the air, our crown brimming with blooms, crackling or whirling about, depending on the caprice of the light’s caress, or whether the tempests thrash the tree about and overturn it. Trees must form ranks lest the seven-league giant stride on! It is the hour of retribution, of the united march, and we must go forward in close formation, like silver in the roots of the Andes. Only the seven-monthers lack courage. Those who have no faith in their land are seven-month men: because they are lacking in courage, they deny it to the rest. The difficult tree cannot be reached by the puny arm, the braceleted arm with painted nails, the arm of Madrid or Paris; and they will say that the tree cannot be reached at all. These harmful insects who eat away at the bone of the native land that nurtures them ought to be loaded onto barges. If they are Parisians or Madrileños, let them go

to the Prado, streetlamps and all, or to the Tortoni [cafe], sorbets and all. These carpenter’s children who are ashamed that their father was a carpenter! Those born in America who are ashamed because they wear the apron of the indio, of the mother who reared them; those who disown their sick mother—scoundrels!—and leave her abandoned on her sickbed! What, then, is a real man? The one who stays with his mother, to cure her of her illness, or the one who puts her to work where no one will see her, living at her expense on rotted lands with a worm for a necktie, cursing the breast that bore him, displaying the written sign of treachery on the back of his paper jacket? These children of our America, who must be saved along with her Indians; America, which must expand from few to many; and these deserters who ask to fight in the North American armies, who drown their Indians in blood, diminishing the many to a few! These sissies, men, and yet they are unwilling to do the work of men! Look at Washington, who made this land: did he run away to live with the English, to live with the English in the years when he saw them go against his own land? These ‘‘incroyables’’ who drag their honor about a foreign land, like the incroyables of the French Revolution,3 dancing and licking their lips, dragging their ‘‘rr’’s! In what other native land can a man possess more pride than in our sorrowful American republics, raised from among the mute Indian masses, to the noise of combat between the book and the altar candle [cirial],4 over the bloody arms of a hundred apostles? Out of such disparate factors, never in any lesser historical period have more progressive and compact nations been born. The haughty man believes that the land was made to serve as his pedestal, because he has a quill or colorful words at his disposal; and he attacks his native republic as helpless and hopeless because its forests offer him no new way of gallivanting around the world, steering Persian ponies and spilling champagne. The fault does not lie with the newborn country, but with those who try to rule originary peoples, composed of a singular and violent nature, with laws inherited from four centuries of freedom in the United States and nineteen centuries of monarchy in France. No decree of Hamilton’s 5 could stop the heaving breast of the plainsman’s steed. No pronouncement by Sieyès 6 could liberate the clotted blood of the Indian. To govern well, attention must be directed toward what actually exists, there in the place that one governs; and the good governor in America is not he who knows how to govern in Germany or France, but he who knows the elements that constitute his country, who can bring them together to reach that suitable state (through the methods and institutions born of that selfsame country) wherein every man knows and exercises his capabilities, wherein all may enjoy the abundance that nature has placed for all in the community [pueblo], conceived with their labor and defended with their lives. The government must be born from the country. The spirit of governance must be that of the country. The form of government must arise from out of that country’s constitution itself. Governance is nothing more than the equilibrium of a country’s natural elements. Thus, has the imported book been vanquished by natural man in America. Natural man has vanquished the artificial men of letters [letrados]. The autochthonous

 Appendix 

mestizo has vanquished the exotic Creole. There is no battle between civilization and barbarism, but between false erudition and nature. Natural man is good, and he obeys and rewards a superior intelligence; and yet the latter does not obtain his permission to wound him, or offend him by ignoring him—an unpardonable thing for natural man, ready to recover by force the respect of anyone who has wounded him with suspicion or prejudged his interest. It is through this conformity to the disregarded elements of nature that the tyrants of America have risen to power, and through their betrayal of them that they have fallen. Through these tyrannies, the republics have purged their inability to know the true elements of the country, to derive from these elements the form of government and governance in accordance with them. Governance, in a new nation, means creation. If, in peoples composed of both cultured and uncultured elements, the cultured have not learned the art of governance, then the uncultured will govern, through their habit of attacking and resolving doubts with their hands. The uncultured masses are lazy, and timid in matters of the intellect, and they want to be well-governed; but if the government aggrieves them, they will shake it off and govern themselves. How will these heads of state come out of universities, if there is no university in America that teaches the rudiments in the art of governance, or the analysis of the specific elements of the American peoples? The youth come out into the world to make predictions with their Yankee or French ‘‘specs,’’ and they aspire to lead a people whom they do not know. Those who are ignorant of the rudiments of politics must be denied entrance into the political profession. Contest prizes must not be given to the best song of praise, but to a close study of those factors at work within one’s country. In the newspaper, the church, and the academe, the study of real factors affecting the country ought to be promoted. It is enough to know them, without bandages or hesitation, because anyone who sets aside a part of the truth, either willfully or by forgetfulness, will in the end fall prey to the same truth that he has omitted, that grows in negligence and overthrows anything raised in the name of truth, without it. Resolving the problem after knowing its elements is far easier than resolving the problem without knowing them. Along comes the natural man, indignant and strong, to overturn the justice accumulated in books, because it has not been administered in accordance with the patent necessities of the country. To know, then, is to resolve. To know the country and to govern it in accordance with this understanding is the only way of liberating it from tyranny. The European university must give way to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught hands-on; even at the expense of the archons of Greece. Our Greece is preferrable to the Greece that is not ours. Ours is more necessary. National politicians must replace the exotic ones. Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but the trunk must be our own. And silence the vanquished pedant; for there is no native land of which a man can be more proud than our sorrowful American republics. With our feet in the rosary, our heads white, and our bodies mottled in Indian and Creole, we came, naked into the world of nations. With the banner of the Virgin, we

Appendix 



sallied forth for the conquest of liberty. A priest, a few lieutenants, and one woman 7 raised the Republic in Mexico on the shoulders of the Indians. A Spanish canon, in the shadow of his cape, taught the principles of French liberty to a handful of magnificent students who later made a general of Spain into a leader in Central America—against Spain.8 With monarchical habits and the sun for a heart, Venezuelans from the North and Argentines from the South led the people up in arms. When the heroes of both clashed and the continent was about to tremble, one—by no means the lesser—pulled back his reins. And because heroism in a time of peace is rarer, less glorious, than in a time of war; because it is easier for a man to die with honor than it is to think methodically; because governing with exalted and unanimous sentiments is more immediately feasible than leading the multiple, arrogant, exotic, or ambitious ideas that arise after a battle; because the powers overwhelmed by the epic onslaught gawked, with the feline wariness of the species and the weight of the real, at the building where it had hoisted the flag of these peoples—nourished by shrewdness in governance through the continuous practice of reason and liberty—on the coarse and singular regions of our mestiza America, among these peoples of bare knees and Parisian jackets; because the hierarchic constitution of the colonies resisted the democratic organization of the republic; because the chief ministers in bowties left their field riding boots in the hallway; or because the bookish Redeemers did not understand that the revolution that did triumph with the soul of the land, unleashed from the voice of the savior, had to govern with the soul of the land, and not against or without it—America began to suffer, and suffers, from the fatigue of having to accommodate discordant and hostile elements, which it inherited from a despotic and wicked colonizer, from imported ideas and forms that have proven utterly retarded in matters of logical government, given their lack of local reality. Only by unacknowledging or ignoring the fools who had helped to ransom it, the continent—dislocated for three centuries by a leadership that denied man’s right to the exercise of his reason, entered into a government that had reason as its base: the reason of all in matters concerning all, and not the university-bred reason of one over the provincial reason of the others. The problem of independence did not entail a change of forms, but the change of spirit. A common cause had to be made with the oppressed to consolidate the system opposed to the interests and customs of the rule of the oppressors. But the tiger, however frightened by the explosion, returned at night to the site of his prey. True, it is dying with fire blazing in his eyes and his claws in the air. Yet no one heard him come, because he came with his claws in velvet. By the time his prey had awakened, the tiger was already on it. Thus did the colony persevere in the heart of the republic, but our America begins to overcome her great errors—the arrogance of her chief cities, the blind triumph of the disdainful peasants, the excessive importation of foreign ideas and formulas, the iniquitous and impolitic scorn for the aborigine race—through the higher virtue, fertilized [abonada] with the necessary blood, of the republic underneath, still fighting against the colony. The tiger waits behind every tree, huddled behind every corner. But it is dying, with its claws in the air, fire blazing in his eyes.

 Appendix 

But ‘‘These countries will be saved,’’ as Rivadavia 9 said; Rivadavia, the Argentine who suffered from excessive refinement in unrefined times. The machete cannot be sheathed in silk; after all, can one ever be rid of the lance if it is by the lance that a country has been won? For the country becomes angry, and would demand at the very door of Iturbide’s Congress ‘‘make the fair-haired one (Iturbide) an emperor!’’ 10 These countries will be saved, because with the prevailing temper of moderation, the serene harmony of nature in a continent of light, and the influx of critical readings, which in Europe have succeeded the readings of trial and error and fallaciousness under which the previous generation was steeped, there is now being born in America, in this epoch, the real man. We were a vision, with an athlete’s breast, a dandy’s hands, and a child’s brow. We were a mask, dressed in breeches from England, a Parisian vest, a jacket from North America, and a bicorne from Spain. The Indian, mute, walked slowly around us, and went off to the mountain, to the summit of the mountain to baptize his children. At night, the scorned Negro sang in the music of his heart, alone and unknown, amid the waves and wild animals. The peasant, a creator, blind with indignation, turned on and against the disdainful city, against his own creation. We were all epaulettes and togas, in countries that came into the world with rope sandals on their feet and the vincha 11 on their heads. The general temper should have been to fraternize, with charity in our hearts and the audacity of builders, the vincha and the toga; to free the Indian, to clear up sufficient space for the Negro, to adjust liberty to the body of those who rose up and triumphantly fought for it. We were left with the bureaucrat, a general, the lettered man, and a prebendary. The cherubic youth, with arms like those of an octopus, threw its head into the sky, let it fall with a sterile glory, crowned with clouds. The native people, urged on by instinct and blind with triumph, destroyed the golden batons. Neither the European nor the Yankee book was able to offer the key to the Spanish-American enigma. They tried to use hate, and these countries took a turn for the worse. Tired of useless hate, of the resistance of the book against the lance, reason against the altar candle [cirial], the city against the countryside, the impossible empire of divided urban castes over the native nation, by turns tempestuous or inert, they unknowingly began to try love. People stand up on their feet and salute themselves. ‘‘What exactly are we?’’ they ask, and they tell one another what they are like. When a problem emerged in Cojímar, no one sought for a solution in Danzig.12 The frock coats were still from France, but the thought now began to come from America. The youths of America roll up the sleeves of their shirts, sink their hands in the mass and make it rise with the yeast of their sweat. They understand that we have imitated for too long and that salvation is in creating. Crear is the password of a generation. If our wine is made from bananas; and if its taste turns out bitter, it is still our wine! It is known that the forms of a country’s government must be accommodated to the country’s natural elements; that lest there be an error of form, the form of absolute ideas must be made relative; that in order for liberty to be viable, it must be sincere and abundant; that if the republic does not open its arms to all and move forward with all, the republic will die. The tiger within will enter through the cracks, and so will the tiger

Appendix 



from without. The general will subject the march of the cavalry to an infant’s pace. Or with the matter of defense left to the infants, the enemy will envelop the cavalry. Politics is strategy. The people must live by being critical of one another, because criticism is the health of nations [pueblos]—but with one heart and one mind. Stoop down and reach toward the unfortunate, raise them up in the arms of the people! With the fire of the heart melt a frozen America! Let the native blood of the country run, roaring and coursing wildly through America’s veins! Standing tall, from one country to another, these new American men will salute one another with the joyful eyes of workers. Natural statesmen will emerge from the direct study of nature. They will read in order to apply, but not to copy. The economists will study every difficulty at the root of its origins. The orators will begin to sober up. The playwrights will bring native characters onto the scene. The academies will discuss practical matters. Poetry will make a clean break with the Zorrillesque 13 damsel of long flowing hair, and hang its red waistcoat on the glorious tree. The heads of state in the Indian republics will learn Indian. From every danger America is being saved. Over the heads of some republics the octopus is still asleep. Others, by the law of equilibrium, have risen from the sea, to reclaim the lost centuries with a mad and sublime urgency. Others, who have forgotten that Juárez 14 once went about in a coach drawn by mules, hitch their carriages to the wind, with a soap bubble as their coachman; for poisonous luxury, the enemy of freedom, corrupts the lascivious man and opens the door to the foreigner. Others revise and refine the meaning of virility with the epic spirit of a threatened independence in mind. Others, in the rapacious war against their neighbor, create an army of thugs capable of turning against and devouring them. But another danger perhaps runs throughout our America, which does not come from America itself, but rather the difference in origins, methods, and interests between the two continental factions, and the hour is drawing near when an imperious and driven people who are ignorant of our America and who disdain it, will advance, demanding intimate relations. And because the virile nations, which have emerged of their own efforts, with shotgun and the law, love and love alone only other virile nations; because the hour of abandonment and ambition—perhaps urged on by the more pure-blooded North Americans, perhaps brought about by the vindictive and sordid masses, or by the tradition of conquest and the interests of a skillful leader—this hour is not so close at hand to those of us who look on in horror, that we have not the opportunity to prove our continuous and discrete pride, capable of confronting it and turning it away; because North America’s republican image before the attentive nations of the Universe, places a barrier against it that must not be broken by any impulsive provocation or ostentatious arrogance, any parricidal discord in our America—the pressing obligation of our America is to present itself as it is, one soul and one intent, fleet-footed champion over a suffocating past, stained only with the redemptive blood drawn from our hands in our battle with ruins, only with the blood of our veins left open by our former masters. The disdain of the formidable neighbor, who does not know our America, is the greatest danger confronting her; and it is crucial in these approaching days of their

 Appendix 

encounter for the neighbor to know her, and know her soon, lest it scorn her. Out of ignorance, it may come, perhaps, to instill in her greed. Out of respect, after it comes to know her, it may take her hands away. One must have faith in what is best in man, and to distrust what is worst. One must give an opportunity for the best to reveal itself and prevail over the worst. If not, the worst will prevail. Nations [pueblos] must have one pillory for anyone who incites them to useless hate, and another pillory for anyone who does not tell them the truth in time. There is no hate among races, because there are no races. Narrow-minded thinkers, thinkers by lamplight, stir up and string together races, which the discerning traveler and the cordial observer will find only in the bookstore, not in the justice of Nature, where the universal identity of man stands out against the background of his victorious love and turbulent appetite. The soul, eternal and in every sense the same, emanates from diverse bodies in form and color. It is a sin against Humanity to foment and propagate opposition and hate among races. But in the jumble of peoples faced with the proximity of still other diverse peoples, peculiar and active characteristics take shape: ideas and customs, of expansion and acquisition, vanity and avarice, which in a period of internal disorder or in the precipitation of that country’s accumulated characteristics, may be able to transform that country from a latent state of national preoccupations to a serious threat to nearby lands, isolated and weak, which the strong country would declare idle and inferior. To think is to serve. Nor must be assumed, through a provincial antipathy, some ingenious and fatal malice on the part of the blond-haired people of the continent just because they do not speak our language, or see a house the way we see it, or because they are not beseeming to us in their political blights, ours being different from theirs; or because one does not find bilious and dark-skinned men in great numbers there, or because from its still uncertain prominence, their country does not look favorably on those who, with less favor in History, are still pursuing the road of the Republic to the last heroic stretch. Nor must one hide the patent facts of the problem, which can be resolved, for the peace of centuries, with the timely study and the tacit and urgent union of the continental soul. Because the united hymn is already sounding; by the road prepared by their sublime parents, this present generation has brought on its back a worker’s America; from the Bravo to the Magallanes, seated astride his condor, the Great Semí 15 is sowing throughout the Latin nations of the continent and the sorrowful islands of the sea, the seed of new America!

Notes Unless otherwise noted, the following notes have been adapted and translated from José Olivio Jimenez’s edition of Martí’s prose: see José Martí, Prosa escogida, ed. José Olivio Jimenez (Madrid: Novelar y cuentos, ). Trans.  This essay was published in La Revista Illustrada (New York) on January , , and in El Partido Liberal (Mexico City) on January , . Along with the speech known under the heading ‘‘Madre América’’ (‘‘Mother America’’), this text most concisely and comprehensively sum-

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 

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 

marizes the Latin-Americanist anxieties and predictions presented in Martí’s thought in the face of the threat of U.S. expansion. The title of this work has remained the most accessible one for its readers in the Latin American world. Juan de Castellanos. Spanish priest and poet Juan de Castellanos (–) resided in many places throughout America from a very young age. In , he wrote the extensive Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias (Elegies for Illustrious Gentlemen of the Indies) in verse, which is of great interest for the numerous facts it presents on American life and history in the sixteenth century. Incroyables of the French Revolution. During the period of the  Directory in France, this name was given to certain young men who dressed, spoke, and gestured with an excessive affectation, and who enjoyed a social life of elegance. There has been some debate on the specific intent behind this word choice: cirial can mean either altar candle or cactus tree. The first meaning would imply the opposition between Enlightenment thought and religious superstition, yet the second would suggest Domingo F. Sarmiento’s opposition between civilization and barbarism (see chapter ). Trans. Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton (–), North American statesman who participated in the U.S. War of Independence; he later acquired prestige in public administration as the secretary of the treasury. Sieyès. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (–), French statesman and publisher who was involved in the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as well as the French Constitution of . A priest . . . and one woman. The first reference is to Mexican priest and revolutionary Manuel Hidalgo (–), who gave the first shout of rebellion that incited the War of Liberation in Mexico. The woman alluded to is Josefina Ortiz de Domínguez (d. ), wife of Don Manuel Domínguez, mayor of Querétaro, who was persuaded by her to join the independence movement. Mexican modernist poet Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera dedicated one of his most well-known compositions to this event in ‘‘La Corregidora’’ (‘‘The Mayoress’’). A Spanish canon . . . against Spain. The canon mentioned here is José María Castilla, the Spanish liberal who urged El Salvador to declare its independence; the general of Spain is Brigadier General Gabino Gaínza, who accepted the political and military command of the independent government of Guatemala. Both events occurred on September , . Rivadavia. Bernardino Rivadavia (–), man of progressive ideas who served as president of the Argentine Republic for a brief period of time (–). Make the fair-haired one (Iturbide) an emperor! In , the Mexican people demanded that the nation’s Congress, already freed from Spain, declare Mexican General Agustín Iturbide an emperor. Iturbide ruled in this capacity for ten months, under the name Agustín I. Vincha. Handkerchief used by natives on their neck or head. Cojímar is the small coastal area in the northern province of Havana, Cuba. Danzig is a European port on the coast of the Baltic Sea. For a long time, it was known as the ‘‘Free City’’ of Europe, although it actually belonged to Poland. Zorrillesque. Allusion to the extreme style of Spanish romantic poet José Zorrilla (–). Juárez. The great Mexican liberal statesman Benito Juárez (–), who was the most noteworthy and progressive president of the Mexican Republic in the nineteenth century, was of humble and indigenous origin. The rest of the sentence in the text refers metaphorically and hyperbolically to the pompous and lengthy dictatorial government of Porfirio Díaz (who was in power throughout the entire end of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, provoking the Mexican Revolution of ).

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

From the Bravo to the Magallanes, from one tip of Latin America to the other. The Río Bravo del Norte (Bravo River of the North) begins in Colorado (in the United States), crosses New Mexico and Texas, and empties out into the Gulf of Mexico. Magallanes (Magellan) is the name of the meridian strait of South America, called thus by its discoverer, the explorer Ferdinand de Magellan. Great Semí. Among the pre-Columbian natives of the Antilles, Semí was a divinity who incarnated all the forces of nature.

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Appendix 

Prologue to Poema del Niágara

Passersby, halt! The one whose hand I hold is no rhyme weaver, no repeater of the old master—old from repeating themselves to no one—no romance tale-teller, like those who would turn the sinister cradle of the treacherous Italian gondolas into magical zithers, no professional complainer, like so many of those who force honorable men to hide their burdens as failings, and their sacred laments as adolescent triflings! The man who accompanies me—and he comes hooded—is great, though he be not of Spain: it is Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde, who has written the Poem of the Niagara.1 Ask me anything more of him, curious passerby, and I will tell you that he has measured himself against a giant 2 and has not left the field in defeat, but with something of a victorious aura on his brow, lyre resting on his shoulder, since he is of those righteous fighters who lead with the lyre. And ask no more, for to dare to measure oneself against giants is already more than proof of greatness: merit does not lie in the success of the feat, even if he fared quite well in combat, but in the value of the undertaking. Age in ruins, where the only prized art is good for filling the house pantry, or for sitting on a golden chair, or living in a gilded world—without seeing that human nature cannot change what it is, and that by bringing the gold outside, one has only left the inside bereft of gold! Age in ruins, in which love and the will to greatness are rare and illustrious achievements! Men today are like certain damsels, who latch onto certain virtues only when they see them either praised by others, or sublimated in sonorous prose or in winged poetic verse; far from embracing virtue, which takes the form of a cross, they cast it from themselves with loathing, as if it were a corrosive shroud that would eat away at the rosiness in their cheeks, the pleasure in their kisses, their wreaths of colored butterflies, which women so love to put in around their necks! Age in ruins, where priests no longer deserve either the praise or veneration of the poets—nor have poets even begun to be priests! Age in ruins! Not for all mankind, that draws from itself (in the manner of spiders) the magnificent thread on which to glide, through space; it is rather an age in ruins for these eternal youths: these apostolic and visionary, exemplary feelers, children and parents of peace; for these ardent believers, hungry for tenderness, voracious for love, ill-equipped to keep their feet or a plot of land; full of memories of clouds and wings, seekers with broken wings, these poor poets! It is their daily duty to take the eagles ceaselessly born in their breast—the way a rose overflows with perfume, the

way the ocean offers shells and the sun, light—and to sit, while with mysterious notes they accompany these wayward travelers with the lyre, watching their eagles fly away. But now the poet has changed in his task, and has now turned to drowning these eagles. In what direction will they turn, if their flight is today obscured by the dust of a battle that began a century ago and still has not come to an end? And who will follow them in their flight, if today men hardly have the time to take the gold from out of the mines, drink it from their cups, to cover their women with it? And to stretch every exercise of reason even further all that is logical appears in a contradictory fashion. That which is coming to pass, through this epoch of elaboration and splendid transformation—wherein men are preparing themselves for the enjoyment of themselves, to be the kings of kings, after overcoming the obstacles that precede all greatness—is destined for the poets, great men amid the confusion brought about by the change of states, faith, and governments, epoch of tumult and suffering, where the noise of battle drowns out the melodious prophecies of good fortune in the times to come; and the ebb and flow of combatants leave the rosebushes without roses; and battleships darken the soft light of the stars in the sky. But in the factory of the universe there is nothing, however small, that does not contain in it every seed of great things: the sky spins and bears its daily and nightly torments, and man turns about and goes on with his faith, his passions, and regrets; and when his eyes no longer see the stars in the sky, he turns to behold those in his soul. Hence, the pale and groaning poets; hence, this new painful and tormented poetry; hence, this intimate, confidential, and personal poetry, a necessary consequence of the times— ingenuous and useful, like a song of kinsmen when it springs from a healthy and vigorous nature; dismayed and awkward when evoked through the strings of a feeble, gifted feeler, like the peacock of brilliant plumage with the gift of song. Like women, weak women would seem the men of today—who, crowned with the wreaths of roses, lying in the arms of Alexander and Cebetes,3 are likely to exhaust the honey-sweet wine that seasoned the festivals of Horace. The pagan lyric remains in disuse for its sensuality: the Christian lyric, too, however beautiful it is for having changed humanity through the ideal of Christ, seen yesterday as the smallest of the gods, and loved today as perhaps the greatest among men. The poets today can be neither lyrical nor epical with naturalness and ease; nor can there be anything more lyrical than that which each one takes from himself, as if the only thing whose existence could not be doubted were one’s own being, or as if the problem of human life would require such bravery and such studied anxiety—that there could be no greater study, nor more stimulating, nor more moved by profundity and greatness than the study of oneself. No one today has any certain faith. The ones who do are deceived. Hounded by beautiful inner furies, the ones who write about faith bite their fists, which they keep clenched when they write. There is no painter who can confidently depict the luminous aureole of virgins with the novelty and transparency of other times; nor is there any religious cantor or soothsayer who can recite his stanzas and anathemas with his own blessing or reassurance. They are all soldiers of an army on the move. They were all kissed by the same sorceress. In each and every one boils the new

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blood. Although their entrails are being torn apart, they are there in their silent room, irate and hungry: Intranquillity, Insecurity, Vague Hope, Secret Vision. An immense pallid man of gaunt appearance, dressed in black, eyes full of tears and mouth dry, walks with heavy steps throughout the earth, without repose or sleep; and he has sat in every home, and has placed his tremulous hand on every headboard! What a battle being waged in his brain! What fear lies in his bosom! What a demand for what is not forthcoming! What a lack of awareness of what he desires! What a feeling in his spirit, at once delightful and nauseous—nauseous at the day that dies, delight in the dawn! There is no longer any permanent work, because works in these times of reconstruction and reshaping are by essence mutable and restless; there are no constant or enduring paths, so soon are they seen as new altars, as great and wide open as forests. The mind solicits diverse ideas from everywhere—and ideas are like polyps, like the light of the stars, the waves of the ocean. One either incessantly longs for the knowledge of something that will verify, or fears to know anything that would change, one’s present beliefs. The development of a new social state has rendered the battle for personal existence ever more insecure, ever more retrenched in accomplishing the daily obligations that, finding no wide open roads, change form and direction at every instant, agitated by the fear that the nearness or probability of misery brings. With the spirit divided among contradictory and unsettled loves; the concept of literature constantly alarmed by a new gospel; every image that was hitherto revered found dethroned and stripped; and even the images of the future as yet unknown, it does not seem possible in this discord of the mind, this turbulent life with neither fixed direction, defined character, nor definite end, this acerbic fear of the impoverishment of the home—and in the varied and halfhearted labor that we undertake to evade it— to produce those distant and patient works, those spacious histories in verse, those enviable imitations of Latin peoples that were written with infinite patience, year after year, in the repose of the cell, in the pleasant leisure of a court official, or in a wide meticulously crafted armchair of cordovan leather, studded with fine gold, in the beatific calm instilled in the spirit by the certainty that the good native was kneading the bread, the good king was dispensing the law, and the mother church bore her cloak and scepter. Only in a general and determinedly literary age, an age of stable and constant elements with the promise of possible individual tranquillity, fixed and well-known channels, was the production of those solid, corpulent works of ingenuity possible—works which require to no avail such a conjunction of suitable conditions. Perhaps hate, that accumulates and concentrates, can still naturally produce such a genre of works; but love overflows and disseminates; and these are the days of love, even for those who hate. Love murmurs fugitive songs, and no longer produces works of unhurried sustenance and arduous labor through its culminating and vehement emotion—a tension that exhausts and overwhelms. And there is today something like a dismemberment of the human mind. Behind us are the days of raised fences; this is the time of broken ones. Now, men have begun to walk without stumbling throughout the entire land; before, they would hardly have begun walking when they would run into the wall of one man’s backyard or the bas-

 Appendix 

tion of a convent. Man loves a God who penetrates him and furthers him in every way. It would be blasphemous to give the Creator of all beings and all that exists the form of only one of those beings. As in the case of humanity, wherein all progress perhaps consists of returning to the point of departure, man is returning to Christ, the crucified, pardoning, captive Christ; to the naked feet and open arms, not to an evil and satanic, malevolent, hating, fierce, lashing, judgmental, impious Christ. And these new loves do not gestate slowly, as before, in quiet cells where an adorable and sublime solitude would hatch gigantic and radiant ideas; nor are ideas from distant days and years brought forth from the mind, ripening and being nurtured, growing with impressions and analogical judgments, to fly at once to huddle around the mother idea, the way standard-bearers in a time of war gather around each other in a small heap where they raise the flag; nor from this prolonged mental pregnancy are those cyclopean and overgrown children born now, the natural trace of an epoch fallen silent and withdrawn, where ideas would become the rattles of the king’s joker, or the clapper of a church bell, or some delicacy brought straight from the gallows; then, the only form under which human judgment could be expressed was charming gossip in a bad setting of romantic comedies about love caught between the criss-cross of swords and the flurry of farthingales, among the suitors and beauties of the town village. Now, the trees of the jungle have no more leaves than the cities have languages; ideas grow in the plaza where they are taught, and pass from hand to hand, and from traveler to traveler. Speech is not a sin, but cause for celebration; hearing is not a heresy, but rather taste, custom, fashion. One has an ear pressed to everything; thoughts barely sown already bear flowers and fruits, leaping from the paper, and entering minds like a subtle, finely ground powder; railroads have leveled the forest, just as newspapers have done to the human jungle. The sun penetrates the cracks of old trees. All is expansion, communication, fluorescence, contagion, dissemination. The journal deflowers grandiose ideas. Ideas in the mind no longer form either family, house, or long life, as before. They are born with wings, on horseback, saddled on lightning. They do not believe in only one mind, but rather the commerce of all. Nor do they delay, after a strenuous maternal labor, in reaping benefit from their small number of readers; they begin almost immediately after having been born. Their readers wring them, elevate them, crown them, lock them in the pillory, hoist them high like an idol, explode them, toss them into the air. Although even the ideas belonging to a lower law have begun to shine as those of a better one, they cannot support the traffic, the beating, the tide, the harsh treatment. The ideas of a good law prevail in the end, compact and entire—bruised, but with the virtue of spontaneously healing themselves. We awaken with a problem; we go to bed with another one. Images devour one another in our mind. The time has not yet come to give form to what is thought. Ideas in the mind’s ocean are lost in one another, as when a stone pierces the blue water, and the circles are lost each within each. Before, ideas would be erected in silence in the mind, like solid towers, for the purpose of being seen from afar; today, they leave en masse from the lips, like golden seeds that fall on the feverish soil; they are broken, they are reaffirmed, they evaporate, they are wasted for the one who created them—oh, beautiful sacrifice! They come

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undone in fiery sparks; they crumble. Hence, the small ebullient works; hence, the absence of those great works—climactic, sustained, majestic, concentrated. And it may also be that with the great common labor of humans, and the healthy custom of self-examination and asking after one another’s lives, and the glorious necessity of kneading the bread for oneself, bread to be served on the altar cloth, the epoch neither stimulates nor perhaps allows for the isolated appearance of superhuman beings occupied in a unique kind of work of a nature widely held to be marvelous and supreme. A great mountain seems less than great when it is surrounded by hills. And this is the epoch in which the hills are at war with the mountains, in which the peaks disintegrate into plains: an epoch rapidly approaching another wherein all plains will be peaks. With the descent of the heights comes the rise of the plains to the same level, which will facilitate transportation throughout the land. Individual geniuses will be ever less distinguished, because the smallness of their environment that had raised their stature to be what it is, is a thing of the past. And as humanity continues to learn how to harvest the fruits of nature and value her gifts, the masters and teachers of old reach them less and less, all to the benefit of still more new people, who were before the mere followers of these venerators of the skillful harvesters. What we are witnessing is something akin to a decentralization of the understanding. The beautiful has come to be the domain of all. It negates the number of good secondary poets and the lack of eminent, solitary ones. Genius freely passes from the individual to the collective. One man loses to the benefit of many others. The qualities of the privileged are diluted, expanded for the masses; whatever is not pleasing to the privileged of humble mien, certainly will be to those who possess noble and generous hearts, who know that the quality of greatness is not of the earth—however great a creature one may be—but rather, lies in the golden sand that will one day return to the beautiful golden font, reflection of the Creator’s gaze. And like the man from Auvergne 4 dying in happy Paris, more from the ills of the country than from bedazzlement, where every man who pauses to see himself goes about besieged with the sweet evil of this century, the poets today—simple Auvergnese in the bustling and sumptuous Lutetia—have a nostalgia for the great deed. War, once the source of glory, has fallen into disuse, and what was once considered great has come to be a crime. The court, once the refuge of hired bards, looks with frightened eyes on the modern bards, who now only pluck at their lyre from time to time, and sometimes not at all. God walks about in confusion, women bewildered and mad; but nature always lights the solemn sun in the middle of a clearing. The gods of the forests still speak the language as yet unspoken by the divinities of the altars; man casts the serpents of his speaking head across the oceans, grasped from one side by the rugged coast of England and, on the other, by the bridled American coastline: he lights the light of stars in a crystal globe; and hurls his black and smoking tritons across the waters and over the mountains;—and when the suns that had illuminated the earth tens of centuries have blown out, the sun in the human soul keeps shining. There is no west for man’s spirit; there is only the north, crowned with light. The mountain ends in the peak; the culminating wave spun by the tempest and thrown

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toward the sky ends in the crest; so, too, must human life also end, at the height. In these transitory changes we are witnessing, and in this refraction of man’s world, in which new life charges forth like spirited horses pursued by barking dogs; in this blinding of the sources and this obfuscation of the gods, nature, human labor, and man’s spirit open up like pure, unexhausted wellsprings to the dry lips of the poets. Let their cups of precious stones be emptied of the old bitter wine, and let them be filled with the rays of the sun, the echoes of manual labor, prized and simple pearls, taken from the depths of the soul,—and let them with their feverish hands raise the sonorous cup before the eyes of frightened men! Thus has the lyrical poet come into his own again, his feet and eyes a pitiable sight from having seen and walked through the still-smoking ruins; he was always, more or less, a personal poet. Thus has he directed his eyes toward the battles and solemnities of nature: this man, who had once been in courtly, conventional, or bloody times, an epic poet. The battle now lies in the workshop; glory, in peace; the temple, everywhere throughout the land; the poem, in nature. When life assents to it, a future Dante will arise, not by his own effort above the Dantesque men of today, but by the force of the time; for what is the arrogant man but the outburst of the unknown, echo of the supernatural, mirror of eternal lights, the more or less finished copy of the world in which he lives? Today, Dante lives in and of himself. Ugolino 5 continues to eat away at his son, or rather, more himself than his son—witness how today there is no crust of stale bread more chewed than the soul of the poet. If they could be seen with the eyes of the soul, the raw knuckles of their fists and the holes in their torn wings would be dripping blood. But suddenly, now, historical life hangs in the balance. With newborn institutions too new, too confused, to be able to offer poetic elements—because like wine, perfume comes to nations with the years—and the crumbled roots of poetry too old, thrown to the wind, to the critical impulse; with personal life so full of doubt, consternation, questions, unease, and battle fever, life—intimate, feverish, unfastened, impulsive, clamorous life—has come to be the principal theme and, along with nature, the only legitimate subject of modern poetry. How much work did it cost to discover this very thing! Man, who has only recently begun to enjoy the use of reason that from his birth was denied him, has to unmake himself to truly come into his own. It requires a Herculean blow against the obstacles erected against him by his own nature as well as by those who, in evil hour, heap on him those conventional ideas of what he is, by impious counsel and culpable arrogance sustained. There is no more difficult task than this, of distinguishing the acquired, proficient aspects of our existence from the spontaneous and natural; what man brings into the world with him, from the lessons, laws, and ordinances imposed on him by those who came before him. Under the pretext of completing the human being, they interrupt it. He has not even been born, and they are already standing beside his crib with great and strong crutches, by their hands prepared: philosophies, religions, political systems, and the passions of his parents. And they tie him up, strap him down; and man becomes a bridled horse throughout the rest of his life. Thus is

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the land today a vast abode of masqueraders. One enters life as pliant wax; and chance empties us into preset molds. Created conventions deform all true existence, and true existence comes to be something like a silent current that invisibly courses beneath an apparent life, at times not even felt by the one for whom it performs its cautious work, akin to the long path that winds silently beside the mysterious Guadiana beneath the Andalusian land. To affirm humanity’s free will; to leave the seductive form of ghosts to the realm of ghosts proper; to leave unspoiled those aspects of virgin nature with the imposition of distant prejudices; to endow them with the aptitude to take what is useful for themselves, without confusing or driving them toward a fixed direction: I declare this to be the only way of populating the land with a vigorous and creative generation of man! All forms of redemption have hitherto been theoretical and formal; it is necessary that they now be effective and essential. Literary originality will not suffice, nor will political liberty persevere, while spiritual liberty is not guaranteed. The first task of man is to reconquer it. Men must be returned to themselves; they must be freed from the ill governance of convention that suffocates or poisons their emotions, accelerates the awakening of their visceral senses, and burdens their mental capacity with a pernicious, foreign, cold, and false sense of wealth. Only the genuine is fruitful. Only what is direct is powerful. Anything else is tantamount to a reheated delicacy. It behooves each man to reconstruct his life: the little that he finds in himself, he reconstructs. Anyone who, under the pretext of guiding the new generations, teaches them an absolute and isolated heap of doctrines, or preaches to them a barbarous gospel of hate before sweetly murmuring in their ears about love, is a premeditated assassin, shameless before God and an enemy of men. Anyone who, in one way or another—in any way whatsoever—prevents the free use, the direct application, and the spontaneous employment of the magnificent faculties of man, stands accused of treachery against Nature! Welcome the good, valiant lancer, the ponderous jouster, the knight of human liberty—the greatest order of knighthood—who comes directly out of the epic poetry of our times, with neither Balbuena’s moans nor Ojeda’s supplications;6 he who flung his generous hands toward the sky in the manner of prayer, and lowered them, cupped, like a sonorous amphora, now replete with opulent and vibrant stanzas, caressed by Olympian scintillations! The poem is in the man, determined to enjoy every apple, to make sport with every bit of knowledge from the tree of paradise, and to transform the fire with which God, in ages past, had forged the exterminating sword into a glowing hearth fire! The poem is in nature, the mother with nourishing breasts, the wife who never stops loving, the oracle who always responds, poet of a thousand languages, sorceress who can communicate what remains unsaid, consoling woman who gives strength in life and preserves after death! Welcome the good bard of Niagara, who has written an extraordinary and resplendent song in the endless poem of nature! The poem of Niagara! All that Niagara recounts—the voices of the torrent, the agonies of the human soul, the majesty of the universal spirit, the titanic dialogue between the impatient man and disdainful nature; the desperate cry of a son, his great father as yet unknown, who asks his mute mother for the secret of his birth; the shout

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Appendix 

of all men in the bosom of one; the heaving of the breast that responds to the ferocity of the waves; the divine heat that scorches and soaks man’s brow as he confronts the grandiose; the prophetic and softest commingling between rebellious, self-denying man and fatal, revelatory nature; the tender nuptial with the eternal; the delightful whirlwind in creation through which man turns to himself, drunk with force and jubilation, as strong as a beloved monarch, this anointed king of nature. The poem of Niagara! A halo of spirit surrounds the halo of colors in the water. The simultaneous swell of all that lives, that will one day die, driven by the unseen, rearing up and turning about, there in what remains unknown; the law of existence, logic in the force of incomprehensible being, that destroys both martyrs and villains without apparent consideration, and like a starving ogre, swallows a handful of evangelists in one breath, even as it leaves hordes of criminals alive on earth, like red-mouthed vermin who feast on it as they will; this very road wherein men and thunderous cataracts explode, clash, rebel, leap into the sky, and sink into the deep; the angelic clamor and combat of man captivated by an overwhelming law, which in the very act of resignation and death, in blasphemy, rises up like a titan that would shake entire worlds and roar; the hoarse voice of the cascade driven by a parallel law, a cascade that moans in rage when it reaches the sea or cliff; and after everything, the tears that now envelop it entirely, and the heartrending lament of a single soul: this is the formidable poem that this man, in his age, saw in Niagara. All history that continues to be written is the history of this poem. In the sense that this poem is a representative work, to speak of it is to speak of the epoch that it represents. The strongest links forged emit the highest sparks. To speak of something as relative is pointless if it does not awaken any thought of the absolute. Everything must be developed in such a way that it leads the mind to the general and the great. Philosophy is no more than the secret of relations among various forms of existence. The soul of this poet was moved by the enthusiasms, the solitudes, the misgivings, the aspirations of genius in a singer. He presents himself before us, armed with every weapon, in an arena where he sees neither combatants nor spectators; nor does he see any prize. He runs in search of opponents, burdened with every weapon weighing on him. He finds a mountain of water that passes him by; and since he has come with his bosom filled with the desire for combat, he challenges the mountain of water! Hardly had Bonalde cast his eyes on himself, and around him; and living as he was in a time of upheavals and in a very cold land, he saw himself alone, a fervent disciple of a religion not yet established, with a heart ready for adoration, but with his reason averse to reverence—a believer by instinct, a skeptic by reflection. In vain did he seek the dust worthy of his virile brow, when he prostrated himself in homage; in vain did he try to find his place, in this age wherein no land exists that has not disrupted its people, in the confused and accelerated battle of the living; in vain, created as he was to his own misfortune for heroic undertakings, and armed with the knowledge of analysis that represses such enterprises (when it does not prohibit or ridicule them), did he resolutely pursue the great actions of men, who now consider it an honor and proof of a strong spirit not to attempt anything great, but rather something

Appendix 



easy, productive, and feasible. On his lips overflowed robust verses; in his hand shook perhaps the sword of liberty—for certainly he had never before carried a sword;—in his spirit the poignant anguish of living overflowing with untapped forces, not unlike the little body of a turtle infused with the sap of a tree. The rushing winds beat against his temples; the thirst of our days assailed his jaws; the past, nothing but a solitary castle and empty suit of armor!; the present, nothing but a question, denial, rage, blasphemy of defeat, scream of triumph!; the future, entirely obscured by the dust and smoke of battle! And exhausted from searching in vain for heroic deeds among men, it was to be the poet to salute the heroic feat of Nature. And they understood one another. The torrent presented its voice to the poet; the poet his cry of pain to the roaring marvel. Out of the sudden encounter between a naive soul and a wondrous spectacle emerged this palpitating, overflowing, lush, luxuriant poem. At times it falters, because the words cleave the ideas instead of giving them form. At times it rises to great heights, because it contains ideas that pass over the lips as they would above a valley of reeds. The poem has a Pindaric ostentation, a Heredian flight, rebellious curves, arrogant excesses, resplendent uprisings, heroic rages.7 The poet loves, instead of remaining astonished. He is not terrified, he calls out. He sheds every tear from his breast. He rebukes, strikes out, implores. He rectifies every arrogance of the mind. He would fearlessly brandish the scepter of darkness. He seizes the fog, rips it, penetrates it. He evokes the God in man; it is buried in the muddy cave: the air is frozen around him; he reemerges crowned with light; he sings the hosanna! Light is the supreme enjoyment of men. Now he paints the sonorous, turbulent, vertiginous river, crashing in a silver dust, evaporating in the many-hued mist. The stanzas are paintings: either blizzard gusts, fire blazes, or lightning bolts. Now Lucifer, now Prometheus, now Icarus. It is our age, facing our nature. Being this is a privilege given to few. He recounted to Nature the sufferings of modern man. And he was forceful, because he was sincere. He mounted the golden carriage. This poem was an impression, a clash, a striking wing, a genuine work, sudden rapture. Here and there can be seen the scholar who reads, a misfortunate character in these clashes between man and Nature; but above it all, gallant and daring, leaps man by his good fortune. The wailer stares on, but the feeler vehemently triumphs. The torrent that tells all, tells him nothing; but after awhile the poet attunes his ear, and in spite of the books of doubt that erect a barrier before him, he hears everything. Potent ideas clash, hurl themselves, take shelter, wrestle and become intertwined with one another. At times the letter bruises them, as the letter always does; at times it prolongs them, as a way of wounding them; oftentimes the copious and burning idea is nobly contained in shining verse. All that the poet is sallies forth in these verses; majesty evokes and brings all that is majestic to its feet. Bonalde’s stanza at this point would be like a wave born of the restless sea, and it grows with each passing encounter with other waves, and towers above them, and coils, and noisily unfolds, and goes to its death in the sonorous spume and irregular, rebellious whirlpools unbound by form or extension, here lording over the sand and spreading out over it like a victor that casts his cloak over the prisoner by captive; there deafeningly kissing the chiseled



Appendix 

edges of the capricious breakers; yonder breaking explosively against the lofty edge of the rocks. Its irregularity arises out of its sheer force. The perfection of the form is almost always obtained at the cost of the perfection of the idea. Look at the lightning bolt: does it conform to a straight path in its way down? When was the running mule a prettier sight than the colt grazing in the meadow? A tempest is more beautiful than a locomotive. By excess and turbulence are those works torn directly from the depths of great souls marked. And Pérez Bonalde loves his language, and caresses it, and punishes it; as there is no pleasure equal to that of knowing from whence comes every word used, or how far it will reach; nor is there anything better for broadening and strengthening the mind than the painstaking study and proper application of language. After writing, one feels the pride felt by a sculptor and painter. It is the diction of this well-rounded and beautiful poem, with its ample stock, its wide canvas, its colors resistant to the sun. Each phrase reaches the heights, as it comes from deep below, and falls scattering colors, or folded with majesty, or fractured like the waters it portrays. At times, in the rush to reach the fleeing image, the verse remains inconclusive, or concluded in haste. But its height is constant—the wave, and the wing. Pérez Bonalde pampers what he writes; but he is not a heavy-handed poet, nor does he want to be. As is obvious, he wants the verse to stream forth from his sonorous pen, well minted and well dressed; he does not want to be like others who approach their verse with a hammer of gold and burin of silver, gadgets for cutting and incising, chipping away at one extreme here, reinforcing a joint there, polishing and shaping the jewel without seeing that if the diamond suffers from craftsmanship, a pearl would die from it. Poetic verse is a pearl. It cannot be like the lush rose, full of leaves, but rather like the Malabar jasmine, loaded with fragrance. The leaf must be limpid, perfumed, solid, terse. Its every dale must be a scent-filled vessel. Wherever verse breaks, it must release light and perfume. Like a tree, poetic language must be pruned of all the frail, yellowish, or ill-fated branches, leaving nothing more than the healthy and robust ones; so that, despite fewer leaves, the branch may grow in a more dignified manner, and bear fruit better, and allow the breeze to flutter around it more freely. Polishing is good enough, especially before the verse is released from the lips and still remains in one’s mind. There it boils, like juice fermenting in the wine cask. Moreover, wine is not improved after it has been aged by adding alcohol and tannins; nor does verse appreciate after being dressed up and adorned with accessories. It must be made of a piece and a sole inspiration, because it is not the work of a laborer in mass production but rather that of a man in whose breast nest condors, a man who must capitalize on the flapping of their wings. Thus did this poem stream forth from Bonalde, and it is one of his talents: it was made of a piece. Oh, this task of cutting, this mutilation of our children, this bartering of the poet’s pick for the surgeon’s scalpel! Hence the final end of polished verses: deformed and dead. As each word must bear its own spirit and bring its own train to the verse, the reduction of verses is the reduction of the spirit, and changing them is reheating the fermenting juice that, like coffee, must not be reheated. The soul of the verse cries out as one maltreated, from these chisel blows. And it becomes less a painting of da

Appendix 



Vinci’s than a mosaic of Pompei’s. A trotting horse does not win battles. It is not in divorce that one remedies the ills of marriage, but rather in choosing the bride well and not being blind in times of mishaps regarding the real reasons for being together. Nor does the high quality of poetic verse lie in its polished glow, but rather in its having come into being winged and singing. Nor must the verse be considered finished in the hopes of ending it later; it may be finished later in appearance, but not truly, nor with that enchantment, that virginal aspect possessed by every verse that has not been cut or overburdened. Because wheat is stronger than verse, and crumbles and goes bad when it changes form too many times. When verse is considered finished it must be armed with every weapon, with a strong and resonant breastplate, and white plumage to crown the sturdy helmet of resplendent steel. All this notwithstanding, like the loose straw that one did not bother to gather up at the first whiff of perfume when the perfume box was opened, some lines [of the poem] that could have been finished, remain at loose ends: here an epithet is excessive; there an untimely assonance stands out; further on a bold antepenultimate flaunts its capricious volute; but as an occasional verse takes flight a bit short of wing, which really is no big deal in this gathering of verses abounding with great wings— since, as I consider to be characteristic of the time, there appear infectious cries and cultivated moments of despair, akin to St. Elmo’s fire in a sky already populated with stars—well then! It may be true, but such a trifle is a matter for pedants. Whoever goes in search of mountains does not bother to gather up stones along the way. S/he greets the sun, and pays homage to the mountain. Anything more is gossip for the after dinner dessert and coffee. Such matters are whispered from ear to ear. After all, who does not know that language is the rider of thought, not its horse? The imperfection of human language in order to secretly express man’s judgments, affects, and designs is a perfect and absolute proof of the need for a future existence. It is now perhaps time for me to comfort this most gallant poet’s soul, knocked about and embarrassed as it is; to assure him of what he longs to know; to pour into him the knowledge bequeathed to me by the gaze of children, a gaze full of fury, akin to someone who enters a humble house, having come from a palace; and by the last gaze of the dying, which signifies less a farewell than an appointment. Bonalde himself never denies, but rather inquires. He has no absolute faith in the next life; but neither does he possess any absolute doubt. When he is asked in desperation what is to become of him, he remains quiet, as if hearing what was left unspoken. He takes faith in the eternal aspect hidden in those conversations and responds to such questions with bravery. In vain would he fear death, when he finally rests his head on the grass carpet of the earth. In vain would the echo, forever playing with his words, respond that nothing survives the hour that seems to us the very last—because nature, like the Creator himself, is jealous of her best creatures, and seeks to confuse the judgment that she has given them. The echo in the soul speaks of deeper things than the echo of the torrent. There is no torrent like our soul. No! Human life is not life entirely! The fall is an endless descent. Yet the mind would not be able to conceive what it was incapable of realizing; existence cannot merely be the abominable plaything of

 Appendix 

a malignant madman. Man leaves this life like a folded cloth, fond of displaying its colors, in search of a frame; like a gallant ship, anxious to cross entire worlds, which in the end, must empty out into the oceans. Death is jubilant, resumptive, a new task. Human life would be a repugnant and barbarous invention if it were limited to life on earth. After all, what is our brain, sown with exploits, but a sign of a certain country in which all must find their end? A tree is born in the soil of the earth and finds its environment by extending its branches; water does the same thing in the mother deep and has its wellspring in the mind: the jubilant apprehensions of incomplete sacrifices, the end to a series of spiritual feats, the thrills that accompanied the imagination of a pure and honest life, the impossibility of attaining it on this earth. Will there be no space for this golden grove to extend its branches into the air? What more would there be for the man when he dies, for all that he had labored in life; who, giant that he is, has lived condemned to weave a monk’s baskets and fashion little nests for goldfinches? What must the tender and overflowing spirit be—which lacking productive labor, takes refuge in itself, and emerges completely autonomous and unemployed by the earth? This adventurous poet has not even entered into the bitter bosom of life. He has not suffered enough. Out of suffering wells forth faith like a halo of light, faith in the life to come. He has lived with the mind, which has darkened; and with love, which at times had deceived him; he has only to live with the pain that comforts, purifies, and elucidates. After all, what is a poet but the living nourishment of the illuminating flame? Cast his body into the fire, and the smoke will rise to the sky: let the clarity of this marvelous conflagration scatter, like a soft heat, throughout the earth! Fare you well, sincere and honorable poet, who partakes of his own self for sustenance. Behold the lyre that sounds! Behold the poet whose heart beats wildly, who fights with his hands turned to the sky, who turns his arrogant face to the living air! Behold a man, a marvel in his supreme art, a rare fruit in this land of men! Behold a hale harbinger who casts a sure foot, an avaricious mind, apprehensive and serene eyes on this pile of temple remains, propped-up walls, gilded cadavers, and wings made into chains, which so many artful opponents with a sinister fanaticism would seek to employ in the service of rebuilding a prison for modern man! He does not pursue poetry, fleeting spume of the deep sea, that only floats to the surface when a deep sea exists beneath it: fickle charmer who neither cares for her suitors, nor refrains from her caprices to the misfortunate. The poet keeps the early hour, when the body distends and the eyes are inundated with sobs, the bosom fills with intoxication, and the sails of life swell with unknown winds, and the boat moves naturally with the speed of a mountain. The air of the tempest is his own, and he sees in himself the lights, the half-opened abysses bordered by fire, and the mystical promises. In this poem, the poet bared his tormented bosom to the pure air, his tremulous arms to the pious oracle, his scorched brow to the calming caresses of sacred nature. He was free, humble, inquisitive, master of himself, knight of the spirit. Who are those sober enough to arrogate to themselves the right to restrain such a thing born free; to suffocate the flame lit by nature, to deprive such a creature as august as the human being of the natural exercise of his faculties? Who are those owls who would keep vigil over the

Appendix 

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cradle of the newly born, only to drink the oil of life from their golden lamp? Who are these wardens of the mind, who imprison the soul, this gallant Castilian, behind two rows of bars? Is there a greater blasphemer than one who, under the pretext of understanding God, dares to correct the work of the Divinity? Oh Liberty! Never stain your white tunic, lest the newborn fear you! Fare you well, Poet of the raging Torrent, who would dare be free in an epoch of pretentious slaves; thus do men accustom themselves to servitude, so that even when they have ceased to be slaves of sovereignty, with shameless humiliation, they now begin to be slaves of Liberty! Fare you well, illustrious singer, and see how well indeed I esteem the value of the word[s] I tell you! Fare you well, master of the flaming sword, rider of the winged horse, rhapsody of the oaken lyre, man who has opened his bosom to nature! Cultivate the great, you who brought all forms of cultivation to the earth. Leave the small matters to the small. May these solemn winds always lead you. Put aside the hollow, worn-out rhymes, strewn with pearls and sprinkled with artificial flowers; these are more fit for sleight-of-hand tricks and the diversion of idle ingenuity than the ignited spark of the soul, the feat worthy of those barons of the mind. Gather together these contagious burdens into a tall sheaf: the Latin tepidities, the showy rhymes, the faraway doubts, the evils of books, prescribed faith; throw them into the fire, and in these cold, sorrowful times warm yourself in the healthy flame. Now that the sleeping creature in the mind has been awakened, every man has risen to stand on earth: lips compressed, their chests courageously bared, fists reaching for the sky, demanding of life its secret.

Notes 

Venezuelan romantic poet Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde (–), exiled from his country under the dictatorship of Guzmán Blanco, established his residence in New York. There, he met up with Martí, whom Pérez Bonalde had met when he was still residing in Caracas. In New York, Pérez Bonalde published his Poema del Niágara () with this Prólogo by Martí. For its sharp diagnosis of the epoch herein portrayed, as well as the novelty of its aesthetic ideas, many consider the prologue to be the literary manifesto of Latin American modernism inasmuch as it is the first conscious evaluation of the modern world in the Hispanic context.  Measured himself against a giant. Some annotators of Martí’s work take this to refer to the colossal size of the Niagara waterfalls. It is more likely that he is indirectly alluding to the great Cuban poet José María de Heredia (–). Heredia had written on the same subject much earlier (Niágara, ) with great literary success: his poem immediately earned him a well-deserved celebrity.  In the arms of Alexander and Cebetes. In the fifth century, writer Tiberio Claudio Donato wrote a Life of Virgil, which came to be well known: it was frequently used later as a prologue to various editions and translations of Virgil’s work. In it, Donato writes: ‘‘Virgil had a particular affection for two young slaves. One was named Cebes and the other Alexander. The latter, who became the subject matter of an ecalogue [the theme of which is the fatal love of the shepherd Corydon for the youth Alexis], had been presented to Virgil as a present from his friend Asinio Pollion. The care that the former invested in shaping the spirits of both youths was not futile. He made a poet out of Cebes and a grammarian out of Alexander’’ (from the French



Appendix 

 





edition of Les poésies de Virgile, ed. P. F. Catrou [Paris: Frères Barbou, ]; innumerable translations of Donato’s Life omit this passage). Here, Martí has derived Cebetes from the accusative form of Cebes, not the nominative, which would have been the more correct spelling. Auvergne. Old province in southern France. The Auvergnese are portrayed as being a mountain people—at once robust, simple, dignified, and hospitable; and coarse and ignorant. Ugolino. In cantos  and  of his Inferno, Dante narrates the history of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, who after being conquered by the rival family Visconti in battles for control of the government in the Italian city of Pisa, ended his life locked up in a tower with his children and grandchildren, all of whom died of hunger. In Dante’s version, he implies that Ugolino devoured his children, or at least chewed on their bones. The historical veracity of this event has been much disputed. Balbuena’s moans nor Ojeda’s supplications. These are references to Bernardo de Balbuena (– ), author of the famous  epic poem El Bernardo o la victoria de Roncesvalles (Bernardo, or the Victory of Roncesvalles) and the descriptive  poem Grandeza Mexicana (Mexican Grandeur); and Dominican monk Diego de Ojeda (–), based in Lima, Peru, where he wrote one of the most important epico-religious poems of Spain’s Siglo de Oro: La Christiada (The Christened One) in . In the context of this essay, in which Martí is alluding to an old epic poetry that required patient elaboration, it is doubtful that, as some of Martí’s commentators have assumed, this allusion refers to the Spanish philologist Manuel de Valbuena (d. ), who had contributed to the Real Academia’s Diccionario de Autoridades (Standard Dictionary); neither does it refer to the Spanish journalist Antonio de Valbuena (–), known for his satirical articles on correct grammatical usage. Pindar (– ...) is perhaps the best known lyric poet of the ancient Greeks, and his poetic works were often used as the standard for evaluating poetry in the neoclassical period. ‘‘Heredian’’ refers to José María de Heredia (see note  above). Trans.

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Appendix 

Coney Island

In human affairs, nothing equals the marvelous prosperity of the United States of the North.1 Whether or not deep roots are lacking in them; whether or not the ties that bind sacrifice and a common suffering are more enduring than those that bind the common interest; whether or not this colossal nation will carry ferocious and tremendous elements in its bowels; whether or not the absence of a feminine spirit, origin of artistic sense and complementary to the national being, will prevail and corrupt the heart of this astonishing people, this is what the times will tell. Now more than ever, it is certainly true that never a happier, merrier, more wellequipped, more jovial, and frenetic crowd has lived around such useful labor in any other region of the land, nor is there one that has brought about and enjoyed a greater fortune, nor is there one that has covered a greater number of rivers and oceans with ships bedecked in merriment, nor is there one that has extended itself with a more tumultuous order and ingenuous happiness through gentle coastlines, gigantic wharves, and glittering and fantastic promenades. North American newspapers come full of hyperbolic descriptions of the original beauties and singular attractions of one such summer place, overflowing with people, dotted with sumptuous hotels [and] commuted by an aeriel railway; sprinkled with gardens, kiosks, small theaters, beer gardens, arenas, tents, innumerable carriages, picturesque assemblies, mobile stalls, auctions, fountains. French newspapers become a mere echo of this renown. From the furthest reaches of the American Union come legions of intrepid ladies and gallant peasants to admire the splendid landscapes, the incomparable wealth, the blinding variety, the Herculean drive, the astonishing sight of Coney Island, this famous island, heap of abandoned earth four years ago, and today the spacious area of repose, refuge, and recreation for a hundred thousand New Yorkers who attend the joyful beaches daily. Four little towns are united by carriageways, streetcars, and steam trains. The first, wherein , people can easily fit at the same time in the dining room of a given hotel, is called Manhattan Beach; another, which has arisen like Minerva with helmet and spear,2 armed with ships, plazas, piers, and murmuring orchestras, is called Rockaway; another, the least important, which takes its name from a hotel of extraordinary capacity and weighty construction, is called Brighton; but the attraction of the island

is not the faraway Rockaway, nor the monotonous Brighton, nor the aristocratic and solemn Manhattan Beach; it is Cable, the laughing Cable, with its elevator higher than the Trinity tower in New York—two times higher than the tower of our cathedral—to whose peak travelers climb, suspended by a diminutive cage at a height that gives one vertigo; it is Cable, with its two iron docks that advance over the sea on elegant pillars three blocks in length, with its Sea Beach Palace, which is no more than a hotel now, and which was once the famed ‘‘Agricultural Building’’ during the Philadelphia Exposition—transported, as if by the art of enchantment, to New York and re-elevated in its original form, without so much as a splint lacking, on the coast of Coney Island; it is Cable, with its fifty-cent museums, where they exhibit human monsters, outlandish fish, bearded women, melancholic dwarves, and rickety elephants, which the advertisement pompously promotes as the largest elephants in the world; it is Cable, with its  orchestras, with its cheerful balls, with its battalions of carriages for children, its gigantic cow that, milked night and day, never fails to produce a fresh twenty-five centimeter glass, its countless couples of loving pilgrims who spontaneously burst into those tender lines of García Guitiérrez:3 Aparejadas van por las lomas las cogujadas y las palomas (Coupled together they pass through the hills the crested skylarks and the doves) It is Cable, where families attempt to look not for the sulfurous and nauseating air of New York, but the clean and invigorating air of the oceanside, where the poor mothers—all gathered together around one of the tables that one finds free in one of these extremely spacious salons, opening an enormous box full of familial provisions for lunch—squeeze against their breasts their ill-fated babies, who seem as if devoured, drained, eaten away by this terrible disease of summer that cuts down children like the sickle reaps the grain—the cholera infantum. Ships come and go; trains whistle, blow smoke, enter and exit, emptying their serpent breast swollen with families onto the beach; women rent their blue flannel outfits and coarse straw hats tied under their chins; men, dressed in simpler garb, lead the women by the hand and enter the sea; the children, barefoot, wait on the wet seashore for the roaring wave to wet them, and they escape when it arrives, concealing their terror with laughs, only to return en masse, as if to defy the enemy in a game that never exhausts the innocents, lying prostrate only an hour earlier from the severe heat; or they enter and leave, like marine butterflies, in the fresh air of the breakers, and since each one comes provided with a bucket and a spade, they entertain each other by filling each other’s buckets with the burning sand on the beach; or after they have bathed (imitating, of course,

Appendix 



the conduct of the more serious people of both sexes, who do not hold censure and shock in high regard, as might those who think as we think in this land), they throw themselves on the sand and let themselves be covered, knocked about, massaged, and enveloped in the burning sand, because this is held to be healthy exercise, and for such a singular ease it offers a superficial, ordinary, and uproarious intimacy, at least from the perspective of those prosperous people so full of enthusiasm. But the shocking thing there is not this way of bathing, nor is it the cadaverous features of the children, nor the capricious hats and incomprehensible dress of those damsels, noted for their prodigality, their extravagance, and their exaggerated disposition toward happiness; nor is it the conversation between lovers, nor the bathhouses, nor the operas sung on café tables, dressed as Edgard and Romeo, and as Lucía and Juliette;4 nor is it the grimaces and shouts of the Black minstrels, who could alas! never be like the minstrels from Scotland; nor is it the majestic beach, nor the mild and serene sun; what one finds so shocking there is the size, the quantity, the unexpected effect of human activity, this immense valve of open pleasure on an immense people, these restaurants that seen from afar look like lofty armies, these roads that from a two-mile distance are not roads but long carpets of heads; this daily spillage of an extraordinary people onto an extraordinary beach; this mobility, this talent for advancement, this change of form, this feverish rivalry of wealth, this monumental aspect of this ensemble, which legitimately pits this nation of bathhouses in competition with the majesty of the land that supports it, the sea that caresses it, and the sky that crowns it; this rising tide, this annihilating and incomparable expansiveness, solid and frenetic, and this naturalness in the marvelous; this is what one finds shocking there. Other peoples—and we among them—live as if devoured by a sublime inner demon, which drives us to the relentless pursuit of an ideal of love or glory; and when we grasp some level of this ideal that we have pursued, with the pleasure of an eagle who seizes its prey, a new urge unsettles us, a new ambition spurs us on, a new aspiration launches us into a new vehement longing, and from the eagle escapes a once-imprisoned free rebel butterfly, as if defying us to follow it, shackling us to its scrambled flight. Not these tranquil spirits, disturbed only by the anxiety to possess a fortune. The eyes are drawn to those reverberant beaches; one enters and leaves by those passages, as vast as the pampas; one ascends to the peaks of those colossal houses, as high as mountains; seated on chairs along the seashore, strollers fill their lungs with that potent and benevolent air; of course, it is common knowledge that a melancholic sadness seizes the men of our Spanish-American communities who live there, who seek in vain and do not find; for however much their senses grant importance to their first impressions, or captivate their eyes, or their reason darken and obfuscate, these men are possessed by the anguish of solitude in the end, the nostalgia for a higher spiritual world that invades and inflicts them; they feel like sheep without a mother or pastor, astray from the flock; and whether or not it shows in their eyes, the[ir] frightened spirit breaks down in the most bitter torrent of tears, because that great land is bereft of spirit.



Appendix 

But what a coming and going! What a flow of money! What facilities for all to enjoy! What an absolute absence of any sadness or visible poverty! Everything is laid out in the open air: noisy groups, the enormous restaurants, this original love of the North Americans, in which almost none of those elements that constitute the sentimental, tender, and elevated love of our lands enters in. The theater, photography, the bathhouses; everything is open-air. Some lift weights, because for the North Americans, this is a source of positive enjoyment, or of real pain—depending on the number of pounds; others, in exchange for fifty cents, will receive an envelope from a strapping German woman in which their good fortune is written; others, with incomprehensible delight, drink slender long and narrow glasses (in the shape of artillery shells) of distasteful mineral water. Some climb on spacious carriages that will bring them from Manhattan to Brighton in the gentle twilight hour; another lands his boat, which he was rowing earlier in the company of a smiling girlfriend, as happy as a little girl, who leaps onto the animated beach, supporting herself with a firm grip on his shoulder; one absorbed group admires an artist who is cutting a black piece of paper, which he later stamps onto white cardboard, the silhouette of which he wants to portray in this singular manner; another group celebrates the skill of a lady who, in a stall that cannot measure more than three-quarters of a yard, creates curious flowers made of fish skins; with bellowing laughs, others applaud the skill with which a ball thrower has managed to hit the nose of a misfortunate man of color, who in exchange for a measly day’s wage, stands day and night with his frightened head stuck through a hole made in the canvas, avoiding the pitches of the ball throwers with ridiculous movements and exaggerated faces; the bearded and venerable sit heavily on a wooden tiger, or a griffin, or an effigy, or on the back of a boa constrictor, all of which are placed in circles, along with horses, that spin around a central mast for a few minutes to sonatas played out of tune by amateur musicians. The less wealthy eat crabs and oysters on the beach, or sweets and meats laid out on tables for free, as is offered by certain hotels; the wellto-do squander large quantities of fruit punch in doses, which they drink like wine; and in strange and solid delicacies that our palate, accustomed to the artistic and the airy, would doubtless reject. Such people eat quantity; we, quality. And this excess waste, this hubbub, this crowd, this scandalous wasp nest, lasts from June to October, from morning until midnight—without interval, without interruption, without any change. At night, how beautiful it is! True, any thinker would find shocking so many a married woman walking around without husband; so many a woman strolling by the wet seashore with a scarf around her shoulders, wrapped up in her pleasure and unmindful that the all-too-penetrating air must inevitably wound the flaccid nature of her offspring; so many a damsel who leaves her little one behind at the hotel, in the arms of a rough Irish woman; and who, on returning from her long walk, neither takes the child in her arms, nor kisses him on the lips, nor satisfies the crying child’s hunger. At night, there is no panorama of the city more breathtaking than that obtained

Appendix 



on that Cable beach. Does one see the heads of people during the day? One sees even more lights at night. Seen at some distance from the sea, the four populations, radiant in the shadows, look as if the stars that populate the sky had unexpectedly fallen into the seas and had been reunited into four colossal groups. The electric lights inundate the hotel plazas, the English gardens, the concert areas, the beach itself where one can count beneath that vibrant light the grains of sand, with a magic and caressing clarity. From afar these places seem like restless higher spirits, laughing and diabolical spirits that pass through the morbid gaslights, the threads of red lamps, Chinese orbs, Venetian chandeliers. As in the full light of day, one can read newspapers, billboard signs, letters, everywhere. It is a town of stars; and there lie the orchestras, the dances, the hullabaloo, the crash of the surf, the noise of men, the chorus of laughs, the pleasure of the air, the loud cry of street vendors, the swift trains, the light carriages; until, when the time to return has arrived, like a monster that empties its bowels entirely into the hungry jaws of another monster, that colossal crowd, crushed and compact, mobs the entrances of the trains that moan when they are full, as if tired from the weight, on their way through the solitude that they transform by redeeming it; and they later yield their mixed-up cargo to the gigantic ocean liners, lit up by harps and violins, that lead to the wharves and sprinkle the tired passengers into a thousand cars and roads like veins of iron, across slumbering New York City.

Notes  This chronicle first appeared in the Colombian (Bogotá) magazine La Pluma,  December . See José Martí, Obras Completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –), –. Trans.  Minerva. Roman goddess; originally the Greek goddess Athena, who was born from the head of Zeus completely armed for battle.  Antonio García Gutiérrez. Spanish playwright and poet (–).  Edgardo and . . . Lucía. Characters from the opera Lucia de Lammermoor (), written by Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti (–).



Appendix 

INDEX

Abrams, Meyer H.,  n.,  n. Adorno, Theodor, xvi, xxxiii n., , ,  n., ,  n., ,  n.,  n., ,  n. Aesthetic(s), xxxix, xlv, –, , –, –, , –, –, , , – ; anti-, –, , , –, –; and literature, –, –, –, – , , , –, –, –, ; of luxury, , –, – n., –, , ; and politics, –, –; and self-critique of autonomy, , , , . See also Arielism; Chronicle, modern(ist); Culture: and culturalism; Letters; Literary ideology; Literature; Martí, José; Style: and stylization; Writer: fin de siècle Alberdi, Juan Bautista,  n. Aldrey, Fausto T., – Alienation. See Estrangement Alsina, Valentín, , – Altamarino, Carlos and Sarlo, Beatriz,  n. Althusser, Louis,  n. Alvear, Torcuato de, ,  n. Anderson, Benedict,  Anti-imperialism, , , –, , – , . See also Spanish-American War () Arendt, Hannah,  n. Argentina: literature of, , , , , . See also Sarmiento Arielism, xxxix, , , , , , –, –. See also Aesthetic(s); Culture: and culturalism Arlt, Roberto, 

Art for art’s sake, . See Aesthetic(s); Bürger, Peter; Literature: fin de siècle Ascasubi, Hilario, ,  n. Assis, Machado de, –,  n. Azúa, Carlos Real de,  n. Balbuena, Bernardo de,  n. Barbarism. See Civilization and barbarism Barceló, Javier Malagón, viii Barthes, Roland, ,  n. Bastos, María Luisa, – Baudelaire, Charles, , , ,  n. Beauty. See Aesthetic(s) Belles lettres. See Letters Bello, Andrés, viii, xv–xvi, xxxv, ,  n., – , ,  nn., , , –; division of knowledge in, –; eloquence in, –, , ; and Sarmiento, –, –,  n.. See also Letters Beltrán, Oscar,  n. Benjamin, Walter, viii,  n., , n., , –,  n. and n.,  n., – n., – n.,  n. Berman, Marshall, xxxiii n. Beverley, John, xxxi–xxxii n. Bidau, Eduardo, and Piñero, Norberto, –,  Bilbao, Francisco, – Bolívar, Simón,  Bonalde, José Antonio Pérez, xxxv–xl,  n.. See also Martí, José Borges, Jorge Luis,  n.,  n. Bourdieu, Pierre,  n. Brooklyn Bridge, – Buffalo Bill, 

Bulnes, Francisco, –,  n. Bunge, Carlos,  n. Bürger, Peter, xli, xlvi n., – n., , – Burrows, Susanna,  n. Cambaceres, Eugenio, , –,  Campos, Haroldo de,  n. Capitalism, xl, , , –, ; and the newspaper, –, –, –, –,  n., . See also Culture: industry; Journalism Casal, Julián del, xli, –, –, , ,  Casey, Calvert,  n. Castelar, Emilio,  Castellanos, Juan de,  n. Catastrophe: in Sarmiento, –, –; in Martí, , –,  Centennials. See Latin America: centennials Certeau, Michel de,  nn., ,  n., ,  n. Chronicle, modern(ist), xli–xlii, xliv–xlv, – , –, , –,  n., –,  n., , –, –, –, –, – n.; and the essay, –, . See also Aesthetic(s); Journalism; Strolling; Style: and stylization Científicos. See Positivism Citizenship, xxxvi, xliii, , ,  n., , , , , . See also Law; Letters; Nation-state consolidation City: as emblem, , –, –, –; and gender, , –; and the newspaper, –, – Civilization (and barbarism), xxxix, xlii, – , , , –,  n., , –, , –, –, –,  Clark, T.J., –,  n. Clifford, James, xii, xxvi Conant, William C., ,  nn.,  Concha, Jaime,  n. Coney Island, –, –, –,  n., , – Consumerism. See Fetishism Coronil, Fernando, xi-xii Cortázar, Julio, –



Index

Creole,  Criminology,  Cruz Malavé, Arnaldo,  n. Cuba, – Cuban Revolutionary Party (),  Culture: and culturalism, xxiv, xxxvi, , –, –, , –, ; high, –, –, , –,  n.; industry, , , , , , –; mass, xvi–xvii, xxxiii n., , , , , , , –,  n., , , , –; national, , –, –, – . See also Aesthetic(s): and literature; Arielism; Fetishism; Humanities Dana, Charles,  Darío, Rubén, xxxvi, xli, , , , –,  n.,  n., , , , , ,  n.,  n., –, –, –, , –,  n., ,  n.. See also Aesthetic(s); Writer: fin de siècle Decadentism. See Darío, Rubén Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix, xxxi n. and n., xxxiii n.,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  Dependency: economic. See Modernization: uneven Derrida, Jacques, viii,  n.,  n. Díaz, Porfirio, , , , ,  Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio,  n. Disenchantment of the world. See Weber, Max Drinnon, Richard, xxx Du Bois, W. E. B., xxvii Edison, Thomas A., – Eloquence. See Bello, Andrés Emerson, Ralph Waldo, –,  n. Encyclopedism, , ,  Enlightenment, , , ,  n., , , , , , , , ,  Escandell, Noemí,  n. Essay, xliv, , , –, . See also Chronicle Estrangement, xlii, ,  n., –, – , –, , , , , ,  n. Exile, xxxv–xxxvii, xviii, xxviii–xxix, , ,

, –; in Martí, –, –, , –,  Facundo Quiroga, Juan, , – Family: crisis of the, –, ,  Feminization, , , –, –, –, , ,  n., . See also Aesthetic(s): and luxury Fernández Retamar, Roberto, xxxi, xxxii n., xxxiii n. Fetishism, –, –,  n.. See also Aesthetic(s): and luxury Figueroa, Sotero,  n. Fin de siècle writers. See Writers: fin de siècle Flaneur. See Strolling Flaubert, Gustave, . See also Aesthetic(s): modernist Fornaris, José,  Foucault, Michel, xviii,  n., – n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Franco, Jean, xl,  n.,  n., ,  n., ,  n. Frankfurt School, . See also Adorno, Theodor Gamboa, Federico, –,  García Canclini, Nestor, xxxii n. García Gutiérrez, Antonio,  García Lorca, Federico,  García Marruz, Fina,  n., –,  n. Gift-economy, , – n. Gilroy, Paul, xxvi-xxviii Goldar, Ernesto,  Gómez, Eusebio. See Criminology Gómez, Máximo, ,  Gómez Carrillo, Enrique, xli, , , –, , –, ,  n. González, Aníbal,  n.,  n. González Echevarría, Roberto, x n.,  n.,  n.,  n. González Prada, Manuel, , –, ,  n., – Gossman, Lionel, ,  nn.,  Goyena, Pedro,  n. Grammar and grammaticism. See Bello, Andrés Gramsci, Antonio, xxxiii n.,  n., , –,  n., 

Groussac, Paul, , , ,  Gutiérrez, José María,  Gutiérrez Girardot, Rafael, xl–xli, ,  n.,  n.,  n. Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel, xli, , ,-, –, , –, ,  n. Habermas, Jürgen, xi–xiii, xxiii, xxxi n., xxxi n., ,  n.,  n., , –, –,  n.,  n. Halperín Donghi, Tulio,  n.,  n.,  n.,  Hamon, Philippe,  n., – n. Hauser, Arnold, ,  n. Haussmann, Baron, , ,  n.,  n. Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, xxxix–xl, ,  n., –, ,  n., , , –,  nn.,  Heredia, José M., ,  n. Hostos, Eugenio María de, ,  n., –,  n. Humanities, ,  n., –. See also Letters Imperialism, xvii, xxix–xxx, –, , , ,  nn., . See also SpanishAmerican War () Indigenismo,  Intellectuals: traditional vs. organic, xlii–xliii, ,  nn., , , –. See also Writer Interior: as aesthetic autonomy. See Aesthetic(s); Arielism; Chronicle: modernist; Culture: and culturalism; Literature: fin de siècle; Martí, José: and poetry Jackson, Helen Hunt, xii, – Jameson, Frederic,  n. Jay, Paul, xxxii n. Jitrik, Noé, – n., ,  n.,  n.,  n. Journalism, xlii, –,  n., , , . See also Literature: and journalism; Newspaper Kant, Immanuel, viii, ,  n. Kantorowicz, Ernst,  n.,  n.

Index



Kaplan, Amy, xxix Kaplan, Marcos,  n. Kasson, John F.,  n.,  Katzman, Israel,  Kitsch. See Art for art’s sake; Style: stylization Knowledge-as-said. See Bello, Andrés Krauze, Enrique,  n. Lara, Agustín,  Latin America: centennials in, , , –; and cultural identity, –, , –, , –, –; Latin Americanism, xlv, , , –, , , ,  n., –,  n.,  n., ,  n. Latino writing, – Laviera, Tato, –,  n. Law, xxxvi–xxxix, xlii, , –, , –, ,  n.,  n., ; vs. letters, , –, –, – n.,  n., . See also Citizenship; Civilization and barbarism; Letters; Rationalization; Writer: as patrician intellectual Legendre, Pierre,  n. Letrado. See Writer: as patrician intellectual Letters, xxxvi, –, ,  n., –, –; and citizenship, –. See also Bello, Andrés; Law; Writer: as patrician intellectual Lezama Lima, José, xxx,  n. Lida, Raimundo,  n.,  n. Literariness. See Style: stylization Literary autonomization. See Literature: and autonomization Literary ideology, , , , – n., ,  n., –, ,  Literato. See Literature: fin de siècle; Writer: fin de siècle Literature: as academic discipline, –, , –; autonomization in, xviii, xxxvii, xxxix, xl–xlii, –, , , – n.,  n., –, –, –, , , –, ; as critique of modernity, xxxv, xxxviii, , , , –, –, , –, –; fin de siècle, –, , , , , , , , , –, ; as invented tradition, –, –



Index

, , , –, ; and journalism, –; pedagogical function in, –, –; and state politics, xxxvi–xxxvii,  n., –; travel, , –, –. See also Aesthetic(s); Chronicle: modern(ist); Civilization and barbarism; Culture; Letters; Literary ideology; Martí, José; Style: stylization; Writer Litvak, Lily,  n. Lizardi, Fernandez de, – Lloyd, David, xv, xxxii n. López, Lucio V., ,  Lott, Eric, xxxiii n. Lott, Tommy, xxxiii n. Ludmer, Josefina, , – n. Lugones, Leopoldo, ,  nn.,  Lukacs, Gregory, ,  n.,  n. Luz y Caballero, José de la, viii, –, –, ,  nn.,  Lyotard, Jean-François,  n., , ,  n. Maceo, Antonio,  Marcus, George, xii Marcuse, Herbert,  n.,  n. Market, xl–xli, –; and art, –, – , –, –,  n., . See also Capitalism; Journalism Martél Miró, Julián,  Martí, José, ix–x, xi–xii, xiv, xv–xxvi, , , –, –, –, , –, – ,  n., , , –,  n., , , , –,  n.,  n.,  nn. , , ,  nn., ; and Amistad funesta, ; and discourse of war, xii, xvii, xviii–xxxi, , , –, –; and Escenas norteamericanas [North American Scenes], xii, xvii, xxxi, xliv–xlv, ,  n., , –, –, , –,  n., – n., , , ; and journalism, –, –,  n., –; and ‘‘Our America,’’ xxix,  n., , –; and the Poema del Niágara, xii, xvii, xxxv–xl, , –,  n., –; and poetry, xii, , –,  n.,  n., , , –,  nn., , –,  n., –,  n.; Ramona, –. See also

Chronicle: modern(ist); Culture; Literature; Writer: fin de siècle Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel,  Marx, Karl, xxxiii n. Marx, Leo,  n. Mass-culture. See Culture: mass Mauss, Marcel,  n. McLuhan, Marshall,  n. Mejía, José M. Ramos,  n. Mercado, Manuel, –, –, ,  n. Mexico: revolutionary. See Latin America Mignolo, Walter, xxxi Miranda, Francisco de, ,  n. Mistral, Gabriela,  Mitre y Vedia, Bartólome, , –,  n.,  n. Mitre, Emilio,  Modernism. See Chronicle: modernist; Literatures: fin de siècle; Style: stylization; Writer: fin de siècle Modernization, uneven, x, xiv, xvii, xl–xlii, , –, –, –, , –, , , ,  Molloy, Sylvia,  n., ,  n.,  n. Monsiváis, Carlos,  n.,  n. Mora, Jorge Aguilar,  n. Mumford, Lewis, ,  n. Nación, La (Buenos Aires), –, – n. Nation-state consolidation, xxxvi, xlii, , , –, ,  n., –, –, –, –, –. See also Citizenship; Civilization and barbarism; Law; Nationalism Nationalism,  n., , –, –, ,  Neruda, Pablo,  Nervo, Amado, ,  Newspaper: and the city, –; news bulletin, , –; and rationalization, –, . See also Chronicle: modernist; Journalism; Market: and art; Nación, La North/South dichotomy, –. See also We/they antithesis ‘‘Nuestra América.’’ See Martí, José: and ‘‘Our America’’

Obligado, Rafael,  Olivio Jiménez, José, ix Onís, Federico de,  Orality: and/vs. writing, –, – n., –,  n.,  Organic intellectual. See Intellectuals Orientalism, ,  Orígines. See Lezama Lima, José Ortega y Gasset, José, , ,  Oyuela, Calixto, ,  Pacheco, José Emilio, xl, ,  n., –,  n. Partido Revolucionario Cubano (). See Cuban Revolutionary Party Paz, Octavio, xl, ,  Piglia, Ricardo, – Piñero, Norberto. See Bidau, Eduardo Poe, Edgar Allan,  Poetry, xli–xlii, –, – n., , – . See also Bello, Andrés; Darío, Rubén; Heredia, José M.; Laviera, Tato; Literature; Martí, José; Sarmiento, Domingo F. Porush, David,  n. Positivism, xxxix, ,  n., –,  Postmodern poetics, –, – Poulantzas, Nicos, ,  n., ,  n.,  n. Quiroga, Horacio,  Rabasa, José, xi Rama, Angel, viii–ix, xxxvii, xl, xlvi,  n.,  n., , –, ,  n.,  n., ,  n., –,  nn., ,  Ramos, Julio,  n.,  n. Rationalization, xlvi n., ,  n., –, . See also Literature: autonomization in; Modernization: uneven Reification, critique of. See Fetishism Republic of letters. See Letters Reyes, Alfonso, xxix, ,  nn., ,  n., –,  n.,  n. Riffaterre, Michel,  n. Rimbaud, Arthur,  Rivera Cambas, Manuel,  Roca, Julio A., 

Index



Rodó, José E., xxxix, xlv, , , –, –,  n.,  n., , , –, ,  n., , , –, , –, . See also Arielism; Culture: and culturalism Rodriguez, Manuel Díaz,  Roebling, John A., –,  Rojas, Ricardo, , ,  nn., ,  n., –,  Romanticism,  n., , ,  Romero, José Luis,  Rómulo Fernández, Juan,  n. Rosas, Juan Manuel. See Civilization and barbarism Rotker, Susana, xxxi n. Saco, José Antonio, , , ,  n.,  n., –,  Said, Edward, , , – Saldívar, José David, xxxiv n. Salinas, Pedro,  n.,  n. Santi, Enrico Mario,  n. Sarmiento, Domingo, xv, –, –,  n.,  n., –, , –,  n., – , , –,  n., ,  nn., , . See also Bello, Andrés; Civilization and barbarism; Culture: and culturalism; Exile Schiller, Friedrich von, ,  n. Secularization. See Rationalization; Weber, Max Sellén, Francisco,  Sierra, Justo, ,  Silva, José Asunción, –,  Simmel, Georg, , ,  n. Sommer, Doris,  n. Spanish-American War (), xxix–xxx, xxix, , , . See also Imperialism Spivak, Gayatri, – n. Starobinski, Jean,  n. Strolling, –, –, –, . See also Chronicle: modern(ist); Style: and stylization; Writer: fin-de siècle Style: and stylization, ,  n., –, , ,  n., , , , –, – , ,  n.. See also Aesthetic(s); Chronicle: modernist; Writer: fin de siècle



Index

Subaltern representation, – Subirats, Euduardo,  n. Tableau vivant, –,  n.,  Ten Years War (Cuba),  Thom, René,  n. Trachtenberg, Alan,  n. Translation, –, ,  United States, –, , – n.,  Vagrancy. See Saco, José Antonio Vallejo, Cesar,  Varona, Enrique J., xliii, –,  nn.,  Vattimo, Gianni,  Vasconcelos, José, –,  n.,  Vedia, Enrique de, – Vega, El Inca Garcilaso de,  Viñas, David, , ,  n.,  n. Virgil,  n. Vitier, Cintio, ,  n.,  n. Volosinov, Valentín, – n. Voyeurism, –. See also Chronicle: modernist We/they antithesis, xxiv, , –. See also North/South dichotomy Weber, Max, xiii, xvii, xxxii n., xxxv—xxxviii, ,  n., ,  n., ; disenchantment of the world, xlvi n., ,  Whitman, Walt, , ,  n. White, Hayden,  n.,  n. Wilde, Eduardo, – n., –, ,  Williams, Raymond, xiii,  n.,  Women: and industrial society. See Feminization Writer: as patrician intellectual, xxxvi–xxxix, xl, xlii–xliii, , , , , , –, – , , ; fin-de siècle, xliv, , , , –, –, , , –,  n., –, , , –, , , , , – Zea, Leopoldo,  n.

Julio Ramos is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ramos, Julio. [Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina. English] Divergent modernities : culture and politics in th century Latin America / Julio Ramos ; translated by John D. Blanco ; introduction by José David Saldivar. p. cm. — (Post-contemporary interventions) (Latin America in translation/en traducción/em tradução) Includes bibliographical references and index.  ––– (cloth : alk. paper).  ––– (pbk. : alk. paper) . Spanish American literature—th century—History and criticism. . Politics and literature—Latin America—History —th century. I. Title. II. Series. III. Series: Latin America in translation/en traducción/em tradução. .  .'—dc - 