Enduring Cuba: Thirty Essays 9783968692548

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface
I. Contexts
II. Thinking Through José Martí
III. Readings
Postscript
Sources
List of Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

Enrico Mario Santí

Enduring Cuba Thirty Essays

La Crítica Practicante, 12

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La Crítica Practicante Ensayos latinoamericanos Vol. 12 «La Crítica Practicante», como crítica imaginativa y descifradora, aspira a unir creación y crítica, sobre todo en el campo del ensayo. Desde que en 1890 Wilde hablara del «crítico como artista», desde que T. S. Eliot apelara a un poeta crítico, consecuente y consciente de la racionalidad de su obra, la exégesis literaria ha intentado acortar las distancias con el texto mismo que comenta. Dentro de la producción ensayística hispanoamericana no faltan ejemplos de esa proximidad; entre ellos, piezas fundamentales para lo que es ya una historia nutrida y variada de la crítica literaria. La presente colección desea recuperar y publicar libros que subrayen la continuidad y coherencia del pensamiento crítico, y no sólo en torno a la literatura; también aquellos que, en sentido amplio, aborden creativamente la cultura latinoamericana

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Enrico Mario Santí

ENDURING CUBA Thirty Essays

Iberoamericana • Vervuert • 2023

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Any form of reproduction, distribution, communication to the public or transformation of this work may only be performed with authorisation from its copyright holders, unless exempt by law. Should you need to photocopy or scan an excerpt of this work, please contact CEDRO (www.cedro.org; 91 702 19 70 / 93 272 04 47).

All rights reserved © Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert Iberoamericana, 2023 Amor de Dios, 1 – E-28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 Fax: +34 91 429 53 97 [email protected] www.iberoamericana-vervuert.es © Vervuert, 2023 Elisabethenstr. 3-9 – D-60594 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 Fax: +49 69 597 87 43 [email protected] www.iberoamericana-vervuert.es ISBN 978-84-9192-209-4 (Iberoamericana) ISBN 978-3-96869-253-1 (Vervuert) ISBN 978-3-96869-254-8 (ebook) Legal deposit: M-4395-2023 Cover design: Carlos Zamora Cover Illustration: Luis Cruz Azaceta, “Rafter Carrying his Country,” 1993 pen, acrylic, tape, paper on cardboard, 33.5 x 20 inches This book is printed entirely on ecological paper bleached without chlorine. Printed in Spain

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For Lex, Venissa and Camila a legacy, to endure

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Table of Contents Preface........................................................................................ 11 I. Contexts Enduring Cuba..................................................................... 17 A Cuban Canon?................................................................. 29 Cheap Glasnost.................................................................... 41 On National Identity........................................................... 53 Unburnt Bridges.................................................................. 59 Wilde, Dreyfus, Disaster..................................................... 67 The Caribbean: Paradigm or Paradox?.............................. 81 Latinamericanism and Restitution..................................... 95 Deaf Dialogues: Literary and Cultural Studies................. 107 II. Thinking Through José Martí Inventing a Nation............................................................... 117 Martí and Revolution.......................................................... 137 The Crisis of Latinamericanism.......................................... 151 Thinking Through............................................................... 165 III. Readings Neruda X 2........................................................................... 187 Isla Negra: An Afterword................................................... 195 Forking Paths: Borges and Tragedy................................... 205 Ten Keys to The Labyrinth of Solitude.............................. 217 Blanco: On the Presence of Absence.................................. 239 Overture: The Other Time.................................................. 251 Letter on Recordatio............................................................ 271 Notes from Underdevelopment......................................... 287 Textual Politics: Severo Sarduy........................................... 311 Bodies of Crime: Becoming Cabrera Infante.................... 323

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I am Alive............................................................................. 341 Hermes Unbound: The Art of Ricardo Pau-Llosa........... 345 Who Are You? The Search for Henriette Faber............... 357 Heberto Padilla: The Impossible Novel............................ 361 Two Notes on Lydia Rubio................................................. 365 Objects of desire: Ramón Alejandro.................................. 375 Our Only Home: Humberto Calzada............................... 379

Postscript Notes on ARK............................................................................. 387 Sources....................................................................................... 389 List of Illustrations............................................................... 393 Index............................................................................................ 395

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Preface In our age men distrust the Western universe and do not expect much of the future except, perhaps, Crusoe’s luck, a personal island off the beaten track. Eric J. Hobsbawm, “The Principle of Hope” ¡Ay, Cuba hermosa, primorosa!, ¿por qué sufres hoy tanto quebranto? Eliseo Grenet, “Lamento cubano”

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nduring Cuba collects thirty of the essays that I have ­mostly written in English over the past thirty years, some of which had remained unpublished. Most deal with literature but some intersect forays into history, politics, and art, including music. Indeed, such intersection, polemical perhaps, constitutes their common theme and makes them timely, too, particularly today when culture rather than literature, or art, or even politics, is meant to carry the day for civic responsibility in critical work. The present gathering joins books in Spanish written earlier plus two more in my own brand of English that I put together over the years, but this one title improves upon the personal edge I had aimed for in the previous ones. Cuba endures, well into the 21st century, following more than half a century of dictatorship, renewed diplomatic relations with the U.S. notwithstanding; in turn, I too, an exile since age 12, endure Cuba, perhaps not with the island’s daily resilience—evident in the 11

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plethora of reports on the subject—but certainly as a pained witness to those news and as part of a U.S. Hispanic minority that is often denied rights to its opposition to that dictatorship, sometimes even rights to being a minority at all. To be sure, not all the pieces gathered here deal with Cuba, or dictatorship, or exile—at least not in the direct way that an essay like “Unburnt Bridges” does. The ones that do verge on those subjects, however, set the tone for much of a book about contexts, one foundational figure, and readings. “Contexts,” the first section, ranges thematically from Cuban issues to general Latin American questions that ultimately lead onto the questionable pedagogy that I find in so-called Cultural Studies. My concerns about both national identity and the literary canon hail from the 1990s, when, as one of four rotating editors of the journal Cuban Studies, I broached those themes in prefaces for relevant issues. Twenty years later, my views have hardly veered. There still is, despite a wealth of bibliography, little conceptual grasp of Cuban national identity, at least not in the fruitful ways in which other nations, like Mexico or Brazil, articulate it, even when they also aim to dismantle it. In turn, the question of a viable literary canon remains today a silly chimera under the mirage of a dreary half-century of cultural policy that hoards discussion and discriminates according to who is deemed to be “within or against” the Revolution. Other yet broader pieces—on the Cuban version of Glasnost, or millennium icons—might seem dated, but they remain relevant, I believe, because they raise questions that, even today, are not pursued, much less resolved. Witness, for that matter, the twin concepts of “Latinamericanism and Restitution,” which, first raised in separate articles, I thrust together as part of an academic survey meant originally to be decisive and proleptic about future critical scholarship, and yet, along with those other harvests, has since borne uncertain fruit. I wrote in Spanish the pieces gathered under “Thinking Through José Martí,” the second section, as part of a separate book on the historical significance of this central Cuban writer, thinker, and foundational figure. My readings on Martí´s instrumental use as part of state monopoly on the subject revise a rainbow of 12

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themes—from the mirage of the figural interpretations of revolutionary history, to the sloppy pseudo-theology surrounding a canonical text like “Nuestra América” (1891). And yet, the section begins with a broad pedagogical survey on the 19th century, originally a lecture before a non-specialized audience, and ends with a confessional piece on family lore, which, as fate had it, thrust me closer to Martí than I ever imagined. The last section, which gathers different “Readings,” starts out reverting to the life and poetry of Pablo Neruda, subject of my first book. The rest of those readings show further predilections— from major figures like Borges and Paz—to several Cuban writers, Cabrera Infante, Desnoes, Sarduy, Pau-Llosa, among others. Each one tackles, as well, issues of textuality, reception and interpretation. Hence what I take to be Neruda’s fissure into generous and liberal, then petty and sectarian. Or else, the various versions, novel and film, of an epoch-making story like Memories of Underdevelopment (1972); Severo Sarduy’s parody, through allusion to a seemingly obscure concept in Heidegger, of the search for identity; or the mask-making itinerary in Cabrera Infante’s life and work. Last, both pieces on Octavio Paz, subject of my ongoing work, grapple respectively with questions of interpretation: the canonical Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), and the ineffable Blanco (1966). Three pieces of art criticism end this last section and the book. They act jointly in a kind of implicit protest, as bookend to the first section, which, as noted, ends with a meditation on Cultural Studies and its seemingly odd failure to account for Culture—precisely what its tag seemingly promotes. One fact which, placed at first, that brief essay underscores therefore surfaces at this other end: literature and art continue to be produced in huge quantities, and yet the “culture industry” that currently rules over our academy fails to train those who are called upon to judge it. Not unlike Cuba, or me, literature, art, and of course culture, endure. Claremont, California September 2022

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I. Contexts

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Enduring Cuba for Graciela Cruz Taura and Orlando González Esteva

Il faut tenter de vivre. Paul Valéry “Le cimetière marin” Lo tuyo es mental. Celia Cruz

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have given an ambiguous title to tonight’s talk. In a roundabout way that I hope to demonstrate, this ambiguity has something to do with the Cuban Heritage Collection and the many reasons why we are here tonight. I may seem at times to digress from our theme: the celebration of the Cuban Heritage Collection. I assure you, however, that this theme is foremost in my mind, and that my meandering is but a circuitous way to get to my sense of its profound significance for our community. To begin, then, “Enduring Cuba” has two meanings, depending upon how we choose to read the subject of the statement. In one reading, the first and most obvious, the word “enduring” is an adjective, Cuba is the subject, and the sense is that Cuba endures or resists erosion. That is, Cuba endures as it resists trauma and destruction, be it physical, as in the battlements of all those hurricanes this community endured this past year, or moral, as in the oblivion in which all things, particularly things having to do with 17

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culture, can fall. In the second and perhaps less obvious reading, “enduring” is a present participle, the subject is us, and the meaning is that we are the ones who endure Cuba. We endure in the sense that we either embody or witness the trauma and suffering that political turmoil and exile have foisted upon the Cuban people for more than half a century. I choose, then, this ambiguous title along with its conceptual play because I believe that these two meanings are hardly separate and distinct. One sense cannot be divorced from the other without risking simplification, or distortion. Resistance and suffering, Cuba and us, endurance embodied or witnessed, are all one and the same, at least in the historical circumstances that most of us continue to live. As Cuba endures physical and moral erosion and its culture survives both corruption and dictatorship, so we, too, endure Cuba with the burden of witnessing and the sadness of loss. A few days ago, a friend of mine complained to me over lunch: “Cada vez que me acuerdo de lo de Cuba, quisiera tomarme una pastillita.” A rough translation of which would render: “I wish I could just take an Ambien every time I remember Cuba.” She meant, of course, what had happened to her over the years, not what happens in Cuba. But it was clear that she felt as if she herself embodied the entire nation’s pain. All of us, even those not born in Cuba, constantly hear versions of this complaint, or else say it ourselves, precisely because its theme is the memory we share and, thus, endure. I do not exaggerate, I think, when I say that Cuba today, or at least the imagination implicit in today’s Cuban culture, on both sides of the Florida Straits, takes the form of a battle between the duty to remember and the temptation to forget. Of course, in today’s Cuba, and particularly in its government policy, forgetting is more than just a temptation. There is little need to revisit tonight the news of the ruin in which many, if not all, Cuban historical buildings have fallen, rescued only through the occasional help of international organizations like UNESCO. Yet a far greater damage is the ruin of Cuban historical memory. Under the banner that whoever controls the past controls the future, the regime’s power 18

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strategy has been and is to make the world forget the facts of the Cuban past to rewrite history. Thus, within that power strategy, the Cuban nation did not actually exist until 1959; because the Cuban Republic was allegedly mediated, it was unreal, or worthless; and those who, prior to the 1959 Revolution, accomplished anything—from artists to businesspeople, from librarians to teachers and politicians—owe their alleged success to the CIA, and therefore deserve to be expunged from the historical record. This strategy, as we know, has not worked. In the wake of the collapse of the Socialist block, and Cuba’s own economic and moral fiasco, the international image the present government promotes survives only thanks to three holdovers from pre­-Revolutionary times: Tropicana dancers, old folks from Buena Vista Social Club, and American baseball. Yet a far worse damage to historical memory, certainly the most scandalous one, has been, and is, the continual depredation of Cuban material culture by the very government that ought to preserve it. From documents in Cuban archives, to books in private and public libraries, to canvases from art museums, objects of any value are hocked the world over, sometimes in the astonished sight of those objects’ actual owners, who left the country long ago. I wonder, however, how aware we all are of the damage to Cuban memory in exile that goes on along with this cultural sell-off. I refer to the damage not only from traumatic suffering I refer to, which acts as an emotional block to memory. I also refer to the damage, often unbeknownst to the ones who feel it, that goes on in our painful relationship to time, memory, and mourning. Have we ever assessed the deep moral and psychological impact, to ourselves individually and to our community, of headlines such as the one that appeared some time ago in the Travel Section of the Los Angeles Times: “CUBA, SUSPENDED IN TIME.” How is one to feel when reading such statements? What psychological or moral impact must one sense upon seeing the gruesome pictures that illustrate such statements? After years of enduring messages like this about the alleged temporal non-existence of my country

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of birth, and by extension my culture, for me at least it feels like battle fatigue. But don’t get me wrong: Miami, like all communities where exiles live and work, is very much dedicated to remembering, and particularly to remembering History. Exile is the place where we come, not just to remake our lives, to be successful, or to make money. It is also where we come to remember. What is exile, after all, if not a long season of remembrance? Toward the end of a well-known film, Andy García’s The Lost City, whose Hollywood screening years ago I was privileged to attend, one scene illustrates what I mean. The scene takes place in 1961 at the Havana airport, as the film’s main character (no less than the former owner of what is supposed to be the Tropicana night club) is about to go through airport security and leave the country. The guard who physically searches him finds in one of his coat pockets a small and delicate cocktail stirrer—the kind shaped as the gyrating ballerina that was the Tropicana trademark. As the guard places the stirrer back in the man’s coat, he remarks: “Uds. los gusanos son todos iguales: no han salido de Cuba y ya están recordando” [“You worms are all the same: you’ve hardly stepped out of the country and are already remembering.”] In a later scene, the film shows again a close-up of the same delicate stirrer, which by then has become a fragile souvenir, a kind of imaginary raft to which the film’s main character clings onto as he endures exile and loss. This same scene from García’s film, which shows the importance of souvenirs (the very French word for memory) instructs me that the kind of remembering that goes on in our community, individually and collectively, may not always be, strictly speaking, memory, but something else. That something else is nostalgia. Cuba Nostalgia, Café Nostalgia, are just two trademarks of the kind of remembering our community engages, but one whose implications we may not be entirely aware of. I should like briefly to address this theme. Indeed, you might well ask: is there really a difference between memory and nostalgia? Does that difference really matter? 20

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Guillermo Cabrera Infante— until recently the most important living Cuban writer who devoted four decades of exile in London to remembering, and therefore to enduring—made up a pithy phrase I like to remember: “La nostalgia es la puta del recuerdo;” [“Nostalgia is the whore of memory.”] Nostalgia, accordingly, is certainly a secret pleasure—we linger on the tunes of old boleros, purchase with glee old Bohemias or Carteles, take long strolls down Havana (Memory) Lane. But all this is also somehow secretive, illicit, illegal. It may even be addictive, because, like prostitution, nostalgia is repetitive in nature—once you have a taste of nostalgia it is hard to let go. nostalgia also comes at a cost—you can’t have nostalgia unless you pay for it. And it is also illusory, a mirage—you may think nostalgia loves you forever, but nostalgia is awaiting the next customer. There may be, I think, something aberrant, or perverse, about nostalgia, even if it is also attractive, seductive, perhaps necessary. My friends, I need to make a public confession tonight: I myself am hopelessly nostalgic! Nostalgia the word comes from the Greek: nostos (return), and algos (pain); as opposed to memory, from the Latin memor, the person who records, and the root mem, which gives us the various words for fixing, engraving, and even naming. The OED tells us that memory is “the capacity to retain, perpetuate or revive the thought of things past.” But if memory is meant to revive the past, it must be because the past is no longer alive. Ultimately, then, memory, as opposed to nostalgia, is linked to death—the bridge that allows us to cross onto things that are truly past. Memento mori was the name the Romans gave to whatever objects remind us of death, like those ruins of Havana buildings, or the beat-up American jalopies that today flash all over the world’s media as trademarks of our glorious revolution… Yes, nostalgia allows us to live again, if only for a moment’s painful illusion, the endearing things from our past; memory, however, revives the thought of that past with the full knowledge that it is, in fact, only a thought. Does that mean, I wonder, that in practicing or engaging nostalgia, rather than memory, we exiles

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choose pain over death; the illusion of return over the certainty of no return? Nostalgia is a product, or as Karl Marx used to say: a commodity; memory, however, is intangible: it has no shape or price. We can buy nostalgia, and lots of it. Can we buy memory? The denial of death through nostalgia keeps us alive, of course, but the price we pay is the illusion that death will either never come, or else that we do not need to say good-bye to, and therefore mourn, our losses. Indeed, nostalgia creates the mirage, the illusion of mourning— Spanish luto or duelo—through the pain of an incomplete or aberrant memory that allows us to hold on to lost objects. That is why the content of nostalgia is almost always melancholy; the content of memory, in turn, is sadness, painful resignation, but also a sense of freedom. Sigmund Freud, who was not Cuban (though sometimes when I read him, I get the feeling he was) tells us that the difference between mourning and melancholy lies in the conscious work we do when we deal with loss. And yet, also according to Freud, the trauma of loss leads to withdrawal and repression, feelings to which we often react, not by mourning—that is, by dealing consciously with the pain of loss—but by melancholy—by acting out, and repeating, self-reproaches about that loss. The work of mourning takes place, or can, when the lost object was loved for itself; when we feel empathy for whatever we lost. I am only able to let go of that object if, and when, I love the object for itself. Melancholy, on the other hand, reveals that the lost object had an altogether different function: what Freud called narcissism. I am, or become, melancholy because I keep feeling that the lost object was a part of me, perhaps a part of my own body, and I therefore blame myself for losing that object, in the same way that I would blame myself for losing a part of my body. Freud, who was of course a doctor, wanted his patients to attain health through the work of mourning, a process he called the work of memory, working-through, rather than through sporadic, repeated, and unhealthy, melancholy self-reproach.

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Does this sound familiar? Nostalgia, as the word says, involves, simultaneously, the illusory pleasure of returning, as well as the real pain of not going back. By repeating that impossible journey unconsciously we may lessen the pain, but we don’t get rid of it. Memory, or at least the work of memory, which amounts to mourning, may not get rid of the pain and sadness either, at least for a good while. And yet, again according to Freud, memory does point a way out of the pain, in the sense that we restore perspective towards our love objects, resign ourselves to loss, and, most importantly, gain knowledge into our own selves. What does all this have to do with the Cuban Heritage Collection, with Cuba, with the Cuban exile community, or with Miami? The Cuban Heritage Collection is not just a gathering of old books, documents, pictures and maps. It is, as part of its name tells us, a re-collection: an act, and a place, of memory. Created amidst a period of historical turmoil by a group of visionary women-librarians who were themselves exiles—it is an archive of the Cuban soul, which, like a torn leaf (from a book? from a tree?) floating amidst a storm, found a place of rest and opened for the benefit of our self-knowledge. Collection versus dispersion: the dispersion caused by diaspora (which is what the word, in fact, means), and that our Cuban heritage historically reflects. At a time (the 21st century) and a place (a U.S. minority culture), when ideology keeps displacing history, and history displaces memory, this collection constitutes the foundation stone of the memorial building that exiled Cubans, not just in Florida but everywhere, have a duty to construct. To both the depredation of material culture in the island and the dispersive melancholy nostalgia of exile life, the Cuban Heritage Collection responds with the creation of an archive of memory, the more solid because it is a storehouse of the one thing that cannot materially be grasped: the Cuban, and Cuban exile, imagination. Moreover, as an archive of a memory that is still ongoing, this collection supplies a civilizing function that can no longer be found anywhere else, particularly not in Cuba. In this, I am happy to acknowledge, the University of Miami joins a growing global trend. For in our day and age, archives like the Cuban 23

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Heritage Collection become necessary precisely because people, governments, and sometimes even institutions, are either unable, or unwilling, to remember. At ideological extremes, they refuse to remember because the desire to impose oblivion, literally to make us forget, has become equally as threatening and as real. I referred earlier to the Cuban Heritage Collection as a “place of memory,” thus alluding to the book by that name by Pierre Nora, a French historian I much admire and whose idea on this subject I borrow here. “Our interest in the places of memory,” he writes, almost as if he were addressing the tragedy of today’s Cuba, “has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn.”1 Nora goes on to describe how this “tear of memory” poses “the problem of embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists.” Thus, he says, “there are places of memory because there are no longer real environments of memory,” a loss which archives supplement, thereby becoming “the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory. It adds to life-itself often a function of its own recording—a secondary memory, a prosthesis-memory.” And he concludes, in another statement that seems to have us Cubans in mind, that “the indiscriminate production of archives is the acute effect of a new consciousness, the clearest expression of the terrorism of historicized memory.” In yet another recent book on the specific issue of Cuban memory, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, its editor, gathers in one paragraph many of the themes that justify indirectly the need for an archive like ours. She says: “the idea of Cuba that most Cuban exiles nurture and seek to preserve gives itself out as a refracted, shadowy image of a lost world, a fragmented void, an appropriated recollection partially ‘re-membered’ . . . through the blue cloud of nostalgia or reconstructed through the vicarious imagination of those who either have never been to the Island or were not old enough to remember when they left.” O’Reilly Herrera refers mostly to

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See (Nora: 1984). 24

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Cubans of my own generation who came to the U.S. as children and whose testimonies her book gathers.2 Her book is, in fact, one among several memory projects, now completed or still ongoing, in this community and elsewhere, which demonstrate that the work of memory, or else the work of mourning, is ongoing and is already bearing fruit. Witness the National Book Award Prize for a remarkable book like Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana, or else the “Memory and Reconciliation” Project spearheaded by Professor Marifeli Pérez-Stable, or else the various Cuban oral history projects that have either been completed or are still ongoing. Many more projects, individual, group or collective, could be mentioned. I would only add that, more than just a need, there is in this matter a duty to remember. For unlike the pleasure of nostalgic collection, memory, as I have said, involves actual work. The Cuban Heritage Collection is the site where that work literally takes place. I dedicate this talk to two dear friends. Now it is time to say why: they are friends devoted to different aspects of Cuban memory. One is a historian; the other, a poet and musician. Each represents the best, in the sense of most persistent, in enduring Cuba. For like the suffering that is both endured and witnessed, these two activities, History and Art, are indissoluble in the necessary work of Cuban memory. Indeed, if our memory is to endure, it will have to nurture equally from both the cold facts of history and the warm images of poetry, both the historian’s science and the poet’s visions. It is a tribute to the Cuban Heritage Collection that its archive is compendious, all-inclusive. History and poetry, politics and art, the violence of history and the frivolity of nostalgia, all meet in its vaults. Thus, Eugenio Florit and Lydia Cabrera shake hands with José Marti, Fulgencio Batista, and even with—that man… Finally, I mentioned earlier that the Cuban Heritage Collection is the foundation stone of a memorial building that Cubans everywhere have a duty to construct. This “building” is my metaphor for what the Collection both signifies and points to, an objective 2

See (O’Reilly: 2001). 25

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that is still missing: the astounding lack in this community of a Cuban historical museum. Isn’t the Cuban Heritage Collection the closest thing? You will agree, I think, that the time has come for such an institution. For it is a scandal that one has not yet been created. To create such an institution will take not only money, probably lots of it, but also lots of imagination, the kind that would benefit, for example, from the digital and virtual revolutions that are making waves today in such fields as visual and informational culture and Museum Studies. I dream of a museum that would not only provide yet another physical place of Cuban memory, but also a series of links among virtual sites, among them the Cuban Heritage Collection, that would allow patrons to access the facts of the Cuban past, and perhaps interact creatively, through ongoing blogs, with our greater cultural heritage. For this reason, I should like tonight to challenge this community to emulate the example of the Cuban Heritage Collection and to create, thus coinciding with the mourning of the half-century of our national disaster, a Museum of Cuban Memory that would encompass the greater exile community, the community that lives here in Miami and anywhere else diaspora has affected people. Cuba will, of course, endure. Will we? I think so. But only, I dare say, if we face fully the work of mourning and the duty to remember. Even after we are all gone, History spent, Memory rendered useless, surely what will remain is Nature; the Paradise that blew away Christopher Columbus the day he first set eyes on that island, and that Cabrera Infante, at the end of a book that summarizes the memory of Cuban violence, once evoked like none other: And it will always be there. As someone once said, that long, sad, unfortunate island will be there after the last Indian and after the last Spaniard and after the last African and after the last American and after the last Russian and after the last of the Cubans, surviving all disasters, eternally washed over by the Gulf Stream: beautiful and green, undying, eternal.3

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See (Cabrera: 1978). 26

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Bibliography Cabrera Infante, Guillermo (1978): View of Dawn in the Tropics, tr. Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: Harper& Row. Nora, Pierre (1984): Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. O’Reilly Herrera, Andrea (200): ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora. Austin: University Press of Texas.

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A Cuban Canon? Soy artista mundiar Y no digo má Chá, chá Bola de Nieve, “Mesié Julián”

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olume 24 of Cuban Studies is the third one devoted to literature in the history of our journal. The first two, Vols. 11 (1981) and 16 (1986), were both special-edited by me at the behest of Professor Carmelo Mesa-Lago, when he still edited the journal single-handedly. This is the first issue containing a cluster devoted to literature within the first cycle of the journal’s most recent restructure, which rotates responsibility among four editors from different fields. It is to Mesa-Lago’s credit that he gave equal footing to literature within a discipline that tends to give prime of place to the social sciences. And yet, despite this assured institutional presence, one could say that the status and matter of literature among cubanólogos (or do we now say cubanistas?) remains, to this day, far from settled. Some footings are more equal than others. How this remains so I shall attempt to answer as I introduce the contents of our issue. Let me begin with a seemingly marginal question—the two essays in this issue that do not deal with literary topics. Raúl Fernández’s study of the course of U.S. Cuban music explores the subtle relations between U.S. and Cuban musical traditions, as well as the impact of that music in both the U.S. and Cuba. Working similarly

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in her study of women’s rights under the 1940 Cuban Constitution, Graciela Cruz-Taura analyzes how legislative efforts during the decade after its passage culminated, and in a sense anticipated, the efforts at modernization that were under way before the batistato. Cuban Studies is especially grateful for the contributions of these two fine scholars working in what could otherwise be regarded as marginal fields of our discipline. It was purely by chance, however, that we ended up with an excellent cluster of essays on nineteenth-century literature. And it was a good thing, too. Due to the attraction of studying literature in relation to the Castro Revolution, there has been a disproportionate amount of scholarship on twentieth-century Cuban works and figures, to the obvious detriment of those of other periods. It is true that during the past thirty-five years much attention has been focused on the nineteenth century, particularly within Cuba, and often as the result of scholars taking refuge in a time frame that would allow them a safe, neutral haven before the emergence of graver political issues. Much, however, remains to be researched about the nineteenth century, arguably the most important period for the emergence of the Cuban nation. Carlos Ripoll’s opening piece on José Martí, riding astride the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, does anything but avoid such issues. Studying what he calls the institutional falsification of this figure in contemporary Cuba, he finely combs the documents that perpetrate such falsification, ferrets out the details of such distortion, and argues against such uses of the cult of Cuba’s National Hero. Of course, Martí’s ambivalent status as a literary figure— himself straddling poetry and politics, history and myth—is what fosters such institutional uses. And this in turn raises the issue of what exactly constitutes the institution of literature in Cuba, especially (though of course not exclusively) in that distant nineteenth century.1



1

For a partial answer to this question, see my “Martí and Revolution,” in this book. 30

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To judge from both Roberto Díaz’s piece on La Havane, by Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlín, and from Adriana Méndez Rodenas’s article on Cecilia Valdés, the question of literature, within this period at least, can be reduced neither to the kind of purely fictive discourse that characterizes modernist texts, nor to lyrical pronouncements that transcend cultural or historical specificity. While Díaz explores the hybrid nature of Merlín’s travel narrative—which lapses into autobiography and lashes onto imagined precursors like Christopher Columbus—Méndez Rodenas shows that Cuba’s alleged “first novel” offers a myth of foundation regarding national identity, a myth of orphanhood that projects, as if on the screen of a political unconscious, its major symptoms. Literature thus appears as the space where private and public history intersect, as well as the sweatshop where the conflicts of racial, social, and gender identities are literally “worked through,” to use Freud’s overworked metaphor. Méndez Rodenas’s meditation is complemented nicely, in turn, by Josef Opátrny’s historical description of the brand of national project that José Antonio Saco, one of the first “thinkers” of Cuban identity, proposed at the beginning of the century; a project that, for all its ambitious scope, excluded blatantly over half of the island’s population. The “name of the father” for which the characters in Villaverde’s now-mythic tale search, is itself found missing in Saco’s proposal. The juxtaposition of all three essays— Díaz’s, Méndez Rodenas’s, and Opátrny’s—thus display a broad pattern whereby a Merlín and Villaverde, in both travel narrative and costumbrista tale, debate implicitly Saco’s myth of national unity and offer instead subjective, perhaps grotesque but equally mythical undersides. Along with Ripoll’s archeology of the ideological uses of Martí, all three outline a status for literature that is neither passive nor retrograde, but rather aggressively referential and foundational. That is, literature is found to underlie, to lay the basis for, other forms of discourse, such as the exclusively political or economic, which lay greater claims to scientific descriptions of physical, cultural and moral reality. One has only to glance through our special feature, the “Forum on the Cuban Writer,” 31

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which gathers the testimony of writers José Lorenzo Fuentes and Manuel Díaz Martínez, to confirm how real and painful these institutional realities continue to be. Remarks such as these would not be necessary were there no need to dispel stereotypes, idées fixes, regarding the status and nature of literature, particularly among academics who allegedly appreciate the force of literary texts but often end up reinforcing ancient prejudices. Indeed, for most people, literature continues to be a simple imaginative discourse, private and subjective, with little to do with the objective description and evaluation of reality, much less its physical exploitation. In the case of Cuban literature, or at least its study, the institutional effects of these prejudices continue to be felt strongly, either in the way that many questions are represented and debated, or altogether suppressed. Debates such as the one between Verity A. Smith and Roberto González Echevarría in Cuban Studies 19 (1989) are indeed infrequent, and for this very reason, welcome. But what is one to say of the representation of literature in a recent book like Cuban Studies since the Revolution? (1992), which purports to “examine Cuban Studies from multiple perspectives”?2 For one thing, literature in this book is given no separate category, at least not in the same way that “Cuban Studies,” “History,” “Political Science and International Relations,” “Economics,” and even “Cubans in Exile” are. No equal footing here. Instead, literature both in this book and in the Florida International University conference on which it was based, is clustered within a broad “Humanities” section which also includes “Afro-Cuban Religion” and so-called “Cuban Linguistics.” To perceive the force and significance of such a suppression we must of course imagine the effects attendant upon a hypothetical reverse situation—one single homogenizing category like “Social Science” in which the above fields of study would all be clustered. Most surprising, however, is not that such an institutional suppression should have occurred in the conference, which was organized by social scientists, but

2

See (Fernández: 1992). 32

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that none of the participants, not even the three literary scholars who addressed the status of the discipline, so much as noted that fact. Even as enlightened a scholar as Carmelo Mesa-Lago, when he remarked, in his detailed survey of the field, “how individual scholars in the United States have produced seminal work at universities that lack a structured program in Cuban Studies,” (3536), went on to identify three of them in political science, history, and economics, but mentioned none in the field of literature, and elided that topic altogether. One could of course argue that the treatment literature received at the FIU conference and in the book was adequate at any rate, so that even under such suppressed conditions the stated purpose of examining “Cuban studies, particularly in the United States… from multiple perspectives” (3) was indeed accomplished. And yet one cannot help remarking, after a close examination of the section on “Humanities,” a number of inadequacies regarding both space and content. González Echevarría’s “The Humanities and Cuban Studies, 1959-1989,” besides handling a subject too broad to be addressed adequately yet tackled valiantly, also happened to be the shortest of all six keynote addresses and, unlike the other five, was not responded to in the two commentaries.3 This was especially regrettable, not only because González Echevarría remarked at the outset that his “appraisal of literature [was] open to debate,” which he said he welcomed (200), but also because he based the bulk of his remarks on a polemical subject indeed: the relationship between Cuban literature and the canon. Before addressing the latter subject, it would be worth rehearsing the debate of González Echevarría’s appraisal that the FIU

3



Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s “A Minor Key-Note on Cuban Studies” (ibid., 21621) is brilliantly funny, but did not comment the survey. Neither did Isabel Castellanos’s “Notes on Afro-Cuban Religion and Cuban Linguistics” (22231), which surveys these two important fields. The length of the six keynote addresses ranged from Pérez López’s forty-one printed pages to González Echevarría’s seventeen, the average being twenty-two. 33

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conference failed to foster. At one point in his survey, for example, he mentions that “Cuban scholars [in the island] whether by choice or by force, never acknowledge work done on Cuban figures abroad, particularly work done by Cuban scholars,” and how such “recoil from intellectual exchange has contributed to the impoverishment of Cuban criticism in the island” (209). It is an irony that the latter remark itself should become an unwitting comment on the recoil from intellectual exchange on literature within the humanities panel of the FIU conference—or so at least appears from the evidence that appears in the Fernández volume. But beyond that, there is certainly much in this remark that one can share, even when one can also find it to be misleading, or at least begging the question. Namely: under what specific conditions is critical work on literature actually acknowledged in Cuba? Indeed, work on “Cuban [literary] figures abroad” like that on Arenas, Benítez Rojo, Cabrera Infante, Padilla, or Sarduy, to name a mere handful, is mostly ignored in Cuba, particularly when such work is done by Cuban scholars—González Echevarría’s work on Carpentier and Severo Sarduy is a good case in point. But I would counter that work done by Cuban scholars abroad, particularly if it deals with Cuban figures, is selectively praised or condemned in Cuba, according to how it accords with political interests on the island, or specific junctures in the government’s cultural policy. If personal testimony serves us here, in 1987 the Spanish version of my 1986 essay, “José Martí and the Cuban Revolution,” was attacked (and therefore, I am obliged to say, acknowledged) in not one but two prominent Cuban government publications. This attack appeared first as an unsigned editorial in the 1987 issue of the Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos and subsequently, as an article signed by Luis Toledo Sande in the August 1987 issue of Revista de Casa de las Américas.4 On neither occasion was I ­given

4

See “De vuelta y vuelta,” Revista de Casa de las Américas 8 (1987): and (Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos 10: 1987, 337-43). At the time, Toledo Sande, a sometime literary critic, was the director of the Centro de Estudios Martianos. In his “Reply to Smith,” González Echevarría mentions rightly 34

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advance notice of the article’s publication (I learned about them by chance, leafing through issues I had received on exchange); and neither journal allowed me to respond, as my requests were never answered. It should be noted that this exchange (if one can call it that) contrasts sharply with the widely known debate between economists José Luis Rodríguez and Carmelo Mesa-­Lago, which occurred barely a year before and concluded with the publication in Cuba of the relevant papers by both scholars. Indeed, it would not be far off the mark to view Toledo’s attack on my work as a late sequel to the same “anti-Cubanology spurt” of the mid-1980s that Mesa-Lago analyzed in his keynote address at the FIU conference.5

5



that Toledo Sande’s works “do not leap to mind” (Mesa-Lago: 1989, 102), but only to contrast his ascent to power with the career of Cintio Vitier, who, he says, “formerly directed the Centro.” To my knowledge, Vitier never directed the Centro, although for a number of years he was one of its principal researchers. González Echevarría does not mention any of these texts. See (Fernández: 1992, 21, 38). Among the epithets that Toledo Sande hurled at me were: “extraviado,” “relativista oficial,” “servidor de los intereses de los Estados Unidos,” “inspirador de cubanos apátridas,” “avieso,” “desagradecido,” and “racista.” Emilio de Armas, a former researcher at the Centro de Estudios Martianos who recently defected, told me that he was once ordered by Toledo Sande, in his capacity as director of the CEM, to “respond” to one of my earlier Martí essays, which dealt with the dangerous subject of Ismaelillo, the small book of poems that Martí wrote to his four-year-old son in 1882! “José Martí and the Cuban Revolution” was also the butt of further attacks that same year by Cintio Vitier, the Cuban poet and Martí scholar, in his bitter exchange with Puerto Rican professor Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, over his work (Díaz Quiñones: 1987), an edition of interviews. Vitier’s “Carta abierta a Arcadio Díaz Quiñones,” with the latter´s response, appeared in (Suplemento En Rojo: Dec. 4-10, 1987). Vitier’s “Carta abierta” brands me (along with Octavio Paz and Angel Rama!) an “ideólogo del exilio cubano.” Díaz Quiñones’s response defended me against Vitier’s distortions and also mentions González Echevarria (20). This polemic has never been published in Cuba. One issue of La gaceta de Cuba (Sep-Oct, 1993) included a cluster of five critical essays by Cuban scholars abroad, including one by González Echevarría. At least two of these essays were pirated. 35

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González Echevarría’s oversight of this particular polemic might have been the result of his not dealing with scholarship on the classics of Cuban literature—his survey does not, for example, study the voluminous bibliography of works on Martí produced since 1959. But the broad point that there is a blanket lack of acknowledgment of work done by Cuban scholars abroad by scholars living in Cuba flies in the face of the further attacks leveled against my work on José Lezama Lima that Cintio Vitier incorporated into what, in the same survey, González Echevarría calls “the (almost) critical edition of Paradiso.”6 It could be said, in fact, that Vitier attacked my 1979 essay “Parridiso” more than twenty times in his edition in order to build up a convenient strawman for his pseudo-philological approach to Lezama Lima’s novel. How González Echevarría could say, after knowing the contents of this edition and ascertaining Vitier’s comments on my work, that Cuban scholars abroad are ignored escapes me, though I must say I have often wished it were true.7 Beyond this important disagreement over the reception in Cuba of critical scholarship produced abroad, other details of the survey appear questionable. It does not, for example, mention the work of major poets like Gastón Baquero, Eliseo Diego, Eugenio Florit, or Heberto Padilla, and mentions only one playwright, José Triana, in a field that encompasses many playwrights of note, like Abelardo Estorino and Abilio Estévez. Internationally acclaimed narrative works, like Cabrera Infante’s Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1974), Arenas’s Otra vez el mar (1982), or Jesús Díaz’s Las iniciales de la tierra (1987), are left out altogether. While it is true that no poet of the stature of a Lezama Lima has arisen in the past thirty years, I would counter that one major poem, Reinaldo Arenas’s El

6 7

See (Fernández: 1992, 212); (Lezama: 1988). See (Fernández: 1992, 212). González Echevarría states erroneously that this book “includes a variorum edition of the text.” See my review of the critical edition in (Vuelta n° 187: 1992). For Vitier’s comments on González Echevarria’s work on Lezama Lima, see p. 474 of the critical edition. For responses to Vitier’s critique of my “Parridiso,” see (Levinson: 1992, 195-217); and (Teuber:1993) 36

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central (1981) ranks above all others written during the same period, including most of those written in Latin America. In the case of the scholarship devoted to Cuban literature, one also notes important oversights, like Matías Montes-Huidobro’s Persona, vida y máscara en el teatro cubano (1973), a greater scholarly endeavor than Rine Leal’s largely impressionistic Breve historia del teatro cubano, which is mentioned; the two issues of Cuban Studies devoted to literature in 1981 and 1986, as well as the special issue on Cuban literature of Revista lberoamericana 56 (December 1990), which exceptionally brought together Cuban scholars from within and outside the island are similarly ignored.8 One wonders, finally, how a survey of this importance could possibly afford to leave out all references to the “Padilla affair,” particularly when this event had such enormous repercussions throughout the world and when its deleterious effects on the production of literature and artistic and intellectual work in general within Cuba are felt to this day. I realize of course that to object to many of these omissions could be construed as opposing the subjective bias that González Echevarría claims as the conceptual basis for his survey. Sobre gustos no se ha escrito nada: you can’t argue with tastes. And yet we have only to look closely to discover that what in the survey appears to be highly subjective is itself based on a highly structured value scale. In order to assert the canon, or at least his version of it, and the apparent insufficiency of many contemporary Cuban texts in respect to it, González Echevarría’s interest lies “in artists who can compete in the international arena” and in works “which are recognized worldwide as masterpieces” (201). What exactly is the measure of such “competition” and “recognition” González Echevarría nowhere says, but it does appear to fall somewhere in 8



Both of the Cuban Studies issues contained essays by González Echevarría, and he wrote a special text on his own work for the Revista lberoamericana special issue. The latter, edited by the late Alredo Roggiano and me, was published in September 1990 and therefore may have been published too late for inclusion in the survey, which has 1989 as its outside parameter. And yet, see the survey’s last page, where González Echevarría attaches an author’s note to comment on the suicide of Reinaldo Arenas on December 17, 1990. 37

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between the sirens of the marketplace and the demons of Harold Bloom’s theory of “strong” and “weak” poets. While I agree that there is some merit to this long view of literary production—for one, it places Cuban literature in a context other than its national one and protects the critic from the dangers of provincialism—it also has its definite drawbacks. One of the most important ones is a lack of historical perspective: the time it takes for an author to compete in the international arena, or for a work to become recognized worldwide, may have little to do with intrinsic worth. The best example is perhaps Lezama Lima, whose work did not become recognized worldwide until thirty years after he published his first poems, while writers of considerably less literary worth (but much more bureaucratic clout), like Alejo Carpentier and Nicolás Guillén, prospered (or were allowed to prosper) with mediocre works. The latest case may be that of Virgilio Piñera, many of whose works are still forbidden. Yet another (less apparent but more significant) blind spot in this long view is that it ignores how the Cuban text views canonicity itself. I would argue that the way Cuban literature has traditionally gone about becoming canonical has been to behave in ways than run counter to how the canon is conceived in this survey. It has done so by engaging in a playful dialectic of mocking literary history and reveling in its own non- or a­canonicity as a means of entering the canon; it does not seek, but rather shuns, the marketplace, thereby shattering the myth of the masterpiece. To explain why this is so would take us far afield, but I would venture that it has to do with a self-consciousness about cultural, economic, and (I would add) ethnic marginality that affects all cultural production in Cuba—perhaps in the entire postcolonial world, and perhaps not just in literature. This may well be the mysterious argument we encounter in the opening lines of Lezama Lima’s poem “Pensamientos en La Habana,” where the speaker protests:

38

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Porque habito un susurro como un velamen, una tierra donde el hielo es una reminiscencia, el fuego no puede izar un pájaro y quemarlo en una conversación de estilo calmo.9 [“Because I dwell in a whisper like a set of sails, a land where ice is a reminiscence, fire cannot hoist a bird, and burn it in a conversation calm in style.”]

If the poet’s voice can be heard barely (the whisper, susurro, of the first line), this appears to be a function of a tropical ostracism, of living in a land where, according to the canon’s condescending view, personal passions end up impoverishing intellectual exchange. This is one among many possible examples. Yet perhaps the most pristine one yet may well be Ignacio Villa’s (a.k.a. Bola de Nieve) “Mesié Julian,” the catchy ditty about a black Cuban artist (much like Bola himself) who, in his noticeably colloquial Havana Spanish, recalls his triumphs as a singer on the world stage by acting out his eccentricity: “Soy artista mundiar/Y no digo má./ Chá, chá” [“I’m a world artist/and I say no mo./Ho, ho”]. Surely the works of the immortal Bola de Nieve still hold a lesson or two for us cubanistas?

Bibliography Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos, vol 10. (1987). La Habana: CEM. Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio (1987): Cintio Vitier: La memoria integradora. San Juan, PR: Editorial Sin Nombre. Fernández, Damián J., ed. (1992): Cuban Studies since the Revolution. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Irby, James (1993): “Thoughts in Havana”, in José Lezama Lima, A Poetic Order of Excess. Tr. J. Brioso and J. Irby. Los Angeles, 2019, 137.



9

Quoted from (Lezama: 1985, 151), translated under the title of “Thoughts in Havana” in (Irby: 1993, 70). 39

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Levinson, Brett (1992): “Summas críticas/Restas erratas: Strange Notes on Lezama’s Miscues,” Cuban Studies 22. University of Pittsburgh Press. Lezama Lima, José (1985): Poesía completa, ed. Emilio de Armas. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas. — (1988): Paradiso, ed. Cintio Vitier. Madrid: Colección Archivos/­ ALLCA Mesa-Lago, Carmelo, ed. (1989): Cuban Studies 19. University of Pittsburgh Press. Revista Vuelta, n° 187. Mexico City, June 1992, 45-47 Suplemento En Rojo, of Claridad. San Juan, PR, Dec. 4-10, 1987, 17-20. Teuber, Bernhard (1993): “¡O Felix Lapsus! Autobiografía, crítica genética y genealogía del sujeto en Paradiso de José Lezama Lima”, in MLN, Hispanic Issue 2, vol. 108, 314-30. Toledo Sande, Luis (1987).“De vuelta y vuelta”, Revista de Casa de las Américas, n° 8.

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Cheap Glasnost: Writing and Journalism

C

arlos Díaz-Alejandro, a Cuban economist I used to know at Yale, would often muse, when facing the predicament of the exiled Cuban intellectual, that at times like this it would be perfect to become Scandinavian: “¡Chico, quién fuera sueco!,” he would cry, in his unavoidable Havana accent. I, obviously, am not a Swede. Nor am I, unlike my three peers, a bureaucrat paid for by a government. My own thoughts on the assigned topic are those of an independent reader of the Cuban cultural scene. Thus, my sole guide through the following reflections is a recent lesson: History is full of surprises, and if this meeting shows anything, it is that we cannot run away from ourselves. I will return to this theme at the end of my paper. Our conference asks-Will the Cold War in the Caribbean end? I take this to be a rhetorical question, half-truth and half-wish, that actually poses another question: How can we end the Cold War between the U.S. and Cuba? In turn, our own session asks us about the ways “Cuban society is shaped by culture and the media.” I share the organizers’ belief that there indeed exists a relationship between these two broad topics, though I do not believe that the relationship is a simple one. One first objection: I am not convinced that the premise upon which these two sessions are built is at all true. Its premise is not so much false as insufficient. Societies are not shaped by culture and the media. Societies are shaped by other things: values, interests, goals. Values can be historical or

41

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moral; interests can be political or economic; goals can be collective or individual. Within these shaping forces, culture and the media do play important roles, of course, but their relationship to society is dialectical rather than static. Society is shaped by forces within people as much as by its external results or effects-what Marxists call superstructure. And so, culture and the media are shaped by society as much as society is shaped by them. Our premise, then, exaggerates the role culture and the media plays upon society, and in so doing makes society appear as a passive agent acted upon by external forces. I would therefore paraphrase the same premise in the following way: the relationship between Cuban society and its culture and media can contribute to ending the Cold War between the U.S. and Cuba. I take the converse to be also true: the end of the Cold War between the U.S. and Cuba could, in turn, have an effect upon the dialectics of Cuban society and culture. Let me begin with this second point. I shall return to the first eventually. That the end of political tensions between the U.S. and Cuba would have an effect, presumably beneficial, on Cuba’s domestic situation is a point the present Cuban government and its apologists have stressed or at least suggested repeatedly throughout the years. Lift the U.S. embargo, normalize diplomatic relations and cease aggression (including the most recent so-called “air waves war” of Radio and TV Martí) and we will reciprocate. Other panels throughout the day have explored the impact of that hypothetical Cuban response within the respective fields of economics, foreign policy, and international security; yet another panel tomorrow will explore the same issue among the Cuban exile community. To confine to the subject of our session —culture and the media-it would seem logical to postulate that, in this field at least, such a release of tensions would have the effect of lessening ideological control inside the island. In contemporary terms, we could describe such a relaxation of tensions as the creation of conditions that would favor a Cuban glasnost—a climate of openness­precisely the same kind of “openness Cuban style” [apertura a la cubana] that we have heard Pedro Rojas, our fellow-panelist, allege has already developed in Cuba despite the lack of international conditions 42

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that would presumably foster such relaxation of tensions. And yet, what seems logical is not always true. For in truth, so-called “openness Cuban style” has little to do with Soviet-style glasnost. Any internal relaxation of ideological control being experienced in Cuba today would have to take place under the broad policy known as Proceso de rectificación de errores y tendencias negativas (Process of rectification of errors and negative tendencies) that for the past four years the Cuban Communist Party has enforced. As we will see, under such a “policy of rectification,” there is more, rather than less, ideological control by and of the media-that is, precisely the opposite of what has been argued here. Still, we are working with a hypothetical model. In terms of the media specifically, this could mean dispelling attention from the obsessive subject of U.S. foreign policy toward other issues, internal to the island, that require more urgent attention. In terms of domestic policy, relaxation of tensions would have a different effect: the Cuban government could, among other actions, go so far as to stop the crackdown against vocal dissident groups, such as the many human rights organizations that have arisen in Cuba since 1987; in turn, these groups would channel their vocal criticism of the human rights situation in Cuba onto the legal system, where they legitimately belong, so long as that system is willing to listen to its citizens and guarantee their equally legitimate rights. Similar hypotheses could be drawn in the area of culture. So as to draw the best possible scenario-though one that would seem not entirely impossible, given the precedent of political circumstances in the USSR-the works of Cuban dissident artists and writers— like Néstor Almendros, Reinaldo Arenas, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Jorge Camacho and Heberto Padilla, to cite but a handful— could be shown and published in the island. Two caveats would have to be added: only by allowing the free-flow of works by these openly critical artists-and not limit it, as has happened of late, to recycled dead writers, like Lezama Lima or Novás Calvo, or relatively apolitical living writers, like Lydia Cabrera or Severo Sarduy-would such a hypothetical openness gain credibility. Neither should the free flow of the work of these writers and critics 43

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replace what would be truly legitimate about such openness: that a true dialogue be initiated, and their points of view be considered in a reform of political culture. To restate this hypothesis in ideal terms: a release of tensions between the U.S. and Cuba could result in a decrease of the ideological effects of rectification. It is precisely this point, one could argue, that would justify this very conference. Its assumption, as we all know, is that the Cold War between the U.S. and Cuba has now reached a particularly low point in the wake of recent events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, not to mention the recent unjustified U.S. invasion of Panamá-this last one an issue, I might add, that none of my peers from Cuba has so much as mentioned at this meeting. Given such a context, it certainly makes sense to include a session like this on Cuban culture and the media. One could go so far as saying that modesty aside this is in fact the central session of this entire conference. Such at least would be what a glance through our program suggests: our session physically occupies the central position in the proceedings (fifth of nine separate sessions). Ours, moreover, is the only one of nine sessions to include three, rather than two, panelists, two of whom represent two forms of Cuban media. As I look over our panel’s composition, then, I am at a loss to know how it could possibly represent culture and the media in Cuba when it lacks a single writer, artist, or critic from the island. Why didn’t the Cuban delegation to this conference include at least one such member? Why did the Woodrow Wilson Center agree to it? I shall attempt an answer. For the moment, let me describe what I see as the focus of our session. As I was writing this paper I could only hazard, in the face of all this highly suggestive evidence, that my two peers were bound to bring up the subject of TV Martí-as they in fact have. After all, in recent days TV Martí has become: (1) an aggravating factor in the Cold War we are all presumably trying to end, (2) a major obstacle in the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries, and (3) the cause of both an internal personnel crisis in the USIA (United States Information Agency) with political ramifications in the Cuban exile community. It is still too soon to 44

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tell whether TV Martí might turn out to damage more than aid U.S. interests. My own view is rather skeptical: so far, TV Martí has only served to distract substantive attention from political repression in Cuba. I wish, then, neither to justify nor condemn TV Martí, but instead use the subject to drive a broader point. In my view, the relaxation of tensions between the U.S. and Cuba, though certainly desirable, will not decrease the ideological effects of rectification and therefore will not serve to relieve the ideological control associated with such a process. The reason for this is simple: rather than an agency of foreign policy, rectification is the result of domestic policy, a reaction to what the Cuban government perceives as its ideological slippage during the mid-1980s as a result of domestic market policies (the Mercado Libre Campesino [free peasants’ market], among others) that were operative then. It is significant that rectification should have been conceived in early 1986, just as Gorbachev’s reformist policies were beginning to take shape in the Soviet Union and the power struggle around him was getting under way. As a planned policy, rectification began to be discussed in Cuba in June of that same year, though only after the draft of the Third Congress of the Cuban Communist party, where the issue was never raised, had begun to circulate. Be it a timely restraint or justified repression, rectification turned out to be the result of political cunning; not of the Party, which never conceived it, but of Fidel Castro and his cohorts. Our political scientists have not yet told us about rectification what appears to be most significant: had it not been implemented when it was, the slippage detected earlier would have probably by now sent the Cuban regime the way of other Eastern European countries. As such, rectification has worked so far as a stop-gap mechanism, though for how long it will continue to work is anybody’s guess. This summary of the political background of rectification seems necessary to highlight what is most pertinent for the purposes of our discussion. To make rectification stick, so to speak, the Second Plenum of the Cuban Communist Party Central Committee, meeting in July 1986, emphasized especially, and I quote 45

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from its report: “the decisive role that belongs to the written, radio and television press in the struggle against errors and negative tendencies.” The report added further: “The Plenum agreed that the critical work of our press has been frequently misunderstood, thus lacking the consequent support in, above all, the Party’s own structures. Thus, the need to reflect the spirit and practice of criticism and self-criticism within the middle levels of the Party, the JUC [Communist Youth League] and the mass and social organizations.” Fidel Castro himself underscored, in the same meeting, the crucial role of the press in carrying out the party’s objectives, and urged the press, in turn, “to liberate itself totally from stereotyped and triumphalist schemes.”1 Subsequent meetings of the Unión de Periodistas Cubanos in September 1986 and of UNEAC, Writer’s Union, January 1988, underscored the crucial role of the press in reaching the objectives of rectification. Carlos Aldana Escalante, then director of the party’s powerful Departmento de Orientación Revolucionaria [Department of Revolutionary Orientation] as well as Secretary of the Central Committee, made rare speaking appearances at these meetings. Indeed, the composite remarks of Aldana Escalante along with those of Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, then Cuba’s vice-president, at the Writer’s Union meeting bear a significant message, I think, for our understanding of the status of culture and communications media in today’s Cuba. On that occasion, no sooner had Aldana reminded the audience that “we encourage a growing protagonism of journalists, writers, and artists [notice the order in which the three are mentioned] in the present stage of the rectification process,” than he immediately went on to chide “intellectuals” [his word] for “not giving us, with a few honorable exceptions, some sign of the tense situation that our society was going through at the beginning of the eighties decade.” Aldana’s condemnation of Cuban intellectuals, in a clear allusion to the events surrounding the May 1980 Mariel exodus, found an echo in Carlos Rafael Rodríguez’s remark, at the same meeting, to the See Cuba Socialista, 23, September-October 1986, 146, 147.

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effect that “it is of great importance that Cuban writers and artists [notice journalists are not mentioned] understand more and more that they are far indeed from being society’s ‘critical conscience.’ They never have been.” Rodríguez added, finally, that “thus freed from the pretensions of becoming the critical reservoir of society, enriched by their historical modesty, our writers and artists will instead be able to approach their being ‘witnesses to the truth.’”2 All of us would agree, I think, that writers and journalists in all societies have never found it easy to cohabitate, so to speak, with power. But if that relationship has never been easy, judging from statements such as these the writer in today’s Cuba finds him/herself in even worse straits: kicked out of bed. By stripping writer-intellectuals of their traditional role as society’s critical conscience, the Cuban Communist Party, under rectification, has reasserted its own control over that conscience. Gone are the days when intellectuals were called upon to defend the revolution publicly, as Roberto Fernández Retamar did amidst the “Padilla Affair” publishing his Calibán (1971). Today intellectuals cannot even draft a telegram on their own criticizing a wayward ally, as happened with Pablo Neruda in the halcyon 1960s and 1970s. In exchange, the Party has appointed the journalist as spokesperson in an effort, as the Plenum report states, to foster “the spirit and practice of criticism and self-criticism.” And so, if writer-intellectuals are now merely “witnesses to the truth,” the journalist has become, in turn, privileged “creator of the truth.” Thus, according to this argument, todays Cuban Vanguard can be found in ­Granma, Juventud Rebelde, and Trabajadores, rather than in Casa de las Américas, ­Unión or Pensamiento Crítico. In essence, that truth, and as my peers on this panel have just confirmed, there is no criticism, or at least what passes for criticism, within the climate of rectification. Within that climate, as reflected by Cuban media, there is, rather than a spirit of criticism, an atmosphere of complaint. In Cuba everyone is allowed to complain about anything. This spirit of complaint, sanctioned of course by the Party, 2



El caimán barbudo, Special Issue, March 1988, 8, II. My translation. 47

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is the basis for the popularity of consumer magazines like Opina; or the effervescence of stories like “Sandra’s Case,” Cuba’s first exposure (and therefore admission) of widespread prostitution; or the meteoric rise of columnists like Soledad Cruz in Juventud Rebelde. Besides creating the illusion of a democratic spirit-a cheap glasnost-such complaints allow the masses to exercise, as a commentator of the Cuban scene recently put it, “a catharsis of their frustration and impotence.” Complaints abound, to be sure, but only insofar as they be confined to immediate, practical aspects of everyday life and avoid questioning the political or economic systems themselves, or the country’s leadership. To put it in terms dear to our social scientists: complaints fail to have any structural repercussion. Scapegoats abound as well: whose fault it was rather than how it happened, is the question most often asked. Such hyper-complaint leads eventually to a dead end: mid-level bureaucrats fall but the system and leadership that put them there remain in place, seemingly invulnerable. That so-called “openness Cuban style,” then, has nothing to do with Soviet-style glasnost seems evident. One has only to compare the sad pages of Juventud Rebelde or La Gaceta de Cuba with those of Moscow News or Oqonyok, to witness the difference. What in the Soviet Union is a rending process of historical and structural criticism, in Cuba is but the setting of a national customer-service desk.3 Sadder still would be to think that the regime, in its desperate search for self-justification, deludes itself into passing off this spirit of complaint as its own false credential of democratic reform to obtain last-minute economic concessions from the Gorbachev administration. All of which points to one thing: my countrymen seem not to have learned that complaining and criticizing are not the same. The difference is subtle but crucial. Since the eighteenth century we know that critical reason, as the leading principle of modernity, does not admit any system to which it would be invulnerable, 3



For a useful summary, see Alec Hove, Glasnost in Action (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 48

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i­ ncluding political systems, or seemingly invulnerable leaderships. That is why true criticism can also constitute itself as an object of analysis, doubt, and negation. To criticize means to follow a method whose sole principle is to examine all principles, including its own ability to criticize. And it is for this reason that, far from affirming an atemporal principle, criticism has meant only one thing: change. The conceptual basis for that change lies in the Greek root of the word “criticism,” krinein: to choose, to decide. Neither change nor true criticism-in the sense of a space of decision—forms part of Cuban rectification. It is the absence of such crucial traits that mark its radical difference with Soviet glasnost. That under rectification the writer-intellectual should find him/ herself displaced by the journalist ought therefor not surprise us. As a discourse, the language of journalism creates, or should create, the illus1on of a transparent screen between reader and event. The journalist erects this screen, and his/her success will consist in the degree to which s/he can achieve that transparency, thus making events assume their assumed “truthfulness”-the same “truth,” to which Vice President Rodríguez now wishes the Cuban writer simply to “bear witness.” And yet, the writer-intellectual has a relationship to his/her age, and therefore to the reality that that language represents, far different from the journalist’s. No longer responsible for the illusion of the screen’s transparency, the writer and intellectual assumes the freedom to interpose him or herself between reader and event. In moral terms, the writer-intellectual is free to choose, and therefore free to criticize, the “truth” s/he wishes to bear witness to. That this is the writer-intellectual’s burden we have known at least since Plato-the first to kick the poet or writer out of the Republic because of his/her unorthodox use of language. (Plato, you see, was the first to practice rectification.) It may well be, of course, that a journalist may at times choose this heterodox use of language-in our tradition, José Martí would be the perfect example; a more recent one would be Jacobo Timmerman-but in that case s/he would cease being a journalist to become a writer. The writer-intellectual has a privilege, a power-base if you will, that the journalist lacks: the power to say “no.” And s/he has 49

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that power, of course, so long as that “no” springs out of his/her conscience, rather than out of tactics, ideology, or the needs of a given political party. All of which leads me to answer the question I posed earlier. If our own session lacks a writer, artist, or critic from Cuba, it must be because under rectification such people have become discredited, useless. I would like to think at least that my own side of the discussion (and I am referring to the side of culture as opposed to that of media, ideology, or place of work) is shared today by Cuban poets like Tania Díaz Castro or Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez, two writers who could have been here today, who should have been here today, were it not for the fact that they are both prisoners of conscience in Cuba. And yet I still have faith in journalism and journalists. In factand this constitutes the thrust of my paper-I believe strongly that only the dialectical relationship between Cuban society and its culture and media, rather than an external diplomatic process, will eventually end the Cold War between the U.S. and Cuba, as it did end that war in Eastern Europe. There are hopeful signs. Barely two days ago, I picked up the latest issue of The Village Voice (May 1, 1990) and began reading an article on Cuba by Marc Moore. What struck me about Moore’s article was not so much the author’s remarks about Cuba, from which I learned little (except perhaps one or two new jokes about Fidel), but from his quoting a Cuban journalist whom Moore described as “the brightest and most articulate” of the ones he met during his trip. “Too often,” said this bright and articulate Cuban journalist, according to Moore, “we have confused unity with uniformity. So, we have to continue opening up the debate. The biggest mistake we could make would be to halt this process of change.” I could not help but be surprised by these words: they sounded like Soviet glasnost in the unlikely person of a Cuban bureaucrat. Thus, I proceeded to look for this person’s name, which I had mindlessly glossed over, and then discovered that he was “the youthful editor-in-chief of Juventud Rebelde, José Vidal,” one of the two people with whom, two days from then, I was to share a session on Cuban culture and media at the Wilson Center. Having 50

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read this, I returned to the rest of Vidal’s quotation, and then my earlier delight turned into my more customary despair: “But we have to do it,” Vidal added then, “without providing an opening for the enemy. We have to move slowly but surely.” When last September I came to the Wilson Center to work on a completely unrelated research project, I never thought I would finish my fellowship year discussing Cuban politics. I doubt, for that matter, that Vidal himself ever thought, at the time he let Marc Moore interview him in Havana, that one fellow countryman would be quoting his words aloud when he would visit D.C. For if it is true that we cannot run away from ourselves, it is also true that the road to ourselves runs through the Other. For more than three decades Cubans on both sides of the ­Florida Straits have told each other that they are enemies. The result of this war, which has run both hot and cold, has not been victory for either side but the mutilation of the Cuban nation. No Cuban alive today, neither in Miami nor in Havana, has been able to escape the sadness and pain of such wounds. Before the spectacle of that pain, that today I regret to say is not just mine, I recall some words of Octavio Paz that might serve us all as consolation for the present and advice for the future: It’s easy to say four truths to our adversary. What is hard is to say them to our friends and allies. But if the writer keeps quiet, he betrays not only himself. He also betrays his friends.

Postscript in 1989: Throughout our two-day meeting in D.C., my fellow Cubans kept saying that great changes were about to take place in the political scene. They pointed to the next Party Congress, to the Pope’s forthcoming visit, and so forth. Most insistent among them was a bright economist by the name of José Luis Rodríguez who toward the end offered to return soon to give us the latest. Upon hearing this, I offered that instead of sending an emissary, we should hold a s1mllar meeting, with the present or maybe greater group of specialists, in Havana, a meeting I would

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gladly attend so long as our agenda were unrestrained, and its proceedings open to the public. Nobody picked up the glove. Postcript in 2023: Still waiting.

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On National Identity Sus campos se cubrirán de espigas y de flores, hermosas naves arribarán a sus puertos; una sombra de gloria y de fortuna recorrerá sus ciudades. Pero a los ojos del observador imparcial, mi cara patria no presentará sino la triste imagen de un hombre que, envuelto en un rico manto, oculta las profundas llagas que devoran sus entrañas. José Antonio Saco, Memoria sobre la vagancia en la Isla de Cuba (1831)

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aco’s eerie personification appears at the very end of his famous 1831 report to the Sociedad Patriótica de La Habana. It was a fitting ending, indeed, for Saco’s final image summarized his concern, expressed throughout the Memoria, for Cuba’s “moral pathology,” that is, for what Saco called the “moral illnesses” whose “remedy” the liberal Sociedad Patriótica sought through ideas that would strike them “at their root.” The final image thus followed the logic of his argument—Cuba’s surface appearance covered up a much different deeper reality. Gambling as much as commerce accounted for the island’s affluence, but Cuba had its own share of bums and prosperous merchants. The implications were equally as foreboding—Cuba would continue to decay, despite seeming wealth and health, unless healing took place beneath the surface. Part of Saco’s contribution to that healing was his own Memoria, a text which, along with the bulk of the work of the Sociedad Patriótica members (not to mention Saco’s own future 53

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writings), was designed to expose Cuba’s social and political ills and make both Creoles and Spaniards alike more self-conscious, thereby allowing islanders to gain control of national destiny. Underlying Saco’s Memoria was the liberal conviction that Cuba’s survival depended on a will to self-knowledge. Writing six years before Saco, in his “Himno del desterrado,” as he espied the Pan de Matanzas aboard the ship that would take him from New York to Veracruz, the exiled poet José María Heredia had similarly remarked the dual spectacle of physical splendor and self-blindness that for him seemed to define Cuban national identity: ¡Dulce Cuba! en tu seno se miran en el grado más alto y profundo, las bellezas del físico mundo, los horrores del mundo moral. Te hizo el cielo la flor de la tierra, mas tu fuerza y destinos ignoras, y de España en el déspota adoras al demonio sangriento del mal.

In the century and a half since the time of Saco and Heredia, Cuba has undergone profound historical changes. From colony of Spain and the U.S., Cuba went on to become a dependent republic and later an equally dependent Socialist state. None of these changes could have been possible without an attendant self-knowledge, an awareness of history and culture, the kind that Saco and Heredia implicitly advocated. If we regard Cuban history as a series of historical crises punctuated by recurrent armed revolts, then each of these crises must have afforded, in turn, a good measure of self-knowledge. Indeed, the richness of Cuban culture during the past two centuries further confirms such self-awareness. For Cuba has lacked neither a wealth of historians—from Arrate and de la Pezuela to Marrero and Moreno Fraginals—nor a plethora of writers—from Heredia and Saco to Carpentier, Lydia Cabrera and Lezama Lima—for whom Cuban history is as much source as

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­ bject of study. Nor has there been a lack of recurrent meditations o on the Cuban national character, beginning perhaps with Saco’s own Memoria, down to Mañach’s classic Indagación del choteo (1928) and Cabrera Infante´s Mea Cuba (1992). Against such an impressive background, why then the persistent impression that Cuban history, as dramatized in part in the present state of political affairs, has been cyclical in nature—an island that repeats patterns of internal oppression and external dependence? ­Consider, for ­ example, the final passage of Hugh Thomas’ monumental Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (1971): The future of Cuba continues to depend on circumstances beyond her control. Dr. Grau San Martín told Sumner Welles that “Cuba could get along without the regulation of foreign powers and even without foreign commercial interchanges”; Eddy Chibás wanted Cuba “free from the economic imperialism of Moscow, Rome and Berlin.” But still the only alternative market to Russia in 1970 for Cuba’s sugar production is the U.S., just as Russia was the only alternative in 1960 to the U.S. With economic diversification further away than ever, and the whole island turned into a single sugar plantation, Cuba has no hope of escaping the politics of its customers or its investors. The eighteenth-century problem of obtaining slaves from across the sea from other countries has been exactly reproduced by the problem of obtaining oil; the Russian embassy official Shliapnikov who boasted how a delay at Baku could strangle the Cuban economy is a twentieth-century South Sea Company factor.1

What in the passage from Thomas’ history constitutes a cyclical pattern caused by the continued influence of external factors finds one impressive equivalent in recent works of literature like Cabrera Infante’s Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1974), or Reinaldo Arenas’s El central (1981), texts whose critique of history points to the recurrence of violence and repression. In turn, that cyclical vision appears to be the legacy of earlier writers like C ­ irilo Thomas, Cuba, The Pursuit of Freedom, New York: Random House, 1971, 576.

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­ illaverde, or Carpentier, to mention just two important cases. V While Cecilia Valdés (1882) provides an allegory of slaveholding Cuba in the cyclical story of its quadroon protagonist, her forebears, and descendant, several of Carpentier’s major works, like El reino de este mundo (1949) and El acoso (1956), dramatize a vision of circularity and regression that extends to the entire Caribbean area. Indeed, the evidence these literary works utilize may be far from fictional. As in the 1820s, the 1980s in Cuba witnessed an excessive economic dependence on the sugar staple, the suppression of ideological pluralism, a centralized political bureaucracy, and a persistent diaspora. It all seems as if two whole centuries of devoted historiography, imaginative literary practice and trenchant characterology may have done little to help the Cuban people know themselves better and thereby control their own destiny— little to heal, that is, the infected ulcers that Saco diagnosed a century and a half before. One could well question whether faith in critical self-awareness that lies at the foundation of Western humanism should be enough to effect positive historical change. In the specific case of Cuba, at Western margins along with the rest of Latin America, one could further question whether a will to self-knowledge has been comprehensive, systematic, or even radical enough, given two centuries of political instability and fragmentation. While it would be too bold to claim that the presence or absence of a specific intellectual practice by itself can affect the historical course of any nation, it does seem striking that the Cuban intellectual tradition should lack, with rare and fragmented exceptions, a comprehensive philosophy of history, even though one could not question Cuba’s rich historiographical tradition. It would be difficult to find a country whose historical origins and development have been researched as thoroughly. One could even concede that all the elements of such a philosophy of history do exist, albeit in piecemeal form, in the works of essayists like Saco, Luz y Caballero, Varela, Martí, Sanguily, Varona, Ortiz, Guerra, Mañach, Vitier, Lezama Lima, Cabrera Infante, among others. And yet the subject range of each of these essays would seem too specific to account 56

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or answer the question that a philosophy of history always poses: what is the meaning of history, or at least what sort of interpretation of history can we formulate from the facts at hand? The essays collected in this special issue of Cuban Studies under “The Emergence of Cuban National Identity” heading pretend neither to affect the course of Cuban history nor to fill the gap created by the absence of such a philosophical enterprise, at least not entirely. They are, rather, an assemblage of varied meditations on certain moments, aspects, tendencies, events, monuments, and texts from the Cuban cultural tradition that cast a significant, at times unexpected, light on that history. The contributors, the majority of whom participated in an April 1985 conference on the subject at Cornell University, were asked to prepare papers considering, from the vantage points of their own disciplines, the meaning of Cuban history; that is, to consider how their topics either structure or problematize a philosophy or interpretation of history, and not simply repeat well-known historiographical facts. In each case, the particularity of the topic—be it the development of a Cuban sugar counter-discourse, the details of diplomatic and labor history during the Machado administration, the historical vision of a Franco-Cuban countess, the reception of Cuba’s “first” poem, eighteenth-century military history, or the mythology surrounding the figure of José Martí—had to be linked to a greater central question: how does this specific problem serve to illuminate the emergence of Cuban national identity? Our inquiries did not yield traditional results. Instead of an essence from which history and culture would derive, identity in these essays emerges from the (often conflictual) interplay of different strategies, discourses, and historical moments. That is, instead of a cultural given or assumption, identity becomes an effect, often sparked by the friction between or among claims, interpretations, or ideologies. Antonio Benítez Rojo’s view of two opposing cyclical discourses in Cuban history, for example, has close and surprising structural counterparts in Jorge Domínguez’s and Allan Kuethe’s reading of the key dialectic between internal and external political forces, as well as in Adriana Méndez Rodenas’s 57

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rescue of la Condesa de Merlín’s double historical vision. Similarly, González Echevarría’s reading of the reception of Espejo de paciencia (1608?) and my discussion of the mythology of José Martí examine how the interplay between different historical moments fills the need for Cuban myths of foundation. If the collection shows a predominance of literary subjects, this emphasis reflects not only the editor’s own field of research, but also a collective conviction that the heterogeneous nature of literary texts— occupying a middle ground between fiction and truth, history and imagination—does provide a privileged field for researching a subject as elusive as national identity. Nor do we pretend to have covered the subject as thoroughly or as comprehensively as perhaps it should. Several of its aspects are admittedly not treated—Cuba’s African heritage, for example, or its exile tradition. Comprehensiveness, however, was not our goal. We set out to be speculative and unorthodox. The results demonstrate that we succeeded.

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Unburnt Bridges for María Elena Cruz Varela

I. From Hanover to Havana

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lashback. Late fall 1979, Hanover, New Hampshire. Three friends at Dartmouth College hastily organize a meeting on Cuba at a campus retreat nearby and invite me to participate. The occasion is the visit of novelist Edmundo Desnoes, author of the novel and film Memories of Underdevelopment, and the U.S. visit of Miguel Barnet, author of Autobiography of a Runaway Slave and other testimonial novels. I come to meet my friends for an in-house retreat. Present also is Carollee Bengelsdorf, then married to Desnoes and a political scientist in her own right. Present at the retreat as well was Lourdes Casal, a powerful presence in the lives of young Cuban exiles then, someone with whom we were, in our own way, “building bridges” to Cuba. The context for my visit was, however, equivocal. With Lourdes, and some thirty other Cuban exile academics, I had traveled to Cuba the previous summer. It was my second visit. The year before, late 1978, I had formed part of the motley contingent of Cubans known as el Diálogo which had traveled to Havana to facilitate, among other things, the amnesty of political prisoners and family reunification. Like those hundreds of Cubans then, I, too, dreamed of building a solid bridge that I had dared cross despite protests from family parents and friends. The three-day trip to Havana had been too brief, my enthusiasm too contained, not 59

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to repeat it. So, the following summer I traveled again, this time for two weeks, on a trip sponsored by Areíto, a pro-Castro journal and group that we all believed in then, though I had turned down an invitation to become a member of its board. I had come to Dartmouth, then, as what I perceived in retrospect an ideologically safe guest. No title for my talk had been demanded, but I did propose speaking on Heberto Padilla, the dissident poet who had been punished by the Cuban government almost a decade before, and whose latest poems then (now collected in his Autobiography of the Other) had appeared in The New York Review of Books. I felt then that those poems deserved another review of their own. But my own position was ambivalent, at least privately. After my second trip my views on the revolution had changed. My first trip had been sponsored by the Cuban government— complete with a single room at the swanky Riviera Hotel, car, chauffeur and guide to tour anywhere—even a celebration night at Tropicana. The second trip had resulted in a sad, and until then secret, disillusionment. In my visit from one end of the island to the other, I had met many desperate people—some begging for dollars that could help buy a pair of shoes at a diplotienda, others simply curious to learn how a Polaroid worked. The most desperate of all had been my uncle Agustín, then living in the same family homestead in Santiago with his family, who had spent fifteen years as a political prisoner in the Isle of Pines. For complex family reasons, my uncle the previous year had turned down my offer to help him negotiate his departure from Cuba along with the thousands of other political prisoners who were being amnestied then. Now I sensed that his desperation was not material but spiritual, emotional: despite my interest in his personal story and my repeated wishes to know how he felt about his life, we remained alienated from each other. He never opened up, communication was strained, and I suspect that he was suspicious of me: twice I had been invited down by the government, and there I was asking him about his life and whether he was happy; all the while he had spent fifteen years in prison, and all that his family had been able to offer me for breakfast the day I flew into Santiago had been a 60

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glass of milk and one tostón, a piece of fried plantain. To top things off, I wore a beard… But such was my family’s, especially my uncle Agustín’s, nobility that, unlike many of the strangers I had met throughout the island, never once did they complain about their lives. Many other things happened to make those two weeks in 1979 the summer of my discontent. But it had been my uncle’s empty gaze, rather than the empty pockets that he and many other Cubans I had met had shown me—grotesquely similar pockets, I might add, to the ones I had seen elsewhere in other Latin American cities—that had changed me. Inside, that is, because I had not dared to speak out and criticize what I had seen. I could not, you see. I felt morally trapped. Upon returning from Havana in 1978, I, along with other participants in the Diálogo, had begun getting death threats from right-wing Cuban exile paramilitary groups like Alpha 66, seeking revenge for crossing a bridge to Cuba. That same December, I had received from them a list of crossedout names of people they had either killed or maimed with letter bombs. My own name was there, too, about to be crossed out and adorned with the gentle parody of a Spanish Hallmark: TE ­TENEMOS EN CUENTA, keeping you in mind… I had not dared to speak out until I showed up in Hanover that fateful December 1979 evening hoping to have my friends listen through the oblique allegory of Padilla’s prison poems. And yet my discussion of those texts was met with indifference by some, fury by others. Edmundo and Carol, I seem (or at least would like) to recall, rushed to my defense after Casal and Barnet—more shocked at my daring gesture to bring up the apostate´s texts than indignant at the subject itself—branded my presentation both outrageous and irrelevant. When the debate was over, which had seemed eternal to me, I felt an overwhelming sense of emptiness. I had come to Dartmouth seeking validation for my doubts, but instead had met a silent, albeit equally as damaging, letter bomb. Later that same month, for the first research leave of my academic career, I took that emptiness with me to Tampa, where I was to live for the next several months finishing a book—near enough to 61

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a Cuban community though safely distant from Miami, I used to think. But it was in Florida again that I learned there’s no escaping from oneself. May 1980 was the fateful month that brought to the Florida shores the Mariel boatlift refugees, not only the mental patients whom I saw escorted in bulging buses across my Tampa neighborhood, but entire destitute families, uncannily similar to the ones I had met and seen throughout my travels in Cuba the summer before. It was at that fateful time that I was able to meet young Cuban writers and intellectuals, like Reinaldo Arenas, with whom I soon became close friends. Indeed, in my two trips Arenas had remained off-limits to inquiring scholars like me because of his alleged unspeakable crimes. But in May 1980 I was finally able to interview him in an anonymous apartment in Little Havana. Mariel became for me, then, what brought down and literally undid, the previous Diálogo. Diálogo had brought out political prisoners, but not everyone wanted or could leave; Mariel questioned such widely advertised policies as “family reunification,” which we as a group had worked hard to achieve. Since 1980 the sense of double (or triple) exile I felt has become one of the fundamental elements of my writing. If I was already a political exile from both Cuba and the exile community—viewed as CIA in Cuba and G-2 in Miami—I had also become a spiritual exile by virtue of being a writer and intellectual who criticized equally the regime and the inactive (perhaps reactive) U.S. policy towards Cuba. Eventually, the yearly greetings from Alpha 66 stopped. In 1986, in reaction to an essay of mine on “José Martí and the Cuban Revolution,” I was twice attacked in Havana government journals, called everything from “man without a country” to “servant of imperialist interests.” To top things off, that same year and using the same essay on Martí as an excuse, Cintio Vitier, a prominent Cuban writer, decided to make me an example by accusing me, in a public polemic with Professor Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, of becoming, along with none other than Octavio Paz and even the leftist critic Angel Rama, “exile ideologue.” My repeated requests for the right to respond were never answered.

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Flash forward. January 1995, Hanover, New Hampshire. With this background I accepted an invitation to return to Hanover to discuss once again the subject of Cuba at a conference on the future of democracy. It seemed hard to believe that fifteen years had gone by. Edmundo and Carol were no longer together; Lourdes Casal and Reinaldo Arenas were both dead; Antonio Benítez Rojo, who in 1979 had been one of my hosts in Havana at Casa de las Américas, had since defected and was sitting next to me at this conference. So was Marifeli Pérez-Stable, one of the leaders of Areíto, whose political views had changed radically; Eloy ­Gutiérrez Menoyo, in 1978 on the list of amnestied political prisoners we discussed as part of the Diálogo, was one of the two conference keynote speakers. And yet, although so much time had gone by, why did I feel the same emptiness I had felt sixteen years before, on that December 1979 night? Gutiérrez Menoyo, pointing an accusing finger, rejected my pointed question on the chances of opening up political spaces for the Cuban opposition for such groups as the Cuban American National Foundation. He never did answer my question and instead proceeded to attack me in a manner that, while perhaps personally justified, was nevertheless undemocratic, to say the least. After the session, however, I walked up to Gutiérrez Menoyo and shook hands. I tried to show him no bitterness and gave him a capsule summary of the personal story I just told you. Gutiérrez Menoyo, now dead, was a noble man, a former political prisoner like my uncle Agustín, so he apologized for speaking to me so aggressively, traumatized as he was by years of harassment by political adversaries like the Cuban American National Foundation. About him I was never worried, though. I was and still am of those who cheered him on for pointing his finger at me. CODA: I have been, as far back as I can remember, politically incorrect. The emptiness I felt both times in Hanover harks back to the way I used to feel between the ages of ten and twelve, during my last two years living in Cuba, growing up in a home where views against the regime were openly discussed yet kept secret 63

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from neighbors and friends, and even close relatives like my uncle Agustín, back then a raving fidelista. It was then I first heard the epithet gusano—the Cuban version of the German ungeziefer that Josef Goebbels had hurled at German Jews—hurled at me. Today, as I read about renewed efforts to build bridges to Cuba, like the recent two-volume issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Summer and Fall 1994), I am saddened about the recurrence of the same manipulation and naiveté to which I once fell victim. I have no reason to doubt the good will of projects such as this one. All of us need to believe in the possibility of reconciliation for a nation torn asunder by decades of dictatorship. But then why not recognize as well the need to build a bridge with support on both sides, as any cautious engineer would, and plead for a commensurate opening on the island side of the Florida straits? The space that makes such reconciliation possible, the structure that would make the bridge work, has a name: Democracy. Democracy was the word contained in the cries of freedom screamed by rioting Cubans on August 4, 1994, during the infamous maleconazo—not unlike Freedom, Libertad, would also be during the later 11-J—and yet it is the one word missing most glaringly from the two-volume issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. Why such reluctance to talk about the need for democracy among Cubans—not just in the island, but in exile as well? Democracy, and Freedom, is the indispensable undergirding that would support any bridge to Cuba. And yet, a free democratic imagination lies muted in the multi-voiced chorus of those two volumes, particularly at those points where one would expect to hear it most loudly. At the head of the “Introduction” to Part One of Bridges to Cuba, for example, the editors quote, almost as their motto, the final lines of the poem “Un puente, un gran puente,” [“A Bridge, a Large Bridge”], by the great Cuban poet José Lezama Lima: A bridge, a great bridge, which cannot be seen, its boiling, frozen waters batter against the last defensive walls. . .

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And yet, the same original stanza bears four more lines that, strangely, were excised from the quotation. Why were they, these lines that resonate loudly and prophetically? (Lezama Lima himself died in 1976, victim to a cruel internal exile), lines that bespeak the need to enlist a pluralist, democratic imagination against the tropes of a common authoritarian enemy: And they steal the head, and the single voice crosses the river again, like the blind king not knowing he has been dethroned, and he dies, stitched softly to fidelity at night.

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Wilde, Dreyfus, Disaster For Gustavo Pérez Firmat

The imagination is always at the end of an era. Wallace Stevens

T

he End is near, or so it seems from our dwindling calendars, not to mention news out of Washington. In October 1999, the front page of the Sunday New York Times carried a fascinating report on the phenomenal commercial success of “Left Behind,” a series of four apocalyptic thrillers with a born-again Christian theme that has already sold millions of copies and whose popularity demonstrates, according to the Times, “the public’s fixation on the approaching millennium and the widespread anticipation that the year 2000 portends some earth-shattering event.” Indeed, the signs of the impending apocalypse appear to be everywhere, beginning with our own computer screens. “Y2K,” the fear that computers that use two digits to indicate the year may mistakenly interpret the number “2000” as “1900” and thereby plunge us all into technological chaos, very well could, according to an evangelical minister quoted in the same Times article, “trigger a financial meltdown leading to an international depression, which

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would make it possible for the Antichrist or his emissaries to establish a one-world currency.”1 Visions of the end are the staple of our film culture, to mention another branch of the vernacular, from Titanic and Armageddon to Deep Impact and Godzilla. Yet support for our culture’s obsession with such visions of the end derives ultimately from real terminal events that we have all experienced recently: the demise of the Soviet empire; Princess Diana’s fatal accident; the economic collapse of foreign markets, from Asia to Eastern Europe and Latin America; and even that mysterious meteorological disturbance known as “El Niño” —which we all know will soon be followed by the infinitely more terrible “La Niña”… Nuclear holocaust, so feared during the Cold War, today has given way to ecological holocaust within the New World Order. Little wonder that the swift succession of such catastrophic events toward the end of the century, the last of this millennium, would carry the cumulative effect of making us question what the world is coming to as we rendezvous with 2000. The more reason to reflect upon the significance of the end in our cultural constructions and on the way that they affect, often imperceptibly and against our better judgments, our most basic assumptions. That our contemporary panic about doomsday is actually old news I have tried to evoke in my title, with its multiple allusions to historical events at the end of the 19th century, and to the title of Frank Kermode’s classic study, The Sense of an Ending (1967). Like Kermode’s, my own subject is the fictions of the end and the ways in which we use them to bridge obscure origins to unknown fates, all the while using them while living in what Kermode calls “the middest,” a perpetual middle ground marked by perplexity and the desire for absolute knowledge. Unlike Kermode, ­however, I am interested in one species of ending, what I will call the utopian impulse, and how that drive conditions a peculiar anxiety and cultural vision. I shall cite examples derived from Latin America, the tradition I know best, though I would venture that my premises 1



See (Goodstein: 1998). 68

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apply equally as well to many contemporary samples of our common culture. My critique, I confess, is directed at certain habits, both of literary creation and cultural criticism, that I deem naively destructive but which, for reasons we might not be able to exhaust in this light piece, remain mysteriously unexamined.

2 Kermode himself reflects, in his chapter on “The Modern Apocalypse,” how at the end of the 19th century there was an outbreak of fin de siècle phenomena redolent with “apocalyptic feeling.” He mentions, among these, “the revival of imperial mythologies both in England and Germany,” and “the ‘decadence’ which became a literary category,” while noting that such phenomena amply illustrate the thesis once claimed by Henri Focillon (author of the 1952 classic L’an mil) that “we project our existential anxieties on to history;” that is, that “there is a real correlation between the ends of centuries and the peculiarity of our imagination, that it always chooses to be at the end of an era.” That such a correlation does exist Kermode confirms by pointing to events that took place in the exact year of 1900, when the 20th century began literally, as opposed to 1914, often claimed to be the symbolic end of the 19th, or at least of its culture. “In 1900,” he wrote: Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl’s Logic and . . . with an exquisite sense of timing [Max] Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900. Thus within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and to the very locus of human uncertainty.

Kermode admits readily, in the search for a satisfying pattern, that such “sense of an ending” provides that “the anxiety reflected by the fin de siècle is perpetual, and people don’t wait for centuries to end before they express it.” Yet for all its conceptual accuracy, 69

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the remark begs the question, for Kermode never does describe, or even speculate about, those specific events at the end of the last century, not the beginning of the next one, that could have expressed the anxiety of the end, or indeed the crisis of an imminent beginning. Was it by chance, I wonder, that between 1895 and 1900 all three of the historical events to which my title alludes—the 1895 trials of Oscar Wilde, the Dreyfus Affair between 1895 and 1899, and the 1898 Spanish Cuban American War—plunged a good portion of Europe into a series of crises from which it was not entirely to recover? (Similar analogous events could be invoked in the cases of other European countries, like Italy and Germany; but I choose to concentrate on these three for the sake of simplicity.) But let us not oversimplify. Each of these events had its own national significance—the rupture of moral cohesion in late Victorian society; nationalism, and the conflicts of modernity in France; the resounding political failures of the Spanish monarchy—but all three could collectively be viewed as symptoms of a deep-seated European anxiety regarding the sense of a cultural ending. Each event expressed this anxiety, I submit, through judicial and military processes that were designed literally to arrest the flow of history and inevitable change. To call such change “progress” is perhaps to idealize History. Suffice it to say that each event meant a reaction to change as it was anchored by the powerful myth of the imminent end of the century along with all its eschatological implications. It was perhaps no accident that each of these events was framed within a judicial and military process. The institutional frames that both the courts and the army provided in England, France and Spain, respectively, became formidable aids in a repression directed not at the average male bourgeois citizen, whose own authority was being questioned, but rather at the three marginal or minority figures that were at stake in each of the conflicts—the homosexual aesthete, in the case of Wilde; the Jew, in the case of Dreyfus; and the colonial subaltern, in the case of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands. Each of these marginal figures threatened, at 70

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the end of the century, to become an agent for change. Each event embodied a reaction against this agency by attempting to repress, by means of the courts and the army, judicial and military means, the contagion threatened by each of these figures. We can safely say today, in hindsight, that none of these attempts at repression worked. And yet, to ignore their long-term effect would constitute a flagrant distortion of the way history is constructed, not to mention written. I have shown elsewhere, for example, that Spain’s humiliating defeat in the 1898 Spanish Cuban American War at the hands of the U.S.—what in Spain is called by the neurotic name of el Desastre—made Spaniards build up a psychic defense against the loss of its former colonies, particularly Cuba, the richest and allegedly the most loyal. Such Spanish “inability to mourn” that loss—as expressed, among other things, in the popular cry of “Más se perdió en Cuba” (Much more was lost in Cuba)—resulted in Spain’s emptying-out of Cuban history, to the point that many in Spain today, including many in more current governments, hold on to the fantasy that Cuba remains a dependent colony, or at least that the 1959 Cuban Revolution, which rejected U.S. tutelage, reaffirmed implicitly Spanish hegemony in the island.2 The truth is, however, that Spain never actually mourned the loss of Cuba and its former colonies in 1898; that, as such, it continues to deny the facts of history; and that its renewed neocolonial presence in the island is anchored upon this strange reading of history. I would venture that the uncanny creation of such ideological spectres out of the denial of historical reality in Spain had close parallels in the cases of Britain and France, with its repressions of homosexuals and Jews, as expressed in the trials of Wilde and Dreyfus, respectively. What one could rightly call the “return of the repressed” of two marginal figures witnessed throughout the 20th century in Britain and France, takes place precisely because of these countries’ reactionary policies, and the failed institutional attempts to repress them at the end of the previous century. Such 2



See (Santí: 1998), and (Santí: 2005). 71

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repressions are not, one might add, simply the denial of subjects— homosexuals in the case of the British; Jews in the case of France; Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos in the case of Spain—but rather a psychic mutilation within the historical subject, a self-mutilation that prevents, in turn and in the long run, its psychic and moral development. To play on the metaphor of the prisoner that I invoked earlier: the arrest of the homosexual, the Jew and the colonial subject at the end of the last century causes in turn the arrest of the anxiety-ridden judge, policeman and statesman who perpetrates, under the pressure of the end of time, the original institutional injustice. One should underscore, finally, that these are not merely convenient metaphors of cultural history that illustrate broad historical trends. They were and are, quite literally, historical subjects who were either put on trial and put away as showcases—as Wilde and Dreyfus certainly were— or who, instead, were murdered, as were the half million Cuban civilians (at the time, one-fourth of the island’s population) who died in Spanish concentration camps during the 1895 Independence War.

3 I confess fascination for the persistence of these apocalyptic patterns in contemporary culture, even as I am also appalled at the ethical blindness underlying many of such creative and critical urges. Latin American culture, or so the stereotype goes, fulfills the wish for such an apocalyptic scene, with its frequent earthquakes and revolutions, as destructive as they are unexpected, endemic economic crises and latter-day prophets. What I have called “Latinamericanism,” the institutional exploitation of such stereotypes, particularly within the American university, feeds upon this seemingly vast reservoir of cultural images and historical expectations.3 What may be less evident, to my mind at least, is how the creative literature produced in so-called Latin America, particularly as the

3

See (Santí: 1992). 72

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pressures of the end of the century and the millennium begin to be felt, plays into this apocalyptic pattern. In other words, rather than a simple model whereby cultural criticism identifies or concocts apocalyptic patterns in the literature, we have a dialectical relationship between culture and its promotion, literature, and its criticism, if you will, or between writer and reader, producer, and consumer. It is a dialectic of mutual convenience: it carves itself a niche within the cultural marketplace; for the writer, it provides a practical literary model; and for the reader, wherever she may be, it satisfies a curiosity, perhaps even a demand, for an intelligible screen used in the acquisition of knowledge regarding a culture that happens to be varied, complex, and, ultimately, resistant to simple consumption. Many such texts could be invoked: Neruda’s Canto General; Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude; Borges’ The Aleph, Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World. All four, one might note, were written around 1950, as if responding commonly to the anxiety of life at mid-century and in the wake of that Western conflagration known as World War II. Yet the litmus test for the persistence of apocalypse in our age remains, I think, one work in particular: García Márquez’s global best-seller One Hundred Years of Solitude, both as a sample of creative literature and an instance of the dialectic between cultural production and criticism to which I have just referred. García Márquez´s novel was not published until 1967, but for purposes of my argument now it seems less important to prove a specific correlation between text and calendar than to identify a persistent pattern. Leaving aside the author´s personal affiliations or political opinions, my interest centers on the novel’s virtually legendary use of an apocalyptic pattern in its famous last pages. This is, arguably, the one feature of our reading we remember best: the dazzling and dizzying manner in which the narrator wraps up the century-long Buendía saga by creating a simultaneous vision, such that an apocalyptic wind blows away the entire pathetic scene of the last surviving family member while the last of the Buendía heirs reads out the Book that contains their history. The end of the 73

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family is also the simultaneous end of reading—the character’s, the novel’s, and the reader’s. I need not summarize the praise the critical canon has poured onto this ending, thus evoking parallels and models as far-flung as The Thousand and One Nights, the Bible, Borges, Don Quixote.4 Suffice it to remind ourselves, perhaps painfully, that our thrill as readers of the final pages posits a fascination with death, the death of others and our own. We participate, that is, in the voyeuristic pleasure of witnessing, as well as participating in, total annihilation, as in the violent wind’s wiping-out of the Buendías’ threadbare encampment. We participate in this annihilation not just vicariously, that is, by witnessing a description from a distance, as we would in any realistic novel, of this genocide, but rather by literally consuming the lines that contain it, as well as self-consuming our own roles as readers in a dazzling mise en abyme. The reader of One Hundred Years of Solitude becomes an actual accomplice, if not the actual producer, of the holocaust that takes place at the end.5 I do not rightly know if anyone has noticed this thanatotic, death-obsessed, ending of García Márquez’s novel, or, for that matter, of all his work. What interests me is not only the presence of this apocalyptic pattern, but how we, as readers, are literally seduced into accepting its naturalness. Call it the seduction of a master prose-writer or the effects of so-called Magical Realism, the truth is that, caught in the dazzling chaos of an apocalyptic pattern, the reader either forgets or represses her participation in or production of that mutual annihilation. It is too bad, in fact, that Frank Kermode was not able to take One Hundred Years of Solitude into account before writing The Sense of an Ending, for the novel would have provided Kermode with a limit case of

4 5

For such a classic reading see (Rodríguez: 1973). Mario Vargas Llosa was one of the first to remark García Márquez’s fascination with Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year as he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Like the inhabitants of London in that particular fiction, the people of Macondo . . . live a history that is natural cataclysm or divine punishment, a superior force that breaks into the community and sweeps it away.” My translation from (García: 1971, 191). 74

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post-modernist apocalyptic fiction, not to mention a coda to his view that in the modern apocalypse “the nightmare of history is part of our condition, part of their material.” Yet what strikes me most is this paradox: how little of the critical canon reflects the complicity between text and reader in the creation of that mutual apocalypse and the extent to which the obsession with death and destruction motivates praise for both the novel and its author. In the final essay of his Some Write to the Future, a book of essays on contemporary Latin American fiction that also purports to offer a statement about the continent’s culture, Ariel Dorfman, for example, focuses repeatedly upon the novel’s persistent use of apocalyptic imagery, such as the Deluge, and goes on to note how in its last scene “for an instant, the last instant, we are the Buendías—except that we as readers survive in order to change the way we live, to tell and live, one would hope our existence in a different manner.” Dorfman’s thesis, in this 1990 essay and throughout his book, is that Latin American fiction contributes to the “reader’s liberation,” as an earlier book of the same title had pressed. Dorfman is obviously sympathetic to, yet appears unbothered by, the reader’s production of this apocalypse. In fact, judging from further statements in the same essay, the idea thrills him: “As for the hurricane that sweeps Macondo away, one can sadly read in it the disappearance of these southern lands from the globe, their insignificance and irrelevance in the grand design of history. Perhaps it is a foreshadowing of an apocalypse that awaits our entire species, just as the original days of Macondo, when everything was so new that it hardly had a name…” “This sense of doom,” he states elsewhere, “therefore arises quite naturally from their dependent and secondary status in the world, living on its periphery, left outside modernity, and is expressed, at the literary level, in the feeling that these men and women are poor underdeveloped incarnations of faraway resonances of biblical or Greek classic myths, pale imitations of archetypes created elsewhere.” Neither the fact of collective annihilation nor the sense of doom stemming from a resigned underdevelopment appears to move Dorfman into reflecting on García Márquez’s treatment of 75

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apocalyptic patterns, or this writer’s obsession with violence and death. Instead, he views both arising “quite naturally” from colonial dependence. Dorfman’s underlying model appears, in this case at least, to be utopian. It justifies any measure, including, apparently, collective annihilation, so long as “some write to the future,” the precise title of the last essay, and the book’s. After all, the aim of his readings, he reminds us in the Introduction, is “to play in the liberation of the people of Latin America” and “to conceive of the reader in a more respectful way, as if she were a citizen of the future.” The future, then, not the present, or even a past that would be open to judgment and criticism, is Dorfman’s chosen timeframe. Dorfman’s utopian gesture, geared towards a future that appears indifferent to annihilation, including the reader’s complicity in such symbolic crime, is therefore consonant with, though certainly not identical to, García Márquez’s seductive apocalyptic pattern. So consonant is this utopia with that apocalypse that it naturalizes the obsession with death as part of an objective state of things—a Book that has already been written and will forever be written “to the future”—as opposed to one being written in the present and therefore subject to critique and correction. One wonders about the underlying relationship between such utopian impulses and the obsession with death while further reading Mr. Dorfman’s later book, his memoir Heading South, Looking North. Divided into sixteen chapters, eight of which are devoted to his relationship to “life and language” and another eight to “death,” all focused upon September 11, 1973 (the date of Pinochet’s coup against Chilean President Allende), it describes, in heavily turgid prose, the author’s life up to his escape from Chile to Argentina and an eventual long exile. Granted that the dialectic between language and death is a structural principle of this memoir, I am nevertheless struck by the images of self and collective destruction that pervade the last chapter, and even the “Acknowledgments” section, whose final lines is devoted to the death of Mr. Dorfman’s mother. Peering into the future, Dorfman assumes the prophetic mantle and writes how upon leaving Argentina, “I could 76

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see how I would be one of the victims of this massacre, I told my Argentine friends that we were heading for a calamity… I could recognize death as I saw it approaching.” Later, as he boards the plane that takes him far from South America, Dorfman reflects how “On that plane, high above the pampas, I told myself that I would be back, I told myself that nothing could stop me from returning to my land… Look at me there, above the clouds, above a Latin America where death is spreading, poisoning the waters of the Argentine city of my birth…” And so forth. If we simply cannot keep a straight face while reading this prose it may be not entirely because of its melodramatic tone. I at least react to its unwitting echo, unconscious parody perhaps, of its model—Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, whose dramatic core is the Chilean poet’s flight from Santiago in 1948, at one of the heights of the Cold War, while escaping the police-force of then-President González Videla.6 Neruda was then in the midst of writing what is perhaps the most famous book in the history of modern Chilean literature, and so, similarly, Dorfman is then writing Hard Rain, a novel in which, he reminds us, “I prophesied that we would overcome and that Chile would be free.” The difference, of course, is that Neruda crossed the Andes—the same Andes about which he had written earlier in Heights of Macchu Picchu—on horseback to Argentina, while Dorfman soared above the clouds in a jet plane bound for Europe.

4 The persistence of apocalyptic patterns in contemporary culture, of which García Márquez’s and Dorfman’s are but two examples, does not therefore mean that it always works. Our age of approaching millennium is also our postmodern age of irony and parody. The latter, as we know, undercut not only the need for 6

For the details of Neruda’s escape from Chile see my edition of (Neruda: 1990). 77

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apocalypse, but the very possibility of representing it. I find one exemplary instance of this denial of apocalyptic closure in Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s 1995 memoir Next year in Cuba, a book that has become a classic of Cuban American writing. In a fast-paced, witty narrative, Pérez Firmat’s memoir, whose title is already a parody of Jewish eschatology, describes the vicissitudes of the Cuban exile community awaiting deliverance from exile and bondage, yet falling prey to the delivery of Cuban cantinas. In one of its many comical passages, Pérez Firmat describes one of these scenes from the Egypt of Miami’s calle ocho and its political rituals: For better and for worse, Cubans face hardship lightly. Confronted with difficult times, we fall back on relajo or choteo, a type of humor that deals with life’s adversities by mocking them. I’m sure you’ve heard the proverb, if life gives you lemons, learn to make lemonade. As soon as we Cuban arrived in Miami, we started making lemonade in industrial quantities. A spoonful of choteo made the Spam steak go down. The carne del Refugio became the subject of endless jokes and stories, as did the factorías where many people had to work for subsistence wages. Just as my mother and her friends exchanged recipes for Spam and powdered milk, my father and his friends traded jokes about Fidel or life in exile. The Miami buses, notoriously untimely, became la aspirina—you took one every three hours. As relajo relaxed us, the town began to fill up with colorful characters. One man who had been a sergeant in Batista’s army liked to walk the streets of Little Havana holding up a signed photograph of the ex-dictator; he became known as el hombre del cuadro, the man with the picture. A transvestite who hung out on Eighth Street was dubbed La engañadora, the deceiver: after the title of a fifties cha cha. A woman nicknamed Beba de Cuba was famous for holding wild parties every May 20 to celebrate Cuba’s day of independence. For the party Beba wrapped herself in a Cuban flag and tied her hands and feet. At around midnight, when Beba was good and tipsy, the partygoers would start the chant, “Beba, break the chains; break the chains Beba”. Beba would start to shake and shimmy and shudder until not only the chains but part of her clothing came off, symbolizing the liberation of Cuba.

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As we can see, the sense of an ending can also be funny. Humor may well be a healthy alternative to the pain of exile. Pérez Firmat’s Cuban exile was and is in fact no less tragic or costly than Dorfman’s, his approach no less symbolic, as his treatment of carne del Refugio, Cuban exile Spam, demonstrates. Indeed, it is an irony not to be forgotten that since 1990, Chilean exiles, including the most critical of the military regime, were able to return to their native land without incident, while Cuba remains off limits to many exiles, particularly those of us who dare criticize the ongoing regime. Humor and irony may yet be the best way to endure the bondage of a seemingly endless exile, or its imminent destruction. It is said that at the height of Oscar Wilde’s first trial, questioned by the British District Attorney about a compromising statement in a certain letter where he stated: “I quite admit that I adored you madly,” he was asked if he had ever had that feeling. Wilde answered, without missing a beat: “I have never given admiration to any person except myself. The expression was, I regret to say, borrowed from Shakespeare.” To which one can only rejoin: What a way to go!

Bibliography Goodstein, Laurie (1998): “Fast-Selling Thrillers Depict Prophetic View of Final Days”. New York Times, Oct. 4, A-1, 20. Neruda, Pablo (1990): Canto General. Ed. Enrico Mario Santí. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra. Rodríguez Monegal, Emir (1973): “One Hundred Years of Solitude: The Last Three Pages,” Books Abroad, Summer, Vol. 47, N° 3, 485489. Santí, Enrico Mario (1992): “Latinamericanism and Restitution,” Latin American Literary Review, Jul-Dec, Vol. 20, N° 40, 88-96. — (1998): “Cuba, Spain, and ‘98: Narcissism, Melancholy, and the Crisis of Historical Memory,” Cuban Studies 28. University of Pittsburgh Press. — (2005): Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vargas Llosa, Mario (1971): García Márquez: historia de un deicidio. Barcelona: Barral Editores.

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The Caribbean: Paradigm or Paradox? In memory of Antonio Benítez Rojo

It is only when the horror of annihilation rises to the level of consciousness that we are able to establish our own relationship with the dead. Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Theory of Ghosts”

I

accepted this invitation to lecture at Potsdam and this seminar on “The Caribbean as Paradigm” for three reasons. First, I wish to explore a series of questions and a bibliography that I, like you, find fascinating. Second, I wish to offer the topic as an intellectual challenge, asking questions rather than prescribing answers. And third, I wish to take the opportunity not only to reminisce about my late friend, the Cuban author Antonio Benítez Rojo, author of so many wonderful essays and works of fiction, but especially to discuss his speculative essay The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Antonio and I were friends, and in the years since his death I have not had the opportunity to pay him the homage he deserves. The time is now. My own essay is divided into three sections. The first aims to make general observations about the topic. The second is an extended review of the book I just mentioned, familiar to all of you;

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in it, I would like us to think through some problems I have raised regarding how that book has been read. The third, shortest section will be purely speculative and, as you will see, a possible overture to a grander topic. As a title, “The Caribbean as Paradigm” lends itself to several interpretations, but the premise implies a logic or argument of its own. It could mean four things: 1) That out of Caribbean culture and space there unfolds a paradigm that allows for an understanding not only of Caribbean realities but also contemporaneous ones beyond it. From there: 2) That the existence, appeal and perhaps prevalence of the Caribbean as paradigm dictate that the whole world is, in effect, turning Caribbean. The idea might strike us as ridiculous. But let us consider some facts that lend it credence. The first, as we know, is global warming: the whole world is turning tropical! Another more serious and important fact is the Caribbean diaspora, which circulates the area to other more developed regions of the globe, especially the North. Such massive displacement of populations as a result of underdevelopment wrought by globalization, is having the effect of forced migration not only of people but of their way of being, culture and worldview. Today people listen to reggae in Bristol, dance merengue in Bilbao, and drink Cuban rum in Potsdamplatz. That is why the relational paradigm of the Caribbean, central to the work of Edouard Glissant and later glossed by Chris Bongie, consists in a foundational encounter—violent, traumatic and total—that today appears inevitable. Benítez Rojo had good reason to claim in The Repeating Island that, with no stable or consistent culture of origin, the Caribbean holds the seed of a “postmodern perspective.” This perspective at once questions and demands an identity lost among the same forced migrations that construct it. 82

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3) Another example suggesting that the world is turning Caribbean would be the epiphenomena of postcolonialism and globalization. Years before we called it mestizaje; today we use creolization. I won’t wade into a discussion of these phenomena. But in saying this, I point to how Caribbean racial and cultural mestizaje, perhaps the world’s first melting pot and certainly its most renowned, now provides the world with a structural model—a paradigm—not only of sociability and survival (its positive aspects) but also of displacement and possible extinction (its negative aspects). Having said that, I might be so bold as to add the following consequence, per the same logic: 4) That the Caribbean as paradigm supposes that the world should be like the Caribbean, or that the world should take up the Caribbean’s paradigm. If the Caribbean has withstood 500 years of violence and depredation, both historical and ecological, by virtue of creolization’s assimilating mechanism, then it follows that the rest of the world, now living in a global economy, should learn from the Caribbean and assume or adopt its paradigm. Having listed these four choices, one might well ask, “What would be the advantages of this paradigm?” In response, I appeal to the work of Edouard Glissant and to two additional observations he makes. The first has to do with the well-worn topic of cultural and ethnic identity and what we might call the necessary deconstruction of its essentialism. As we know, Glissant was one of its most reliable critics, whether in disagreement with the racialism of his positions or against what he himself called “the trap of folklore” (Discours 231). Thus, when Glissant shifts theoretical attention to the concept of relation, he explains that “affirming that people are métissés, or that mestizaje is a value in and of itself, means deconstructing a racial category (mestizo) that would in itself be an intermediary between two pure extremes” (Discours, 231). To Glissant’s criticism of mestizaje as a mask of essentialism 83

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I would, however, add the following: the idea of creolization (or of mestizaje, hybridity or even of transculturation) has to do not so much with the fact that racial and cultural intermixing takes place in the Caribbean—in reality, this happens everywhere—, but rather, with the fact that we are now much more aware that it happens. Deliberate analysis of creolization allows us to appreciate a series of mechanisms, an ensemble of presences, perhaps even a web of conflicts and paradoxes, that do not merely affect human coexistence, but might even determine the planet’s survival. Yet a second observation derives from the preceding one: since creolization is a process and not an essence, it provides for the possibility of unforeseen and even unprecedented outcomes. Turning once more to Glissant: “As a reunion and synthesis of two differences, creolization rises up as a limitless mestizaje whose composition has been enlarged and whose consequences are truly unpredictable” (Discours 46). And herein lies a point of debate that ought to be better known between Glissant and thinkers such as Sédar-Senghor, or even Alejo Carpentier, who at one time insisted on “criollidad,” as opposed to creolization. If the older term identified and isolated an exclusive Caribbean essence as fundamental to its cultural and psychological identity, Glissant himself, in turn, signaled a paradigmatic process that, while certainly prevalent in the Caribbean, is nevertheless present in all cultures.

II I now turn from general observations about the Caribbean as paradigm toward a second topic having to do with one text in particular: The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. I shall refer to both the first, 1989 original, as well as its revised, 2011 edition. I would like to think that in selecting “The Caribbean as Paradigm” as the topic of this seminar, the organizers of this seminar did have in mind Benítez Rojo´s book, and for reasons that seem clear. I also think of the very use of paradigm, a concept that 84

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became so useful to historians of science after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), a book to which Benítez Rojo does refer on multiple occasions. It seems logical, then, to begin with a bit of elaboration on the applications of the concept of paradigm that appears in The Repeating Island. To be sure, I will not summarize the book´s familiar argument. Let us instead recall one of its most relevant sections, that of the “Bibliographic Notes on Chaos,” which is followed by the “Final Commentary” appearing as an Appendix to the first edition. It reads: “I believe ultimately that readings that admit the Caribbean are written within the three great paradigms of knowledge about which I have spoken: those of the Peoples of the Sea, those of modernity, and those of postmodernity” (1989, 311-12). As we can see, the passage does not speak of the “Caribbean as paradigm,” but to the “three paradigms” that the essay sets out to explore. Benítez Rojo makes this observation in the Appendix, as I have noted, and thus at the end of the book, where he anticipates possible objections to his reading owing to the eclecticism of his method and his desire to include as many works as possible in the paradigm (“My method of analysis does not invalidate other readings, but it does attempt to take them into account,” 311.) It is a matter of considerable interest that part of what appears as “Notes on Chaos” in the book’s first edition reappears in the prologue “To the Reader” in the later revised edition. This change, more than just editorial or rhetorical, attests to the author’s recognition of the importance of this section. And yet, in the revised edition of The Repeating Island the bibliographic repertoire on Chaos is retained at the back of the book, and most notably all the references to Kuhn and Lyotard (I refer to La condition postmoderne) on which Benítez Rojo bases his discussion of the concept of paradigm.) If Kuhn, for instance, “constitutes an excellent point of departure to assess the whimsical history of knowledge and, above all, the influence of arbitrary and irrational processes upon scientific discourse” (309,406), Lyotard’s book, by way of contrast, provides “valuable distinctions between narratives of legitimation 85

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of knowledge which are at their most useful in comparisons between modern and postmodern paradigms” (309, 406-407). The 2011 revised edition of The Repeating Island was also expanded. As we know, the original 1989 edition, translated into English in 1992, was comprised of three sections: “Society,” “The Writer,” and “The Book”. The revised and expanded edition, published posthumously, added two more sections of unequal length: “The Paradox” (three chapters) and “Rhythms” (two chapters). The addition of a new section on paradox should come as no surprise. The groundwork had been laid not just by the thread of Chaos that is interwoven throughout the whole essay, but also by the Appendix to the original edition. The end of the latter bears an explanation of how the subtitle, “The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective,” privileges the postmodern paradigm. For according to Benítez, the title captures best “the game of paradoxes and acentricity, of shifting and flowing; that is to say, [it] suggests possibilities that are in tune with those that define the Caribbean” (313). The same note extends the pertinence of the concept of paradox beyond its semantic usefulness to what might be called a metaphysical commentary on the Caribbean and its people. It refers, for instance, to “the inconclusive instability, the uncertainty that people from the Caribbean usually run into when they try to write about it, most of all when they suspect that some signifier they are using does not really belong to them, but instead makes perfect sense in a faraway language, in a sort of computer code there.” Benítez Rojo includes “postmodernity” itself as one such code. To my knowledge, the etymological and conceptual proximity between “paradigm” and “paradox,” the two keywords in our discussion, is not considered explicitly in the book’s endnotes, nor anywhere else in The Repeating Island. Both keywords deriving from Greek roots, “paradigm” and “paradox,” share the prefix para (alongside or beyond) but have different endings (deiknumi, to show, bring to light or make known; and doxa, opinion). And just as the book’s endnotes do not consider the similarities between these words, neither does the book anywhere consider the ways in which they stand in semantic opposition. “Paradigm” 86

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means pattern, model, example; “paradox” seeks to express something “contrary to opinion or expectation,” yet another proximate way of saying contrary to the pattern, model, or example. By this logic, “paradigm” and “paradox,” as words and concepts, are opposites. Recalling Kuhn, whose studies of the structure of scientific revolutions put the concept of the paradigm in vogue, we are reminded that changes in a paradigm (i.e., a “paradigm shift”) are never rational, and that they unfold in a way that resembles political revolutions. According to Kuhn, then, within any paradigmatic process in the sciences, paradoxes arise that defy the rationality of the model and end up replacing the reigning paradigm. To be sure, Kuhn does not use the word “paradox”; instead, he calls the contradictions “anomalies,” and yet such so-called anomalies are indeed paradoxes, contradictions, and in more than one sense. For, as Kuhn himself explains, when paradigms arise and end up competing, they render one another incommensurable. In other words, since there is no way reason can reconcile the two, the pair hold each other in a mutually paradoxical relation. At the heart of every paradigm are paradoxes that grow into crises where one paradigm gets replaced by another. All paradigms give birth to paradoxes, but without paradox, there is no paradigm. As a counterpart to these observations, which today seem clear enough, the Appendix to The Repeating Island explains, as we have seen, that of the three paradigms the essay deals with, the postmodern happens to be the most applicable to the Caribbean phenomenon (“the only one that suggests possibilities that in tune with those that define the Caribbean”). Hence the subtitle, “The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective,” which conveys that sense of “inconclusive instability, the uncertainty that everyone in the Caribbean should feel.” The metaphysical, perhaps even psychological and moral resonance of these words, grows louder as they recur in the revised edition, beginning with the prologue. As we see, the book begins by describing itself as “the ship’s log of a strictly personal voyage—my way of trying to grasp the Caribbean” (16). Moreover, though mentioning it only in passing, the prologue also adds a fourth, future paradigm to the three named 87

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before, “a super-syncretic or (super-mestizo) paradigm which includes aspects of the other three.” Benítez Rojo adds: I will not be the one to name this paradigm, because its method for interpreting the world does not apply exclusively to the Caribbean. It would also be useful to study the realities of other Atlantic territories—and even those of the Pacific and Indian Oceans—their respective economies, societies and cultures as constructed both by the colonial plantation and the phenomenon of creolization. These are the Peoples of the Sea. (16)

Thus, from this long remark we are given to understand that the so-called “fourth paradigm” would not be exclusive to the Caribbean but would instead appear anywhere the phenomena of the plantation and creolization were found. One might even say that this fourth paradigm would be a trans-colonial one. It is in the final paragraph of the prologue, however, where Benítez Rojo steers this paradigm toward the metaphysical, tinging it with sadness along the way: “If I speak of a fourth paradigm it is because my spirit feels like a foreigner in each of the previous three” (16).

III We would not be mistaken to observe that The Repeating Island’s textual evolution, from its original edition to the revised and enlarged posthumous one, exemplifies, and even dramatizes, the same structure of scientific revolution identified by Kuhn in the history of science. That is, slowly, and perhaps strangely, paradigm gives way to paradox, as though the paradoxes and anomalies of the Caribbean contaminated its paradigm (more accurately: paradigms, in the plural, for, as we have seen, there are three.) The result, we have noted, is a so-called fourth paradigm. I say so-called because for the rest of this essay I must interrogate whether this is truly a fourth paradigm, or something else. In any case, what starts as an “unsolvable paradox” begins over time to take the shape of

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a fourth, personalized paradigm (“super-syncretic or super-mestizo”) that encompasses the other three. Although I point out how out the emergence of a paradox running parallel to, or within, the three-part paradigm gives rise to a fourth, trans-areal, or trans-regional, paradigm, I certainly do not propose that what I call the process of contamination was Benítez Rojo’s conscious intent. That is, the gradual proliferation of this concept is not some strategy for the exposition of an idea. Neither do I believe it is a controlled or systemic revision of the first edition of The Repeating Island. It results, rather, from a cumulative, inconsistent, seemingly unconscious process. I also by no means believe that this proliferation of paradox is a mark of incompetence on the author’s part. On the contrary, I would say this facet of The Repeating Island’s textual evolution has the end-effect of dramatizing—even embodying—the very same thesis the book proposes: the lack of order and control. That is, paradox underscores how any attempt to subjugate the Caribbean in the domain of theory is invariably met with Chaos. It is important to note that the revised edition of The Repeating Island situates paradox above, at least certainly alongside, paradigm, by adding the fourth section appropriately titled “The Paradox.” Here the works of Carpentier and García Márquez are discussed, as well as the concept of Carnival, all under the same heading. If, on the one hand, Benítez Rojo’s rereading of Carpentier leads him to define the Caribbean as “a paradoxical literature,” on the other hand his rereading of García Márquez (by way of Eréndira, a character whose story he analyzes) leads him to remark that “the Caribbean author always feels a lack because the language and literary tradition of the West are inadequate . . .” and therefore, “this dense paradox, which the Caribbean is part of, always eludes that tradition” (331). To the chapter that discusses Carnival, possibly the book’s most ambitious, he also adds an expert reading of the Carnivalesque performance in works by Carpentier, Guillén, Walcott, and Brathwaite, authors who “speak of the paradoxical or, more concretely, of a desire to create an atemporal space where paradox is the rule and not the exception” (353). 89

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Complementing the added fourth part’s discussion on paradoxes is a fifth and final chapter entitled “Rhythms.” At first blush, such rounding out of paradox along with the concept of rhythm might well seem arbitrary, perhaps even absurd, but only if we forget that the introduction to The Repeating Island begins precisely by speculating about the role of rhythm in the Caribbean—a rhythm heard not just in the self-evident case of music (one important facet of Caribbean culture if there be one.) Rhythm happens to be the substance, as it were, of the narrative form that Benítez, citing Lyotard—who found himself in the same condition postmoderne— associates with the social practice, the stories, of the Peoples of the Sea, both the Mediterranean and Caribbean. As a result, narrative form and rhythm, which one could call pre-modern, appear quite distinct from the legitimation story of the West, whether modern or pre-modern, which in turn derives not from rhythm but from a “long process of inquiry, verification and reflection” (173, 198).

IV As we approach the end of this essay, you might think that in navigating the Caribbean paradigm I have gone too far off-course. Nevertheless, after analyzing the logic behind The Repeating Island’s revisions, we find two themes—paradox and rhythm—that allow us to focus upon what I term the paradigm’s “deep structure.” Alluding to this concept from linguistics—deep structure—allows me to formulate a question in the simplest terms: By focusing on paradox and rhythm, do we not highlight the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of describing the Caribbean paradigm in purely linguistic terms? Is there in fact an adequate language—or, more precisely, a conceptual or theoretical framework—that can articulate this paradigm? Faced with the prodigious reality of the Caribbean (its ontological excess, so to speak), with its questioning and confrontation of the West’s logical and epistemic system—right down to the ambivalence over how to name this phenomenon— the Caribbean (singular), or The Antilles (plural)—would there be 90

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a way to reduce the Caribbean paradigm to a single name without betraying its exceptional nature?1 The epistemological challenges of theorizing the Caribbean, the basis of such studies as Benítez’s The Repeating Island, or Glissant’s Le Discours Antillais, might mirror those that arise in other fields of knowledge that draw heavily on materialism, such as socalled Cultural Studies. For if, as is the case of the textual evolution of The Repeating Island, the Caribbean paradigm gives way to the primacy of paradox, ultimately based on Chaos theory (“a chaos that returns, a detour without direction, a continuous flow of paradoxes,” xiv, 30), it is because the nature of the phenomenon itself cannot be comprehended, (neither grasped nor encompassed) by modes of interpretation that depend on the stability of reason. That is, a theoretical approach is defeated by the instability and turbulence of its object of study. That is why both Benítez Rojo and Glissant, to name only two scholars who attempt to theorize the Caribbean, resort to notions of Chaos and relation, respectively. The semantic instability of the terms they come up with belies, in turn, the conceptual instability of the Caribbean. In a revealing passage from Poétique de la Relation, Glissant, for his part, acknowledges those two concepts at work, albeit without referring to (perhaps not even knowing about) the work of Benítez Rojo. In the middle of a section on “Relativity and Chaos,” for instance, Glissant speaks of the need for a “science of inquiry” that would take up the themes “of dynamics, relation, chaos—of that which, being fluid and variable, it is also necessarily uncertain (that is, unknowable), and yet, at once, fundamental and, if it is to be found, full of invariances.” Glissant goes on to add that, “Within understanding [l’entendue], the science of Chaos shakes loose from the powerful grip of the linear, recognizing indeterminacy as an analyzable fact and the accident as measurable.”

1



Spanish contrasts the Caribbean (el Caribe) with the Antilles (las Antillas) not only by number, but also by gender. 91

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In conclusion, all of this leads me to speculate about the surprising parallels between the “science of inquiry,” as shared by Benítez Rojo and Glissant, and “spectral criticism.” Indeed, both science and criticism reject material linearity in favor of a relational, turbulent, destabilizing speculation—a spectralization that is chaotic. In this case, the spectral is not, as the term might suggest, about reading ghost stories or gothic novels; it is, rather, about subjecting common, everyday reality to a view that admits the ghostly, the phantasmatic, or, quite simply, destabilization. According to one of the primary exponents of spectral criticism, whose approach combines psychoanalysis, Marxism and trauma studies, “social life and its cultural textuality, regardless of how material they may seem, are made up as much by absence as by presence, and the past assumes the form of apparitions that can neither be interpellated nor dismissed” (Punter 262). In effect, spectral criticism, in a way not so different from the “science” we have applied to the Caribbean, assumes a paradoxical substrate in our relation to all texts, an undecidable bottom layer upon which all reading rests. Above all, spectral criticism reinvokes a communion with the dead, a communion that is both frightening and alluring. For if, as Octavio Paz puts it in a memorable prose poem, “the past is a present that never stops passing,” (¿Aguila o sol?), it is because the unconscious acts as an archive where cumulative sensations are not on the surface, and yet cannot be erased from it either. Such an unconscious is of course not just personal or subjective, but rather collective, historical, and thus the subject of sudden apparitions, like the revenant or specter, whether conjured up by psychoanalytic transference or by the slings and arrows of personal and collective fortune. Freud would often draw parallels between Rome and the unconscious: the Eternal City as storehouse of ruins and psychic energy. As he would say, “Nothing which has existed disappears, and the old phases of development continue to exist alongside the new” (cited Punter 263). One could say something similar, I would argue, about the Caribbean: its history, with all its moral and ­ecological violence, endures in its culture and in the storehouse of its soul. Only, it endures is in the form of a paradox, or chaos: 92

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the spectral. In 1969, writing an early notion about the Caribbean, Glissant himself observed: “This reality is here, in essence: dense (written in acts) but endangered (not written in consciousness). The dream is alive but not obvious” (Discours 221). Dense but endangered, alive but not obvious. Suffice it to say: virtual and spectral, chaotic and fractal. Such a spectral (read chaotic) reading of the Caribbean would allow us to bring seemingly irreconcilable phenomena—hurricanes, pirate ship mirages, recurrent political revolutions, the history of slavery—within a single theoretical framework. It is no coincidence that a famous poem by Nicolás Guillén harks of “shadows that I alone see,” nor that Wilson Harris’ most recent novel (2007) be titled The Ghost of Memory. Could the fourth paradigm alluded to by Benítez Rojo be like the fourth, or perhaps fifth, dimension: time itself, or times, including those of “el Más Allá?” If paradox is the paradigm of the Caribbean, then could its ghosts be the consciousness of trauma? And if we truly wish to open the door to the Caribbean’s paradoxical, chaotic nature, mustn’t we try to find the language that invites it, and us, within?

Works Cited Benítez Rojo, Antonio. La isla que se repite. El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1989. (Rev. ed., San Juan, P.R.: Editorial Plaza Mayor, 2010). Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles. The Creole Identities of Post-Colonial Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998. Camayd-Freixas, Erik. “El fractal de Mandelbrot. Del travestismo al Caos: Fuentes del nuevo realismo aleatorio de Antonio Benítez Rojo, Mujer en traje de batalla”, Caribe, 10.1 (2007), 9-47. Glissant, Edouard. Poétique de la Relation. Poétique III. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Discours antillais. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981. Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Harris, Wilson. The Ghost of Memory. 2007. London: Faber and Faber, 2007 93

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Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: UP Chicago, 1962. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. La Condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979. Paz, Octavio. ¿Aguila o sol? Mexico City: Tezontle, 1951. Punter, David. “Spectral Criticism”, in Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002. Rogozinski, Jan. A Brief History of the Caribbean. From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present. New York: Meridian, 1992.

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Latinamericanism and Restitution Faut-il déraisonner pour être généreux? R. Aron No me defiendas, compay. a Cuban guajiro

A

mode of discourse and a mode of interpretation. Nothing in our critical horizon seems worth more meditation. And yet, is this what the LALR editors want from me to celebrate their journal? I wish I could remind them of yet another thing: their role as “translators” of one culture into another? Worth a try? Can one articulate the link between “Latinamericanism” and “restitution,” discourse and an interpretion? But I can only write fragments: spectacle of an impossibility.

*** My subject, Latinamericanism, is not so much Latin America, interesting as that is, as our image of it. Is this original? Probably not. One could even say that by invoking the discourse of Latinamericanism I am merely restating one of the fundamental principles underlying all knowledge regarding Latin America, perhaps regarding the entire so-called Third World-namely, the inmixture of a Western language and imagination with physical and c­ ultural 95

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realities that are only marginally Western. Indeed, the paradox of Latin American ontology is constituted by Western languages and cultures that do not fully encompass it. Yet despite these truisms, the past five hundred years has paid little attention to Latin America as discourse, that is, as an imaginary construct the West has built for its own interested use, often at the expense of the realities that give rise to it. We certainly know many facts about Latin America, but we know little, or at least much less, about the uses to which the West puts those facts in the construction of an interested image, an image often at odds with the reality from which those facts are derived. And yet, were we to pay attention to the discourse about Latin America, we might begin to take hold of a number of images, issues, stereotypes, clichés, idées fixes-in short, the representations and unquestioned habits of mind that we unconsciously practice in our everyday dealings with it, and· especially those we repeatedly encounter in the classrooms of U.S. colleges and universities.

*** We can call it, for lack of a better name, “poetics of restitution.” Its actual workings could be found in what Geoffrey Hartman called, in an essay justly titled “Criticism and Restitution,” “the Philomela project (the restoration of voice to mute classes of people).” For Hartman at least, such a project suggested that “the process of restitution (of righting wrongs) seems endless,” as we face retrieving only fragments of the historical record and therefore condemning historians and critics to construct what he calls “legal fictions,” “to invent, that is, a persona for absent presences.” Hartman would protest, in the same essay, the potentially negative social effects of our current critical climate, and thereby concluded that “recognition is the key to restitution” because “the end is not righting wrongs as such (there may be several rights in conflict),” but rather what he called “a new sense of respect that is spiritually as well as politically effective.”

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I remain skeptical of Hartman’s general conclusions-the fragmentation of historical records may simply be a given of our alienated cultural legacy. But I would still like to take a cue from him by inquiring into the nature of the “legal fictions” to which he refers. I focus, instead, on the compensatory hermeneutics of restitution as a critical and cultural practice and ask, of this instance: precisely what sort of persona do we end up constructing in the process of inventing such “absent presences”? My hypothesis is that, as a critical practice, restitution is supplementary in character-in compensating for a previous lack, it exceeds rather than simply restores the original. That is, we never get back what we originally lost.

*** Latinamericanism, as concept and term, owes much to a wellknown book, Orientalism, in which Edward Said studied the ways in which the imperial West built up a discourse to deal with-that is, to dominate, restructure, and have authority over-the Orient. Said’s inspiration, in turn, was Michel Foucault, whose own work circulated the notion of discourse. Discourse, for Foucault, is a body of texts and traditions whose sheer cumulative material weight gives shape not only to knowledge of a given reality, but power over it. That is, through discourse we can reveal the relationship between knowledge and power. Like Orientalism, then, Latinamericanism would identify the corporate institution that frames both a systematic discipline-we can in fact choose ­Latinamericanism (or “Latin American Studies”) as a college major as well as a professional career—and the whole network of political, economic, and imaginary interests that underlie that discipline. To focus on the status of each as discourses would mean to deal principally with their own internal consistencies, not with their supposed ­correspondence to given cultural or geographic realities. In other words, both Orientalism and Latinamericanism are bodies of knowledge and cumulative layers of language that hold power, yet exist beyond or despite the real Orient, the real Latin 97

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America. Last and most important is the pointed impact of such a discourse on the creation of a hierarchical perception of the West in relation to the Orient and Latin America. For, like Orientalism, Latinamericanism is never far from the collective notion that identifies Europe, and by extension the U.S., as a superior culture in comparison with non­European peoples and cultures. Like the Orient, Latin America is there to be charted, deciphered, understood, remade, and ultimately controlled by latinamericanists, that is, implicitly or at least positionally superior Western Europeans who never lose the upper hand. What creates and preserves that upper hand is none other than Latinamericanism, the discourse guaranteeing a representation of Latin America that satisfies those hierarchical requirements, quite apart from whether it has anything to do with a real historical existence.

*** It is in biblical versions that we can identify most clearly the peculiar commutative logic that governs restitution as a broad practice. Hebraic law points to two elements in any act of theft or damage: one, there is an imbalance of justice caused by the act; and two, there is guilt of the crime incurred by its performance. Restitution of what was taken remedies the inequity; punishment, the exaction of more than was taken, is to make amends for the guilt of the crime, that is, an action that gives rise to a liability. As a practice, restitution assumes an accrued interest or surplus value meant to compensate symbolically for the transgression committed against the system of justice. As such, restitution always involves some form of expiation; indeed, if it is to restitute, and not simply restore, then the punishment must exceed the crime. The Bible is full of such moments. “If what he stole is found alive in his possession, be it an ox, an ass or a sheep, he shall restore two animals for each stolen” (Ex 22:3). “Behold, Lord, I give one-half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold” (Luke 19:5). As a means 98

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of symbolic exchange, then, restitution exacts more than what was originally taken away. If so, then we can never exact what was originally lost. For better or worse, restitution returns more of the same—perhaps, even, something else altogether.

*** Pervasive Latinamericanism, beginning with its very name. Would it surprise anyone to learn that the term “Latin America”(Spanish America Latina) is not Latin American? Like the Orient, which can only be perceived from the vantage point of an Occident or West, Latin America can be perceived from outside, as if condemned to be repeatedly baptized by a colonizer. Travelling through Latin America one discovers that hardly anyone uses, except in solemn or bureaucratic occasions, the Spanish or Portuguese America Latina or Latinoamérica, terms that sound rarefied. In so-called Latin American countries people do not call themselves latinoamericano/a/s, which sounds fake, and instead use national designations: mexicano, peruana, argentino, cubana, brasileiro, and so forth, to describe both themselves and others like them. That in the U.S. and Europe we do use the term constantly, sometimes to the exclusion of any other, is a symptom that demands reflection. Neither did the Spaniards or Portuguese, for that matter, ever use the term América Latina to describe their colonies; they used instead the misnomer “Indias,” or the totalizing “Nuevo Mundo”. After 1810, once the former colonies became independent, Spain resorted to several clever alternatives, like “Hispano América” or “Iberoamérica,” seeking somehow to preserve a claim. Even Franco, ever the resourceful gallego, devised a new name for the spirit that bound Spain to its former colonies. He called it Hispanidad in which racist overtones resonate all too loudly.

*** 99

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Telling instances of restitution’s symbolic logic can be found, though exercised with subtle differences, in actual critical practice, particularly in philology, the one discipline or method where the term restitution is most often used, though significantly as a metaphor for the procedures of textual authentication-as in the formal restitution of an original manuscript, or in discussions of authenticity and attribution of authorship. Such use is guaranteed by the general restorative aims of the philological enterprise, philology being, in Guillaume Budé’s classic definition, “a means of revival and restoration.” Since the Renaissance, as is well known, philology has been an instrument for the revival of learning and, as a critical practice, the restoration of ancient meanings deemed to be true. Indeed, as part of a humanist enterprise, philology is directed at disengaging the meaning of a text, deemed a function of its linguistic structure and historical context, from the truth of a text, a function of its interpretation and therefore subject to readers’ changing ideological needs. Tzvetan Todorov, who discussed the role of symbolism in philological interpretation, drew usefully such a distinction by putting these two polar terms (meaning/truth) on a scale, on the former of whose sides “there is truth, knowledge, reason, philosophy, science,” while on the latter there is “faith, effect on the receiver, and, as we say today, ideology.” While Todorov views a search for meaning to be the basis of scientific discourse, “in which the representative function dominates,” he views the search for truth, dominated by what he calls the impressive function, as the basis of ideological discourse. One need not extend further the implications of such humanist disengagement to realize that what I call the surplus logic of any restitutive practice sets in the moment the quest for truth exceeds meaning in any interpretation. One could assert, of course, that all interpretation involves some form of restitution-for example, when it attempts to restore in rational, discursive terms the theme or message displaced by the text’s figurative language. Yet Todorov ‘s distinction does allow us to identify how certain forms of interpretation, such as the explicitly moral or ideological, strain the 100

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tension between meaning and truth to tilt the balance, so to speak, in the latter’s favor and render a discursive message that exceeds the text’s figurality. Thus, philology would seem to enact the one constant law in the surplus economy of restitution. As in any litigation the punishment exceeds the crime, so in interpretation truth exceeds meaning. Philology is concerned in theory with restoration, but in fact deals with restitution; “revival and restoration” is its ethical justification, its ideology, but restitution is its actual practice­giving back something other, or more than, what it purports to restore. And so, if it is true that inside every philologist lies a closet patriot, then it can also be said that, for that patriot, a will to restitution forms part of his or her unconscious agenda.

*** Of course, I can make no claim to an exhaustive inquiry into the various names by which the New World has been known for the last five hundred years. (Incredibly perhaps, there exists no such historical study-even in these well-funded days of Quinto (or Sexto) centenario-a lack which itself points to the pervasiveness of Latinamericanist discourse: it remains unidentified because it goes unnamed.) As far as· I have been able to ascertain, the term “Latin America” is itself of relatively recent vintage. It dates, it seems, from the early nineteenth century and originates, of all places, in France, to designate, with the expression les états latines de l’Amérique, the French colonies of Québec and Louisiana. Its French fortune caught on when in 1836, in a book about his travels in the U.S., Michel Chevalier, a little-known French journalist and follower of Saint Simon, opposed a “Catholic and Latin” South America to “Protestant Anglo-Saxon” North America. Typical of his time, Chevalier was guided by the Romantic historicist penchant for national definitions. Thus, there were “Latin” and “Saxon” cultures, as there were “Germanic,” “Slavic,” and so forth. From Chevalier, whose book was a best-seller, following on the heels of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, “Amérique 101

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latine” appears to have been picked up twenty-five years later by José María Torres Caicedo, a Colombian writer who lived in Paris. In Unión latinoamericana, (Paris, 1865), Torres Caicedo appears to have been the first to propose, reacting in part against the threat of U.S. “Manifest Destiny,” a kind of proto-OAS organization of (Latin)American states from which the U.S. would be pointedly excluded, since it did not partake of a requisite “latinity.” But the fact that Torres Caicedo’s Latin American Union never quite made it to the New World (its only offices remained in Paris and Rome) demonstrates, once again, the role that an exterior designation, a naming from the outside, plays in the formation and diffusion of Latinamericanism as an effective discourse. Efforts like Torres Caicedo’s, to be echoed a few years later in José Martí’s call to “Nuestra América,” (1891) (itself written in New York) therefore demonstrate a renewed anxiety to supplement with an overarching fiction what Simón Bolívar had perceived, at the origin of so-called Latin American independence, to be the fundamental lack at the core of so-called “Latin America.”

*** Restitution: our latest zealous drives toward vindications of the Other. Any protracted discussion of the institutional implications of this insight would take us far afield. Suffice it to say that be they called academic exoticism, colonial tolerance, or plain tokenism, benign forms of restitution usually have one thing in common: when unchecked, they subordinate the Other to the Self’s salvational project. Rather than recognize the Other’s stubborn difference­which would lead to a further humbling recognition of the Other’s equality, or perhaps, superiority-our restitutions pigeonhole the Other within prescribed institutional roles that are designed to fit the Self’s mystified self-righteousness. They claim to work on behalf of the Other, but they work to ease the Self’s historical or moral conscience.

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*** “For more than three centuries,” wrote Octavio Paz, “the word ‘American’ designated a man who was defined not by what he had but by what he would do. A person who has no past, only a future, is a person with little reality. Americans: men of little reality, men of little weight Our name condemns us to being the project of a foreign consciousness: European consciousness.” We are all familiar, of course, with the aesthetic possibilities of being, as Paz says, “the project of a foreign consciousness.” Works like those of Jorge Luis Borges’s, not to mention Paz’s own, are but systematic flowerings of that utopian seed. Yet Paz’s reformulation leaves unresolved the distortive consequences of such a project. What is good food for literature may yet be poison for history, and both Borges and Paz themselves were the first to criticize the condescension of a foreign consciousness whose project they would appear to embody. When in 1929, in an essay on Whitman, Borges complained that “the people of the diverse Americas remain so out of reach that we hardly know each other by reference, counted only by Europe,” he thereby linked the fragmentation of which Bolívar bitterly complained to an alleged Western superiority. Implicitly, then, Borges identified Latinamericanism as the only way out of such fragmentation, yet located its ironic source in Europe, rather than in “the diverse Americas.” By thus identifying, along with Borges and Paz, Latinamericanism as a mode of Western domination, I may seem simply to advocate the customary defense of a weak and fragmented Latin America before a powerful discursive alliance. In this I would appear to be following the stand favored by most Liberal Latinamericanists, both in Europe and the U.S., whose implicit sympathy for the material plight of the people in whose country they do research provides moral justification of their work. I am not certain, however, that such sympathy by itself would be enough to bypass the snares of a discourse as entrenched as Latinamericanism, or that by simply expressing lofty platitudes a Liberal White European could neutralize the paternalism implicit in his/her perception of so-called Latinamericans. In this my 103

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colleagues remind me all too often of Francisco de Vitoria’s arguments, during the 16th century Salamanca debates on enslavement of the native Indian population, not as the natural right against enslavement, but as the Christian precept of charity... I tend, rather, to think the opposite. The Liberal rhetoric of sympathy and salvation-or, to call it by the names used today, diversity and multiculturalism—often couched in mindless platitudes, is but one more, ever so-powerful turn in the attempt to position Europeans in a superior relation to non-European peoples and cultures. Such noble efforts reinforce rather than dispel the oppressive discourse of Latinamericanism. For to paraphrase the late Carlos Rangel, if we once had a “noble savage,” why then not have now a “noble revolutionary”?

*** All great writers make a paradoxical discovery, usually toward the end of their careers-namely, that the historical and existential self, to whose knowledge that career was largely devoted, disperses into fragments each time the writer sets pen to paper. The writer knows by then that historical, existential, and even judicial claims will eventually be made to compensate for that dispersal. But she also knows that all those well-intentioned claims, like her own earlier attempts at self-knowledge, will remain hypothetical, subject to stubbornly imaginary evidence. Not that it should simply be a matter of avoiding restitution, for it clearly cannot be, short of obliterating the writer’s record­-Kafka’s mercifully unfulfilled wish. The writer knows that she will be misunderstood, her works misread. But as such late stage all that remains is to provide a critique of restitution, to demystify and set limits to its claims, along with comforting the reader’s despair at the inevitability of misunderstanding.

*** 104

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How aware are latinamericanists, in the U.S. or Europe, of our complicity with the discourse that underlies our discipline is a question that we may not be able to answer right away, but that remains of deep concern. I wish I were able to report that I perceive in Latin American Studies-particularly that terra incognita called the Social Sciences-the exemplary self-questioning that is normal in the physical or hard sciences, or that lately has been the stuff of such healthy research in fields like cultural anthropology (the work of James Clifford, for example). Instead, I perceive the same provincialism that half a century ago Florestan Fernandes, a Brazilian sociologist, complained about U.S. latinamericanists. He wrote, all-too-prophetically: These scholars lack both information and understanding about the Latin American scene, and they are excessively preoccupied with the academic status of Latin American studies in United States university circles... The intellectual effort exerted by Latin American countries to develop the teaching and application of the social sciences, as well as research in this field, is usually not fully or thoroughly described, as if this effort were a marginal activity of no great value or of no great importance The margin between this and an active kind of ‘scientific colonialism’ is a narrow one.

I also wish I had prescriptions for this malady. I have none except perhaps a plea for an archeology of the discourse I have called Latinamericanism. It remains a daunting task, nothing less than stripping ourselves bare of the pretense to superiority that our society reinforces at every turn through various means, including the media. Yet a worse evil still may be not so much our need for constant comparison, as the unwitting creation of Latin America as a traumatized culture, a monster we behold for our delight, but that, like all true monsters, exists only in our minds.

***

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Y diversa de mí misma entre vuestras plumas ando no como soy, sino como quisísteis imaginarlo. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Bibliography Chevalier, Michel. Lettres sur l’Amérique du Nord. Paris: Gosselin et Cie, 1836. Fernandes, Florestan. “Patrones de dominación externa en América Latina,” Revista mexicana de Sociología, Vol. 32, No. 6 (1970), 14-39. Hartman, Geoffrey, “The Philomela Project,” in Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars. Cambridge, Mass: HarvardUP, 1991. Todorov, Tzvetan. Theories of the Symbol, Tr. Catherine Porter. Minneapolis, MN: UP of Minnesota, 1982. Torres Caicedo, José María. Colonisation des Deux Amériques. Paris: Veuve Bouchard-Huzard, 1868.

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Deaf Dialogues: Literary and Cultural Studies

M

y title alludes awkwardly to the Spanish “diálogo de sordos.” Yet, contrary to what the subtitle claims, I do not intend to pit Literature against Culture in what strikes me as a fruitless debate. I would simply like to share some reflections about this dialogue, or perhaps the lack of its necessity, between literary and cultural studies and how that lack affects everything we do. I also do not pretend any kind of theoretical sophistication. I merely bring to the table thirty years’ experience teaching Spanish American language and literature, plus snippets of what we used to call “literary theory.” I have thought it best for this exchange, on the contrary, to raze the ground, and address the issue with a common-sense, or at least a common-reader approach, that, in some respects, waxes autobiographical. I am old enough to remember a time when this sort of debate, would have been moot. We studied Literature and there was no such thing as Cultural Studies. We studied novels, poetry, the essay, and drama, both classical and modern. Culture, like a kind of polish, was something you acquired on the way; some of us were simply more cultured. There was also something called the Canon, or Great Books, in the form of immutable reading lists that graduate students were expected to know and reflect upon. We also know that beginning in the 1960’s, two changes took place: critical theory and multi or trans-disciplinary work. Theory expanded method beyond formalism; the addition of other disciplines

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beyond literature expanded not only method, modes of inquiry and interpretation; it also changed objects of study. At first, the impact of theory, beginning with Structuralism, seemed justified and almost natural. If literature was formalized language, what better way to study it rigorously than linguistic models, or indeed as manifestations of something intrinsic to literature, which we then called literariness? In turn, post-structuralism, in its various trans-disciplinary forms, took those linguistic models and stood them on their head, particularly as fields like Philosophy and the History of Ideas—Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes are some of the tutelary names that come to mind—saw literature as one of a number of discourses at play in a far vaster field of knowledge. It would not be wrong to add, however, that all three of those important figures—Barthes, Derrida and Foucault, each in his own way—also viewed literature as a privileged discourse, the study of which, or else the reflection upon which, could alert us to unseen modes of logic and power. Hence the names scattered throughout their ponderous reflections: Cervantes, Racine, Edgar Allan Poe, Mallarmé, Borges. It would therefore be too simple, I think, to view their common impact as a reduction of literature to mere discourse, or as one more praxis among others. I would argue, instead, that their common work, theirs and that of a number of other towering figures who date from that post-structuralist moment, constitutes, if only implicitly, a defense of literature—a defense of the craft, study, and practice of literary art. The rise of Cultural Studies, nationally and globally, presents us, I think, with a different history, a different set of coordinates, and of course different challenges. To quote from a current prestigious source, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism: What most readily distinguished cultural studies from mainline literary studies were new and different objects of study and modes of inquiry. In addition, cultural studies both reflected and propounded a cultural politics opposed to the belletrism and formalism c­ haracteristic 108

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of Anglophone academic literary studies during the early cold war period. Typically, adherents of cultural studies conceived themselves— and were conceived by others—as being in opposition to the reigning establishment of university disciplines and values.

In the case of the particular impact that Cultural Studies has had upon Hispanic Studies, objects of study, not to mention cultural politics, became quickly evident by way of the critical attention paid to the heritage of colonialism—that is, our own take on the postcolonial paradigm. It also became evident in the impact of our curriculum upon the growing Hispanic college student population, whose own ethnicity, social mores and indeed culture, also became worthy, and with all good reason, of study and attention. I have of course no interest in criticizing the new Cultural Studies paradigm, either the expansion of the range of object of study, which I share, or the interests of that rising U.S. Hispanic population, to which I happen to belong. But I do wish to call attention, in the passage from the Hopkins Guide, to the apparently disparaging reference to the “belletrism” and formalism against which, and accordingly, the Cultural Studies paradigm seemingly arose. The same passage of the Hopkins Guide refers further to a new focus against aesthetic masterpieces of canonized high literature, as opposed to “the claims of low, popular, and mass cultures,” a postmodern context in which, according to the Guide’s anonymous authors, literature becomes reframed as a communal practice or document with social, historical, and political roots. That is, literature is not treated as an autonomous aesthetic icon separable from its conditions of production, distribution, and consumption. Quite the contrary. Thus, if this argument is to be understood correctly, one important justification for the rise of the Cultural Studies paradigm within a postmodern context would be its opposition to the perceived elitism of so-called “mainline literary studies,” elsewhere called belletrism, formalism and “aesthetic masterpieces of high literature”—that is, an alleged ivory tower of hermeneutics and interpretation represented ideally by formalism and thus heir to a similarly alleged exclusionary politics. Within this scenario, 109

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formalism as a critical practice was swept away by a rising tide of social and political forces which Cultural Studies represents. Leaving aside, for the moment, whether in fact there ever was such an ivory tower of interpretation, the question could be raised, instead, whether such justification may simply serve as a convenient strawman in the dialectics of scholarship. Witness, for example, the American New Critics, who themselves espoused an ethics of poetic knowledge, or the Russian Formalists, who once claimed they were the true heirs to the Bolshevik Revolution. And yet I prefer to focus on the terms upon which such justification revolves—namely, that the exclusionary nature of aesthetics and, by extension, of “high literature,” is itself exclusionary. That is, a Cultural Studies term would seem to exclude aesthetics, any form of art, any form of literariness, from the range of objects of study that its allegedly inclusionary umbrella would shelter. Such inclusion, it would appear, triggers other perhaps subtler forms of exclusion. One far starker version of the same implicit justification of the paradigm appears in the definition of Cultural Studies that one can find in a far more popular, or at least less illustrious, scholarly source. I refer of course to everyone’s favorite: Wikipedia: Cultural studies is an academic field which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender.

I hasten to point out the obvious: nowhere in this long list of methods or objects of study is there any reference to aesthetics, or indeed to literature. (Art history and literary theory are not, clearly, the equivalents of my reference.) And yet the Wikipedia entry has at least the added advantage of articulating what may strike us as the intimidating nature of Cultural Studies as a field of scholarship. According to this definition at least, the specialty

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must combine expertise in so many areas as to make it unrealistic, impractical, and, in a strangely paradoxical sense, idealistic—that is, non­materialist. For how could one possibly expect students, indeed how could we expect ourselves, to know so much about so many subjects and in such detail, and yet produce responsible scholarship or teaching? One imagines of course, that in our age of retrenchment, such academic one-person bands would be very much in demand, a circumstance that explains circuitously the strange relevance of the Wikipedia entry. My broad point, then, concerns the apparent exclusion of aesthetics, art and, by extension, of literature from the prevailing and allegedly inclusionary concept and practice of Cultural Studies. The exclusion seems to be especially worrisome when we consider that since the 18th century, at least, aesthetics and art have provided the foundation of what we in the West consider to be Culture. Indeed, the conceptual binary “arts and culture” remains today a staple of our language and social life, as made evident by the daily reminder of the Arts and Entertainment sections in our newspapers. Which then leaves us with the necessary though potentially embarrassing question: what exactly is the status of culture within Cultural Studies? A number of years ago, in Ciphers of History (2005), a collection of some of my essays, I raised a different though related question: what exactly is the status of context in Cultural Studies? I raised it then and expand it today with this later question because back then it seemed to me that, protestations to the contrary, too often in the rush to get the theory right, there exists a tendency in scholarship to relegate two things: 1) the crucial importance of context; and 2) what Borges once called “the halting and rudimentary art of reading.” Teaching how to read contexts along with texts, it seems to me, has been and is the fundamental practice of our profession. And yet today, relegating or repressing reading, to quote here a passage from that earlier book: becomes most evident in cross-cultural analysis, as in the treatment of Hispanic texts that are taught and interpreted in the Western 111

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a­ cademy with an eye towards an understanding we call ‘theoretical’, or indeed ‘cultural,’ but which ends up blinded to textual, particularity. While concern for culture is most often upheld by a moral call to retrieve archives far removed from the present, the uninformed, abstract, de-historicized ways in which any such retrievals often take place violate the integrity of particular texts that are part of what we call the archive of the Other . . . and the archive of the Other’s culture, both of which require concrete material study and interpretation. I believe strongly that it is only through context that the Other’s archive can be known; it is only through such concrete knowledge that the Other can be fully respected.1

My general point about contexts and reading can safely be transposed onto what I believe is the unfortunate exclusion of aesthetics and art from the practice of Cultural Studies. I have often found it ironic that one of the hottest topics in Cultural Studies today should be Museum Studies (one of the objects, incidentally, listed in the Wikipedia entry): the study of museums as institutions, memory machines and power structures. And yet, the cumulative contents of those same museums, and particularly of art museums—whose discourse we are all eager to study—seldom if ever become part of that object lesson. One could of course argue that it is not part of that lesson simply because the museum and its contents happen to have different objects: the contents—in this case, the works of art—ought to be studied more appropriately by art historians, rather than by scholars of Cultural Studies. And yet, just as art historians ought to account for the challenge that the leveling method of Cultural Studies proposes, so, too, should Cultural Studies scholars learn, as a way of preserving the museum’s archive, the aesthetic culture of those same contents. The same trenchant critique could be leveled, I think, at artists—be they visual, musical, and verbal—who, in my experience at least, tend often to dismiss the most enlightened work in Cultural Studies as either “academic” or ideological.

1



See (Santí: 2005, 6). 112

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Writing in a context far different from ours, the British novelist C.P. Snow, in the Middle Ages of the mid-20th century, once described “two cultures,” the Humanities and Science, as a rift—a matter of incomprehension tinged with hostility—that had emerged between scientists and literary intellectuals after World War II. Today, that rift, as shown in the work of essayists like Simon Critchley or Stephen Jay Gould, has been largely overcome. But if there is any truth to the scenario I have painted in today’s more specialized and certainly more byzantine academic world, then there remains the danger of yet another rift—the rift between those who dismiss art and aesthetics as a mystification that led the West to the verge of nuclear self-destruction and those who still defend and indeed believe, in the wake of post-war recovery, in the crucial manifestations of aesthetic conviction. One inescapable fact remains: art, verbal and visual, does not only remain with us in museums, libraries and universities. Artists happen to keep producing in large quantities, and scholars must account for that production if we are to practice a responsible account of culture. How to bridge that rift, how to close that gap, how to get these two deaf guys to hear each other, how to teach Literature and Cultural Studies together and fruitfully remains, I think, the important challenge we face in the coming years.

Bibliography Santí, Enrico Mario (2005): Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth and Imre Szeman. (1994). Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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II. Thinking through José Martí

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Inventing a Nation In memory of 23 Cuban children who drowned in the “13 de marzo” tugboat incident, July 13, 1994.

T

he scene opens one afternoon in 1836 in Matanzas, the province immediately to the east of Havana, at the home of Domingo del Monte (1804-1853), a patrician Creole who for the previous two years had been gathering emerging writers at frequent tertulias to discuss and recite their poems, plays and stories. That afternoon it was different. The writers had gathered to listen not to one another but to no less than an Afro-Cuban slave, Juan Francisco Manzano (1797?-1854), read from one of his poems. Invited by del Monte to join him and his friends at his estate, Manzano had taught himself to read and write. Since learning such skills, he had begun to correspond with del Monte seeking his help to obtain his freedom. The poem Manzano had written for the occasion was a sonnet titled “Mis treinta años”: Cuando miro el espacio que he corrido Desde la cuna hasta el presente día, Tiemblo, y saludo a la fortuna mía, Más de terror que de atención movido. Sorpréndeme la lucha que he podido Sostener contra suerte tan impía, Si tal llamarse puede la porfía De mi infelice ser, al mal nacido. 117

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Treinta años ha que conocí la tierra; Treinta años ha que en gemidor estado Triste infortunio por doquier me asalta. Mas nada es para mí la cruda guerra Que en vano suspirar he soportado Si la calculo ¡oh Dios!, con la que falta.1

Upon hearing Manzano, the writers reacted with amazed applause. If a lettered slave would be a rare find, what could one say of a slave-poet? Upon this, del Monte, with the help of one of the writers present, the philosopher José de la Luz y Caballero (1800-1862), offered to start a collection to buy out Manzano’s freedom. Within days, the 800 pesos required was collected, paid to Manzano’s mistress, and he was set free. Three years later, in 1839, again at the behest of del Monte, Manzano finished writing a moving autobiography in which he told of the physical and spiritual horrors of slave life. The manuscript of that autobiography was smuggled out of Cuba to Britain, where it was published along with many of Manzano’s poems. This description of Cuba in the 19th century and unique historical events provide both a historical marker and dramatic frame for many of the themes I wish to address. Cuba was, for the greater part of the 19th century, a society scarred by slavery. But its greater social problem for Cubans of all races, including its White minority, was freedom, and specifically political freedom from Spain. Thus, the cultural transactions, both real and imaginary, between Whites and Blacks, Creoles and Spaniards, formed the backbone of the political struggle between the island and Spain. In the struggle to win freedom from Spain, not to occur until well into the 20th century, Cubans in the 19th in effect invented their nation. That invention gave moral justification to their separatist struggle, provided them with a sense of collective identity, and forged much of the cultural mythology with which Cubans represent

1

I cite from (Manzano: 2007, 137-138). 118

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t­hemselves to this day. The Cuban “pursuit of freedom,” to cite Hugh ­Thomas’ famous title, provides content for this invention; in turn, the invention of Cuba gives form to this content: the quest for freedom, national sovereignty and separate identity. Before turning to all these issues, however, three caveats are in order. First, it would be foolhardy to attempt to cover all the different aspects of life of this, arguably the most important century in Cuban history. My essay is meant as a general introduction, not a specialized study. It attempts to sketch a limited number of themes, describe main currents of historical life, and mention some of its most important actors. The second caveat has to do with my use of the term “invention.” By that I mean not a false or aberrant version of historical reality, but rather the often healthy and always creative aspect of a “national longing for form.” That is, to invent, in this case at least, does not necessarily mean to supply what is not there. Nations, as Timothy Brennan reminded us, “are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions. . . .”2 Calling such a cultural apparatus fictional does not make the nation any less real, less historical, or less morally justified. By identifying how the concept of nation depends upon the imagination we can study it as a malleable structure that does not always follow a scientific logic. The third and last caveat flows from the first two. As someone who teaches literature, my views on the emergence of Cuban national identity are influenced by my scholarly interests.3 Thus, some of the examples from which I shall draw derive from my field of inquiry. My conviction is that in Cuba’s imaginative quest for national form, poets as much as patriots contributed in their common and collective actions, and often with their own lives.

2 3



See (Brennan: 1990, 44-70). See my essay “On National Identity,” in this book. 119

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II There is cause to believe, as historians like Ramiro Guerra (1880-1970) and Leví Marrero (1911-1995) argued, that the birth of a specifically Cuban Creole consciousness dates back to the 17th century with the emergence of a cattle-raising and smuggling economy on the eastern part of the island.4 It is precisely at that time that the myth of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint, effectively emerges.5 But it is actually not until the beginning of the 19th century, two hundred years after that apparition, and with the emergence of a first generation of a Cuban lettered class, that one can begin to trace a self-conscious identity among Cubans. The gradual emergence of this national consciousness reaches a peak shortly after mid-century, in 1868, with the outbreak of the so-called Ten Years’ War, the first nationwide attempt at independence from Spain. Indeed, the Ten Years’ War in effect divides the Cuban century into two: events before 1868 prepare the way for the war of independence; events after that, culminating with the death of José Martí in May 1895, attempt to reconstitute or recover the efforts that led up to that war and later were either lost or compromised by its settlement. Similarly, following a well-known pattern in all types of colonial dependence, some of the most pivotal events in the island’s political history (the periphery) are intimately tied to events in Spain (the metropolis). Thus, the adoption of the 1812 Liberal Constitution set off a chain of events in the island, among which was a demand for freedom of the press and enlightened reformist legislation. Half a century later, the 1868 Liberal uprising would bear a strong repercussion on the 1868 Independence uprising by Creoles, who themselves were frustrated by the Spanish crown’s unwillingness to carry out the promised reforms. It is therefore no accident that that first generation of a Cuban lettered class should have been trained around the discussion of

4 5

See (Marrero: 1972), especially Vol. 1; and (Moreno: 1995) See (José Juan Arrom: 1971) 120

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the 1812 Spanish Constitution. Discussion of citizen rights and responsibilities, to which Cubans obviously felt entitled, first led to the emergence of a self-conscious generation of Cuban intellectuals. The man most responsible for making this emergence possible, the first teacher, was Father Félix Varela (1787-1853), a Catholic priest who early on was put in charge of teaching the 1812 Constitution in Havana’s San Carlos Seminary, then the most important institution of higher learning. Thus, while the proper names I invoked earlier were Domingo del Monte and Francisco Manzano, it could just as easily have been Félix Varela’s, and arguably for greater reason.6 Not only was Varela Cuban (unlike del Monte, who was born in Venezuela); he was also del Monte’s teacher, as well as mentor to all the Creole intellectuals who were present at that tertulia where Manzano read his poem. Luz y Caballero, who in time would become the most influential Cuban philosopher, also studied under Varela, as did José Antonio Saco (1797-1879), a reformist writer and arguably the most brilliant member of his generation. So were a host of other writers who were emerging at the time, like Cirilo Villaverde, who went on to write Cecilia Valdés, the first Cuban novel; Ramón de Palma y Romay (18121860), Anselmo Suárez y Romero (1810-1866), José Antonio Echeverría (1815-1885), Felipe Poey (1799-1891), Ramón Zambrana (1817-1866), and Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, aka “El Lugareño” (1803-1866)—a true constellation of Liberal intellectuals who carried out the dual mandate of the Varelian legacy: to demand political reforms derived from the Spanish constitution, reforms that would give Cubans the same rights as Spaniards, and to invent the Cuban nation, including a distinctively different culture. Years after Varela’s death in New York, Luz y Caballero would eulogize him by remarking that he had been the first one to teach Cubans to think, a hyperbole that projected Varela as the first to convey the dual tenets of modernity: conscience and criticism. Indeed, Varela had advocated more than just critical thinking. As one of the Cuban representatives in the Spanish Cortes, he

6

On this subject see (Hernández: 1942). 121

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­ emanded, along with abolition, political autonomy for Cuba, itd self part of the broader reform program Spain had promised. And yet it was abolition that was to hold the island hostage to its relative prosperity. Slavery had been the one social factor that had kept Cuba, along with Brazil, from riding the wave of independence that had swept the rest of continental Latin America earlier in the century, and it was slavery that determined the ethical and political question regarding Cuban destiny. One need not delve into the intricacies of this issue, which Manuel Moreno Fraginals’ last book covered in brilliant detail.7 Simply put, the question was: how could one possibly abolish the very institution, slavery, upon which depended the island’s survival? The question was of no small consequence. At stake was the interest of Cuban landowners, the so-called sacarocracy, who depended on slavery as the principal mode of production in the manufacture of sugar and coffee. It could be said that the story of how the issue of slavery was variously understood and eventually resolved throughout the 19th century is the story of Cuba’s pursuit of freedom during the same period. For Varela, then, as well as for most of the great Cuban thinkers, the issue was clear: so long as slavery existed, the island would be hostage to Spanish military occupation and its native population would continue to be denied its demands for greater political autonomy and economic freedom. Successive Spanish governments succeeded repeatedly at this extortion simply by invoking the example of Saint Domingue, present-day Haiti, which had ended up becoming a Black republic to the ruin of its French creole class, swept as it was with the effects of the French Revolution. And so, political control in 19th-century Cuba often boiled down to a matter of demographic balance: import enough slaves to create dependence of the White Creoles upon a collective paranoia yet not too many to make real the threat of a Haitian-style slave revolt. Indeed, because the ghost of Haiti haunted virtually all political discussion in Cuba before 1868, the compromise ­solution most 7

See Cuba/España, passim. 122

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f­ avored by White Creoles was a reformist rather than revolutionary approach to independence; their plea for autonomy was accompanied by promises of gradual abolition. Such was the prudent position Father Varela held both in Cuba and later in the Cortes. And yet, all such efforts stopped in 1823 with Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, the dispersion of the Cortes, and Varela’s U.S. exile. It was in the U.S., and notably in Philadelphia, where Varela assumed parish duties and soon began publishing El habanero, the first Cuban-exile political publication and certainly a pioneer U.S. Latino periodical. From its pages Varela advocated vigorously the joint causes of Cuban independence and abolition. In turn, what could be called Varela’s radicalization was the result of a huge disillusion, first endured at the Cortes, with Spain’s inability or unwillingness to put into practice the principles of its own Liberal Constitution. It was therefore as an exile in the U.S. that Varela waged his own ten-year struggle against Spanish domination, which at one time he envisioned taking hold with a latter-day military invasion of the island by Simón Bolívar and a continental Latin American army. As the prospects of such an invasion faded, however, Varela’s political work gradually ceased, as disillusioned by the indifference of his fellow Cubans to the cause of independence as he had once been frustrated by the incompetence of Peninsular politicians. Indeed, Varela was never to return to Cuba, choosing instead to devote himself to church work in New York City. In one of his harsher articles, he stated bitterly: “En la Isla de Cuba no hay amor a España, ni a Colombia, ni a México, ni a nadie más que a las cajas de azúcar y los sacos de café.”8

III By then, Varela’s intellectual seeds had sprouted. His influence became evident in the following generation of students, which extended well into mid-century, and became particularly evident in 8



See (Hernández: 1942, 64). 123

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the respective life and works of two of the great Cuban intellectuals, themselves poets, of its first half. One was José María Heredia (1803-1839), known as El cantor del Niágara for his ode to the famous waterfalls. Arguably the first Latin American Romantic, Heredia was best known in his time as the bard of Cuban freedom. He fled Cuba at the age of 20 as one of many accused in the 1823 anti-Spanish conspiracy of Rayos y Soles de Bolívar. It was from his exile, first in the U.S., where for a time he worked alongside Varela, and later alone in Mexico, that Heredia wrote poems that eventually were smuggled back to Cuba in the form of sueltos, printed sheets, sometimes even in hand-written manuscripts, that, learned by heart and recited by Cubans at private gatherings, circulated as a form of resistance against Spanish colonial authority. One of them read: Cuba al fin te verás libre y pura como el aire de luz que respiras, cual las olas hirvientes que miras, de tus playas la arena besar. Aunque viles traidores le sirvan, del tirano es inútil la saña, que no en balde entre Cuba y España, tiende inmenso sus olas el mar.

Heredia’s vehemence found a counterpart in the eloquence of José Antonio Saco, whose own work spans almost the entire century. As a Liberal reformist, Saco, like Varela, argued for recognition of the Cuban nation by Spain, thereby becoming a bitter critic of the island aristocracy, indifferent as it was to the cause of Cuban freedom. Yet unlike Varela, Saco never advocated outright independence, since he never thought it feasible, and instead defended the route of gradual reform and progress toward autonomy. Saco was a modern, critical spirit who engaged easily and eloquently in polemics that sought to clarify the issues burning in the Cuban soul. (His monumental Papeles sobre Cuba [1881], published

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posthumously, spans three volumes, each over 500 pages.) On the slavery issue, for example, Saco favored gradual abolition, but his concept of the Cuban nation pointedly excluded Afro-Cubans and favored, not unlike Sarmiento, in Argentina, an influx of White European immigrants as a strategy to whiten the island population gradually. Indeed, Cubans owe to Saco some of the clearest statements on the invention of Cuba as a nation. At the end of the 1840s, for example, when the threat of Cuba’s annexation to the U.S. arose, and many Cubans advocated it openly as a desperate measure to end Spanish rule, Saco argued vigorously against it. He believed that instead of securing eventual independence, the U.S. would end up absorbing the fledgling Cuban nation. “Todo pueblo que habita un mismo suelo,” wrote Saco then, “y tiene un mismo origen y una misma lengua, y unos mismos usos y costumbres, ese pueblo tiene una nacionalidad . . . Negar la nacionalidad cubana es negar la luz del sol de los trópicos en punto de mediodía.”9 For statements like this, including his spirited defense of Heredia’s poetry against the attacks of the Spanish naturalist Ramón de la Sagra (1798-1871), himself an island resident, Saco was banished. Like Heredia, who at the end of his life returned home full of hope, yet became disillusioned by the experience, Saco himself became a permanent and bitter exile. Evident in Saco’s thought, as in Heredia’s poetry, the self-conscious nationality and advocacy of national rights for which Varela had argued appears glaringly in his work as a critique of decadent political practice and open rebellion against tyranny.

IV By mid-century, then, there existed a well-defined Cuban spirit of revolt. It appeared not only in the work of writers like Heredia and Saco, but in the more than dozen conspiracies against the colonial government that erupted across the century, not to mention 9



See Saco: 1963, 361-470. 125

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the three open military wars of 1868, 1880 and 1895. It may be difficult today to perceive the gravity of decadent Spanish political practice from abstract discussions of Cuban national identity, such as I have been describing. How objective could these accounts be, given that their proponents were also actors in the independent struggle? Fortunately, however, we count with independent eyewitness reports on social conditions in Cuba during the 19th century that bear witness to the island’s rebellious spirit. To mention only one: in 1860, Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), the American poet and social critic, better known as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” visited Cuba for a period of two months during which she travelled extensively. During her visit she met and spoke with many Cubans, among them notably the philosopher Luz y Caballero, Varela’s heir. Out of that two-month visit that same year came the travel book, A Trip to Cuba which describes, in a gracious and at times humorous style, Howe’s experiences during her island tryst. Her book includes a poignant portrait of Luz y Caballero—”the wise, the gentle, the fearless, whom all the good praise.” Yet in in one of its last chapters, as Mrs. Howe is about to draw her conclusions, she leaves the following contrasting, scathing portrait of life in this colonial outpost. To quote at some length: Of the great sums of money received by the Government through direct and individual taxation, little or nothing revisits the people in the shape of improvements. The government does not make roads, nor establish schools, nor reform criminals, nor stretch out its strong arm to prevent the offences of ignorant and depraved youth . . . There is little or no instruction provided for the children or the poorer classes, and the prisons are abominable with filth, nakedness, and disorder of every kind . . . The administration of justice would seem to be one of the worst of all the social plagues that abide in the Island. Nowhere in the world have people a more wholesome terror of going to law. The Government pays for no forms of legal procedure, and a man once engaged in a civil or criminal suit, is at the mercy of judges and lawyers who plunder him at will and without redress . . . Much of what we narrate [used to be] common to all the civilized world a ­hundred years ago, but 126

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the Cubans do not deserve to be held under the weight of these ancient abuses. They are not an effete people but have something of the spring of the present time in them and would gladly march to the measure of the nineteenth century were it not for the decrepit Government whose hand has stiffened with their chains in it.10

V The War of 1868, better known as La guerra de los diez años [Ten Years’ War] is the watershed of the Cuban 19th century. With the failure of both the repeated calls for reform and the efforts at U.S. annexation, Cuban Liberals used yet another juncture in Spanish political history to advance their cause of independence. Yet another in the series of conspiracies against the colonial government was brewing in the easternmost Oriente province, where a Liberal revolution followed in the footsteps of the Spanish rebellion against the decadent government of Isabella II that promised, among other things, public liberties, constitutional elections, universal suffrage, administrative decentralization, a free press, and abolition of the death penalty. Such promises dovetailed with the principles that Cuban Liberals espoused. Along with their Puerto Rican counterparts, who issued almost simultaneously their own Grito de Lares in solidarity with the Cuban Grito de Yara—both named after the towns where the revolt was first proclaimed— they sought similar freedoms. Thus, on October 8th, 1868, acting hurriedly to the news that colonial authorities had gotten wind of the conspiracy, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes (1819-1852), a patrician from Bayamo and Liberal leader, summoned a meeting of his co-conspirators at the sugar mill his family owned, La Demajagua, near the town of Manzanillo. There, before 500 people and twenty Black slaves, Céspedes presided over a moving ceremony: he proclaimed independence for Cuba, raised a first version of the Cuban flag with the lonestar, la Estrella Solitaria; called for the

See Ward: 1860, 160.

10

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adoption of the principles enunciated two days later (October 10th) by the Revolutionary Junta; and swore all present to the cause of vencer o morir. More importantly, Céspedes proceeded to free his own slaves and invited them to join in the fight. Many in fact did. Indeed, the topic of Afro-Cuban heroism in the wars of independence by itself could occupy several volumes.11 The events of La Demajagua constituted a foundational act that made evident what had been clear from the time of Father Varela. Namely, that the Cuban nation had already been invented and was merely awaiting expression through national institutions. That Céspedes, the man who came to be known as El padre de la Patria, would choose to join the armed struggle with the decision to free his slaves, was of no small consequence. It was an invitation to White Creoles like himself to do the same. Implicit in Céspedes’s decision was his concern that the issue of slavery within the so­called Cuban Declaration of Independence, to be adopted two days later, did not go far enough, since it called only for “gradual emancipation, under compensation.” Indeed, on this issue the patriots in nearby Camagüey province, led by Ignacio Agramonte (1841-1873) and Salvador Cisneros Betancourt (1828-1914), would go much further, four months after the events of La Demajagua, than their counterparts in Oriente, by declaring abolition outrightly. Slavery was thereby recognized by the War of 1868 patriots to be linked to colonialism. If abolition was a first step towards independence, then the production of sugar, the commodity that depended on slave manumission and to which the White creoles were bound, was held responsible for colonialism. It is hardly an accident, then, that Céspedes’s ceremony of Cuban independence, the foundational act of the Cuban nation, should take place precisely at a sugar mill located in Yara, in southern Oriente province, precisely the region that, since the 17th century, had been known for encouraging alternative sources of economic activity, such as smuggling and cattle-­raising. The insight, made evident in 20th century critiques of the one-crop economy, such as Fernando Ortiz’s, On this subject see (De la Fuente: 2001).

11

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that all Cubans, not just Blacks, were slaves to sugar, was dramatized powerfully in a particular icon that tradition has made part of Cuban national mythology.12 Cubans are familiar with the two famous pictures of La Demajagua sugar mill, which was razed to the ground by Spanish troops barely nine days after Céspedes’s October 8th ceremony. One picture shows the ruins of the knelling bell, which summoned slaves to work, and on October 8th Céspedes himself had tolled to signal the dawn of Cuban independence; the other picture shows two huge mill wheels, one prostrate the other standing, that had been part of the ruined sugar mill (see p. 129). Through the spokes of the destroyed wheel a tree, a ceiba—for Cubans, the closest thing to a sacred national tree—has over the years grown through the spokes with its massive trunk, while the other damaged second wheel rests against it. The stunning scenes, along with the ruined knelling bell, are dramatic icons of Cuban independence, displayed frequently in public ceremonies, paintings, stamps and coins. Their symbolic intricacy, however, bears a different message regarding freedom, or at least about the significance with which Cubans invest it, silently and mythically. Outwardly, they showcase the violent Spanish onslaught upon the mill and its inhabitants in retribution for their declaring independence. As an icon, however, the second scene predicates the organic growth of the Cuban nation (the ceiba) upon the humbling of the sugar mill wheels, modernity and economic progress, which much like an infernal machine, have now been defeated by the forces of Nature.

VI Humbling and destruction on both sides were indeed the immediate effects of the Great War, beginning with the self-burning of the city of Bayamo, home to the insurgency and provisional capital of a free Cuba. Barely ten weeks after Bayamo had been See (Santí: 2002).

12

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taken as the first victory by Céspedes’s rebel forces, during which Cuba’s national anthem, composed by Pedro “Perucho” Figueredo (1819-1870) was first sung, the city was besieged by the Spanish troops of Blas de Villate y de las Heras, Count of Valmaseda (1824-1882). And so, amidst the siege, the citizens of Bayamo voted at a town meeting to burn down their city rather than surrender to the Spaniards, a huge sacrifice that required the evacuation of 6,500 people, most of whom were women and children. But not all was destruction. In the middle of the war, in April 1869, in the township of Guáimaro, which sits on the borderline between Camagüey and Oriente provinces, representatives from the three warring regions (including Las Villas) met to draft and approve the first Constitution of a free Cuban Republic. The Great War did have other broader, less evident effects. For one, it proved to people across the island, Cubans and Spaniards, Black and White alike, that political change in the form of violent insurgency was real, a fact that served to change the character of political culture, particularly in Havana, the seat of colonial power. It was in Havana, in fact, during the first few months of 1869, that a young boy of sixteen by the name of José Martí (1853-1895) began publishing a student paper, La Patria Libre, which the Spanish authorities would soon use as evidence against him. Accused of treason, Martí was sentenced to hard labor in the San Lázaro penal colony. Prison soon broke his health, but thanks to the good interventions of influential friends his sentence was commuted to exile to Spain. In Spain, joining exiles like him, and in what eventually was to become a lifetime of severe hardship, Martí’s first writings as a university student denounced both the Spanish political penal system and the failures of the 1868 Republic. In practically the same blow, he also decried both the brutality of colonial repression and the legislative restitution that Spain still owed its colonial subjects. Martí’s goal was to prove one point, at least tacitly: that the 1868 War, still raging while Martí was living in Spain, was justified, and that its only resolution was independence. Martí’s central notion of independence within his ideological program is of course heir to Father Varela’s original formula. In 131

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fact, Martí had been educated at the same school run by Rafael María Mendive (1821-1886}, a student of Luz y Caballero who, in turn and as we know, had been a student of Varela’s. Thus, Cuban nationalist historiography, intent on demonstrating the continuity of Cuban history and the achievement of national form, is wont to emphasize this teacher-to-teacher generational chain, culminating in Martí’s life and work—what Cubans call Martí’s apostolado. And yet Martí’s development of the idea was linked, in turn, to a systematic discrediting, as part of a deliberate political program, of the two ideological byroads, reform and annexation, that were travelled in parallel fashion and to no avail during much of the century’s first half. Like Father Varela’s, Martí’s experience of Spanish Liberalism showed that it could not be relied upon for consistency, or indeed for basic honesty; promises and programs simply were not honored. Like Saco, Martí believed strongly that the fragile Cuban sense of national identity, weakened by centuries of colonial oppression, could not survive U.S. annexation, despite protestations to the contrary from U.S. politicians and naive, or else greedy, fellow Cubans. Particularly after his brief return to Cuba in 1878, with the Great War over and after witnessing first-hand how Spanish promises for meaningful political reform were violated consistently, Martí became further convinced of the need for Cuban independence. As an exiled minority, living close to fifteen years in New York City during a time when the U.S. was still intent upon expanding its territory, he feared that such expansion would end up swallowing up Cuba. Thus, it could be said that in the line that stretches straight from Father Varela to José Martí, the Cuban 19th century is bound together, as Rosario Rexach once put it, by one “single attitude”: the cause of freedom.13 Not that the alternate roads of independence were obstacle-free. To the expected hostility of the Spanish Crown towards Martí (no one in the history of Spain was called worse things than he) was added a further circumstance to which he reacted time See (Rexach: 1991).

13

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and again: the presence of militarism, or more precisely, the militarization of political culture amongst Cubans and as a relic of Peninsular habits. Having himself gone through a varied exile in several Latin American countries—Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela—and having personally witnessed the effects of Latin American caudillismo, Martí was equally as fearful of allowing the humanist revolution to which he had breathed life fall in the hands of the military, thereby ensuring failure of a civil polity. “General, un pueblo no se gobierna como se manda un campamento”: “nations are not ruled like military camps,” wrote Martí, then barely 31, in a scathing letter to General Máximo Gómez (1836-1905), then twice Martí’s age, who along with Afro-Cuban General Antonio Maceo (1845-1896), were then the most respected veterans of the Ten Years War. Thus, the conflict for Martí was clear: on the one hand, secure a sufficiently powerful base that would at once achieve independence from Spain and distance itself from an imperial-minded U.S.; on the other, prevent that same base, which necessarily would have to be military, from falling into the hands of undemocratic caudillos. Caudillos, in his view, were bound to monopolize power and thwart efforts to create the democratic republic he envisioned under the motto “con todos y para el bien de todos.” Indeed, with that motto Martí went on to found, in 1892, the Cuban Revolutionary Party, arguably the highest expression of 19th-century Cuban political culture. By means of this political organization Martí secured the century’s second war: the 1895 war of independence. Based on the concept of democratic coalition he was able, under his party’s umbrella, to form alliances among different exile organizations, and working hand in hand with military leaders like Gómez and Maceo, he took the war to the island. The diary Martí kept during the military campaign in which he was briefly engaged, between January and May 1895, at which time he died in battle at age 42, demonstrates that the conflict between the military and civil concepts of the Cuban polity was very much alive, even to his own bitter end. Historians have speculated, and will no doubt continue to speculate, what exactly Martí wrote 133

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in the five pages that were torn out from the diary apropos of the meeting at La Mejorana, Oriente, on May 5, 1895, one of the crucial rest-stops during the campaign that brought together Martí, Maceo and Máximo Gomez, the three great insurgency leaders. The passages preceding those five pages abound in Martí’s anxiety over the age-old issues of caudillismo, as well as his interest in preserving civil principles amidst war. The five pages themselves, however, which contained his version of the secret meeting among the three men, were mysteriously torn out. To this day we do not know who tore them out or why. Thus, Martí was killed in battle on May 19, 1895 without telling us what exactly he thought about these crucial issues based on his most recent experiences. The effects of his eloquent silence are still felt today.

VII I have tried to convey the story of the invention of Cuba during the 19th century, a mere snapshot of what is truly a vast mural. The story, as you can probably tell, has many shortcomings. Filled with legacies and continuities, heroic actions, events and figures, the story is also shot through with tragic losses, gaps, omissions, failures, torn pages. Varela’s invective to the effect that in Cuba all people care about is making money resounds all too loudly in our national discourse. Cuba invented itself well enough in the 19th century, yet did so at the expense of a legacy of exiled men and exiled women—can one possibly forget the poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873), author of “Al partir,” the quintessential poem of Cuban exile; or indeed wealthy matriarchs like Marta Abreu (1846-1909), who spent most of her life in New York aiding the independence struggle; or else, Mariana Grajales (1808- 1893), Maceo’s heroic mother, who lost several sons to the war effort? Such also was the life of some of the major figures we have visited: Francisco Manzano, Domingo Del Monte, Father Varela, José María Heredia, José Antonio Saco, and of course José Martí. It is no exaggeration to say that they invented the Cuban 134

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nation “outside,” as it were: from the margins of nationality and the experience of exile. To say so is no paradox. In fact, acknowledging so allows us to discover another tragic dimension of Cuban nationhood. The same invention of Cuba waged another cost still since the dawn of the nation: the pervasive legacy of racism and discrimination emanating from centuries of slave oppression. Manzano, the slave with whose story this paper became, became a free man well enough after his mentors bought his freedom, yet not for long. Soon after becoming a free man, he again fell victim to raids attendant to the conspiracy of La Escalera, (January 1844), the same anti-Crown conspiracy that would take the life of the Afro-Cuban Romantic poet Plácido, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (18091844). Manzano himself gave up writing altogether after serving a jail sentence, and died in 1845 in complete obscurity, no doubt terrorized by these events. After being smuggled out of Cuba and published abroad in translation, his autobiography was not to see a domestic edition in its original Spanish until 1937, more than a century after it was written. To this day it remains unknown to many Cuban readers. Thus, if it is true that all nations invent and reinvent their stories, then our own outside narrative, away from the island whose object it is, constitutes as much part of this reinvention as any other attempted from the inside, upon solid Cuban soil. Ought we not claim, then, our equal right to such invention, upon these newfound islands?14

This essay was, originally a lecture given in April 1994 at the New York Historical Society (Manhattan) and the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. The present text is a revision of the original lecture.

14

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Bibliography Arrom, José Juan (1971): Certidumbre de América: Estudios de letras, folklore y cultura. 2ª ed. ampliada. Madrid: Gredos. Brennan, Timothy (1990): “The National Longing for Form,” in Nation and Narration, Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge. De la Fuente, Alejandro (2001): A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill, NC: UP of North Carolina. Hernández Travieso, Antonio (1942): Varela y la reforma filosófica en Cuba. La Habana: J. Montero. Manzano, Juan Francisco (2007): Autobiografía del esclavo poeta y otros escritos, ed. William Luis. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Marrero, Leví (1972): Cuba: Economía y sociedad. 15 vols. Madrid: Editorial PLAYOR. Moreno Fraginals, Manuel (1995): Cuba/España, España/Cuba: Historia común. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica. Rexach, Rosario (1991): Dos figuras cubanas y una sola actitud, Félix Varela y Jorge Mañach. Miami: Ediciones Universal. Saco, José A. (1963): “Réplica de D. José Antonio Saco a los anexionistas que han impugnado sus ideas sobre la incorporación de Cuba en los Estados Unidos”, Papeles sobre Cuba. Vol. III. La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba. Santí, Enrico Mario (2002): Fernando Ortiz: Contrapunteo y transculturación. Madrid: Editorial Colibrí. Ward Howe, Julia (1860): A Trip to Cuba. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

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Martí and Revolution

T

o discuss the relationship between José Martí and the Cuban Revolution, as I have been asked to do, means to focus on one of the central issues of contemporary Cuban history. What has been Martí’s impact on contemporary Cuba? How did Martí’s thought and example influence the development of the Castro Revolution? What does the appropriation of Martí in present-day Cuba mean? These are all questions whose urgency makes them no less complex. Their answers lie, of course, in the facts of Cuban history itself, a situation which the conference participants, most of whom are social scientists, would readily acknowledge. My training as a literary scholar warns me, however, that facts are never as clear or as absolute as they seem. Although history is not fiction, we are always compelled not only to live history but also to interpret it, to derive meaning from it. In other words, we must not only describe historical facts, but also inquire about their significance. For this reason, I am not here concerned with proving or disproving the ideological and moral affinities between the thought of José Martí and the ideology of the current Cuban government. Instead, one global inquiry, stemming perhaps from my own literary concerns, permeates my view of these important questions: What is the meaning of José Martí in modern Cuban history? One wonders whether there might not be some justice after all in inviting a professor of literature to address a group of specialists on Cuban history and politics on this subject. For where else in the American university, except in literature departments, 137

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is Martí read nowadays? Where else could his tortured prose and sentimental verse be tolerated, or even looked up to as a source of knowledge? (I am speaking of the American university, of course; Martí’s status inside Cuba and throughout Latin America is, of course, very different.) This situation illustrates an irony, I think, about Martí’s ambivalent status in academic circles. For most social scientists, Martí remains mostly a dreamy poet whose literary imagination and lyrical idealism vitiate the clarity and efficacy of his sociopolitical thought. Martí´s works provide documents about a peculiar form of moral nationalism, not a body of clear ideological doctrine. Inversely, for literary critics Martí often presents the paradox of an important figure without whom modern Spanish American literature is simply inconceivable but whose own literary works—his poetry, his awkward plays, or his single attempt at a novel—somehow miss the mark of true modern art. Martí’s works seem far too rhetorical, far too laden with an antiquated moral and ideological content, to fit a modern poetics of ambiguity. By contrast, the ambiguous, literary, and therefore open character of Martí’s prose explains, at least in part, why his works, like the Bible, often become all things to all Cubans. Martí’s ideology continues to be used both to praise and to condemn the U.S., both to justify and to deny the present Cuban government, and to inspire both exiles and islanders alike. The rhetorical density, moral heaviness, and ideological burden of Martí’s literary works account, to a great extent, for the proverbial polemics among literary historians about whether Martí was a mere precursor or a true harbinger of modernity.1 And yet, in sharp contrast with Martí’s equivocal status in U.S. academic circles is the sacramental role he continues to play in contemporary Cuban history and politics. Following in a tradition that began after his death in 1895, Cubans in and outside the island revere Martí as the very spirit of their national identity, and they search in his works, as they would in a sacred text, for the keys that either justify the current revolutionary government or 1



See (González and Schulman: 1969) for the best guide on the subject. 138

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make sense of the reality of exile. It would be almost foolhardy to remind us of all the evidence regarding Martí’s presence in contemporary Cuba. Even before there was a Movimiento 26 de Julio, Fidel Castro’s followers were calling themselves La generación del Centenario, after the centennial of Martí’s 1853 birth. The assault on the Moncada fortress, as we know, took place under the aegis of Martí. In his famous trial speech, “La historia me absolverá,” Fidel Castro invoked Martí a dozen times, once notably to claim that Martí had been no less than the action’s “intellectual author.” Since then, virtually every political speech and policy statement, including the major documents of the present Cuban government, invokes Martí’s name. The First and Second Declarations of Havana, the 1976 Socialist Constitution and the statutes of the Cuban Communist Party all quote extensively from Martí’s works. Earlier documents of the insurrection period, such as the Manifiesto del Moncada and Nuestra razón, had similarly invoked and quoted Martí. Martí’s presence towers over every Cuban political pronouncement, much as his gigantic marble statue towers over Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution, where such pronouncements are usually made. It is not enough to say, however, that Martí is merely invoked by the Cuban government. For in the twenty-five years since Castro took power, a certain reading of Martí has clearly been elaborated, a reading designed to prove the ideological links between Martí’s sociopolitical thought and the current revolutionary process. Indeed, this reading has had the effect of restoring Martí’s original political radicalism, as opposed to the vaguely patriotic aura that had enveloped him before 1959. In what is otherwise a useful survey of the presentation of Martí in the literature about him, John M. Kirk has shown how the image of Martí as inadaptado sublime which prevailed during the Cuban Republic has become that of present-day líder revolucionario. “A detailed reading of works concerned with Martí’s political thought,” says Kirk, “reveals that, particularly after 1969, many martianos began regarding José Martí not solely as a fervent revolutionary, but also as a direct link between the thought of Karl Marx and the Marxist-Leninist 139

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nature of the Castro Revolution.”2 To appropriate Martí, to promote the interpretation of his works from the vantage point of Marxist-Leninism , and implicitly to legitimize the current Cuban government in terms of Martí’s thought, is the unabashed purpose of institutions like the Centro de Estudios Martianos, created by the Cuban Communist Party. Under the direction of poet Roberto Fernández Retamar, the Centro carries out several ongoing projects: It publishes the Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos, a yearbook of Martí scholarship and bibliography; it is currently preparing the first critical edition of Martí’s complete works; and it sponsors yearly national youth seminars on the work of Martí.3 It is obvious, then, that Martí was a precursor of certain ­general aspects of the current Cuban government. Indeed, Martí was a nationalist, a critic of the U.S. during a period of expansion, and a promoter of Latin American political and economic autonomy. It can also be shown that Martí’s political sympathies clearly lay with the colonial world in general and not just Latin America in particular. Martí’s revolutionary nationalism and his aggressively native or indigenous imagination therefore make him a natural precursor of the post-1959 regime. And yet, to demonstrate that Martí was a Marxist, or even a proto-Marxist, has been an infinitely more difficult task. By invoking Martí’s nationalist, anti-imperialist texts, the Cuban government implicitly subsumes Martí’s ideology into its own. But such implications always stop short of becoming explicit when faced with the need to provide more precise definitions of Martí’s specific ideology. Some of the more serious readers of Martí in Cuba today—Roberto Fernández Retamar, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Cintio Vitier, and Juan Marinello—acknowledge the methodological obstacles to any attempt to view Martí as a precursor of the Marxist regime. For example, in “El pensamiento de



2



3

See Kirk: 1983, 15. For a critique of Kirk’s views and scholarship see (Ripoll: 1984, 33-50). For the documents on the founding of the Centro see (Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos: 1978, ll-21). 140

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José Martí y nuestra revolución socialista,” an essay first published in 1962, Marinello warned: Desde luego que el hecho de que un hombre como Martí contemplase con visión tan sagaz los problemas que su época acumulaba sobre Cuba, no quiere decir que poseyera la doctrina y el método oportuno para su tratamiento y solución. En Martí se da una oposición intermitente y vitalicia entre sus puntos de mira de gran demócrata liberal y su asombroso entendimiento de cuestiones que, como ha probado su posteridad, no podían ser liquidadas por las vías que propugnaba.4

In a gesture that has become typical of this reading, Marinello wanted to show in Martí a mixture of blindness and insight about Cuban history. Martí knew what the problems were but did not possess the keys we now have to understand, let alone resolve, those problems. It is as if Martí’s faith in liberal democracy and ideological pluralism, not to mention his spiritual bent, had blindfolded him and kept him from correctly analyzing the concrete social and political ills that he did detect. Thus, Marinello’s dialectical reading restores Martí’s historical dilemma, a dilemma now presumably resolved, as Marinello goes on to argue, by the ideals of the current revolutionary government. The question remains, of course, whether a comparison of Martí with the ideology of the current Cuban government does justice to the complexities of his thought, and, more crucially, whether the current Cuban government has been able to transform Martí’s ideals into a historical reality, instead of merely recycling the rhetoric of those ideals. It would perhaps seem unnecessary to pose such questions were it not for a venerable tradition in Cuban politics of recycling Martí periodically as an empty rhetorical exercise. Years before the current government proposed its own reading of Martí, 4



I quote from (Marinello: 1980, 4-5). The essay was first published in (Cuba Socialista: 1962, 16-37).. For similar arguments, see Rev CEM: 1978, which collects essays by Julio Antonio Mella, Raúl Roa, Blas Roca, Ernesto Guevara, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Armando Hart, Juan Marinello. The title exaggerates the Marxist content of these nationalist essays. 141

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past Cuban presidents, from Estrada Palma to Batista, had paid lip service to Martí and used him for their own strategic purposes. Given Martí’s institutional role in the rhetoric of Cuban politics, therefore, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the current appropriation of Martí’s image should differ substantially—in its strategic purpose at least—from previous uses. I am not denying what I affirmed before. The current Cuban government has indeed succeeded in proving that Martí was a precursor of certain aspects of its ideology. I am merely attempting to place that proof in a historical perspective that casts a different light on its motivations. The reasons for the periodic recycling of Martí are varied and complex, and they concern as much Martí himself as his interested readers. As is well known, Martí’s death in May 1895, at the start of the War of Independence, left political and military plans in disarray. The ensuing delays in sending new armed expeditions to aid the mambises, the inner fragmentation of the thinly unified rebel forces, whom Martí had personally held in check in his role as delegado of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, not to mention the loss of morale, accounted to a measurable extent for the relative failure of the war effort and the eventual intervention of the U.S. government. Whatever the immediate results of Martí’s death were, the eventual reaction of the first generation of republican Cubans toward him was intensely ambivalent. For them, Martí had been, at once, a martyr and a fool, a leader and a failure, a hero and a suicide. To give an idea of just how intense this ambivalence was, the Havana newspaper El Fígaro took a poll in 1899 among 105 outstanding Cuban subjects and learned that out of that number only 16 (barely 10%) favored a statue of Martí in Havana’s Central Park. Of those 16 positive votes, three were cast by Martí’s best friends—Fermín Valdés Domínguez, Juan Gualberto Gómez and Miguel Viondi.5 That Martí was simply forgotten and that his works remained unread during those pessimistic early years of the

5

See (Butler: 1962, 88). 142

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Cuban Republic are understatements regarding the initial reception of Martí. Because Martí had never collected his prose works in book form, having written mostly for foreign newspapers, his ideas were dispersed and did not circulate inside Cuba. The piecemeal, fragmented, foreign publication of the first edition between 1900 and 1933 of Martí’s collected works constitutes both a cause and effect of this initial vacuum. It is not enough to say, however, that Martí’s vindication came with the nationalist revival of the early 1930s. That Martí had to be vindicated at all is itself significant. Martí had been a martyr in the struggle for Cuban independence, and yet independent Cuba had not bothered to pay him national homage, as he clearly deserved. During the years immediately after Martí’s death, the little recognition he received came from foreign literary figures—from Rubén Darío to Miguel de Unamuno—who were aware of his importance as a writer. It was only with the overthrow, in 1933, of Gerardo Machado, that the Cuban nation began to acknowledge Martí’s additional importance as a political, moral, and spiritual leader, and it is precisely at this juncture that the national cult of Martí begins, a cult the trappings of which we all know. Martí becomes then “el Santo de América,” “El Cristo americano,” “Místico del deber,” “El Apóstol de la Independencia,” and so forth. It would be too simple, as others would have it, to attribute such religious titles to the heavy Catholic influence on Cuban republican life. The reasons for the cult of Marti are, I believe, more deep-seated, and are related to a national complex of collective atonement for the neglect into which Martí fell during those early years of the Republic. By reacting with a mixture of reverence and awe toward Martí following the political convulsions of the early 1930s, the Cuban people in effect compensated for an earlier ambivalence and disinterest. The result of that reverence may well have been the first massive acknowledgment of Martí’s contribution and the eventual dissemination of his thought. It is important to recognize as well, however, that this thought began to be disseminated within the framework of a religious cult that compensated, in turn, for a national sense of embarrassment and guilt. The national guilt 143

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complex surrounding Martí has been pervasive and wide-ranging, and we feel its effects to this day. After all, Martí’s disappearance had been at the root of the frustration of Cuban independence and the eventual imposition of the Platt Amendment upon the first Cuban constitution. In other words, Martí (or rather, Martí’s absence) lies at the very root of a national political identity crisis, a crisis that the lament of a song, the well-known “Clave a Martí,” clearly evokes: Martí no debió de morir ¡Ay de morir! Si fuera el maestro y el guía otro gallo cantaría. La patria se salvaría y Cuba sería feliz.

The national identity crisis that these anonymous lines reflect surfaces with the revolution against Machado, after which the image of Martí begins to loom large over the Cuban people as a kind of spirit guiding toward the restoration of national values. It is not by chance that the first attempts at a Marxist reading of Martí also appear then. Julio Antonio Mella, for example, one of the founders of the Cuban Communist Party, wrote an essay titled “Glosas al pensamiento de Martí.”6 The guiding spirit returned with a vengeance following the demise of the 1933 revolution, however, and the resulting collective guilt toward it explains, I think, why successive Cuban political administrations have been so successful in exploiting Martí’s image for their own purposes. Perhaps the most blatant instance of such exploitation was Batista’s, who in 1953 used the various activities surrounding celebration of the centennial of Martí’s birth to overshadow the coup that brought him to power. The institutional reading that prevails in Cuba today constitutes, I fear, the latest version of that strategic use.



6

First published in (Revista América Libre: Apr.1927), but written in December 1926 in Mexico City, reprinted in part in Siete enfoques, 11-18. 144

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Of course, neither the national complex toward Martí nor the religious rhetoric that compensates for it would have been possible without Martí’s own religious rhetoric. In other words, quite apart from the circumstances of Martí’s death and the poor early reception of his works, there remains a religious quality about Martí’s own thought and language, especially evident in his oratory, that somehow preconditions the cult built around him. By the religious quality of Martí’s thought I refer to more than just his spiritual ethics, which, as Roberto Agramonte and others have shown, stems from his readings in post­-Hegelian Idealism, and more than his Americanist utopianism, or even the uplifting tone of his oratory, designed at first to persuade his fellow exiles and later to preserve their uneasy political alliance.7 I refer, principally, to the vision of Cuban history that underlies the strategic recycling of Martí, a vision, one might add, that finds in Martí himself one of its most powerful proponents. That vision of Cuban history has to do with the progressive relationship that is customarily established among the various revolutionary moments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: 1868, 1895, 1933, and 1959—the Cien años de lucha that was invoked during the 1968 centennial of the Grito de Yara. We are all familiar with the argument that each of these revolutions becomes an ever more powerful and organized expression of Cuban nationalism, culminating, presumably, in the latest revolution of the series, as embodied in the present Cuban government. This view of modern Cuban history assumes that there is not only an economy (a deposit of experience from which successive revolutions profit), but also, I submit, a teleology, a telos or providential design that allows us to interpret each revolution succeeding the others. This teleology gives meaning to the entire historical pattern of modern Cuban history, and privileges, implicitly and necessarily, the end of that pattern. The previous three revolutions led up to the present one; the present revolution grants meaning upon the preceding three. The very fragmentary appearance of modern Cuban history—its 7



See (Agramonte: 1971), especially 200-272. 145

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successive, frustrated attempts at autonomy through revolution— summons such a teleology and lends credence to its formulation. I am not so concerned, for the moment at least, with questioning the validity of this interpretation as I am in exploring a couple of its implications. First, I would like to note that such a teleology postulates a figural interpretation of historical events. What does figural interpretation mean? According to Erich Auerbach, from whose famous essay “Figura” I borrow the concept: Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life.8

The example of Moses and Christ might clarify Auerbach’s description. Moses signifies Christ, Christ fulfills Moses; Moses conceals Christ, Christ reveals Moses; Moses is a figure for Christ, Christ is the truth of Moses. “The aim of this sort of interpretation,” adds Auerbach, “was to show that the persons and events of the Old Testament were prefigurations of the New Testament and its history of salvation.” Moreover, as Auerbach also shows, figural interpretation had a concrete ideological function at the time of the Christian break with Judaism. It provided Christianity with an immense persuasive power, and it legitimized the new providential view of history. What does all this have to do with José Martí and the Cuban Revolution? My point is that teleological conceptions of Cuban history, such as the one I have examined, and prevails today, incorporate automatically a figural interpretation of specific historical characters and events. If the 1895 War, for example, is deemed to foreshadow the 1959 revolution, then José Martí automatically becomes a figure for Fidel Castro, who in turn becomes Martí’s truth or fulfillment. This analogy has been drawn repeatedly: “Lo

8

See (Auerbach: 1959, 53). 146

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que Martí prometió, Fidel te lo cumplió,” is one of its catchier versions. But the frequency with which the analogy is invoked conceals its significance. One revealing instance appears in “Martí en Fidel,” a typical newspaper article from the early 1960s, where novelist Edmundo Desnoes, author of the famous novel and film Memorias del subdesarrollo, wrote the following: Aunque el habla de Fidel carece del nerviosismo poético de Martí, ha logrado por otra parte un estilo más directo y eficaz. Martí era un incendio y su cultura humanista de raíz cristiana lo llevaba siempre a grandes alturas expresivas; su genio verbal era deslumbrante. Tal vez sea mejor así. Martí era demasiado frágil, su sentido inalcanzable del hombre noble y puro lo llevaron a vivir constantemente desgarrado, lanzado hacia la muerte. Para la toma y el ejercicio del poder fue una ventaja que Fidel no haya tenido la profundidad sentimental de Martí, el humanismo desgarrador y trágico de Martí. Martí es el ideal. Fidel es la acción. Pero los principios son los mismos.9

Desnoes’s figural argument reflects a belief held by the Cuban popular imagination during those early years in Fidel Castro as reincarnation of José Martí. The analogy was and remains, in this sense, obvious, but what may not seem quite as obvious is that the analogy presupposes, in turn, a teleology of Cuban history.10 And yet Desnoes’s limited journalistic exercise would not be as significant were it not for the fact that it uncannily repeats the same gesture that one finds in many of Martí’s political writings. Faced with the need to persuade his fellow Cuban exiles of the moral imperative to renew the war against Spain, Martí himself resorted constantly to invoking a figural interpretation by alluding to the heroes of 1868, their relation to his own times, as a way of l­ egitimizing his

I quote from (Desnoes: 1967, 30), originally from (Lunes de Revolución: Jan. 1961, 61-62). 10 The analogy survives to this day in volumes like (Castro: 1983), which compiles all of Fidel Castro’s references to Martí in his speeches between 1953 and 1981, as well as Castro’s notes to his own copy of Martí’s Obras completas. 9



147

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own political struggle. The following passage is typical of Martí’s annual speeches commemorating the Grito de Yara: ¡Oh, sí aquellos tiempos eran maravillosos! Ahora les tiran piedras los pedantes, y los enanos vestidos de papel se suben sobre los cadáveres de los héroes, para excomulgar a los que están continuando su obra. ¡De un revés de las sombras irritadas se vendrán abajo, si se les quieren oponer, los que tienen por única hueste las huestes de las sombras: los que han intentado dispersarles, en la hora del descanso, las fuerzas de que necesitaban para triunfar, cuando se levanten, como ya se están levantando, sobre la debilidad de los enemigos y el desconcierto de los propios! Aquellos tiempos eran de veras maravillosos. Con ramas de árbol paraban, y echaban atrás, el fusil enemigo; aplicaban a la naturaleza salvaje el ingenio virgen; creaban en la poesía de la libertad la civilización; se confundían en la muerte, porque nada menos que la muerte era necesario para que se confundiesen el amo y el siervo…11

To propose anything but a teleology of history would appear to contravene the very logic of historical knowledge. We grant meaning to the past on the basis not only of the pattern of that past but also the results of that pattern—the present vantage point that allows us to confer meaning. And yet, in reading passages such as Desnoes’ about Martí, or Martí’s about 1868, one finds that their common figural argument rests upon a profoundly antihistorical move. To point out that Fidel, and not Martí, is the real man of action, Desnoes must turn Martí into a passive idealist whose sentimental shortcomings Fidel has the good fortune to avoid. The contrast enhances Fidel but distorts Martí, or at least fictionalizes the latter. A similar and, I would argue, more revealing gesture appears in the passage from Martí, who resorts to calling 1868 “tiempos maravillosos,” in its dual sense of astonishing and supernatural. In his speech about 1868 Martí invokes the phantasmagoria of an army of spirits who return to avenge their indifferent progeny, hardly a material or historical way of referring to Carlos Manuel “Discurso en conmemoración de 1868, en Hardman Hall, Nueva York,” in (Martí: 1964, 237).

11

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de Céspedes and Roberto Agramonte. Both passages dramatize, in other words, the implicit purpose of any figural interpretation— the legitimation of a present ideology. And that legitimation inevitably takes place, as we have seen, at the expense of a dehistorization of the past in relation to which the present ideology becomes established. As Auerbach goes on to show, the Old Testament in the readings of the Church Fathers ceased to be a book of the law and history of Israel and became a promise and prefiguration of Christ. Something similar is at work in most readings of modern Cuban history. Beginning perhaps with Martí, such readings empty out the contradictions and discontinuities that separate the various moments of revolution for the sake of presenting a flawless, meaningful narrative. To understand the meaning of José Martí in modern Cuban history, then, we must examine the periodic recycling of his figure, including the one currently taking place in Cuba, and its relationship to a more basic issue: the pervasive and, I believe, ultimately distorting teleological reading of Cuban history. That Martí himself contributed to the prevalence of the very reading that has distorted his historical complexity is an irony whose fault lies less with Martí than with the Cuban people’s own struggle to make sense of their historical plight. There remain, in my view, two ways out of that irony, the analysis of which lie equally beyond the limited scope of this paper. The first and more difficult would be to abandon the teleology that has served to dehistoricize the Cuban past. A second, perhaps more manageable course, would be to attempt to research and write a critical biography of José Martí. Modern Cuban history is replete with martyrs and heroes. No sooner do they die than they return as ghosts in a nightmare that recurs only to claim still more martyrs and more heroes. But ghosts do go away, however, as soon as we speak to them face to face, and then discover they are but the substance of our own dreams.

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Bibliography Agramonte, Roberto (1971): Martí y su concepción del mundo. San Juan: UP of Puerto Rico. Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos, vol. 1. Centro de Estudios Martianos, 1978. Auerbach, Erich (1959): Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. New York: Meridian Books. Butler Gray, Richard (1962): José Martí, Cuban Patriot. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Castro, Fidel (1983): José Martí: el autor intelectual. La Habana: Editorial Política. CEM (1978): Siete enfoques marxistas sobre José Martí. La Habana: Editora Política, Departamento de Orientación Revolucionaria del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba. Desnoes, Edmundo (1967): Punto de vista. La Habana: Instituto del Libro. González, Manuel and Ivan A. Schulman (1969): Martí, Darío y el modernismo. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Kirk, John M. (1983): José Martí, Mentor of the Cuban Nation. Tampa: University Presses of Florida. Lunes de Revolución, n° 90, (30 January, 1961). Marinello, Juan (1980): Escritos sociales, ed. Mirta Aguirre. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Martí, José (1964): Obras Completas, vol. 4. La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba. Revista América Libre, (La Habana) 1:1 (April 1927). Revista Cuba Socialista, 1962; (2): 45-62. Ripoll, Carlos (1984): Jose Martí, the United States, and the Marxist interpretation of Cuban history. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books.

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The Crisis of Latinamericanism Carlos Ripoll, in memoriam

I

begin this essay considering the following passage from José Martí’s chronicle of the May 3, 1890, Washington Pan-American Conference. By the time Martí published his text in Buenos Aires’ La Nación, the eight-month conference was effectively over and the delegates from Latin America were preparing to return to their respective countries. There Martí chronicles what appears to have been the final social gathering of the delegates in New York City, a celebration of the defeat of the U.S. proposal of a continental customs agreement (Zollverein) and a parallel arbitration agency. During this, their final New York bash, the gathered delegates toasted the health of Manuel Quintana, a young and, from all signs, aggressive Argentine delegate, whom the other delegates hailed with the epithet of “Bayardo de la Conferencia” for his eloquent defense of the so-called Latin American position during the proceedings. Martí quotes Quintana’s response to the toast of his fellow delegates: “On behalf of my country I accept your kindness! We are nothing more than a united people in America!” [“¡Para mi patria acepto estos cariños! ¡Nada más que un pueblo somos todos nosotros en América!”]. To which Martí adds in his chronicle: One American without a country, unhappy child of a land that has not yet learned to inspire compassion from the republics of which it is both natural sentinel and indispensable, natural component, viewed, perhaps teary-eyed, that rapture of nobility. The republics, taking 151

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pity, turned to the unfortunate man’s corner, and they all toasted to the American without a country. What some of them saw as pity, others saw as prophecy. [Un americano sin patria, hijo infeliz de una tierra que no ha sabido aún inspirar compasión a las repúblicas de que es centinela natural, y parte indispensable, veía, acaso con lágrimas, aquel arrebato de nobleza. Las repúblicas compadecidas se volvieron al rincón del hombre infeliz, y brindaron por el americano sin patria. Lo que tomaron unos a piedad y otros a profecía.]1

My remarks are based on, and circumscribed by, the idea that sustains this passage from Martí’s chronicle. I wish to document and analyze Martí’s, and consequently Cuba’s, isolation within the “rapture of nobility” of Pan-Americanism, or as I shall call it, Latinamericanism: the pious fiction of continental unity that both motivated the U.S. invitation to the 1889-90 conference and justified the Latin American delegates’ defeat of U.S. proposals within it. While in the one case, Latinamericanism is the pious fiction that serves the U.S. to keep European interests at bay, in the other case it is the fiction that keeps at bay U.S. interests contrary from those of post-Independence Latin America.2 Few issues as Martí´s anti-imperialism have been more discussed than this one in the critical canon, or at least as tradition has it—the political canon from Julio Antonio Mella to Fidel Castro. Yet little, if any, attention has been paid to Martí’s parallel critique, bordering on sheer anxiety, of the exclusion of Cuban interests by its so-called “sister republics.” That Martí’s critique of Latinamericanism has been overlooked should not surprise us, perhaps. Thanks in part to the rhetorical uses to which Martí’s own Latin Americanist position has been put since his death—the defense of

1



2

All citations of Martí’s works will come from (Martí: 1964). For a useful collection of Martí’s works following the two Pan American Conferences (188990 and 1891-92), see (Martí: 1985). I develop this idea in “Latinamericanism,” appendix to (Santí: 2005); portions of the essay appear in this book. 152

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“Nuestra América”—all his other concerns on the subject are often swept aside. Even more decisive, however, is that Martí´s own critical statements, in this and other passages, should be dispersed, oblique and ultimately ambiguous: they sound more like jabs at a good friend than outright stabs at an enemy. And while Martí’s obliqueness regarding this critique may have been justified at the time out of sheer political expedience—not to mention his strategic concerns for the imminent struggle for Cuban independence— our own historical distance dictates, or at least should dictate, a different judgment altogether. Least justified of all perhaps is the blindness, moral and otherwise, of the Martí canon regarding this subject—although this, too, can be explained as a result of the pervasive effects of Latinamericanism as discourse and ideology. It matters little, finally, that historical reality might show that Martí was indeed not counted among the Latin American delegates during their last celebration. From Martí’s perspective, at least, Cuba was, as he himself states, “an indispensable component” of “our America”, and his sense of exclusion urged him to speak in those very terms. And yet, a close reading of the historical context out of which Martí wrote the essay “Nuestra América,” the ostensible pilar of so-called Latinamericanism, demonstrates that his rhetoric is tainted by a sharp ambivalence before that entire project, to the point that it ends up questioning the very “rapture of nobility” that sustains it. To parody the well-known essay by Angel Augier, it could be said that Martí promulgates an “anti-Latin Americanist thesis in the cradle of Pan-Americanism.”3 Hence my contention: a critique of Latinamericanism not only constitutes the rhetoric of “Nuestra América,” but also explains Martí’s motivation in writing the essay of the same name.

3



See (Augier, 185-210). 153

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II We need to recall first the issue that for Martí lurks in the background of the Pan-American Congress: namely, the threat of annexation by the United States. Martí´s chronicles during this entire period allude at times to the issue, but it is his correspondence with Gonzalo de Quesada Aróstegui, who at the time was an assistant to Roque Sáenz Peña, the principal delegate from Argentina, that shows fully his anxiety over it. His anxiety stems from three immediate sources. The first was the rumor at the time of visits of U.S. State Department officials to both Cuba and Madrid exploring the purchase of Cuba from Spain; then there was the actual proposal, initiated by Cuban annexationist José Ignacio Rodríguez, that the U.S. government purchase Cuba’s independence, a proposal that Martí viewed with open suspicion; and finally, news had reached Martí that a fake chronicle datelined Washington and bearing his own initials had been spuriously published in La discusión, a Havana newspaper, describing, U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine’s commitment to the idea of annexation. Martí viewed all three simultaneous events as a sinister conspiracy that was meant to coincide with the Pan-American Conference. Yet precisely because of that odd coincidence, he also saw fit to counter such a proposal by attempting to insert the issue of Cuban independence in the conference proceedings while support for the Latin American delegates from the “sister republics” was still a possibility. Martí himself was a not a delegate to the Conference, even though he nominally did hold the diplomatic post of Uruguay consul in New York), and so he acted indirectly by writing to Gonzalo de Quesada on October 29, 1889: What we ought to obtain from the Conference is, then a recommendation that would join an acknowledgment of our right to independence and the U.S. government’s acknowledgment of our capacity for it . . . We do need to know about the U.S., which is at our door like a question mark at least.

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[Lo que del Congreso se había de obtener entonces, era, pues, una recomendación que llevase aparejado el reconocimiento de nuestro derecho a la independencia y de nuestra capacidad para ella, de parte del gobierno norteamericano . . . De quien necesitamos saber es de los Estados Unidos; que está a nuestra puerta como un enigma, por lo menos.]4

The following month, after further news of talk among the ­Latin American delegates of the U.S. annexation of Cuba, Martí wrote again to Gonzalo de Quesada, more pointedly: There are blind men for everything, and each job has its own man. But Sáenz Peña knows how to think for himself, and he comes from an independent and proud country. He will see and will know what to do. Work on him well, for this apprenticeship will be good for you, and be decidedly useful. [Para todo hay ciegos, y cada empleo tiene en el mundo su hombre. Pero el Sr. Sáenz Peña sabe pensar por sí y es de tierra independiente y decorosa. Él verá y sabrá lo que hace. Trabájele bien, que este noviciado le va a ser a Ud. muy provechoso, y de utilidad acaso decisiva.]5

That Martí hoped for a resolution from the Conference regarding the Cuban question along the lines outlined in his October letter and introduced by a Latin American delegation (preferably Argentina, arguably the most powerful) is therefore clear from these statements. No such resolution ever came, however, and already in the next letter to Gonzalo de Quesada, dated November 16, Martí shows his disillusionment: Many have sold out, and many more are corrupt; but with a grunt of righteous indignation one can force back those who, acting like a herd, or out of hunger for lentils, break ranks as soon as they hear the crack of the whip that summons them or hear that dinner is served.

4 5



See (Martí: 1964, vol. 1, 249). See (Martí: 1964, vol. 6, 121).. 155

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[Son algunos los vendidos, y muchos más los venales; pero de un bufido del honor puede echarse atrás a los que, por hábitos de rebaño, o el apetito de las lentejas, se salen de las filas en cuanto oyen el látigo que los convoca o el plato puesto.]6

The same day he wrote this he also wrote to Serafín Bello, another Cuban exile then living in Key West, about such annexationist designs, and added: In the loneliness in which I see myself—because sooner or later I await what I despise—I shall prevent it, I shall implore, I am imploring, I place at the service of my silent country all the credit to my name that I can give those sister lands. [En la soledad en que me veo—porque cuál más cuál menos espera lo que abomino—lo que he de impedir, he de implorar, estoy implorando, pongo al servicio de mi patria en el silencio todo el crédito que he podido darle dando en esas tierras hermanas mi nombre.]7

Finally, in another letter to Sáenz Peña, on April 10, 1890, as the Conference was winding down, Martí announced a future trip to Washington to make before him a “cautious, and very private request on behalf of my country” [“una súplica cauta y muy privada por mi patria”].8 At the heart of Martí’s position, then, seethes a burning conflict: the America to which he was so devoted had done or would do nothing to assist the one sister land, Cuba, that needed the most help. Martí may have deemed it politically wise to preserve, and even exacerbate, his Latinamericanist allegiances, but resigning himself to this circumstance hardly eliminated, or lessened, the moral gravity of the conflict. Indeed, the conflict, which goes unstated by Martí but nevertheless is or should be evident to his informed readers, is what determines both his aggressive 8 6 7

See (Martí: 1964, vol. 6, 122).. See (Martí: 1964, vol. 1, 254).. See (Martí: 1964, vol. 7, 398). 156

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­ atinamericanism and the frequent remarks that serve to temper L it, or that at least show his reservations towards its ideology. Additional proof of this position appears in Martí´s well-known speech on José María Heredia, the Cuban Romantic poet, delivered in New York City the same month of November 1889, at what was perhaps his first face to face encounter with the conference delegates. Halfway through that speech, as Martí describes the life of exile poet Heredia in Mexico, he chooses to allude to another conference, the 1826 Congress of American Republics that Simón Bolívar had convened in Panama and at which it was decided that the continental independence movement would not reach Cuba: On behalf of his country, and of his greater country, our America, [Heredia] had wanted the free republics to lend their arms to the only people of the emancipated family that kissed the feet of the angry owner. He said: Let free America rescue the island that Nature gave it as a gate and guardian… Bolívar himself was set to go when an English-speaking man, who came from the North with government papers grabbed his horse by the bridle and said: ‘I am free, and so are you; but that people which must be mine, because I want it, cannot be free.’ [Por su patria había querido él, y por la patria mayor de nuestra América, que las repúblicas libres echaran los brazos al único pueblo de la familia emancipada que besaba aún los pies del dueño enfurecido. ¡Vaya, decía, la América libre a rescatar la isla que la naturaleza le puso de pórtico y guarda! Ya ponía Bolívar el pie en el estribo cuando un hombre que hablaba inglés, y que venía del Norte con papeles de gobierno, le asió el caballo de la brida, y le habló así: ‘Yo soy libre, tú eres libre; pero ese pueblo que ha de ser mío, porque lo quiero para mí, no puede ser libre.’]9

It would not be an exaggeration to describe Martí’s labors during this time as walking a tightrope between praise for “our America” along with blame of U.S. imperialism, on the one hand, and a 9



See (Martí: 1964, vol. 5, 136).. 157

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critique of Latinamericanism, on the other. In that sense, Bolívar in this passage is no less to blame for the continued enslavement of Cuba as the “English-speaking man” who persuades Bolívar that he should give up the fight. But such a proposition can only be gathered by implication, given the delicate balance between political expediency and historical fact that Martí was forced to preserve were he to facilitate the eventual independence of Cuba from Spain by means of an equally possible, but in the end non-existent, helping hand from the rest of Latin America. What in the Heredia speech is a historical jab at the delegates regarding their lack of action with respect to the Cuban issue, in “Madre América”, the other major speech that Martí gave the following month before the same delegates, would become a vindication of the continental sympathy for his own status as an exile, making repeated references, especially towards the end, to the life of Latin American immigrants in the U.S. And yet, in September 1890, once the conference was over and the delegates were gone, in an essay on Cuban poet Francisco Sellén, Martí would describe him in the following ambivalent terms: “Son of Cuba, to whose novel heroes he gave time in order to correct the indifference of a deaf continent” [Hijo de Cuba, a cuyos héroes novicios dio tiempo para errar la indiferencia de un continente sordo].10 The passage from the May 3 1890, chronicle that I quoted at the beginning, where Martí describes the toast to Manuel Quintana and from which he felt excluded, finds its fullest significance, and possibly its source, in yet another important passage, not in Martí but from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. “When ranks are almost equal among a people,” writes de Tocqueville in part 3, chapter 1 of his Liberal classic: as all men think and feel in nearly the same manner, each instantaneously can judge the feelings of all the others; he just casts a rapid glance at himself, and that is enough. So, there is no misery that he cannot readily understand, and a secret instinct tells him its extent. It See (Martí: 1964, vol. 5, 187)..

10

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makes no difference if strangers or enemies are in question; his imagination at once puts him in their place. Something of personal feeling is mingled with his pity, and that makes him suffer himself when another’s body is torn.11

It is precisely because Martí sees himself as a paradoxical “American without a country,” suspended midway between the factual pity of his peers and the necessity of historical prophecy, that he sought refuge in “our America,” “holding out our hand without getting tired of being held out to those who deny us theirs,” he wrote on October 10, 1890, barely five months after the conclusion of the Conference and with all the delegates having returned home. All, of course, except Martí himself. It should not surprise us that, years later, in a document known as the “Letter to Cuban Leaders”, endorsed with Máximo Gómez barely five days before the fateful battle of Dos Ríos in May 19, 1895, we should read: “From the peoples of Spanish America, we ask for no help, because those who deny it will only confirm their own lack of honor.” Thus, Martí affirms, without being explicit, that he expects nothing from the “sister republics,” for the simple reason that no help had been given during all the previous years that he had asked.12

III One searches in vain, in the reams of canonical scholarship on Martí, for any discussion of his ambivalence towards so-called Latin America. The most prevalent view is rather the opposite, to the extreme that the portrait of Martí as a militant Latinamericanist—an ideologue of Latin American political and cultural union— 11 12

See (De Tocqueville: 1988, 564). Martí’s statement echoes another to Gómez in a letter (Martí: 1895): “To the people of Spanish America we ask for no help, because it would only confirm the dishonor of those who would deny us.” Cited from (Martí: 1993, 213 and 225) 159

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erases any complexity from his ideology or personality. Neither one of the monographs by Florencia Peñate and Graciella Chailloux, devoted respectively to the First Pan-American Conference and Martí’s economic anti-imperialism, take notice of the themes I have just highlighted.13 Their omission could perhaps be overlooked given their thematic and methodological limits. But what is one to say of such compendious studies as Ricaurte Soler’s Idea y cuestión nacional latinoamericanas, or perhaps Jean Lamore’s José Martí et l’Amérique?14 The former sticks closely to a reading of Martí´s anti-imperialist canon yet chooses not to problematize his views on the continent. The case of the latter, however, is particularly serious, given its stated subject. Originally a multi-volume thesis, and later a book, nowhere does it so much as gloss over Martí’s double-edged view of his cultural peers, though it does invest heavily in Martí’s portrait as a blind if faithful Latinamericanist. We can perhaps wonder endlessly at such critical blindness, but the reason for it is simple: over the years Martí, hero and martyr, has been co-opted by the ideology of Latinamericanism to justify petty regional-economic interests, particularly before U.S. administrations. This co-option has taken place, tragically and disgracefully, in ways parallel to those in which successive Cuban political regimes, beginning with Tomás Estrada Palma and including the present communist regime, have enlisted the image of José Martí for their own interested use.15 It is with this backdrop that I believe we should revisit the foremost important document from Martí’s canon: the essay “Nuestra América.” While there is no arguing that this piece is an extension of Martí’s defense of the Latin American experience, as opposed to its North American and European versions, it should also be clear that the essay condemns the adulteration of that experience and places them squarely on the shoulders of Latin Americans See (Peñate: 1977), and (Chailloux: 1989). See (Soler: 1980) and (Lamore: 1986 and 1988). 15 I propose this reading in my essay “José Martí and the Cuban Revolution,” in this book. 13 14

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themselves, whose laziness at knowing and assuming their own culture—what Martí calls “the wicked and imprudent disdain of aboriginal culture”—was surpassed only by their political opportunism. From its very title the essay is addressed to Latin Americans, Martí himself included, and no amounts of negative references to European and U.S. cultures—Martí calls them “European Americans”—can replace its object. It is precisely in “Nuestra América” where Martí gives free reign to his pent-up critique of neo-colonial behavior, which must have appeared evident to him in, among other things, the actions of the Latin American delegates in the previous year’s conference, a behavior that became particularly obvious in their condescencion towards, or lack of sympathy for, the cause of Cuban independence. I find it deplorable that most ideological readings of “Nuestra América” during the last thirty years or so choose to frame the text exclusively as Martí´s belated response to U.S. actions at the First Pan-American Conference, rather than the far more crucial reformist critique of mores that were then prevalent among Latin Americans, especially among its cultured class.16 Thus, Cintio Vitier, in what could be called the ultimate canonical framing—namely, his introduction to the critical edition done jointly in 1992 by Casa de las Américas and the Centro de Estudios Martianos, states that the problems Martí discusses, “come all the way down to our times, dramatically worsened, in the context of what today we call the Third World because of the growing greed, power and aggression of American imperialism.17

Regarding this topic, see the short, yet enlightening, essay “Pueblos nuevos” where Martí states, “Throughout our America there is an abundance of Iberophiles, Welshophiles and Yankophiles of the laziest nature, of purely second-handed and inept character, of pure impatience and imitative character, those who know not the profound pleasure of amassing greatness with their own hands, those who have no faith in the seed of their country, who send out for foreign souls, as if they were suits or shoes,” in (Escritos desconocidos de José Martí: 1971, 211). 17 See (Vitier: 1992, 12). 16

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Were it not for the fact that Vitier fails to mention anything else about the essay’s contents—not even the critique of colonial alienation to which Martí devotes the better part of it—it would not be difficult to agree with that statement, at least in part. On the other hand, ignoring the moral and reformist critique of Latin American custom simply reduces the essay to another anti-imperialist pamphlet that plays into the hands of Latinamericanism—one more turn of the screw of imperialism, U.S. or other. And so, it would not be farfetched to see “Nuestra América” as Martí’s defiant, if also ironic, assertion of a Latin American cultural identity that those conference delegates, representatives of allegedly free countries, either resisted or ignored, while Martí, “an American without a country,” was the one person there most eager to embrace it. My corrective of the canonical representation of the contents of “Nuestra América” is borne out in part by another well-known document from that period, the well-known preface to Versos sencillos, where Martí reveals that the negative results of the Pan-American Conference took a toll on his health: And the agony I lived through, until I was able to confirm the caution and pride of our peoples; and the horror and shame of my legitimate fear that we Cubans might, with parricide hands, might help in the senseless plan to draw Cuba . . . away from the fatherland that claims it and in which it is completed, the Spanish American fatherland.”18 [Y la agonía en que viví, hasta que pude confirmar la cautela y el brío de nuestros pueblos; y el horror y vergüenza en que me tuvo el temor legítimo que pudiéramos los cubanos, con manos parricidas, ayudar al plan insensato de apartar a Cuba, para bien único de sus amo disimulado, de la patria que la reclama y en ella se completa.]19

Notice, once again, that the blame is placed not solely on North Americans or Europeans, but on Latin Americans themselves, including Cubans, whose annexationist attempts in time were to

See (Martí: 2002, 270-71). See (Martí: 1964, vol. 16, 142).

18 19

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prove more persistent than those of ambitious U.S. government officers, such as Secretary of State Blaine´s.

IV It is a commonplace of the Martí canon that he had an ambivalent attitude towards the United States: he admired its democratic institutions and the ways that North American society embraced modernity, yet despised its imperialist practices, and particularly its condescension towards Latin America. Philip Foner has aptly referred to this attitude as Martí’s perception of “the two faces of the United States.” So, similarly, should we become equally aware that Martí also saw two faces down south. He loved “Our America,” but he also took pity on it. His devotion was tempered by a tragic knowledge of the petty interests that prevented the socalled “sister republics” from acting as one, an impediment that Martí knew could seal the fate of his country of origin. Martí’s representation of this dilemma, this burning conflict, is that of an outsider: he writes from a position of extreme marginality and isolation. The figure that embodies this representation is the orphan, and by implication, his imagining of an absent mother: precisely what he calls “Madre América.” If Martí was in fact isolated, it was not so much because, as the canon has insisted, he felt alienated from an imperial power like the U.S., with which he ultimately had little in common, but rather that he felt rejected by the very people for whom he wrote and worked: the other Latin Americans whom he wished would regard him more sympathetically; not as the Other, but as a peer. Not as an orphan, but as a true brother. Yet the fact that Martí’s Latin American peers never exerted themselves to acknowledge Martí´s political rights to his own country hardly makes the matter more justified, rational, or palatable. It only makes it that much more urgent, sad, tragic, pathetic.

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Bibliography Augier, Angel : “Martí: tesis antimperialista en la cuna del panamericanismo”, Dos congresos: Las razones ocultas. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Chailloux, Graciela (1989): Estrategia y pensamiento económico de José Martí frente al imperialismo norteamericano. La Habana: CESEU / Universidad de La Habana. De Tocqueville, Alex (1988): Democracy in America, trans. G. Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer. New York: Harper and Row. Escritos desconocidos de José Martí, ed. Carlos Ripoll. New York: Eliseo Torres & Sons, 1971. Lamore, Jean (1986, 1988): José Martí et l’Amérique, 2 vols. Paris: L’Hamattan. Martí, José (1895): “Carta al Director del New York Herald”. Patria, 3, June 1895. — (1964): Obras Completas, 27 vols. La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba. — (1985): Dos congresos: Las razones ocultas, ed. Centro de Estudios Martianos. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Estudios Complementarios de Angel Augier y Paul Estrade. — (1993): Epistolario, Tomo 5, ed. Luis García Pascual and Enrique H. Moreno Plá. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. — (2002): José Martí: Selected Writings, trans. Esther Allen. New York: Penguin Books. Peñate, Florencia (1977): José Martí y la Primera Conferencia Panamericana. La Habana: Editorial Arte y Literatura. Santí, Enrico Mario (2005): Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Soler, Ricaurte (1980): Idea y cuestión nacional latinoamericanas de la independencia a la emergencia del imperialismo. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Vitier, Cintio (1992): “Presentación”, Nuestra América. Edición Crítica. La Habana: Centro de Estudios Martianos / Casa de las Américas.

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Thinking Through Roberto Valero, in memoriam

After all, what is to think? To think is nothing but to raise up, to open furrows, to lay foundations, and to give a password to all souls. José Martí We must learn to be air: to be a dream in freedom. Octavio Paz

T

hinking through Martí was always the greatest challenge, the greatest obstacle. Dead in combat at the age of forty-two, Martí’s fate was the hero and martyr’s, and that turned him into something quite different from what he had been the greater part of his life: a writer and a thinker. In the great task of building the Cuban nation, not to mention the hemisphere where it belongs—Martí called it “Madre América”—it became too easy to exploit the ideological and sentimental aspects of his life and work, appropriated as they were by successive political generations that spread his patriotic fervor whilst neglecting his critique of the demagogues, or his vast writings. Other aspects of his work—his critique of the military, for example—were also suppressed for the sake of a future that has not yet arrived. And yet, what has indeed arrived is the time to think through Martí, to dissect his varied work and personality, at once far-reaching and 165

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limited. Time, that is, to free ourselves from a cult that not only distorts Martí but avoids thinking through him. Thinking through Martí implies exactly what that means: pensar, to think, comes from pesar, to weigh, to determine value. To do that well one must view Martí and his work in relation to, or in dialogue with, other contemporary figures and events of his time in Cuba, Spain, the U.S., Latin America, Europe. For we certainly know a lot about Martí: biographies of him constitute a genre of their own. But what we do know is still little because we have not yet thought him through. Thus, one harmful approach has been to consider solely what Martí did or said rather than focusing on what he reacted to, or was confronted by, serious faults that obscure many aspects of his work. To cite one example: of Martí’s vast correspondence, the letters he wrote take pride of place, but any of those written to him are still missing, a void that creates the impression that his life was one long monologue, when in reality he devoted most of it to the exchange of views. Thinking through Martí thus means to measure him, to reflect on him, not simply to feel his presence, or to pay him homage. Thinking through implies nothing less than to understand critically a living personality, virtues and vices alike, instead of celebrating the mummy that a rhetoric of homage repeatedly attempts to turn him into, more than a century after his death. Due to the many ways in which Latin American political rhetoric and what I call Martí’s mummification reinforce one another, thinking through Martí would thus contribute to a cleansing of political morals. We would thereby show that wrought terms like “Our America” ought to be understood as a trenchant critique of political opportunists, the kind of addiction that blames political misfortunes upon powerful neighbors instead of accepting responsibility for one’s shortcomings and failures, facts which Martí himself viewed as both legacy and challenge. Thinking through Martí thus requires us to restore the lost or at least blurred face of a spirit that still haunts us amidst continental nationalism, out of style by now yet still profitable for some, and certainly oppressive for many others. 166

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Thinking through Martí would confirm, in addition, that the rhetoric of homage of which Martí has been victim, is yet another symptom of our inability—either the entire hemisphere’s or our defective Modernity’s—to assume our history and reconcile ourselves to it. For the recurring, opportunist recycling of our heroes, so often justified to praise national values, promotes mythical virtues, denies defects and mistakes, and thus subverts the exceptionality of those same heroes. Historian Edmundo O’Gorman, in one of the most cogent arguments I know on the need for such moral reform—which ought to begin, he felt, with the very writing of History—once asked, and then answered: Ought we to persist with mistaken ways of expressing and conceiving the love of country, turn a blind eye to the weakness of heroes and make them cardboard figures that cannot reach our hearts; deny one bit of good intentions, willingness to sacrifice, or patriotism to outstanding men and women who embraced causes historically lost or proven wrong; preach like patriotic gospel about a historical development predestined to witness the victory of a generation of good men over bad ones? These are all but clear examples of a type of nationalism, harmful and already overcome, whose survival points to an unfortunate lack of historical growth. Must we be underdeveloped in this, too?1

My own generation—by this I mean more than just Cuban peers—for years manipulated by the good intentions of a pious “political gospel” that at last century’s end witnessed the collapse of ideologies used to support and justify it, today demands an end to that harmful heroic myth and the start of an honest dialogue, painful though it be. To carry it on—for which Martí’s life and work does set an example—requires no special research teams or fellowships. It does require us to own up to our loneliness, and to use our imagination to read both our past and our present creatively. Not too long ago, here in Washington D.C., I lived through

1



See (O’Gorman: 1977, 85). 167

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a singular episode that I believe illustrates these principles. I turn now to retell it in some detail.

II A few years ago, I became very ill. For weeks, doctors were unable to diagnose the mysterious illness that swelled up my hands, paralyzed my legs, and ailed me with high fevers. During convalescence, I spent entire days sitting, unable to move, and depressed. Rather than spend time on academic work during those miserable days, I began revising a book of the poems that for twenty years I had put away, an exercise that allowed me to confirm what Lucien Blaga, the Romanian poet, once remarked: “Every book is an illness overcome.” Few visitors came to see me then, and whenever they did, I was forced to welcome them sitting in a big armchair, legs propped up on the coffee table like a latter-day Sheridan ­Whiteside, though hardly “the man who came to dinner,” since I happened to be at home… One of the friends who paid me regular visits was the poet Roberto Valero, who was also my D.C. neighbor. Each time Roberto came to see me, he would bring me something to eat: delicious Cuban black beans that his wife María Elena Badías had just made, desserts his mother sent from Miami, or else cookies that his two beautiful daughters had just baked. My friend Valero would also bring along his great sense of humor, and of course the latest Cuban jokes, be they about Fidel or “Pepito.” One day when I happened to feel especially bad, Roberto arrived with his customary charm and right away set out to rescue me from the moods he himself knew better than anyone. He began telling me outrageously funny stories about his childhood in Matanzas, the adventures and mischief he experienced, and went on to tell me how as a child he had managed without the help and support of his father, whom he never knew. To let him off from his visibly moving tale, I offered that my case had been different: my father had been an important figure in my life, not only because I loved him, but because he 168

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was the first intellectual I ever met, and with whom I discussed all subjects imaginable. I also recalled then that my father, a student leader during the Gerardo Machado dictatorship, would often tell me about the part of Cuban history he had lived through, the grandeur and miseries of the Cuban Republic, as well as his experiences as an artist and executive director of the San Alejandro Academy, Havana’s premier School of Fine Arts. As such, my father had been a marginal, indirect, and of course, unwitting witness to key events in recent Cuban history. One day, when I was seventeen, still in high school, I told Valero, my father and I were involved in a particularly heated discussion. During our debate, the subject of Martí came up, and my father, who always looked to engage that subject, mentioned me something that I found particularly strange and disturbing but that he asked me never to reveal. My disclosure was enough to make Roberto lean forward on his seat and force me to let him in on the secret. (Beyond his many undeniable virtues, Roberto was, like all of us Cubans, a good gossip.) At first, I thought of refusing. But then I thought of the special moment that united me and my friend, now departed, and recalled the lines from “Limits,” a poem by Borges. After reflecting on how there is for everything “a last time, a never more, and oblivion”—“última vez y nunca más y olvido”—the poet ends up wondering if he might not, without knowing it, have already taken leave from someone dear: “de quién . . . sin saberlo, nos hemos despedido.” And so, I agreed to tell Valero the story my father had told me, but also made him promise me not to retell it, like a pact between mortals. I have no doubt that my friend kept his promise and took the secret with him to the grave. Today, I break both the promise I made to my father and the pact with my friend. With it I wish to recall not only Roberto Valero’s presence in our lives. The story also holds an important lesson for our common history. My father, I reminded Valero, designed and built in 1951 the mausoleum and tomb where José Martí is buried at the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in Santiago de Cuba. This fine work of sculpture and architecture was the professional climax of my father’s career. 169

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It was also a titanic enterprise due to the limited technology that was available in Cuba for this kind of monument. The mausoleum, for those who don’t know it, is a huge hexagonal building one hundred feet high with six enormous caryatids carved in stone, each an allegory of the country’s six original Cuban provinces. Inside the hexagon sits an oversize Carrara marble statue of Martí atop a sepulcher that bears, as Martí had famously requested: “un ramo/ de flores y una bandera.” The technical difficulties in building the mausoleum were compounded by serious budget problems. Given the proverbial corruption of the Carlos Prío Socarrás administration, the project budget was repeatedly cut. Thus, my father, who considered himself sole creator of the work, often had to resort to doing the chores of a day laborer to fulfill needs that the scant budget would not. One early evening during construction, towards the end of the project, after everyone had gone home, came the climactic moment of extracting the concrete cube, inside which lay the coffer containing Martí’s remains; the cube had to be moved from the old tomb, elsewhere in the same cemetery, to the new mausoleum being built. Considering the importance of this delicate task it is surprising that there was no one else left to perform it, except for two men: my father and his chief assistant, a Black man from Santiago by the name of Ignacio whose acquaintance I once made as a child. Lifting the huge concrete cube required not only a crane, which Ignacio maneuvered, but also a second person, my father, to direct the entire operation. Night was falling when the two men, after a difficult maneuver aimed at ensuring the structure’s safety, were finally able to put the crane’s hook into place. Slowly and carefully, the crane began to lift the concrete cube. But as soon as it reached eye level, my father noticed water leaking out of one of its corners, coming out of a wide and moldy hole. At this point of the story, I remember clearly, my father getting up from the seat next to mine, drops of sweat streaming down his forehead, as if recalling that experience caused him personal anguish. He got up to have a drink of water and when he came back, he stood hovering over me. He continued noting that at 170

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that ­moment he feared that the crane, through some bad maneuver, might have damaged the cube, so he ordered Ignacio to stop and bring it down. Not only did Ignacio follow his instructions at once, but he shut off the crane, got off himself, and ran to the place where the structure had been laid down. My father began examining it, terrified and blaming himself for the loss of Martí’s remains. By then, it was completely dark, almost nighttime, when Ignacio heard my father’s wails, each more distressed than the previous one. But Ignacio, more calmly, or perhaps feeling less responsible, began to inspect the structure with a flashlight. He concluded that neither the crane’s hook nor poor instructions could have caused the damage. The hook had only touched the cube’s upper surface on the opposite side to the hole where the water had leaked from. Because of some structural defect on the cube itself, an underground stream must have gotten into it and drilled a hole through which water was now draining. Mold around the hole proved that the damage had happened a long time before that fateful evening. Whatever the cause of this unfortunate incident, the main worry of the two men was the state of Martí’s remains. Thus, without giving any thought to the fact that they needed an exhumation permit, my father and his assistant began to remove the cover, with one of them holding the flashlight, to ensure that the remains would not be damaged when the structure was lifted again. There was always the chance that the actual remains were inside another metal coffer, smaller than the one they had lifted. To their amazement, however, they discovered something more surprising still: there was nothing else inside. The metal coffer appeared to be empty. Apparently, the remains that had once rested there had long since departed with the water stream that had penetrated and had now become part of Cuban soil.2

2



I am, of course, aware, of all the facts regarding the first exhumation of Martí’s remains on February 24,1907 as detailed in (Quintana: 1953) (Pictures of both the ceremony and the physical remains exist here and elsewhere.) Page 406 states that the remains “were gathered and placed inside a lead box [which was] hermetically sealed and placed inside another wooden one.” After the 171

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I would not want readers to think that I wish to make a christological allegory. My father did verify that Martí’s remains had disappeared. His shock before this discovery was not only historical but ethical: finding that empty grave contradicted his whole purpose as an artist: building a mausoleum for remains of José Martí. Is it possible to build a tomb for remains that are no longer there? Despite this finding, the two troubled men agreed to keep the incident to themselves, to close the structure leaving it the same as they had found it, and finish the work, perhaps not as a mausoleum but as a monument, thus swearing each other to secrecy. In response to my father’s shocking revelation, I did not know what to say. I remained silent, and remember that my father, still standing and staring at me, put his hands in his pockets, turned away, and walked in silence toward a window to look outside, as if thinking. I understood then—or at least wanted to understand— that although he and Ignacio had sworn each other to secrecy, my father was offering me the story as a mystery that someday I would have to decipher. I never heard him mention the subject again, and, of course, I never again brought it up. Neither had I discussed it with anyone else until that afternoon when my friend Roberto Valero, to mitigate my illness, had come home to cheer me up, and I shared with him this secret that ties me so closely to my father’s memory. “We must learn to disappear,” I then heard Roberto Valero say, as if it were the most pertinent moral of the story. “We must learn to disappear and never return.”

III One needs little imagination to uncover the meaning of this strange story. Martí’s empty grave subverts all the old, scheming attempts to mummify him. Valero’s brief but eloquent ­summary, remains were buried again in 1907, and despite the extreme care that was taken in their handling, the participants in the ceremony discovered that they had left a tooth out (412-415), which is now exhibited in the Santiago de Cuba museum. 172

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worthy of the poet he was, points out, on the other hand, the radical alternative that our time demands: thinking through our heroes, along with their mythical tales, means to make them disappear within a history reconciled with the present. Making the heroes disappear lets them rest. Unless we do this, we cannot come to terms with history, and we condemn ourselves to loneliness, to a recurring alienation. My father’s simple yet eloquent gesture after telling me the story illustrates again what I aim to say: looking out the window means searching for the light, breathing, “opening furrows, laying foundations, giving passwords for all souls,” and, finally, departing with a water stream, as Martí’s remains did when they, too, left, along with the underground current that rescued him from a vain historical kidnapping. In this, Martí, as opposed to us, his descendants, was faithful to his own principles. Contrary to what one might think initially, Martí’s patriotism and poetry were but roads toward disappearance: parallel versions of disinterest. “The first quality of the patriot,” he wrote in Patria in April 1893, “is to abandon all passions; to end passion and personal preferences in favor of public reality, and the need to accommodate just ideals to the forms of this public reality.”3 “The Fatherland belongs to nobody,” he wrote on another occasion, [and] should anyone claim it, it should be only in spirit, [since it] will belong only to those who serve it with the greatest intelligence and unselfishness” (1:460). To his Mexican friend Manuel Mercado, exactly one day before his death, whilst being harassed by intrigues from his own colleagues, Martí predicted: “I’ll know how to disappear. But my thinking will not, nor will my oblivion make me bitter” (3:606). Indeed, Martí was something more than just a political thinker. Political thinkers create institutions, reassure politicians, and endorse power. What makes Martí different is that he was the thinker of the Nation, in the sense that his last and highest aspiration (which he believed ought to be shared by all) was the disappearance of the political body, and thereby open up a national spirit. If it is true that our postmodern 3



See (Martí: 1992, 184). All translations are mine. 173

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era has made us rethink the relationship between politics and the patriotic sense—what amounts to the relationship between politics and the Nation—Martí’s work offers us a privileged space in which to do it. In a similar vein, Martí’s poetry constitutes a manner of disappearance. Aesthetic impersonality, as developed in the work of modern poets like T. S. Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, Ezra Pound, or W.B. Yeats, is often identified with a certain kind of poetry, and more specifically with that of Keats, Laforgue, Mallarmé, or Whitman. In truth, however, every poet, be it Homer, Eliot or Valero, is impersonal. The transformational dynamics of poetic language turns the poet into an Other. Thus Martí, great poet that he also was, conceives poetry as the sacrifice of the artist’s personality in exchange for the aesthetic and moral demands of language. If in Ismaelillo (1880), his first book of poetry, Martí discarded personal feelings on behalf of a symbolic identification with his son, in Versos sencillos (1892) he will end up identifying the speaker with poetic language itself, or, as the last stanza states: “Verso, o nos condenan juntos/o nos salvamos los dos.” What is Martí’s “new stanza” in Versos libres if not one more version of the Romantic desire to make language coincide with Nature and thereby eliminate the poetic subject altogether? Vaciad un monte; en tajo de sol vivo tallad un plectro; o de la mar brillante el seno rojo y nacarado, el molde de la triunfante estrofa nueva!

Far from being a political poet—which would amount to yet another version of the same mummifying, kidnapping ideology— Martí was a patriot-poet, all of which makes him the true patriot. It is hardly a coincidence that my late friend, the poet Roberto Valero, was able to decipher so swiftly the meaning of my story, or of Martí’s belated disappearance. And yet, one need not be a poet to realize the ultimate meaning of Martí’s action. Call it aesthetic impersonality or political disinterest, Martí’s disappearance, which 174

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he advocated and practiced, brings us close to an open window that lets in the light and invites us to think. In the pane reflections, which are also our mirror, we see the faces of the disappeared, our own future face, and with them we tell ourselves: “Oh please, let me be air, let me be a dream in freedom.”

Appendix Y ahora que la muerte se apodera del sordo lamentar de sus esclavos, sé tú la buena voz consoladora que puede hablarnos del perdido cielo. Eugenio Florit, “Con Martí”

The original version of this essay spurred unexpected reader reactions— all unexpected at least for me. At the time I was living far away from Miami, but many readers, scattered all over, still called me and wrote. To “congratulate” hardly captures the flavor of all those messages. Better descriptions would be sharing, amazement, consternation, sadness, maybe even euphoria. Several young readers, among them a renowned Cuban poet, left me messages saying how much they agreed. Other Cuban peers, some older, called me with cracked voices overwhelmed as they recalled being moved by their reading. The one reader who impressed me the most was a certain colleague, recently arrived from Cuba, who wrote telling me she would keep the essay so that when her daughter grew up, she could read it as an example of how Martí ought to be thought through. All of these messages confirmed what is seldom recognized: good readers abound. Yet despite such happy results, I do keep asking myself: of all the essays I have written, why did this one prevail in its reception? I shall try to give an answer. It was certainly never my intention to write a sensationalist piece. Literature professors—particularly in the U.S., where universities are so close to bureaucracies and intellectuals always suspect—cannot make a career with anything but serious research.

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True, “Thinking Through Martí” was not strictly a research article. But neither was it a “chronicle,” as the Cuban poet Luis Mario later called it, thinking perhaps of the journalistic genre in which he excels. (Incidentally, I much admire chroniclers; one of the best is José Martí.) I first read “Thinking Through Martí” as a lecture at the “José Martí: Patriotism and Poetry” conference in April 1995 dedicated to the late Cuban poet Roberto Valero at Georgetown University. Soon after I published the first version in Spanish in Diario de las Américas, a Miami newspaper, and later as the opening essay in a book of mine on Martí.4 ln a departure from strict scholarship, my essay contained personal anecdotes and tried to say something about Martí based on them. Because the subject of Martí, for reasons I explain there, is very much part of my life, that makes me blur scholarly boundaries. My case is not the only oneit happens to many Cubans who write about Martí. The reactions to my essay that struck me the most, for reasons I shall explain, were those of Luis Mario and Luis Casero, who wrote after him. The former apparently published on June 1, 1995, in Diario de las Américas, a chronicle in which he restated the personal anecdote I had mentioned. (I say “apparently,” because I have not read his article; I get this newspaper only sporadically, and no one sent me Luis Mario’s article). Barely one month later, on July 6, Luis Casero published in the same newspaper a letter in which he objected to the substance of my anecdote—that Martí’s remains had disappeared before his last official burial. I know not whether Casero’s letter was published at Luis Mario’s request. But this time I was lucky that a friend did send me a copy of Casero’s article. Mine is therefore not a response to their double reaction—I cannot rebut what is not a response to my essay. Mine are merely remarks. Casero’s letter labeled my story a “strange assertion” and a “lie” [infundio]. In the same publication, Luis Mario justified his previous article by explaining that he was “obliged to make public this serious subject that could run the risk of being missed in 4



See (Martí: 1996). 176

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the middle of such a long essay.” In contrast to the many positive responses that I have received from readers, Luis Mario and Casero’s sole focus was on the “news” of the loss of Martí’s remains. Apparently, neither one was interested in the rest of my “assertions,” strange or not. Luis Mario alleges, for example, that because I whisked out the anecdote, burying it in a long essay, he felt obliged to retrieve it. Casero, on the other hand, briefly refers to my essay, but the real purpose of his letter is what he calls Luis Mario’s “ratification.” Casero also provides his own version of the whereabouts of Martí’s remains and asks Luis Mario to correct his assertion. To the latter I can only respond by saying that in my essay I tried neither to whisk out nor highlight the anecdote. My idea was to offer a metaphor of the uselessness of Martí’s historical kidnapping, what I called his mummification. The fact that this metaphor is based on something that actually took place proves, I think, how close thinking through Martí is, or should be, to everyday actions. As for the rest, I would say that good readers have no need of another chronicle to discover the anecdote I tell in my piece. Proof lies in the essay’s excellent reception. As for Casero’s testimony, and those who were present at Martí’s fifth official burial, they require a different kind of response. In “Thinking Through Martí” I did wish to reveal the disappearance of Martí’s remains, but only as a part of a broader meditation. For years I kept the secret to myself. Better said: I repressed it, in the same way my father had and revealed it to me at a moment of personal anguish. My own reaction to that revelation can only be compared to horror—the emotion one feels before any sort of sacrilege. My father’s original reaction was probably the same. A devoted admirer of Martí, he was responsible for building his last place of rest.5 Casero’s reaction to Luis Mario’s statement,

5



My own mother’s reaction to the publication of “Thinking Through Martí” also surprised me. After reading the essay, she called to give me the news that she, too, had known the secret, but had never spoken about it, thus keeping my father’s pledge. She, too, thought the whole thing was terrible, and of course, went on to reproach me for revealing it. I was thus proven wrong 177

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based on my text, was thus the same as my family’s. However, in Casero’s reaction there is one more circumstance that ought to be told, for Casero was not only, as he says, the “Director… of the fabulous national ceremonies at the dedication of the Martí mausoleum.” Casero was also the Minister of Public Works in Cuban President Prío Socarrás’ administration. As such, Casero held ultimate responsibility for the integrity of Martí’s remains; he was, literally, my father’s boss during the actual building of the mausoleum. Casero speaks of “sadness” at reading this story. True enough. But when he chooses to call it a “lie” [infundio]—which of course saddens me—he shows his indignation, no doubt a result of his sense of historical responsibility. I respect this. In revealing my father’s story, I could have been accused of a lot of things, among them imprudence, but I firmly reject the charge of dishonesty, which is what the word infundio refers to. I, too, feel indignation, for reasons which I shall go on to explain. It may sound strange, but I have no reason to doubt Casero’s honesty or that of others like him, who affirm they were present, as Casero says, “at the moment when Martí’s remains were exhumed from a tin-plate container.” Of all the evidence offered about Martí’s remains, the only one that moves me is Casero’s. The rest of the so-called evidence, including the extant photographs of the event, is doubtful, at least on the matter of Martí’s remains. Thus, after reading Luis Casero’s letter, I began to do research into the story my father had told me, and reviewed the events related to Martí’s fourth and fifth burials. Indeed, at the time the Cuban national press was full of descriptions of the ceremonies surrounding the transfer of the remains on June 29, 1951 and their burial the next day. The most explicit description of the transfer was the one published on the front page of Havana’s Diario de la Marina, (June 30, 1951). It read: “Rafael Argilagos had the honor of exhuming with his own about having a privilege, but also thought that perhaps my father had planned it that way: in the event one of the two revealed the secret, the other could confirm it. 178

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hands the remains of the Apostle, and placed them in a bronze coffin, where they shall rest forever.” The photograph Diario las Américas reprinted along with Luis Casero’s letter shows precisely that historical moment. This was, incidentally, the same picture published by the Havana magazine Carteles (Vol. 32, no. 27, July 8, 1951, 41) at Martí’s fifth burial. However, if, by reprinting the picture, Casero or the newspaper wanted to support his testimony, I am afraid they chose the wrong one. The caption under which Carteles published reads, instead: “The ceremonies for the transfer of Martí’s remains from Dos Rios began on Friday the 29th at 2 p.m. The urn where the remains were held was placed in a bronze coffin. Present were Luis Casero, Minister of Public Works; Rafael Argilagos, who has the urn in his hands, and Doctor Felipe Salcines, President of Universidad de Oriente.” Note that the Carteles description contradicts both versions, Diario de la Marina’s and Luis Casero’s. It states clearly: “The urn where the remains were held, was placed in a bronze coffin.” The caption does not mention any handling of the actual remains. The original caption also shows that the one published most recently to identify the same picture in Diario las Américas makes a further mistake: it states that “Luis Casero was exhuming Martí’s remains, which were in the tin plate urn,” though it was Rafael Argilagos who did the honors. And yet, despite all these doubts, I still consider Casero’s testimony the most moving. None of the other descriptions published at the time dispel my doubts. The ceremony, to my knowledge, was not filmed; there does exist a certificate of transfer prepared the same day by attorneys Ernesto Buch and Silverio Pérez. In the event that Martí’s remains were ever in the future exhumed and the indispensable forensic identification made, that legal certificate would remove all doubts. The 1951 forensic identification should have followed the procedure done in 1907 (the 1907 exhumation certificate is included in the book mentioned in note 2). Despite my own efforts and the efforts of those whom I have consulted on the matter, I have not succeeded in locating the 1951 exhumation certificate. I am told that it must be in the General Archive of Protocols of the 179

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Havana Ministry of Justice. We know this document exists not only because of the report in Diario de la Marina, but because it is mentioned in a very useful essay, “The Five Burials of José Martí,” by Francisco Ibarra Martínez. This essay, written (and perhaps published) years ago, provides a summary of all the facts known about Martí’s burials. The essay was republished on May 19, 1995, in Granma, the Cuban Communist Party daily. It includes a summary of the certificate, but unfortunately does not reprint it.6 All these facts notwithstanding, one doubt does remain. Even if it could be established that everyone present in the 1951 ceremony was able to view Martí’s physical remains in the so-called tin container and witnessed their transfer to the bronze urn, and despite whatever forensic certificates may have been written at the time, who can assure us, lacking a forensic DNA test, that those were Martí’s genuine remains? And yet, let me repeat: I have no reason to doubt Luis Casero’s sincerity. But neither do I have reason to doubt my father’s. Their testimonies exclude each other; unless, of course, the remains that were in that “tin container” happened to be someone else’s. In that case, both testimonies would be right. Hence my perplexity. As a scholar, I cannot deny the facts or doubts of witnesses like Casero. As my father’s son, I cannot deny the truth of his story, which he solemnly passed on to me—and, as it turns out, to his wife and my mother. The events my father related to me must have taken place before the 1951 transfer to

6

While the Spanish version of this essay was in press, Professor Carlos Ripoll, the foremost specialist on Martí’s life and works, obtained for me a copy of the document in question, the certificate detailing the “Exhumation of the Remains of the Apostle José Martí,” (Dirección Provincial de Justicia: 1951). While it does not mention the extraction of the physical remains, it does describe how “Rafael Argilagos Loret de Mola, a member of the committee, removed them from the grave that has temporarily contained José Martí’s remains since September 8, 1947 (sic.); moreover, they are publicly deposited in a bronze urn.” Without referring to a “complete identification of the Maestro,” or any kind of forensic identification, it goes on to assert that these were “José Martí’s physical remains.” I hereby acknowledge the help of Professor Ripoll. 180

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which Luis Casero’s letter refers; actually, and according to the information given by Ibarra Martínez, they must have occurred sometime between February 1948, when my father and architect Jaime Benavent won the contest that awarded them the contract to build the mausoleum, and June 1951, when the fifth burial took place. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the story that I have shared is that my father’s discovery was a true accident and that, I am certain, he would have preferred it never to have happened. What else could I do but remain faithful to my own recollection? My own distress before Luis Mario and Luis Casero’s reaction stems, then, from the arrogance with which they chose to treat this subject, implying that to say that Martí’s remains had disappeared and to urge his readers to think through him is unacceptable; implying, in fact, that the truth belonged only to one person. The poet Gastón Baquero, in that same issue of Diario de la Marina that described the events of the transfer of Martí’s so-called remains, wrote, in words I would now like to my own: “José Martí, who nowadays is fashionable and whose remains everyone would like to own as a monopoly . . . never believed in hatred.” The use of a word like infundio to refer to as complex and delicate a subject as this, is, to say the least, very unlike Martí. Indeed, no one has a monopoly on Martí, much less on his physical remains; to pretend to own them is the only way to lose them. Nietzsche once wrote that greatness of spirit ought to be measured by one’s capacity to endure the truth. Sadly, our times are full of small spirits. But if the generous reception of my essay means anything, it is that those small spirits are fast becoming extinct. This is certainly not the first time that Martí’s death or his remains have generated discussion. Like Columbus’s or C ­ uauhtémoc’s remains, which are both everywhere and nowhere, Martí’s have frequently provided the excuse for nationalist mythmaking. The myth is due not only to the various versions of Martí’s death, but also to the historical circumstances that preceded it. I refer to the historic uncertainty regarding the events of the legendary Junta de la Mejorana (May 5, 1895), ever since it was discovered that five pages had been ripped out from Martí’s war diary, a lacuna that 181

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created a blank in Martí’s biography and a huge vacuum in Cuban history. The uncanny repetition of burials and exhumations to which Martí’s body has been subjected since his death more than a century ago constitutes an unexplored symptom in Cuban history. (Lezama Lima, in one of his baroque raptures, used to say that a dead Martí was reminiscent of an “unburied Eteocles”). Our historians have been either unable or unwilling to fill that enormous vacuum with the only thing that would be worthwhile: the truth. And so, we go through history carrying not just one, but many dead bodies on our weakened shoulders. The polemic about Martí’s corpse has taken other channels. The Argentine essayist, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, in his edition of Martí’s war journal, cited the autopsy performed by Dr. Pablo Valencia, where he erroneously stated that Martí had “blue eyes.” Not too long ago, on the centennial of Martí’s death, the Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner pointed out this notorious contradiction. Likewise, Professor Joaquín Roy made public that Martínez Estrada, who spent several years in Cuba studying Martí’s biography, died convinced that the corpse that lay in the Santiago de Cuba tomb was not Martí’s, and tried in vain to win over many influential Cubans to this belief. I remain skeptical of all these myths, though not of what they mean. It was never my intention to contribute to the mythification of Martí’s remains. Far from it. “Thinking Through Martí” dealt with the theme of disappearance in Martí’s thought and poetry, not so much in its physical sense (which, I repeat, is merely a metaphor) as in its ethical aspect. To recall once more the phrase that no one can read safely without shivering: “I know how to disappear. But my thinking would not, nor would my oblivion make me bitter.” Is it too much to insist that my interest remains Martí’s thought, not his corpse? I would like to think that my essay’s relative success, modest though it is, was due not only to its contribution to an understanding of Martí’s personal dimension. It also seized upon the ultimately popular and commonplace wisdom of knowing when to disappear as part of Martí’s thinking. At a time when Cuba 182

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e­ ndures the double curse of late communism and the capitalist cult of money, and when all of us are fed up with the lies of the political class, how can we not help but feel refreshed by the simple truth of disappearance and the abandonment of all passions, as both political advice and spiritual maxim? The paradox that ensures Martí’s relevance is a challenge, not physical but moral: leave so we can remain, disappear so we can gain access to our true self. And that self, as we all know, has a name. They call it Freedom. Translated by Gina Gammage-Sikora (Binghamton University); revised by the author.

Bibliography “Exhumación de los restos del Apóstol José Martí” (1951), Document #139, Junio 29, Dirección Provincial de Justicia, Santiago de Cuba. Martí, José (1992): Obras escogidas en tres tomos, Tomo 3. La Habana : Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. O’Gorman, Edmundo (1977): México: el trauma de su historia. Mexico City: UNAM. Quintana, Jorge (1953): El Archivo Nacional en la conmemoración del centenario del natalicio de José Martí y Pérez 1853-1953. La Habana: Publicaciones del Archivo Nacional de Cuba. Santí, Enrico Mario (1996): Pensar a José Martí: Notas para un centenario. Boulder: Society for Spanish and Spanish American Studies.

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III. Readings

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Neruda X 2

F

ew writers can boast that literature would not be the same without them. Cervantes, Martí, Borges, Octavio Paz and, like them, Pablo Neruda. 2004, the centennial of his birth offers the chance to reflect upon his legacy. Indeed, we need such a reflection, for much of Neruda’s life and work have been revered by both sectarian politics and zealous nationalism. But today, years after the fall of the Wall, neither circumstance remains operative. No less influential in such belated reverence were Chile’s convulsions during the Pinochet dictatorship and the succeeding democratic governments whose priority, with all good reason, was national reconciliation. But even while I respect that project, I also feel distant from it, for cultural and critical reasons, at least as it affects interpretation of Neruda’s global significance. Neruda’s fame, as we know, took off during the Cold War. Canto general, Las uvas y el viento and the cycle of Odas elementales all shared in making up the canonical image of the politically committed poet. The term today might seem stale, but during Neruda’s lifetime it became indispensable to define public attitudes, both literary and moral. At the time, the West had just emerged from World War II and many feared worse. Many writers, though not all, were forced to choose sides. In 1945 Neruda became a Communist, never to stray again from the Party line; and his Confieso que he vivido: Memorias, written towards the end of his life and published posthumously, held steadfast to that position. And yet, limiting Neruda’s work to Cold War events is neither necessary

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nor fair. His Obras completas span half a century, and his Cold War period occupies less than half that space. Indeed, there were many Nerudas, but especially two: before and after the Cold War. Before were the erotic poet (Veinte poemas de amor), the hermetic surrealist (Residencia en la tierra), the epic singer (España en el corazón); after: the ironic humorist (Estravagario), the lyric philosopher (Geografía infructuosa). Neruda’s work is far vaster than his enemies, or groupies, would have us believe. Not only vast but varied. Paul Valéry remarked once a true classic displayed three traits: quantity, quality, and variety. Neruda enjoyed all three. And even when the three might not be entirely proportionate, his reputation as a classic is no less deserved. Neruda, the politically committed poet, occupies a fraction of his canon. But our times are servant to two masters: ideology and the marketplace. To facilitate consumption, slogans and jingles, rather than knowledge and facts, rule the day. Neruda was not immune to neither shortcut, often thanks to Neruda himself, and always against the inner complexity of his work. Thus, much of his critical reception remains shot through by a series of misunderstandings, the most powerful among which is the idea that he was always “political.” Far truer is that, though Neruda the man had grand political passions that marked the second half of his life (from the Spanish Civil War onward), only one portion— one very meaningful portion— of his poetry was dominated by these passions. Two reasons account for Neruda’s creation of such reduction. The first was his sectarian public image. His politics often erased the boundaries between personal belief and poetic expression. The same poet who charmed masses in public recitals—one of them, memorably, at a 1966 New York City recital—was the same poet who wielded the lonesome melancholy voice of signature poems. Sealing that image were the awful circumstances of his death, amidst the bloody military coup against Salvador Allende’s government, on that other 9/11, which hastened the cancer that had long eaten away at him. The second reason, less evident perhaps yet no less powerful, was Neruda’s self-fashioned image as poet of immediacy, resistant 188

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to the world of ideas and intellectuals, in this so different from contemporaries like Borges or Octavio Paz, his sole towering rivals. Hence his pronouncements, even the most orthodox, that appeared often as personal platforms, adopted as much for their emotional appeal as for ideological zeal. While it is no exaggeration to say that Neruda was a sentimental communist, there is little excuse to dismiss his blind eye to the crimes of totalitarian communism—from the Soviet Union and so-called Eastern Europe, to the Castro regime. History has proven that he was wrong in appraising so-called Socialism for the working-class who was forced to endure it. And yet, Neruda was dead right in opposing fascist brutality, more so even in his defense of the underprivileged and the poor before corrupt statesmen, especially those from Latin America. And yet, it remains shameful that Neruda never did extend that same defense to the poor and oppressed who read and admired his poetry while living under the same communist dictatorships that he justified so zealously. Hence the paradox that another great laureate poet, Czeslaw Milosz, once pointed out as early as 1953, in The Captive Mind: When Neruda describes his people’s misery, I believe him, and I respect his great heart. When writing, he thinks about his brothers and not about himself, and so to him the power of the word is given. But when he paints the joyous, radiant life of people in the Soviet Union, I stop believing him. I believe him as long as he speaks about what he knows; I stop believing him when he speaks about what I know myself.”1

Milosz’s remarks take me to the heart of my reflection, aided by 21st century hindsight, concerning Neruda’s dual legacy: Neruda times 2. He was, on the one hand, a writer of noble intentions, a poet of accessible language and seductive prosody, a huge author (in more than ways than one), a master of poetic forms and contents; a guardian of life dedicated, visibly at least, to defending the

1



See (Milosz: 1953, 164). 189

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underprivileged, and to praising human love; at the end he became a symbol and the victim of a bloody coup against his country’s legitimate government. On the other hand, Neruda sung the praises of the same Soviet leadership that put the Gulag Archipelago into operation, thereby causing the eventual holocaust of millions of people, not to mention helping to cover up that monstrous fact; and he was also the first, and probably only, major Latin American poet who praised the longest-running dictatorship in Latin America. Should that legacy surprise us? As the French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret once remarked, our times are marked by “poets’ dishonor.” Pound’s Mussolini, Heidegger’s Hitler, Lukács’s Stalin, Borges’s Pinochet, Cela’s Franco, Sastre’s ETA, García Márquez’s Castro—all of them sound, painfully, much the same. Such dual, contradictory legacy is therefore hardly Neruda’s exclusive ­province; rather, to quote Ortega y Gasset, it happens to be the “theme of our time.” And there is no use denying it. Indeed, our troubled times, more than ever, intent as it is on unblocking traumatic memory, requires us to be aware of that legacy. Ethics and poetics, morals and aesthetics, far from being connected, often find themselves in conflict in the work of major writers. Neruda was no exception. Am I coming down too hard on Neruda? I don’t think so. If we have learned anything from last century’s disasters it is this: to carry out just evaluations of culture and avoid repeating harm, we must recruit the exercise of memory, and that means admitting history’s traumas to consciousness. Impartial readings, at least those that do aspire to impartiality, take place only when preceded by honest if painful judgment, without excluding human error. Thus, and in all fairness, it behooves us, at the same time, to recognize that in the ten years between 1954 and 1964—between the death of Stalin and Neruda’s sixtieth birthday—the poet himself expressed numerous doubts about his former Stalinist ­allegiances. Those doubts first came privately, to friends and associates, and later, publicly, through the ironic and humorous, some might say frivolous, tone of his middle poetry, an irony whose target in many 190

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cases—as in Estravagario, one of his best books—is precisely the solemn S­ talinist rituals that had marked his middle works. And yet, we hasten to add, Neruda’s doubts were never accompanied, unfortunately, by public critiques of the historical causes of Stalinism. Indeed, he never stopped being an obedient communist, for even the “Critical Sonata” he included in Memorial de Isla Negra (1964), his poetic autobiography, bore the timid title of “The Episode,” thus implying that Stalin, the Great Terror, had been an aberration that could be easily corrected, rather than the monstrously crooked path it proved to be. Or else, to invoke another glaring episode, his abject silence before the assault of Cuban apparatchiks, in the mid-1960s, on him and his work simply for agreeing to attend a PEN Club meeting in New York City. The assault had been orchestrated by the same regime he nevertheless defended to the bitter end. To cite Jorge Edwards, who reached similar conclusions from their personal contact: One could ask, what strange entelechy, what possible essence was that Revolution, which devoured its children and yet remained immune, untouched, by its abuse and excesses . . . Thus, it was still possible, by means of such subterfuge, to witness the error, deterioration, the failure of so-called Socialism and yet maintain one’s faith unscathed in theory, as we used to say with spontaneous precision…

And yet there remains, to our good fortune, much to be gained from Neruda, and especially from his poetry. Thirty years ago, following the lead of Emir Rodríguez Monegal, my teacher at Yale, posed the view that the most enduring aspect of that work, what gives it internal unity and opens up universal links, is its prophetic modes. A late Romantic, Neruda thought of the poet as a privileged spokesperson, not only of personal emotions but of all that lacks and demands a voice, from Nature to trivial objects to History writ large. Poetry is nothing less than prophetic enunciation (from Greek profanae, “speaking before”), a discourse that locates language in the strength of things and translates their silence into concrete acts. Throughout his work, the prophetic ­vocation 191

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changed as the poet, and time’s aesthetics, changed—from the ­Surrealist visions (often auditions) of Residencia en la tierra, to the investiture of an epic poem like Alturas de Macchu Picchu; from the Biblical rhetoric in much of Canto general, to the apocalyptic visions he wrote at end of his life: Fin de mundo, 2000, La espada encendida. In such prophetic modes, which predict nothing yet reveal much, one can find Neruda’s most authentic, most original contribution by far. And so if in Neruda’s poetry we, his readers, find, above and beyond his many errors, an authentic language, it must be because it displays what Octavio Paz once called “the other voice”: Between revolution and religion, poetry is the other voice. Its voice is other because it is the voice of the passions and of visions. It is ­otherworldly and this-worldly, of days long gone and of this very day, an antiquity without dates . . . All poets in the moments, long or short, of poetry, if they are really poets, hear the other voice. It is their own, someone else’s, no one else’s, no one’s, and everyone’s.2

We hear that other voice in Neruda, not only in our silent reading; it can also be literally and dramatically heard in his actual physical voice, the oral experience of his verse that today, fortunately, is preserved in the numerous recordings he made in life. To hear Neruda read his own poetry is to let oneself be seduced by the primordial, indeed primitive, rhythms of poetic language, an experience that restores our contact with the deepest strata of historical experience, the passage of time, the flow of blood, and the flash of human contact. In one of the first scenes from The Postman, Antonio Skármeta’s moving narrative about Neruda’s life—upon which the film Il Postino is based—Mario the postman at one point complains: “Damn, how I would love to be a poet!” To which Neruda ­responds: “In Chile, we are all poets. So, it would be more original if you kept on being a postman.”

2



See (Paz: 1990, 151). 192

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Reading Neruda, in a sense, means to share in Mario the Postman’s wish. We aspire to become poets ourselves: to contaminate ourselves with the experience of poetry.

Bibliography Edwards, Jorge (1990): Adiós, poeta. Barcelona: Tusquets. Milosz, Czeslaw (1953): The Captive Mind, Tr. J. Zielonko. New York: Knopf. Paz, Octavio (1990): The Other Voice. Essays on Modern Poetry, Tr. ­Helen Lane. New York: Harcourt Brace.

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Isla Negra: An Afterword

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eruda wrote Memorial de Isla Negra during 1962-63, at the age of fifty-nine, as a present to himself for his sixtieth birthday, an autobiography in the form of a sequence of poems. It was his third such excursion. The final section of Canto general (1950), twenty-three poems entitled Yo soy, reviewed his own life up to 1949. In 1962, the Brazilian monthly O Cruzeiro Internacional published “Lives of the Poet,” ten consecutive autobiographical articles which later became the basis for Neruda’s Confieso que he vivido: Memorias, published posthumously in 1974. It is hardly surprising that Neruda should have turned to autobiography on occasion, for he was a public figure since his early twenties, when his Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) brought him early fame, and his life as Chilean consul in various parts of the Far East and subsequently in Spain, as the Civil War broke out, had been full of vivid incident. Fiercely anti-intellectual, a political militant, he was the embodiment of the Latin American Poet, and his poems enjoyed huge popularity and were commonly learned by heart. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, the Swedish Academy described him as “the poet of violated human dignity,” who “brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams.” In his prose Memorias and even in Yo soy Neruda was concerned with his historical self, his part in the drama of history and social change. In Isla Negra, however, he is less involved with history than with his previous selves and becomes the ever­changing 195

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poet bringing the past into the present for review, as if keeping a wandering notebook on himself. “Notes from Isla Negra” would be the most literal rendering of the original Memorial de Isla Negra in which the Spanish memorial has little to do with its English cognate. Instead of a pompous memorial, Neruda wrote a diary that fluctuates between present and past, bringing the lived past into a written present. Neither black nor an island, Isla Negra is a small village above a stretch of sand on the Chilean Pacific coast, eighty miles south of Valparaíso. There Neruda bought an old sea captain’s house in 1939, to which he retreated to write whenever he could. When the book came out in 1964 Neruda described its purpose as “spinning the thread of biography” while also capturing “each day’s joyous or somber feeling . . . a tale that strays off and then rejoins, haunted by the events of the past and by nature, which keeps calling me with its numerous voices.”1 Unlike the prose memoirs, the “notes” were intended much less as a factual autobiography than an informal notebook in which a narrative of past events mingles with the record of present experience. The “memoirs” come from retrospection, the “notes” from introspection. The original edition in Spanish drew attention to a notebook by publishing as separate volumes the five books that make up Isla Negra. Thus, whilst progressing through all five the reader will notice a gradual fraying away of the biographical thread and a growing frequency of “diary” poems, lyrics that play the whims of the present over recollections of the past, gradually shedding the rhetoric of autobiography for the meditations of the still-changing poet. The shift is first acknowledged in “Those Lives,” the nineteenth poem of The Moon in the Labyrinth, as the text breaks off from biographical sequence: · This is what I am, I’ll say, to leave this written excuse. This is my life Now it is clear this couldn’t be done—

1

I quote from (Neruda: 1999). All translations are mine. 196

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that in this net it’s not just the strings that count but also the air that escapes through the meshes.

By the time we reach “Memory,” fifty-five poems later, the earlier acknowledgment has become a plea to “be gentle with the poet,” to forgive the vagaries of memory, because: I was always quick to forget, and those hands of mine could only grasp intangibles, untouchable things which could only be compared when they no longer existed.

There is, then, a paradoxical recall at work in Isla Negra, a poetic memory that can only make sense of experience by “forgetting.” Neruda implied as much in the preface he wrote for Where the Rain is Born, the first book, when it was published separately in an earlier edition in Italy.2 There he called it “the first step back to my own distance,” and then admits to the loss of direction that “guides” it: The road’s forgotten, we left no footprints to return, and if the leaves trembled when once we passed them, now they no longer do, and the fatal lightning rod that fell to destroy us doesn’t even whistle. To walk toward memories when these have become smoke is to sail in smoke. And my childhood, seen from 1962 and in Valparaíso, after having walked so long, is only rain and smoke.

By thus viewing memory as precarious, unreliable, unpredictable, Neruda gives the past a unique character, preserved in its unrepeatable, unrepresentable, integrity, and makes of the autobiographical gesture an act of interpretation that acknowledges the “distance” separating the past of lived experience from written

2

See (Neruda: 1963). This “Prólogo” is reprinted in (Neruda: 1999). 197

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chronicle. This preface was never included in any of the subsequent editions of the complete Isla Negra, perhaps because Neruda preferred to leave that view implicit. The first book, Where the Rain ls Born, is the most straight-forwardly autobiographical. It covers the years 1904-21, from birth in Parral, a small country village in central Chile, to arrival in Santiago as a student of French at the Teacher’s Institute. The poems follow Neruda’s chronology, their impersonal titles lending an objective frame to each, much like pictures in a family album. The book’s title refers to the humid Chilean south (“The rain was the one unforgettable presence for me then,” he says in Memorias), where Neruda’s family moved when he was two. Paradoxically, the first poem, “The Birth,” is a meditation on the death of his unknown mother—dead of tuberculosis a month after he was born—a sacrificial death that nourishes both the vineyards of Parral and the boy’s physical growth. It is followed by poems to his adored stepmother, Trinidad Candia Marverde, and his brusque father, José del Carmen Reyes Morales, machinist on a ballast train, both looming figures of those early years. Anecdotes from Neruda’s boyhood in Temuco predominate in the poems that follow—of the boy’s discovery of Sandokan, the heroes of Emilio Salgari’s famous pirate story; the house and daughters of Homero Pacheco, close friends of the Reyes family; of the tall tales of an Uncle Genaro. Not unlike Wordsworth in the first books of The Prelude, Neruda unearths his “fair seedtime,” growing up “fostered alike by beauty and by fear.” Thus, along with childhood visions of “the Evil One, the dark deceiver” in poems like “Superstitions,” he evokes small towns of southern Chile—Carahue, Cautín, Renaico, Pillanlelbún—whose names echo their Araucanian origins. The sequence ends with Neruda’s settling into a student rooming house on Calle Maruri in Santiago, where he was to write many of the poems of Crepusculario (1921), his first published poetry volume, a poignant farewell to childhood. The second book, The Moon in the Labyrinth, covers 1921 to 1929, from his first writings to the second of his three consular postings in the Far East. The first ten poems fill in the turbulent, 198

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threadbare Santiago years. “1921” evokes the awards ceremony at which Neruda received a Student Federation Prize for “Song of F ­ iesta,” and refers, famously, to the “twenty love poems with a salty tang to them” which at the time were being inspired by two different women, the Terusa and Rosaura, the first two figures in the succession of Amores poems that runs through Isla Negra. ­Neruda never did identify these two women, resorting instead to teasing sobriquets: Terusa (or Marisol, as she is called in Memorias) was the rural muse of half of those twenty love poems, which abound in rich imagery; Rosaura (Marisombra) was her urban counterpart, “the physical peace of the passionate meetings in the city’s hideaways,” as Neruda recalls in his Memoirs.3 In between the two serene muses lie the poems devoted to two “crazy friends” of bohemian Santiago, Joaquín Cifuentes Sepúlveda and Alberto· Rojas Giménez, poet companions whose separate suicides would go on to inspire Neruda’s most moving elegies. Separately, Homero Arce was a well-known poet who later became Neruda’s secretary for a time. (The real identity of Raúl Ratface remains, ­however, a mystery. He goes unmentioned in any of the prose memoirs.) The next nine poems chronicle Neruda’s departure, in 1929, for Rangoon, via Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, and Marseilles, and his consular stints in the Far East. The five Asian years were difficult ones, removed as he was from a familiar geography and climate, and it was then that he wrote the bleak lyrics of his famous ­Residencias. As distinct from the nostalgic “Paris 1927,” rowdy with exiles from Latin America, the poems about the East are tinged with a ­horror at life in the colonial outposts he served in. Thus, the “flowing river” of “Paris 1927” becomes the “river that flowed . . . into the stifling city” of “Rangoon 1927.” And yet, he recalls Ceylon in a far more favorable light, even when he admits to living there “­between despair and luminosity.” The biographical thread breaks off after “Those Lives,” however, and there is no further mention 3



Since publishing this “Afterword,” Rosaura was in fact identified as Albertina Rosa Azócar Soto, a fellow student at the Teachers Institute and sister to Rubén Azócar, one of Neruda’s early best friends. 199

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of ­Neruda’s remaining years in Java and Singapore, or of his loveless first marriage to María Antonieta Hagenaar, a Dutch Javanese, or to Malva Marina, the ill daughter they had together, or to their eventual return to Chile in 1932. Instead, the section ends with four unrelated poems which conclude, defensively, that “there is no clear light / no clear shadow, in remembering.” The third book, Cruel Fire, returns thunderously to historical event, as though the poems forced themselves upon the poet. “Cruel Fire” is Neruda’s chronicle of his passionate experiences in the Spanish Civil War, when he served as consul, first in Barcelona, then in Madrid, from 1934 until late 1936, and became close friends with a brotherhood of Spanish poets, whose names are scattered all throughout—García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre. Wenceslao Roces, on the other hand, was a Spanish friend who appeared among the many refugees for whom Neruda had arranged safe passage aboard the Winnipeg, a makeshift passenger ship he contracted as Chilean Consul on behalf of his government. Chronology in “Cruel Fire” soon becomes jagged, however, as it jumps from poems about Spain to “In the High Mines,” about the Chilean mining districts of Antofagasta and Tarapacá, which in 1945 elected Neruda as their Communist senator. The jump is perhaps meant to suggest that his involvement and experience in the Spanish war is what led him to declare his political engagement in Chile. Indeed, Neruda’s conversion caused him to reassess the poet’s function: “I began to look and to see deeper/into the troubled depths/of human connections.” This “new poet,” committed politically, committed also to “Americanism”—the celebration of Latin American identity—had made his first appearance in Canto general, which, as is well known, Neruda completed in exile while hiding from the Chilean police.4 Three flashback poems suddenly appear In the middle of Cruel Fire—“I remember the East,” and “Josie Bliss I and II.” Chronologically, they rather belong in the second book, but they erupt here like memory flashes. Josie Bliss was Neruda’s Burmese mistress, 4



For the details of this period in Neruda’s life see Chapter 1 of (Santí: 2005). 200

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his own “dark lady,” a jealous lover whose violent threats drove Neruda away from Rangoon to Ceylon, where she followed him pleading for a reconciliation that was never to take place. ­Neruda’s rejection of her came back to him often and painfully, and she appears here, an untimely ghost, as an emblem of his remorse. The remaining poems of Cruel Fire belong to the diary format. The last one, “Exile,” refers to the period around 1951, which Neruda spent exiled in Europe and where on Capri he took up with Matilde Urrutia, who in 1955 became his third wife. He then views exile, however, as empty, the poet himself “an embarrassed ghost,” “a spirit without roots.” This same theme of exile generates the title of The Hunter after Roots, the fourth book, which also expands it, as it projects ­Neruda’s definitive return to Chile in 1952 as a journey to reconnect with those lost roots and repossess his identity.5 Little biographical content appears in these eighteen poems, except for the two addressed to Delia del Carril, Neruda’s second wife, whom he divorced in 1954. His marriage to Delia had lasted eighteen years of shared political intensity, thus accounting for this historical perspective alongside the personal. “Mexican Serenade,” on the other hand, recalls the time Neruda spent there in exile in 1949, eventually publishing Canto general. The remaining poems retain something of the whimsical moods of Neruda’s Estravagario (1958)— diverse meditations and reflective asides. The last book, Critical Sonata, is arguably the least autobiographical of all five, organized as it is around a long political poem, “The Episode,” the palinode in which Neruda both decried Stalinism and indulged in apology. The poem’s twenty-nine sections roughly follow Nikita Khrushchev’s 1957 denunciation of Stalin’s cult of personality yet rescues that one phase of communism as a temporary distortion that does not cloud his views: “A moment 5



The title was taken from a wooden statue carved from a single tall root by the Spanish sculptor Alberto Sánchez, to whom Neruda dedicated ·this fourth book. A picture of the statue appeared as the frontispiece of the original edition. 201

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in the dark does not blind us,” reads one typical verse. Indeed, ­Neruda had been an obedient Stalinist, and much of the poem is calculated to mollify his critics. In 1954, he had written, piously: “Stalin is the noon day/ man’s and the people’s maturity”; but now, “The child of terror hides/ the eclipse, the moon, the accursed sun/ of his blood­stained progeny.” Two of Neruda’s more stubborn decriers are singled out here for special homage; Ricardo P ­ aseyro (the Pipipaseyro of “The Episode”), an Uruguayan would-be poet who literally stalked Neruda in his: travels around the world, and Pablo de Rokha (“Señor K., stuttering poet”), a Chilean and ­Neruda’s contemporary, whose psychotic envy drove him to write a querulous book titled, no less than Neruda and Me!. (De Rokha eventually committed suicide.) In the original 1964 edition of Isla Negra, the last text was a poem dedicated to Matilde Urrutia (“Amores: Matilde”), which, in contrast to the rest of the book’s Amores poems, was a single, long lyrical meditation on love meant to be a spiritual integration rather than a sundered memory. In the third edition of his Complete Works Neruda removed that poem from Isla Negra and made it the opening poem of a later book, La barcarola (1967), another long poetic sequence dedicated to his wife. And so, once the change was made, “The Future Is Space” became the very last poem of Isla Negra, a new ending that opened up rather than closed down, envisioning a world of possibilities: “What joy to find in the end/ rising/ an empty planet.” On September 23, 1973, Neruda died in a Santiago de Chile clinic of a prostate cancer aggravated by his distress over the military coup that brought down the government of Salvador Allende, whom Neruda had helped to put in power. Yet the poet’s autobiography, like the wavering memory that sustains it, remains an open book, inventive and alive: “Nor can I measure the road/ which may have no country /or that truth that changed.” No man is an island. Man’s memory is.

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Bibliography Neruda, Pablo  (1963): Sumario. Libro donde nace la lluvia. Alpignano, Italy: A. Tallone. — (1999): “Algunas reflexiones improvisadas sobre mis trabajos”, Obras Completas. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores. Santí, Enrico Mario (2005): Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Forking Paths: Borges and Tragedy

I

n The Order of Things, Michel Foucault begins his lengthy meditation by appealing to two figures from Hispanic culture, Diego Velázquez and Jorge Luis Borges, the two figures whose respective centennials we celebrate this year.1 Jointly, their art, according to Foucault, outlines an arch in the history of order and representation in Western culture. Few have remarked on the significance of Foucault’s reliance on Hispanic culture as a way of demonstrating what he calls the limits of Western representation. And yet both “Las Meninas” and Borges’ “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language” are precisely the works Foucault invokes (a third emblematic piece would be Don Quixote) to delimit radical discontinuities of language, moments of disjunction that both dramatize and upset, despite appearances to the contrary, the precarious correspondence between words and things that constitutes our Modernity. Beyond whatever lessons one can derive from Foucault’s choice of Hispanic culture as lynchpin of the self-unravelling of Western epistemology, it just so happens that Velázquez and Borges do meet not only in the fortuitous threshold of this particular centennial. They also meet in a common radical approach to mimesis, an approach that, I would argue, sustains their powerful respective visions of human nature, and continues to assure their respective places in the Western canon. 1



Revised text of an April 1999 lecture at the University of Southern California. 205

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I wish to dwell on the theme of such precarious order by reading the story “The Garden of Forking Paths” as a commentary on tragedy, arguably the Western genre that teaches best what Nietzsche called “the annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence.” A precarious order indeed… I choose this story, beside the fact that it happens to be my Borges favorite, because the author himself privileged it as an emblem for all his fictional work when he gave the same title to his 1941 second collection of short stories, and three years later gave it again to the second section of Ficciones. Alhough it is certainly tempting, I will not, skirting my reference to Nietzsche, pursue this reading through the screen of The Birth of Tragedy. I simply wish to trace in this story what I would call Borges’ own anatomy of tragedy: how tragedy is made, or how it occurs, and not just in literature. One could well question the choice of tragedy as an interpretive grid in the case of an author as devious and often downright ­comical as Borges, at least in his stories. (Borges’ poetry, as we know, is a different matter altogether.) Indeed, at first sight and from the point of view of genre, tragedy in Borges would not appear to make much sense, for he avoided drama altogether and detested all forms of staging. In addition, as we all know, when addressing the specificity of Borges’ texts, the critical canon has, with notable exceptions, preferred to view them as mere “metaphysical fantasies”—the world of Tlön, for example, or the estrangement that “Borges” the character goes through at the end of “The Aleph.” In the case of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” we have been content to call it a spy thriller, one that, as we know, was written and published amidst World War II, and refers to events that may have taken place in England during World War I. Such penchant on the part of the critical canon for generic description, as opposed to attention to content, has contributed, I think, to estrange Borges’ stories even further from any reading that would recognize the broad humanistic appeal of his texts, particularly in relation to the traditions upon which Borges the reader, author and reviewer insisted time and again. And yet, who could doubt that in much of Borges dwells a modern tragic vision, as much as 206

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there is one in Kafka, Faulkner, or T.S. Eliot? Part of the experience of reading Borges is the realization that behind his irony, deviousness and, often, downright comicity, there lies an inscrutable moral universe where humanity appears lost amidst laws barely understood. Borges characters know typically that they are subject to some sort of fatal legislation, and most, if not all, of his stories show them involved in the process of recognizing both the workings of these laws and their roles within them. What Aristotle called peripety, discovery, is in fact an intrinsic principle of the Borgesian experience. In sum, what we casually refer to as “­Borges’ labyrinthine world” contains an unacknowledged measure of tragic awareness. Unless of course we forget that the labyrinth itself, recurring as it does in classics like Sophocles, Calderón de la Barca or Racine, is the tragic emblem par excellence.

II Let us remember the plot, or plots, of “The Garden of Forking Paths.”2 The story consists of the transcript and edition of a fragment which in turn contains the confession of a certain Yu Tsun, a professor of English of Chinese nationality educated by German missionaries, doubling in England as a German spy during World War I. The fragment is introduced, and later footnoted, by an anonymous editor of military history, for whom Yu Tsun’s story alters understanding of the British offensive of France during July 1916. His prime connection dead, Yu Tsun realizes, at one and the same time, both that he, too, is being pursued by his connection’s assassin and that he must communicate to Berlin, on his own, his latest discovery: that the Belgian city of Albert is the secret site of a British artillery park. Desperate, he devises a coded stratagem: before being caught, he will kill a man by the same name of Albert. German intelligence, scouring British papers for clues, will read about the incident, recognize his message, and act upon it. The 2



I cite from (Borges: 1964, 19-29). The text was translated by Donald A. Yates. 207

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same superiors will also read this incident, Yu Tsun fantasizes, as a heroic feat, thus vindicating allegedly inferior Asians like him before ostensibly superior German eyes. He remarks: “I had to prove that a yellow would be capable of saving their armies” (21). Yu Tsun thus picks his victim, literally and randomly, out of the White Pages, and then rushes to Ashgrove, where a certain Stephen Albert lives, a few train stations away. Upon arriving at the village station, he is surprised to find that kids playing there recognize him, no doubt owing to his Asian phenotype, as a guest of Stephen Albert’s. Albert, we soon learn, also happens to be a sinologist, a village celebrity who frequently receives guests. Yu Tsun, literally a marked man, is simply one more Asian visitor. Thus, on the way down to Stephen Albert’s house, from the train station on a forking path that always turns left, Yu Tsun recalls not only the way to get to “the courtyard to certain labyrinths” (22) but also his own family history. For it also turns out that Yu Tsun is a descendant of Ts’ui Pen, former governor of Yunan province, who withdrew from temporal power for thirteen years to write a novel and build a labyrinth. An unknown assailant eventually murdered him, to his family’s, including Yu Tsun’s, eternal damnation. “Those of us of Ts’ui Pen’s blood continue to damn that monk” (23). Upon arriving at Stephen Albert’s house, preceded by both the sounds of Chinese music and the sight of a paper lamp, Yu Tsun is greeted by his would-be victim, who himself happens to have been a former missionary in Tientsin before becoming a sinologist. Their exchange leads to a mutual discovery: Stephen Albert delights in welcoming an unexpected descendant of Ts’ui Pen, the same author in whose works he happens to specialize, while Yu Tsun is astonished to learn the truth about his descendant, to his certain eventual vindication. Stephen Albert vindicates Ts’ui Pen by solving the riddle: instead of two tasks—write a novel and build a labyrinth—he had only one: to write an infinite, labyrinthine book. “Everyone imagined two works; nobody thought that book and labyrinth were one and the same thing” (25). Two facts provide the keys to the riddle of Ts’ui Pen. The first is a statement that appears in a fragment of a lost Oxford manuscript of Ts’ui 208

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Pen’s Albert discovered and that notes: “I leave to several futures (not all) my garden of forking paths” (25). According to Albert, “the phrase ‘several futures (not all)’ suggested the image of a fork in time, not in space” (26). This key explains, in turn, the structure of Ts’ui Pen’s seemingly nonsensical novel, whose title indeed happens to be “The Garden of Forking Paths”: “In all fictions,” he explains, “each time a man faces several alternatives, he opts for one and eliminates the others; in Ts’ui Pen’s almost inextricable fiction, he opts—simultaneously—for all. Thus, he creates several futures, several times, that also proliferate and fork out. Hence the novel’s contradictions” (27). The second key to the riddle of Ts’ui Pen is even simpler: because the word and even the theme of time is the only one lacking from the novel, this proves that time is in fact its true subject. “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Stephen Albert instructs Yu Tsun, “is a huge riddle, or parable, whose theme is time… Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute, time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing and dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times.” (27) Throughout Stephen Albert’s recount, Yu Tsun grows to admire him. He remarks: “His face, within the lamp’s vivid circle, was an old man’s no doubt, but it had something unshakeable and even immortal” (28). The remark echoes the earlier allusion as part of his confession: “I know of a man from England—a modest man—who for me is no less than Goethe. I didn’t speak to him more than an hour, but during that hour he was Goethe” (21). And as the exchange about the subject of parallel times comes to an end, Yu Tsun remarks that “at all times I thank you and revere you for the recreation of the garden of Ts’ui Pen” (27). Indeed, in revealing to Yu Tsun the truth about his ancestor, Stephen Albert restores his self-esteem, eroded by centuries of family scorn nurtured by decades of colonial abjection, the nadir of which is his becoming a spy for Germany. That restoration notwithstanding, Yu Tsun kills Stephen Albert and thus accomplishes his mission. Herein, then, lies the ironic core, and I believe the tragedy, of the story: Yu Tsun kills precisely the one person who reveals to 209

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him who he really is, the only one who restores his true historical, biographical, family identity. The tragedy is anticipated by Stephen Albert himself when he underscores Ts’ui Pen’s wisdom and corrects Yu Tsun’s claim to being his friend at all times: “Not in all… Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy” (27). In turn, Yu Tsun’s own succinct response betrays the tragedy’s precise structure, I dare say Borges’ “birth of tragedy”: “The future already exists… but I am your friend” (27).

III Most extant readings of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and in particular, the precarious Ts’ui Pen-Stephen Albert-Yu Tsun triangle, privilege the textual or, if you will, critical allegory that is contained in Stephen Albert’s discussion of Ts’ui Pen’s misunderstood novel project. Thus, Ts’ui Pen’s endlessly forking narrative is viewed as a blueprint for the forking plots of those novels we call postmodern that have appeared in the wake of Borges’ story—from Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler to Cortázar’s Rayuela. All that may well be true as a fact of literary history, but in my opinion does not exhaust the thrust of Borges’ greater point in this story. For Yu Tsun’s statement contains a paradox: “The Future already exists… but I am your friend” (28). That is, in the future that I have chosen (“The doer of any atrocious task… must assume a future that is as irrevocable as the past”) (21), Yu Tsun had told himself, I must both kill you and be your friend, must both revere you and destroy you. The conflict is ethical, not literary, although I would concede that literature does appear to be the privileged medium through which the wisdom of such conflict is staged. Thus, tragedy, according to Borges, lies in this conflict, a conflict that cannot be resolved: action and being do not necessarily, and indeed most often do not at all, coincide; we do, must do, one thing while being, or believing, something else altogether 210

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­ ifferent, if not directly opposite. Tragedy, accordingly, springs d from, is born out of, this precise human predicament: the, often monstrous, burden of having to decide. Human beings, Borges seems to tell us, are burdened with decision-making, even when the c­ircumstances from which such decisions emerge are often over-determined. Such would be the uncanny role of coincidence in all of Borges’ texts, particularly this one, where the role of fate turns out to be as crucial as, say, in Oedipus the King. I hasten to add that my dissatisfaction with the critical canon over the complexity of this story is not so much that it concentrates on its critical allegory to the exclusion of its ethical content, as that it does not concentrate enough on the allegorical possibilities regarding literature and its ethical dimension. Far from objecting to having that canon read the story exclusively as literature, I believe that those readings do not take literature far enough, or at least not as far as what I believe Borges would like us to. In my view, then, it is insufficient to focus exclusively on Ts’ui Pen’s novelistic project; we must view that project in relation to Yu Tsun’s own project, his own narrative, as well as the anonymous editor’s. That is, the story’s critical allegory encompasses at least two literary projects: Ts’ui Pen’s forking novel and Yu Tsun’s straightforward, though edited, confession. And they both share the same title: “The Garden of Forking Paths.” The plot of Ts’ui Pen’s novel is infinite, non-linear, anti- (or at least non-) Aristotelian; Yu Tsun’s confession, on the other hand, comes straight out of Aristotle: it has a beginning, a middle and end. To this insight into the critical allegory, one must add yet another commensurate insight into the story’s ethical dimension. Ts’ui Pen, or at least the Ts’ui Pen that Stephen Albert restores, suspends ethics in favor of contemplative solitude; he literally “gives up temporal power” to gain Time writ large. Another way of viewing this is to notice that Ts’ui Pen suspends decision-making by choosing spiritual contemplation. By contrast, Yu Tsun, Ts’ui Pen’s heir and double, does exactly the reverse: he suspends spiritual contemplation (what in the context of Chinese thought would be ancestor-worship) to gain, by means of spiteful spying, temporal power. Yu Tsun cannot suspend decision-making 211

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in the way Ts’ui Pen, his ancestor, does. What he can do, and does, at least moments after Stephen Albert’s revelation, is to join his interlocutor in the admiring contemplation of Ts’ui Pen’s project, and feel, if only one fleeting instant, the spectral vertigo of infinity: “From that moment on, I felt about me and within my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming,” (27) he remarks, as if grasping for adequate metaphors. And yet, this momentary, perhaps illusory, contemplation is fleeting, indeed; it cannot be sustained either for Yu Tsun or, I would argue, for any of us, all too human readers. Thus what is most real, most tragically real, I would add, is not Ts’ui Pen’s admirable, infinite project, devoid of decision-making; what is real is Yu Tsun’s desperately limited human situation, that is, Yu Tsun’s and us, his readers’. All Yu Tsun has left—and us with him—is a single material life where we must make choices, certainly not Ts’ui Pen’s multifarious dream, or spiritual practice. For Borges, then, tragedy is born not just from a disjunction between action and being, but from the effects of unbridled desire. Indeed, Borges’ birth of tragedy could perhaps be represented by a monstrous figure, a cross between Oedipus and Tantalus, self-blindness and tortuous desire. Perhaps the most intriguing, while not overt sign of the unbreachable difference between the two projects, Ts’ui Pen’s and Yu Tsun’s, may lie in their given names. Critics have speculated on the possible relationship between these characters’ names and those of two others, with similar ones, who appear in the Hung Lou Meng (or Dream of the Red Chamber), the 18th-century long narrative that Borges read sometime during the l930s and whose story is mentioned as the text that Ts’ui Pen starts out by emulating. But this, as with so many sources in Borges, constitutes a red herring, one of his favorite narrative tricks. My own reading is that these names are cross-linguistic puns that function allegorically. Yu Tsun is a homonym of “You too soon.” He is, after all, the character who is destined to arrive early enough to evade Richard Madden, his Irish assassin-pursuer, and to perpetrate a crime he later regrets. Indeed, for this character time is of the essence: “I told myself that I was already set on my duel and that I had won the first 212

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assault by jump-starting, even by forty minutes, even by a favor of fortune, my adversary’s attack,” (22) he tells himself at the outset; and amidst his deed: “I calculated that my pursuer would not be here before the hour” (22). At the end, Yu Tsun shoots Stephen Albert as Richard Madden is walking through the door to arrest him: he arrives too soon for his own good. Similarly, Ts’ui Pen is a partial anagram of that character’s “sweet pen,” a literary project that requires no further explanation. In the same vein, the name Albert itself, who throughout Borges’s Spanish text is referred to as “alto” [“tall”]—not only in its physical sense, but also in the moral sense of uplifting—resonates for its etymology: Albert means “bright through nobility.” Indeed, this character, according to Yu Tsun at least, is very much that.

IV For me, “The Garden of Forking Paths” is neither a metaphysical fantasy nor an allegory of the Postmodern. I read and reread it as a primer on that most fundamental of human burdens: making decisions about ourselves, our families, our friends, our communities. It is a story about our daily tragedy, for each day we must choose not only to get up from bed; for some, it may even involve whether to go on living. Oddly enough, not too long ago I was affirmed in this reading by a series of coincidences that were almost as circuitous as Yu Tsun’s desperate search for Albert. But for this I must tell you an anecdote, and with it end. Several years ago, I went through a personal crisis, weighing a very difficult decision. I did not know what to do because every choice spelled uncertainty, despair, and suffering for those around me. Those days I was also working closely with the poet Octavio Paz, with whom I shared my predicament. In a letter I mentioned to him Robert Frost’s huge poem “The Road not Taken”—which, as is well known, talks about how “Two roads diverged in a wood/ and I took the one less traveled by.” I also told him how f­ rightening

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that vision was to me then. A few days later Paz answered my letter. And when he got to this subject, this is what he had to say: About the road not taken: Life, according to existentialists, is a series of choices. But one would have to add: all of them definitive, all of them relative, and all of them unpredictable. When we choose this or that, what do we really choose? One never knows… Also, those decisions we do not take we also live as decisions: we live them as desire, as melancholy, as regrets, as nostalgia. In short, we live them as images. Only they are images with which we speak in our own lonely silence. We must learn to live with those ghosts. Don’t you think?”3

I cannot think of a better summary to my reading of this Borges story, to the meaning of tragedy, to the pain and the sorrow of living.

Postscript of 2021 Twenty-two years after writing and delivering this unpublished lecture, I set out to confirm how, or indeed whether, other readers have recognized the ethical dimension of this Borges story. The one essay that meets that aspect most closely, I believe, is Aníbal González Pérez’s 2002 reading.4 Although its broad focus is the complicity between writing and violence, and the reading a­ rticulates brilliantly the case for ethics in the Borges canon, it does not link this issue to tragedy, which I believe would be the next logical step in the interpretation not only of this story but of much of Borges’ fiction. Thus, in my view, it is not enough to point out that, by changing alternatives, Yu Tsun’s course of action “would have led to a different narrative,” (100) the point being that the one chosen, consistent with the character’s actual circumstances and identity, leads to the unresolved conflict that constitutes tragedy. González’s reading does help me, however, to

3 4

See (Frost: 1915). See (González: 2002, 89-104).. 214

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formulate my definition of the concept. Tragedy describes the catastrophe that ensues after a series of ethical choices made from a panoply of available alternatives.

Bibliography Borges, Jorge Luis (1964): Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions. Frost, Robert (1915): The Road Not Taken. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly. González, Aníbal (2002): Killer Books: Writing, Violence, and Ethics in Modern Spanish American Narrative. Austin, TX: University of ­Texas Press.

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Ten Keys to The Labyrinth of Solitude Alan: Gods don’t die. Dr. Dysart: Oh yes, they do! Equus

1. The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) is a double cornerstone of modern literature: both a modern essay and a reflection on Modernity. Within the broader Hispanic context, it is an essay on national identity—what Germans at one time called Völkerpsychologie (psychology of nations) and which, during the 19th century, became popular throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Spanish Romantics (Larra and Mesonero Romanos) inaugurated the tradition in Spain, but it was the Generation of ’98 writers (Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, Azorín) who developed it in such texts as Purity Revisited (1895), or Meditaciones del Quijote (1914). The tradition in which Paz’s book fits was once described by him: “It is a book in the French tradition of ‘moralism’. It is a description on the one hand of certain attitudes and an essay, on the other, on historical interpretation.”1 Thus linking his essay with the French 1



The standard text, which I cite in parentheses, is (Paz: 1985). For this quotation, see “Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude,” Paz’s dialogue with Claude Fell, 332. On the Spanish identity essay, see (Ramsden: 1974). For a study of its Spanish American version, see (Stabb: 1967) and (Oviedo: 1990). For the Spanish text, see my edition of (Santí: 1993, 417-444). This essay is a condensed version of my introduction to that edition, 13-137. 217

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moralist tradition—which runs from Montaigne to Valéry and includes the 18th-century ‘encyclopedists’ like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire—Paz places himself in the line of writers who analyze psychological attitudes and summarize and criticize their historical consequences. The European cultural archive Paz so admired had resonated throughout 20th-century Spanish America, where it inspired an entire library on national identity. Paz’s book is part of that library, along with Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s Radiografía de la pampa (1933), Gilberto Freyre’s Casa grande e senzala (1933); and José Lezama Lima’s La expresión americana (1957). Within Mexican literature, the book holds an equally privileged place, as it prolongs, summarizes, and gives closure to a national reflection on cultural identity.2 It was, in fact, Paz’s first organic prose book and, in his own career, the centerpiece of his lifelong reflection on Mexico. It was and continues to a polemical book; even today, it is hotly contested—a complex mixture of essay on morals, philosophical meditation, cultural anthropology, psychohistory, and autobiography. Paz wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude in Paris between 1948 and 1949, but he had begun writing down many of its themes twelve years earlier.3 The first edition appeared in Mexico in 1950; the second, nine years later, also in Mexico. To that second edition Paz added one more chapter and made important changes that updated the book. Ten years after the second edition, in 1969, Paz delivered the Hackett Memorial Lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, under the title of “Mexico: The Last Decade,” another summation of his ideas that made special reference to the October 1968 Mexican State crisis, otherwise known as the Tlatelolco



2



3

For a discussion of this theme and pertinent anthologies see (Martínez: 1971) and (Bartra: 2002). See also (Iturriaga: 1951), (Villegas: 1960); also (Mullies: 1974); see also (Hernández Luna: 1950). For a narrative on the circumstances surrounding the book’s writing see, (Paz: 1993, 15-32). Unless otherwise noted, all references to Paz’s works are to this edition, noted by volume and page numbers. 218

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student massacre. The following year, that lecture became Postscript, a book that, in Paz’s words, was “a critical and self-critical continuation” (215) of The Labyrinth of Solitude. The continuity entailed in the two editions along with Postscript and accompanying texts demonstrates the extent to which, beginning in 1950, Paz wished to interpret critically Mexico’s history. In his preface to El ogro filantrópico (1979) Paz pointed out that in the first part of this book (“El presente y sus pasados”) he had also included essays on Mexican reality that were “restatements and extensions of themes I had dealt with before.”4 2. The Labyrinth of Solitude is made up of eight chapters and a single appendix. The first edition had eight chapters, too, but the eighth was simply another essay, rather than the appendix that came later. The second edition thus underwent three kinds of revisions. First, it added an eighth chapter that, under the old title of “Our Times,” updated the book; second, one entire new section, devoted to Mexico’s contemporary culture, became a separate chapter, now re-titled “The Mexican Intelligentsia;” and third, the earlier last chapter, “The Dialectics of Solitude,” was turned into an appendix. The text’s evolution reveals a quest for a three-part symmetry: two sections of four chapters each followed by a conclusion of sorts. I mean “of sorts” in the sense that the rhetorical use of an appendix exempted Paz from giving the book too close a conclusion, which the first edition had lacked in any case. The following index makes explicit the book’s structure: Introduction: Chapter I The Pachuco and other Extremes First Part: Reading of Mexican Myths Chapter II Mexican Masks Chapter III All Saints Day, Day of the Dead Chapter IV The Sons of la Malinche Second Part: History of Mexico

4



See (Paz: 1979, 11). 219

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1. History Chapter V Conquest and Colony Chapter VI From Independence to the Revolution 2. Mexico’s present world situation Chapter VII Mexican Intelligentsia Chapter VIII Our Days Appendix: The Dialectics of Solitude

We appear, at first glance, to be before an inductive argument that moves from the particular to the general. Following Paz’s own descriptions to Claude Fell, we move from “certain myths,” to “the history of Mexico,” and from there to the derivation of a “vital, historical rhythm.” It soon becomes clear, however, that this inductive argument is but a fragment of a broader and more complex hermeneutics. Suffice it to say that the book’s general strategy is to infer a history, and from there a rhythm that explains it, beginning with its reading of a series of “myths”. The book thus begins with observations about things that appear in plain view. As such, we begin with an exercise in phenomenology—literally, a theory of appearances. I underscore this goal because the book itself does not. Unlike an academic or philosophical exercise, whose rhetorical coherence requires an explicit, preliminary statement of intention, Paz’s book, a literary essay, is reticent about its own method. That is, essays, unlike academic or philosophical treatises, are structured intuitively, precisely what sets them apart. As Theodor Adorno once put it: the essay “thinks discontinuously just as reality is discontinuous.” To which one might add Ortega y Gasset’s famous remark: all essays show “knowledge without explicit proof.”5 Discontinuity—both in language and in reality—is therefore the conceptual basis for the literary essay’s rhetorical flexibility. Readers often miss such rhetoric out of a demand for an emphatic methodology, to the point that some have found The Labyrinth of Solitude to be laden with too

For these two descriptions of the literary essay and further comments on Paz’s, see (Oviedo: 1990, 11-20, and 111-118).

5

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“labyrinthine” a prose. And yet, the book, as Paz himself states in the first chapter, is but “a personal answer to a personal question.” 3. The potential that functions rhetorically has other conceptual effects. Though not stated openly, the first chapter’s reading of the pachuco—itself a model for a good part of the book—derives from a psychoanalytic model. The pachuco as “one of the extremes at which the Mexican can arrive” (14) is a model of conflict: “he feels ashamed of his origins”; moves with “a furtive, restless air” (13); and just as “he does not want to become a Mexican again, he does not want to blend into the life of North America” (14). The pachuco’s clothing is itself conflictual: it “spotlights and isolates him, but at the same time it pays homage to the society he is attempting to deny” (16). In turn, such conflict, an agglomeration of “contradictory representations,” inevitably explodes in violence. One important premise of this reading is therefore that the pachuco exhibits neurotic symptoms, in the precise Freudian sense of a “sick ego that has lost its unity,” and exists pierced by “contradictory and opposing desires.”6 Conflict is, in effect, sickness, neurosis. At the same time, the subject’s aggressive nature means not only that such a conflict exists, but also that it must be expressed somehow. From a psychoanalytic standpoint—especially Freudian—conflict always takes place between instinct and repression, Biology and Culture. Finally, the pachuco’s rebelliousness and violence constitutes one way—irrational, self-destructive and yet eloquent—to express a desire to reintegrate him/herself into the society that rejects him/her: “The circle that began with provocation has completed itself and he is ready now for redemption, for his entrance into the society that rejected him” (17). Thus, unless we understand that Paz is here interpreting the pachuco’s agony as a desire to reintegrate him/herself into rejecting society (the United States), we miss two important aspects of the argument. We have, first, an implicit comparison of the pachuco 6



My application of Freud to Paz’s reading owes a debt to (Rieff: 1979). I am also indebted to (Mermall: 1968, 97-114). 221

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and the Mexican in general. That is, not unlike the pachuco, all Mexicans desire, but do not completely attain, reintegration into a community. Second, Paz intuits the pachuco as the prefiguration of what later would become known as the chicano/a, an American of Mexican origin. Indeed, Paz’s meditation is one of the most controversial parts of his book, particularly among Chicano artists and intellectuals, and it has led to its share of misreadings.7 Thus, one central analogy underlies the book’s argument: Mexican history is like the biography of a clinical subject. Historical conflicts can be resolved, or at least understood, by employing and applying proper analytical tools. Years later, in Postscript, this psychoanalytic model will become more evident, “The persistence of infantile traumas and structures in adult life is the equivalent of those remaining in certain historical structures in societies” (288). 4. Psychoanalysis then, is but one of the book’s several conceptual strands, and yet its imprint seems indelible. In his interview with Fell, Paz pointed out that he had attempted “a description of the world of repressions, memories, appetites, and dreams that has been and is Mexico.” Among his sources he mentioned “Freud’s study on Judaic monotheism,” and added that “moral criticism is the self-revelation of what we conceal and, as Freud teaches a… relative cure” (332). By thus opening with a psychoanalytic framework, the book also alludes polemically to Samuel Ramos’ Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1934), which at the time of the first edition was the most recent precursor in the use of a psychoanalytic model for the similar goal of understanding the Mexican.



7

See, especially, the interview with José de Armas, (De Colores: 1975, 11-21). The bibliography on this subject is especially long and rich: (Madrid-Barela: 1982, 202-219); (Flores: 1978, 51-58); (Leal: 1977, 115-123); (Porath: 1974, 6-30); (Monsiváis: 1983, 83-90); (Bruce-Novoa: 1986, 55-64); (Medina: 1988, 69-78); (Sánchez-Tranquilino: 1987, 34-42). On the pachuco and the chicano, see (Mazón: 1984), as well as the catalog of the exhibition curated by (Luckenbill: 1990). 222

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Indeed, its most striking allusion appears in its Chapter 3, on the pelado, the violent urban pícaro.8 Paz refers often in the first chapter to Ramos and his book. Indeed, the pelado and the pachuco are but versions of the “submissive hero,” the prototype—in the precise psychoanalytic sense of a “traumatic and prefigurative antecedent”—who, according to both authors, and following a venerable Mexican interpretation, resides within all Mexican subjects.9 This tradition has one underpinning: the prototype—that is, the imaginary product of a historical trauma—is repeated in the subject’s present life. Only through analysis of that ancestor, and awareness derived from such analysis, can the subject become free. Indeed, psychoanalysis seeks to free the subject from history and memory; we become free once we are aware of the “submissive” prototype within. Similar arguments underlie Paz’s reading of Mexico’s other national “myths.” 5. Criticism of the present coupled with an evaluation of the past: such would be the dual dynamics of the book’s monism. As comprehensive model, monism postulates an original unitary substance. For Paz, this substance is what one could call Mexican Being or Identity, from which diverse, and degraded, emanations derive. These, in turn, incarnate in Forms (we shall soon see the fitness of this term) of historical reality. Thus, one of the book’s recurring images is that of detachment—the Mexican wishes to “return to the center of that life from which he was separated one day” (20), or else rupture (“any rupture… engenders a feeling of solitude, 20). Both terms, even if they evoke contemporary philosophical theories, like Otto Rank’s “birth trauma,” or Heidegger’s “thrown-ness,” hark back to a historical monism, which is in fact the one that provides the conceptual foundation of such modern terms. It is precisely such On this theme, see (Bartra: 1992). For other readings of Ramos, see (Romanell: 1975, 81-102), and (Schmidt: 1978). 9 Ramos’, and Paz’s precursors on the treatment of this theme are (Chávez: 1901, 81-99); and (Guerrero: 1901). 8



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historical monism that discloses what the book calls the pachuco’s “extreme” alienation: a people distant from their homeland, who barely speak the language of their ancestors, and for whom the roots that bind them to their culture have withered away. They are not, certainly, the only “degraded” ones; merely the ones most distanced physically, temporally, and morally from the “primary substance,” and, therefore, the ones who embody most dramatically the “symptoms” of a generalized “sickness” that afflicts all Mexicans. The name of that sickness is Modernity. It is hardly an accident, then, that the pachucos, in Paz’s reading, should be the version or form of the Mexican the author finds in his own historical present. If pachucos inspire his meditation, it is because with them the author shares the alienation of exile. With one difference: unlike the pachuco, but like the chicano later in time, Paz meditates and reflects upon that alienating condition. 6. The same historical monism forms part, in turn, of the Romantic archive—influenced especially by Hegel and Schelling, but whose roots lead back to Neoplatonism—that subtends the book’s vision of man and history. Romanticism contributes two central ideas. First, an Idealist morphology; that is, the progressive fall of Spirit (the name Hegel gives to what I have called “primary substance”) into Forms of degraded worldly material. Second, and as part of the same morphology, the cyclical return of that Spirit to the same point of departure, a return that presages reconciliation. Paz’s book describes the fall into Forms as successive historical stages through which the Mexican seeks to insert him/herself into universal currents: Colonial, Independence, Reform, Revolution, all historical phases not unlike those “stations on the road” or “Forms of awareness” (Gestalten des Bewussteins) that Hegel describes in his “Introduction” to Phenomenology of Spirit as the object of his narrative. “The way of the soul, which travels through the sequence of its Forms, like stations marked out for it by its own nature in order that it may purify itself into pure spirit in

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reaching, through the complete experience of itself, the knowledge of what it is in itself.”10 When, in the first chapter, Paz describes the pachuco’s moral and psychological process each time s/he rebels as a “circle that began with provocation,” later to close “ready now for redemption, for his entrance into the society that rejected him,” the description harkens back to Hegel. And when, in the book’s very center he states that “the history of Mexico is that of a people seeking a form that will express them” (134), and further that “the [form] the Mexican [seeks] is that of a man who aspires to communion” he invokes both the primacy of Forms in the Romantic concept of History as well as the paradigm of the circular pilgrimage of the Spirit. In the Romantic tradition, that pilgrimage appears as an implicit theodicy, a concept that, according to M.H. Abrams, constitutes the tradition’s conceptual heart: “the journey is a spiritual way through evil and suffering which is justified as a necessary means to the achievement of a greater good; and usually, although with greater or less explicitness, this process is conceived as a fall from unity into division and into a conflict of contraries which in turn compel the movement back toward a higher integration.”11 Paz’s debt to Hegel remains, however, indirect. It derives not from philosophical sources but from German Romantic poetry: Goethe (whose theory of the Urformen one must not overlook), Hölderlin, and of course Novalis. This poetry, stripped of the vocabulary of German Idealism, was one of Octavio Paz’s staple readings during the thirties and forties, before writing The Labyrinth of Solitude. Perhaps the most palpable evidence of the book’s Hegelianism appears towards the end of Chapter 6 (“From

See (Hegel: 1967, 135-136). I quote from (Abrams: 1971, 193). Abrams’ central concept in this book is the “circular voyage.” Frances Chiles has studied the importance of this theme in (Chiles: 1987). Strangely, however, she does not mention The Labyrinth of Solitude. I have shown elsewhere how this theme works in Paz’s poetry; see my edition of (Paz: 1988, 11-63).

10 11

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I­ndependence to Revolution”) in the discussion of the Mexican Revolution, where it waxes: “It is not a scheme that some group imposed on reality; instead, it manifested itself in various places and began to take form embodied in conflicting groups and at different times.”12 7. Only after we understand the universal nature of solitude as a concept can we grasp Paz’s reading of Mexican “myths” in Chapters 2 to 4. Paz’s uncanny skill in describing them—Mexican masks; ninguneo, the nullification of others, and nihilism; the Fiesta, Malinche, the Virgin of Guadalupe—could lead us to think that his goal was mere folklore. On the other hand, focusing instead on the content of those myths would lead us to judge his reading as a condemnation of mid-twentieth century Mexican culture, as suggested in one of the anecdotes Paz recalls in his conversation with Fell: “A poet told me something quite amusing: that I had written an elegant insult against Mexican mothers” (330). Despite such misreadings, Paz’s skill is in fact part and parcel of the book’s rhetoric; and precisely for that reason it constitutes a two-edged sword. On the one hand, his skill catalogs all the traits that reveal the persistence of the myths and customs in Mexican daily life. That is, the book is concerned with showing, above all, how easily people cohabit with both those manifest particularities, to the point where they turn them into part of their nature, their “identity.” On the other hand, Paz also tries to show, by way of the same reading, the “strangeness” of those same customs as soon as he reveals their latent content—what he described to Claude Fell as “hidden reality that hurts” (332). Thus, even while it exalts through description, the reading also criticizes through analysis. I underscore this (Freudian) manifest-latent model because, true to its laconic form, the book itself does not, even though much of the argument of the first few chapters hinges on it. The fact remains that this binary opposition determines not only the intellectual Strangely, the English translation (147) drops this important reference: “como lo querían los románticos alemanes” [as the German Romantics deemed it.]

12

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focus of the first four chapters but constitutes the logical link between the book’s two parts. Manifest-latent oppositions derive, too, from psychoanalysis and are related to an even more fundamental couplet: conscious-unconscious. Both mean that only by piercing the “superficial” level can one gain access to a deeper, more authentic level. “The tendency to explain one level of reality by means of another more ancient and unconscious,” wrote Paz in another context, “the social regimen, instinctive life—is an inheritance from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud” (10, 617-618). The common legacy of all three is what Arnold Hauser, years ago, called the “psychology of exposure,” and what Paul Ricoeur in turn baptized as the “school of suspicion.”13 As Ricoeur explains it: “If we go back to the intention they [Marx, Nietzsche, Freud] had in common, we find their decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness . . . Beginning with them, understanding is hermeneutics: henceforward, to seek meaning is no longer to spell out the consciousness of meaning but to decipher its expressions” (33-34). Thus, The Labyrinth of Solitude synthesizes such deciphering strategies. With all three, Paz shares the goal to dissolve alienation by means of manifest decipherment, and thereby reveal, through consciousness-raising, latent reality. Chapter 3, “The Day of the Dead,” analyzes the open-closed conflict. Mexicans in effect repress affective life, as shown in the formulaic, courteous, simulated ways they deal with one another; in collective life, on the other hand, they externalize and express that affection. Paz’s reading of the Mexican Fiesta does find a healthy symptom: “If we hide within ourselves, in the confusion of Fiesta, we let ourselves go” (53). The Fiesta manifests—the pun is itself significant—less a conflict than a forgetting or repression of its ultimate meaning. Mexicans are “a ritual people,” and “the art of Fiesta has been debased almost everywhere, but not in Mexico” (53). It is “inscribed on the orbit of the sacred” because it means “above all

See (Hauser: 1957, 58); (Ricoeur: 1970, 33-34).

13

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the advent of the unusual” because “special, exclusive rules govern it, isolate it and create a day of exception” (51). The goal of Paz’s reading of Fiesta would be, then, not so much to probe a latent conflict, as to dissolve whatever alienation one may feel towards its ritual through recovery of its hidden meaning. Paz never does get into the reasons behind Mexicans’ repression of that meaning, but he does disclose—as the book’s second part shows—that one forgets it due to Modernity’s ongoing secularization, a false “progress” that has made of the “art of the Fiesta” a degraded survival of the sacred. 8. In this regard, Paz’s discussion alludes to the readings of “French sociologists” (50) who “consider the Fiesta to be a ritual expenditure.” Neither of the two editions identifies those sociologists by name, but Paz’s summary of their ideas, together with his comments in the interview with Fell, suggest that he refers to Emile Durkheim (especially his Elementary Forms of Religious Life), Marcel Mauss, Roger Caillois, and Georges Bataille (in particular, the latter’s important essay “The Notion of Expenditure”). Of all four ethnographers—to call them “sociologists” is a stretch, though we shall soon see why Paz calls them so—the one his argument relies on most is Caillois, specifically in his Man and the Sacred, whose Spanish translation, published in Mexico in 1942, devotes an entire chapter to a “theory of the Fiesta.”14 Like Bataille, Caillois had been a disciple of Marcel Mauss, just as Mauss had been a student of Durkheim’s. Caillois, probably influenced by Bataille, was responsible for developing an economic theory of sacrifice that included the ritual of Fiesta. Indeed, in public lectures he gave during 1942, Paz had himself quoted Caillois’ Myth and Man, an earlier book in which Fiesta is barely mentioned, as “a permitted excess” that propitiates the rise of mythic heroes. In his chapter, Paz alludes to Caillois’ later economic theory but only to reject it—not completely, as we shall see.

14

The Spanish edition was: (Caillois: 1942, 109-145). 228

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Despite the fact that Paz considers Caillois’ theory “incomplete,” clearly he derives from it much of his description while introducing one important change. Rather than an expenditure, or waste, Fiesta, for Paz, constitutes “a Revolt.” Such substitution of ethics for Caillois’ economy thus alters the function of Fiesta, and reveals that, among Mexicans, it is a mechanism for ex-pression: “They [Fiestas] free us, even if only momentarily, from all the thwarted impulses, the inflammable material that we carry within us” (53). Since Fiesta compensates for other expressive “defects” in Mexican identity, it is thus inevitable that the ritual includes an emotional overload. “The frenzy of our festivals shows the extent to which our solitude closes us off from communication with the world” (33). The mere fact Paz should conceive Fiesta as a “frenzy” (the Spanish original is much stronger: “ruptura violenta”) demonstrates the extent to which he retains Caillois’ economic thesis while modifying it within a psychoanalytic framework. For Paz, the importance of Fiesta’s emotional overload is that it achieves resolution in the “return to an original state of non-differentiation and freedom.” Caillois himself called this state “Primitive Chaos” (Paz’s “place of all metamorphoses, all miracles”). Both Caillois’ and Paz’s boil down to equivalents of what Freud called the death wish, a return to the non-differentiated state of inert matter. It is hardly an accident, then, that the death wish should be the logical thematic bridge between both sections of Chapter 3: “If we open out during fiestas, then, or when we are drunk or exchanging confidences, we do it so violently that we wound ourselves” (63). As in the case of Fiesta, death’s sacred meaning has diluted, repressed or forgotten. This repression or oblivion is hardly an exclusively Mexican trait; once again, it is a symptom of Modernity in general. As the Mexican has repressed his double heritage— Christian and Aztec—with respect to the sacred meaning of death, so “everything in the modern world functions as if death did not exist” (57). Mexican indifference to death is therefore a symptom of an exacerbated death wish, what Paz had earlier called, referring to the poetry of Xavier Villaurrutia, the creation of a “culture of death.” “Therefore, our relations with death are intimate—more 229

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intimate perhaps than those of any other people—but empty of meaning and devoid of eroticism” (59). To summarize: the overall narrative line of Chapters 2 and 3 discloses an internal logic. Chapter 2 analyzes the Forms that repress the Mexican and deprive him/her of intimacy—with others or with him/herself; Chapter 3 analyzes the ritual mechanism that, even if it sublimates individual repression collectively, represses the original meaning of sacred communion and resolves itself in the death wish. The former examines the lack or defect of Love; the latter analyzes the inevitability, desire for, and emptiness of death. Love and Death, Eros and Thanatos: the two primordial instincts that, according to Freud, structure the fundamental conflict of human life. Such is the deep structure of Paz’s first two statements on Mexico’s “myths.” 9. We would not be wrong to call Paz’s attempt to describe and understand these “myths” a “Sociology of the Sacred,” in the precise sense in which Caillois had used this formula in 1938 when describing the goals of the Collège de Sociologie [College of Sociology] he had helped found: “The study of social existence, whenever in its manifestations the active presence of the sacred is present.” Caillois himself had then proposed “to establish the points of coincidence among the fundamental, obsessive tendencies of individual psychology and the directive structures that preside over social organization and govern its revolutions.”15 It would be excessive, of course, to reduce the entire goal of The Labyrinth of Solitude (or at least its first part) to a mere updating of the College of Sociology’s agenda. Still, a comparative study of the two would help clarify certain matters. Caillois was certainly an important source for Paz, especially after 1942, when his books began to circulate in Spanish thanks to the Argentine magazine Sur, which Paz read constantly and to which he was a regular contributor.16 Paz’s indirect reference to the I quote from (Caillois: 1988, 25). Caillois’ El mito y el hombre, along with Sociología de la novela, for example, were published in translation by Editorial Sur in 1939, and 1942, respectively.

15 16

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College of Sociology that Caillois, along with Georges Bataille, helped found in 1937, news of which must have spread throughout the Hispanic world during the 1940s, would explain his “error” upon describing the anthropological work of the Durkheim school as that of “French sociologists.” One must also recall that Paz does this amidst a discussion of Mexican Fiesta, a phenomenon Caillois had himself analyzed years earlier. Paz also quotes other participants in the College (like Jacques Soustelle), or works the College had adopted as its own (such as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Primitive Mind). But the most important link yet between Paz’s analytic intentions and those of Caillois’ College was not so much the specific readings they shared (such as Hegel and Freud), as Surrealism. As is well known, Caillois and Bataille had themselves been young members of the Surrealist group. Indeed, they founded the College seven years after breaking with André Breton (Bataille had signed the notorious second Un Cadavre in 1930), and in doing so had gone their own way in pursuit of a scientific, or at least more rigorous alternative to what they considered Surrealism’s excessive identification with aesthetics. Thus, the participants in the College turned to the so-called human sciences, among them sociology, and in particular the ethnographic version of sociology designed by Durkheim and Mauss, to investigate the dynamics of cultural process. At the same time, they deviated from orthodox, academic anthropology by focusing Other essays by Caillois appeared in the journal: see (Caillois: 1939, 103-107); an extract on the chapter on Fiesta in El hombre y lo sagrado also appeared in (Caillois: 1940, 57-83); also, “Exámenes de conciencia”, Sur, 79 (abril de 1941), 102-107. (Caillois spent the war years in Buenos Aires as a guest of Victoria Ocampo’s, who was editor of Sur.) Several of Caillois’ works were also published in Mexico at the time: (Caillois: 1943, 1945). On Myth and Man, Paz once stated: “Caillois’ book was for me a discovery and an acknowledgment… many of his themes were also mine, even though he treated them with greater clarity and broader perspective… It’s not strange that, working from within my own Mexican solitude, there should have been affinity between my ideas and his,” my translation from “Las piedras legibles de Roger Caillois,” (2, 467-470). 231

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on modern societies, instead of the misnamed “primitive societies” that had been studied by the likes of Durkheim, Mauss, or Alfred Métraux. Their common goal was to study those ritual moments in present life when unusual experiences find collective expression (as, for example, in Fiesta). One common belief determined their focus: the guilt one feels amidst the desert of Modernity derives from the banishment of experience of the sacred and the consequent triumph of profane culture. For this reason, the College’s theoretical speculations—and, in Bataille’s unique case, his spiritual practice—fought against modern, profane alienation in a way not unlike Surrealism’s. Despite their break with Breton—or perhaps because of it—the intentions of those who participated in the College of Sociology constituted, in effect, a critique of modern secularization and the spiritual desert it produced. Their collective research into how the sacred bursts into daily life was one more legacy of that magical splitting of reality, the disclosure of reality’s unusual, marvelous dimension, which is in fact the basis of all surrealist practice.17 10. Ethnographic Surrealism and the Sociology of the Sacred are therefore the two concepts that frame Paz’s book. Through them, we can understand yet another two of its important traits. The first would be that, above and beyond any rejection implied by Paz’s critique of national “myths,” or the “therapy” of their psychoanalytic decipherment, his broader goal is to criticize Modernity and thereby restore those sacred (and therefore significant) strata that survive within Mexico’s marginal Modernity. In that sense, Paz’s anecdote about the poet who called the book “an elegant but obscene insult of Mexicans” would be but a half-truth. While his reading does denounce and condemn certain Mexican myths and customs, it is by virtue of that same critique that they On the links between the College of Sociology and Surrealism, see (Worms: 1991, 95-104). Also, (Price and Jamin: 1988, 157-174); (Jamin: 1980, 5-30); and (Duvignaud: 1979, 91-96). I owe a great debt throughout this discussion to James Clifford’s chapter “Ethnographic Surrealism” in (Clifford: 1988).

17

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become reinvested with meaning. Ultimately, Paz is after vindicating a Mexican collective imaginary. But we can only understand this goal by familiarizing ourselves further with the second part of the book, which contains a philosophy of Mexican history. As the summary in Chapter 4 underscores, “historical circumstances explain our character to the extent that our character explains those circumstances” (72). This means that we cannot view the book’s second part as either a simple extension of the first, or its sole, mechanical explanation. Were one to be carried away by the book’s strong psychoanalytic flavor, it would be only natural for us to take the historical interpretation present in Chapters 5 through 8 as the latent content of the manifest “character,” or “symptoms” that the earlier chapters described. As we have seen, Paz insists on a less deterministic, more dynamic, dialectical model of explanation, a model where the manifest-latent poles turn out, in fact, to be interchangeable. Thus, Character and History, symptom and etiology, explain one another. That is, whereas the book does establish links between its two parts, those links are made neither explicit nor emphatic. Reading The Labyrinth of Solitude is much like viewing heterogeneous objects juxtaposed in a collage. While both parts of the book use the same vocabulary, and sometimes the same concepts, these undergo a radical alteration as they move from one to the other. The relationship between the two is hinted at rather than made explicit. For example, the reader may well infer, though it is never openly affirmed, that the “open-closed dialectics,” which according to Chapter 2 predominates as a behavior among modern Mexicans, is the result of a conflict between the two concepts of society that constitute New Spain (Mexico’s colonial name). This, as we know, is explained in Chapter 5. Similarly, the existence of character traits, like courtesy or “ceremonious reserve,” is never attributed explicitly to the failure of the Mexican to find “a Form that might express him.” Once again, rhetorical reticence is part and parcel of the book’s dialectical principles and cannot be reduced to one more stylistic trait of the essay as genre. 233

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Thus, to articulate the conceptual links in favor of Character exclusively would mean limiting oneself to a “philosophy of things Mexican”; alternately, to favor History exclusively would amount to repeating the very historic alienation the essay denounces. Yet by pointing out the parallel existence of both Character and History the text leads us to understand something important: both that particular “dialectic” and such “formalism” can perhaps be explained through certain historical events. One must emphasize perhaps because the reverse argument could also be true: character traits could well be the cause of those same historical events. Thus, one part of the book is a mirror to the other. And yet, their mutual reflections are not necessarily faithful. Even if a philosophy of History should complement a phenomenology of Character, History can never be reduced to Character. Rather, one is analogous to the other. Though not identical, Character is like History, History like Character. Such analogies demonstrate that the argument the book makes is ultimately poetic. It works through Analogy, not logical proof.

Coda History, which for Paz in earlier chapters appears as a pyramid of superimposed strata, is therefore summarized, in the book’s Appendix, as “a dialectic,” an oscillation between two “extremes”: solitude and communion. Such dialectic is the rational equivalent of the image being proposed: if each one of History’s ideological strata constitutes a moment of Solitude or alienation, then, conversely, each one of its ruptures represents an instance of Communion. By thus emphasizing the dialectical nature of those two extremes, Paz also affirms consubstantiality. It is no longer a matter—as Paz’s writings during the forties had naively suggested— of dissolving solitude in favor of communion, but of recognizing the two extremes as mutually necessary. This explains, in turn, the epigraph to the book that Paz borrowed from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado: 234

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The Other does not exist: that is, rational faith, the incurable conviction of all human reason. Identity=reality, as if, when all is said and done, all had to be, necessarily and absolutely, one and the same thing. But the Other will never submit to such elimination: it persists and it suffices for itself; it is the hard bone on which reason fastens its teeth and all but gnaws them away. Abel Martín, in the faith of poetry, no less human than the rational kind, believed in the Other, in the ‘essential Heterogeneity of Being,’ the incurable Otherness, so to speak, underlying the life of the One.”18

If both rationalism and “the essential Heterogeneity of being” are incurable, then there can be no Communion without Solitude. Such would be the premise of Paz’s meditation on love in the “Appendix,” the climax of which lies in one single central remark: “The problem of love in our world reveals how the dialectic of solitude, in its deepest manifestation, is frustrated by society. Our social life prevents almost every possibility of achieving true erotic communion” (202).

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— (1943): Ensayo sobre el espíritu de las sectas. Mexico City: Ediciones Quetzal. — (1945): La Communion des forts. Mexico City: El Colegio de México. — (1988): “Introduction”, The College of Sociology (1937-39), ed. Denis Hollier, tr. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Chávez, Ezequiel (1901): “Ensayo sobre los rasgos distintivos de la sensibilidad como factor del carácter mexicano”, in Revista Positiva, vol. 1, n°. 3 (Mar 1 1901). Chiles, Frances (1987): Octavio Paz: The Mythic Dimension. New York: Peter Lang. Clifford, James (1988): The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard UP. De Colores, vol. 2, n° 2 (1975) Duvignaud, Jean (1979): “Roger Caillois et l’imaginaire”, in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, Vol . 66. Presses Universitaires de France. Flores, Lauro (1978): “Dualidad del pachuco”, in Revista Chicano-Riqueña, vol. 6, n° 4. Guerrero, Julio (1901): La génesis del crimen en México: Estudio de psiquiatría social. Mexico City: Viuda de Ch. Bouret. Hauser, Arnold (1957): The Social History of Art. Vol. IV. New York: Vintage Books. Hegel, G.W.F. (1967): The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J.B. Baillie. New York: Harper. Hernández Luna, Juan (1950): “Primeros estudios sobre lo mexicano en nuestro siglo”, Filosofía y Letras, n° 20, (Oct.-Dec., 1950), 27-354. Iturriaga, José E. (1951): La estructura social y cultural de México. ­Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Jamin, Jean (1980): “Un Sacré collège, ou les apprentis sorciers de la sociologie”, in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, Vol . 68. Presses Universitaires de France. Leal, Luis (1977): “Octavio Paz and the Chicano,” in Latin American Literary Review, vol. 5, n° 10. (Spring-Summer 1977). Luckenbill, Dan (1990): The Pachuco Era: Catalog of an Exhibit, University Research Library, Sept.-Dec. 1990. Los Angeles: University Research Library, Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. Machado, Antonio (1963): Juan de Mairena, tr. Ben Belitt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Madrid-Barela, Arturo (1982): “In Search of the Authentic Pachuco: An Interpretive Essay,” in Renato Rosaldo et al, ed. Chicano: The Evolution of a People. Malabar, Fl.: Krieger. Martínez, José Luis, ed. (1971): El ensayo mexicano moderno, 2nd ed. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mazón, Mauricio (1984): The Zoot Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation. Austin, Tx.: U of Texas P.

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Medina, Rubén (1988): “Del pachuco al hispano: Octavio Paz ataca de nuevo”, in Crítica (La Jolla, Ca.), vol. 2, n° 1. (Spring 1988). Mermall, Thomas (1968): “Octavio Paz: El Laberinto de la soledad y el sicoanálisis de la historia”, Cuadernos Americanos, vol. 27, n° 1 (JanFeb 1968). Monsiváis, Carlos (1983): “Este es el pachuco, un sujeto singular”, in Salvador Leal, ed. A través de la frontera. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Económicos y Sociales del Tercer Mundo/Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM. Mullies, William Arthur (1974): “‘Mexicanidad’ in the Essays of Samuel Ramos, Leopoldo Zea, and Octavio Paz”, Ph.D. thesis (Thesis, University of Missouri). Oviedo, José Miguel (1990): Breve historia del ensayo hispanoamericano. Madrid: Alianza. Paz, Octavio (1979): El ogro filantrópico, Historia y política, 1971-1978. Barcelona: Seix Barral. — (1985): The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, tr. Lysander Kemp et al. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. — (1988): Libertad bajo palabra (1935-1957). Ed. Enrico Mario Santí, Madrid: Cátedra. — (1993): “Entrada retrospectiva”, Obras Completas. Edición del autor. Tomo 8. Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores, 1993-2004. Porath, Don (1974): “Chicanos and Existentialism”, in De Colores, vol. 1, n° 2. (Spring 1974). Price, Sally and Jean Jamin (1988): “A Conversation with Michel Leiris,” in Current Anthropology, Vol. 29, N° 1, (Feb 1988). Ramsden, Herbert (1974): The 1898 Movement in Spain. Manchester: Manchester UP. Ricoeur, Paul (1970): Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP. Rieff, Philip (1979): Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Romanell, Patrick (1975): “Samuel Ramos on the Philosophy of Mexican Culture: Ortega and Unamuno in Mexico,” Latin American Research Review, vol. 10, n°. 3 (Fall 1975). The Latin American Studies Association. Sánchez-Tranquilino, Marcos (1987): “Mano a mano: An Essay on the Representation of the Zoot Suit and its Misrepresentation by Octavio Paz,” in Journal: A Contemporary Art Magazine (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art) (Winter 1988). Santí, Enrico Mario, Ed. (1993): El laberinto de la soledad (1950, 1959). Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra. Schmidt, Henry C. (1978): The Roots of Lo Mexicano: Self and Society in Mexican Thought, 1900-1934. College Station, Tx.: Texas A & M UP.

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Stabb, Martin (1967): In Quest of Identity. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Villegas, Abelardo (1960): La filosofía de lo mexicano. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Worms, Jeannine (1991) Entretiens avec Roger Caillois. Paris: La Différence.

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Blanco: On the Presence of Absence

I

f I had to summarize the sensation I experienced completing editorial work on Octavio Paz’s Blanco/Archivo Blanco it would be my paradoxical title: the presence of absence. At the end of “Esto no es un poema” [“This is not a poem”], my 1996 essay, I reflected on how the concluding lines “La irrealidad de lo mirado / da realidad a la mirada” [“The unreality of the seen / gives reality to the seeing”] describe not only the vanishing bodies of the two lovers whose erotic experience the poem narrates but also the vanishing of the text itself.1 My point was not that the end of the poem allegorizes its own narrative ending—a trite theme and procedure in modernist art. Instead, I wanted to show that the poem’s running argument against all forms of relativism reaches one devastating conclusion: all matter, including all bodies, even the text we are reading, dissolves as soon as we reach a stage of silence after the word. “Silence after the word,” precisely the poem’s target (which blanco also means in Spanish), could therefore be reduced neither to a mystical experience nor to a vulgar nihilism. In the poem’s context, and indeed the poet’s, it refers to Buddhist relative silence, sunyata, as defined in Madhyamika, the Buddhist school of Nagarjuna. An explanation of this concept appears in Paz’s book on Lévi-Strauss, the contents of which date from 1966, the same 1



See (Paz: 1995, 235–321) and (Santí: 1997; revised edition 2015, 301–367; 333399). 239

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year he published Blanco. “There are two silences,” he wrote then, “one before the word, a desire to say; another, after the word, the knowledge that the only thing worth saying cannot be said.” In yet another text from the same year he added: “The poem is the trajectory between these two silences—between the wish to speak and the silence that fuses the wishing and the speaking.”2 Obviously, these reflections point not only to the distinction between two types of silence, before and after the word, before and after the experience of poetry. They also attempt to get at the meaning of meaning. “The Buddha’s silence,” Paz wrote, “neither affirms nor denies. It says something else, and it alludes to a beyond which is right here. It says: Sunyata: everything is empty because everything is full, the word is not a saying because the only saying is silence. Not nihilism but a relativism that destroys and goes beyond itself.”3 Indeed, a summary of this idea appears in those final lines: “The unreality of the seen/ gives reality to the seeing.” “Lo mirado,” the seen, according to a comment that Paz made to an early draft of my own essay, cited then and re-cited now, “is the world of relative relations. As soon as we discover it, relativism opens up, and lets us see the other side: untouchable and unsayable reality, a vision that also gives reality to us, mortal creatures, mere accidents in the chain of evolution.”4 Thus, at the end of Blanco the paradox of an absence of presence takes hold by virtue of one inescapable fact: by then, the reader has gone through an extremely elaborate material experience; radical presence yields to radical absence. Such material experience takes place on at least three levels. First, it becomes literally palpable with the actual production of reading: the reader must unfold all thirty-two sheets, the text’s 552 centimeters—a physical, sometimes awkward activity that harks back to precursor texts like Cendrars and Delaunay’s Prose du Transibérien (1913), not 4 2 3

See (Paz: 1973, 69). See (Paz: 1970, 142) See (Paz: 1995, 310); and based on Octavio Paz’s communication, from the Santí archive. 240

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to mention Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dès” (written in 1897). In the case of Blanco, the experience is related to Buddhism and, specifically, as we shall see, to Tantric ritual. In 1969, when Blanco was included in Ladera este/Eastern Slope, the poems Paz wrote earlier in the decade in India, the text´s unfolding was lost with its reprint in book format. Paz did use the occasion, however, to point out that the poem “ought to be read” as “a succession of signs on a single page; as the reading progresses, the page unfolds: a space that in its movement allows the text to appear and that, in a way, produces it.”5 It became clear that text production was very much linked, in Paz’s mind, to unfolding the poem’s single sheet. It was also clear that this central feature would be lost the moment the poem was reprinted in traditional print form. An echo of Paz’s awareness of (and, I dare say, anxiety about) this loss can be heard in the letter he wrote to Emir Rodríguez Monegal (April 19, 1967), editor of the journal Mundo Nuevo, as the poem was also being printed in Mexico. He pointed out, as instructions to print the poem, the need for several font sizes and more page centering than was normally done for poems published by the journal. “Si Ud. lee el poema,” he warned, “verá que no se trata de caprichos tipográficos” [“If you read the poem, you’ll see these are no typographical whims”].6 Of course, traditional print happens to be the way most readers today know Blanco. And yet, Paz’s concern for its material production was evident at least one year before the publication of Eastern Slope. The same concern surfaces in yet another letter of his (January 25, 1968) that topped fifteen months of correspondence with Joaquín Diez Canedo, the Mexican (and first) publisher of Blanco. Reacting to what appears to be Diez Canedo’s misgivings about the finished product—which to a stodgy Spaniard must have seemed weird, to say the least—he wrote: “It’s not exactly a luxury edition: it’s a functional edition, aimed at incorporating into the text the material part of the book. I dare say that its typography 5 6



See (Paz: 1969, 145–182); translation in (Paz: 2014, 329–352). See (Paz: 1995, 95). 241

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[la disposición tipográfica] constitutes a first reading of the text. The material difficulties of handling it are the equivalent of the language difficulties that every poetic text pose to readers.”7 Yet a second level of material experience appears in the poem’s indeterminacy: the reader’s choice of various readings as shown in, though not exhaustively contained by, the directions that appear at the end. In the later Eastern Slope version of Blanco, the directions appear at the head of the poem, and for good reason. According to that note—which proves, among other things, that Paz had in mind an open work—there are at least six ways of reading Blanco: (1) as a single text, (2) reading the center, (3) left column by itself, (4) right column by itself, (5) reading the left and right columns together, and (6) reading the six center sections together with the left and right columns. Nine years later, in a lecture at El Colegio Nacional, Paz himself increased the number of possible readings to fourteen, or rather six sections and fourteen poems; he also proposed then the poem followed the structure of a mandala. Mandalas, as we know, are visual symbolic representations of the universe that are common in Asian cultures. Paz’s own mandala had one entrance and one exit—ruled over, respectively, by silence and the color white—plus four intermediate sections with corresponding colors, elements, cardinal points, and faculties. In my essay, however, I disagreed with this count and identified up to twenty-two possible readings, a figure that can be increased if we consider the poem’s “modular form,” to use John M. Fein’s useful term, which allows us to vary the design by manipulating the poem’s folding and interchangeable parts. That is, in reading Blanco we can opt not to follow the reader directions and simply fold the strip, build our Lego poem, so to speak, whichever way we wish to generate our own text. In the same note attached to Eastern Slope, Paz draws the difference between what he calls “temporal order, the form that the poem’s course adopts: its discourse,” and “spatial order: different parts spread out like mandala regions, colors, symbols and

7

See (Paz: 1995, 95), (emphasis Paz’s). 242

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­figures.”8 Thus, we certainly can, on this basis, make up our own text. And there is yet another compelling reason for having the poem proceed as it does: the poem has an order, a logic, an argument, and, of course, a goal or target: blanco. Elsewhere, Paz called this “head to toe” composition “fundamental”; it was, in fact, the same order he would follow whenever he gave public readings of the poem, including the 1995 DVD on Blanco that he and Marie José Paz produced.9 What this meant, ultimately, was that, beyond whatever permutations the poem’s spatial order or modular form could generate, the reader appears to have two broad sets of options: either pursue a Western, ironic reading, where we follow directions; or follow an Eastern, analogical reading, where we simply flow with the text. I mentioned earlier that in 1969, with the inclusion of Blanco in Eastern Slope, the reader directions shifted from the tail end of the poem to its head. The shift thereby eliminated the physical unfolding of the continuous strip; it also restricted, though not lost totally, the text’s modular potential: no longer could the reader perform permutations through modular shifts. On the other hand, the reader could still go through the six alternate readings, which, according to Paz, could amount to as many as fourteen (and, according to Santí, twenty-two). Temporal order, then, won over spatial order, though not completely: the “head to toe,” or “fundamental and basic” reading, won out, a reading that the 1969 note, attempting perhaps to make up for the loss of the long-strip format, described further as a ritual procession, or pilgrimage. Changing the location of the reader directions from tail end to head also revealed something else, albeit indirectly. If the reader directions were in fact a guide to reading—as happens, for example, in Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela—why, then, in the first edition were those directions placed at the tail end rather than at the head? The obvious answer is that this was the whole point of an Eastern reading: as readers, we are supposed to go with the flow,

8 9

See (Paz: 2014, p. 595 in reference to p. 327). See (Fein: 1986, 64–94). 243

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­ naided by (Western) instructions. A less obvious answer, howevu er, is the one that the poem’s best readers, notably Eliot Weinberger, the translator of Blanco into English, and the late Mexican poet Manuel Ulacia proposed: Blanco is a reversible text. We can read it in either of two ways. In the first, we start at the end and read toward the top; the first lines would be “La irrealidad de lo mirado / da realidad a la Mirada” [“The unreality of the seen / give reality to the seeing”] and its last word would be “Blanco,” the title. In this reverse (actually, upward) reading, a different ritual takes place: the gradual ascent of the kundalini, instinctual or libidinal energy, through the seven chakras of the yogic or Tantric body, which the textual body of Blanco is meant to represent. Weinberger explains this as a paradoxical movement: “Blanco, which necessarily must be read downwards, can be viewed, waxing bold, like a diagram of the chakras in reverse… Thus, the kundalini ascends at the same time the poem descends through the [other] chakras.” Ulacia, in turn, went even further by identifying two additional aspects of this reading: first, the six sections of the center column of Blanco represent those six chakras (the seventh, which signifies the illumination of emptiness, lies of course outside language); second, the double stanzas of the center column represent the two kundalini channels, rasana and lalana, which correspond to the masculine and feminine principles. They symbolically run up and down, left and right, of the Tantric body, and they channel libidinal energy. Thus, as we read upward, the last word is “Blanco”; but as we read downward, the last word is “Mirada”: “the seeing.” Be it up or down, however, we end up in the same place: the sixth chakra at the forehead, “the color of which,” according to Weinberger, and alluding to Buddhist doctrine, “is transparency”: “Transparency is all that remains,” goes one of the more prominent mantras of “Blanco.”10 No doubt you have noted that while describing the second level of material experience, the poem’s indeterminacy, I have also hinted at the third: the Tantric ritual that makes up the poem’s ­narrative 10

See (Weinberger: 1992, 17–45); and (Ulacia: 1999, 225). 244

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and that we could otherwise call its diegesis. To delve further into the particulars of Tantric doctrine would take us far afield. More pertinent for our immediate purposes would be simply to limit ourselves to the paradox that sustains it and that I have otherwise described as radical absence by means of radical presence. Paz himself, in several writings, referred to the paradox of how Tantra, being an extension of Buddhism, is itself a new and exaggerated attempt to reabsorb, within the great critical and metaphysical negation of Mahayana, yogic, bodily, and primal elements. Thus, in ritual copulation the yogi must avoid ejaculation, a practice that has two goals: (1) to deny the reproductive function of sexuality and (2) to transform semen into the thought of enlightenment. Thus, Tantrism employs ritual sexual intercourse, among other physical transgressions (which can include bingeing, intoxication, defecation, and vomiting). It does so as “immersion into chaos, into the original source of life,” on the one hand, and ascetic practice, a purification of the senses and of the mind, on the other. The procedure is meant to reach into the annulment of world and self. In Blanco, the erotic ritual appears in its central column, each of whose sections is divided in turn into two stanzas in what constitutes a counterpoint between erotic ritual (on the left) and modes of knowledge (on the right). In the poem’s sixth section, the literal climax, the two stanzas colored in red and black join typographically in an ideogrammic representation of the couple’s orgasmic union. The climax also coincides thematically, diegetically, with the speaker’s attainment of language. That is, linguistic germination (poetic achievement, lifting of the writer’s block) occurs simultaneously with the couple’s orgasmic climax. The above description of the three levels of material experience—what I should like to call the levels of physical reading, interpretation, and diegesis—is meant as a preface to my main point. It is also a preface to a new modest proposal regarding Blanco, to which I shall now devote the last brief section of this essay. Although I have already stated my main point, I shall clarify it further. By the time the reader reaches the concluding, ninth section of Blanco, beginning with the key lines 245

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In the center Of the world of the body of the spirit The crevice The splendor

two contradictory issues have taken place. The first is that we (speaker and reader) arrive at the verge of illumination through emptiness; “the crevice” is the poem’s metaphor for this experience. The second issue is that we have become aware of emptiness by virtue of an earlier, more radical, and opposite, experience: the complex materiality we have gone through by virtue of reading, interpretation, and diegesis. Indeed, the “crevice,” the crack or slit through which both speaker and reader now perceive “splendor” (where world, body, and spirit become one and the same), also constitutes the metaphor for both the woman’s vulva (worshipped in Tantric ritual, experienced in the poem) and the fissure through which we transcend relativism. That is, the “crevice” is both physical object and metaphysical concept. According to Paz, the “crevice” is the tear that allows us to experience poetry, “the other shore.” That we are at a higher stage of consciousness is signaled further by the poem’s line “in the center,” where “center” refers not only to the reader’s return to the poem’s center column. “Center” alludes as well to “the Way of the Center,” the name given historically to Madhyamika, the middle road of Buddhist relativity that was reconceptualized and refined by Nagarjuna, the master of this “central” tendency that proclaims an emptiness that neither affirms nor denies the world.11 What I call a higher stage of consciousness represents merely an inadequate conceptual shortcut for understanding what that “central” or middle way entails. For once we become aware of such relativity and our language names emptiness, and if indeed everything is emptiness, then the proposition “everything is emptiness” is itself empty: the world tears open, and “splendor” appears through the “crevice.” The end of Blanco thus describes metaphorically a logical operation: the world becomes meaningful by On “the middle way” See (Dasgupta: 1958).

11

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means of a­ cknowledging its emptiness, an acknowledgment that turns against itself and therefore dissolves the assertion. Far from fleeing the world, then, as some Western readings of the poem wish to do, Blanco returns to the world and plunges into all its relative relations. The first of these is the link between “world” and “word,” hence the cryptic lines: “if the world is real, the word is unreal,” “yes and no, two syllables in love,” etc. By this point, we have reached the stage of silence after the word. But because by now we have also learned that the only thing worth saying cannot be said, the poem resorts to acknowledging and celebrating the world. Pere Gimferrer, whose early, sensitive reading of Blanco has been the basis of many interpretations, was wrong, I think, when he limited the poem’s anecdotal content (what I call the celebration of the world) to the “steps heard in the other room,” to which the speaker refers in this last section. While Gimferrer does attribute this anecdote correctly to the speaker’s woman companion, I would argue that this is hardly the only other anecdote to which the poem refers.12 In fact, the poem makes constant, if elliptical, references to many other objects, events, and experiences to which the speaker responds as he attempts to write the poem—for example: the “sunflower” and “lamp” of the first section, the “insect” that flops through the manuscript pages; the Livingstone diary that happens to be on his desk and from which he quotes, the thunder and lightning heard in a looming storm; the “amethyst ring” he turns on his finger; the music heard in the next room along with the woman’s steps. All these everyday material events, objects, and circumstances are, in fact, anecdotal, and constitute what Paz elsewhere calls the experience of otherness. As we know, Paz first described otherness in a long, lyrical reflection in the essay “Signs in Rotation” (1965); but in his written reaction to drafts of my old essay, never before made public, he drove the point further. Otherness was the stuff Blanco was made of:

12

See (Gimferrer: 1980, 59–71). 247

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Otherness designates everyday life… in its radical strangeness… It is the stuff of poetry, from its origins until today… It is the experience of being in the world, being here and now. On one extreme, Otherness borders with religion and philosophy; on the other, with everyday life. Otherness is… the central source for Blanco, which is a carnal poem, a love poem… Yet, the experience of Otherness is unsayable; it alludes to a reality beyond words and that only silence can name. (Poetry can name it, too, but only by alluding to it.) Each true poem, be it a haiku or a long poem, is a window open onto infinity, onto the Otherness that makes us up.13

We would not be wrong in viewing Paz’s attempt in Blanco to find equivalents, in Western poetic language, to the experience of empty illumination that he found in Tantric Buddhism. Indeed, this is the central goal of Paz’s mature thought on poetry and poetics during the late 1960s and 1970s. The problem, of course, is that no such actual equivalent exists in Western experience, which makes the experience of Blanco hypothetical at best. How can we represent emptiness, precisely that which excludes expression and representation? Paz’s technical compromise, so to speak, was therefore to attempt a material equivalent by making paper the literal ground of absence, or as he once noted about the 1969 reprint version: “Blanco’s typography and binding wanted to underscore not so much the presence of the text as the space that sustains it: that which makes writing and reading possible, and where all writing and reading end.”14 Yet despite such a monumentally daring experiment, it is also evident that Paz became aware from the outset of the inadequacy of that compromise. For years he sought ways to resolve that inadequacy, or at least improve on it. He sought it, first, through public readings of the poem. As early as May 2, 1967, he told editor Díez Canedo that the reading he was planning in Mexico City would be “special”: “partly recorded, either with my voice or with two actors, plus a very brief audition of modern music in which language would appear more for its sounds than See (Paz: 1995, 310). See (Paz: 2014, 595).

13 14

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for its meaning.”15 Years later, in those pre-digital days, he wanted to work with the artist Vicente Rojo and produce a film based on Blanco. In a March 6, 1968, letter he described that project as “a screening of the book (and of the act of reading it)… that would combine dynamically letters, spoken words, visual and hearing sensations and the different senses. In other words: the transfer of an interior subjective movement (reading) onto an exterior objective movement (film screening).” He added and reiterated barely eight months later in another letter to Rojo, that “letters would appear on the screen, either moving or upon a moving background with changing colors; other times, upon the empty screen there would appear only colors and abstract forms and the audience would hear the words without reading the text.”16 The film with Vicente Rojo was never made. But Paz himself did make it in 1995. Finally, in this long list there was a stage version of Blanco, whose idea also dates from 1968, when Paz first proposed it to the Mexican director José Luis Ibáñez and even sent him a script.17 Twenty-three years later, Paz would even give a slightly different version of that script to Vicente Molina Foix, the distinguished Spanish writer who at the time was director of Madrid’s National Theatre, for a staging that unfortunately never took place. Today we have the good fortune to have both the 1995 DVD version plus a third staging and DVD, both made recently by the Catalan artist Fredric Amat.18 All the avatars of this complex poem demonstrate, I think, that, in addition to its supple materiality, there remained another element, the strange matter of its performativity. It was as if Paz had been the first to become aware that it was only through its fleeting

See (Paz: 1995, 96). All quotations from Paz’s letters are from (Paz: 1995). 17 My thanks to my friend Vicente Molina Foix for allowing me access to this letter, dated July 19, 1991, from Octavio Paz. 18 On Amat’s 2007 staging of the poem, See (ABC Cataluña: 2007). My thanks to my friend Frederic Amat for sharing with me his DVD on Blanco. 15 16

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performance that one could capture the central, paradoxical core of Blanco: the presence of absence.

Bibliography ABC Cataluña (2007). Frederic Amat le da forma y escena al poema “Blanco”, de Octavio Paz. Available: https://www.abc.es/espana/ catalunya/abci-frederic-amat-forma-y-escena-poema-blanco-octav io-200712040300-1641449475215_noticia.html [Last accessed: April, 2019] Dasgupta, Shashi Bhusan (1958): An Introduction to Tantric Buddhism. Calcutta: University of Calcutta. Fein, John M. (1986): Toward Octavio Paz: A Reading of His Major Poems 1957–1976. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Gimferrer, Pere (1980): Lecturas de Octavio Paz. Barcelona: Anagrama. Paz, Octavio (1969): Ladera este (1962–1968). Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz. — (1970): Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction, Tr. J.S. Bernstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. — (1973): Alternating Current. New York: Viking Press. — (1995): “Esto no es un poema”, Blanco/Archivo Blanco. Mexico City: Ediciones del Equilibrista. — (2014): The Poems of Octavio Paz, ed. and trans. Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions. Santí, Enrico Mario (1997): El acto de las palabras: Estudios y diálogos con Octavio Paz. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Revised edition, 2015. Ulacia, Manuel (1999): El árbol milenario: Un recorrido por la obra de Octavio Paz. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. Weinberger, Eliot (1992): “Paz in Asia,” Outside Stories. New York: New Directions.

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Overture: The Other Time

I.

It has been twenty years since Aurelio de la Vega first asked me to write about his Piano Works CD. At the time, I couldn’t help asking myself: Why me? I am just a literary scholar, and my knowledge of Music, back then far less than it is today, was practically nil. To ask me to write about it was certainly mad. And yet for me, after two decades, it has turned into an adventure that today bears fruit in this book. I want to believe that it was simply good fortune that made a full-fledged composer and a literary critic coincide in time and space and spur this collaboration. In this, our book, we gather, in addition to the most competent, or least incomplete, three essays I have written on his music, and two of the many texts he has himself written. We also include one long interview detailing his life and work that we put together over the years, as well as other materials, a Chronology and Discography, that enhance knowledge of his work. And because this is a true collaboration between a composer and a man of letters, the book section titles we have chosen reflect those mutual interests. Various factors influenced our so-called coincidence. Both of us reside in Southern California—de la Vega since the late fifties, when he left Cuba; I since the nineties, after I married Nivia Montenegro, who lived here already. We also share critical views on the Castro regime, as well as on the international (including the U.S.) tolerance that allows that regime to prosper. And lastly, we agree in our dissatisfaction with the American academic world, to which we have nonetheless devoted a good portion of our lives. All this 251

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added to our common devotion to all art forms—de la Vega himself writes poetry and collects visual art, and I, coming from an artistic family, also write poems and make sculptures. Twenty years ago, that first invitation took me by surprise indeed. But I was even more surprised by the additional invitations to discuss other aspects of his music. Only the three fuller of those essays I include here. The reader will soon find, however, that they are anything but a specialist’s. I took on the task with the only tools I have, those of a literary scholar and art lover. And because close reading has always been my forte, for the task of “reading” scores, waxing bold, I invented a similar, though certainly imperfect, method that would try to make up for my lack of musical training. I also took advantage of the fact that the composer allowed me to study the scores. Armed with that advantage, I was able to parse measures, scales and instrumentation. I discovered then that I could decipher the pieces while listening to them repeatedly, sometimes with works as difficult and complex as the orchestral works, gathered on a CD about which I also wrote. But it was in the third essay included here, on Recordatio, a single, late and moving piece, where my high-flown “method” reaches its limits, I think. Because the piece is built around a poem by Emilio Ballagas and comments on it, I felt I had a clear advantage here; and so I set out to decipher the score with the help of both the Maestro and his wife, the soprano Anne Marie Ketchum de la Vega, and with them was able to identify in Recordatio the quotations of earlier works of his and how that intertextuality structures the piece. While doing that close reading, the compiling, memorializing nature of the piece thus became decipherable and confirmed the validity of my so-called method, primitive and fragile though it is, and of course always open to further precision. It should be clear that I never tried to hit upon the one correct reading, so much as to provide an Other reading, in the sense that I listen for, read and interpret like a lay, untutored melomaniac. . . For this very reason it was also my decision to order the contents with a chronology that inverted the sequence of my essays. Thus, I begin with the last of my essays, about Recordatio, and end 252

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with the first, on the Piano Works. With such inverted chronology I wanted to highlight not only the image of my first title, but also that all Music, not just de la Vega’s, creates an Other time. Music is not the only art form that does this. So do all the temporal arts: poetry, dance, theatre, film. As Octavio Paz once wrote: “Between revolution and religion, poetry is the other voice. Its voice is other because it is the voice of the passions and visions . . . All poets in the moments, long or short, of poetry, if they are really poets, hear the other voice”.1

II Beyond the fact that all Music involves an Other time, de la Vega’s case in particular happens to be Other in ways that I’ll now try to recount. My aim in this Overture or preface is certainly not to provide an exhaustive discussion of the Maestro’s entire canon—for which I simply do not have the training—so much as to discuss the circumstances that, for him, made up that rare quality shared by all great artists and that I call Otherness. That voice and time are Other, first, because his Music happens to be borne out of a context, a culture and a society that rank classical music below its popular version. While it is true that almost everywhere classical music is made and consumed by cultured minorities, in 20th-century Cuba, where de la Vega happens to have been born and raised and popular music reigns supreme, that minority status becomes exacerbated. So much so in fact that, in common speech, when referring to música cubana, one assumes the popular version. Indeed, some would even deny that Cuban music can, by definition, ever be classical. Thus, among Cubans today, classical music is, by definition, perhaps by curse, Other. That most popular Cuban music is universally excellent seems beyond doubt. And yet, it is equally doubtless that the classical C ­ uban 1



See (Paz: 1991, 151). Henceforward, like Paz himself, I shall italicize the term Other. 253

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­ usic canon is much more accessible and much broader than m meets the eyes of popular opinion, marketing, or entertainment. In turn, yet a second source of the Otherness I refer to has to do with the place, at once central and eccentric, of de la Vega’s music within that already marginalized Cuban classical canon. Born and raised within a wealthy family, the child heard nothing but classical music. In our interview, he recalled: “My first musical contacts were through my grandfather, who had a huge record collection. As soon as I opened my eyes, it was opera and a few symphonies all I heard.”2 His home, then, was a virtual oasis within the desert that only the work of two classic Cuban composers, Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla, had rescued during the early years of the 20th century. The parting of waters began during the 1940s when, as a secondary effect of World War II, Central European refugees—people like Fritz Kramer, Paul Csonka, Erich Kleiber and Frieder Weissman, among others—began arriving in Havana and brought with them their rich musical heritage. Indeed, it was a heritage quite different from the prominent neocolonial Spanish music during those years. Through the Austrian pianist Kramer at first and later through Kleiber, de la Vega thus began learning about the kind of music that had triumphed in Europe for the last quarter century but in Cuba was fresh news. “He [Kramer] made me aware for the first time of the work of composers like Bruckner, Mahler, Pfitzner, Hindemith or Alban Berg, who at the time were also unknown in Cuba. Nothing was known about the post-Wagner German school.” It is an uncomfortable but real fact, however, that those first years of de la Vega’s training were precisely those of the apogee of the so-called Grupo de Renovación Musical [Musical Renovation Group], the Havana musical school that, beginning in 1942, coalesced around the leadership of José Ardévol Gimbernat (19111981), a Catalan composer and music teacher who had settled in Cuba in 1930. Soon after his arrival, Ardévol began directing the Havana Chamber Orchestra and to teach composition in the local

2

See Santí, from this interview (11-242). 254

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Municipal Conservatory, positions that allowed him ample room to create his own School. Edgardo Martín rightly summarizes Ardévol’s influence: “He gave himself over to update the Cuban musical scene”.3 It was therefore inevitable for a young composer like de la Vega to have sporadic contacts with Ardévol and the Group of students who, beginning in 1942, began to gather around him. I refer, among others, to people like Harold Gramatges, Julián Orbón, Hilario González, and Martín himself. And yet, coincidence in time and space never assures coincidence in taste. “For some reason I never sympathized either with the Group’s personalities or aesthetics, although I certainly respected Ardévol’s historical importance”, de la Vega says in our interview. Beyond class and personal aesthetic differences, the “reason” to which he alludes here seems clear: while he was being led by people like Kramer in acquiring the technical workings of the Viennese post-wagnerian school, Ardévol and the Group, separately, were pledging allegiance to the neo-classical—and eventually nationalist—version of serious music; that is, closer to the works of Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla than to those of Arnold Schönberg or Alban Berg. Thus, by the time de la Vega lands upon the Cuban musical scene and makes a first splash in 1946 with a public lecture on “Schönberg and the Atonalists,” the rivalry was set. While de la Vega was maturing, and despite the mutual approaches made on both sides, the differences grew greater still, thanks in no small measure to the Group’s intolerance of other musical tendencies, not to mention Ardévol’s own personal prejudices. The discrepancy between the two sides, or rather between these two aesthetic predilections, that greeted the young de la Vega on the Havana classical music scene harked back to the age-old European polemic between France and Germany over Richard Wagner and his followers, a complex, ancient war, far removed from provincial Havana, that one must nevertheless review briefly, the better to understand what I call de la Vega’s other time. 3



See (Martín: 1971, 132). 255

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As shown in Scott Messing’s excellent study of the reception of musical neoclassicism, it was the French reaction to the premiere of Wagner’s Tannhäuser (1861), followed years later by the effects of the Franco-Prussian War (1870), that produced the nationalist drum-roll for the outright rejection of all Germanic chromaticism and a return to the 18th-century French musical tradition (Rameau and Couperin).4 Because the return to those sources thus spelled a return to 18th-century classicism, it became natural to adopt the term néoclassicisme, even though at first it was a pejorative term applied to any German music that would make superficial use of the past—as in the case of Brahms, for example, who at one time was accused of being a “néoclassique.” Eventually, the same term would become the antidote to any Teutonic “poison.” Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that the French modernist musical canon (Saint-Saëns, Chausson, Debussy, Ravel) involves, in great measure, neoclassical reactions against German influence. It is hardly a surprise, then, that this musical polemic between French and Germans should have reached its apex with World War I (1914-17) or with the emergence, amid Modernism, of the two great composers who embody such aesthetic discrepancy: Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951). The two were the leaders of the so-called schools of Paris and Vienna, respectively; the former, of neoclassicism and the latter of chromatic atonality. While the first goes after the “renovation of classical form through a new and creative rebuilding of tonal practice, independent of the functions which had first established those forms,” the latter favors “no tonal center, and the notes of the chromatic scale are used impartially”.5 Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, formally conservative, delves into the musical past and recycles those forms without altering the tonal scale. Schönberg’s atonality, and his later, more radical twelve-tone compositions, are relatively indifferent to traditional forms and pose greater scale freedom. Well beyond the mutual personal rancor both European Maestros

4 5

See (Messing: 1996), passim. See (Salzman: 1974, 44); and (Kennedy: 1999, 36). 256

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developed for one another, the polemics between the two schools eventually polarized under the high-flown cultural banners of “Diatonic Latins” and “Chromatic Teutons”. And yet, despite, or because of, their deep aesthetic differences, it was precisely thanks to the creative debate between the two schools that we now have twentieth and twenty-first century classical music.6 This European background, which in two or three decades would finally make landfall in Cuba, allows us to understand the quandary in which the young de la Vega found himself in 1942, at the ripe age of 17, upon becoming the involuntary witness to the emergence of Ardévol’s Musical Renovation Group. In turn, however, and well on his own, he was gaining interest in the other, “Teutonic” version of modern classical music under the influence of Fritz Kramer and others like him. When I asked de la Vega whether he had ever studied under Ardévol, he quickly responded: I was never his student for two reasons. First, because I was never interested in the aesthetic issues he favored: neoclassicism, Stravinsky, Falla, etc. Second, Ardévol totally opposed (I never knew why) German music. Wagner was an abomination, Bruckner, Strauss and Mahler were all impossible. He totally ignored the German world. Schonberg was a demon and Alban Berg a degenerate . . . Those were the words he used to refer to them.

And when I also asked him if one could say Kramer was Ardévol’s nemesis, he answered: “Of course, totally. Kramer hated Ardévol, and Ardévol hated him three times that. For members of the Group, and for many intellectuals at the time, the Csonka-Kramer couple was like a thorn planted in Cuba by sinister forces that one had to ignore at all costs.” In 1945, the same year the Group published the Manifesto that contains its aesthetic and ideological agenda, Ardévol himself made his warnings known in an essay titled “The Position of ­Today’s 6



“Tradition thus assures the continuity of creation”, wrote Stravinsky in (Stravinsky: 1947); “I take aim at those who allege to aspire to ‘a return to. . .,’” wrote Schönberg in his preface (Schönberg: 1925). 257

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Cuban Composer,” a wholesale program in itself.7 There Ardévol argued that in Music there are “forms and styles . . . that are impossible to incorporate because they are concrete expressions of musical types that oppose ours;” that is, forms, he believes, that would have a “disastrous” influence because they do not involve what he then called a “Cuban national essence”. To illustrate this, Ardévol provided this example: ”Late nineteenth-century German symphonism, including symphonic poems, Wagnerism and all the music deriving therefrom. We believe that none of these forms can be incorporated into our tradition without serious dangers.” And applying his thesis to the Cuban context, he went on to warn that: ”The advice being imparted today by some of the authorities, trained in such symphonism, who are currently visiting us, ought not to be heeded by our composers, except in order to know the extent to which the essence of our music is being ignored by them.” One cannot help noting Ardévol’s paternalism. German influence, for him, involved “serious dangers” that could not be “heeded,” as if his warnings came from a jaded dad on behalf of innocent kids. All this with the stated purpose of protecting what the Group’s Manifesto itself called the “musical idiosyncrasy of national being,” which, according to the same document, “can only be identified in people whose roots receive only the sap that comes from acts of popular creativity” [p. 7, italics in original]. The avatars of such “idiosyncrasy of national being,” as promoted during the following two decades on the part of the socalled Group—as well as during the next seven, on the part of the bureaucracies that seek to justify them—constitute a veritable rhapsody against logic. Not only because all throughout, Ardévol and his Group steadfastly denied, against all evidence, that they were, in effect, promoting musical nationalism. For even when they did affirm the importance of such “idiosyncrasy,” based in great measure on the pioneering work of Roldán and García See (Grupo de Renovación Musical: 1945), and (Ardévol: 1945), but I cite from (Ardévol: 1966).

7

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­ aturla, they rejected, at the same time, the importance of the AfC rican content of Cuban music, which happens to be the signature contribution of those two composers in their pioneer work.8 The lock on that straitjacket shows up in the arguably most flagrant contradiction that cuts across the Group’s collective, and Ardévol’s own personal, pseudo-nationalist arguments. To wit, here’s a European-trained Catalan composer, recently arrived, leading a Cuban school of music that advocates for the repression of a crucial sector of the European canon. The same Catalan composer, to boot, would go on to advocate the exclusion of another Peninsular Spanish student and colleague (Julián Orbón), though like him a longtime resident, from any Cuban musical canon. It would appear from all this, then, that midcentury classical Cuban music, allegedly eager to shake off all foreign influence, instead ended up opting for duplicating the same contradiction that had cut through the European neoclassical school: no less than a White Russian, Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, was put in charge of defending a French “national idiosyncrasy”! The Cuban circumstance in particular recalls the remark that Jorge Luis Borges once made when a few nationalist colleagues had begun accusing him of being a European writer: “The Argentine cult of local color is actually a recent European cult that our nationalists ought to reject because it’s foreign.” Similarly, Alejo Carpentier would write in one of his columns for Caracas’ El Nacional: “Our rather naïve nationalism was actually preceded and justified by a European nationalism that was encouraged by composers we believed to be the most modern. . . .”9

8



9

The best study of such contradictions is (Vega: 2019). See, also, (Martín: 1971); suffice it to browse through pages 129-136 to discover the many examples of such rhapsodic logic, which both avows and rejects musical nationalism. Ardévol himself defended the Group’s neoclassical aesthetic in “Nuestro breve y necesario neoclasicismo”, (Ardévol: 1951), also in (Ardévol: 1966, 59-64). See (Borges: 1957), and also (Carpentier: 1952); quotation from (Carpentier: 1980, 471-73). Suffice it to cite Vega Pichaco’s opinion in her comments on the Group’s program: “It seemed clear that they were trying to justify inclusion of a Spanish musician like Ardévol within the construction of they named ‘Cuban sound idiosyncrasy’.” (p. 97). On Ardévol’s inclusion within the 259

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The above is worthy of further reflection. In less insecure contexts, differences in taste or aesthetic choice would occasion ­vigorous discussion or polemics, though certainly not institutional rejection, and even less unjustified political persecution. Such is the lesson we gather from the coexistence—certainly tense but nevertheless fruitful—of neoclassics and atonalists in both France and Germany throughout the twentieth century. By contrast, in mid-century Cuba, disagreements, a wrong aesthetic choice, became cause enough for moral and patriotic failings and, consequently, cause for impoverishing, when not outright censoring, all public dialogue. In words that years later, after the 1959 change of government, would echo in the highest spheres of the Castro regime, Ardévol himself would proclaim in 1943: “Our agenda is very simple, but as in all simple things, very sure of itself and intolerant as far as anything that is out of its reach . . . We do not exclude any personal differences so long as they do not contradict the essential principles of Music. . . .”10 Thus, in 1946, with both sides defined, the 21-year-old de la Vega decided to give a public lecture and demonstration on the subject of “Schönberg and the Atonalists” at ProArte Musical, one of Havana’s major cultural venues. The event became a dare: “It became a scandal. And then they gave me more of the same: ‘Here’s this stateless guy who comes to spiel about that Viennese dude… What does Havana have to do with Vienna?’”. And yet, the silver lining on that cloud was that Erich Kleiber, then Havana ­ ationalist campaign, Paul Bowles´ apropos comments at the time were most n clever: “It would be more convincing if Ardévol were a Cuban. A similar state of affairs would exist here if Schönberg were to announce the twelve-tone system as the new, true American idiom.” In Vega Pichaco, quotation from (Bowles: 1946); and her own p. 97. 10 I cite from the original text, (Ardévol: 1943), as quoted in Vega Pichaco, p. 95. I allude here of course to Fidel Castro’s infamous “Words to Intellectuals” (August 1961), where the regime set the terms of a its new canon: “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.” Neither Ardévol nor Castro ever specified what were the limits, within or against. Ardévol clearly was anticipating Castro’s formula, avant la lettre. 260

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Philharmonic Orchestra Director, was one of many in attendance. Impressed, he offered to write a letter of introduction for de la Vega to have him meet, and perhaps study with, Schönberg in Los Angeles. Kleiber himself had known Schönberg in Vienna, and in 1925 had even directed the premiere of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. It was that one contact that encouraged de la Vega to move in 1947 to Los Angeles, where the Viennese Maestro had been living since 1935. To be sure, Schönberg had been, in de la Vega´s own words, “the musical idol of my youth”. But as often happens with first loves, the Master-Student idyll, after a peaceful start shared with another two colleagues, ended badly. Their disagreements over class content soon led to a fight with a genius who turned out to be an insufferable curmudgeon. “Sadly, with all my illusions ruined, I decided not to pursue that painful chapter.” Once the Schönberg study plan effectively closed, yet a second possibility opened through the good services of Erich Zeisl, ­another Kleiber contact, who suggested de la Vega study with Stravinsky, then living in Los Angeles, too; Zeisl even offered to contact Stravinsly on his behalf. But that briefest of contacts, too, did not go beyond a rude send-off and door slam. In sum, those two separate, bitter experiences with the two world-class Maestros confirmed, once again, de la Vega’s Otherness, even though the young, unknown Cuban composer could now claim, out of this chronicle of disillusions, that he did get to meet, in a matter of months, no less than the two rivaling, towering Giants of modern music. While the fight with Schönberg allowed de la Vega to learn that agreement with a type of work does not necessarily mean agreement, or even sympathy, with its author, in turn Stravinsky’s cold shower, a long shot by any measurement, confirmed that neoclassicism had never in fact been the right aesthetic choice for him. As Cuban poet José Lezama Lima once wrote: “Only what’s difficult can stimulate” [“Solo lo difícil es estimulante”]. And for a ­struggling young artist there may well be nothing more

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­ ifficult, but also nothing more stimulating, than to feel all doors d are closed.11 Soon, however, de la Vega would find another welcoming teacher in Ernst Toch (1887-1964), another Viennese composer and friend of Kleiber’s who at the time was teaching at UCLA. “Like Schönberg, Toch was a famous composer, a gentle soul who warmly welcomed me with interest and with whom I worked for two years. I learned a lot from him, especially the concepts of form and orchestral color.” In the meantime, while de la Vega was living and working in Los Angeles, in Havana several events had altered the status and fate of classical music. Two important members of Ardévol’s Group, Julián Orbón and Hilario González, broke ranks. The two also happened to be the two young composers that Alejo Carpentier, in his landmark Music in Cuba (1946), the first-ever such scholarly history, had singled out for special praise in its last chapter on “The State of Cuban Music Today.”12 Indeed, Carpentier’s praise for those two, as opposed to his relative silence about most of the other members (Harold Gramatges was the clear exception) raised so many hairs that, at one point, Ardévol himself had to write the author to try to avert further misunderstandings. It would be the first of many crises that would lead to the Group’s dissolution in 1948.13 Yet another commotion in the Havana musical scene was Erich Kleiber’s sudden resignation as Philharmonic Director. His return for Buenos Aires’ Colón Theatre Directorship, was caused, among other things, by conflicts with the Orchestra’s ruling Board, not to mention a few skirmishes with Ardévol and the Group. Thus, it was the sad departure of his two mentors—Kramer would also

The phrase is Lezama Lima´s first in the famous lecture series (Lezama: 1957). See (Carpentier: 1946). 13 See especially (Ardévol: 2004, 115-18), letter dated 9 January, 1947, where he admits: “I was always convinced that Julián´s and Hilario´s breaking of ranks from the Group was a disaster,” p. 118. 11 12

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leave for New York City the year after Kleiber—that greeted de la Vega upon his return to Havana. According to a reputable Cuban musicologist, the dissolution of Ardévol’s Group in 1948 was due, in great measure, to what she describes as “the leader’s creative asceticism and abstract universalism.” And yet, as she herself adds, despite that dissolution “for some time there remained a bond between teacher and disciples.”14 This so-called “bond,” however, was actually more of an alliance, political and other, that solidified within other Havana institutions, like the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo [Our Time Cultural Association] actually a Communist front that took in most of the former Group members students while trying to impose its earlier hegemony. Thus, de la Vega’s first years back had him endure a renewed conspiracy of silence, and with it, further confirmation of his Otherness, back as he was fresh from an extended journey in the decadent North among Viennese atonal exiles… Some of that newfound alienation can in fact be heard in some of the new pieces he composed at the time, like Epigrama (1953) and Elegía (1954), commonly stricken with an obvious melancholy tone. And yet, the times had also brought with them fresher, happier winds of change, such as his commission as editor of Conservatorio, a flagship professional journal; weekly columns as music critic in two Havana dailies; and board membership in the National Culture Institute, the makeshift culture ministry that was created after Batista’s 1952 bloodless coup. “Cuba’s cultural and economic growth was impressive then,” he recalls: Artistic activity took place mainly in Havana, which in the fifties rivaled New York, London or Paris. Theatre companies miraculously abounded, as did the Philharmonic Orchestra after the Kleiber period, which made it first-rate, arguably the best in Latin America. Our Concert Society and the Havana Chamber Orchestra were constantly competing to provide magnificent recitals, and all of these institutions

See (Carredano: 2015, 207).

14

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premiered work by Cuban composers. . . The legendary ProArte Musical, which since the 1920s had brought the best world-class singers to Havana, was in full form. There were also premieres of ballets like Ardévol’s “Forma”, with Lezama Lima’s libretto, or Gramatges’s “­Icaro”. We also had premieres of symphonies by Mahler, fragments of Berg’s Wozzeck, as well as an opera by Paul Csonka. I got to hear premieres of my own Overture to a Serious Farce, directed by Mántici, and of Introduction and Episode, by Frieder Weissman. My own Elegía, which had premiered in London by the Royal Philhamonic directed by Bolet, was first played in Cuba by the Culture Institute Chamber Orchestra.

Finally, the most significant change had been the slow but inevitable revindication of Schönberg and atonality, along with the attendant critique of musical nationalism, on the part of no less than Alejo Carpentier, Ardévol’s erstwhile ally and supreme arbiter of Cuban classical music, writing in his influential columns of Caracas’ El Nacional. And so, by 1957, when de la Vega wins the coveted Lyceum and Lawn Tennis Club award for composition with his String Quartet in Five Movements: In Memoriam Alban Berg, his reputation as composer appeared assured. The title itself, alluding to that other prominent atonality Maestro, was a total dare to the detractors, who must have fumed when the following year the same piece premiered at Panamerican Union Concert Hall in Washington, D.C. That such a twelve-tone work would also mark the start of his career in the U.S.—de la Vega had just turned 32 and that year he returned to California for a visiting stint at USC—were all signs, however, that times were about to change. Indeed, the 1959 political storm in Cuba all but reaffirmed de la Vega’s Otherness, though this time it had nothing to do with aesthetics, such as a choice of musical form or technique. Instead, he made the choice to leave Cuba, to become an exile. So-called revolutionary change meant condemning the immediate past and regressing to a previous ideological regime. As far as classical music was concerned, the change meant vindicating an outmoded, yet politically expedient, nationalism.

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Such nationalism bears, in its first instance, a definite positive aspect: it seeks to possess an identity, to come into the light, to acquire its own voice. All this is very positive. Later all this is turned into a political weapon. . . The problem lies in that nationalism then becomes a closed canon that invokes a single, inflexible dogma. . . Once it becomes dogma, it closes all doors, asking who is over here or over there. And that is the road to totalitarianism, which uses nationalism as an instrument of State power.

Thus, after 1959, defending a nationalist creed became political. But had exile meant solely loss of soil, perhaps that loss could easily be compensated by eventual material prosperity. Not so in the case of an artist who has enjoyed presence and influence in his own country, for that type of loss translates invariably, as witnessed by all escapees from totalitarian experience, into the canon’s disfigurement. In effect, erasure from History. Thus, immediately after de la Vega’s 1959 decision to leave, the Castro regime banned all performances of his music from all the newly nationalized media, now under its control.15 If before 1959, a conspiracy of silence had sufficed, after 1959 all further mention would turn offensive and libelous. In a 1969 pamphlet José Ardévol, by then the regime´s musical tsar, lunged at both Julián Orbón and de la Vega, exiled former colleagues, by reducing the importance of their work to the barest minimum. Regarding Orbón, he alleged that “he identified little with our socio-cultural context and always gravitated towards a Hispanist ideology . . . so idealist and ahistorical that it subtracted from his various possibilities”; de la Vega, in turn, he portrayed as “frankly cosmopolitan—which is not the same as universal—with many influences and no roots of his own.” Both, wrote the Catalan commissar, “have abandoned Cuba when this land and people have finally reached their plenitude.”16 ­Separately, two years later, Edgardo Martín, another ­former student The single exception, better late than never, remains in 2018, when de la Vega’s “Intrata” was played as part of a concert by the Cuban National Orchestra. 16 See (Ardévol: 1969, 117). Years before, however, Ardévol’s opinion of his two colleagues had been very different. In a letter to M. Cuvelier, a UNESCO 15

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of Ardévol’s, writing in what then was the sole canonical source of information about Cuban music, though failing here to mention a single one of de la Vega’s many titles, added: “In general, his music has lacked its own defined style, featuring instead its modern technical profiles.”17 Finally, in a belated echo of such official disparagement, Victoria Eli, a Cuban musicologist, does mention de la Vega’s name twice in an essay inserted in her own History of 20th-Century Spanish American Music (2015), but only in passing, and identifies too titles with too many embarrassing errors. To capture fully the same unjust prejudice, one must compare these putdowns to the unwarranted praise this same scholar heaps upon the various hacks who reside in Cuba that her essay slavishly includes.

III In addition to facing his own family’s initially troubled acceptance of his artistic vocation, Aurelio de la Vega faced the marginality stemming from a society and culture that then viewed, as it still does today, classical Cuban music as an eccentricity of lesser value. Added to that marginality were his own disagreements, plus consequent further marginality, with the aesthetic predilections of the then-hegemonic Group that allegedly wished to renovate Cuban classical music but succeeded in repressing major sections of the European canon. Such double marginality explains the reasons for his eventual desire to seek abroad both adequate professional training and a willing audience. The rupture and loneliness attendant to all those decisions left an indelible mark on this artist, who, eventually, for strictly moral and political reasons, also chose exile over life in a totalitarian dictatorship. official, he included the two in a list of plana mayor [top brass] composers. See (Ardévol: 2004, 224). 17 (Martín, 146). Regarding Julián Orbón, Martín does not mention one of his many works and reduces it to the following: “He used his talent to continue on the paths of Scarlatti, Soler, Falla and only sporadically giving tribute to Guantanamera”, 132-33. 266

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Such are the various stations, the formative, successive rituals of internal change that make up what I call de la Vega’s other time. And yet, at the end of this brief review, we are left with a vexing question: What is the meaning, the overriding central theme, of all these formative changes? If I had to hazard an answer, I would invoke one single word and concept: Criticism. Can Music be critical? I believe it can, although Music does not always set out to be critical, or it can indeed become so. All great creations—all the arts, certainly, but also all great human enterprises, including, of course, Science—take place as the result of profound disagreements, dissatisfactions, with the status quo. In the realm of science, as Thomas Kuhn showed conclusively, progress is the result of the slow but inexorable sequence of paradigms.18 In the world of ideas and the arts, in turn, change, which of course can also mean progress, takes place, first, as a questioning of what already exists, and then provides a replacement with an alternative perception, an Other view which in its more radical versions can assume the high-flown name of Revolution. Clearly, de la Vega’s music constitutes, in its roots and first training, a critique, both aesthetic and political, of the fragile Modernity that floated rootlessly in the mid-century Cuba he happened to be born in. By aspiring to connect his work with an Other aesthetic, radically different from his surrounding one, far removed from his immediate context, he thereby aspired to reconstitute that fragile Modernity with structures that could prove more solid and lasting. One must say as well that similar critical goals reach out onto de la Vega’s long exile from Cuba. For they demonstrate, among other things, the excellence of his own work in comparison to that realized in two other parallel contexts: contemporary fellow-Cubans who never chose to go into exile, and more recent colleagues who remained indifferent to his accomplishment. It is both profoundly ironic and tragic that during allegedly revolutionary times such as ours, the same Revolution should have persecuted its more

See (Kuhn: 1962)

18

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revolutionary artists, like Aurelio de la Vega, to the far corners of exile precisely for creating revolutionary work. In his own “Ouverture” to his monumental series Mythologiques (1964), Claude Lévi-Strauss, argued that no two languages, no two semiotic codes, are more similar, or perform more analogous functions, than Myth and Music. Their common feature, he says, is that each commonly handle a code that: transcends the language level and requires at every instance a temporal dimension to become manifest. . . However, this relationship to time is of a very special nature: everything takes place as though music and mythology needed time only to deny its place. Both, in effect, are mechanisms designed to do away with time . . . The act of listening to the musical work immobilizes the passage of time because of the work’s internal organization, like a cloth billowing in the wind, it has caught up and unfolded it. In listening to music—and while we are listening—we achieve a kind of immortality.

Upon listening, if we truly set out to listen to Aurelio de la Vega’s music, we can reach that Other critical time: the magical time of myths, fruitful silence, immortality.

Bibliography Ardévol, José (1943): Conservatorio. — (1945): Conservatorio, 5, Oct. - Dec., 1945. — (1951): La Música, n° 8, Apr. 1951. Sociedad de Ediciones Cubanas de Música. — (1966): Música y Revolución. La Habana: UNEAC — (1969): Introducción a Cuba: la Música. La Habana: Instituto del Libro. — (2004): Correspondencia cruzada, ed. Clara Díaz. La Habana: Letras cubanas. Borges, Jorge Luis (1957): “El escritor argentino y la tradición”. Discusión. Obras Completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé. [Conferencia pronunciada por J. L. B. en 1951, en el Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores y reproducida en su Revista, vol. XLII, enero-marzo, 1953]. Bowles, Paul (1946): “In the Tropics”, Modern Music, XXIII, (39), 1946: 12, pp. 57-58 268

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Carpentier, Alejo (1946): La música en Cuba. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. — (1952): “Un artículo sobre el Nacionalismo”, Letra y Solfa. El Nacional, 19 de noviembre. — (1980): Ese músico que llevo dentro, ed. Zoila Gómez, vol. II. La Habana: Letras cubanas. Carredano, Consuelo; Eli, Victoria, Ed. (2015): Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica 8: La música en Hispanoamérica en el siglo xx. Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica de España. Grupo de Renovación Musical (1945): Presencia cubana en la música universal. La Habana: Conservatorio Municipal. Kennedy, Michael, Ed. (1999): The Oxford Dictionary of Music. Oxford University Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lezama Lima, José (1957): La expresión americana. La Habana: Instituto Nacional de Cultura. Martín, Edgardo (1971): Panorama histórico de la música en Cuba. Cuadernos CEU/Universidad de La Habana. Messing, Scott (1996): Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic. University of Rochester Press. Paz, Octavio (1991): The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry, tr. Helen Lane. New York: Harcourt Brace. Salzman, Eric (1974): Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Schönberg, Arnold (1925): Three Satires for Mixed Chorus. Stravinsky, Igor (1947): Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Harvard UP. Vega Pichaco, Belén (2019): “Discursos y prácticas en torno a la construcción de una ‘escuela cubana de composición´: José Ardévol, el Grupo de Renovación Musical y la Orquesta de Cámara de La Habana (1934-1946)”, Resonancias, vol. 23, n°. 45 (Jul.-Nov. 2019), pp. 91-120.

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Letter on Recordatio Dear Aurelio, Recordatio starts out as a devotional piece but soon turns into an explanation or survey of your musical career, past and future, and of the nature of Otherness—be it Art, the Sacred or the mysteries of the self. The title itself contains several meanings, beginning with the obvious one of Latin remembrance, or memory. The Latin resonates further, however, with several other meanings, like ordatio, order, and oratio, oration or prayer. All of those meanings are implicit in the overarching meaning of recording—of sound, memory, archive. The entire piece, then, is a record, if not a musical career, and therefore a musical autobiography that highlights certain pieces in both the earlier and the yet unwritten canon. It does so in order to explore through memory the meaning or motivation of artistic destiny, a memory exercise that inevitably reorders the past and prepares for the future. Finally, as the piece is structured around Emilio Ballagas’ moving devotional poem, it is indeed an oratio, Spanish oración, in its dual sense of prayer and grammatical sentence. But before we go any further, I must make a confession. As you know, I love music but know next to nothing about it. In my life that has been a serious personal lack, a source of sadness and frustration, as if I were condemned to love a lady yet remained incapable of knowing her totally and completely. Luckily, my frustration in this case become lessened thanks to Ballagas’ very moving sonnet, which allows me to orient my enjoyment through 271

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a dramatic or rhetorical reading of your piece, an exercise that is bound to seem heretical to musicians and musicologists alike, yet allows me, and perhaps other people who share my lack of musical training, to delve into Recordatio’s fascinating structure and message. No less helpful of course has been your loan of the annotated score, which I have perused diligently, if not musically. In order to engage that dramatic or rhetorical exercise, then, my reading starts in media res, so to speak, not with the first notes and measures, but with the entry of the soprano voice in ms. 180 and the poem’s first verse: “Si a mi angustiosa pregunta no respondes/ yo sé que soy abeja de tu oído”. This first verse provides the key, I think, not only to the rest of the poem but to all of Recordatio. For it tells us two things: 1) that the preceding first section embodies an anguished question, and 2) implicitly, that it identifies the poem’s speaker, as well as the musical emitter, as a kind of buzzer, a busy bee whose buzz insists upon the ear of an as yet unidentified addressee. What matters most from this information is that it points to the beginning of the piece as precisely that anguished question posed by the insistent buzzer. That is, the voice’s entry both climaxes the preceding first section and casts a retrospective sense onto the beginning by offering a semantic or linguistic clue. Thus if the voice in its address (to God, we assume, though this for the moment remains unclear) invokes an anguished question, this must mean that the entire first part is precisely that: a series of anguished questions that are posed musically, or else a dramatic question that is here given musical form. Whether or not all of Recordatio can be reduced to a series of questions, I am not prepared to argue, though by including a poem that begins by referencing an “anguished question” the piece does aim to provide an important clue. With that clue we can return to the first ten measures to notice that they constitute a kind of dialogue—a single insistent strident note (do) followed by a series of chords of different values (4, 2 and 6). The exchange recurs at least twice before there appears, by ms. 11, a noticeable change in mood from allegretto to adagio. More than a dialogue, the exchange constitutes I think a call-and-response that gives form to the anguished question, even 272

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if at this stage the listener suspects little that what is taking place is an actual interrogation of that initial single note by the successive variant chords. Indeed, the single do note sounds strident, stark: truly a sting, a term I shall emphasize in order to play with ­Ballagas’ ­image of the buzzing bee. Thus the initial exchange has the following structure: sting-4 notes; sting-2 notes; sting 6 notes. The exchange will vary in the remaining measures up to ms. 11, when the adagio takes over and a new section begins. I am privileged to know from you that, beginning with this first section, Recordatio quotes from several of your earlier works, as well those moments in the score when these quotations occur. This information is useful for the purpose of determining the rhetorical structure I am after. Thus, if in fact the first quotation, your 1959 Woodwind Quartet, occurs beginning with ms. 11, immediately after the initial exchange that embodies the “anguished question,” this suggests that the question itself, or else the lack of an answer thereof, thrusts the quest onto a remembrance of the past (recordatio) and thus a necessarily regression in time. Further quotations from your earlier work, as well as various sundry rhythms, will emerge later, of course, but by now, at the start of this first long section, it seems logical to expect that this regression will work further back onto the de la Vega canon, as far back perhaps as your Leyenda del Ariel criollo (1954). And yet, the first quotation, wrapped in a stylized melancholy adagio, dates not from that far back but rather from 1959, to be followed (ms. 25) by a second quotation of your 1960 Woodwind Trio. Quite aside from the specifically musical significance of these two relatively early pieces, what strikes me, as a reader who also happens to be Cuban, are the dates: 1959-1960. As we know, in recent Cuban history these are the fateful years that mark the collapse of the Cuban Republic with the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship and the communist takeover. 1959 also happens to be the year you and your wife left Cuba definitively and started your lifelong exile in California. Twice before you had left Cuba for periods of residence in the U.S. (1947 and 1957), but those two times had been voluntary and you knew you always had the choice to return. 1959 was different: you 273

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knew then there would be no return; and if you didn’t know it then, now in your memory, and in your piece, you know that it is so. That was in fact a definitive rupture. The second quoted piece, the 1960 Woodwind Trio, happens to reinforce, through the date, this traumatic rupture, as the adagio is sustained up to ms. 30 and as soon as another allegretto picks up the Quintet. It matters little, then, that these two first quoted pieces should not be the canon’s earliest. What does matter is that they both date from those fateful rupture years and that they are both woodwind pieces, now enacted by half of the present wind and string instrumentation. And yet what I call rupture means, in emotional or spiritual terms, something far more personal: loss of land, loss of a previous life, loss of culture, and, as Recordatio itself goes on to show, loss of a language, a musical language. If the dialogue section, the initial exchange (later to be called “anguished”) occupies the first ten measures, the first section, opened by the regressive adagio, will occupy the next 170 measures, the first third of the entire piece. As prefaced in the first thirty measures, the ensuing fifty will alternate and sometimes fuse quotations from those two pieces, as if by replaying elements from your windwood canon you were attempting to evoke and recover the significance of that two-year station in your life and thereby, implicitly, the personal feelings stemming from that rupture. If Recordatio were a straight memoir or confession—and who would dare say it isn’t one?—one could even venture that by regressing onto the past, as if in a psychoanalytic transfer, you were trying to relive that particular trauma in order to decipher its significance. Remembrance is hardly arbitrary or gratuitous: memory heals, or it should. Remembering pain such as this traumatic rupture, means, psychically and emotionally, to work through the resistance to acknowledge past suffering and to seek relief from burdens endured. I find it further significant, however, that the reminiscent interplay between the Quintet and the Trio, besides rendering their elements in stylized rather than original forms, represents it as a quick succession of elusive flashbacks. That is, retrospection proceeds, rather than as straightforward quotation, as stylized 274

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t­ rial-and-error series whereby, for example, the Quintet elements appear briefly, only to be succeeded by the Trio’s in what my terribly untrained ear perceives as an up-and-down spatial movement, or else fast and slow tempos, which in turn aim to recreate opposite and conflicting moods of enthusiasm and sadness. In other words, the regression in time, or what amounts to your exploration into your past, very much approaches the style of a literary stream of consciousness, or perhaps of unconscious memories (recuerdos) that surface seemingly out of control, as if they were out of the reach of the music’s originating source. The effect becomes particularly evident in ms. 115-130, where the quotation of your 1948 Rondó, with its waltz-like effects, echoes a happier and perhaps more innocent time, flourishes loudly and at one point even simulates a carousel tune—or so I’d like to think. We perceive especially the rondó quotation’s relative joy because it contrasts pointedly with the passage that precedes it, a quotation from the 1954 Epigrama, a piece that, thematically at least, happens to be the Rondó´s diametrical opposite. As you are the first to know, and I have written elsewhere, view Epigrama as a work of total rupture, a poem of death, coming as it does after your first return to Havana and your subsequent disillusion with and rejection of both the immediate national musical context and your own aesthetic development. Not the least of this rupture was also the 1952 Batista coup that sealed the fate of Cuban history; Epigrama is but the distant echo of that coup. Thus if we were to line up the narrative of the entire regression that occurs of this first section, we would ascertain a first interplay of the Quintet and Trio (1959-1960), followed by the descent (adagio) of the Epigrama reminiscence (1954), followed by the joyful ascent of the 1947 Rondó quotation. Such mixture of moments, styles, moods and tempos soon rushes (ms. 160-170 ) into an instrumental frenzy. As the earlier Rondó quotation simulated happy carousel tunes, its aftermath renders instead a loud and plundering phantasmagoria, as if the exploration into past time, meant originally as a healing, had made matters worse and now hit a limit with the 1947 chronological signpost that blocks further regression. The 275

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blockage is signaled by a vertiginous descent that soon becomes reinforced (ms. 170-180) by a lengthy string glissando that yields expectation of either silence or else a significant change. The change comes with the entry of the voice whose first notes happen to coincide and fuse with the instrumentation, thus suggesting that the voice actually picks up at the very limit where the instruments must yield, or else where the previous inquiry surrenders, gives up. That is, the first Ballagas verse Si a mi ­angustiosa pregunta no respondes . . . informs us that the voice takes up, while qualifying it, the previous anguished inquiry, and it further suggests that it does so precisely because the instruments by themselves, or the various instances of remembered musical experience, failed to yield an answer to the search that began with the initial dialogue. The voice is no less musical, of course, but the fact that it has further recourse to language highlights the recruitment of poetry to aid in the same search. Before proceeding to a reading of Ballagas’ poem and its effect on Recordatio, I must, however, pause and wonder: what is the relationship between the poem’s most salient theme—the silence of God—and the plunge into memory? I might add now that the theme is not only the poem’s but the initial dialogue’s. For Ballagas´s angustiosa pregunta has to do with nothing less than God’s silence. We have seen that the voice (the poem) begins at the very point (ms. 180) where, after several regressive trials in time, a partial survey of your musical canon, the voice complains that there has been no response, no satisfactory answer to the anguished question. Does that mean, then, that each of the pieces in your canon—or at least those chosen for Recordatio’s particular inquiry—had themselves posed anguished questions; or soes it mean, instead, that you pose the question retrospectively, not so much by the original pieces themselves as by their joint memory, their recollection in time? Did the anguished question, God’s silence, arise at each time of composition, or did it arise at a later time of remembering the entirety of the (selected) canon? Does the complaint regarding God’s silence emerge in the previous acts, or in the ­memory 276

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of those acts? If the question or complaint does emerge with the original compositions, then it could be said that each of de la Vega’s pieces was indeed meant to elicit God’s voice, or else that each piece arose as a supplement to God’s silence. Extending the argument, once could even say that out of God’s silence comes the human reaction we call music. Music is man’s response to God’s silence. If, by contrast, the complaint or question emerges with the memory of the act(s) rather than at the time of original composition(s), then the anguished question has to do with the meaning of the entire canon. I ask you, God, for the meaning of my music, but you won’t give me a straight answer. And yet, as Ballagas’ poem makes clear, God’s answer is not silence as much as an answer disguised, an answer that is hard to detect or to understand. The Ballagas sonnet begins with a conditional clause followed by an antithesis or contraposition: “If you are this, I know I am that.” In the sonnet’s own terms: If you do not answer me, I know I can keep on bugging you. My bugging will continue until you finally answer. You may well have been attracted by Ballagas’ bugging image of the bee, which not only bothers and stings; it also makes a buzz, sounds directed at an ear, not unlike what the musician or composer, as well as the poet, do. But notice that Ballagas sets up the image as antithesis, as if he were daring his addressee. God won’t answer me but I’ll keep bothering Him nevertheless, the speaker asserts, as if wishing to counteract human persistence to God’s reticence. The further fact that, in this particular devotional context, abeja (bee) resonates antithetically with oveja (lamb), reinforces further the speaker’s dare: I am your pestering bug, not a docile lamb. The second quatrain begins with an apostrophe to the “silent, unknown” God, who hides the more He is sought after. The sentence immediately following explains the source of the speaker’s suffering and the reason for seeking solace: he has lost his coastline [litoral], an image that, not unlike the bee´s, must have resonated with you as an exile. (How much so will become evident in the score itself.) The speaker’s litoral is nothing less than Cuba, our homeland. Thus the speaker’s “angustiosa pregunta/anguished 277

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question” could well be contained in his reference to “los cuándos y los dóndes/ the whens and wheres” that he wonders about; that is, with the coastline lost, when and where will we ever get it back? A second conditional clause comes at this point to clarify the ­speaker’s identity: if you, God, are not asleep, then perhaps it’s because you are close to my hearth. And yet the suggestion here, given our knowledge of the speaker’s suffering and his plea for God’s help, is that this is no domestic “hearth.” It is actually a literal stake where he is being burned. This identifies the speaker as a martyr or saint (the allusion later to Saint John of the Cross’ “noche oscura” reinforces this identity) who is being sacrificed and now pleads for his life to an unresponsive God. The sonnet’s tercets offer the solution, or at least the logical outcome, to the speaker’s dilemma, beginning with the dual choice that the silent God appears to be: either a bright star in the soul’s “noche oscura/dark night,” or a vampire sucking the blood out of the martyr’s body. Light or darkness? Good or evil? God of love or cruel Demon? The ambivalence regarding the motivation for God’s silence reinforces the speaker’s initial dare, or else his insistence upon equal terms to have God heed his plea. The final tercets reinforce that suggestion, though subliminally. Ballagas here takes recourse in homonyms—words that sound the same but mean different things, depending on grammatical context; in this case, because the tercet’s two phrases can be read in Spanish either as admirations or questions. Thus “Cómo nutres de luz. . .” can be read in two ways: either “How you nurture!” (“You are a great nurturer!”) or “How do you nurture?”. In turn, “Qué secreta” can be read either as “How secret is your tenderness” or “What does your tenderness secrete?”. If the last two sentences convey admiration and devotion, then the speaker is satisfied with his sacrifice: I may die but this is the disguised way God shows me his love. But if they happen to be questions, then the speaker shows himself to persist in being his God’s bug, wishing to know exactly how His silence happens to nurture and secrete. That is, on the surface, Ballagas’ message is devotional: he exalts God despite His silence. Subconsciously, or subliminally, however, he not only dares God, 278

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as shown in the first appositive phrase, but also questions Him, as shown in the homonym phrases at the end. The ambivalent meaning arises because all of this takes place not alternately (in an either-or argument), but simultaneously (in both-and assertions). The clause questions and answers at the same time, but the result still remains unsatisfactory. Ballagas inserts yet another fascinating subliminal complication that has to do with his chosen imagery. Early enough the speaker identifies himself with the bee, an image that in the context of both poetry and music (the sonnet and Recordatio) can easily be identified with either the poet or the composer, both of whom direct their respective media, language and music, to the addressee’s ear. If so, then the homonym secreta as verb form (English secretes) at the end of the sonnet resonates semantically with the image of the bee at the beginning. If honey is the bee’s secretion, then what is God’s? If at the beginning Man is a bee in God’s ear, then at the end God Himself secretes: he, too, is a bee, the bee in Man’s ear. But can Man hear God? Apparently not. Implicitly, through this conceptual play, the poem is telling us that God does speak to Man; only He does so in disguise. For God’s disguise is Man’s own works, works that include poetry and music, works that secrete God’s voice. The disguise is so good, so secret, however, that Man (including Ballagas’ speaker) does not realize that the moving poem he has been uttering is precisely the secretion of the voice of God he has been seeking all along. The poem itself is the disguise God uses. Poetry and Music may be Man’s response to God’s silence, but in so responding they also secrete, produce, God’s voice, not just complain of His silence. Ballagas’ complaint about God’s silence is of course. It is a biblical commonplace, hallmarks of Job and Isaiah for example—not to mention Christ on the Cross—and it recurs in many devotional poems like Saint John of the Cross’, to which the sonnet alludes, and of course John Donne’s, whose poems Ballagas uses, incidentally, as epigraphs to two of the sections of Cielo en rehenes, the book that contains the sonnet you chose for Recordatio. Ballagas’ brilliant conceptual play with the image of the bee and the secreta 279

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homonymns is of course his very own, further evidence that he was a careful reader of Golden Age poets like Quevedo and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. And yet I sense that his sonnet echoes, or else coincides with, the work of another modern poet who was very much in vogue at the time Ballagas wrote his major poetry but today we seldom study. I refer to Rainer Maria Rilke, author of the magnificent Duino Elegies, whose first such poem includes a passage and an argument uncannily similar to the sonnet’s. It reads: Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground: yet they kept on, impossibly, kneeling and didn’t notice at all: so complete was their listening. Not that you could endure God’s voice—far from it. But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.

Rilke, like Ballagas, knew that even saints could not aspire to hear God’s voice. But Rilke also knew that the voice was secreted or disguised elsewhere, as in what he calls the wind’s “ceaseless message,” and that to hear it was simply a matter of paying closer attention. The same idea surfaces in another, less known, work of Rilke’s that contains another uncanny coincidence with Ballagas, this time with the sonnet’s conceptual play. I refer to what Rilke wrote concerning the subject of transience to his Polish translator a year before his death: “It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth,” Rilke wrote then, “into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, ‘invisibly,’ inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”

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The performance of Ballagas’ sonnet, beautifully rendered by Anne Marie Ketchum de la Vega, occupies almost one third of Recordatio (pp. 46-72, ms. 180-267). The voice enters at exactly seven minutes and the performance lasts exactly seven minutes, to be repeated in capsule form exactly seven minutes thence (p. 122124, ms. 461-471). Such chronological symmetry demonstrates the sonnet’s importance to the piece; it was a deliberate choice, not an arbitrary or accidental illustration. How your music also happens to comment on the sonnet, how it interprets its content, is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this reading for me. I mentioned before that the first section of Recordatio (ms. 11180) is built around a series of quotations from your earlier work, ranging from the 1959 and 1960 Woodwind Quintet and Trio, respectively, to the 1954 Epigrama and then on to the 1947 Rondó, and how this series, arranged in chronologically regressive order, showed a working-through process that, so the music suggests, exhausts itself in a frustrating frenzy that eventually becomes rescued, so to speak, by the voice performing the sonnet. In my list of quoted works in the first section I did not, however, include the quotation of generically Cuban rhythms that appear sporadically throughout ms. 141-145 (particularly in the bassoon) and swiftly fuse with the so-called carousel tunes in ms. 145-154 that soon disintegrate in the subsequent phantasmagoria leading up to the voice’s entry in ms. 180. These Cuban rhythms, including the cinquillo (alternating eighth and sixteenth notes) produce a syncopated background to the carousel / phantasmagoria / frenzy passage to provide a commentary on the origins, emotional or other, of the grotesque chaos that the music otherwise suggests. Cuba, or at least the memory of Cuba, your painful recuerdo of loss, thus beats in the background to the final station of the regressive journey that you work through in the first section of Recordatio. It is also significant, I think, that the background to the phantom passage should quote a generic national tune instead of one from your personal canon, as if the frenzy of the passage were marked by a kind of musical unconscious, reached upon exhausting the limit of your own early pieces. 281

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The voice performance is divided, in turn, into five passages of varying lengths. The first two apportion the sonnet’s first quatrain into two sections, each of which corresponds to two lines of verse, rendered separately in a way that highlights their thematic importance. The next two, corresponding to the second quatrain and the first tercet, limit the wind section throughout the voice performance. The last two apportion the second tercet into two sections for greater dramatic impact. In the entire performance three things call my attention. First, the sporadic appearance of what I call the sting, the single strident do note that seemingly represents God’s striking interventions. It occurs, I believe, as we approach the voice entry (ms. 154 and 158), then in between the voice’s first two passages (ms. 199, 214), then again twice after the third passage (ms. 232 and 234), several times after the fourth (ms. 262, 263), and immediately after the fifth (ms. 269). There may well be more stings that I am missing, given my woefully untrained ear. But what strikes me about these so-called stings, the sporadic recurrence of the single do note, is the way each intervenes in the voice’s discourse in order to disturb, and thereby comment on, its content, as if the single note acted operatically, though as a second, abstract and incomprehensible voice. The second thing I take away is the haunting appearance of Cuban rhythms, including the cinquillo, in certain passages of the performance, and thereby of the Ballagas text, rhythms that bring back the national background I mentioned earlier. This occurs, significantly, as the third passage is about to begin (ms. 208-210), in both the second violin and the bass, almost imperceptibly and as the voice is about to pronounce “Las olas de los cuándos y los dóndes . . .,” a poignant verse that alludes indirectly to the confusing pain of exile; then it recurs in the second violin in ms. 218-220, as in a telegraphic ostinato and as the voice utters the crucial words “litoral perdido,” to which another series of stings (ms. 229-233) swiftly respond; then it recurs once again as the fourth passage is about to begin (ms. 242-244, 248-49, 253-254) and as the voice engages the lines that refer, ominously, to “noche oscura,” “vampiro amoroso” and “sangre impura,” arguably the darkest images in 282

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Ballagas’ poem. The coincidence of Cuban rhythms and ominous imagery is hardly an accident. They underscore the music´s emotional content and render Ballagas’ sonnet, in the context of Recordatio, as a personal allegory of Cuban exile rendered in its painful reality, as opposed to the golden myth that fans of the Castro regime usually invoke. Nor is it a coincidence, either, that your own rhythmic signature should appear twice, in ms. 256 and 262, both times in the clarinet, and before and after the fourth passage, as if placing quotation marks around the desperate line that reads: “¡Cómo nutres de luz a tu criatura en tanto la devoras!”. I suspect strongly that you appropriate that particular line as your own for one special reason: you know that Time is Music’s best friend, but it is also Man’s worst enemy… My third source of curiosity is how your Second String Quartet—at least sketches of it, since it was never written—first appears in ms. 200-205, amid the first and second passages of the voice performance and limited to the strings section, and recurs later throughout Recordatio’s second section, post-poem, so to speak and predominant over the rest of the piece. Were I to pursue here the psychoanalytic model that I posed in my reading of the first section—a journey back to the earlier pieces as traumatic moments whose suffering needed to be overcome by working through the resistance to memory and consciousness—one could say that the gradual appearance of the Second String Quartet throughout Recordatio provides evidence, or symptoms, of a liberation, a release that somehow had been held back or repressed by earlier suffering. Once surveyed, perhaps understood again and its obstacles overcome, the earlier pieces, from the Woodwind Quintet to the Rondó as well as the nostalgic cinquillos, now make room for this unwritten piece. When exactly you wrote those sketches or why that piece remained unwritten are questions that might intrigue the musicologist, but that bear little influence on my own reading. Thus the voice performance of the Ballagas sonnet is followed by a second section that contains another plunge into memory. But if the first section regressed into the past, this second section will do so only partially and revel in the present and the future, 283

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bringing in the quotation of your 1984 Homenagem: In Memoriam Heitor Villalobos, as well as the unwritten Second String Quartet. Brief passages of the Woodwind Quintet and Trio will recur as well (ms. 308-315, 371-385) but they will not predominate as much as the other pieces. In reference to the first section one major difference I do notice is an accelerated tempo throughout, as if the failed search, or anguished question, of the first section had given new energy to the definitive search that now is newly undertaken. This explains, at least formally, the use of Brazilian tunes in Homenagem for what sounds like an extended dance sequence, a frenzied maxixe perhaps, though its accelerated quoted reminiscence comes through with a dissonance approaching the grotesque, sufficiently distinct at least from the joyful Rondó quotation in the first section as to make a real difference. This grotesque sequence, allied to the series of strident do stings in ms. 276-278, serve as an ominous premonition of the rest of the second section which, as in the case of the first, will be equally as anguished, and it, too, will ultimately result in a frenzied exhaustion. Analogous ominous sequences will therefore recur, I think, at least twice in this second section; first, in the long string ostinato of ms. 326-338; shortly after that, in the renewed phantasmagoria of ms. 356-360; and in preparation for the final exhaustion of ms. 434-435, whose do stings are followed, significantly, by the brief appearance of the cinquillo in ms. 444-445. The voice makes its reappearance (ms. 452) after the section’s sole deceleration, only this time it begins not by repeating Ballagas’ verse but with a series of wordless laments (ms. 453-467). The voice’s Oh’s and Ah’s in the absence of verse—the only concession will be the poem’s final exclamation—suggest, in effect, the defeat, or at least the insufficiency of language before God’s silence, a defeat that turns out to be analogous to the insufficient result of music’s own search. The music search had taken place, if we recall, working through painful memories, memories of loss and exile, the understanding of which releases a buried unwritten piece from the personal canon. Put at the service of finding the answer to the same “anguished question,” neither this newly released piece nor the other pieces that come to its aid (like the Homenagem) 284

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­ roduce the desired response and ultimately yield a similar frenp zied exhaustion punctuated by the nearly obsessive, recurring do stings. But again, at the end, who utters those stings? God or Man? As in Ballagas’ poem, Recordatio leaves the matter open, to the point that the one quoted verse at the end happens to be Ballagas’ final one, which repeats, and therefore underscores, the homonym upon which the entire argument rests: secreta; and its final note (ms. 468), like its first, is in fact the do sting. Thus raising the ultimate question: who is the Bee? Who has the final word (the final note)? God or Man? If Poetry is the honey that Man secretes in response to God’s silence, then so is Music, and both Ballagas’ poem and de la Vega’s Recordatio are human exercises in the revelation of the ways that God’s hand works through the mystery of Art.

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Appendix De como Dios disfraza su ternura Emilio Ballagas Si a mi angustiosa pregunta no respondes, yo sé que soy abeja de tu oído. Dios silencioso, Dios desconocido, ¿por qué si más te busco, más te escondes? Las olas de los cuándos y los dóndes manchan de sombra el litoral perdido en donde clamo… Si no estás dormido tal vez mi hoguera parpadeante rondes: Lucero en lo alto de mi noche oscura, o vampiro amoroso que la veta se bebe lento de mi sangre impura. ¡Cómo nutres de luz a tu criatura en tanto la devoras! ¡Qué secreta, qué secreta, Señor, es tu ternura!

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Notes from Underdevelopment

R

eaders of Edmundo Desnoes’ Memorias del subdesarrollo (1965, 1967, 1968, 1975) may have been struck by the differences among its several versions. Three years after the first Cuban edition, the novel became the basis for a film directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the script for which, coauthored by Desnoes and Alea, incorporated several new scenes that were not part of the original text. This expanded version was also the basis for Desnoes’ own English translation one year before the film’s release. To it, Desnoes added the same scenes he added to his latest Spanish edition, which incorporated addi­tional revisions.1 The number and extent of all these changes attest to something other than the demands of a polishing craftsman. The new scenes, especially, resulted from Desnoes’ work on Alea’s film, whose ideological aims and content critics have repeatedly acknowledged as 1



Following are the editions I have used and from which I cite: (Desnoes: 1967a, 38-45, 55-74, 107-114,126-127, 136-140); (Desnoes: 1968a); (Desnoes: 1975, 32-37, 46-65, 93-98, 118-121, 124-130). No script of the film has ever been published, but I have consulted the recomposed text in (Myerson: 1973, 51107). In subsequent notes I shall identify each text by date and give page numbers. According to (Rodríguez Monegal: 1975), some Galerna editions omit the four short stories of the “Apéndice,” but my own copy includes them. Desnoes’ English translation omits them and the 1975 Mortiz edition omits only the last story, “What can I do?”. The latter’s front matter indicates a first edition (1965) by Casa de Las Américas, but this seems to be a mistake. Cf. Memorias del subdesarrollo (La Habana: Ediciones Unión, 1965). At least four of these new passages, that I know of, were published earlier: (Desnoes: 1969); (Desnoes: 1967b, 173-177); and (Desnoes: 1968b, 147-158). 287

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much more coherent than the novel.2 Whether or not these new scenes add a missing ideological dimension remains to be determined, but clearly the intent behind these changes was more ideological than stylistic. That one can no longer speak simply of “Desnoes’ novel” as if it had always been an unchanging text is also clear, though acknowledging this fact alone does not settle the implications of having this single novel in different versions. What such changes do suggest is the existence of an ordering consciousness—a mastering Author—who updates the text’s content and infuses it with ideological purpose. In what follows I wish to dwell on this issue and probe its coherence. Given the context in which Memorias del subdesarrollo was first published and the ideological charge with which the text has been invested, it may be possible to regard its textual history as a metaphor for the political itinerary of Cuba’s revolutionary intellectuals, not merely as the reflection of a changing political scene. I aim, instead, to view these changes as the consequence of a peculiar tension between history and narrative, and of the uncer­ tain, indeed erratic role played by the intellectual, or at least its figure, in mediating this tension. If the story of Memorias del subdesarrollo is the history of its several rewritings, it is not so much that the times have willed it, as that the text itself dramatizes the necessity of rewriting.

II Rather than broach at once a discussion of the novel in its several versions, let us begin with a text of Desnoes’ that is seldom considered. I am referring to Punto de vista (1967), the collection of essays Desnoes published barely two years after the first edition



2

See (Rodríguez Monegal: 1975, 588-591), and (Grossvogel; 1974, 60-64). The film’s ideological aims are made clearer by its use of documentaries of the trial of the Bay of Pigs soldiers and the voice-over commentary, all taken from (Rozitchner: 1963). 288

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of Memorias and the same year as its English translation.3 Five of its seven essays, dated 1960 to 1967, had appeared earlier in periodicals, both in Cuba and abroad. The two exceptions were “El mundo sobre sus pies” and the title piece and preface, which share a confes­sional thematic and tone. In the preface, Desnoes outlined his ex­perience as a writer, recently returned from an alienating period in the U.S., during the early years of the revolution, and described those years retrospectively as the gradual shedding of universal abstractions for the adoption of a concrete “point of view.” What defined this “point of view” was, of course, the experience of the revolution, which Desnoes calls “decisiva,” and forced Cuban intellectuals to move beyond merely understanding underdevelopment to assuming it by interpreting immediate revolutionary reality (7). One could well question the coherence of Desnoes’ argument, particular­ly its interchange of “revolution” and “underdevelopment,” but one must understand that argument both in general terms (the conversion of a liberal intellectual to the cause of a Third World, Marxist revolution) and for Desnoes’ career as a writer. Indeed, the distinction between understanding and assuming underdevelopment forms part of a broader tension running through the confessional piece between theory and practice, a tension whose formal correlative is Desnoes’ dual activity as essayist and novelist. Thus, it was the gradual disjunction of the “conscious” essayist from the “unconscious” novelist that appears to have given Desnoes access to a concrete “point of view” and provided a key to technical success in his novelistic craft. He chronicles how in the case of No hay problema (1961), his first novel, “digo con experiencias lo que dije con ideas en ensayos publicados en Lunes de Revolución.” In the case of El cataclismo (1965), his second (“la novela que más he trabajado y la menos lograda”), the same essay attempt to arrive at some universal, objective truth ended in failure (9). In turn, Memorias del subdesarrollo, his third and last, does assume a “point of view” thanks to the displacement of essay

3

See (Desnoes: 1967c). 289

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content onto the pieces collected in Punto de vista. As the essay’s analytical thrust would have crippled the practical immediacy of the fic­tional text, so should the revolutionary novelist avoid at all costs theory’s potential practice: No basta describir la revolución, hay que interpretarla, relacionarnos con el resto del mundo, incluyendo nuestra propia novela, tener un punto de vista; no basta estar parado sobre terreno firme, debemos funcionar a partir de la propia vida in­dividual: hay que ponerse tododesde la pasión hasta las dudas, desde las ex­periencias hasta las ideas más abstractas—en la literatura. Cuando comprendí eso, y la cosa fue inconsciente, escribí Memorias del subdesarrollo. Este libro de ensayos no es más que su expresión consciente en ideas concretas… Estoy rajado por muchas partes: por el choque del inolvidable pasado y el presente intenso; por la firme conciencia revolucionaria de un socialismo “con todos y para el bien de todos,” y mi vida insignificante, presente, llena de zozobra ante lo nuevo que hacemos para el futuro. Somos siempre dos. El que lo entiende todo, lo justifica todo con el análisis frío de la implacable historia, desde arriba, en teoría—y el pobre yo que sólo tiene su vida individual en medio del caos sorprendente y contradictorio de la revolución. Esta necesidad de incluirlo todo me obligó casi com­pulsivamente a meter aquí tanto ensayos—el que siempre busca entender—como un cuento—el que siempre sólo vive. En los ensayos, no pude evitarlo, se cuelan a veces experiencias personales y en el cuento especulaciones teóricas (9-10).

One could, once again, question Desnoes’ offer to distinguish essay from novel while also denying it in the end. Be that as it may, the argument, for all its incoherence, aims both to invest the essays of Punto de vista with the status of a “companion volume” to Memorias del subdesarrollo and provide a chronicle of ideological error and success. That Desnoes should have written this in 1966-67, while working on the script of Alea’s film and expanding the novel, makes his argument all the more telling. For ideological coherence (not to mention technical success) is thus seen to stem from the same distinction be­tween theory and practice he promotes. 290

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And yet if we take a closer look at the terms upon which Desnoes’ distinction rests, one cannot help concluding that the relationship between essays and novels is more rhetorical than substantive. Of the twenty or so articles Desnoes wrote during 1960-1 for Lunes de Revolución, on­ly one, an essay on José Martí’s poem “Hierro,” has a clearly conceptual relation to No hay problema.4 The rest of the Lunes articles, including literary and film reviews, dealt with topics of immediate journalistic interest rather than the immediate prerevolutionary past.5 As such, the temporal and thematic discontinuity between these early articles and No hay problema, whose plot takes place between 1952 and 1958, belies Desnoes’ claim to a fusion of action (“experiencias”) and thought (“ideas”). In the case of the ostensible relation of Punto de vista to Memorias def subdesarrollo, the breach between essay and fiction appears even greater. Beyond the fact that a two-year difference separates their respective dates of publication, each book attests to revisions that preempt their being companion volumes. Instead of a single coherent statement whose contemporary publication would provide a theoretical counterpart to Memorias, the essays of Punto de vista were written for different occasions during a convulsive seven-year period. Some (like “Martí en Fidel”) even attest to Desnoes’ own revisions before reprinting them.6 To be sure, the inclusion of essays devoted to Hemingway and to “La

4



5



6



See (Desnoes: 1960). The text of No hay problema is divided into three parts, each of which begins with an epigraph from Martí’s poem. For the complete, edited text of the poem see (Martí: 1970, 67-68). During 1960 and 1961 Desnoes published, in addition to the piece on “Hierro,” the following articles in Lunes de Revolución: (Desnoes: 1960a, 1960d, 1960b, 1960c, 1960f, 1961g, 1961c, 1961a, 1961i, 1961k, 1961n, 1961m, 1961j, 1961e, 1961l, 1961d, 1961b, 1961h). In addition, Desnoes participated in an encuesta on (Desnoes: 1961f), and was the translator for (Purdy: 1961, 10-12). This list may not be complete. Compare “Martí en Fidel Castro” with “Martí en Fidel,” Punto de vista, pp. 21-33. Desnoes signs the latter “1961-1966.” If in fact there is correspondence between the two books, then why did Desnoes not specify which of the two versions of this essay he had in mind? 291

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ima­gen ­fotográfica del subdesarrollo” in Section II of Punto de vista would appear to guarantee a thematic link to those scenes of the 1967 version that deal with Hemingway, as well as providing the key to the meaning of the novel’s title. And yet, as we will see, whatever links do exist between that essay and those scenes turn out to be tenuous; and the key to the title lies elsewhere. The discordance between novel and essay that the background to Desnoes’ texts expose should convince us of the intentions behind any claim to a coherent parallel of theory and practice. No longer is it just a matter of isolating the stuff of concrete fiction from a crippling abstraction, but of providing a political context for a reading of the fictional texts. The distinction between essay and novel, theory and practice, proves useful, then, because it safeguards the literary text (not to mention its author) from the dangers of ambiguity, besides harnessing figurative literary language to literal political reality. Desnoes’ attempt to rewrite Memorias del subdesarrollo thus inheres not only in its several fictional versions, but also in the updating gesture of his political essays. I would now like to transpose this provisional conclusion to a reading of Memorias del subdesarrollo and probe the extent to which this compulsion to rewrite, so evident in Desnoes’ autobiographical pronouncements, is itself an integral part of the novel. It may be that the attempt to justify ideological coherence stems as much from the novel’s rhetorical implications as from the reality of political revolution.

III Memorias del subdesarrollo is divided into two parts. The first, roughly three-fourths of the book, is made up of the un­dated diary entries kept by Malabre, an alienated bourgeois, who sets out to write a book of short stories upon the departure of his wife and parents for exile in the U.S. The remainder of the book is an appendix comprising four of the (possibly revised) stories that Malabre had written as a fledgling author before keeping the diary. While 292

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both the English and film versions exclude the second part altogether, the 1975 Spanish version reprints the first three of the four stories. All three book versions (1965, 1967, 1975) contain brief references to these three stories. Only the fourth story, “What can I do?” goes without comment in all versions, which may explain in part its exclusion from the 1975 version.7 I note these facts merely to remind us of its basic structure, a system of cross­references between the two parts. While the diary entries explain the cir­cumstances under which each of the stories were written, the stories illustrate Malabre’s earlier potential (if any) as a creative writer. In eliminating the possibility of cross-reference between the two parts, both the English translation and the film versions alter radically this original structure. Given the temporal nature of film language, such an alteration was perhaps in­evitable, though it remains puzzling why it should have been so in the case of the English translation. Be that as it may, Malabre himself hints at his purpose in keeping the diary: “Llevo años diciéndome que si tuviera tiempo me sentaba y escribía un libro de cuentos y llevaba un diario para saber en realidad si soy un tipo superficial o profundo. Porque uno no para nunca de engañarse. Y sólo podemos escribir la vida o la mentira que realmente somos” (1968, 10-11; 1975, 10-11). Malabre’s intention in keeping the diary is to compile a critical or analytical companion volume to the fictional texts he intends to write. Accordingly, this analytic component would allow Malabre, as author, not only to reflect upon his creative enterprise, but also to ward off those delusive risks that the figurative language of fictional texts both fosters and reflects. The diary’s in­trospective rhetoric, that is, would render explicit those issues concern­ing the 7



According to Malabre (1968, 48, 59, and 62; 1975, 71, 82, 85), the chronology of the stories should be “Jack y el guagüero” (“mi primer cuento”), “Yodor” (written im­mediately after Malabre’s trip to post-war Europe), and “¡Créalo o no lo crea!” (“lo escribí en el cincuenta y tres”). The appendix arrangement does not follow this chronology. Desnoes published “What can I do?”, the fourth story, in (Desnoes: 1961n). The variants are too slight to make a difference. 293

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self that are kept implicit in the figurative nature of literary language. This is, of course, Malabre’s stated purpose only; it does not describe what the book registers. Instead of compiling the stories that Malabre would be writing parallel to the diary, the appendix in­cludes only those stories that were written before the revolution. By thus freeing Malabre from the distractions of bourgeois alienation and providing him with free time, the revolution has allowed him to fulfill his life-long project to write a book of short stories. In so doing, however, the revolution has also so shaken Malabre’s bourgeois values that he decides to keep a companion diary to reflect upon that enterprise and thus restore a sense of self­; except that, as the novel goes on to show, the task of writing the diary ends up displacing the primary objective, thus mak­ing the book of short stories conspicuous by its absence. Memorias del subdesarrollo is the story of a book that never got written. This apparent alteration of Malabre’s stated purpose renders suspect the novel’s two-part structure and forces us to explore further its probable cause; the more so, since we do have, in the appendix, a few of Malabre’s stories, but only the wrong ones. In the diary, Malabre notes that he intends to send those unpublished stories to “Eddy,” or “Edmundo Desnoes,” hoping that this ­writer friend whose first novel Malabre has just finished reading, and heard recently at a panel discussion, will get them published. Malabre notes further that the stories merely suggest “lo que podría haber hecho si me hubiera dedicado sistemáticamente a la literatura,” and adds, as if guarding against self-deception, that he really has no hopes of getting them published: “Eddy ni los tomará en cuenta.” Still, he admits, “los pienso seguir reescribiendo. Y si puedo escribiré algunos cuentos nuevos” (1968, 51; 1975, 74). One cannot simply gloss over these entries. Malabre’s comments on his writing project, from his initial statement to his resigned admission halfway through the diary, attest to the gradual erosion of his original intention. The desire to rewrite the old stories has displaced the original project to write new ones, as if the experience of rewriting offered a haven from risks entailed by the experience of original creation. Of course, one could easily ­detect, 294

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in Malabre’s choice, Desnoes’ implied critique of the Cuban bourgeoisie, which chose exile and old values rather than the fresh start of revolution. Still, one cannot quite divorce Malabre’s choice from the fact that it is to “Eddy” to whom that rewriting would be addressed and whom it is ultimately designed to impress. For the name “Desnoes,” two sentences above, refers as much to “Eddy” the character as to Edmundo Desnoes, the empirical author. And whatever political critique is implied in Malabre’s choice involves necessarily the ideological complicity of one “Desnoes,” whoever that may be. That such complicity exists cannot be taken lightly, for it could be said that the novel’s entire thrust is designed to disguise if not dissolve it. That is, given Malabre’s choice to rewrite rather than create, it becomes im­perative that the levels of reality within the novel be kept separate and distinct and that Desnoes’ coherence not be mistaken for Malabre’s·error. The way the novel promotes this distinction is by creating the fiction of a critical edition. That is, both the diary and the appendix constitute the col­lected, perhaps posthumous, texts of one “underdeveloped” Malabre. In addition to the two-part structure and the inclusion of an appendix, the telling footnote at the end of “¡Créalo o no lo crea!,” the second story, suggests further the presence of a tampering editor.8 The format of an editorial fiction has many precedents in Western, and especially Hispanic, narrative, ranging from Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor (1492), in which an “Autor” collects the letters of two star-crossed lovers, to Cervantes’ attempts at convincing his reader, in Don Quijote (1605), that the story of his glorious knight is his own translation of some old Arabic manuscripts he discovered in the Alcaná de Toledo. Modern narrative, from Rousseau’s Julie (1761) to Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), has been especially fond of this device; and in the cases of Spain and Latin America one can invoke such samples as Pepita Jiménez (1874), La 8



See 1968, J07; 1975, 146. We do not know if Malabre or the editor wrote the note since, as Malabre himself tells us, it was “Eddy” who took him to meet Pereira. 295

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vorágine (1923), and La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942), without forget­ting, of course, some of the stories in Borges’ Ficciones (1944). In contemporary Cuban literature, particularly, the locus classicus is, of course, Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (1953), although one also thinks of José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso (1966), whose one mysterious footnote suggests the presence of a mischievous editor; Reinaldo Arenas’ El mundo alucinante (1968), and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Un oficio del siglo XX (1963), a text that, though not explicitly fic­tional, does exploit the editorial fiction formula. The purpose behind this formula, in all cases, is to create an ironic distance between author and character in such a way that it guarantees the former’s rhetorical power or authority over and above the latter’s assertions. As such, the author’s power derives from the temporal totalization afforded by the editorial role as it becomes the only reliable vantage point within a narrative world fraught by the bad faith and self-delusion of first-person discourse.9 More than just another character mentioned in the diary, then, more even than the real historical author, the name Edmundo Desnoes designates the editor who has assembled Malabre’s texts as a “specimen case” in cultural underdevelopment. Of course, the editor’s presence is never dramatized overtly, as it would be, for example, if we had a critical preface or epilogue, but the novel’s

9

“By the mechanics of editorship, the editor—technically speaking—is enabled to let his voice be heard among, and sometimes above, the characters of the novel. He is the character in the novel who can continually and at any given moment take a panoramic view over the whole course of fictitious events, a view which is only vouchsafed to the main characters when the last letters have been written . . . The editor’s function makes it possible to speak of two dimensions or levels in the time-conception that characterizes the novel. On the one hand there is simultaneity in the ex­periencing and the writing down . . . and on the other hand there is the retrospective view which the editor’s vantage-point gives him and which he can reveal, after the manuscript is transformed into a printed book, whenever he likes, by commentaries, cross-references, and other types of nar­rative meditation—and above all hints that point forward to what for the reader and also for the main character is still unknown territory,” (Romberg: 1962, 76). 296

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rhetorical armature is such that we can safely infer that discreet but powerful intervention. It could be said, at any rate, that the ap­pendix is but the ironic fulfillment of Malabre’s wish to have “Eddy” help him get the stories published. Only those stories now appear juxtaposed to the very diary in which Malabre states his wish, thus making their appearance in print even more pathetic. That the very person whom Malabre sneers at throughout as an “escritorzuelo” should ultimately turn out to be his editor constitutes, of course, the ultimate irony in this game of shifting ­mirrors. Read as a straightforward narrative, Malabre’s contemptuous comments for Eddy would seem to give Malabre the upper hand; read within the editorial fiction, however, the situation is exactly the opposite. For if the object of the game has been to reach a reliable vantage point out of the maze of self-delusion and literary bad faith; if the object has indeed been to attain a concrete “point of view” free of literary fiction and close to revolutionary reality, then it would seem that Edmundo Desnoes has come out the clear winner, given that his name, rather than Malabre’s, is the one that appears on the cover. Such conclusions would be comforting enough were it not for the fact that Desnoes the editor is himself guilty of literary sins and, particularly, of literary underdevelopment. Memorias del subdesarrollo, the title he gives to his “critical edition,” is but a takeoff on Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), whose Spanish translation has been rendered traditional­ly as Memorias del subsuelo.10 By replacing Dostoevsky’s metaphysical symbol (subsuelo) for the more current economic term (subdesarrollo), the implied editor is doing something more than just updating his vocabulary. The very choice of such a parodic title betrays the editor’s literary faith and returns the text to the literary realm from which he pretends to rescue it. In fact, the overt triteness of the I have not been able to consult a Dostoevsky bibliography to ascertain how widespread is the use of this translation, but I have consulted two Spanish editions that bear that title: the Aguilar edition of Dostoevsky’s Obras Selectas and a pocketbook edition of (Dostoyevski: 1975).

10

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title renders it as one more evidence of the cultural inauthenticity about which Malabre complains in the Hemingway se­quence of the revised version: “Eso es todo lo que merecemos, copias, no somos más que una mala imitación . . . una caricatura, una reproducción barata” (1975, 61). The choice has other more clearly functional aims, of course, such as pointing up the editorial fiction, since Dostoevsky’s Notes is itself another milestone in that tradition, and its text, too, consists of two interrelated parts—a long, polemical monologue addressed to some “gentlemen,” and the underground man’s narrative of some of his experiences. (At the end of Dostoevsky’s novel an anonymous voice interrupts the narrative to inform us that he is cutting the notes short because otherwise they might go on in­definitely).11 Finally, the allusion to Dostoevsky is also meant to suggest Malabre himself as a kind of underdeveloped “underground man,” the proto­type of the existentialist hero, though unlike his precursor’s, the cause of his alienation appears to be social rather than metaphysical or psychological. Within the editorial fiction, then, the parodic title conveys ultimately the editor’s political contempt for Malabre and promotes the difference between them in ideological as well as rhetorical terms. Malabre’s texts, the title implies, provide us with a specimen case of an underdeveloped past which, once objectified, may serve as a negative example. As Federico Alvarez put it, in one of the few Cuban reviews, the text wouldn’t be called “memorias” if one had not already forsaken “subdesarrollo.”12 The same in­terpretation, one should add, runs all through Gutiérrez Alea’s “Working Notes” on the film version, which view Desnoes’ novel as an exercise in what he calls “toma de conciencia”.13 Yet the For a subtle discussion, see (Holquist: 1977, 35-74). See (Álvarez: 1966). For the reaction of another Cuban reviewer see (Antón: 1966). 13 “Como resultado de toda esta especie de toma de conciencia llegamos a saber (a sentir en carne propia) que el camino que tenemos que recorrer es mucho más largo y más incómodo de lo que pensábamos . . . Por todo esto, digo ahora, me sentí llevado a trabajar en la novela de Desnoes, que pone el acento 11 12

298

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t­ rouble with such a strictly political interpretation is that it ignores the title’s parody. If memorias in fact translates the English Notes (or the Russian zapiskie), then we are not so much remembering underdevelopment after having overcome it as repeating it at the very moment when we pretend to be beyond it. Even if we chose the generic (English memoirs) over the existential or parodic meanings, the implications would be equally as vexing. By calling the book memorias, based presumably on the autobiographical merits of Malabre’s diary, the editor interprets those texts as a personal history that seeks to articulate or repossess the historicity of the self. That is, all memoirs—Che Guevara’s Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria (1963), Neruda’s Confieso que he vivido (1974)—present a first-person portrait of the self as engaged in the drama of history and in its relations to cultural pattern and change. And yet, if there is one trait that defines Malabre’s autobiographical discourse, it is its wholesale inability to conceive the self in such historical, cultural terms; or even temporal ones, as Malabre’s decision to erase the dates from his diary further attests (1968, 16; 1975, 16). Instead of providing a discourse of historical selfhood, as the memorias of the title seems to promise, the diary creates a kind of ontological breathing exercise, “an inward and outward of being, itself punctuating the discontinuous life being lived.”14 In generic terms, that is, the title creates the expectation of a discourse grounded on history, but that ex­pectation becomes dispelled as soon as one discovers the discontinuity that mediates between title and diary. Indeed, the experience of discontinuity itself is what seems to hold the book together. Just as there is no conceptual cor­respondence between the diary and the appendix, between the fictional texts and the diary that claims to analyze

sobre el factor subdesarrollo de nuestra realidad . . . para estar identificado plenamente con la revolución es preciso asumir nuestra condición de subdesarrollados,” (Gutiérrez Alea: 1969, 154-155). 14 See (Hart: 1970, 498). Malabre’s atemporal existence is captured in the words of the blues song he sings to himself: “feeling tomorrow just like I feel today . . . I hate to see that evening sun go down.” 299

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them, there is no correspondence between the actual book and the editorial fiction that names it. As the writer can only keep the diary of the book he does not write, so the editor or critic appears condemned to perform his critical act in the mode of error.

IV These issues involve more than just an awareness of the diacritical nature of all meaning—that all language is, for better or worse, nothing but a system of differences. At stake is the very basis upon which rests the rhetorical and ideological distinction between Desnoes the editor and Malabre the character; that is, the distinction that allows us to tell not only consciousness from self-delusion, fact from fiction, but political right from wrong. For if, as we have seen, the language of the righteous editor is as guilty of literary figuration as that of the underdeveloped character whom he condemns, how then can he claim to be ideologically correct on the basis of greater access to rhetorical literalness? How can we decide, in other words, that the “memoirs” of the title refers simply to the act of recollection and nothing else? From the above we can derive that the text of Desnoes’ novel dramatizes the impossibility of formulating ideological distinctions solely on a rhetorical basis. Even at those moments when political language would appear to be most immediate and thereby assign a stable meaning to each sign, it lapses into the mediation of a literary self-awareness, thereby undermining its own claims to ideological difference. None of this denies the historicity of literary language. On the contrary, it confronts us with the possibility that literature might be more historical than politics itself. That is, instead of presenting us with a specimen case the knowledge of which would protect us from “mystifications and dangerous idealizations,”15 the

“El conocimiento del terreno en que debemos movernos, permite que nuestros pasos sean más seguros, y nos protege de mistificaciones e idealizaciones peligrosas,” (Gutiérrez Alea: 1969, 154).

15

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language of the novel casts doubts on the p ­ ossibility of distinguishing a mystified consciousness from one that is not. Whereas in political terms Malabre’s first-person discourse ostensibly embodies a self-centered bourgeois consciousness against which the reader is expected to react, in literary terms it is precisely the introspective quality of that discourse that guarantees the reader’s interest and disallows such re­jection. Malabre’s story holds our interest, even our research time, despite (and perhaps because of) his ideological doubts, thereby rendering a much more faithful picture of the tensions and contradictions that plague a revolutionary politics, especially for writers and intellectuals.16 It should be clear that my interest focuses upon the representation of these tensions, upon how Desnoes’ literary language embodies a historical con­sciousness in its very erosion of the ideological difference that allows the pro­duction of his discourse. One way to test this hypothesis beyond the surface of the editorial fiction might be to probe further into a couple of the entries that Desnoes added to the diary section of the original Cuban edition as a result of his work on the script for Alea’s political film. A brief look into the language of these passages will allow us to temper our argument and will bring us closer to a conclusion. The first of these entries describes Malabre’s visit to “Finca Vigía,” Hemingway’s former Havana residence in the company of Elena, his young mistress. This entry is designed to suggest, in political terms, Malabre’s gradual awareness of Hemingway’s colonialist attitude toward Cuba and of his use of the island both as a haven from contemporary turmoil and a surrogate for Spain, from which he had been barred since its civil war. “Tengo sentimientos encontrados. Siento amor y odio hacia Hem­ingway; lo admiro y al mismo tiempo me humilla… Cuba, para Hemingway, era un “Desnoes’ protagonist is in danger of more than the author’s (self?)-lacerations that jeopardize his exemplariness as the figure of a political allegory: any attention paid by an author to the inner world of his characters encourages the growth of that inner life at the expense of the ideological illustration which they are meant to serve.” (Grossvogel; 1974, 62).

16

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lugar para refugiarse, vivir tranquilamente con su mujer, recibir a sus amigos, escribir en inglés, pescar en la Corriente del Golfo.”17 Thus what begins as Malabre’s mixed feelings about Hemingway, to whom he looks up as a figure of literary success, becomes resolved in the form of an ideological in­sight. That insight coincides, for the most part, with the views that Desnoes himself expresses on the subject in “El último verano,” a contemporary essay written at the time of Hemingway’s death, republished in 1966, and collected later in Punto de vista. Indeed, the Hemingway sequence constitutes a literary version of “El último verano,” and the political intention of both sequence and essay can be summarized by Desnoes’ telling conclusion: “Creo que la revolución ha roto para siempre la posibilidad de que una relación semejante vuelva a producirse en Cuba. Hay aquí una especie de símbolo. No seremos más criados de amos extranjeros, aunque amos nos ayuden a vivir con comodidad, nos sienten a su mesa, nos tengan protegidos de las violentas luchas de nuestra época.”18 One would be tempted, in view of such forceful demystification, to read the diary entry in terms of the essay and view Malabre’s mixed feelings as the first sign of a potential ideological conversion at diary’s end. And yet, the narrative sequence introduces additional details that render suspect what would otherwise appear to be a foregone deduction. For one thing, in the diary Malabre takes jabs not only at Hemingway but also at the Russian tourists with whom Malabre and Elena are sharing their visit to the museum. The jabs at the Russians, whom Malabre regards as the amos de turno, cannot be read simply as a sign of antirevolutionary prejudice. For it is the figure of the Russians, as well as their uncanny physical resemblance to the American tourists of yesteryear, that allows for thematic transition from the ­immediately preceding

See (“El último verano”: 1966) and Punto de vista, 37-58. An English translation, by Frances Wyers Webber, appeared in (Race and Class: 1977, 49-162). 18 Punto de vista, 47. Desnoes’ views here are very different from the ones held earlier in (Desnoes: 1961e). 17

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e­ ntry.19 By thus-projecting in structural terms what would otherwise appear to be a subjective opinion, the text objectifies Malabre’s critique and veers away, in effect, from the more pointed essay’s ideological objectives. More significant still is the symbolic role played by the figure of Hemingway in the revised version. More than just a writer of colonialist attitudes whose demystification would be the symbol of revolutionary rupture, as the essay argues, Hemingway becomes the proleptic figure of Malabre’s fate. That is, Hemingway’s suicide, which Malabre even comments on at one point (“decía que mataba para no matarse. Ahora él también está muerto,” 1975, 49) foreshadows Malabre’s own. It would be difficult to miss the obvious parallel: Malabre models his literary style after Hemingway’s, as the stories collected in the appendix illustrate, and like him he looks at Cuba from the distant safety of an alien watchtower—his penthouse apartment or urban “finca vigía.” At one point during the museum tour Elena herself draws the parallel in terms of their respective typewriters: “‘La tuya siempre está junto a la mesa.’ ‘Hemingway escribía de pie’ fue todo lo que atiné a decirle, conmovido y avergonzado. ‘¿Por qué tú no escribes tam­bién de pie?’” (1975, 53). Unlike Hemingway, that is, Malabre is unable to stand on his own two feet as a writer, though ultimately both Hemingway and Malabre suc­cumb to their respective crises. The end of Malabre’s diary highlights the importance of this crisis in dramatic terms. Whereas the revolution survives the missile crisis, Malabre does not survive his own spiritual crisis, and his last diary entry, “Ir más allá de las palabras,” suggests his creative, if not physical, demise (1968, 94; 1975, 133). And whereas in the original Cuban edition the end of the diary remains open to the choice of death or conversion, in the revised version, the symbolic charge of the new “Más adelante, entró un grupo de rusos . . . Eran cuadrados, gordos, pero pensé que a finales del siglo pasado los norteamericanos debieron haber producido el mismo efecto que ahora dan los rusos,” and “Siempre lo mismo. Los mismos turistas de siempre. La gran potencia visita una de sus colonias . . .” 1975, 46, 47.

19

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Hemingway sequence has the effect of preempting conversion as a viable choice and restricting the end to only one alternative. Malabre’s suicide, in other words, becomes the requirement of ideological revision.20 To be sure, Alea’s film brings out the protagonist’s death in even stronger terms by sug­gesting it in its opening shots, the frenzied dance scene in Tropicana’s “Salón Mambí,” in which we witness, behind the flashing picture credits, the shooting death of a suited man. As we watch the corpse being lifted out on shoulders and carried out through the milling crowd, we realize that the suited man is none other than Sergio (Alea’s Malabre) whose pathetic story we are about to learn in the rest of the film and of whom we know only that he does not survive the dance of revolution.21 This is more than a plea to restore thematic ambiguity or to have us detect an underlying political critique. By preempting the conversion that could have allowed Malabre to become editor of his own texts, the addition of the Hemingway sequence underscores symbolically the rhetorical and ideological differences between editor and character. But the reinforcement of these differences takes place, as we discover, at the expense of Desnoes’ stated The removal from the revised version of “What can I do?”—arguably, the most “Hemingwayesque” of the four collected stories and the only one to show some measure of social conscience on Malabre’s part—further suggests the impossibility of conversion. 21 See 1975, 51. Alea’s comment is very telling in this regard: “Así fuimos desarrollan­do más de lo que aparece en la novela esa línea que va mostrando la realidad ‘objetiva’ que rodea al personaje y que poco a poco le va estrechando un cerco hasta sofocarlo al final,” 156. Desnoes himself, in a little-known text in which he comments on the film, hints at the same ending: “El mundo del personaje está cerrado; la revolución, sin embargo, se abre para todos . . . Sergio está vivo en la pantalla y al mismo tiempo está muerto en la revolución”, “Se llama Sergio,” (Gutiérrez Alea: 1969, 160-161). In an interview with William Luis, however, Desnoes denied explicitly the possibility of suicide: “I think it is a death of a part of him. I think it would be rather mechanical if he committed suicide . . . Now, whether after that he com­mitted suicide, or decided to leave Cuba, or to begin to participate in the Revolution is open to speculation.” See (Luis: 1982, 7-20). 20

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thesis (Hemingway’s or American colonialism), which urged the revision in the first place. This disjunction of formal projection from authorial intention—the text’s surpassing of ideological utility—is also present, though less apparently, in the other entry where Malabre and Noemí are in bed and learn the news of the U.S.-imposed quarantine which precipitated the 1962 missile crisis. The scene appears in both the English translation and the Spanish revised edition, but not in the film.22 The entry’s political significance seems obvious enough: Malabre’s sexual union with Noemí signals, especially after the embarrassing debacle with Elena and her family, the possibility of an authentic communication with a member of the lower classes. His relationship with Noemí (the biblical ring of whose name does not escape him) would thus suggest her functioning as a mediatrix of sorts who restores, at the height of a historical crisis, man’s faith through bodily com­ munion: “Encima de todo, Noemí creía en Dios. Me sentí joven.”23 Such obvious symbolic content, however, cannot quite be divorced from its attendant irony. First, Malabre’s seduction of Noemí self-consciously replays the hackneyed theme of el caballero y la criada, so prevalent in Latin American soap operas (as well as real life). The ironic effect stems from the montage or counterpoint structure upon which the entire scene is built. While necking with Noemí, Malabre is also cautiously reaching out with his arm to change stations on the radio playing on the night­stand, simply because, he tells us, the music does not let him concentrate on lovemaking. The passage juxtaposes such melodramatic phrases as “me molesta la música porque quiero tenerte para mí solo,” to other flat, realistic statements like “yo no entiendo lo que canta esa” (1975, 119). The collision between melodrama and According to Desnoes, in an interview with me recorded in Ithaca, N.Y. on November 11, 1979, Gutiérrez Alea decided to eliminate this scene because it detracted from the film’s political message and made Sergio too much of a Don Juan. It could be said, at any rate, that whereas in the novel Malabre consummates his relationship with Noemí, in the film it remains a fantasy of Sergio’s. 23 1975, 119. The significance or the name is remarked earlier on: “Noemí. ¿Ese no es un nombre de la Biblia? Tengo que buscarlo,” 1975, 28. 22

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realism comes to the fore with the flash of President Kennedy’s voice at the moment Noemí is about to kiss Malabre: “Aggressive b ­ ehavior, if allowed unchecked and unchallenged, leads to war” (1975, 120). And the entire scene unravels when Noemí, after learning of the possibility of nuclear war, finally screams out: “¡Coño!” (1975, 121). Instead of gaining access to history, as the scene’s pregnant symbolism would suggest, Malabre sinks into an existential crisis from which he never recovers. We thus find literary language, once again, far surpassing ideological intention, shaking itself loose, as it were, from the strictures of authorial rewriting. Nor does such literary rhetoric seem to follow a consistent pattern in its unsettling of ideological formulation. Whereas in the first sequence the symbolic charge of Hemingway’s suicide displaces the intention, in the Noemí sequence it is the symbolic charge itself, containing the intention, that becomes displaced by irony. Literature suggests itself, in this fashion, as a space of permanent displacement.

Conclusion Both the retrospective assertions of Punto de vista and the fictional ver­sions of Memorias del subdesarrollo attest to a desire to rewrite a text whose rhetorical tensions proved too unsettling to be left on its own. But whereas the prose essays provide a literal rhetoric from which an ideological updating can be carried out, the novel’s figurative language, including its several versions, deny the possibility of a stable rewriting grid. It is perhaps an irony that Memorias del subdesarrollo should so often be viewed as a post-literary text, so to speak—the kind that, free of fictional delusions and ideological bad faith, responds to an immediate political present, when its very allusive title forces us to acknowledge, from the outset, the very fictions that would seem to be surpassed. It would, of course, be too simple to attribute these rewritings to mere political anxiety on Desnoes’ part; that is, to his wish to comply with ideological expectations and to make of his text the 306

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political pamphlet that party ideologues and cultural commissars would most likely wish. Yet the textual itinerary we gather in this case might well be but the magnified version of the erratic relation that all authors, regardless of political context, establish with their own texts; the relation whereby the restatement of an original intention ends up creating an interpretive context rather than elucidating the origins of the text that summons their commentary. Such restatements might well be ideologically motivated, but their results are invariably political, in a sense other than the ideological—in the author’s attempt to condition the critical assumptions that others make about one’s literary texts. Memorias def subdesarrollo provides a metaphor for the ­writer’s role in the revolution, though not so much by recalling the errors of the prerevolu­tionary past as by dramatizing what all writers everywhere are condemned to do: read, write, rewrite.

Bibliography Álvarez, Federico (1966): “Perspectiva y ambigüedad en las Memorias del subdesarrollo (de Edmundo Desnoes)”, in Casa de las Américas 39, La Habana, (Nov-Dec 1966), 148-150. Antón, Mercedes (1966): “Memorias del subdesarrollo: el cataclismo”, in Unión, 5, n°1, (Jan-Mar 1966), 164-166. Desnoes, Edmundo (1960a): “Donde quiera que se encuentren”, in Lunes de Revolución 61, (May 30 1960), 21-23. — (1960b): “Edgar Varèse, o la música del siglo XX”, in Lunes de Revolución 76, (Sep 12 1960), 24-25. — (1960c): “El nacimiento de una nación”, in Lunes de Revolución 82, (Nov 28 1960), 19. — (1960d): “¿Evolución o revolución?”, in Lunes de Revolución 65, (Jun 27 1960), 20-21. — (1960e): “ ‘Hierro’ de Martí”, in Lunes de Revolución 74, (Aug 29 1960), 3-6. — (1960f): “Neruda y Nuestra América”, in Lunes de Revolución 86, (Dec 26 1960), 27. — (1961a): “Año dieciséis después de Hiroshima”, in Lunes de Revolución 94, (Feb 27 1961), 24-25. — (1961b): “Cortando por lo sano”, in Lunes de Revolución 128, (Oct 23 1961), 13-15 [a chapter from No hay problema].

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— (1961c): “Gunga Din o Mahatma Gandhi”, in Lunes de Revolución 92, (Feb 13 1961), 21-22. — (1961d): “La palma y la seiba”, in Lunes de Revolución 124, (Sep 28 1961), 20-21. — (1961e): “Lo español en Hemingway”, in Lunes de Revolución 118, (Aug 14 1961), 14-15. — (1961f): “Los diez mejores libros cubanos”, in Lunes de Revolución 126, (Oct 10 1961), 5. — (1961g): “Martí en Fidel Castro”, in Lunes de Revolución 90, (Jan 30 1961), 61-62. — (1961h): “Picasso: Vivir es pintar”, in Lunes de Revolución 130, (Nov 6 1961), 13-15. — (1961i): “Propiedad sexuada”, in Lunes de Revolución 95, (Mar 6 1961), 26. — (1961j): “¿Qué pasó en Estados Unidos?”, in Lunes de Revolución 104, (May 8 1961), 4-5. — (1961k): “Seriocha es un niño”, in Lunes de Revolución 96, (Mar 13 1961), 23. — (1961l): “Tres notas sobre Lorca”, in Lunes de Revolución 119, (Aug 21 1961), 18. — (1961m): “Una película yugoslava en el Trianón”, in Lunes de Revolución 100, (Apr 10 1961), 20. — (1961n): “What can I do?”, in Lunes de Revolución 98, (Mar 27 1961), 19-21. — , Tr. (1967a): Inconsolable Memories, foreword by Jack Gelber. New York: The New American Library. — (1967b): “Llegas, Noemí, demasiado tarde a mi vida”, in Unión 6, n.º 4. — (1967c): Punto de vista. La Habana: Instituto del Libro. — (1968a): Memorias del subdesarrollo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna. — (1968b): “Una aventura en el trópico”, in Narrativa cubana de la ­revolución, ed. José María Caballero Bonald. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. — (1969): “Memorias del subdesarrollo (Dos nuevas escenas para un film de Tomás Gutiérrez Alea)”, in Islas, vol. XI, n.º 1, Santa Clara, January-August, 1969, 163-170. — (1975): Memorias del subdesarrollo. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz. Dostoyevski, Fiódor (1975): Memorias del subsuelo. Barcelona: Editorial Juventud. — “El último verano”, in ¡Siempre!, (Nov 14 1966). Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás (1969): “Memorias del subdesarrollo: notas de trabajo”, in Islas, 11, (Jan-Aug 1969), 154-155. Grossvogel, David (1974): “3/on 2 Desnoes Gutiérrez Alea”, in Diacritics, vol. 4, n° 4, (Winter 1974). Hart, Francis R. (1970): “Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography,” in New Literary History, Vol 1, N° 3, (Spring 1970).

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Holquist, Michael (1977): Dostoevsky and the Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP. Luis, William (1982): “America Revisited: An Interview with Edmundo Desnoes,” in Latin American Literary Review, Vol .11, N° 21, (Fall - Winter, 1982). Martí, José (1970): Versos libres, ed. Ivan A. Schulman. Barcelona: Editorial Labor. Myerson, Michael, Ed. (1975): Memories of Underdevelopment: The Revolutionary Films of Cuba. New York: Grossman Publishers. Purdy, James (1961): “No me llames por mi nombre”, tr. Edmundo Desnoes, in Lunes de Revolución 56, (Apr 25 1961), 10-12. Race and Class,19, (Autumn 1977). Rodríguez Monegal, Emir (1975): “Literatura: Cine: Revolución”, A propósito de las dos versiones [literaria, cinematográfica] de Memorias del subdesarrollo, in Revista lberoamericana, vol. 41, July-December 1975. Romberg, Bertil (1962): Studies in the Narrative Technique of the First-Person Novel. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Rozitchner, León (1963): Moral burguesa y revolución. Buenos Aires: Editorial Poseidón.

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Textual Politics: Severo Sarduy Rien ne vous tue un homme comme d’être obligé à représenter son pays. Jacques Vaché

O

ne of the assumptions that governs literary history is that progress exists because Modernity allows for greater and demystified knowledge. The origins of this pretension to epistemological superiority are perhaps located in Romanticism, whose parallel development and alliance with German Idealism strengthened its case with a powerful philosophical basis rarely seen before its time. It could be shown, however, that the superiority Romanticism claims as its own was already present in the Renaissance and that, in the case of certain modern genres like the novel, such claims form the very basis of their status in literary history. The same could be said of those literatures that arise with the advent of Modernity, such as Latin America’s, which from their inception establish a critical stance before Western culture and tradition. Implicit in virtually all approaches to the Latin American novel are one or more of the above notions, although critics themselves are wont to recognize the limits such notions impose. The interplay between these assumptions, on the one hand, and the blindness displayed by certain critics, on the other, has been especially prevalent in readings of what has come to be known as the new Latin American novel, which came of age during the 1960s and, some say, continue even today. The assumptions, in this case, have been 311

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the following: that these recent novels display greater self-awareness as literature than all previous texts; that such self-conscious textuality, which rejoices in its own playfulness, exposes the arbitrariness of all sign systems; and that these qualities render more accurate, less mystified representations of the historical nature of Latin America. Among these recent novels, those by Cuban author Severo Sarduy (1937-1993) emblematize these literary and critical trends. His works, several novels and volumes of essays, are viewed as sustained explorations of parodic discourse, or have at least been so qualified to describe a peculiar brand of writing that defies simple classification.1 In what follows I will not hesitate to repeat this commonplace, but only with the intention of challenging its strength and testing its limits. The general focus of my argument will be to use Sarduy’s mode of writing as an instance of the problematic interplay I have sketched above. I begin by expanding on notions, some of which are well known, about the novel; next, I will attempt to link these broad generic issues to the subject of parody and then adumbrate the relationship between parody and the novel. Finally, I will try to bring these ideas into focus and apply them to a discussion of Sarduy, and to a reading of a section from De donde son los cantantes (1967), the “Curriculum cubense,” with which this novel, arguably the most significant by this author within a specifically Latin American context, begins. By the end I will hope to have shown that Sarduy’s brand of writing belongs to a species of post-modern literature that is much tamer than it has been made out to be.

II Literary history tells us the novel is a late genre. Compared to tragedy or the epic, both discussed in Aristotle’s Poetics, the novel is recent. Risking a pleonasm or a bad pun, one could say

1

For a good bibliography see (Sarduy: 1999). 312

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the novel’s belatedness constitutes its novelty: generic newness inscribed in its very name. The implications of this belatedness, as is well known, are crucial. Born of Modernity, of the radical disjunction between words and things that Michel Foucault describes as the origin of classical representation, the novel arises as a genre that is both corrective and self-corrective.2 Con­sciousness of the past, so typical of the Renaissance, an acute and dense temporality conceived in linear terms, thus entailed the pangs of historical and antiquarian anxiety. (The word “anachronism” is in fact a Renaissance invention.) For the philological minds of the Renaissance— Erasmus, Valla, Vives, Inca Garcilaso—the past ceased to be a contemporary presence more or less tolerated and became a historical dimension whose limits had to be measured and judged. For these and other reasons one can say that the literature of the Renaissance, in the consciousness of its difference from the past and its judgment of literary history, is the first truly historical literature.3 It is hardly an accident that the birth of the novel—Rabelais and Cervantes the two names that leap to mind—should occur during this time. In seeking to provide a foundation, the novel casts a critical, corrective glance towards its own past, thus making of literary history the culprit of its founding gestures, an evil site of error and delusion. Rabelais assumes the same critical distance toward the epic that Cervantes will cast on romances of chivalry. Both identify in precursors errors of art and thought, allegedly straying from the correct union of sign and meaning that hinder philosophical and moral knowledge and foster delusion, madness. It could be said that from its inception the novel internalized two distinct and simultaneous political gestures—in the sense of overpowering corrective strategies—that we have barely begun to understand.4 The

4 2 3

See (Foucault: 1966). These and other related ideas are discussed in (Quinones: 1972). Here, as throughout this paper, I am assuming an affinity between rhetoric and politics. For a discussion of this idea, see (Veron: 1971, 59-76), and (Valesio: 1976, 1-96). On the relations between knowledge and power see (­Foucault: 1975) and (Foucault: 1976). 313

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first one could call a politics of literary history; the second, a politics of the subject, or individual consciousness. The first, a strategy to achieve power over precursor texts by claiming an ability to correct history; the second, a strategy to attain power over the limits of the subject, consciousness and writing’s deceptions, a strategy that works by unfolding the creative self into mirroring doubles and a protracted use of humor. The labels we traditionally attach to these two strategies are “parody” and “irony,” respectively. Parody is one of several modes of the politics of literary history. One could undoubtedly cite others: imitation, quotation, allusion. But among all these, parody would seem to be the most political, or at least the most overtly so. Indeed, one could speak of terrorism, rather than politics. The power of parody is the reader’s terror, or at least the awe s/he displays before the genre’s demystified knowledge. For parody is the demystified genre par excellence. One thinks of the language Mikhail Bakhtin employs to define it: the parodic text (e.g. Don Quixote) seeks to destroy, by mock inversion, the base model (Amadís of Gaul); parody exaggerates literary conventions in order to destroy them.5 It is a question, then, not just of imitation or benign derision, but of outright destruction. In its desire to correct literary history, parody will go so far as to destroy all anteriority, even if in so doing it means destroying itself. For the crux of parody, which is also the crux of the novel, is the crux of Modernity itself: the tension between, on the one hand, the desire to escape from a successive temporality, from the duration to which writing condemns the literary act and towards the facticity of action and presence, and, on the other, the need to describe that desire in temporal (or linguistic) terms. Perhaps parody is the genre that most violently enacts that general principle that Paul de Man derives from the relationship between literary history and literary modernity: “The more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past.” Translated into our subject, the same formula would give us: “The more parody seeks to overpower and destroy, the 5



See (Bahktin: 1984). 314

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more it creates and is subdued by literary history; and the more it attempts to subvert literary conventions by deriding them, the more it reinforces them.”6 Both the novel and the parodic text share in the enactment of this principle of Modernity, as it were. That is, they share in the enactment of a cycle of destruction and creation, derision and reinforcement of literary conventions that are held to be at once, and paradoxically, both outworn and necessary. I am not of course suggesting that we should confuse novel and parody, genre and mode of discourse, as though they were one and the same, that is, blurring distinctions which, measured against their common origin, are secondary. I am saying that within their own rhetorical requirements, novel and parody share this common structure. And in the case of a parodic novel, that is, of an explicitly parodic novel—since, as I suggested earlier, the genre by itself enacts political gestures that are always potentially parodic—this tension becomes exponentially doubled, the same cycle of creation and destruction, derision and reinforcement of literary conventions, becomes magnified as their political or rhetorical strategies fuse, and corrections, both of the past and of itself, become more violent and thus more convincing. A parodic novel is a two-fisted terrorist.

III It is almost a platitude to refer to Severo Sarduy’s novels as parodies. From Gestos (l963) to Maitreya (1978), Sarduy’s texts span the entire spectrum of parodic correction—from pastiche to collage and allusion, to outright travesty. In an interview in which Sarduy states his penchant for the Baroque, he goes so far as to claim that without parody there would be no Baroque, which one must take to mean that without parody there would be no Sarduy…7 De donde son los cantantes, Sarduy’s second novel, is explicitly parodic in

6 7

See (De Man: 1971, 126). See (González and French: Summer 1972, 41-45). 315

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its mockery of a whole tradition in Latin American literature—the search for cultural identity­and indeed of Latin American thought itself. González Echevarría writes that the novel “deploys the question/ affirmation of origins as a text within an open space, that donde, with and without an accent, as well as within the movement of that son, plural being and Cuban dance, which both confers and subtracts the essence of that illusory—in the sense of theatrical— place of represen­tation.”8 It is this tradition that De donde son los cantantes parodies, assembling a mock-archeology of the structure of Cubanhood, so to speak, a tradition the novel identifies in its ludicrous itemization of the different racial components of Cuban culture—Chinese, Black and Spanish­as sites of error and delusion. Thus, of the novel’s five sections, the middle three are devoted to a burlesque dramatization of each racial component. These sections are preceded by an introduction, the “Curriculum cubense,” a kind of scene of instruction meant to reveal the book’s purpose and followed by a final note that recapitulates the entire novel and repudiates its pertinence to the subject. Of all five sections, none is perhaps more enigmatic, more baffling in its allusive density, than that first chapter. The final note informs us that the purpose of this first section is to introduce the characters.9 Indeed, throughout the “Curriculum” we witness the picaresque wanderings of Auxilio (Help) and Socorro (Mercy), two interjections that function more or less as two protagonists engaged in an ever-frustrating search for the essence of Being: “La pregunta de los sesenta y cuatro mil pesos, la definición del ser” (“The sixty-four thousand dollar question, the definition of being,” 330). Their search includes Socorro’s visit to Domus Dei, the house of God or of Death; Auxilio’s subsequent foray into a modern self-service, where s/he (the characters’ sexual identities are as mysterious as their names) proceeds to distribute old, probably apocryphal, pictures of him/herself to the rest of the customers;

8 9

See (“Memoria de apariencias y ensayo de Cobra”: 1976, 73). See (Neruda: 1999, 329-36). All references to this edition. For the translations see (Fuentes, Donoso and Sarduy: 1972). 316

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and, finally, a section titled “Nueva versión de los hechos” (“A New Version of the Facts”) which narrates the mutual seduction of Auxilio and General. The latter is at one point described, in language borrowed from the first line of Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, as “el blanco de la peluca y la casaca” (“the White man of wig and frockcoat,” 334), an obvious allusion meant to convey that the General stands for the Spanish component of Cuba’s cultural makeup.10 The union between these two strange bedfellows, Auxilio and General, described as a “cosmogonía en ciernes” (“a budding cosmogony,” 335), is said to attract a whole world: “chupó mundo. El binomio Auxilio-General chupó todo lo que había alrededor y, claro está, chupó a una negra y a una china: así se completó el curriculum cubense,” (“it sucked in world. The binomial Help-General sucked in all that was around and, obviously, it sucked in a Black woman and a Chinese woman: thus, was completed the curriculum cubense,” 335). The name given to this new allegorical binomial of desire and Hispanicity, we are told, is “…Auxilio-Concepción del Universo” (“Help-Conception of the Universe”). It includes, we are further told, “la Pelona Innombrable” (“the Unnameable Baldy,” 336), Death itself, as companion to a heroic Spain. Altogether, then, the elements of Cuban culture are four, rather than three: Spain, China, Africa and Death. The four are variously referred to as a “trébol gigante de cuatro hojas” (“giant four-leaf clover,” 336), “animal de cuatro cabezas que miran hacia los cuatro puntos cardinales” (“a four-headed animal that looks toward the four cardinal points,” 336), and “un signo yoruba de los cuatro caminos” (“a Yoruba sign of the four roads,” 336). The final description summarizes the significance of this quartet by means of a discreet allusion to Heidegger: “las cuatro partes de que hablaba el lechosito de la Selva Negra” (“the four parts of which spoke the jack-off from the Black Forest,” 336). “Sí, ¡el único,” (“Yes, the only one”), Socorro is quick to add, “que le puso la tapa al pomo! (“Who put the lid on things,” 336). The allusion to Heidegger at the end of the section attempts not only See (Neruda: 1967, 319); for context, see my edition of (Neruda: 1991).

10

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to ­summarize the preceding mock descriptions, but more importantly to prescribe a structure for the novel, a telos and an intention the rest of the text faithfully follows. In its almost didactic deliberateness, its shameless allusion, the reference to Heidegger and by extension the entire “Curriculum cubense” acquires an allegorical cast that invites decipherment, an allegorical turn prepared for by both the title’s macarronic Latin and Auxilio’s earlier remark concerning “la definición del Ser” (“the definition of Being”). The Cuban foursome, it suggests, stands for, or is a version of, the “cuatro partes” (“four parts”) which the Heideggerian text, arguably the most powerful ontological investigation of our times, is supposed to contain. Granted that Heidegger is brought into Sarduy’s text almost casually and then dropped abruptly, only to be jabbed later at one or two other spots in the narrative. And yet, the strategic position this allusion assumes, plus its attendant allegorical cast, render it more important than it would appear at first sight. This allusion to the “four parts” is none other than a reference to the “quadruple constellation,” what Heideggecr calls the Fourfold (das Geviert), or quadrate of ontology, which in his conception means the gathering of four experiential structures (Earth, Heaven, Man and Gods) as the ontological constitution of the world. It goes something like this. The Fourfold is originally and repeatedly co-present and implicit in all things; all four imply one another always, permanently and in an original sense. Accordingly, to take the example Heidegger himself employs, when I look at a jar I must understand, if I wish to understand the jar as a real thing, that water which flows from it implies the presence of both a water spring (Earth) and rain (Heaven); that water is both a refreshment for mortals (Man) and an offering to the gods (Divinity). Thus, to know the Fourfold is to know what makes up a thing, authentically. I italicize because Heidegger indeed chose to explain the Fourfold in the context of his famous 1950 lecture on “The Thing.” In it he attempts to offer solutions to what he called, using

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a phrase which recalls a similar concept of Lukacs’, “modern man’s transcendental homelessness.”11 Heidegger’s word for this condition of modernity is the German Heimatlosigkeit, in which the German heim stands for both home and fatherland (Spanish patria). The gathering of the Fourfold, then, is a way of recuperating not only the Being of things, but of the fatherland itself, of returning to the place of birth, the donde to which the title of Sarduy’s novel alludes. For Heidegger any one thing is a meeting of the four (das Geviert), an original unity where each and every element implies the other three, as in a gathering of mirrors facing one another, to use another of Heidegger’s images that Sarduy fondly picks up in “Curriculum cubense”: “Ya se van zafando, ya se miran. ¡Qué graciosos!” (“They’re starting to come apart, they’re looking at each other. How cute!,” 336). It could be shown that much of the baffling imagery we find at the end of “Curriculum cubense” has been lifted out of Heidegger’s description of the return to the transcendental home or fatherland. Of course, it would be at once too simple and naive to look upon this allusion as an authoritative key to Sarduy‘s text, an exegesis whereby the once abstruse allegory would be domesticated. More interesting, perhaps, would be to regard such a moment as the navel of the novel, so to speak; the moment when parody and allegory teeter in an undecidable balance between presence and absence, meaning and derision, code and joke. This would be the moment when the text’s political or terrorist gestures are subverted in order to enthrone meaning, Heideggerian meaning no less, thereby invalidating, or at least rendering suspect, all of the text’s pretensions to power. In other words, if the purpose of Sarduy’s The lecture “Das ding” was first published in (Gestalt und Gedanke: 1951) and was subsequently reprinted, with a preface by Heidegger, in (Heidegger: 1954). Since then, the text of the lecture has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, (Heidegger: 1952-53) The same translation was reprinted in (Heidegger: 1953). Sarduy could have used any of these texts or, as is more likely, its French version in (Heidegger: 1958). On the concept of the Fourfold see, in Spanish, (Olasagasti: 1967, 180-182); in English, (Mehta: 1971, 220-223) and (Demske: 1964).

11

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text is to subvert the tradition of the search for Latin American identity, why invoke, at this crucial moment of the novel, Heideggerian hope, especially when this gesture, even if not specifically cultural, drags along with it a whole system of metaphysical complicity? Asking such questions would not be necessary were the allusion to Heidegger not to surface at a point where there occurs a closure of representation, fulfilled by the novel’s remaining sections—the four Heideggerian original elements, four layers of Cuban culture. The fulfillment of such closure ends up privileging retrospectively the allusion to Heidegger and confirms an allegorical structure not unlike that of many traditional texts (Dante’s for example) in which another external, authoritative code structures the narrative’s length and order. It is significant that the novel offers yet another example in miniature of this same structure in “La Dolores Rondón,” the second chapter, where the décima inscribed upon Dolores’ tombstone prescribes the order of the narrative.

IV My conclusions may seem obvious. In De donde son los cantantes Sarduy may have chosen to deny, through parody, the specificity of Cuban (and through it of Latin American) identity and culture, but he appears to broach such critique by invoking a higher authority (Heidegger) and a method of destruction (Cuban parody, or choteo) that dismantles all critical gestures at the very moment when they are posed. What if, one might ask, the very act of denying Cuban specificity through parody turns out to be the most peculiarly Cuban gesture of all? The question at least seems worth asking in view of Sarduy’s heavy reliance, throughout all his novels, upon Cuban slang. And similarly, would not the determination of a mock archeology through Heidegger turn out to be the most metaphysical, the most insidious search for identity of all? The novel’s “Nota final”, which repudiates the pertinence of the preceding sections, would seem to take the extra leap into the nihilism of a total fiction, but the question remains whether that 320

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note is part of the fiction or, instead, an authorial directive, not unlike, one might add, Alejo Carpentier’s deceptively historical postscripts. Sarduy, or his language, is unable to escape the ontological question, that question which all parody, in its violent corrective gestures, seeks to answer in advance, pretending to be always already in control of a demystified knowledge. Sarduy’s writing, in this not unlike that of Juan Goytisolo, another similar post-modern writer, or that of the Tel Quel movement, which at times inspired both, may well be a new species of Romanticism, a far more powerful and more convincing because more violent Romanticism, which believes in the myth of the innocence of becoming; the myth, to use Jonathan Culler’s critique of Tel Quel, “that continued change, as an end in itself, is freedom… and changing constantly liberates us from the demands that could be made of a particular system.”12 And yet, parody seems to be less the final, authentic answer to the question, De donde son los cantantes, less the comforting correction that all modern authors dream of, than the symptom, the painful reminder that out there a question endures and seems worth quarreling about.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984): Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson, Introduction by Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Culler, Jonathan (1975): Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP. De Man, Paul (1971): “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Blindness and Insight: Essays on the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP. Demske, James M. (1964): “Heidegger’s Quadrate and the Revelation of Being,” Philosophy Today, 8, 15-32. Foucault, Michel (1966): Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. — (1975): Surveiller et punir. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. See (Culler: 1975, 251).

12

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— (1976): La Volonté de savoir. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Fuentes, Carlos; Donoso, José; Sarduy, Severo (1972): “From Cuba with a Song,” Triple Cross, tr. Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: E.P. Dutton. González Echevarría, Roberto; French, Jane E. (1972): “Interview: Severo Sarduy,” Diacritics. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press. — (1976): “Memoria de apariencias y ensayo de Cobra”, Severo Sarduy, ed. Julián Ríos. Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos. Heidegger, Martin (1952-53): “La cosa”, tr. Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot. Ideas y Valores (Bogotá), 2, n° 7-8, 661-667. — (1953): “La cosa”, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, n° 40, 3-20. — (1954): “Das ding”, Vorträge und Aufsätze. Neske: Pfullingen, 1954. — (1958): Essais et conférences, tr. André Préau. Paris: Gallimard Mehta, Jarava L. (1971): The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. New York: Harper and Row. Neruda, Pablo (1967): Obras Completas. 3ra ed. aumentada, Tomo I. Buenos Aires: Losada. — (1991): Canto general, ed. Enrico Mario Santí, Madrid: Cátedra. — (1999): Obras Completas. Vol. 1. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg/­ Círculo de Lectores. Olasagasti, Manuel (1967): Introducción a Heidegger. Madrid: Revista de Occidente. Quinones, Ricardo J. (1972): The Renaissance Discovery of Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Sarduy, Severo (1999): Obra completa, Ed. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl . Tomo II, 1841-1877. Paris: ALLCA/ARCHIVOS. Valesio, Paolo (1976): The Virtues of Traducement: Sketch for a Theory of Translation. Semiotica 18. Veron, Eliseo (1971): Ideology and Social Sciences: A Communicational Approach. Semiotica 3. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Bodies of Crime: Becoming Cabrera Infante Sabemos, qué carcajada, que lo lúdico es lo agónico. José Lezama Lima ¿Quién es el ventrílocuo que habla en este mismo momento por mi boca—o más bien por mis dedos? Exorcismos de estilo

H

ow does a writer get to be who s/he is? The mystery of Literature, like Art’s, is no different than Biography’s. The most we can hope for is to trace steps, identify key experiences, draw inferences from a few texts at hand. In the case of Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2004), we do have four decades’ worth of written work and that makes up, for lack of a better term, his “career.” He started out during the 1940s in Havana as a journalist and film critic; later, in the early 1960s, he thrived as chief editor of Lunes, the Cuban Revolution’s earliest, and best, cultural magazine. Soon after that, as author of a host of works—short stories, screenplays, popular music, political journalism, two long narratives that sell as “novels,” apocryphal histories of Cuban violence, musings on cigars… In 1965, when he left Cuba for Europe, he became an exiled dissident soon to turn vocal Castro critic. Yet for all their precision, sundry images like these fail to describe the

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hidden traits that mark internal signs, traits that determine not only his writings, a body in time, but his writing, an atemporal core. I invoke here that much abused term, writing, in the precise sense Roland Barthes gave it—écriture, the morality of form, midway between a thematics and a style. For the question about what kind of writer Cabrera Infante was, perhaps cannot be answered by way of a simple formal inquiry, such as asking what genres he happened to frequent. One must ask what concepts undergird his writing, his relationship with language, and, given his many interests beyond literature, with culture in general. Such are the signs that I call “bodies of crime,” a term I borrow from writer Jacobo Machover, who in turn took it from one of Cabrera Infante’s better-known titles.1 I also call them “bodies” in the dual sense of living matter and agents of transgression, for those are, in the truest sense, the signs that assure a canonical life as figure and institution. And yet, for such bodies to have a voice, one must first trace them here and there in the plethora of details stemming from a long, if accidental, “career.”

I Journalism first determined Cabrera Infante’s vocation. And yet, his own brand of journalism was rendered peculiar by those first circumstances. The very first, typically, was his family’s and particularly his father’s. Guillermo Cabrera López himself had started out writing for El Triunfo, the provincial newspaper in tiny Gibara, in Cuba’s easternmost Oriente Province. Oedipal tensions thus set in from the outset and involved a primal conflict: Dad as both model and obstacle. Psychoanalysis, especially the French version that rivals poetry, has struck up one ingenious name for that conflict: le nom du Père. Translation: nom, the name of the Father, legitimacy, coincides with the Father’s No, rejection. Hence Raymond D. Souza’s comment, in the only extant ­biography of

1

See (Machover: 1996); Machover cites from (Cabrera: 1995). 324

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Cabrera Infante we have, about the author’s early life. While Mom, Zoila Infante Castro, encouraged her eldest’s literary leanings, Father, worried about survival, took a far dimmer view and steered him onto more practical jobs, like editing or translation. Cabrera López himself, while a journalist, was himself only a copy editor, and later, in Havana, rose to city manager of Hoy, the Cuban Communist Party daily. Years later his son’s initiation would also come as newspaper editor.2 Were it not for a series of extraordinary early experiences, such family background would not be significant. The most salient, when he was barely seven, was the one he told writer Danubio Torres Fierro in an interview in the mid-1980s: One morning—April 30 1936—I awoke to see my Mother running towards the back of the house. Behind her ran my brother, half naked—he was three—and behind the two ran two police officers, gun in hand. I cautiously got up, ran out of the house in my briefs and took refuge a few doors down, at a friend of my mother’s. She noticed how scared I was but couldn’t get out of me why. Soon enough she heard noises outside and went out to find out what was happening. I think I, too, went out—or perhaps they told me I did, and I confuse that story with my memory. Actually, the two cops . . . were carrying off my mother. I don’t know where my brother ended up, he had saved my mother’s life: one of the cops was saying that he hadn’t shot her because my brother had stood in front of her. My mother was arrested. Later, my father, who wasn’t home then, went to the jailhouse and turned himself in.3

The raid took place because they thought Dad, local communist commissar, was about to receive a cache of pamphlets for eventual distribution in Gibara on May Day (hence recollection of the exact date). No sooner did the postman hand over the pamphlets to Mom than she noticed the two officers and proceeded 2 3

See (Souza: 1996, Chapter I). All references to Danubio Torres Fierro’s excellent interview are from (­Cabrera: 1999, 1066-1097). 325

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to get rid of the package. Her swift move resulted in no evidence produced and charges dropped at the trial that was brought against them later. For the child, however, the trauma felt far heavier. At first, both parents were thrown in jail for six months, far enough from the kids to cause separation anxiety. What this forced separation must have meant for the seven-year-old one can only imagine, particularly as it was preceded by his witnessing a violent raid on the home by two cops who also attempted on the mother’s life. It matters little whether the child was an actual eyewitness. (That his recollection might be the mother’s he admits as much.) What does matter is that the trauma then made him lose his speech: “No lograba sacarme el porqué del susto” [“She couldn’t get me to say what scared me”]. We can speculate about this onset of aphasia in the frightened child, as recalled by the adult author. Indeed, in losing speech the child returned to a state before speech, a state the author’s second surname (or mother’s maiden name) also happens to reference— infante, the Spanish for infant, Latin infans, meaning “he who does not speak.” Thus, the trauma of speech loss coincides with a symbolic fusion with the Mother, now doubly reinforced: fusing not only with the child’s idea of the Mother, but also literally with the word that names her: Infante.4 It also matters little now—though in time it of course will—whether the child understood the police raid to have been caused by illegal pamphlets, a political literature whose sole possession risked dissolving the family. Indeed, from the same interview we also learn that in the same raid the cops ransacked Father’s library, an experience Cabrera Infante later would go on to describe as, “authorities confusing poetry and politics for the first time in GCI’s life”.5 Be that as it may, the sum-total of these experiences adds up to a peculiar sense of writing as transgression, be it transgression of a political regime, a group’s moral values, or a given society’s language. Such transgression, no different in kind than the Name of the Father—simultaneous model and

4 5

On this theme see (Perrone-Moisès: 1986, 47-56). See (Cabrera: 1999, 32). 326

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obstacle—will become eventually the writer’s conflicted source of desire and risk.

II Childhood trauma thus impacted Cabrera Infante’s linguistic unconscious, also made clear from yet another revelation he made in the same interview: While my parents were in jail another incident took place which had repercussions thirty-five years later. I suffered nightmares, but they occurred when I was awake . . . These hallucinations turned on a single word or a series of numbers. My mother used to sing a song that was full of esdrújulas. It went: “Y bajo plácida ventana gótica / cogió su cítara / y así cantó” [“. . . and under the Gothic window/ it gathered its cythar and thus sang.”] Well then, that “Gothic window” became for me a demonic being, “the Goth.” I would scream: “The Goth is hiding under the bed!”, or “The Goth wants to take me away!,” convinced as I was that this Goth, who came to my room at night, wanted to kidnap me.

Remembering the past, Cabrera Infante projects onto the future, specifically thirty-five years later, onto his 1972 mental breakdown in London, what years later was diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Those of us who marvel at Cabrera Infante’s linguistic genius will recognize that one childhood event as the origin of his “Joycean” style, packed with puns and verbal games associated with the vernacular. Thus, at this traumatic stage, during the child’s forced separation from his parents, an obsession with language sets in. In the face of speech loss and orphanhood, the child reacts with a contrary defense: an obsessive conjuring of the Mother by way of fragments of a stylized song the child associates with her. Such hallucination demonstrates, I believe, an unconscious struggle to control language, a mother tongue the child both conjures and fears, and that language both embodies and bewitches.

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After the parents left jail and returned home, the police raid reverberated further. For one, Cabrera López was literally blackballed in newspapers all over Cuba. “My father was never to find another job as a journalist and instead became an accountant [Spanish, tenedor de libros, literally, book fork].” To which he then added: “I always thought that was a funny job; I couldn’t help associating fork with table; linking it with a book just broke me up.” Thus, by age seven the child knew, or felt, that writing could threaten power. He also learned that writing, literature, bore dangers so grave they threatened death, or else censorship—that version of death writers fear most. Circumstances turned the child into a witness to censorship as embodied by his Father, forced now to turn from the book of letters to a book of numbers; from signs that threaten power to signs deprived thereof. Because letters had been the cause of the police raid, writing was perceived dangerous enough to crack a vocation that Father, a man of convictions, linked to politics. And, as we know too, in Cabrera Infante’s communist family, politics was religion. The adult writer once recalled how “my mother kept two portraits on the wall: Joseph Stalin and Jesus Christ.” All those experiences will have lasting effects. For just as Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz titled one of his books A Cuban Struggle Against Demons, so writer Cabrera Infante would also remark: “My entire life has been the Cuban writer’s struggle against censors.”

III So far, then, we have signs that took place during Cabrera Infante’s “pre-history”: 1936 to 1941, ages 7 to 12. The following stage came between 1942 and 1960, ages 13 to 31, and the scenery changes to Havana. The move from Gibara was from rural to urban setting; from provincial poverty to proletarian oppression; from country farm to city tenement house; from hick drawl to Havana slang—all surface changes concealing the deeper psychological ones that must have added up to a feeling of difference, by which I mean the sense 328

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of loneliness that Octavio Paz once described: “To feel lonely is not to feel inferior but to feel different.” In interviews, particularly anytime his own peculiar literary archeology of Havana speech was brought up, Cabrera Infante would tell how upon arriving there at age 13 he set out to change his accent—literally, to learn to speak—terrified he would be spotted as a guajiro, a country bumpkin. For just as the adjective habanero denotes in Cuba a sense of social refinement, so guajiro in Havana brands people not just as provincial but as low-class, unmannered, ignorant. Thus, the wish to become someone else, what in this formative stage amounts simply to becoming someone, translates into forging a speech pattern that dissolves differences within the adopted community. This new circumstance deserves some thought. For a Havana or city accent to set in, there must first be an acute awareness of a new linguistic code. The analogy with learning a foreign language is clear. It is perhaps significant that while he was mastering a Havana accent, he was also learning English. Handling several linguistic codes within the same language is what Roman Jakobson called “intra-linguistic translation,” and constitutes what Gustavo Pérez Firmat views as a staple of “the Cuban condition.”6 More crucially, perhaps, one other aesthetic effect obtains: to be able to speak, or write, we literally must become an Other, or Others. What Rimbaud and later Borges said about visionary character—“Je est un autre” (“I is another”)—the young Cabrera Infante actually lived through in his early Havana days. Of course, childhood prehistory had already trained him. The first elements of the writer’s mask slowly set in. In referring to masks, I invoke, of course, no special moral connotation, even though masking does of course stake psychological roots. From Freud and Erving Goffman, not to mention Ezra Pound, we know that the ego constitutes an ideal identity stemming from both desires and defenses, and, further, that its psychological projections can and often do assume several figures that are not, in fact, gratuitous: they constitute the writer’s voice, or voices. 6



See (Pérez: 1989); (Jakobson: 1959, 232-239). 329

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The best reading of this entire process might well be Cabrera Infante’s own in “The day my childhood ended,” one of his early short stories. An apparently realistic tale, the narrator describes a peasant family rendered poor and insecure because of the ­father’s physical absence, in stark contrast with rich relatives who reside together in the same town, all viewed through the eyes of the eldest son on the eve of Epiphany. When circumstances force the mother to tell the child that this year there would be no Three Wise Kings, the narrator remarks: “we learn lessons of hypocrisy and we keep on living . . . Many years were left for him to become a man, and so he had to keep faking he was a child.” In the story’s last scene, which shows the child playing with a friend who has asked for toys from the Three Kings, he adds, finally: “To complete the childhood gesture, I fancied myself a warrior, saber in hand, hair tussled and making an angry face.”7 The story can be read not only as witness to Cabrera Infante’s childhood poverty, but as an X-ray of the writer’s emerging vocation. Hypocrite is of course one of the better-known synonyms for actor. “Lessons in hypocrisy” in the child’s social life therefore become “lessons in masking”: fiction, theater, literature. In the footsteps of Cabrera López, the son’s initiation into Havana journalism came as soon as he began working as copy editor and translator of English stories. Success would come by 1954. As he told Torres Fierro: I blame the sore, rather than sorely missed, Miguel Angel Asturias for my starting to write. After reading passages from El señor Presidente (I never could read the whole thing) I decided that I, too, could be a writer and produced a parody (truly, it was pitiful) with the terrible title of “Waters of Remembrance” which I then showed to Carlos Franqui. He in turn suggested that I show it to Antonio Ortega, an exiled Spanish Republican who was then chief editor of Bohemia, Havana’s most popular magazine. To my (and many others’) consternation, and my surprise, the story was accepted and well paid for.

7



Collected in (Cabrera: 1964). 330

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Back then, “well paid for” meant fifty bucks: a small fortune in Republican Cuba for a poor family like his. But for all its irony, the story underscores how this grand entrance into Literature took place through parody—the burlesque imitation of an Other’s words. That the parodied text should have been no less than Miguel Angel Asturias’ El señor Presidente, that canonical Latin American dictator novel, points further to an unconscious drive for mocking temporal or political power, harking back to the trauma he had experienced in Gibara. Lastly, the small fortune he earned for writing that parody must have strengthened the young writer’s narcissism, for it soon opened the doors to mainstream Havana journalism. Barely a year had passed when Antonio Ortega, the same editor who had published Cabrera Infante’s first piece in Bohemia, proceeded to hire him. It was the second in a string of favors, followed later by Ortega asking the budding author to become manager of Carteles, the rival Havana magazine that Ortega had begun editing as of late. It is no exaggeration to say that Ortega then became a surrogate father: professionally secure, untouched by censorship. To top it off, he was from Spain: he owned the Spanish language. As it happens, it was also around this time the young author began signing his first texts as “Guillermo C. Infante,” thus eliding the Father’s last name. Years later he explained the elision as a way of shortening his full name, whose length he hated. But if that was the reason, then why not simply drop the Mother’s? Against the background of Cabrera López’s public censorship and his son’s belated reaction, the elision was meant not so much to avoid influence as to skirt the shame of public censorship. At the same time, it struck out all traces of the shameful cabrera (shepherd, from Spanish cabra, meaning goat, a guajiro job), a further masquerade that the mature writer later would invert by creating, in much of his early fiction, the ironic alter ego of Silvestre. Thus separately, in highlighting the second last name (Infante) the child literally incorporated the mother triumphantly—to recall El Triunfo, the name of his Father’s ill-fated Gibara newspaper that had almost gotten them killed.

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IV Barely five years would go by before learning that chance was not the only culprit in those bodies of crime. Towards 1952 Cabrera Infante was working on the staff of Bohemia and studying nights in Havana’s Journalism School. He was also becoming a distinct “man of letters,” in the sense of pursuing a career either through existing institutions or else creating them outrightly. Havana lore has it that the family’s tiny tenement room soon became a literary salon of sorts where writers and artists, mostly associated with Hoy, the Cuban Communist newspaper, gathered nightly for lively repartee. Indeed, between 1949 and 1951, Cabrera Infante took a personal lead in founding institutions: a literary magazine (Nueva Generación), a cultural society (Nuestro tiempo), and Cuba’s first Cinèmatheque. Souza tells further how in those years Antonio Ortega even made him editor of Bohemia. All that flurry of activity shows more than just the wish to fill an institutional vacuum. It also betrays the will to self-fashion a man of letters, a literary persona. And so, amidst such growing professional security, Cabrera Infante went on to publish yet another short story in Bohemia, the (in)famous “Ballad of Bullets and Bull’s Eyes,” to be collected later in his first collection, Así en la paz como en la guerra (1961). Of its stormy reception he recalled, I had published . . . a short story that contained bad words in English. Generally, the Cuban government—Batista was already in power—and the Interior Ministry were dead set against Bohemia, and so they decided to bring obscenity charges against them. Bohemia’s editor, Miguel Angel Quevedo—washed his hands by blaming the whole thing on the story’s author—me, that is—and I was thrown in jail and brought to trial.

In what constitutes a far more detailed summary of the incident, a later non-fiction piece titled “Obsceno” (1972) describes how the government trial punished him in three ways: 1) a $150 fine, 2) expulsion from Journalism School, and 3) censorship: ­forbidden

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from “publishing again short stories, articles or chronicles” in his own name “for a long time.” As remarked in “Obsceno”: “Perhaps that is where my passion for pen names begins (I’ve written under four at least), or the reason for the many changes my name has undergone.” It was of course naïve for the young author to think, barely seven months after the Batista coup of March 13, 1952, that he could get away with publishing a story full of bad words, even in English. But it was far more naïve, if not downright irresponsible, for the Bohemia editors to believe they could get away with publishing the story, unless it was meant as provocation. While Batista’s was certainly no conservative dictatorship, to publish a story full of bad words was fated to become a threat to his legally insecure regime. By far the funniest passage in “Obsceno” has the bad-mouthed cops screaming the Cuban equivalents of “God­ damned” and “Mother-fucker,” in sharp contrast to the narrator’s silent terror. Ultimately, Cabrera Infante must have thought that putting bad words in a drunk American’s mouth was enough of a distraction to fool the regime’s censors, who on top of being illiterate were just plain lazy. Effects rather than causes held the day. Souza believes that “Cabrera Infante’s five-day imprisonment was a traumatic event that at some level must have made him recall the emotional turmoil of his parents’ 1936 incarceration.” He also remarks that the search for emotional stability in the wake of the trauma made the author take refuge in a first marriage that quickly ended in estrangement and divorce. Yet none of these consequences will be perceived as grave as will censorship of his own signature. Jail time may have been traumatic, but censorship was downright humiliating, and not just because it extended prison into the labor sphere. Given his childhood experiences, the latest run-in with censorship could not help but hark back to his parents’ brush with the law, particularly Father’s. For years, the young writer had tried to elide (or hide) his father’s last name, both shame and model; now fate, a return of the repressed, made him coincide once more with his parents’ name, literally becoming a writer who dared not say his name.

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V “You can’t mess with the Law!” Such was the presiding officer’s admonition to the narrator of “Obsceno” as he threw the writer in jail, thus summing up the moral of this latest body of crime. Whatever the origin of “Ballad of Bullets and Bull’s Eyes” may have been, the story did end up causing legal trouble. First, by resonating with the inmost details of the family drama. Second, by clashing with the Law, the same Law that Batista himself had broken with his coup seven months earlier. And yet, far from intimidating the young writer, the legal trauma undergone in 1952 ended up reinforcing the same transgressive poetics. If cautious Cabrera López had given up writing in favor of anonymous, or indeed silent, editing, the intrepid Cabrera Infante learned ways to play with the Law as subterfuge to keep publishing. He found hope, once again, in prodigious Antonio Ortega, by then chief editor of Carteles. “Infante,” he said to him soon after leaving jail, “I want you to take over the film page.” Years later, “Infante” recalled that invitation: Nothing could please me more: at least I could earn a living with my first writing vocation. But there was a but: my column had to be anonymous, or signed with a pen name . . . As you can see, it was a daring act on the part of Ortega to name me film critic. I responded with a parallel action, creating my pen name out of letters in my name. And so, in December 1953 I published my first film review, an overview of that year’s films signed by G. Caín.

Out of the first syllables of his two last names he thus forged Caín his most famous pen name, a biblical curse real-life enemies would eventually use against him. Clear in meaning yet ultimately secondary, the new name issued finally the mask that had forged during all those formative years: a warring persona, armed with “sabre” and “angry face,” that the child had learned to make in that distant “lesson in hypocrisy”. Years later, he confirmed the signature gesture in his own “Portrait of the Critic as Cain,” the

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imaginary biography he attributed to Caín, alter ego, in A Twentieth Century Job (1965), his collection of film reviews, where he describes the emblem that stood for the infamous writer’s voice: On his desk he had a small calamine statue that had a missing head: it was a swordsman, and this made of his accident a metaphysical occasion . . . the small hero had totally lost his head, which must have once been beautiful, curly medium sideburns and bicycle moustache: foot forward and the other ready to go; one arm wielding a sword correctly (for it was a sword, neither foil nor sabre) behind the garrison while the other hand held the sword’s point peevishly and his pinky held out on top of the sharp blade.

The Torres Fierro interview further refers the invention of Caín to an action “parallel to” Antonio Ortega’s act of defiance,” his sponsor’s decision to keep him hired. Thus, Caín may have been sly and inventive; but above all he was daring, astute: a fighter swordsman. Through him not only was film reviewing reinvented; he was also reinventing, and circumventing, the Law by making the culprit’s body invisible: bodies of crime rendered by an Invisible Man. Lastly, in melding two syllables from the two parents into a single pen name, he had fashioned a homegrown symbol whose punishment, alas, fitted the crime. Thus, in the new signature accursed by theology, Caín, his brethren’s assassin, exits Paradise on his own. Strange prophecy, indeed. Eventually the mature Cabrera Infante will choose permanent exile over permanent censorship or anonymity.

VI The censorship and imprisonment to which Cabrera Infante was repeatedly exposed explain how a book like A Twentieth Century Job would come to be. I refer specifically to Fidel Castro’s 1961 shutdown of Lunes, the cultural magazine Cabrera Infante had begun editing in 1959 with Castro’s takeover. As Cabrera Infante told in the essay “Bites from the Bearded Crocodile,” the 335

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new regime maneuvered the shutdown as lynchpin of a wholesale campaign to take over Cuban culture. Two years after Castro’s dictum in “Words to Intellectuals”—“Against the Revolution nothing; within the Revolution, everything”—publishing A Twentieth Century Job meant committing yet another transgression, creating yet another body of crime. In 1952 the Law forbade him from putting proper names to published work; nine years later, yet another Law forbade Caín and his generation from making public use of political rights, including dissent. And if, eleven years before, Cabrera Infante had hedged the Law through a pen name, now he reacted to total censorship by attributing an imaginary biography to that same made-up name, thus showing, as he once remarked, that in such regimes “the only way a critic could survive was as a fictional entity”: A “Cuban struggle against censors,” indeed. And yet, it would be ludicrous to compare both circumstances—Batista’s bumbling dictatorship and Castro’s Final Solution. At stake was nothing less than the uncanny recurrence of the repressive horizon that Cabrera Infante’s writing was intent on transgressing. But it was not, to be sure, a mere accident; it was, rather, the condition of possibility. Nothing less than a repressive horizon explains the various discursive mechanisms of this writer’s language, his parody, transgressive strategies that add up to a unique style and a defiance of power. By the time A Twentieth Century Job was published in Havana in 1963 Cabrera Infante had left Cuba as cultural attaché to the Brussels embassy. And it was there, in his reluctant exile in northern Europe, that he completed the manuscript of Vista del amanecer en el trópico, the first title he gave to the manuscript that ultimately won Seix Barral’ 1964 Biblioteca Breve Prize. But for the text to be as transformed as it was, crisis, this time decisive, had to take place. In July 1965, upon receiving news of his mother’s illness, Cabrera Infante flew back to Havana only to learn of her death upon arriving. Losing Mother would play against the child’s neardeath experience by plunging him into another symbolic loss, as if the aphasia that had struck him at age seven recurred, strangely. 336

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Such a latter-day version of “couldn’t get out why he was scared” would not be made public until three years later in an interview with Argentine journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez where he broke publicly with the Castro regime. Under normal circumstances, homecoming after a time abroad, plus returning for a mother’s funeral, would have rendered the prize winner a measure of professional recognition; instead, multiple circumstances produced loss. To the loss of Mother—primary source of language and identity—was added loss of Nation, not to mention loss of Havana, its charming capital. Months before choosing permanent exile in Europe, a strange exile at home had begun after burying Mother. Cuba was no longer Cuba. It was something else—its doppelgänger, a robot changed by an experimental accident, a genetic freak, a switch in chromosomes . . . In an incredible Hegelian twist, Cuba had made a great leap forward but had fallen back . . . In Cuba, through a strange perversion of praxis, poverty had been socialized.

The writer forcibly stayed put in Havana until October 3, 1965—though on at least one occasion before departure cops had forced him down from the return plane with no explanation. Clearly, he felt then, he had landed in jail again, though a far worse than the one endured at the hands of Batista’s foulmouthed thugs. Once again, censorship kicking at the door, only now the thirtysix-year-old knew he could end up like many of the friends he saw trapped there: “Spiritually decrepit, they gave their acknowledgement and then died wagging their political tails.”8

VII Many were the factors that made Cabrera Infante go on to the first version of Vista del amanecer en el trópico and turn it into Tres tristes tigres. From the X-ray we have so far examined we may gather that the revisions shot through that terrifying four-month 8



The entire experience is contained in (Cabrera: 2013). 337

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prison experience, whose total effect made the author incorporate a recovered Mother tongue. Loss of Mother thus coincided with loss of language, the official attempt to stamp out the writer, and a grave move that harked back to the censorship policies the regime had begun as early as 1961. Cabrera Infante’s deepest crisis—to which he alluded often—was therefore the intimate context in which Vista became TTT. As is well known, as a sequel to Así en la paz como en la guerra, his first collection of short stories, the winning text alternated scenes of Havana nightlife with those of urban warfare. In turn, TTT, the revised novel, became, a “gallery of voices.” “Upon arriving in Madrid,” Cabrera Infante said once, “I learned that Spanish censorship had suppressed publication of my book in toto… Thus, I began working feverishly (Homeric phrase or phase) on the entire rewriting and conversion of Vista, an ironic title, into TTT, made up of words.” He also told them how the book, rewritten as it was, was censored yet again by Franco’s inquisitors. Only after making the twenty-two cuts the censors had “suggested” (“the best editing job I’ve ever seen: the censor turned creator”) was publication assured.9 The author’s response was not, in fact, altogether different from the one given years earlier in A Twentieth Century Job. For TTT was, in effect, yet another masquerade. Indeed, each time it was called a “novel,” Cabrera Infante countered, alluding to Cervantes’s understated description of Don Quixote, that it was only a “book.” Not once did he deny, however, that, like Don Quixote, it is a labyrinthine book and therefore an heir to Borges: a traitorous, demonic compilation of unpublishable texts, documents, unauthorized recordings, and private confessions put together, indiscreetly, by a certain Silvestre; that is, a veritable “edition” that attempts to capture scenes from the lives of a group of young Cubans during the fateful summer of 1958, as their fun world was about to end. Up until 1963, Cabrera Infante’s fiction had played with a host of different narrators—Silvestre’s poses in the first stories, Caín’s film reviews, or else the latter’s

9

For the details of this rewriting see (Cabrera: 2010, 15-32). 338

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imaginary biography in A Twentieth Century Job. Beginning with TTT, however, the magnum opus becomes an opéra bouffe, either through the rival pens of its implied authors, or the various judicial voices of Vista (in its eventual, and final, 1972 version), or even yet, the extensive dialogue between narrator and protagonist in Infante’s Inferno. If the writer who had fled Havana for Brussels in 1965 was changed, surely it must have been because part of him had died during that fateful retour au pays natal. I am not of course referring to Caín, whose own funeral had occurred two years before when A Twentieth Century Job was first published. The beginning of exile proper harkened the birth of a literally Other writer whose later work outlines a contrary movement. On the one hand, he incorporates the Mother tongue—witness TTT; on the other, he acknowledges the tongue’s disappearance. Thus, at thirty-six, having internalized the recurring effects of a censorship-prison cycle, the only Law still awaiting transgression would be language itself, the one labyrinth Cabrera Infante would travel from then on guided by two blind figures: Exile and Freedom. Exile, especially, became the price paid for being what he became. “Distance from Cuba does not harm me,” he told Torres Fierro in the same interview. “It actually does me good. Over there I never would have been able to write TTT, not even in the relatively free Havana of 1959. I needed not only distance but the certainty that the light on that candle was definitely out and that only through literature could I recover that past.”

VIII A charming paradox there is: beginning in 1963, with A Twentieth Century Job, Cabrera Infante’s writing became known for its masterful humor. TTT confirmed it; and so did numerous essays, like the many collected in Mea Cuba. Amidst a virtual avalanche of novels redolent of somber sociological claims, the socalled “Boom of the Latin American novel,” Cabrera Infante’s 339

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would play a dissonant note. And yet, those who underscore the humor of that writing, especially the “book’s,” fail to mention that its playful nature is rooted in a deep-seated agony bordering on nihilism. Superficial readings of this paradox would render it all as a simple clash of charm and resentment. I hope to have shown, however, that such humor became available at the cost of a manifold agony stemming from conflicts with family, context, culture, politics, national history, language, and of course himself. And yet, agonies like these are not exclusive to Cabrera Infante. They are part and parcel of the best writing, the best art, the best culture. How Cabrera Infante’s work will be judged in the future nobody knows. I only know that without his writing the crucible of our Hispanic reality—in its broadest possible historical and imaginary senses—would have been greatly impoverished. And that our language would no longer be the same were it not for that poor kid deciding to end his childhood by “making a furious face” so the rest of us could laugh right along with him.

Bibliography Cabrera Infante, Guillermo (1964): Así en la paz como en la guerra. La Habana: Ediciones R. — (1992): A Twentieth Century Job. London: Faber & Faber. — (1995): Delito por bailar el chachachá. Madrid: Alfaguara. — (1999): Infantería, ed. Nivia Montenegro and Enrico Mario Santí. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. — (2010): Tres tristes tigres, ed. Nivia Montenegro and Enrico Mario Santí. Madrid: Cátedra. — (2013): Mapa dibujado por un espía. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. Jakobson, Roman (1959): “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” On Translation, ed. R. Brower. Harvard UP. Machover, Jacobo (1996): El heraldo de las malas noticias: Guillermo Cabrera Infante (ensayo a dos voces). Miami: Ediciones Universal. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo (1989): The Cuban Condition. Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature. Cambridge UP. Perrone-Moisès, Leyla (1986): “L’Enfant dans la glace,” Cahiers Confrontation, No. 6. Souza, Raymond (1996): Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds. Austin, TX: UTexasP. 340

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I am Alive

“

Estoy vivo,” the story of a good cop who comes back from the dead to do the same job with super-powers aided by a young angel sidekick, is currently the most popular primetime show on Spanish TV. The show, rife with supernatural stuff, knocked off “Cuéntame cómo pasó” (Tell me How it Happened), which, for over two decades straight, peered realistically into the foibles of one multi-generation Madrid family during the long transition from Franco’s dictatorship to parliamentary democracy, and beyond. The transition in viewer-taste this shift points to seems obvious: from one political system to its opposite, from realism to spectrality, from hard-and-fast facts to ghostly lore. Indeed, spectrality is alive and well… in Spanish TV at least. Spain’s national TV is hardly the only venue where this cultural shift is occurring. More than thirty years after the premiere of Ghost Busters, specters are haunting not only Europe but the entire planet, as if somehow the turn towards globalization carried a parallel sympathy for ambiguous spectrality and its dialectic of presence-absence. Thus, and to ask questions about the most recent debates taking place today across Europe, where does political power physically reside today? Is it in Brussels, seat of the EU, which dictates the old continent’s most significant political and economic decisions, or else in the ancient capitals of Paris, Berlin, Madrid or Athens, whose budgets are now subject to approval by distant impersonal commissions? The debate, as we can guess, is fueled by the haunting of a transnational spectral State that is, or would be, far removed from 341

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actual living territories and peoples, yet controls lives and nations. With all those facts in mind, it is hardly an exaggeration to parody Marx’s catchy prophecy to claim again that a specter is indeed haunting Europe: the specter of globalization. And yet, the advent of spectrality is hardly new, certainly older than the 1848 Communist Manifesto, which opens with that prophecy. Borges once famously claimed that “fantastic tales”— by which he meant, in good measure, ghost stories— were “as old as fear itself.” Way before literature, there were ghosts; or, at least, our belief in them. Yet here, too, we must clarify, as indeed the essays gathered here do, that “spectral theory,” such as it is, cannot be reduced to a gothic discourse whereby supernatural spirits, as revenants, actually return from the dead to haunt the living; or else, to the spiritualist phenomena that during the late 19th century was all the rage in both social discourse and popular culture. For even when individual concepts emerging from that spiritualist experience (the revenant, haunting) do help us understand spectrality, the spectral encompasses materialist evidence that exceeds the metaphysical speculation that spiritualism, among other belief systems, had proposed. Beginning perhaps with the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis, a discipline and mode of knowledge whose apogee happens to coincide in time with spiritualism, psychic experience became viewed as the enigmatic (uncanny) interplay between past and present, presence and absence, such that present anxiety, for example, turns out to repeat past repressed trauma, much in the same way that desire, too, results from relived imaginary pleasure. As both anxiety and desire, pain and pleasure, become decentered, so too does present experience succumb to unconscious mechanisms that we call “phantasmatic,” spectral. Spectrality, then, turns out to be less a belief system in the persistence of life after death than a pedagogy of perception, a method to read life and experience, including the experience of death, the death of others and ours. If today spectrality, or as I prefer to call it, “ghost studies,” haunts us, it is the result of the longrange, largely unconscious effects that our indispensable media and technology is foisting today upon the world’s populations. 342

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We immerse o ­ urselves daily in virtual realities that reproduce and exacerbate the same effects of psychic fantasy, effects that subjects await, look forward to, as actual experience. “To dream, phantomize, virtualize”: Serge Tisseron’s programmatic title, put in service of the most comprehensive discussion of spectral phenomena I know, provides a neat summary of the tangled web that spectrality addresses, be it in literary and cultural studies, psychoanalytic practice, critiques of technology (so necessary in this age of social networks) and, one hopes, the future of political analysis.1 Persánch and Silva’s collection of first-rate essays on spectrality is the first of its kind in Hispanic and Lusophone Studies.2 It gathers a generous variety of approaches to spectrality—not always in agreement with my own views, I should add, which goes to show the extent to which this burgeoning field is still a matter of debate. In it, readers both virginal and veteran will find essential arguments and bibliography, lucid introductions, and directions for future research. As their former mentor and guide in the Ghost Studies seminars I was privileged to direct at the University of Kentucky, I am proud to help launch this important scholarly adventure. And I am also proud to utter in this last paragraph the fateful words with which I would end those uncanny spectral journeys: “MAY THESE IDEAS HAUNT YOU FOREVER!”.

Bibliography J.M. Persánch and Fabrício Silva (2020): Espectros del Poder: Representaciones y discursos de resistencia en literatura y cine en los siglos XX-XXI. Madrid: Editorial Pliegos. Tisseron, Serge (2012): Rêver, fantasmer, virtualiser. Du virtuel psychique au virtuel numérique. Paris: Dunod.



1 2

See (Tisseron: 2012). See (Persánch and Silva: 2020). 343

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Hermes Unbound: The Art of Ricardo Pau-Llosa He sang the story of the deathless gods and of the dark earth, how at the first they came to be, and how each one received his portion. “Homeric Song of Hermes” These are the arguments of a life earned by reflection. “The Mastery Impulse”

L

ike many good things in my life, the art of Ricardo Pau-Llosa was a late discovery. Late, but not untimely. The poet and I had had contact twenty years before, when Maestro Aurelio de la Vega— until his recent passing, one of the great classical composers— first introduced us. But it was only years later that I backpedaled into his work, and gathered a truncated first reading, by way of a side interest, when I began translating into Cuban Spanish Cuba-themed poems written by Anglo poets. I started with Stevens and Crane, who famously penned such works, but almost as an afterthought began doing some of the excellent Cuban American poets who write in English, and concentrated on Ricardo’s two early books, Cuba and Vereda tropical. I was led at the time by haunting lines like the ones that evoke his childhood exile: “My ‘mameyes’ were the snows of Chicago/and the sounds that were not, could not be/words coming out of every mouth.” Thus,

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I set out to retrieve “sounds that were not,” the Cuban Spanish words that never made it into verse. One crazy question framed that project: how would English Cuba-themed poems sound in Cuban Spanish? It was reframed by yet another, far wackier doubt that rendered the whole thing suspect: is there even such a thing as Cuban Spanish? To this day, the answers escape me. But I do know that my later, broader acquaintance with Pau-Llosa’s art enabled me to know a major living poet, regardless of language or theme. Nine volumes and forty years of poetry made Pau-Llosa major. Not just out of volume and length of service. It’s the power and strangeness of the language in those books, which owes little to his native Spanish, and over the years has evolved a unique vision and style. The strangeness comes from a chiseled verse that conjures a vocabulary wealth, a syntax often so tortured, and an allusive texture so rich, that they defy coherence, delay sense but in the end render luminous apothegms that border on the oracular. Making few concessions, his is a language of cosmopolitan urbanity, learned elegance and aesthetic dignity, even when it deals with the everyday, as is often the case, or kids around with frivolous anecdotes, as the trickster in Pau-Llosa is wont to do. Such would be the essence of lyric he has mastered over the years, culminating in the forthcoming Fleeing Actium. The cadence of Pau-Llosa’s verse can wax Shakespearean; his extended metaphors, grounded in a very personal context, of Rilke and Stevens; Walcott and Lezama Lima haunt the baroque echoes of his Caribbean visions—and all that, rising in a language harbored within an archive of world poetry stored since acquiring English as a child. The linguistic strangeness I invoke can only be compared, I believe, with prose masters like Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov or Alejo Carpentier, or with two mid twentieth-century poets, Borges and Brodsky— all five “extraterritorial” natives of tongues foreign to the ones each ultimately chose as literary destiny. The more reason to restate the obvious: Pau-Llosa is very much an American poet who writes superb English verse, tout court. And I say this while vigorously opposing any view to pigeon-hole his work as “Cuban American” or “Latino” that 346

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would acquiesce to that mild form of discrimination that too often limits the importance of emerging U.S. poets. In turn, the right to U.S. citizenship hardly strips the poet of a native identity. To quote from the interview that appears in this issue: “An artist’s ‘Cubanness’ or ‘Mexicanness’ is not determined by palm trees, maracas, pyramids, or sarapes, but by how they use metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and other tropes in their visual thought.” And then there’s Pau-Llosa’s sheer volume of work: not only those nine collections but a good amount of prose, to this day uncollected, devoted mostly to art criticism that would easily make up a goodly tome. Hence, added diversity of theme and obvious merit, one is left with the three requisites of Paul Valéry’s definition of a classic: quantity, variety, excellence. Centuries before Valéry, Cervantes had called Lope de Vega, his contemporary polymath, as “monstruo de la Naturaleza” (monster of Nature) to describe the same phenomenon. Because there certainly is something monstrous about Pau-Llosa, well beyond the surface issue of linguistic mastery. I mean monstrous here in the original sense of “deviating from the stated order of nature” that Dr. Johnson, closer to Cervantes than to Wikipedia, once elucidated, to reference the sheer excess of his production: exuberance as a brand of teratology. An exuberance that, one might add, goes well beyond his art. Step into the poet’s lair, which houses a world-class art collection— walls teeming with canvasses, large and small; room corners camouflaged by sculptures, old and new; mantels overflowing with objects, strange and familiar— and take the personal tour— Bacardí in hand, Padrón in snout—to experience in body the sort of monstrous event I refer, the kind of awe one associates with the cornucopia of a Picasso, or the breadth of a Richard Taruskin. Indeed, monstrosity, exuberant or not, happens to have been in Pau-Llosa’s mind, in relation to himself or at least his persona, in at least one important poem of Man (2014), arguably his most original book. In each of its seventy poems of this book the trappings of Christian theology launch a kaleidoscope of self-caricatures— the title’s “Man.” Thus, “Monstrance Man,” the seventeenth, exploits the homonym monstrance-monstrous: 347

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As a boy he had trouble speaking, past three before a real word preened from his lips. And for the longest time, malaprops haunted him. His older sister did what she could to train the bitten seal of   his brain to twirl the red ball on the nose of eloquence, and his grandmother tired of   insisting he utter the names of   toys or foods — for every desire was coded — and gave him whatever he grunted and pointed to. O, the man then a boy thought, when I tower among them I should invent my own speech and leave others empty and afraid that they did not know it, could not ask or plead their case in the one tongue that mattered. I shall have them look upon the simplest things, the man then a boy thought, and fill up with stolen awe, and point with their faces, their pupils wide as blackened coins, and hope with all the revenue shattered heart-glass can muster that someone had grasped their need as need and not as the monstrous coupling of   sounds in a trance of whims. Then, the grind of   his teeth vowed, then the plazas of my city will fill with my name, and their blood will matter as little to them as to me.

Here we have one of many texts where Pau-Llosa reflects upon extraterritoriality, his and others’, linguistic, or not. First, ­bouncing memories of his sister’s preening of actual words and the 348

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doting grandmother’s short-circuit, a counterpoint to which the grown “Man,” the book’s recurring mask, attributes the freakish origins of artistic fate. And then, as a result, the Zarathustra-like invention of a speech so unique that it bars response, save for those silent cues of “stolen awe” that forces presumed interlocutors to grasp “their need as need and not/as the monstrous coupling/of sounds in a trance of whims.” The end-result of this Man’s identity, then, would be to pit monstrance—a sacred or transcendent offering, as in the Christian ostensory—against the monstrous, here defined as doggerel, metaphor for any negative aesthetics. If, on the one hand, transcendent monstrance breaks out of aesthetic media, including language, to move souls, monstrous, on the other, is condemned to dissipate. In the end, having reached the immediacy of monstrance, Zarathustra cannot help embodying the monstrous himself, as he boasts indifference to human suffering. Dr. Johnson would agree with such redefinitions: true monstrosity would be the banality of evil; monstrance, well beyond “the stated order of nature,” surpasses it, even when its producer, too, happens to be a monster. Monstrance makes the good visible; monstrous shows up the ugly and evil. Man, Pau-Llosa’s seventh book, is of course an exercise in self-mockery by a mature, self-confident poet, and we have here, rather than a definitive ars poetica, the contours, perhaps the moral limits, of a poetics, one of many that recur throughout all the nine volumes. By contrast, Cuba (1993) and Vereda tropical (1999), the two volumes I backpedaled into, had preceded Man by two decades. While those two books had plunged into a Cuban imaginary, Man went on to expand personal mythology by stripping it of native details. Thus, working through trappings of Cuban identity— from island geography to boleros, Little Havana to airline corridors, José Martí to Tropicana—allowed an abstract, generic Man to emerge. Not that the Cuban theme would be done with— it recurs in many poignant poems of the later books—-but working through that native stage does seem to have cleared the way for the more random philosophical musings that make up The Mastery Impulse, Parable Hunter, and The Turning. That is, the “Cuban 349

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interlude” appears to have been a necessary probe of native culture before proceeding with the ongoing inquiry—broader, less localized—into philosophical themes, including art, that is Pau-Llosa’s trademark. You might note my preference for invoking art, rather than poetry, in relation to Pau-Llosa. It derives from convictions strewn among his ekphrastic poems, not to mention acquaintance with his parallel métier as curator and art critic. Again, from Hill’s interview: “Ekphrasis is a term used to describe art that is inspired by other art forms, as, say, a musical composition inspired by a poem, or a painting inspired by music, or poetry that is triggered by painting. In my case, the latter.” Studying as I usually do those poems alongside Google Images, itself an education, has made me realize the centrality of art in Pau-Llosa’s intellectual horizon. For just as the early poems about Cuba surpass folklore to render moral arguments about historical fate, the ekphrastic poems use descriptive rhetoric to reflect upon the mysteries of art, mimesis, or else to elaborate far more intimate musings, such as the ways in which aesthetic experience compensates for a life of exile. Access to art and its practice thus become exercises in freedom, as shown in the plethora of subjects and themes, occasions all for “the arguments of a life/earned by reflection.” This, my second epigraph, I take from Sorting Metaphors, Pau-Llosa’s first book, at the end of the poem “Trash,” as if wishing to broadcast early his belief that anything is game for poetic reflection. And so it is. I’ve already mentioned part of the repertoire in the Cuba poems and provided a glimpse of the huge ekphrastic gallery. Tour the rest of the canon and you will also encounter such sublime topics as bars, car washes, gardens, truck tires, cigar smoke, opera arias… In each, the initial sensation or material support— trash, tires, arias—launches a reflection at the end of which we are struck by an aphorism, an apothegm, or as Pau-Llosa prefers, a parable, thus making the reader marvel at the extraction of such wisdom. “Where shall wisdom be found?” the question that vexed Job, and later my Yale teacher Harold Bloom, seems also to be at the heart of Pau-Llosa’s random musings. Reading him for the 350

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delight of his parables I have often thought how much his work reminds me of religious texts like Pascal’s Pensées, or Loyola´s Spiritual Exercises. Which makes me wonder: could the poet have absorbed the structure of such exercises from the Jesuit primary education he gathered both in Havana and Florida? Louis Martz wrote in 1954 a whole book showing how “the poetry of meditation” of a John Donne followed strictly the ­Loyola-inspired structure of “a particular situation, through analysis of the situation, and finally some sort of resolution of the ­problems which the situation has presented.” Of course, Pau-­ Llosa is not Donne, his themes neither moral nor theological, although he does indulge frequently in metaphysical and spiritual musings that make a reader like me think of that link. That we are dealing with a poetry of meditation with deliberate structure alerts us as well to a dialectical trait: Pau-Llosa is not a poet of sensation, in the sense of a single impression whose verbal equivalent is self-contained. Pau-Llosa and haikus don’t mix. His are a philosophical mind and pen that cannot help pursuing initial impressions as logical, extended narratives whose derived endpoints may well be as puzzling for him as for his reader. Such poetics of inquiry, so to speak, explains, I think, Pau-Llosa’s fascination for Edmund Husserl, and for phenomenology in general, even though Heidegger’s teacher, unlike his more famous disciple, never did write about poetry and confined his inquiry to what he called die Sache (the things). It is that pursuit of analysis, or logical narrative, to the bitter end of things, material situations, regardless of resolution, that also explains Pau-Llosa’s penchant for ekphrasis, a rhetorical grid that provides stable pictorial equivalents to the moral despairs of a Donne yet harbors enough evidence to destabilize any modern’s amateur viewing. Just survey the canon’s books five through eight and you will identify the wealth of themes and method I am describing. Nowhere more evident, though, than in Fleeing Actium, the ninth and latest book, in press as of this writing. For one, it is Pau-Llosa’s longest book—112 poems as opposed to the average 30 in earlier ones—and the most variegated, as if by it the mature poet had 351

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wanted to provide a summa of themes and objects (Sache, though here he calls them Res), all subjected to his customary exercises and with the virtuoso daring of a skilled sonneteer. Thus, ekphrases of both Western and Asian art (Edo, Hokusai, Hiroshige) and pastiches of apocryphal Buddhist sermons meet poignant elegies of both family members and an expired era (as in “Last Quarter of the 20th Century in Miami”.) Structured in five sections (“Ekphrases,” “Edo,” “Belief,” “Res,” and “Genius Loci”) the book proceeds, funnel-like, from aesthetic distance to local immediacy, with a recurring use of the sonnet form to provide a semblance of unity. Where Pau-Llosa’s formidable monstrous imagination does show most daring perhaps is in the series of eleven dramatic monologues of figures, historical or not, in dialogue that he sets up in the first third. Thus, “Helen to Bathsheba” is followed by “Bathsheba to Helen,” “Homer to Moses” by “Moses to Homer,” etc. A compendious assemblage of figures, historical events, art forms, texts, anecdotes, Fleeing Actium thus reaches for a totalizing encyclopedic form, radically different from the earlier books yet no different, in range if not in content, from modernist Gesamtkunstwerke like Pound’s Cantos, Neruda’s Canto General, or de Campos’s Galaxias. The German comes, of course, from Wagner, who coined the term for totalizing art forms (like his own Ring Cycle) that synthesize diverse media, but a term that eventually came to describe encyclopedic texts, ranging from Dante’s Commedia, Whitman´s Leaves of Grass, or Mallarmé’s Coup de dès. Unable to provide further illustration, I opt instead, as road to a conclusion, for reading the title poem as microcosm.

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Fleeing Actium   New Year’s, Port Largo  for Robert Nazarene  

Summer on the backs of winter sirens the rich.  By late morning the canal regains its calm  after yachts and jet skis have shed   their docks for the Gulfstream.  From shore  the festive clusters, wreathed in beer, ignore  our witness and the sunken life for pleasure’s bread.  Banners stroke the distant sand where helms  brace against the sky, a melding in which  three dozen craft engage into a form.   What golden day can truly presage storm,  this nest of noise in a cell’s blind horizon?  Naxos before the courtship and slaughtered maze,  when no Before held sway over the known  and Now no Pharos yearned in ledger’s trace.  By 5, with hungers shorn, a flybridge boat  heads east and pulls a raft in tow.  The rising tide reclaims by ancient rote. 

True to form, three sections—situation, analysis, resolution— structure the witness’ exercise one bright New Year’s morning, an exceptional summery day in winter at the paradisal Florida Keys, as neighbors’ yachts stream out to sea and rowdy crowds gather at the shore. Yet never content with surface appearance, Pau-Llosa’s speaker wants to pierce through Paradise to forecast the inevitable coming storm—et in Arcadia ego—, likely as a defense against certain disappointment. The circumstance—one “golden day” in a strait canal in pursuit of open waters—makes the learned speaker recall a historical analogy: Mark Anthony and Cleopatra’s flight from Actium before Octavian’s navy (September 30 B.C.), an escape from North to South—Naxos to Pharos—that, unforeseen by the famous lovers, would end eventually in inevitable tragedy. Analogy thus posed, at day’s end another sumptuous yacht comes

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into view, heading east out to sea, while pulling “a raft in tow.” Is this spectacle the true flight? Regardless, it derives a law (“ancient rote”) from the timely epilogue: the unavoidable “rising tide” will always reclaim its own. Pau-Llosa subtly rewrites through History. Hardly content with Longfellow’s scanty moral (“The day returns, but nevermore/returns the traveler to the shore”), he inquires into the enigma of cyclical change, cycles that rule not just Nature, but History as well. That History is involved appears not only in the speaker’s learned archive; the apparition of the tiny raft hauled by the sumptuous yacht, out to sea and away from land, reminds painfully, for refugees like Pau-Llosa or me, the fate of desperate island migrants, too often repatriated, repudiated, by either Law’s or Nature’s “rising tide.” And so goes the macrocosm—the ninth book, all nine books. For what can Nature’s cycles, invariably captured in Art, East or West, or pseudo-Buddha’s sermons, or dialogues among the famous, or the merest anecdotes, too often ignored for their parabolic value, their wisdom, teach us? By what method, what structured exercise, what “mastery impulse,” can we learn what human experience is all about? Future biographers of Pau-Llosa might note, finally, that publication of Fleeing Actium coincides in time with the poet’s move from Miami to the Florida Keys, and therefore that the title metaphor could well be the cipher for the retreat from the city—the Horatian beatus ille: Happy are the few..,—and therefore a retreat from both Aktion, the original Greek spelling, and Actaeon, the tragic mythical figure for strayed, or excessive, desire. And yet, will trading Miami for Keys open doors to greater knowledge? Is it here where Wisdom shall at last be found? And wherefore Hermes? We forget that he is not only the proverbial messenger of the Gods. Hermes is one of the two most prominent mythical poets. His rival is Orpheus, Eurydice’s widower, but unlike his sad colleague, Hermes, the most human and least divine of the gods, happily carries on the affairs of the world, yet cares for the ­netherworld. 354

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He first gained fame as a cattle thief, and was pardoned once or twice by Apollo, his doting father, when seduced by the charm of his lyre. “Slayer of oxen, trickster, busy one, comrade of the feast,” went that address to his wayward son, only to add, upon melting at his sounds: “this song of yours is certainly worth fifty cows.” All too human, Pau-Llosa is no god. But the trickster in him keeps him busy with the world, his song acquits the cattle thief, his poems convey the message. Therefore, heed my words: Let him have those fifty cows. And please leave him unbound. The Gods will reward us.

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Who Are You? The Search for Henriette Faber1 Querido Antonio, You and I haven’t talked for a while. How long has it been now? Ten years? Seems like yesterday we were sitting in your kitchen sipping Glenlivet 24. Lots of changes down here! We have a Black President now. We also have a Pope from Argentina (well, nobody’s perfect!) That new guy in Russia, his name at least in Cuba is pronounced PUTEEN. So, I guess his girlfriend’s name, following Russian custom, must be PUTEENA! Also, Cuba and the U.S. now have diplomatic relations. They finally exchanged embassies. Only problem is the Cuban embassy in DC won’t let any Cubans in, and the U.S. embassy in Havana is overrun with Cubans who want to get to Miami! Go figure! But the best news around is that your novel Mujer en traje de batalla came out in English translation as Woman in Battle Dress, done beautifully by Jessica Powell, una americana who knows Spanish and English better than you and me, a student of Jill’s (yeah, cute Jill Levine). Who published it? Remember City Lights, that communist bookstore in San Francisco? Well, maybe not communist, I mean left-wing, beat poets, hippies, that sort of thing. Yeah,

1

This letter to Cuban author Antonio Benítez Rojo (1931-2005) was read at the launch of the English version of his last novel, Woman in Battle Dress, at City Lights Bookstore, the book’s publisher, in San Francisco, California, on September 27, 2015. 357

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the one that made Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg famous and was almost burned down? Pretty good, huh? Huge. They’re also a publisher, you know, not just a bookstore. And boy, do they publish! You should see their list! Each book awesome looking. You should also see the cover for your book! Makes a cool p ­ oster! I can tell it’s going to be a bestseller. It’s got everything, bro: history, adventure, true confessions, lovemaking, scenes in France, Switzerland, Austria, Russia, even Havana; from the Russian tundra to the Cuban tropics. And then, there’s the story: the strange case of that lady who in the middle of a revolution dresses up as a man just so she can become a doctor, just so she can be who she wants to be. Sex change is not new of course (and BTW, bro, since you’ve been gone, everybody seems to want to try it!). But Enriqueta’s case is different, no? She changes gender, not sex. She just needs to look like a man. What you show, am I wrong?, is that her decision brings on unforeseen consequences: she ends up not only a doctor, but a writer. I can just see the banner now: “Cuban writer born in Lausanne, Switzerland.” (Sounds like an ad for Alejo Carpentier!) Henriette/Enriqueta/Don Enriquito writes her story and her family’s, her adventures, her love life, memories of Napoleon, revolution, war, her travels, her trip to Cuba, dressing up as a man—even marrying a woman who later turns her in—her humbling, her expulsion, her vindication. She also writes about how strange it is to write a memoir, an autobiography that slowly turns into a novel (at least that’s what she says). History turns into fiction because she’s so good at telling her story. Too good to be true! Somebody said the whole thing sounded like Tootsie, Orlando, Yentl, Fidelio, Twelfth Night. But bro, you give Henriette an internal life none of those characters had! So, I’m sitting here wondering: Why Antonio? How did you do it? How come Henriette’s voice, the first person you use so well, sounds so real? You don’t fool me, bro! Can’t fool me! Enriqueta’s you, right? Madame Faber c’est moi, and all that Flaubertian jazz. No, I don’t mean that: I don’t mean you were CD, or even DL. (You didn’t even have a Ph.D.!) What I mean is that this book is also an apology for what you were forced to do in Cuba between ’69 and ’80, when you defected and came to the U.S. Your family (wife and 358

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two kids) had to leave Cuba seeking medical care, but they just wouldn’t let you leave with them. At first, in Havana, during the ’60s, you wrote fantastic short stories; your model, your idol, was Julio Cortázar, and those stories you wrote even got you a couple of writing awards. After that, your family gone, as a pledge of good (or better) behavior, you became not only a realist writer. You became, you had to become, a cop. Wasn’t it then we met? 1979, in Havana, a writers’ conference where you sneaked up and slipped me a couple of signed copies of your books? Back then, you were known as Benítez EL ROJO; the Red Menace! After that, when you had everyone in Cuba convinced you had adjusted, forgotten your family, were a game player, you defected. You betrayed the regime, your friends, your lovers, people who trusted you for over a decade—they even say that Haydée Santamaría, that sad heroine of the Cuban Revolution and your mentor, shot herself after hearing you’d left. After Paris, invited to give a talk, you went on to Berlin, asked for asylum in the U.S., but seeing that Berlin was too risky you were whisked off to Bonn, where you were brought in from the cold. (Sounds like John le Carré, but it isn’t.) Reunited with your family in the U.S., for months you were debriefed by the FBI before being released. After that, you started teaching in the Boston area; then at Amherst, full-time, and you started writing again. You also got lecture gigs at schools like Cornell, where I was teaching. Back then, you told me you wouldn’t fly, you were that scared of getting hijacked, and chose instead to drive from Amherst, Massachusetts all the way to Ithaca, New York… in the middle of February. Here in the U.S. everyone knew you’d come to the other side, but you seldom if ever said anything about the other other side. You wanted to be a writer, not a political activist. You even got pissed at that guy who reviewed the translation of Sea of Lentils, your first novel, because he’d blurted out the story was Marxist. Over and over and over you told us you’d left Cuba for personal, not political, reasons. Soon you got to be famous with an essay, a masterpiece: The Repeating Island. But its true subject was neither the Caribbean nor the postmodern, as the

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subtitle claimed. Its true subject was Chaos: the chaotic story of your life, the chaos of all our lives. Were you hiding something, bro? Were you told not to tell? By whom? Fidel, CIA, your wife? One day I remember telling you I regretted your silence about Castro. Made me sad. I also told you I didn’t condemn you for it: up to you, bro, your choice, your conscience. But then you had to put up with my questions, my doubts, my readings. And today you put up with this letter, a letter as melancholy as it is joyful. So then, out you come with the story of Henriette Faber. Parallel lives, each of you writing your secret confessions. Or almost. Two orphans (you lost your dad early on, you never told me how) caught in the wind of revolution, who must pass for someone else (a man, a commissar) to survive and protect your loved ones. Both of you also had to bury, under tragic circumstances, your firstborn. In the end, both of you become writers… So, you don’t fool me, bro! Henriette’s story is your story. Doesn’t make it better, doesn’t make it worse. Makes it real. Damned good writing. But who was the real you, Antonio? Were you just one of those Julio Cortázar groupies running around today? Were you a cultural commissar? Were you the professor who used to have nightly convos with the ghost of Emily Dickinson, the Belle of Amherst herself, your next-door neighbor—she, too, like me, like you, guzzling Glenlivet 24? Or were you, like Emily, like me, like so many others here today who understand and are here to greet you and your work, were you, too, just a writer? “I’m nobody, who are you?/ Are you nobody, too?” So, there it is, bro. I can tell it’s going to be a bestseller. But let’s hope the movie version comes out soon. Because I tell you: I can’t wait to play… you. Un abrazo, E.

Bibliography Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (2016), Issue 92/93, Vol. 49, Nos. 1–2.

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Heberto Padilla: The Impossible Novel

I

n the “Afterword” to this, his first and only novel, Heberto Padilla refers to books written under Socialism as “generally imperfect” because the Socialist aesthetic “stamps books with a feeling of desperation or neurosis.” He adds that such books “are accepted abroad out of solidarity, rather than literary recognition,” and cites the English translation of Milan Kundera’s The Joke as a case in point. When Kundera’s British editor “restructured” the novel in order “to make it ‘accessible’ to the English public,” Kundera reacted by firing a letter to The Times asking people not to read that version, which was barely his at all. From this Padilla concludes that books like Kundera’s, and presumably his own, “require an impossible reading by an impossible reader since no reader will have the kind of knowledge required for understanding them. It’s a kind of writing for the blind.” Although the English translation of En mi jardín pastan los héroes (1981) (Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden, 1984), has undergone similar restructuring, Padilla never did, as far as I know, write a letter to The New York Times disavowing it. Does this mean that Padilla agreed with the restructuring because it made the novel less “imperfect” and more “accessible”? Or does it indicate, rather, his resigned acknowledgement that his novel, too, is a kind of writing for the blind? Padilla began writing the novel in Havana in 1970, at the height of his career as a poet and in the aftermath of the 1968 scandal

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surrounding publication of Fuera del juego (Sent Off the Field), a book of poems critical of the communist revolution. While still writing the novel, Padilla was imprisoned under charges of conspiracy against the State, five copies of his manuscript were seized, and he was forced to recant publicly before his colleagues at the Writers’ Union. This cause célèbre, which itself caused an uproar in intellectual circles the world over, became known as “the Padilla affair.” Padilla himself was able to smuggle out the manuscript (“in a nylon bag among hundreds of letters my wife had sent me from the United States”) in 1980, when he was allowed to emigrate after a decade of “forced work” as ghost writer and translator. (He finished writing the novel at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center.) Years before readers were finally able to ascertain that this was indeed a book of “desperation or neurosis,” news of the novel and of Padilla’s paranoia while writing it had reached the outside world. “During those days,” recalled Jorge Edwards in Persona non grata (1973) “[Padilla] began to walk around with the manuscript under his arm, taking turns carrying it with his wife Belkis.” The novel has two narrative threads. One deals with Julio, 35, a former revolutionary now turned translator and would-be writer who lives with Luisa, a neurotic former activist, now would-be architect, in a rundown house in the Miramar section of Havana. The other thread deals with Gregorio Suárez, former apparatchik and frustrated alcoholic novelist. He, too, lives in the same Miramar section with his wife Gloria and a small child. The two threads interweave throughout the novel’s four parts, a tale of tropical lassitude punctuated by sedulous security agents, a couple of naive European tourists of Socialism, and even a nagging mother-in-law. For all its neurosis, though, this book is far from the typical Cuban exile narrative. “What am I doing,” asks Julio in one of the final meditations, “throwing up moral demands against a movement that passed its protagonists by, made them victims or hangmen?”. The Revolution, already petrified in its second decade, has become a collective fiction that everyone uses defensively against everyone else. Thus “politics,” in Julio’s same meditation, “fired the last argument of all friends; it furnished the only pretext that 362

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legitimized breakups and quarrels.” The Revolution is no longer “a sign of people’s convictions, or of the evolution of political consciousness . . . but rather “a mark of compliance or resignation . . . a “safe-conduct pass through the future.” If we are to take seriously Padilla’s remarks in the “Afterword,” then obviously his novel must indeed be one of those “imperfect” Socialist books whose value lies more in its message than its form; “adopted for the scandal they cause,” rather than for the pleasure they may give. The novel’s imperfections are, in fact, many. Julio’s and Gregorio’s flashbacks are awkward and naive; characters like Rodríguez, Humberto and Gunter deserve greater development; some of the dialogue could have been trimmed. None of these technical faults is corrected, however, by the American editor’s restructuring of the Spanish original. On the contrary: its faults are increased. The Spanish original consists of two parts, unequal in length but each consisting of six chapters. The English restructured version (rendered impeccably by Andrew Hurley, one of our finest translators) has four parts, each consisting of one, two, seven and four chapters, in that order. (The translation has two more chapters because it divides one long chapter (part I, chapter 5 of the original) into three smaller ones. More importantly, the new version rearranges some of the chapters. Taking as reference the Spanish original, the narrative now begins with the end of part l and picks up for two chapters the beginning of part 2. It then returns to the remainder of part 1 and picks up on the third chapter of part 2 until the end. Restructuring the book affects the plot. The Spanish original is structured like an hourglass: characters are dispersed at the beginning, then slowly converge in the middle only to disperse again in the end. The restructured translation is diamond shaped: characters are together in the beginning, dispersed in the middle and convergent in the end. While the restructuring makes the narrative gain in clarity, it lessens irony. After all, the whole ironic point is that Julio, along with everyone else close to him, is a character in the novel that Gregorio is trying to write. Having the English restructuring begin with Gregorio’s story gives away too soon the 363

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fiction within the fiction that the Spanish original endeavors to prolong until the reader is trapped. Padilla’s irony is not, to be sure, merely an attempt at technical virtuosity. The trick on the reader forms part of the novel’s ideological critique. The defensive “collective fiction” the petrified Revolution has become is meant to reach the reader and make him one more accomplice. According to the security agent who interrogates Padilla in the “Afterword,” this book should have been titled “An Inconclusive Novel.” Padilla agreed with this, adding that “the fates of these characters, as well as the situations they are involved in, are inconclusive, because everything written in a suffocating political atmosphere is inconclusive and fragmentary. This rings true not only for Padilla’s novel, but for the more interesting narratives to come out of Cuba during the past quarter century—Memories of Underdevelopment, Three Trapped Tigers, Oppiano Licario, Farewell to the Sea, each of them a vast fragment.

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Two Notes on Lydia Rubio

Invisible Arc Lydia Rubio’s “Viñales” series signals, I believe, the culmination of the artist’s search to bring together form and concept, image and idea. It is no exaggeration to say that this is also the search of art in our time. The coincidence is significant, I think, and we might reflect upon both. I have said elsewhere that Rubio’s works start out with one premise: art is a mystery the solution to which is as desirable as it is elusive. No sooner do we begin unraveling one of its clues, than it spawns other mysteries: cutting one branch off makes the others sprout, like those baobabs that grace many Florida landscapes. The result is an endless cutting and pruning: the spectator must constantly decode and decipher. In this, Lydia Rubio proceeds like a modern Gnostic, intent upon pursuing the dispersed clues of an ancient hermetic code. For this she organizes themes according to a formal strategy of geometric pieces or fragments, structured in series. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints—duly accompanied by diaries, maps, notes, and even doodles. In turn, these series are ruled by insights into correspondences with conceptual codes that range from letters of the alphabet and the four elements to the cardinal points and even the gods of a multicultural pantheon. Taken piecemeal, each of these forms constitutes a clue for a plot the meaning of which may well be lost but whose mystery and

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beauty seduces us into further speculation. Be it the radiant ghost ships of “Written on Water,” lost in the splendor of imaginary seas; the Kabbalistic rituals of “In An Image” or the “Alphabet Series,” where letters play musical chairs; or else, the monumental scroll of “All night long we heard birds passing,” one of her more ambitious public art pieces. In all of these works abstract conceptual play is anchored, fastened, if you will, onto sensuous, recognizable forms, rendered masterfully and whose sheer physicality ends up seducing us. It is hardly surprising, then, that within such a search Rubio should have tackled the challenge of landscape, particularly the Cuban landscape, and within that, the region of Viñales in her native Pinar del Río. She tells us that she returned there twice at the end of the 1990s and that her perception of the region’s beauty was influenced by a statement made by Cuban poet José Lezama Lima in a letter written to his sister in the 1970s, where he speaks of the valley’s proverbial beauty. To quote that statement: The valley is graceful and splendid. To face it in contemplation is to feel the weight of the history of Cuba, not the one that was made but the one that remains a possibility and seems like an appearance of a ray of light. To sit before it and see its huge spectrum of green and copper blues, shot through with threads of gold, everything looks as if it’s about to fly off and crash down in a ceaseless parabola from earth to sky.1

A large canvas beyond the four panoramic paintings that structure the series carries the same title “Invisible Arc” [Spanish, “El arco invisible de Viñales”] that Lezama Lima wrote in Cuba during the 1940s and which is meant as a summary and comment upon the entire series. Rubio also tells us that the multiple points of view the paintings show are unconventional, in the sense that they are alternatives to the single portal, or belvedere available to tourists who visit the valley. Rubio spent two weeks in Viñales



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October 20, 1972, in (Lezama: 1978, 245). 366

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horseback riding, sketching, and photographing the unusual views that she captures in her series, though clearly the intent of the series is hardly documentary. Rubio paints what Cuban history left potentially unpainted in its palette, so to speak, and in views seldom seen by the naked eye. While historically Viñales has been a favorite site for Cuban landscape artists and photographers, Rubio makes little if any concessions to pastoral stereotypes. If Cuban landscape tradition ranges from the picturesque to the beautiful, Rubio’s peculiar treatment spans from the beautiful to the sublime, in the precise sense of astonishing and awe-inspiring. She speculates on the correspondence of landscape to the four elements, the times of day, and even moral and political positions. Instead of typical country flora or fauna, huts, or peasant folk, she renders us stark, inhuman geological formations, like the valley’s famous mogotes, often depicted as threatening giants; unseen night or moon-shaded views, fields burning in afternoon red hues, panoramic skies that barely relate to the variegated earth. Rubio is in love with these forms and moods beyond nationalist illusions, and renders them in compositions so structurally unusual, through points of view often so far-fetched, or at least unseen in the Cuban tradition, that one cannot help but wonder whether they are accurate representations, or perhaps imaginary renderings that are meant to illustrate political allegories. Cuban landscape tradition describes and make statements: Nature is harmonious and at peace with itself. Rubio’s pictures, on the other hand, disturb that peace by introducing enigmas in the landscape. What is the relationship between the red afternoon hues, the two towering fires on the right side of the canvas, and the concept of subversion? How do the violet clouds and blackened river relate to each other in “Land of Reflection”? In what sense does the panoramic sky suggest dissolution in the canvas of the same name? How do the mogotes’ sheer earthly presence imply “Resistance”? In so doing, Rubio makes us question the meaning of landscape, the spirit of place—that genius loci that is her own (Rubio’s ancestors happen to be natives of Pinar del Río), 367

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along with the s­ ignificance of region and our relationship to certain moods and moral positions. Previous Cuban landscape artists, from Esteban Chartrand to Domingo Ramos, had worked under the maxim: “Cuba, ¡qué linda es!”. That is, landscape painting as praise and nationalist publicity. As if responding to that statement, Rubio’s landscapes make us exclaim: “Cuba, ¡qué extraña es!”. That is, landscape as a mirror of post-national questioning. It may well be that Rubio’s canvasses are very much part of the Cuban landscape tradition. My good friend the art historian Carlos M. Luis once remarked that “for the Creole, landscape began as a site of discovery and later became a site of reflection of his destiny”. Nothing bears that statement better than “Invisible Arc”, the large piece that serves as a comment to the entire series and that bears the title of Lezama Lima’s poem. Two oversized, and therefore unreal, mogotes face each other across a divide that occupies the center of the canvas. In meticulous realistic rendering, the background shows a much-reduced promontory, while the foreground displays several rows of skinny palm trees dwarfed by the mogotes’ sheer monumentality, as if they were Caribbean Himalayas. Atop each mogote sits a lettered sign—one reading “Aquí” [here] and the other “Allá” [there]—though the sign for “Allá”, removed in perspective, appears backwards: we are in front of Aquí and behind Allá, closer to Here than to There, facing Here while creeping behind There. As in “Sea of Ebirac”, the tondo centerpiece from Rubio’s recent “Project Room” series, “Invisible Arc” constitutes, then, a geographical allegory that reflects in turn upon the significance of region—Viñales is not a place but a region—what philosopher Edward Casey once called “the coherent clustering of places within the openness of landscape—a clustering that both depends on and reflects—contiguity and coexistence”.2 Casey’s definition of region has in mind John Constable’s diverse 19th-century meditations on the landscape of his native East Anglia, but clearly applies as well, on one level at least, to Rubio’s divided

2

See (Casey: 2002, 74). 368

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homeland between island and exile communities. What “Sea of Ebirac” portrays as an imaginary map over a reasonable facsimile of Biscayne Bay, “Invisible Arc” dramatizes as a geographical allegory, a topo-allegory, if you will, of Viñales. If Viñales is, in general, a synecdoche for the Cuban nation, then “Invisible Arc” is an allegory of a Cuba historically divided into at least two. It is also an allegory of Rubio’s own Viñales series, which explores the region in plural form, seeking alternative views of the valley outside of the official view sanctioned for tourists, or else lazy native visitors. The “invisible arc” is of course the bridge that connects Aquí with Allá, here with there, arching over the precipice that divides the two mogotes, a precipice made the more daunting by their unreal height. Of course, one need not adhere strictly to this geographical or political interpretation. While the empty space at the center of the canvas suggests not only ocean and air but also the emptiness that separates the here and now from the beyond, the two mogotes evoke other dualities: Night and Day, Earth and Heaven, male and female. Would it surprise us to know that in the Chinese landscape tradition “yin” and “yang”, the two famous Taoist principles, are not only metaphysical principles (such as giving and receiving), but principally, and originally, senses of concrete place that related the two sides of any hill: the shady side (yin) and the sunny side (yang)? Whether concrete or metaphysical—perhaps both—Lydia Rubio’s meditation on region proposes that we visualize not only a concrete place—There: Allá, the more desirable because unattainable, at least temporarily, but that we visualize it from Here: Aquí. “Viñales” invites us to visit a region visually, and to imagine a relationship in which we all become pilgrims at home.

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Invisible Arc, 1999 Oil on linen, 42 x 72 inches.

Alphabet of gestures Lydia Rubio’s ongoing search reflects her journey. An exile from Cuba since late childhood, she grew up in Puerto Rico, went to school in Florida and then attended Harvard, where she first trained as an architect, and eventually moved to New York City and later to Miami and Bogotá. She now lives in Upstate New York. In between, world travels: Europe, India, Cuba, and, most recently, Patagonia and Russia. In New York, where we met thirty years ago, she worked within a community of artists, scholars, writers, and translators. Their individual journeys affected her work in ways that artists and art critics might well find unorthodox. We met through Emir Rodríguez Monegal, then my teacher at Yale, and translator-scholar Suzanne Jill Levine, another mutual friend, though our first dialogue, amidst writers as keen as Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, and Alastair Reid, revolved more around language and poetry than the visual arts. Indeed, Lydia Rubio is as much a visual poet as a poetic painter. 370

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Her penchant for creating unique travel books as complements to individual pieces merits a grand entrance into what we often call “poetry” or “literature.” Since that auspicious meeting thirty years ago I have been struck by Rubio’s visual imagination, which can only be described as cornucopian; often, because of its depth, as kabbalistic. Through all the many shows of her work I have been privileged to enjoy, one nagging question keeps recurring: what is the relationship between ideas and forms? Which amounts to asking: can we envision equivalences between figures and concepts, or else links among colors, shapes, sizes, calligraphies, and disparate objects in Nature, birds, fish, flowers, mountains? To seek, Rubio first shows: vision precedes concept. Abstract conceptual play anchors and fastens itself onto sensuous, recognizable forms, all rendered with detailed mastery, a sheer physicality that, much like Salvador Dalí’s oneiric dramas, wins us over completely. Ships in series like Written 0n Water (1995) strike us almost like historical prints, though few would dispute that the history they depict is an actual nightmare; familiar landscapes, such as the ones in Viñales (2000), display photographic yet visionary details. Similarly, analogously, the language, or rather the letters, drawn (rather than written) in more recent pieces, like La pintura Auxilio (Painting Help); or else the calligrammic I Am the Boat, strike us at first as frivolous publicity. Yet, once that initial impression wears off, we are left with a persistent tension between image and concept: Rubio’s boat, like Rimbaud’s, soars drunkenly with utopian possibilities; and the· innocent plea for Auxilio! engages the reader in laborious decoding. “An art of illusion,” defined Emir for Rubio’s Bronx show thirty years ago, “and of obsession, is both calligraphically lucid and elusive.” Then, as further summary, Emir went on to quote Borges’ famous axiom on art: “the imminence of a revelation that does not occur.” Rubio’s latest series, Patagonia Journal 2015, reflects her recent foray into the hinterland of William Henry Hudson’s “Purple Land.” I am struck especially by its renewed “Poetics of Water,” 371

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aqueous in two senses of the word: waterscapes and watercolors. While the union of subject and medium provides greater movement, swift watercolor brush strokes allow for more intense light. Dazzling color schemes thus make up for increased abstraction and relative loss of figuration while hinting at both land and waterscapes, or flashes thereof. Witness a work like Night, which draws out a blue and turquoise light spectrum where little of it is called for. Rubio herself explains how in this new “poetics of water” she sought to portray “patterns and rhythms of natural forces.” While confirming indirectly my intuition of her quest after equivalences between image and concept, she stresses yet another aspect of that subtle play: “forms that equate the large- to the small-scale world: river deltas as trees, flocks of birds as shrubs bent by the wind, islands as stains, schools of fish as scribbled spirals.” Indeed, the obsession with water is hardly novel for this Caribbean artist. “Written on Water,” once identified by John Yau as a quotation from John Keats, could arguably tag Rubio’s entire visual oeuvre, as if with that oxymoron she strove to capture an impossible metaphysical goal. One additional kabbalistic image summarizes Rubio’s greater scheme: “Alphabet of Gestures.” If Nature is indeed a Book, and the artist its Reader or Translator, then capturing its spectacle in dazzling figures and colors—Rubio’s “gestures”—and not just in rhymed meditations, takes us all one step further into art as ­decipherment; correspondances, following Baudelaire’s insight: Nature as Temple, objects as interlocutors. And the Artist, finally, as the Speller of the World’s Alphabet; and of course, Conveyor of Beauty.

Bibliography Casey, Edward S. (2002): Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lezama Lima, José (1978): Cartas (1939-1976), ed. Eloísa Lezama Lima. Madrid: Editorial Orígenes.

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Sea of Ebirac (Mapa Mundis) 2003 Oil on wood with aluminum bird sculpture, 60 x 48 x 3 inches.

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Object of desire: Ramón Alejandro

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n object is a figure, but a figure is an object represented, desired. Both the machine—Alejandroids—and the fruit are objects. The machines, especially early Alejandro, float in space, isolated in all their beauty and terror. Fruits, in turn, appear simply surrounded by landscape, other fruits, live Nature, spatial and natural contexts. The fruit object always appears forefront. We see it before us though seldom by itself. Concentration. Focused gaze. The machine object is desirable out of its color and play of volume, a figuration so realistic it persuades us of its impossible existence: a mimesis both inviting and repellent. A seductive, attractive, dangerous threat that anticipates pain, noise, destruction. The machine object signals encounter: unprecedented. The fruit object signals re-encounter: precedented, we have seen it before, we see it again. Thus, the fruit object is History, while the machine object is pre- (or post-) historical. The machine came before, or afterwards. The fruit is now, always. While someone cut open the fruit, someone built the machine. (Who did?). The machine object is useless; the fruit object nourishes. Like the machine object, the fruit object seduces us with colorful, realistic, radiant mimesis. A veritable spectacle (spectare: to contemplate) of forms, color, light, volume, reflections. But unlike

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the machine object, whose strangeness, or rarity, or threat, rests upon the isolated object, the fruit object’s rests upon its strange interaction with contexts, ensemble, scenery: a theatre of spectacle. Both objects want to be contemplated: contemplate me, copulate me; view me, screw me… But the machine is chaste, i­ ntellectual; the fruit has no heart: an old tart. In late Alejandro, the machine object appears in landscapes that supply its own matter. In early Alejandro, the essence of the machine lies in its nuts and bolts, an ironwork that participates in and owes itself to mimesis. In late Alejandro, machinery, its own tools, gives way to landscape matter. Early Alejandro: iron or its mineral peers, aluminum, gold, silver, bronze, polished metal. Late: stone, granite, marble, clay, dry dust. Landscape infects the object. What does remain constant is the object’s uniqueness: loneliness. Both fruit and machine are objects of desire, but also roads towards objects. Objects, objectives. The machine object lacks an interior: the inside lies outside. Nuts and bolts all around, profound… Parts that both fasten and decorate—we discover them thanks to its volume, or effect, and to a virtuous coloring. The fruit object opens up; better said: someone cuts it open. (Who does?). We peer through inner being, interrupting the spectacles of interaction among object, light, context. Antonio José Ponte observes that because fruits are part of the the gods’ banquet, Alejandro is actually a mythological painter. (Am I, too, a god?) In the machine object, seduction and terror are at work; but upon the fruit object, indiscretion, wonder are at work. Both devolve into questions: What is this good for? Where can I get this served? Answers, like objects, float… The machine object lacks an origin, a telos: nobody put it there, nobody knows its function. It’s an apparition; or better: a vision. The fruit object exceeds origin and telos: somebody put it there, we’d better eat it right away. Fruits surprise us: look but don’t touch. Prière de pas toucher. But where should I touch? How chow?

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Roland Barthes: the machine is intransitive, a-subjective, a ghost: it both denies and affirms. Severo Sarduy: the machine is a spectral effect: it fills up an irreparable vacuum with the simulacrum of a filler. José Lezama Lima: the fruit is an unreal gift from Nature that asks us to expand. José Martí: two objects have I here: fruit and machine. Are they one and the same?

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Our Only Home: Humberto Calzada

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n his Poetics of Space (1961), Gaston Bachelard remarks that “the house we were born in becomes imbued with dream values that remain after the house is gone.” Writing for a postwar reader in France, a country that narrowly escaped the physical devastation that affected most of Europe, Bachelard invokes the kind of stable space that by last century’s end had already become a luxury for most of the world’s inhabitants. For whom among us can still claim, in these dismal times of diaspora, to hold a clear picture of the “house we were born in”? And yet, Bachelard’s point remains. For “the oneiric house” he describes is made up of the “lusters of boredom, solitude and daydream” which are, he adds, “far more lasting than the scattered memories of our built place.” The house itself may be gone, but the dream (the nightmare) of it remains. I always think of Bachelard when I view the works of Humberto Calzada and do so mindful that my thinking may go against the grain. That is, over the last quarter century the reception of Calzada’s works has been based invariably upon a contextual, (auto)biographical reading. As an exile from his native Cuba, he paints, it is said, the interior landscape of a vanished lifestyle. The popularity or market value of those works is thus tied to their ability to evoke, for a Cuban American, and perhaps pan-Caribbean audiences, traces of intimate spaces that History has swept away, or at least rendered inaccessible. From here there is but one small

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step to conclude that Calzada is a naive realist, more intent on producing exercises in colorful nostalgia than in the terrors of painful memory. And yet, if Bachelard is right, the “oneiric house,” made up as much of boredom and solitude as of pleasurable desires, contains all the fearful elements, the imminence, of a nightmare. Thus, when viewing Calzada’s works I not only wonder at what I see. I also wonder what is missing. And why. Great art always exceeds context. Calzada’s is no exception. Calzada’s spaces are empty. Asked once by Emilio Ichikawa why they have no people in them, he answered: “Because Cuba is in my mind, but empty of people. I know nobody in today’s Cuba, hardly anybody.” And yet, Calzada’s actual scenes go beyond autobiography. Working with an architecture that is more illusion than fact, Calzada organizes interior spaces that underscore the emptiness of the horizon, the transparency of light, the absence of habitat. His main character is not architecture, but the wind. Calzada’s scenes allude not to a real architecture, Cuban or other; not even to what that architecture could ideally be; but rather, to the architecture of dreams. To this phantom spectacle we must add yet another tension: it is not enough to say that people,·human characters, are missing from Calzada’s canvases. Their absence in such spaces of intimacy is but part of what Bachelard also calls a topo-analysis (akin to psychoanalysis) that introduces in each canvas “the systematic study of the sites of our intimate lives.” Hence the paradox, or at least tension, between scenes of an intimate stage, on the one hand, and the lack of actors, on the other, a trait which often invites comparison with De Chirico’s surrealist landscapes. I myself prefer to think of Atget’s photographs of barren Paris streets yet note that in both cases we are dealing with public, external spaces, whereas Calzada plays with internal, private ones, and often subverts the difference between inside and out. More than to De Chirico, then, Calzada’s works often seem closer to Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione (1745, 1761), themselves the precursor-visions to De Chirico, Hebborn and Escher’s. Like Piranesi, himself an engineer and architect, Calzada distorts volumes within limited stages to create disturbing, deserted scenes that 380

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are strangely at odds with a seemingly soothing tropical setting. Hence stairways that lead nowhere, false perspectives, truncated, and therefore useless, arches. But again, these are all invenzione, unreal sites. True, Calzada’s stunning use of color and light sets his works far from the dark interiors of Piranesi’s etchings. Such colorful settings, made eerier still by the straight acrylic lines, enhance, rather than detract from, the same production of mystery. Does color really make a canvas like “El acecho” (2001) any less mysterious than Piranesi’s dark “The Smoking Fire, Plate VI” (1745)? I may seem to be stretching the analogy between two vastly different types of visual samples, whose difference I am the first to admit. I do bring the two together to point not only to one of Calzada’s implied sources, but to the disquieting, sinister tone that runs under his seemingly placid tropical scenes. Indeed, Calzada, like Piranesi, is interested in ruins. But whereas the Venetian master underscored the “antique” nature of his invented scenes—his etchings were called at one time Antiquities of Rome—Calzada’s deft use of color and his naive representations of “Cuban” architecture render the ruins brilliant, desirable, “new”. Strange ruins these are! Colorful, new, desirable, and yet inaccessible all the same. The ruins of today’s Havana, it would seem, are reborn in Calzada’s dazzling imaginings. Could Calzada’s paintings be called an art of imaginary restoration? An art of restitution? One wonders, in that sense, whether there might indeed be, throughout Calzada’s canvasses, a running (though arguably unconscious) homage to Piranesi’s “jails” in his deft play of grillwork (rejas) and internal blinds (Cuban persianas). Like the tejas, mediopuntos and lucetas that lend support to an iconic Cuban reading, the grillwork motif enhances perspective and allows the filtering of light in varying shades and tones. The recurrence of this motif, particularly in what could be called Calzada’s “middle period” (late 1970s and early 1980s) makes me suspect a greater thematic function. Such is what appears in works like “Viñales” (?), “La casa de enfrente” (1978), or the more explicit “La reja.” Other late works, like “Playing with the Essence” and “The Elements of Night” (part of the “Cuba and the Night” series), simplify the motif further, 381

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but in so doing make it more explicit. In all these works, grillwork provides a frame or filter for the scene depicted in either or second planes, thus suggesting that either the spectator or the scene itself lies, literally, “behind bars,” accessible to sight but not to our touch. Further variants of this “prison” motif appear in other major works, such as the stunning “Reflection as Completion II” (1984), whose central image is an internal blind that is both mirrored in its shadow reflection and literally mirrored upon the central wall; and in “A World Within #16” (1984), which “quotes” the same motif on the right side of the canvas against the more architectural, and therefore relatively more concrete, treatment on the left.

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In her astute 1984 catalog essay on Calzada Lenore Miller comments obliquely on this motif through the technique of refraction. “Just as light rays deflected from a straight path pass obliquely from air to glass,” she notes, “the artist uses stained glass images and reflections to explain that the art of painting is an illusion— no more than an arrangement of colors, shapes and lines on a flat plane.” The play of stained-glass refraction in Calzada’s canvasses would be, in this sense, the most evident variant of a motif that extends to grillwork and internal blinds. In all such cases “regionalist” elements (to quote Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s useful term)—mediopuntos, lucetas, rejas, persianas—are more than just “national” (or else, exile) reminiscences or quotations; they function as refractive devices that underscore the illusory character of the depicted scenes. But, if this is so, wouldn’t then the grillwork or “prison” theme that quotes Piranesi itself provide another instance of the same illusion? Calzada’s canvasses are frequently read as allegories of a Cuban exile consciousness, its deserted, eerily abandoned spaces viewed as traces of a barren historical landscape. We miss, however, how its more explicit representation of imprisonment (and of course freedom, its opposite) are inscribed in that consciousness and in Calzada’s visual imagination. Could Calzada’s art be called an art of liberation? A freedom-fighting art? In comparing Calzada to Piranesi and De Chirico, Piranesi’s heir, we imply that his art, like theirs, is “metaphysical.” The adjective evokes an abstract other worldliness, or else direct access to a pure dimension of stable principles and ideas. We should recall, however, that “metaphysical painting,” an early avant-garde label, was the common invention of De Chirico and Carrà while they were both patients in a military hospital (a mental ward?) and describes not an art of stable principles but of mystery and hallucination, unreal perspectives and strange use of light and scenery (dummies are favored instead of human characters). “Is there anything more monstrous than metaphysics?” Borges once asked, and then went on to list the Holy Trinity among prominent members of that teratology… 383

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Calzada’s eerie scenes may appear to comfort avid consumers of nostalgia, that metaphysical “whore of memory” that Cabrera Infante so often evoked. But beneath their acrylic surface, their ceaseless quotation of architectural and decorative sites, their sheer brilliance of composition, lie the ciphers of our eventual absence: space and light. And, of course, the wind. Our only home.

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Postscript

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Notes on “ARK”

A rafter. A menacing, prosthetic oar out of his left arm. A ragged innertube, a makeshift raft. Five hanging cables, tips with attached pics. Upper right, the start (perhaps the end) of A-R-K, a word that couldn’t fit. Everything floats upon a cream-colored, grainy surface; white spots (cotton balls?) resemble holes (shots on the raft? On clouds?). Five thick white lines, water currents, traverse the canvas up and down, right and left, divide five empty spaces, themselves split by a vertical amber splatter. The splatter echoes in the drop that hangs at the tip of the oar (dry blood? excrement?), relics of a perilous journey. The rafter stares stunned, exhausted, begging, baggy-eyed, worn, wrinkled, haggard: Everyman’s signature. His prosthesis, a 387

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waving oar, a parody of the angry raised fist; the innertube wrapped in tatters, worn-out from the salty voyage, adorned, trapped by, hanging cables at the tips of which dangle the pics of a shark (the word that couldn’t fit?) and other rafters. Those pics are memory flashes that, like luck charms, sprout at the tips like tentacles searching for support, anchor. Rafters rescued in a storm by an apparition happens to be, far and away, Cuba’s central religious icon. La Virgen de la Caridad, Virgin of Charity, the island’s patron saint, descends on three rafters—all three named Juan (one Indian, one White, one Black), all three stunned by Mother’s timely rescue, to whom they pray for protection. The mulatto Virgin is also Ochún and Atabey, its African and Taíno counterparts. Finally, in the Cuban myth the rescue is mutual: la Virgen rescues rafters; rafters rescue the tiny wooden icon floating lost, like them, at sea. Virgin and island thus become parallel, mutual arks sanctioned in divine covenant. “ARK” reconfigures an essential Cuban myth. But yesteryear’s iconic objects have changed, or rather, disappeared. Instead of the Virgin, a stunned rafter appears center canvass; in place of three Juanes in a boat, a ravaged innertube. “The ARK is not biblical,” observes Alejandro Anreus, “there is no covenant between God and man.” Spatially, the piece embodies not so much emptiness as disappearance: spectral traces of an icon torn from the surface. The tear leaves remains, bloody perhaps, spread by the amber splatter. Indeed, viewed vertically, the splatter hints at not only the vanished Virgin, formerly at center stage, but at the island’s blurred silhouette, as if, torn from the map, it had left the spectral trace of a displaced cartography, doomed to erasure. In place of the icon, or traditional symbols and characters, we have diaspora’s degraded residues: by now the oar has become second nature, an outgrowth of need, to Cubans fleeing without hope of Mother’s rescue. Working from a simple narrative, tuning in to a bedrock though perhaps unconscious icon, Cruz-Azaceta captures the desperate essence of the Cuban diaspora, spectral image of a nation lost at sea. Enduring.

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Sources “Enduring Cuba,” originally a 2006 lecture for the Cuban Heritage Collection at Otto Richter Library of the University of Miami, Coral Gables, is unpublished in English. “A Cuban Canon?” first appeared in Cuban Studies/Estudios cubanos, Vol. 24 (1994). “Cheap Glasnost” appeared in Will the Cold War End in the Caribbean? Joseph Tulchin and Rafael Hernández. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1991. “On National Identity” appeared in Cuban Studies/Estudios cubanos 16 (1986). “Unburnt Bridges” was published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Summer 1995). “Wilde, Dreyfus, Disaster” first appeared in MIFLC Review, Vol. 9 (2000). “The Caribbean: Paradigm or Paradox?”, a lecture at Potsdam, Germany, in a seminar of the same name, appeared in Spanish in El Caribe como paradigma: convivencias y coincidencias históricas, culturales y estéticas. Un simposio transrreal, ed. Ottmar Ette et al. Berlin: Verlag Walter Frey, 2012. My thanks to John Schranck. “Latinamericanism and Restitution” was part of a special issue of Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 20, No. 40 (July-December 1992). “Deaf Dialogues: Literary and Cultural Studies,” a keynote address at the Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Conference in October 2009, is unpublished. “Inventing a Nation,” originally lectures at the New York Historical Society in Manhattan and the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, April 10, 1995, is unpublished in English. “Martí and Revolution” was published in José Martí and the Cuban Revolution Retraced. Ed. Edward González. Los Angeles, Ca.: UCLA Latin American Center, 1986, and was the keynote address at the conference of the same name.

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“The Crisis of Latinamericanism” first appeared in Jeffrey Belknap and Raúl Fernández, eds. José Martí’s Our America: From National to Hemispheric Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999 and was a lecture at the UC Irvine conference of the same name. “Thinking Through” appeared in Julio Rodríguez-Luis. Ed. Rethinking Martí, One Hundred Years Later (Albany: SUNY University Press, 1999, also a lecture at the conference of the same name. “Neruda X 2,” a lecture read in Spanish in Córdoba, Spain and Cairo, is unpublished in English. Translation mine. “Isla Negra: An Afterword,” appeared in Pablo Neruda, Isla Negra. A Notebook. Tr. by Alastair Reid. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981. “Forking Paths: Borges and Tragedy,” a lecture in April 1991 at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, is unpublished. “Ten Keys to The Labyrinth of Solitude” was published in Review Literature and Arts of the Americas, 70 (May 2005). I owe this translation to my dear friend, Professor Alfred J. MacAdam. “Blanco: On the Presence of Absence” was a keynote address at Stanford University in November 2010 and published subsequently in Transpoetic Exchange, Ed. Marilia Librandi, et al. Bucknell UP, 2020. Both “Overture: The Other Time” and “Letter on Recordatio” appeared in Santí and de la Vega, The Other Time/El otro tiempo: Aurelio de la Vega and Music. Valencia: Aduana Vieja, 2021. “Notes from Underdevelopment” was published in Cuban Studies/Estudios cubanos, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1981) “Textual Politics: Severo Sarduy” appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 8, No. 16 (1981). “Bodies of Crime: Becoming Cabrera Infante” first appeared in Spanish as preface to Infantería, Ed. Santí and Nivia Montenegro. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000, and is unpublished in English. Translation mine. “I am Alive” was, in Spanish, Preface to Espectros del Poder, Ed. J.M. Persánch and F. Silva. Madrid: Pliegos, 2020, and is unpublished in English. “Hermes Unbound: The Art of Ricardo Pau-Llosa” appeared in Birmingham Review (Winter 2023). “Who Are You? The Search for Henriette Faber” was read at City Lights Bookstore in October 2016, and appeared in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Vol. 49, Nos. 1-2 (2017). “Heberto Padilla: The Impossible Novel” appeared in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Vol. 34 (January‑June 1985). “Two Notes on Lydia Rubio” appeared in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Vol. 91 (November 2015). “Fruits and Machines: Ramón Alejandro” is unpublished in English but appeared earlier, in Spanish, in my book Mano a Mano (2012).

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“Our Only Home: Humberto Calzada” appeared in Humberto Calzada. Ed. Carmen Kohly Calzada. Miami: Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, 2007. “Notes on ARK” is unpublished.

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List of Illustrations p. 129: p. 370: p. 373:

p. 377:

p. 382: p. 387:

Two views of ruins of La Demajagua sugar mill. Lydia Rubio, Invisible Arc, 1999 Oil on linen, 42 x 72 inches. Lydia Rubio, Sea of Ebirac (Mapa Mundis), 2003 Oil on wood with aluminum bird sculpture, 60 x 48 x 3 inches. Ramón Alejandro, L’Ange à la fenêtre, 1978 oil on canvas (top), El instante perpetuo, 1996 oil on canvas. Humberto Calzada, La reja, 1979 acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48 inches. Luis Cruz-Azaceta, “ARK,” 1994 Acrylic, charcoal, Polaroid prints, and shellac on canvas, 110 x 119 inches.

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Index Abrams, Meyer H. 225 Abreu, Marta 134 Adorno, Theodor 81, 220 Agramonte, Ignacio 128 Agramonte, Roberto 145, 149 Alberti, Rafael 200 Aldana Escalante, Carlos 46 Aleixandre, Vicente 200 Alejandro, Ramón 375-376 Allende, Salvador 76, 188, 202 Almendros, Néstor 43 Amat, Fredric 249 Anreus, Alejandro 388 Ardévol Gimbernat, José 254-268 Arenas, Reinaldo 34, 36, 37, 43, 55, 62, 63, 296, 370 Argilagos, Rafael 178-180 Armas, Emilio de 35, n. 5 Atget, Raymond 380 Auerbach, Erich 146-150 Bachelard, Gaston 379-380 Badías, María Elena 168 Ballagas, Emilio 252, 273, 275-294 Baquero, Gastón 36, 181 Barnet, Miguel 59, 61 Barthes, Roland 108, 324, 376 Bataille, Georges 228, 231-232 Bello, Serafín 156

Bengelsdorf, Carollee 59 Benítez Rojo, Antonio 34, 57, 63, 81-93, 357-360 Berg, Alban 254-255, 257, 264 Betancourt Cisneros, Gaspar 121, 128 Blaga, Lucien 168 Blaine, James G. 154, 163 Bloom, Harold 38, 350 Bolívar, Simón 102-103, 123-124. 157-158 Bongie, Chris 82 Borges, Jorge Luis 57-60, 103, 198, 111, 169, 187, 188, 190, 205215, 259, 296, 329, 338, 342, 346, 371, 383 Brathwaite, Kenneth 89 Brennan, Timothy 119 Breton, André 231-232 Brodsky, Joseph 346 Buch, Ernesto 179 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo 13, 21, 26, 34, 36, 43, 55, 56, 296, 323340, 384 Cabrera López, Guillermo 325, 328, 330, 331, 334, 340 Cabrera, Lydia 25, 54 Caillois, Roger 228-231

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Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 207 Calvino, Italo 210 Calzada, Humberto 379-391 Camacho, Jorge 43 Campos, Haroldo de 352 Candia Marverde, Trinidad 198 Carpentier, Alejo 34, 38, 54, 56, 73, 84, 89, 259, 262, 264, 296, 321, 346, 358 Carril, Delia del 201 Casal, Lourdes 59 Casero, Luis 176-181 Castro, Fidel 45-46, 50, 139-140, 146-152, 189-190, 251, 260, 285, 291, 323, 325, 333-337, 360 Cela, Camilo José 190 Cendrars, Blaise 240 Cervantes, Miguel de 295, 313, 338, 347 Céspedes, Carlos Manuel de 127, 128, 130, 131, 149 Chailloux, Graciella 160 Chartrand, Esteban 368 Chevalier, Michel 101 Clifford, James 105, 232 Columbus, Christopher 26, 31, 181 Constable, John 368 Cortázar, Julio 210, 243, 359-360 Crane, Hart 345 Critchley, Simon 113 Cruz Azaceta, Luis 388 Cruz Taura, Graciela 17, 30 Cruz Varela, María Elena 59 Cruz, Celia 17 Cruz, Soledad 48 Csonka, Paul 254, 257, 264 Dalí, Salvador 371 Darío, Rubén 143

De Chirico, Giorgio 380, 383 De la Cruz, sor Juana Inés 106, 280 Delaunay, Sonia 240 Derrida, Jacques 108 Desnoes, Edmundo 147-148, 287, 294-297 Díaz Castro, Tania 50 Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio 62 Díaz Rodríguez, Ernesto 50 Díaz, Jesús 36 Díaz, Roberto 31 Díaz-Alejandro, Carlos 41 Dickinson, Emily 360 Diego, Eliseo 36 Dorfman, Ariel 75-77 Dostoevsky, Fiodor 297-298 Dreyfus, Alfred 70-72 Durkheim, Émile 228, 231-232 Echeverría, José Antonio 121 Edwards, Jorge 191, 362 Eire, Carlos 25 Eliot, T. S. 174, 207 Estévez, Abilio 36 Estorino, Abelardo 36 Estrada Palma, Tomás 142, 160 Faulkner, William 207 Fein, John M. 242 Fell, Claude 217, n. 1, 220, 222, 226, 228 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 358 Fernández Retamar, Roberto 47, 140 Florit, Eugenio 25, 36 Foner, Phillip 163 Foucault, Michel 205, 313 Franco, Francisco 99, 338 Freud, Sigmund 22, 33, 41, 69, 92, 221-231 Passim

396

Santi.indb 396

06/06/2023 18:26:54

García Caturla, Alejandro 254, 259 García Lorca, Federico 200 García Márquez, Gabriel 73, 89 García, Andy 20 Gimferrer, Pere 247 Ginsberg, Allen 358 Glissant, Edouard 82-84, 91-92 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 209, 225 Goffman, Erving 329 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis 134 Gómez, Juan Gualberto 142 Gómez, Máximo 133-134, 159 González Echevarría, Roberto 3237, 316 Gonzalez Esteva, Orlando 17 González Pérez, Aníbal 214 González Videla, Gabriel 77 González, Hilario 255, 262 Gorbachev, Mikhail 45, 48 Gould, Stephen Jay 113 Grajales, Mariana 134 Gramatges, Harold 255, 262, 264 Grenet, Eliseo 11 Guerra, Ramiro 56, 120 Guevara, Ernesto “Che” 141 n. 4, 299 Guillén, Nicolás 38, 89, 93 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás 287-305 Gutiérrez Menoyo, Eloy 63 Harris, Wilson 93 Hart, Armando 141, N. 4 Hartman, Geoffrey 96-97 Hauser, Arnold 227 Hegel, F. W. 224-225, 231 Heidegger, Martin 13, 190, 223, 317-320

Hemingway, Ernest 291-292, 298306 Heredia, José María 54, 124-125, 134, 157-158 Hernández, Miguel 200 Hölderlin, Friedrich 225 Hove, Alec 48, N. 3 Howe, Julia Ward 126 Hudson, William Henry 371 Hurley, Andrew 363 Husserl, Edmund 69, 351 Ibáñez, José Luis 249 Kafka, Franz 104, 207 Keats, John 190, 329 Kermode, Frank 68-74 Ketchum de la Vega, Anne Marie 252, 281, 358 Khruschev, Nikita 201 Kirk, John M. 139 Kleiber, Erich 254-263 Kramer, Fritz 254-263 Kuethe, Alan 57 Kuhn, Thomas 85-88, 267 Kundera, Milan 361 Laforgue, Jules 174 Leal, Rine 37 Levine, Suzanne Jill 357, 370 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 239, 268 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 231 Lezama Lima, Jose 261, 264, 296, 323, 346, 366, 368, 377 Luis, Carlos M. 368 Lukacs, Gyorgy 190, 319 Luz y Caballero, José de la 56, 118, 121, 126, 132 Lyotard, Jean Francois 85, 90 Maceo, Antonio 133-134 Machado, Antonio 234

397

Santi.indb 397

06/06/2023 18:26:54

Mallarmé, Stéphane 108, 241, 352 Mañach, Jorge 55-56 Manzano, Juan Francisco 117-135 Marinello, Juan 140-141 Mario, Luis 175-181 Marrero, Leví 54, 120 Martí, José 120, 137-183 Martín, Edgardo 255, 265 Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel 182, 218 Marx, Karl 139, 227 Mauss, Marcel, 228-232 Mella, Julio Antonio 144, 152 Méndez Rodenas, Adriana 31, 57 Mercado, Manuel 173 Mesa Lago, Carmelo 29, 33, 35 Messing, Scott 256 Métraux, Alfred 232 Milosz, Czeslaw 189 Molina Foix, Vicente 249 Montaner, Carlos Alberto 182 Monte, Domingo del 117, 118, 121, 134 Montenegro, Nivia 251 Montes Huidobro, Matías 37 Moore, Marc 50-51 Moreno Fraginals, Manuel 54, 122 Nabokov, Vladimir 295, 346 Neruda, Pablo 13, 47, 73, 77, 187202, 299, 317, 352, Nietzsche, Friedrich 69, 181, 206, 227 Novás Calvo, Lino 43 O’Gorman, Edmundo 167 O’Reilly Herrera, Andrea 24 Opátrny, Jozef 31 Orbón, Julián 255, 259, 262, 265 Ortega y Gasset, José 190, 217, 220 Ortega, Antonio 331-335

Ortiz, Fernando 56, 328 Palma y Romay, Ramón de 121 Paseyro, Ricardo 202 Pau-Llosa, Ricardo 345-355, 383 Paz, Octavio 13, 35, 51, 62, 73, 91, 103, 165, 187, 189, 192-253 Peñate, Florencia 160 Pera Hernández, Agustín 60 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo 33, n. 3, 7879, 329 Pérez, Silverio 179 Pérez-Stable, Marifeli 25, 63 Pessoa, Fernando 174 Pezuela, de la Jacobo 54 Picasso, Pablo Ruiz 347 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 380-383 Planck, Max 69 Poe, Edgar Allan 108 Poey, Felipe 121 Ponte, Antonio José 376 Pound, Ezra 174 Powell, Jessica 357 Prío Socarrás, Carlos 170 Puig, Manuel 370 Quesada, Gonzalo de 154-155 Quevedo, Francisco de 280, 332 Quintana Manuel 151, 158 Rabelais, François 313 Racine, Jean 108 Ramos, Domingo 368 Ramos, Samuel 222, 223 Reid, Alastair 370 Rexach, Rosario 132 Reyes Morales, Carmen 198 Ricoeur, Paul 227 Rilke, Rainer Maria 280, 346 Rimbaud, Arthur 329, 371 Ripoll, Carlos 30, 31, 140, 180, n. 6

398

Santi.indb 398

06/06/2023 18:26:54

Roces, Wenceslao 200 Rodríguez Monegal, Emir 241, 370-371 Rodríguez, Carlos Rafael 46, 140 Roggiano, Alfredo 37, n. 8 Rojas, Pedro 42 Rojo, Vicente 249 Rokha, Pablo de 202 Roldán, Amadeo 254, 258 Roy, Joaquín 182 Rubio, Lydia 365-372 Saco, José Antonio 31, 53-56, 124135 Sáenz Peña, Roque 154-155 Said, Edward 97 San Pedro, Diego de 295 Sanguily, Manuel 56 Santa Cruz y Montalvo, María de las Mercedes 31, 58 Santamaría, Haydée 359 Sarduy, Severo 13, 34, 43, 311-321, 370, 377 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 125 Schelling, D. F. 224 Schönberg, Arnold 255-264 Passim Sellén, Francisco 158 Shakespeare, William 79 Skármeta, Antonio 192 Snow, C. P. 113 Soustelle, Jacques 231 Souza, Raymond D. 324, 332-333 Stevens, Wallace 67, 345-346 Stravinsky, Igor 255-261 Passim Suárez y Romero, Anselmo 121 Taruskin, Richard 347 Thomas, Hugh 55, 119 Timmerman, Jacobo 49 Tisseron, Serge 343-345

Tocqueville, Alexis de 101, 158 Todorov, Tzvetan 100 Toledo Sande, Luis 34, 35 n. 4 Torres Caicedo, José María 102 Torres Fierro, Danubio 325 Triana, José 36 Unamuno, Miguel de 143, 217 Urrutia, Matilde 201 Valdés Domínguez, Fermín 142 Valdés, Gabriel de la Concepción [“Plácido”] 135 Valencia, Pablo 182 Valero, Roberto 165, 168-172, 174, 176 Valéry, Paul 188, 218, 347 Varela, Félix 56, 59, 121-135 passim Vargas Llosa, Mario 74, n. 5 Varona, Enrique José 56 Vega Pichaco, Belén 259, n. 8 Vega, Aurelio de la 251-271, 305 Velázquez, Diego 205 Vidal, José 50 Villa, Ignacio [“Bola de Nieve”] 39 Villaurrutia, Xavier 229 Villaverde, Cirilo 56, 121 Viondi, Miguel 142 Vitier, Cintio 34-35, n. 4, 35, n. 5, 26, 56, 62, 140, 161 Vitoria, Francisco de 104 Wagner, Richard 254-258, 352 Walcott, Derek 89, 346 Weinberger, Eliot 243-244 Weissman, Frieder 254, 264 Whitman, Walt 103, 174, 352 Wilde, Oscar 61-79 Yau, John 372 Zambrana, Ramón 121

399

Santi.indb 399

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