Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture 9780292799578

Citation preview

- - - FACUNDO AND THE CONSTRUCTION - - -

OF ARGENTINE CULTURE

The Texas Pan American Series

FACUNDO AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ARGENTINE CULTURE

BY DIANA SORENSEN GOODRICH

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN

Portions of rhis work originally appeared as "Reading Sarmiemo: Wri£ing rhe Myrhs of Narional Cul£ure," from Sarmiento and His Argentina, edired by Joseph T. Criscemi. Copyrigh£ © I993 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Used wirh permission of rhe publisher; and as "The Wiles of Dispurarion: Alberdi Reads Facundo," from Sarmiento: Author of a Nation, Donghi, Tulio Halperi, Ivan Jaksic, e£ al. Copyrigh£ © I994 The Regems of rhe Universiry of California; and as "From Barbarism £o Civilizarion: Travels of a Larin American Texr," from American Literary History (1992.) Vol. 4, 3: 443-463. By permission of Oxford Universiry Press. Copyrigh£ © 1996 by rhe Universiry of Texas Press All righrs reserved Primed in rhe Unired Srares of America Firs£ edirion, I 996 Requesrs for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent £O Permissions, Universiry of Texas Press, P.O. Box 78 I9, Austin, TX 787I3·7819.

@> The paper used in this publication meets rhe minimum requirements of American National Standard for Informarion Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Primed Library Materials, ANSI Z39·48-1984. Library of Congress Caraloging-in-Publication Dara Goodrich, Diana Sorensen. Facundo and the consrruction of Argemine culture I by Diana Sorensen Goodrich. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-292-72790-8 r. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 18 I I - 1888. Facundo. 2.. Argentina-Hiswry-1 810- 3· Argentina-Imellectuallife. I. Tide. F2.846.S2.47G6 1996 982.-dc10

For my daughter Lisa

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX

INTRODUCTION I

ONE

THE WARS OF PERSUASION

Conflict, Interpretation, and Power in the Early Years ofFacundo's Reception 23 TWO

THE RISKS OF FICTION

Facundo and the Parameters of Historical Writing 41 THREE

THE WILES OF DISPUTATION

Alberdi Reads Facundo 67

Vll

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FOUR

FACUNDO'S TRAVELS TO THE METROPOLITAN CENTERS 83 FIVE

THE NATION CONSOLIDATED

The r88o's and the Canonization ofFacundo 99 SIX

A CLASSIC CORRECTED

Rewriting the National Myths 142

NOTES 171

BIBLIOGRAPHY 195

INDEX 213

VIII

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Emily, f,iends, and colleagues have contributed to the writing of this book by being listeners and interlocutors, and also by providing the practical help without which writing cannot take place. Foremost is my mother, Marta Sorensen, whose devotion and support have smoothed many wrinkles along the way. My father, Gerardo Sorensen, has always been the ultimate reading partner. To Jim Goodrich, the deepest thanks for his loyalty, kindness and companionship. Throughout the writing of this book I profited enormously from the intelligent and generous attention offered by Sylvia Molloy. She has followed its progress with continuous support, and I am greatly indebted to her for her friendship and the shared passion for Sarmiento and his world. Josefina Ludmer, Ana Maria Barrenechea, and Walter Mignolo also offered helpful leads when the idea of this project was taking shape. My colleague Ann Wightman has been a most valued interlocutor throughout the years, at times helping me think through some questions from her vantage point as a historian. The same could be said about Jay Winter, whose sense of history and poetry furthered my dialogue with the past. To Wilfrido Corral, many thanks for his unfailing and generous bibliographical expertise. Arcadio Diaz Quinones and David William Foster offered most valued readings of the manuscript, for which I am deeply grateful. Over the years, I have had stimulating and sometimes heated conversations about Sarmiento with Joseph T. Criscenti, Elizabeth Garrels, Marina Kaplan, and Doris Sommer. I hope the following pages spark many more. IX

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

The research and writing of this book were aided by a Fulbright Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a semester at Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities. I am indebted to their support, which provided essential access to research materials as well as the equally necessary peace and concentration. In Argentina, Adriana de Muro from the Museo Hist6rico Sarmiento went beyond the call of duty to allow me to access the valuable materials under her supervision. Many thanks for her kindness and efficiency. My friend Dr. Eduardo Duek worked miracles to obtain microfiches from Chile's Biblioteca Nacional. Theresa J. May from the University of Texas Press lent her gracious and professional support throughout. My colleagues and students at Wesleyan University deserve my gratitude for their interest in my work and the intellectual stimulation they provide: I can always count on the generously intelligent input of Peter Dunn, Bernardo Antonio Gonzalez, Robert Conn, and Khachig Tololyan. Joan Jurale, Edmund Rubacha, and Steven Lebergott at Olin Memorial Library have lent their expertise and support on many crucial occasions. Thanks go to all whose fingerprints are present on the following pages; may I have the good fortune to have put their traces to occasional good use. I dedicate this book to my daughter, Lisa K. Goodrich, who keeps teaching me.

X

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OF ARGENTINE CULTURE

SARMIENTO

Del tiempo que es despues, antes, ahora, Sarmiento el soiiador sigue soiiandonos. -JORGE LUIS BORGES

INTRODUCTION

Yet another book about Facundo? A look at the daunting bibliography on this foundational book would suggest that this volume would be best left undone. But the point of departure of the pages that follow is precisely the sheer proliferation of writing that has accrued around Facundo, and the ideological rifts traversing it. For although there is general agreement about the importance of the book, and about its status as a classic of Latin American letters, there are deep disagreements about its interpretation and about the kinds of nationbuilding myths it promoted. To this day, Argentines engage in heated debates over Sarmiento's book. To some, it is a necessary call to join the developed world and draw from European civilization in order to foster Argentine modernization. To others, it contributed to the insidious discourse on national inferiority which blocked the expression of populist and rural-based aspirations from the production of national identity. No one treats Facundo as a neutral text. Growing up in Argentina, within the somewhat eccentric environment of a British school, I was exposed in my childhood to the glorification of Sarmiento and his ideas. We sang the "Himno a Sarmiento," invoking his struggles "with the pen, with the sword, with the word" [con Ia pluma, con Ia espada, y Ia palabra,], we called anyone who never missed school "una Sarmiento," and we devoted long speeches on commemorative celebrations on September II, "Teacher's Day"-the day of Sarmiento's death-to his lifelong dedication to education. Among my

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

earliest recollections of school readings are passages taken from Recuerdos de provincia (Paula Albarracin's fig tree loomed as emblematic without my knowing why; Sarmiento the miner reading through the night in Copiapo epitomized the passion for learning) and Facundo. The latter lingered in our imagination before we knew what to make of its discursive heterogeneity; we read extracts about the problems of Argentina's desolate spaces, about the intriguing abilities of the "track-finder" [rastreador] or the "path-finder" [baqueano], about the "gaucho outlaw" [gaucho malo] as incarnated by a Facundo Quiroga fleeing from justice as he looked into the eyes of a terrifying tiger. Juan Manuel de Rosas, of course, epitomized the ever-present barbarism of Argentina's conflict-ridden political life; memories of Peron's rule were obliquely evoked by the colorful depiction of terror in the days of the Confederation. A high school history teacher who mentioned the enterprise of revisionismo alarmed us with the possibility that we might have to readjust our distribution of good and bad qualities, but it was not until I was a student in the Facultad de Filosofla y Letras at the Universidad de Buenos Aires that I had to confront the dismantling of the received myths. During the seventies, when the governments of Campara and Peron were giving voice to populism, Facundo was indicted as the document of the vende-patrias who had betrayed Argentina and had literally given it away to foreign interests. The attacks were launched from a variety of angles, but one consistent target was the civilization-barbarism dichotomy, which was made to stand on its head in order to read the whole book against the grain. The power and pathos of these debates left traces which I pursued in graduate school in the United States as I further delved into the vaster territories of Latin American literature. The polarity reappeared in more or less veiled but persistent ways in a panoply of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, with the risky, if seductive, qualities provided by its capacity to articulate numerous other binary oppositions so deeply entrenched in our habits of thought. I was intrigued by the possibility of following the traces of the conflict of interpretation as it pertained to Facundo's readings in Argentina's cultural formation. To what extent could they help account for its fractured nature, for that Argentina en pedazos, that Piglia so suggestively evokes in his latest book, centered on a scene of writing which is torn by violence; or for the metaphors of failure which underpin the Invention of Argentina as rendered by Nicholas Shumway? As one of Sarmiento's detractors has put it, there are sarmientones who deliriously extol his virtues while other sarmientudos 1 condemn him with equal passion; he can be deified or vilified but certainly never set aside. In the words of one of his admirers, Sar-

INTRODUCTION

miento is the essence of argentinidad, but maybe, as another one put it, that essence can only be understood as divided between him and Rosas: Sarmiento and Rosas are . .. the two genuine representatives of Argentineness in their lights and in their shadows, somewhat like the thesis and the antithesis of national life. [Sarmiento y Rosas son ... los dos representantes genuinos de Ia argentinidad en sus luces y en sus sombras, algo asi como Ia tesis y Ia antitesis de Ia vida nacional.)2 Without subscribing to the Hegelian dialectic suggested above, this book seeks to explore the constant interplay between light and shadow which has sustained the conflicting readings of Facundo since its publication in 1845, trying to take distance from it so as to construct a reading of readings. Attendant upon this project is a conception of writing which can be summed up by Barthes's observation that "to write is to offer your word (parole) to others, that they may complete it." 3 Rather than attempt yet another analysis of Facundo, then, I will see how the text has been "completed" in a plurality of ways, which, in turn, have to be seen within context-specific relations of power, institutional constraints, and other circumstances affecting the "uses" a book is put to. Hence, as a founding premise, this study conceives of the work as not only destined for the reader, but also in need of the reader to have its meanings activated and brought to life. The text, then, is an object for the active reading subject, who is a creative coproducer in a communication process that is not subordinated to the notion of a correct or appropriate interpretation-a notion the pages that follow set out to problematize. A work like Facundo, which has engendered a plurality of readings, dramatizes the unstable nature of the text itself: far from being a homogeneous bearer of meaning, it is a web of differential relationships that is not limited by the physical boundaries of the book, but that spreads over a vast network of readings claiming to legitimize it, question it, or undermine it. If a text is a dissemination of meanings, its readings stage their production. Although the text cannot be conceived of independently from its readings, the readings in turn cannot be detached from the contexts in which they obtain, nor can the interaction between different reading contexts be ignored. When the historical axis is taken into account, the succession of readings becomes part of a semiological chain in which the elements of the system interact with each other: each new reading can be affected by pre3

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

vious ones, and it, in turn, may influence the receptions that will follow it.

If Facundo's varied readings can be said to constitute its meaning, then they can, at the same time, illustrate the extent to which there is no such thing as the objective meaning of a work. Looking at the book through the layers of readings which have accumulated on it along the diachronic axis, one is led to underscore the ways in which readings are charged with the remnants of others which provide an archaeological base of sorts and hence an intertextual dimension. The productivity of a work resides in the varied and often unexpected readings to which it gives place, in the new structures of reception which result from different interpretations. The act of "unhitching" 4 the work from the context of production seeks to undermine the possibility of closure in its study and to open it up to the multiple relationships which might obtain as different readers read. In turn, the readings are not context-free but, rather, determined by a number of factors that shape them. As Hans Georg Gadamer has so persuasively argued, the interpretation of each text is a creative event that does not merely reappropriate the textual message of the past: it also incorporates the interpreter's present. 5 Indeed, the framework of each reading will necessarily differ from the one in which it was originally constituted as meaningful. Reading is a mediation between different intellectual and cultural positions; not infrequently, it takes place in less than harmonious ways, requiring both destructive and constructive interventions which may shore up, undermine, or shatter ideas in circulation. Since what one might for reasons of expediency call the initial meaning is already caught up in the movement of history, the notion of a final valid interpretation makes little sense. Facundo's reception illustrates the bankruptcy of such a notion and the extent to which each time tends to understand the written tradition in its own way. Arthur Danto suggests an additional difficulty: even if one were to completely describe the text's initial context, it would not be possible to locate it in all the right stories that would achieve this. 6 If the notion of tradition must be questioned in order to accommodate a skeptical stance vis-a-vis the interaction between past and present, by taking into account the conditions under which tradition develops and changes, one might be able to track the way in which meanings are constituted and modified, consolidated and undermined. As Facundo is studied through its readings, what emerges is a process in and through which a society articulates its culture and in so doing produces and mediates conflict, giving shape to social relationships. Within the patterns that emerge, one detects the varying interpretive mechanisms deployed in dif-

4

INTRODUCTION

ferent subcultures. The cultural field appears fragmented and discontinuous; nevertheless, the complex relationships between ideology, knowledge, and power present themselves as regulating the struggles for interpretive supremacy. In other words, it soon becomes quite clear that the conflicting interpretations of Facundo stem from such differences as political affiliation, conceptions of the nation, or the uses of culture. Thus, it is as interesting to trace the differences as the site from which they are produced. As I study the reception of Sarmiento's classic, then, I will examine the institutional forces that legitimize interpretations, the allegiances of those who make validity claims about the book, the forms of legitimation deployed, and the terms in which the unresolved struggle for interpretive hegemony takes place. This entails looking into such interrelated processes as production and consumption, communication and selection, reception and action. The connection between text and practical life will be shown to be an active and fertile one; it throws light on the constitution of Argentine culture and on some of the ways in which historical consciousness is developed, so that the issues raised touch upon the reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history. It is interesting to see how national identity can be observed from the vantage point of a classic and its readings, how they constitute a repertory of conflicting interpretations, and the extent to which polemics can provide a model for understanding cultural formation. Persuaded of the social and material embedding of all modes of writing, I have grounded my descriptive and interpretive work in society and history so as to widen and deepen my concern with language and reading. Hence, I hope the scrutiny of the discursive practices engendered by a classic will make contributions not only to literary studies, but also to the related areas of history, political thought, and the examination of ideological formations. In this way, the scrutiny would participate in the ongoing redrawing of disciplinary boundaries which locate the humanities as a site of intellectually and socially significant work. The conception of history which underpins this project eschews the Hegelian notion of comprehension as a unified process granting intelligibility to events in a homogeneous diachronic sequence. Instead, historical periods will be seen as mixtures of events emerging at different moments of their own time, marked by Foucauldian discontinuities and constructing what we might call an archive of Facundo's readings. As Roman Jakobson points out in his Essais de linguistique genera/e, "Like the history of the language, historical poetics must be conceived as a superstructure, built on a series of successive synchronic descriptions." [La poetique historique,

5

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

tout comme l'histoire du langage, doit etre con~ue comme une superstructure, batie sur une serie de descriptions synchroniques successives.] 7 A FORMULA FOR CONFLICT: CIVILIZATION VERSUS BARBARISM The tensions which have characterized the reception of Facundo derive in no small measure from the dichotomy which Sarmiento chose to account for the struggles in the post-Independence era. Although he was not its creator, his astute appropriation of it turned it into an influential paradigm in Latin American literature, one which has engendered an archive of writing, either ratifying it or dismantling it. Such varied works as Martin Fierro or Dona Barbara, in their own very different ways, bear witness to the deep imprint of the Sarmientine formula on the construction of the culture. The dichotomy civilization-barbarism is traversed by difference: it is a double-voiced conundrum which affirms and negates, which contains the matrix for tradition and countertradition in a Nietzschean, agonistic way. Obviously an instance of the conceptual oppositions of Western metaphysics, its long life underscores the hold of this polar way of thinking on the one hand, and, on the other, the power of its "either/or" structure to foster conflict in cultural formation. The discursive field commanded by the formula has dominated the readings of Facundo as if it were both its blindness and its insight, providing a powerful conceptual tool and a fertile ground for attack. Even a cursory perusal of Facundo's reception suggests that the polemics surrounding it have been most frequently launched from the vantage point of the famous dichotomy. Not surprisingly, its terms end up not so much referring to a specific condition, as to problematic conceptions of social values. It is not without interest to trace the history of the terms it commands and see an instance of the workings of language, culture, and ideology. If one agrees with Emile Benveniste that the history of modern thought is linked to the creation and maintenance of "a few dozen essential words which together constitute the common heritage of Western European languages" [quelques dizaines de mots essentiels, dont !'ensemble constitue le bien commun des langues de !'Europe occidentale], 8 it may be fruitful to look into the emergence of as pregnant a term as civilization. 9 There is an eloquent conjunction between a certain experience of culture and society and the need to expand the linguistic repertory. As Lucien Febvre has pointed out, the term did not exist until the second half of the eighteenth 6

INTRODUCTION

century-a fact which provides a suggestive opportunity to ponder its roots in a conception of reason, progress, and the perfectibility of the human condition. In the history of the term, as Febvre avers, one confronts the emergence of a cultural formation: To trace the history of the French word civilization would be in fact to reconstruct the phases of the most profound revolution accomplished and experienced by the French spirit between the second half of the eighteenth century and our days. And therefore, from a particular point of view, it would be to apprehend in its totality a history whose attraction and brilliance are not limited to the borders of one state. [Faire l'histoire du mot fran~ais civilisation ce serait reconstituer, en realite, les fases de Ia plus profonde des revolutions qu'ait accomplies, et subies, I' esprit fran~ais depuis Ia seconde moitie du XVIIIe siecle jusqu'a nos jours. Et par consequent, d'un point de vue particulier, embrasser dans sa totalite une histoire dont !'attraction, pas plus que le rayonnement, ne s'est bornee aux frontiers d'un Etat.J 10 Febvre finds the noun in printed form for the first time in 1766, though he believes it was coined earlier, 11 and, indeed, both Emile Benveniste and Jean Starobinski 12 note earlier occurrences of the term. Although Starobinski finds it as early as 1743 in Trevoux's Dictionnaire universe/, he moots its significance because it has a purely jurisprudential range of meanings. Both Starobinski and Benveniste agree that the marquis de Mirabeau may have been the one to have used it in its nonjudicial sense for the first time in his Ami des hommes (1756-1757, p. 176), where it appears a number of times in ways which are not unequivocal. 13 By 1798, the term had acquired considerable currency in the writings of Raynal, the abbe Baudeau, and Diderot, but its triumph only comes with the French Revolution. In the history of the English word, we may recall the story Boswell tells about how Johnson resisted admitting civilisation into the fourth edition of his "Dictionnary," preferring "civility" to express the opposite of barbarism. It would seem that the Scotsman Adam Ferguson, from the University of Edinburgh, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society of I 767, may have been the first one to use the word in English. 14 Adam Smith's seminal An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations (1776) contains a few uses of the word with the connotation of advancement toward a higher level of human development. For indeed, the word civilization is coined so as to cover the gaps left

7

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

by other existing words, to introduce or delete modulations of meaning contained in existing ones. Thus, civilite, a very old term, alluded to honesty and politeness in manners, whereas civil had political and judicial implications. There was also a semantic cluster around the words police, police, policie, politesse, politeia, urbanitas, all of them suggestive of law, order, administration, the city or polis, government, and opposed to their absence in the state of barbarism. The word civilization, then, was specifically needed to designate the triumph of reason in the political, intellectual, and moral senses. It proclaimed the spirit of the Encyclopedie, of rational and experimental science. Its self-reflexive stance is indicative of an emergent consciousness about the development of collective life, and it is soon aware of other civilizations, while retaining a sense of critical mastery over the other. Thus, it was bound up with its opposite inasmuch as it entailed a view of the perfectibility of human society away from the primitive, savage, barbarous early stages. Diderot sums this up in no unclear terms: "To teach a nation is to civilize it; to extinguish its knowledge is to take it back to the primitive state of barbarism." [lnstruire une nation, c'est Ia civiliser; y eteindre les connaissances, c'est Ia ramener a l'etat primitif de barbarie.... ) 15 This sense of civilization implied a culmination in a linear, ascending historical conception: how can one not see it as a telling instance of the intertwining of language and ideology? There may also be a paradoxical quality in the term: as jean Starobinski has perceptively argued, it may signal both the consolidation of a sense of mission and achievement and a concomitant crisis: "The withering away of the institutional forms of the sacred, the impossibility for theological discourse to retain its force as 'concrete and absolute' urgently invite most souls to search for substitutive absolutes." [L'effritement du sacre institutionnel, l'impossibilite pour le discours theologique de continuer a valoir comme 'concret et absolu' invitent Ia plupart des esprits a chercher de toute urgence des absolus substitutifs.] 16 The word civilization could be seen as coming to the rescue with all it entails in terms of human perfectibility and the belief in reason as an alternative to religion. The conceptual model it provided allowed for a variety of uses which referred both to itself and to its implicit counterpart (barbarism), as part of a family of concepts through which an opposite could be named in a rhythm marked by self and other. Linguists, travelers, and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, found it handy-in conjunction with its opposite-as a tool for recording impressions of the various stages of human development encountered as they scrutinized the globe and its inhabitants from their superior vantage point. The great explorer Wilhelm von Humboldt commented on this as8

INTRODUCTION

cending curb away from barbarism and towards a three-tiered system which would include Zivilisation, Kultur, and finally Bildung. 17 In the course of the nineteenth century, the word took on connotations of cultural superiority as the expansionism of the West produced an ideology of empire which was at least in part justified by the idea that the inferior, savage, and barbarous peoples would be raised from their condition in the civilizing enterprise. As Roberto Fernandez Retamar has pointed out, the dichotomy civilization-barbarism cannot be detached from the ascendancy of capitalism. 18 In his view, it was part and parcel of the development of capital and its concomitant need to create world markets. Attendant upon it was a degree of ethnocentrism which tended to underscore the differences between the European and the non-European. Quoting Engels, Fernandez Retamar alludes to the material implications of the dichotomy, for within the Marxist interpretation, the basis of civilization is the exploitation of one class by another. Within this context, one is reminded of Walter Benjamin's powerful statement, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." 19 In the early years of the twentieth century, the metropolitan formula was circulating in the newspapers of the Rio de Ia Plata area, in the ones founded during the viceroyalty ( Te/egrafo Mercantil, Semanario de Agricultura, Industria y Comercio, Correa de Comercio) as well as in the ones which followed the Revolution of I8Io. According to F. Weinberg, it is in the Mensajero Argentino, published by Rivadavia's followers, that the dichotomy is deployed as such for the first time. 20 In a recently published book, Jaime Pellicer argues the point that it was Sarmiento's friend and fellow exile, Vicente Fidel Lopez, who actually transplanted the polarity to the Latin American cultural shores in his graduation thesis, Memoria sobre los resultados generales con que los pueblos antiguos han contribuido a Ia civilizaci6n de Ia humanidad. 21 Sarmiento takes up its sense of struggle and history, and to chart the progress of the nation in its postcolonial phase. Although there seems to be a certain geographic determinism in his thinking whereby the land and its impact on the socialization process block the growth of a civilized society, the historical thrust which drives the formula civilization-barbarism seems to guarantee a forward movement which will culminate in the triumph of civilization, as can be seen in the final chapters of Facundo. For all those who saw themselves as immersed in the enterprise of modernization, the call to end the power of the rural caudillos, as epitomized by Quiroga and Rosas, rested on the validity of the civilizing mission. "A term which is charged with the sacred demonizes its antonym" [Un terme charge de sacre demonise son antonyme], declares Starobinski as he 9

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

discusses the power with which the conceptual charge of civilization carries with it a negative judgement of its inverted selfY Sustained by the powerful tropological tension of the dichotomy, the term barbarism, the "outside" of civilization, its inverted self, has a much longer history, which can be accounted for by the fact that it represents the anxiety with which the other has usually been confronted. Indeed, the word appears in a contribution to the Encyclopedie written by the Abbe Yvon for the I 7 5 I edition-in which civilisation is absent. The word barbarous, like its close semantic relatives wild and savage, illustrates how definition can progress by negation and how difference can be accounted for by the assignation of negative or inferior qualities to what is perceived as a threat to the societal norm. 23 Further, the term marked the boundary between an outside and an inside, since for Aristotle and his commentators the barbaroi were excluded from the oikumene, or the family of man. One important implication of the word barbarous was, since Classical Greek times, that it might be adduced as a justification for enslavement. This pragmatic connection has been expounded by Lewis Hanke in his seminal book Aristotle and the American Indian, with a wealth of examples illustrating how it contributed to the discourse of domination of the Native Americans. Anthony Pagden's work probes these terms and their Aristotelian roots, revealing the extent to which the legitimacy of Spanish rule in the sixteenth century was tied in with the interpretation and definition of the words barbarous and barbarians. The anxiety to establish the range of possible meanings associated with these terms in writers such as Vitoria, Sepulveda, Las Casas, and Acosta suggests their problematic bearing on matters such as legality, theology, the nature of the world, and its inhabitants. As Pagden's The Fall of Natural Man eloquently proves, a fundamental shift of focus allowed the Spaniards to justify their rule over the American Indians: no longer probing the "supposed juridical rights of the conquerors," they scrutinized instead the nature of the people being conquered.24 Drawing on the notion of barbarism was the sleight of hand which located the question of power within a new conceptual frame. Affirming or denying the putative lacks of the indians were the operations on which the nature of Spanish rule was to rest. Thus, even if a barbarian was not a natural slave, he needed the mediation provided by Christian Spain to begin to erase the marks of foreignness and gradually move from the outside to an inside. Only those equipped with civility could make that transition possible. Of course, several chapters could be added on the uses of the word barbarism to designate the condition of gauchos, llaneros, people of African origin, or Native Americans. Even a work like the Martin Fierro of 10

INTRODUCTION

1872, so keenly aware of the plight of the dispossessed gaucho, insistently deploys terms such as salvaje or barbaro to refer to the Indian. The kind of perceptive cultural relativism that we encounter in Las Casas or Montaigne is very rare indeed. In Latin America, the most sobering reminder of the dangers of an uncritical espousal of the ideology of European civilization is Marti's eloquent "Nuestra America": by 1891 the problems of adhering to the ideology of Western domination were becoming apparent. But even before the Cuban patriot made his plea against the espousal of foreign criteria for modernization, several cautionary notes were sounded by others who were skeptical of the drive to modernize. In the 185o's, Juan Bautista Alberdi acuitously questioned the blind acceptance of European values, frequently doing so in and through his attacks of Facundo and its impact. The Venezuelan Ramon Ramirez, in his El cristianismo y Ia libertad: ensayo sobre Ia civilizaci6n americana (1 8 55), pointed to the ills caused by the attempt to assimilate European values at the expense of the well-being of the majority and of a truly continental identity. With the advent of the twentieth century, the legacy of Nietzsche and Freud, resistance movements, the anthropological self-awareness of thinkers like Levy-Strauss, and the ironic, questioning stance of modernism visa-vis, the consequences of imperialism have allowed for the development of a sustained critical discourse on the implications of the problematic formula. But even early on, the whole-hearted adherence to the virtues imputed to civilization underwent questioning. A term which had gained its ascendancy with the French Revolution was placed in problematic contexts by those who opposed it, such as Edmund Burke, who pointed to the "savage brutality" of a state which had done away with religion and nobility. Civilization was problematized by the inclusion of barbarism within it, as a latent threat. Even the "inventor" of the word, the Marquis de Mirabeau, alluded to the "barbarism of our civilizations" and to the "false civilization," for the word was part of a critical enterprise since its inception. A revealing set of articles serialized in El Comercio de Valparaiso in the early months of I 848, entitled "La civilizacion: Conferencias Jerundianas" shows how if on the one hand civilization was considered as providing the qualities that were deemed necessary in the early stages of national formation ("that degree of culture acquired by people or persons when they move from the natural state of roughness to the delicacy, elegance and sweetness of the voices, the habits and customs of educated people. Urbanitas, civilitas, comitas" [aquel grado de cultura que adquieren los pueblos o personas, cuando de Ia rudeza natural pasan al primor, elegancia y dulzura de voces, usos y costumbres de jente culta. Urbanitas, civiliII

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

tas, c6mitas)),25 on the other it is not without its clearly negative underside in terms of morals, religion, and even "the desire to acquire" [el deseo de adquisici6n]. 26 Thus, the use of the formula is not without inherent contradictions inasmuch as the positive term was in turn divided along the lines provided by a cautionary note about the dangers of decadence. Sarmiento's astute appropriation of the dichotomy had on the one hand the advantage of generating concepts and theories, but on the other it passed on its fractured nature to the debate about Latin America's destiny. Without tediously mapping out the lengthy repertory of texts and theories which invoke the formula, it is essential to note the important contestatory book by Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Caliban, which stands the formula on its head, claiming the identity of Caliban as the other embraced defiantly by Latin America in response to its postcolonial predicament. Fernandez Retamar both subverts the Sarmientine formula and remains within its purview, revealing how deeply it has set the terms within which the debate can be articulated: the Cuban critic is still trapped into choosing one of the two poles, unable to extricate himself from the binary logic in which the signification process is embedded. 27 Moreover, as Fernandez Retamar is only too well aware of, the defiant claim of Cali ban as a purveyor of identity is itself a sign of dependency: To come to terms with the Cali ban in all of us implies rethinking our history from the other side, from the other protagonist. The other protagonist of The Tempest (or, as we would have put it, The Cyclone) is not of course Ariel, but Prospero. There is no real polarity Ariel-Caliban: they are both in the service of Prospero, the foreign sorcerer. [Asumir nuestra condici6n de Caliban implica repensar nuestra historia desde el otro lado, desde el otro protagonista. El otro protagonista de La tempestad (o, como hubieramos dicho nosotros, El cicl6n), noes por supuesto Ariel, sino Pr6spero. No hay verdadera polaridad Ariel-Caliban: ambos son siervos en manos de Pr6spero, el hechicero extranjero.) 28

The resilience of the polarity has allowed it to outlive the self-reflexive turn of our times, sometimes turning up in very contemporary debates without shedding its nineteenth-century trappings. A case in point is a discussion with Mario Vargas Llosa, Arcadio Diaz Quinones, and Tomas Eloy Martinez in the spring of 1993, in which the exchange of views on modernization, the opening up of trade barriers following the impulse of economic liberalism, the sale of state-owned enterprises, and the decentralization of the national economies is conducted in the terms set

12.

INTRODUCTION

down by Sarmiento, who is invoked in the conversation. After Vargas Llosa has expounded his political views, Diaz Quinones astutely sums them up as follows: "At this point in the conversation I notice that Mario Vargas Llosa's true model for the public space is Sarmiento, with his civilizing and modernizing discourse, and his ideas of civilization and barbarism." [A esta altura de Ia conversacion advierto que el verdadero modelo de Mario Vargas Llosa para el espacio publico es Sarmiento, con su discurso civilizador y modernizador, y sus ideas de civilizacion y barbarie.] 29 Not surprisingly, the editor of the "Cultural Supplement" of Pdgina r 2 chooses as a title for the piece, "La modernidad a cualquier precio," alluding to the unresolved controversy of the postcolonial scene. An important recent contribution to Argentine scholarship on women writers, Francine Masiello's lucid Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina, 30 both proclaims and moots the tenacious formula, alighting on the space "between" it to explore precisely "a feminine gesture against binarism." 31 Carving out an alternative discursive space involves an attempt to transcend the binary logic inscribed in Sarmiento's disjunction: "A third position . .. is located neither in the dwellings of the civilized nor in the fields of the barbaric: a merger of the two is pronounced in the precepts of women writers who undermine the binary logic." 32 1t is its imposing presence in the cultural field of Latin America which in part, at least, explains the fast hold of Facundo in Argentine culture: it is a machine for engendering texts and interpretive discourse. A BOOK AND A NATION Josefina Ludmer refers to Facundo as "the first cathedral of Argentine culture" [Ia primera catedral de Ia cultura argentina] 33 and, like Tulio Halperin Donghi, sees national culture as containing and contained by the double voice of Facundo and Martin Fierro. For Ludmer, in fact, although Sarmiento stopped short of producing literatura gauchesca by not giving Facundo Quiroga himself the voice in the text, he heard it all the time ("it was the voice of his delirium, of his dream, because he had it inside him and because that was the voice of the fatherland when he wrote Facundo" [era Ia VOZ de su delirio, de su sueiio, porque Ia tenia adentro y porque esa era Ia voz de Ia patria cuando escribio Facundo]) 34 and enacted the scene of gauchesca writing when Facundo Quiroga is presented choosing desertion over discipline, after having been recruited in I8Io in the Arribeiios regiment under General Ocampo. 35 The "empty space" (vacio) left by 13

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

Quiroga in the army as he opted for his own claims to power, "for valor and crime, government and disorganization," 36 is both his absence from the patriotic regiment and from the genero gauchesco. This absence also invokes the tension which sustains the civilization/barbarism divide: Barbarism dramatizes not only the confrontation with "civilization" but also a second, inner confrontation, with itself.... It contains a part of civilization, valor, and governance, associated with crime and disorganization. The double tension, towards the outside and the inside, is the best definition of Sarmiento's text, Facundo. [La barbarie no solo dramatiza el enfrentamiento con " Ia civilizaci6n" sino un segundo enfrentamiento interior, consigo misma ... . Contiene una parte de civilizaci6n, valor y gobierno, asociada con crimen y desorganizacion. La doble tension, bacia afuera y adentro de si es Ia mejor definicion de Facundo, el texto de Sarmiento.] 37

It is that tension between the inside and the outside of a cultural formation which has charted Argentine identity, both torn and sustained by the Facundo! Fierro divide. Harking back to Ludmer's suggestive text yet again, we are reminded of Sarmiento's tenacious presence even, then, in the genre he would have silenced: Sarmiento, Facundo, is the historical guide of the genre because of his written words and because of the space from which they are written. Each time Sarmiento's words-the reverse side of the genre and its point of maximum contact-enter one of the [gaucho] genre's texts, there is a turn, and Sarmiento appears in its heart. [Sarmiento, Facundo, es el guia hist6rico del genero por sus palabras escritas y por el espacio desde donde estan escritas. Cada vez que las palabras de Sarmiento, el reves exacto del genero y su punto de contacto maximo, entran en un texto del genero hay una vuelta y Sarmiento se hace presente en su coraz6n.] 38

Bound up by identity and difference, the two founding texts of Argentine culture both mediate and engender conflict. Facundo seems to contain the combinations which enable the organization of a space in which culture is modelled; resistance and contestation, canonization and legitimation are embedded in it and have determined the fractured sense of tradition which could well be called the "Argentine predicament." As Nicholas Shumway has observed, "the peculiarly divisive mind-set created by the country's nineteenth-century intellectuals who first framed the idea of Argentina" 39 14

INTRODUCTION

persists to this day, undermining consensus and a belief in unity or, at least, community. The "guiding fiction" that Sarmiento bequeathed to the nation has been, paradoxically enough, both deeply divisive and allembracing: not entirely unlike Plato's pharmakon, it is both the condition of difference and the hinge by which the opposing terms share a common element. 40 Indeed, the most incisive readers of Argentine culture are drawn into conflating its two antagonic voices, seeing them as two sides of the same coin, or as the light and the shadow present in the cultural memory of the nation. A passage from Tulio Halperin Donghi's jose Hernandez y sus mundos deserves to be quoted in its entirety because of the pregnant insights which he brings to bear on the texts and their worlds: The cult of symmetry [between Facundo and Martin Fierro] does not quite explain the tenacity with which we continue searching in it. After so many disappointments, the enterprise retains its appeal to many in that they prefer to find in Hernandez an alternative, rather than a parallel, to Sarmiento; that secret monument of a buried literature, whose presence Martin Fierro allows us to guess, is the ideological and literary correlative of a political tradition with which they identify passionately, and whose temporary defeat offers the central theme of any truthful history of Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century; Martin Fierro is then Facundo and Hernandez the Sarmiento of that hemisphere of light which the servants of the shadows-victorious in an ephemeral way-tried to delete from national memory-with equally ephemeral results. [EI culto de Ia simetria (between Facundo and Martin Fierro) no bastaria sim embargo pa1a explicar Ia tenacidad con que se sigue buceando en su busca. El atractivo que, luego de tantas decepciones, Ia empresa sigue manteniendo para muchos deriva de que prefieren buscar en Hernandez una alternativa, antes que un paralelo, para Sarmiento; ese monumento secreto de una literatura soterrada, cuya presencia Martin Fierro permite adivinar, es el correlato ideologico y literario de una tradicion politica cuya temporaria derrota ofrece a su juicio el tema central para cualquier historia veraz de Ia Argentina en Ia segunda mitad del siglo XIX, y con Ia cual se identifican por otra parte apasionadamente; Martin Fierro es entonces el Facundo y Hernandez el Sarmiento de ese hemisferio de luz que los servidores de las tinieblas, efimeramente victoriosos, buscaron, con exito igualmente efimero, borrar de Ia memoria de Ia naci6n.] 41

Halperin Donghi's compelling prose teaches us to see the dangerous chiaroscuro in the Argentine canvas-made even more dangerous by the attempt to erase the submerged light of resistance. Such unsuccessful at-

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

tempts have produced a panoply of both worldly and textual effects, ranging from the recent horrors in the country's history to the frequent metaphors of illness or failure deployed in the discourse about the nation. If national culture organizes and sustains communal memory, the need to redeploy and reinterpret its founding texts would be suggestive of the ways in which unresolved issues prompt revisions of the past. Reading Facundo has been one of the means of conceptualizing the conflicts of the past and, also, of mapping out possibilities for the future, but on most occasions the effort has entailed coming to terms initially with the Sarmientine interpretation of the nation, displacing or corroborating it. As passionate an intellectual as Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, who so vividly evoked the experience of Argentine failure in his anguished Radiografia de Ia pampa, wrote insistently about Sarmiento, as if he needed to come to terms with the founding father in order to plot his own thinking.42 He saw Sarmiento as a "crystallization" of the national equation, as the one whose writings contained all its terms, as the "national problem par excellence," as the "example of the Argentine being." Martinez Estrada is trapped in the double bind which forces him to admire Sarmiento while, at the same time, subjecting his ideas to frequently critical scrutiny. If, on the one hand, he proclaims that "he and the country are the same truth"; on the other he denounces the pernicious effect of the civilizationbarbarism paradigm on the grounds that, because of it, "phantoms displaced men, and utopia devoured reality." 43 If in Radiografia de Ia pampa Sarmiento is denounced as "the most harmful of those dreamers" [el mas perjudicial de esos sonadores], his Los invariantes hist6ricos del Facundo, however, acknowledges the extent to which his country's deep life-themes are to be understood within the parameters established by a Facundo conceived as a forecast and a myth. The book's title announces the aporia of a history which is arrested in the invariable fixity of a canonical work: Facundo is vaguely reminiscent of the "total book" whose existence is rumored in "La biblioteca de Babel": as Martinez Estrada conceives of it, it would contain all the possible combinations needed to understand the nation. In fact, the static qualities that the text has bequeathed to the configuration of the Argentine problematic leads Martinez Estrada to render them as different forms of invariantes. Thus, there is the "invariante Espana," with "structural, constitutional, specific and organic" characteristics which account for the parallels that still obtain between Spain and Argentina in the twentieth century; or "the backward structural invariable in the development of the nation" [invariante estructural de retroceso en el desarrollo del pais], which explains the institutional problems, the bad habits of the ruling classes, and the moral decline. 44 Much of the critical r6

INTRODUCTION

distance that had separated Martinez Estrada from Sarmiento in his earlier books appears significantly diminished in this later one, where the certainty of Sarmiento's prescience in Facundo turns it into a diagnosis and an oracle. The nation's past and future are dangerously conflated in a classic endowed with the power to hold it all as it foresees both the problems and the terms in which they are to be configured. A case in point would be the acceptance, in this later work of 1974, of the country versus city dichotomy, seen as prefiguring ideas later formulated by Tonnies, Geddes, Spengler, and Mumford. As a libro anunciador it even manages to foresee fascism. Its key find is the negative myth of barbarous forces provided by Facundo Quiroga. But the find is also its doom-and here lies the danger of many a reading of our book: "But this is what makes it fearful at the distance provided by one hundred years, since every myth is the flowering of the most archaic irrational forces at the threshold of reason." [Pero esto mismo lo hace temible a cien aiios de distancia, pues todo mito es el afloramiento a los umbrales de Ia raz6n de las fuerzas irracionales mas arcaicas.]45 Like few other Argentines, Martinez Estrada eloquently and vehemently states the agonistic, unhealthy reason for Facundo's persistent relevance: If today it presents itself with the validity it had a century ago it is because of two sets of circumstances:-except for some very recent work-nothing has been written which surpasses either its literary quality or its deep vision of reality's internal organs, and that profound reality of the internal organs has not been healed. [Si hoy se nos ofrece con una actualidad tan vigente como hace un siglo es por dos circunstancias: porque no se ha hecho nada-excepto alguna obra reciente-que lo supere como calidad literaria ni como vision profunda de los organos internos de Ia realidad, y porque esa realidad profunda, Ia de los organos internos, no ha podido ser saneada.] 46

The persistent deployment of such images of disease and failure is one of Martinez Estrada's well-known obsessions, but he is not altogether exceptional in the discursive field of Facundo interpretations. With a very different intellectual and emotional disposition, and tempered by his cultivated laconism, Borges's reading of Facundo restates the conviction that its relevance derives from the continued validity of its theses in a national scene where change has been only a matter of appearances: Facundo offers us a dilemma-civilization or barbarism-which can be applied to our entire political process. For Sarmiento, barbarism lay in the 17

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

plains of the indigenous tribes and of the gaucho; civilization, in the cities. The gaucho has been replaced by the tenant farmer and the laborer; barbarism exists not only in the countryside but also in the populace of the big cities, where the demagogue fulfills the function of the old country chieftain .... The dilemma has not changed. Sub specie aeternitatis, Facundo continues to be the best Argentine history. [E/ Facundo nos ofrece una disyuntiva-civilizaci6n o barbarie-que es aplicable, segun juzgo, al entero proceso de nuestra historia. Para Sarmiento, Ia barbarie era Ia llanura de las tribus aborigenes y del gaucho; Ia civilizaci6n, las ciudades. El gaucho ha sido reemplazado por colonos y obreros; Ia barbarie no solo esta en el campo sino en Ia plebe de las grandes ciudades y el demagogo cumple Ia funci6n del antiguo caudillo.... La disyuntiva no ha cambiado. Sub specie aeternitatis, el Facundo es aun Ia mejor historia argentina.] 47

Trying to construct a genealogy of such interpretive positions, and of the forms of representation through which the book reached its reading public, this book sets out to unravel the question of its continued centrality in the national imaginary, while paying heed to the not infrequent contestatory attempts to debunk it. After years of often tedious reading of innumerable readings of Facundo, it became clear that the only way to make sense of the discursive excess which confronted me was to focus on a selection of moments of semantic density and interest. That has become the organizing principle of this book. If the readings of Facundo have helped construct the problematics of Argentine tradition, the question here is precisely how the contradictions and unresolved conflicts survive in cultural and countercultural formations. Further, if a classic is endowed with authority, how is this authority contested when it obtains in a discursive field characterized by strife and weak consensus? Ricardo Piglia has pessimistically and poignantly announced," Facundo has been written in order to be misunderstood" [Facundo ha sido escrito para no ser entendido]: I would like to contribute not so much to understanding it-though such an enterprise is not without its appeal-but to tracing the often befuddling paths of this misunderstanding. As Raymond Williams reminded us, a hegemonic position is constantly being resisted, limited, modified, but also renewed and recreated in a process which can never be cut off from power and politics: Facundo's enduring dominance in the national scene is a case in point, so powerful and vulnerable at one and the same time. In its 1 5o-year-old life we see how the nation as imagined community is truly inseparable from 18

INTRODUCTION

printed works and from the production of a centrally sustained high culture which seeks to make claims for the majority as a repository of political legitimacy, without, however, silencing the countercultural forms which resist it. To study the dynamics of cultural formation through the repertory of uses to which Facundo has been put entails focusing on the sites of reading, that is to say, quite literally, the places in which it has taken place and the contextual factors which have framed interpretation. Chapter I examines the inaugural reception of Facundo, when it appeared in serialized form in El Progreso in I845, and the role it played in the intricate web of writing, action, and nation-building which was being woven by the group of anti-Rosas exiles. As a feuilleton and as a book, Facundo promoted intense debates, among the emigres and also among the Chileans, in whose political debates Sarmiento had become involved. Chapter 2. locates the controversies surrounding the book within the problematics of genre: Facundo's generic hybridity (the fact that it can be read as biography, history, political pamphlet, or even as a novel at times) is brought to bear on the conflict of interpretations it is trammelled in, for the lack of clear generic tracks affects the parameters of text-use. Its affiliations with historical writing in particular are scrutinized here, both in terms of the status of the discipline in the first half of the nineteenth century, and of the revealing "Notes" sent to Sarmiento by Valentin Alsina in I 8 so. The latter provides an eloquent example of how reading Facundo has generated discursive practices which often leap over the book itself and carve out a space for writing against the grain. The discussion in Chapter 3 has a similar point of departure: it also examines an attempt to claim discursive and political authority by displacing Facundo's. In this case, the reader is the incisive Juan Bautista Alberdi, Sarmiento's most brilliant opponent in the enterprise of nation-building. Studying the prolonged polemic bitterly sustained by the two great men, I also trace the process of Argentine social and political organization as it obtains in the post-Caseros era. With Rosas out of the immediate scene, what kinds of reading does this book elicit? How is the sense of the nation bound up with its claims? Chapter 4 continues the examination of reading sites by subjecting Facundo to a migration to different cultures and to the estrangement brought about by translation. Radically changing the context of reception, the translations into English and French throw light on the forms of appropriation through which the metropolitan readers received a cultural product of the margin, producing highly revealing deformations and misunderstandings. Chapter 5 deals with the process of canonization in the 188o's, tracing the relationships between power and discourse which lead to Facundo's 19

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

standing as an emblem of cultural authority, albeit not entirely uncontested. At a time when the ideology of modernization was embraced by the urban bourgeoisie consolidating the sense of the nation, Sarmiento's book provided a powerful matrix for the invention of tradition, even in those cases where its conceptual scheme was called into question. Indeed, the tension between conflict and canonicity is never resolved, a point which becomes only clearer in Chapter 6, which looks at the social changes of the turn of the century and the early years of the twentieth century, and the cultural shifts they brought about. As the complexity of the national scene grows, and the sense of community is eroded by the influx of immigration and other dramatic changes, a shared culture has an important binding effect. 48 Hence, dominant culture skillfully retains Facundo even as it finds ways of eliding the disjunction between canonicity and rejection. This final chapter studies the ruses which allow the book to remain within the national literary repertory even though its interpretation of Argentine reality is called into question and its denotation is weakened. The book is brought to a close with Ricardo Rojas's I945 El profeta de Ia pampa, written to commemorate the centennial of Facundo's publication. Despite its publication date, however, Rojas's homage can be placed within the field of the earlier celebrations of the centennial of the Revolution of r8ro (alluded to in Argentine history as simply "EI Centenario"), for ideological and discursive reasons. Of course, a study of this book's reception could well have continued to our days, but that would have fallen beyond the purview of my project. By the time the nation has worked out a set of transmitted semantic contents which can be packaged into a tradition, the terms in which Sarmiento's book are to be read have already been defined. If communicative interaction, in Habermasian terms, has suffered significant disturbances where our text's reception is concerned, it can be averred that the schemata deployed in the communication process are already in place in the early decades of this century. The political struggles of twentieth-century Argentina have kept the Facundo debate alive, but it has remained within the paradigm established by earlier readers. One of the most virulent attacks came from the school of historical revisionists that generated new readings of the central characters of national history. Its main thrust was to vindicate Juan Manuel de Rosas as the first nationalist hero, while, in true Manichean fashion, demolishing the reputation of those who had attacked him. Not surprisingly, Sarmiento and his works were an early target of their assaults; their nationalist tendencies sought roots in a Catholic, Spanish, and monarchical past with conservative overtones. For them, Facundo was an early in20

INTRODUCTION

stance of a pernicious tendency to relinquish national identity to foreign interests: it stood for the dangers of entreguismo. Although the revisionistas had an ambivalent relationship with Peronism, both located their attacks in a nationalist and populist rhetoric which denounced the turn away from the autochthonous. If their rhetoric had a ring of its own, the arguments espoused, however, had been in place since the book's early days, and had been cogently articulated by Juan Bautista Alberdi in his Cartas quillotanas. In fact, there is a sense in which the obsession with this book has tended to fixate neurotically on its power to engender divisions. They, in turn, have become emblematic of public life, and they have been appropriated for their symbolic value. It is hardly accidental, for example, that Carlos Menem should have cultivated a resemblance with Facundo Quiroga during the presidential campaign, when he was presenting himself as a populist candidate who would renew the Peronist party, or that attempts to deal with political strife should not infrequently turn into the destruction of an "other" construed as barbarous. Facundo has played a central role in the battle for authority in Argentine political life, and the pages that follow represent an attempt to map out the process whereby the struggles have been enacted. Echoing Ernest Renan, Ernest Gellner reminds us that nations are made by human will, as in a kind of "perpetual plebiscite, a choice rather than a fatality." 49 In that voluntaristic enterprise, memory and forgetting are both essential. If the latter seems to have been particularly operative in recent approaches to the 1976-1983 "Proceso," memory, on the other hand, activates an ongoing conversation-textual as well as otherwisewhich is still regulated by some of Facundo's visions. With that in mind, I have deliberately eschewed the attempt to provide a conclusion, hoping to have contributed to an understanding of how and why the terms of the strife keep defining and redefining the nation.

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ONE

THE WARS OF PERSUASION

Conflict, Interpretation, and Power in the Early Years of Facundo ~ Reception ~

I n Mi defensa, Sacmiento pwclaims: "My love of learning has had no other origin than having learned to read very well." [En mi no ha tenido otro origen mi aficion a instruirme que el haber aprendido a leer muy bien.] 1 One of the tricks his orphaned texts play upon him is that they call into question the very possibility of reading well. This is epitomized by Facundo: though unquestionably an honored member of the Latin American canon, Facundo has been read in such divergent ways that it challenges the possibility of interpretive validity. The deferral of meaning-an inevitable condition of our dealings with language-is extended when reading becomes tangled in politically charged conflicts of interpretation. A text's meanings are not fixed once and for all; its meanings are in part determined by the situation of its early interpreters, and contextual constraints shape the process of reception. Facundo has given life to a national literary circuit, it is a founding text, as it marks a beginning of a series of cultural phenomena centered on the book as an artifact of primary importance. This chapter will focus on a particular moment in the very eventful life of Sarmiento's first major book: the time of its initial publication, seen as a rich cultural event. Since the study of the canonization of Facundo is closely linked with the process of elaboration of Argentine cultural myths, this chapter traces the impact of the actual coming on stage of the text itself, the avatars of its publication, its moving from pamphlet to book, the very immediate dialogue that it established with its readers, the way in which a text seeks out an audience as it comes on the scene, and, in doing so, is actually struggling for influence and hegemony. We tend to view a canonized book through the hindsight of later versions, or maybe through the vast repository of the complete works, and this per23

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

ception may entail losing any sense of the earlier versions as different but equally vital speech acts in the world. Because the complete works, or even the annotated editions tend to reify writing as a series of complete final products, they erase any sense of their mode of production and reception, and of their interaction with contexts which were particularly powerful at the time of their publication. By looking at Facundo's occasion and original readership, seeing the impact it had on its contemporaries and during its first few years of life, its emergence can be considered as a phenomenon inscribed in the tension between legitimation and contestation. Facundo can be viewed, as Foucault says, as "discourse in its sudden irruption; in that punctuality in which it appears, and in that temporal dispersion that enables it to be repeated, known, forgotten, transformed, utterly erased and hidden, far from all view, in the dust of books." Rather than treating it as "the distant presence of the origin" it can be viewed as and when it occurs. 2 Releasing it from the inertia of the book and restoring some of its lost vitality, this chapter will examine the circulation of meanings produced as a result of its beginning. We can thus observe the material and discursive conditions of the existence of Facundo as it appeared in serial form in Ei Progreso, the interplay of relations it brought into being as it was read and interpreted, and some of the implications of its transformation from pamphlet to book. Of course, any attempt to recapture the initial situation of a text's reception is itself caught up in the movement of history. Gadamer has written eloquently about the problems of the fusion of horizons, and it is as interesting to bring to the forefront what can be reconstructed as it is to note the gaps which the past makes it impossible for us to fill. Attempting to reach back to the multiple factors which came into play in the production and reception of Facundo around the decade of its publication brings home to us in a powerful way the degree to which the past is beyond reach. In part, of course, this situation is due to the dynamics of my historically situated, present subjectivity, so well defined in Walter Benjamin's penetrating dictum: "History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now." My "now" evidently conditions my understanding of the past as well as the direction in which I will seek significant information. Again, Benjamin comes to mind: " ... every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably." 3 The image of the past which I will try to bring into existence has, of course, a purely textual status: it emerges from newspapers and letters, two discursive forms which sustained the communication among intellectuals at this time. These textual materials constitute a fabric tightly woven

THE WARS OF PERSUASION

of writing, inscription, and action. The relationship has a powerful double fit which has to do with the community of Argentine exiles living in Chile during Rosas's era: while they were constantly in touch with each other, inscribing their doing in astonishingly numerous letters and newspaper articles, they were also keenly aware of the extent to which writing was transmuted into action. To peruse the letters and journalistic pieces written by Sarmiento and his acquaintances at this time is to become aware of the degree to which Facundo is manipulated as a power-gaining tool. With no other one of his works was Sarmiento as concerned to have it reach those readers who might respond favorably to him as its author. He was convinced that as his readership expanded so did his prestige and that this would bring him closer to public office. There are many eloquent proofs of this in Sarmiento's correspondence. There is a letter written on April 8, I 8 5 I, to Modestino Pizarro from his quinta in Yungay, in which Sarmiento deals with the arrangements to be made as soon as Rosas is overthrown: If that conference takes place, there would be an empty seat if I were not there. The people would miss me, their march would be incomplete and hesitant. My presence would inspire confidence in everyone and fear in Rosas only; because I am associated with ideas which are already formulated and known by everyone. Moreover, and this is the most serious thing, that conference would be subjugated by Urquiza, and I believe only my presence can safeguard the majesty of its national representation.

[En ese congreso, si tiene Iugar, habria un asiento vacio si no estoy yo. Hecharanme (sic) de menos los pueblos, sera incompleta y vacilante su marcha. Mi presencia daria a todos confianza, y solo a Rosas miedo; porque a mi se ligan ideas ya formuladas y de todos conocidas. Hay mas, y esto es lo peor, ese congreso sera subyugado por Urquiza y creo que solo mi presencia puede conservarle Ia majestad de Ia representacion nacional.] 4 Sarmiento's legitimation as a potential member of Congress derives from his writings, from the fact that his readers have become acquainted with his thinking. The pragmatic connection between book and action is such that on the occasion of Facundo's second edition, Sarmiento's choice of words to describe it is revealing: "Civilization and Barbarism will be bound next week-a rich, revised and augmented edition, its nails sharpened .... " [ Civilizaci6n y barbarie quedara empastada en Ia entrante semana, rica edici6n corregida, aumentada, afiladas las uiias .... ] 5 The metaphor is suggestive of the belligerent qualities that he attributes to his book, and of his conviction that it would have far-reaching repercussions in the world. When he wrote to Paz and Benavidez hoping to win their

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support, he saw to it that they received copies of Facundo, as though the relationship between author and book were metonymical. In the letter to Paz, written in Montevideo on December 22, 1845, Facundo is seen in the same pugnacious light: "I wrote Facundo with the purpose of stirring up the concerns of the interior provinces, and I got it through the Andes in a box." [Con el proposito de agitar todas las preocupaciones del interior escribl el Facundo, del que hice pasar a cordillera cerrada un cajon.] 6 Sarmiento was not alone in attributing such efficacy to his writings. An eloquent letter written by Juan Andres Ferrera from La Paz, Bolivia, encouraging him to continue his discrediting enterprise against Rosas assures him of his success in the following terms: "Aldao and Facundo will soon be two invisible powers which will drag the infamous Rosas to the gallows." [Aldao y Facundo seran bien pronto dos poderes invisibles que arrastraran hacia el cadalso al infame Rosas.] 7 Another early reader, Wenceslao Paunero, illustrates to what extent the early reception of Facundo privileged its pragmatic dimension: "None of the Argentine writers has understood and explained the diverse elements of our society as you have. Congratulate yourself, my friend, on your beautiful work and its fruitful results." [Ninguno de los escritores argentinos ha comprendido y explicado los diversos elementos de nuestra sociedad como Ud. Felidtese pues amigo de que su trabajo es hermoso y fecundo en resultados.] 8 This relationship between writing, action, and power was one of Sarmiento's obsessions. His enemy Alberdi knew exactly how to nettle him in this regard, and he found subtle ways to berate his performance as "a journalist in the periodical press" [escritor de Ia prensa periodica]. Urquiza also mooted Sarmiento's insistent claims to having waged an effective battle against Rosas with his pen, and he did so in very blunt terms through his secretary, Angel Elias, shortly before the battle of Caseros, on January 2, 1852: The General read the letter you wrote to him yesterday, and he has asked me to tell you, regarding the wonders you claim for the press in frightening the enemy, that "for years now the press in Chile and elsewhere has been screeching, and so far Don Juan Manuel has not been frightened; on the contrary, he has been growing stronger by the day." [EI sefior general ha leido Ia carta que ayer le ha escrito usted, y me encarga le diga respecto de los prodigios que dice usted que hace Ia imprenta asustando al enemigo, "que hace muchos afios que las prensas chillan en Chile y en otras partes, y que basta ahora don Juan Manuel de Rosas no se ha asustado; que antes al contrario cada dia estaba mas fuerte." ] 9

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Sarmiento's offended answer is dated the very next day, and what he responds to is the charge against the effectiveness of the written word: It is very natural to believe that in my mind I exaggerate the influence of the

press, that is, of the word .... But I have been the Chilean press for many years, and recently it has busied itself with nothing other than predisposing public opinion in favor of the General [Urquiza] and of the worthy enterprise he was about to undertake .... The weapons which fight Rosas are invincible; but it is also true that public opinion has abandoned him, and some part, small as it may be, must be granted to those who have had the courage to fight his power for ten years. [Es muy natural creer que yo me exagere a mis propios ojos Ia influencia de Ia prensa, es decir, de Ia palabra .... Pero Ia prensa de Chile he sido yo durante muchos afios, y en estos ultimos no se ha ocupado de otra cosa que de predisponer Ia opinion publica en favor del senor general y de Ia digna empresa que iba a acometer.... Las armas que combaten a Rosas son invencibles; pero tambien es cierto que Ia opinion lo ha abandonado, y alguna parte, por pequefia que sea, debe concedersele a los que han tenido el coraje de combatir su poder diez afios.] 10 This compelling alliance between discourse and power, not limited specifically to the actual overthrow of Rosas but taken in more general terms, has had a bearing on the relationship between the reception of Facundo and the shaping of an Argentine cultural tradition, for, as Habermas might put it, the contents of a cultural tradition are the communicable meanings toward which social action is oriented. The questions which the countless readers of this book have addressed over the last almost one hundred and fifty years have touched upon the ways in which discursive practices regulate social and political relations. For indeed, as Foucault has so eloquently argued, power circulates, it functions in the form of a chain, and the production and circulation of discourse embodied in the letters and journalistic pieces connected with Facundo are defined by the ever-changing choreography of power which was being played out before and after the battle of Caseros.

COMMUNITY AND EXILE The production of power, prestige, and community are interconnected in the moment when this book made its appearance. The network of these discursive practices helped mold the concept of nationality which the cast 27

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of characters of the pre- and post-Caseros era helped define. The connection between exile and community is strong: the "proscriptos" [exiles] (to borrow a term from Ricardo Rojas) became what in Benedict Anderson's suggestive terms can be called an "imagined community," which needed to fight its own sense of dispersion by turning to the binding force of writing.11 If, as Victor Turner claims, the journey is a social process, we can see the journey into exile-a pilgrimage away from the fatherland-as a meaning-creating experience. 12 Only the power of writing could grant a sense of community and of nationhood to the men who were plotting the demise of Rosas from Chile, Montevideo, Peru, and Bolivia. Anderson attributes great importance to the newspaper in the formation of the cultural artifact of nation-ness. The perusal of such newspapers as ElMercurio, or E/ Progreso, in which Sarmiento played a pivotal role, gives us a sense of the cohesive way in which they created an assemblage of fellow readers. Of course, these fellow readers were not limited to Argentine exiles, for they included the Chilean reading public, but the Argentine dominant intellectuals like Sarmiento, Vicente Fidel Lopez, Alberdi, Juan Maria Gutierrez, Carlos Tejedor, and Felix Frias, established a remarkable network of communication among themselves and with their counterparts in Montevideo (Esteban Echeverria, Florencio Varela, Bartolome Mitre, Valentin Alsina) by writing and reading letters and newspapers in a truly feverish manner. The emergence of Facundo in E/ Progreso must be seen within this field: it is part of a rich, sometimes dissonant conversation among them all, and was received as such. The questions that follow are designed to determine the conditions of existence of these discursive formations: the situations that provoked Facundo together with the consequences it gave rise to. This chapter will locate this discursive event in some stories, always bearing in mind Arthur Dan to's caveat regarding historical reconstruction that "completely to describe an event is to locate it in all the right stories, and this we cannot do." 13 These "stories" will touch upon the contextual factors which might have conditioned the reception of the text, the forms of appropriation which were deployed, questions of distribution, circulation, readership, as well as the intricate counterpoint between consent and dissent, legitimation and contestation, which Facundo's appearance brought into play. The first "story" deals with the author and his reading public. As Foucault has put it, "The author's name indicates the status of discourse within a society and a culture." 14 What did the name "Sarmiento" mean to the audience of the I 84o's? How was their reading of the feuilleton, as it appeared in El Progreso between May 2. and June 21, 1845, framed by the political and cultural discourses which were circulating at the time?

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Even though it was published in book form as early as July, I 84 5, it seems obvious that Facundo was a vital element of the journalistic field in which Sarmiento played so prominent a role and which Benedict Anderson considers crucial in the development of a sense of community. 15 When Sarmiento wrote to Urquiza, "I have been the Chilean press" [La prensa de Chile he sido yo], he was only mildly exaggerating. When he arrived in Chile, the only existing newspaper was E/ Mercurio of Valparaiso, founded in 1827. Shortly after the publication of an article of his commemorating the battle of Chacabuco, Sarmiento was offered the editorship of the paper. His centrality was soon sustained by an intricate mesh of controversy and power contests which pertained to both Argentines and Chileans, as well as to the founding discourses of culture and politics. In the Chilean environment, his writing was drawn into the struggle between the Conservative and the Liberal parties (pelucones and pipiolos, respectively), which was played out in the founding of newspapers, in the recruitment of prestigious editors, and in the daily battling of articles. Sarmiento's decision to support the conservative party was reached after a careful examination of the role of the Argentine exiles in the Chilean political arena (as he explained later in Recuerdos de provincia), and after considerable effort on the part of Las Heras and Montt to recruit his services for newspapers that were being founded to promote their respective causes. Shortly after he left E/ Mercurio in I 842, Sarmiento established the first newspaper of Santiago, E/ Progreso, under the auspices of Manuel Montt. Clearly, this was the founding moment of journalistic discourse in Chile. Lastarria and his pipiolo associates founded E/ Miliciano, and, later on, El Siglo. It is significant that when E/ Progreso began the serialized publication of Facundo, Sarmiento was involved in heated debates not only, as is well known, with Rosas's emissary, Baldomero Garcia, but also with the "pipio/o" newspapers, most especially with E/ Siglo. These debates, in part focused on the Chilean presidential elections of I 846, framed the early readings of the text with controversy. Sarmiento describes one of the peaks of the disputation in a colorful letter to his friend Pepe Posse on January 29, I 84 5: The people of El Siglo gave in to the fury which is customary among these swine when I squeeze their guts. They called me "Argentinian horse," coward, and who knows what else. Incited by Lopez, I went to the offices of El Siglo, demanded to see the offender, they gave me no explanation, I spat on his face, and even as he was attempting to overcome the fright and wash off the affront, he tried to grab me and reached for my hair. I freed myself and pushed him away in that awful moment. I prepared myself for something

29

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serious, gentlemanly; half an hour later, dancing with joy, Santiago was filled with I know not what stories, made up to suit them, about how they had kicked me to shreds, pulling my eyes out. Two weeks later the entire Republic was brimming with stories of my guts being ripped out, etc., they were toasting in Aconcagua, the priests were preaching, etc. [Los de E/ Siglo se abandonaron a todo el furor que es costumbre entre todos estos canallas, cuando les aprieto los callos. Dijeronme "caballo cuyano," cobarde y que se yo. Instigado por Lopez, me dirigi a Ia imprenta de El Siglo, requeri al ofensor, no me daban una explicaci6n, escupile Ia cara, y eJ entre si se le pasaba el susto, si hacia algo por lavarse Ia afrenta, trat6 de agarrarme, alcanz6 a los cabellos, me desasi de ely lo eche en hora mala. Yo me aguardaba algo serio, algo de caballeros; media hora despues empero estaba lleno Santiago, jbailaban de gusto! de que se yo que cuentos, inventados a placer, me habian molido a patadas, sacandome los ojos, quince dias despues Ia republica entera estaba llena, de que me habian destripado, etc., brindaban en Aconcagua, predicaban los curas, etc.] 16 The press did not merely report; its writing was the arena where the power struggle was staged. A letter addressed to Sarmiento by Santiago Cueto in I 84 5 conveys the sense of immediate pragmatic efficacy attained by print: You are our savior and I do not doubt that you will use all your talent to defeat the Lastarrias, those infamous slanderers .... Tomorrow's article, like the ones to follow it all this week, will have all your talent poured into them; let them move the people of Santiago: let them feel horror for that infernal party: let them give us the victory as a result of the fear felt by those morons. [Usted es nuestro salvador y no dudo que empleani todo su talento para dar por tierra contra los Lastarrias, infames calumniadores.... El articulo de manana, asi como todos los que sigan en toda esta semana han de ser tales que a pure usted todo su talento; que muevan al pueblo de Santiago: que lo hagan tomar horror a ese partido infernal: que nos den el triunfo, por el miedo que tengan esos imbeciles.] 1' The readers of El Progreso, El Siglo, and the Diario de Santiago, which replaced El Siglo as of July 5, 1845, formed an interpretive community whose competence was marked by heated debate. Here is one example of the early reception of Facundo by Pedro Godoy, a pipiolo who wrote in El Siglo and in the Diario de Santiago: The author of Facundo created a plan, wished to call it the biography of a famous man in the annals of the Argentine Revolution, tried to describe one 30

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of the bloodiest periods in that Revolution, sought to call attention to his work, and, without the necessary knowledge, without clear ideas about politics or the events which he may have partly witnessed, . .. drawing on nothing, in sum, but his natural daring, has brought to light the web of absurdity which we are now examining. [El autor de Facundo se forjo un plan, quiso llamarlo biografia de un hombre celebre en los anales de Ia revolucion argentina, pretendio describir una de las epocas mas sangrientas de esa revolucion, intento Hamar Ia atencion del publico sobre su obra, y sin los conocimientos necesarios, sin ideas fijas sobre politica ni sobre los acontecimientos que en parte, quiza haya presenciado, ... y no contando, en suma, mas que con su atrevimiento natural, saco a luz el tejido de absurdos que ahora examinamos.] 18 Sometimes the tone of the reviews was blatantly insulting, and the struggle became such that a press jury was summoned on behalf of Sarmiento, but Godoy was absolved. In the cultural field Sarmiento's name became associated with controversies which had to do with the construction of a truly American cultural discourse, and which implied a break with the established tradition. As is well known, Sarmiento was deeply involved in the 1842 polemic with Bello and the strongholds of classicism, and it was played out in the daily newspapers (in this particular case El Semanario-the first weekly publication with literary pretensions to appear in Chile-and El Mercurio), which became display texts for the community of readers to participate in and consume. As in the controversy with El Sig/o, it is remarkable to note how aggressive the writing is. Here is a brief sample, from Sarmiento's pen: The editors of El Semanario want to confront us, and they will get what they want, because he who attacks the writer attacks his readers, and the reading public does not get involved in such nonsense; they like the writers to lock horns and to draw their own conclusions hearing the pros and cons of the matters which are aired. So the gentlemen of El Semanario should stop harping on the public, because we have our own diminutive little public, but it is young, and educated and in touch with the times and not with things that have the stench of rotting bacon like Classicism. [Los redactores de El Semanario quieren haberselas con nosotros, y se las habran, porque el que ataca al can ataca al sabadan, y el publico nose mete en esas ninerias; gusta que se rompan los cuernos los escritores, y sacar el solo Ia utilidad oyendo el pro y el contra de las cuestiones que se ventilan.

JI

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Conque dejense de publico los senores de E/ Semanario, que nosotros tambien tenemos nuestro publiquito diminuto, pero joven, ilustrado y amigo de su tiempo y de las cosas que no huelen a tocino rancio como el clasicismo.] 19

Sarmiento's standing in the discourse of cultural formation and in the foundation of institutions at this time is eloquently revealed by the fact that on October I?, I843, he presented the first paper to be produced by the newly founded University of Chile. His Memoria sabre Ortografia americana provoked heated debates, and it is interesting to examine the newspapers of the time and observe the degree of spelling instability which the Memoria triggered: while some ignored Sarmiento's suggestions, several of them adopted them and did away with the h, v, and z, with the silent u in such combinations as gue, gui, que, and qui. It is, of course, relevant that Sarmiento's suggestions coincide with the foundation of the nation's institutions and the production of a national discourse, since clearly the new spelling model was ultimately designed to inscribe in the realm of writing a difference between Spain and the emerging nations. Another relevant factor in the context of production and reception of Facundo was, as I anticipated, the visit to Chile of Rosas's emissary, Baldomero Garda in April, I845-a month before the first "issue" of the feuilleton. This event generated a rich array of journalistic articles ranging from discussions focused on the trip's purpose to animated commendation of the heroic attributes of an otherwise obscure Argentine exile, a certain Bedoya, who had to face prosecution as the result of having torn a label reading "death to the savage, filthy, repugnant Unitarists!" [jmueran los salvajes, asquerosos, inmundos unitarios!] from one of Garcia's servants. Garcia's presence galvanized some of the conflicts which pertained to both the inner workings of the Chilean political struggles and the agency of the Argentine exiles. As a result, tensions mounted to a point which, according to a piece written by Sarmiento on May I in El Progreso, announcing the forthcoming publication of the "Vida de Quiroga," made it imperative to bring out a text designed to halt "what may turn out to be far-reaching harm to us." [un mal que puede ser trascendental para nosotros.] Facundo stands in the midst of this tangled web not merely because Sarmiento, as has been said, wanted to discredit Garda and, certainly, Rosas, but because he needed to address his enemies at El Siglo. In order to undermine the authority of the peluc6n newspaper (E/ Progreso), they had adduced that Sarmiento was being silenced in his attacks of Garda by no other than Montt (his supporter, and, in fact, the one the pipiolos wanted to bring disrepute to) in order to avoid problems between the governments of Chile and Argentina. Sarmiento's fiery response, entitled "Why Does El Siglo 32

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Attack Us?" [~Por que nos ataca E/ Siglo?] appeared in E/ Progreso on the very same day he announced the serialized publication of Facundo; the central thrust of his argument was that the issue at stake was freedom of speech: "So then let the freedom of the press be destroyed, as E/ Siglo demands, and let the orders issue from the Ministry, as E/ Siglo advises and condones. Only thus would they find Minister Montt's actions dignified and enlightened." [Pero entonces destruyase Ia libertad de imprenta, como lo pide E/ Sig/o, e impartase ordenes del ministerio, como lo aconseja y aprueba El Siglo, que solo esta vez halla digna e ilustrada Ia conducta del ministro Montt.J2° Thus, the questions of communicative understanding and misunderstanding were bound up with oppositional practices and situational constraints. In the "Anuncio" of May I, Sarmiento sums it up in the following terms: "Petty and particular interests, journalists' squabbles, and partisan aims, tend to excite passion and jealousy; these emotions, the purpose of which is to taint an individual in the eyes of public opinion, end up creating in Chile echoes of Rosas's barbarous regime." [Intereses mezquinos y de circunstancias, rencillas de periodistas, y propositos de partido, tienden a sublevar pasiones y celos que con el designio manifiesto de comprometer a un individuo ante Ia opinion publica no van a nada menos que a levantar en Chile ecos al barbaro sistema de Rosas.] 21 It was necessary to occupy a different site in the struggle with a work of vaster scope, one which would grant authority by placing the debates within a broader framework and by bringing to bear on them the conceptual apparatus of the thinkers who, as he put it in the Ortografia americana, "direct today's thinking" [dirigen el pensamiento de hoy]. 22 TEXT AS WEAPON : PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION The way we read Facundo now tends to reify writing in the form of the completed book. Here is a unity which we must question as artificial: it is always salutary to suspend, as Foucault says, "the material individualization of the book, which occupies a determined space, which has an economic value, and which itself indicates, by a number of signs, the limits of its beginning and its end." The frontiers of Facundo have undergone numerous reconfigurations, always betraying their placement within a complex field of discourse, again, as Foucault put it, "caught up in a system of references, ... as a node within a network." 23 As a serialized publication, the text was read in a fragmentary way, and it was also framed by the other pieces which occupied the space of the newspapers-both within El Progreso and the other papers with which it established a dialogue. It is important to retain a sense of the material mode of existence of this text, 33

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its status as a publication and the forms of reception it might have invited. A piece Sarmiento wrote for El Progreso on August 30, I 84 5, suggestively entitled "Our Sin, the Feuilletons" [Nuestro pecado de los folletines], conveys both the condemnation the feuilleton inspired in the reading public (derived, of course, from the "sinful things" which it contained) and its communicative success, facetiously yet proudly presented as a disease ("the leprosy of the feuilleton has already reached all the newspapers" [Ia lepra del folletin ha ganado ya todos los diarios]), which El Mercurio introduced during the early years of Sarmiento's stewardship. While this section favored the consumption of romantic and truculent literature (Sue and Dumas might epitomize the preference here, but Balzac was not excluded), it did not rule out nonfictional accounts of general interest: E/ Mercurio, for instance, was publishing the "Estractos del viaje al viejo mundo por el peruano D. Juan Bustamante" in August, I845, only a month after El Progreso had brought out Facundo. Here was a space slightly removed from the actual news coverage, but which shared its borders and its readers and which allowed concepts to gain currency and power. As Sarmiento observed in Viajes, "A good feuilleton can be decisive in the destiny of the world by giving new direction to the spirits." [Un buen folletin puede decidir de los destinos del mundo dando una nueva direccion a los espiritus.)24 Evidently, it was the desirable medium for shaping opinion at a time of crisis, and Sarmiento saw to it that its readers encountered in the pages of El Progreso journalistic pieces which would orient interpretation in a supportive way. Thus, in May and June of I845, the readers of the folletin "Vida de Quiroga" were presented with pieces which reinforced its central thesis, such as "lnteres de Chile en Ia Cuestion del Plata" (May 8, I945), "EI sistema de Rosas" (May 28, I945), "La causa de Bedoya" (June 2, 3, and 6, I945), or "Lo que a Rosas debe Ia America del Sur" (June I 3, I945). But the serialized folletin, with its fragmentary reception, is especially prone to the dialectics of both legitimation and contestation: a reader who then turned to E/ Siglo, or later the Diario de Santiago, would encounter all the possibilities of reading Facundo against the grain. Here is one brief example taken from El Siglo, on May 20: "Facundo is a most fertile work in its nonsense, plagiarism and lies." [EI Facundo es una obra Ia mas fecunda en desatinos, en plagios y en mentiras.] Another, from La Gaceta de Comercio of Valparaiso: "Good Lord, wake up Mr. Sarmiento, shake him so that he can see himself as he is and know that he calls attention to himself only by dint of his immense insolence." [Santo Dios despierten al senor Sarmiento, sacudanl6 (sic) para que se mire en su estatura y conozca que solo llama Ia atencion por Ia magnitud de su insolencia.] El Siglo, on June I4: "The only thing Sar34

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mien to will gain is that we, the people of Santiago de Chile, raise our voice to say that when they read Montt and Sarmiento they should read Bolivar and Sergeant Pino, ... and a worn out old shoe." [lo unico que lograra (Sarmiento) sera que los Santiaguinos levantemos Ia VOZ para decir a los Provincianos que cuando lean Montt y Sarmiento agan (sic) de cuenta que leen Bolivar y el Sargento Pino, ... Montt y una Chancleta vieja.)2 5 Aggravating things was Montt's investiture to the Interior Ministry; by June I I E/ Siglo announced, "fight to death the editor of El Progreso." [guerra a muerte al redactor del Progreso.] In August the Diario de Santiago published a parody of Facundo with some aggressive distortions: the subject of the biography was now Sarmiento himself, renamed "Pantale6n del Carrascal" to allude to a poor quarter of the city of San Juan, and events in Sarmiento's life were incorporated in a derisive manner. This was no harmless scoff: Pantale6n-Sarmiento was even made to murder two federal soldiers. Evidently, what Hans Robert Jauss calls the "horizon of expectations" of the readers was deeply stamped by conflict, and the text was set in an interplay of relations existing within its textual boundaries but also outside of them. It is not surprising that by September, I845, when Sarmiento left El Progreso in the midst of such heated controversy, Felix Frias made the following confidential remark at the end of a letter to Juan Maria Gutierrez: "Sarmiento is leaving E/ Progreso. He will probably go to Europe if we cannot all go back to our country. He has been made honorably useless for the press." [Sarmiento deja E/ Progreso. Se ira probablemente a Europa si pronto no podemos todos regresar a nuestro pais. Esta ya honrosamente inutilizado para Ia prensa.] 26 When in July, 1845 the text changed its status from feuilleton to book the struggles did not subside, but there was a shift in the schemata of text use. We witness now the dynamics of circulation and distribution, the seeking out of a broader audience, and the anxiety to exert influence beyond the sphere of the political debates which were being enacted in the Chilean newspapers. The little book was received as a unit, removed from its previous fragmented journalistic frame. The text itself underwent the first of several future modifications, for there is good reason to believe that the folletin had ended after "jjBarranca Yaco!!," with the murder of Quiroga. As a book, it entered a different system of distribution than the one it had had in the journalistic medium, and the numerous letters written by and addressed to Sarmiento about this attest to the difficulties inherent in promoting book circulation at this time. Sarmiento's plight was obviously aggravated by exile, and by the government's hostility in the territory he wished to penetrate. Whatever the effect of the difficulties to be faced, it is remarkable to observe how much Sarmiento wanted to be read, to have 35

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his book reach an audience which went even beyond the continental confines. Of the letters he wrote to Gutierrez, very insistently making this kind of request, there is one that stands out as epitomizing the reach of his anxiety for readership: "But let's return to your mission of sp.reading the Odyssey throughout the world. I bet you haven't written a word about it to your friends in France, to the National, to the Pacific Democracy, to the Paris Review and the Revue des Deux Mondes, etc., etc.? Come on, do it." [Pero volvamos a su misi6n de derramar Ia Odisea por toda Ia redondez del orbe. (.A que no a escrito una palabra a sus amigos de Francia, al National, Ia Democracia Pacifica, Revista de Paris i de Ambos Mundos, etc., etc.? Vamos, agalo.] 27 About fifty copies were furtively introduced to Buenos Aires, others were given as presents to the patriots in Chile, or sent to powerful figures such as Paz, Varela, Echeverria, or Rivera Indarte. In spite of such efforts, it was evidently very hard to have the book reach its readers. Juan Maria Gutierrez, commissioned with what seems a major portion of the burden of the distribution of the book, and who at one point assured Sarmiento he would do what was necessary so that "Mr. Facundo can parade himself along those capital cities" [para que el seiior don Facundo se pasee por esas capitales], has difficulty obtaining the books in Valparaiso: "I must warn you that I have not a single one of the copies of Facundo, neither in the bound nor in the rustic edition." [Quiero advertirle que de los ejemplares de Facundo, ni encuadernados ni a Ia rustica, hay uno solo en mi poder.]Z 8 His friend Aberastain, who had helped Sarmiento gather information on Facundo Quiroga in March, writes on August 5, 1845, from Copiap6: "I have received your letter but not the forty copies of Facundo; I think they must have arrived but are delayed in the harbor. I have asked Rios, who is living there, to send them to me as soon as possible." [Recibi su carta y no los cuarenta ejemplares del Facundo; pienso que estos hayan llegado y esten demorados en el puerto a donde he encargado ya a Rios establecido alii que me los mande en Ia primera oportunidad.] 29 Wenceslao Paunero, writing from La Paz, has obviously been waiting long for his copy: "I know nothing of Facundo. What devil of a route have you sent it on!" [Nada se de su Facundo basta esta; iPor que demonio de via lo ha dirigido usted!] 30 The vicissitudes of transportation made distribution tentative: a shipment of books to France, for example, never made it beyond Cape Horn, and Sarmiento had to give away his very last copy to the Revue des Deux Mondes when he presented it for review. Small wonder, then, that writing to Gutierrez on his way to Europe, in January I 846, Sarmiento should express his discouragement: "What an unfortunate book this has been! Everything, even the printing has turned out as if Rosas had placed his hand on it." (jQue libro tan

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desgraciado fue este; todo, hasta Ia impresi6n, sali6 como si Rosas ubiese sido el que ponia Ia mano en el.)3 1 Thus, Facundo set in motion a process of circulation and distribution; it also engendered the discourse of literary criticism. A rich dialogue about it was established among the hegemonic intellectuals in Chile and Montevideo. In attempting to trace it, one is again struck by the situational nature of reading and interpretation, and by the problems of historically reconstructing the contextual constraints which are in place in a particular reading. From among the early readers of Facundo, Juan Maria Gutierrez seems to address both issues in an intriguing way. A man with a clear sense of the need to promote the emergence of a "Poetica americana" (to quote the title of an anthology he was compiling), Gutierrez was the one Sarmiento turned to for a favorable review. The pragmatic and textual circumstances surrounding this review heighten our awareness of the inferential or speculative grounds on which historical understanding takes place, of the extent to which one tentatively considers filling gaps, and then does so with varying degrees of success. The result is a suggestive mix of adequately and inadequately explained events, and an inevitable coming to terms with the slippage between text and reading. Sarmiento sent to him the very first copy on July 2.4 with the following letter: "I am sending you the first copy of Facundo to see the public light. It has been infamously treated. Would you take it upon yourself to analyze it in ElMercurio, and to say it is a splendid, magnificent, celebrated book?" [Remito a usted el primer ejemplar del Facundo que ve Ia luz publica. Ha salido como una cosa infamemente tratada. ~Quiere usted encargarse de analizarlo, por El Mercurio, y decir que es un librote estupendo, magnifico, celeberrimo?] 32 On July 2.7 El Mercurio published an unsigned review full of praise and admiration, and which gave the book credit for having understood the underlying causes of the political turmoil in Argentina; for having been written with the conceptual elegance of a philosopher and with the beauty of an artist. Palcos attributes this review to Demetrio Rodriguez Pefia, on the grounds that he was the editor of the paper, and calls it "the frankest and the most openly favorable" [Ia mas franca y abiertamente favorable]. 33 Verdevoye, for his part, considers Palcos's attribution in the light of the letters exchanged between Sarmiento and Gutierrez and suggests that the author might be Gutierrez. 34 Antonio Pages Larraya does not waver: he ascribes it to Gutierrez without further consideration, and so have other critics. 35 Complicating matters is a letter written by Sarmiento to Gutierrez on August 8 which expresses considerable dissatisfaction with the review written by him: "You have written your editorial salutation in El Mercurio and I thank you. Were I not a journalist, I would 37

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

have thought the derisive comment rather heavy; but since I am of the trade, I understood that you did with Facundo what others have done with worse things. Please spare me the tasteless attempt to explain this point." [Escribi6 usted su salutaci6n editorial en E/ Mercurio y se Ia agradezco. Si no fuera periodista yo hubiera creido que Ia chanza era pesada; pero como soy del metier, comprendi que bacia usted con el Facundo lo que yo he hecho tantas veces con otras cosas peores. No vaya usted a tener Ia falta de gusto de entrar en explicaciones sobre este punto.)36 Now, the piece published byE/ Mercurio on July 27 (only three days after the letter with which Sarmiento sent the first copy) could hardly have inspired these comments, because it is enthusiastic in every respect. Moreover, on August 22, while writing again to Gutierrez about the book, Sarmiento alludes to Facundo as "my Odyssey, as you like to call it" [mi Odisea, como se ha complacido en llamarla usted], 37 and there is no allusion to Homer's work in the review of July 27, nor are there any letters in which Gutierrez suggests the comparison. At this point one is acutely conscious of the precarious contact established with the past. If it is eminently textual, it is also subject to the gaps which this textuality is fraught with: either Sarmiento's reading of the review which appeared on July 27 totally misconstrued its stance, or else somewhere in E/ Mercurio between the 24th of July (when Sarmiento sent the book to Gutierrez) and the 8th of August (when he wrote to him in clear displeasure about the review) there is another review which is less favorable. Obviously, one must go back to the historical record in search for a text which might help construct a plausible explanation. Here again we are confronted with the inaccessibility of the past: all the microfilm copies of El Mercurio available in the U.S. (at Sterling Library at Yale University, the Library of Congress, and Bancroft Library at Berkeley) have one big hiatus which extends between the 30th of June and the 18th of August. Among the complete microfilms at the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, there are no other reviews during those dates. Did Sarmiento misread the one of the 27th? Did Gutierrez write another review which we are unable to trace? Aside from its cautionary effect, this situation is part and parcel of the early readings of this text. 38 Thus, the striking interpretive instability which characterizes Facundo does not derive exclusively from the conflicts among readers, but also from discrepancies which can be detected in the same reader, and which seem to stem from the different circumstances within which his acts of reading take place. Interpretations can differ depending on whether they are framed by the private space of a letter or the public one of a newspaper. Gutierrez voices strong reservations about Facundo contained in a

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letter written to Alberdi on August 6, I 84 5. He assures Alberdi that "every sensible man will see in it a caricature" [todo hombre sensato vera en ei una caricatura] and adds: "This book is like the portraits of our society which are sometimes painted by travelers in order to say strange things: the slaughterhouse, the girl in intimate consort with the mulatta, the cigar on the lips of the older woman .... The Argentine Republic is not a pool of blood; our civilization is not measured by the progress of primary schools in San Juan." [Es este libro como las pinturas que de nuestra sociedad hacen a veces los viajeros por decir cosas raras: el Matadero, Ia mulata en intimidad con Ia nifia, el cigarro en boca de Ia senora mayor .... La Republica Argentina noes charca de sangre: Ia civilizacion nuestra noes el progreso de las escuelas primarias de San Juan.)3 9 Likewise, Echeverria, who wrote a very positive appreciation of the book in the "Ojeada retrospectiva" which is part of the Dogma socia/ista, ("the biographical notes on the Friar Aldao and the life of Juan Facundo Quiroga are in our opinion among the most complete and original products of the pen of the young Argentine exiles" [los apuntes biograficos de Fr. Aldao y Ia vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga son en concepto nuestro lo mas completo y original que haya salido de Ia pluma de los jovenes proscriptos argentinos,]) 40 expressed a different, angry reaction in a letter to Alberdi of June I 2, I 8 50: "What has he written other than short stories and novels even by his own account? Where in his works lie the power of reason and the deep conceptions? I see nothing in them beyond fantastic lucubrations, descriptions and useless chatter." [~Que cosa ha escrito el que no sean cuentos y novelas segun su propia confesion? ~Donde esta en sus obras Ia fuerza de raciocinio y las concepciones profundas? Yo no veo en elias mas que lucubraciones fantasticas, descripciones y raudal de chachara infecunda.] 41 Within the community of exiles, Facundo was judged in very mixed ways; even an admiring reader like Alsina deauthorized the book by writing his painstaking fifty-one notes, intending, as he put it, "not to allow errors to remain uncorrected, neither in the facts nor in the judgement." [no ... dejar pasar errores, ... acerca de los hechos como acerca de los juicios.] 42 Alsina's corrections are the object of a separate study in Chapter 2; for my purposes here suffice it to say that Sarmiento alluded to them in the edition of I 8 5 I in a way which reveals the destabilizing effect they had on his own validity claims. These "stories" beg the question of how Facundo came to occupy a central position in the accepted Latin American canon. It is a story that takes us into the early years of the twentieth century and the production of national identity myths which is associated with the "Centenario" cele-

39

FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE

brations. Nevertheless, the book's appearance, as it maps out a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings blend and clash, prefigures the conflicts which characterize the history of its reception. In the last analysis, it is a process in which reading is revealed in all its problematicyet productive-dimensions.

TWO

THE RISKS OF FICTION Facundo and the Parameters of Historical Writing ~

A,

one ponders the va