Facundo and the construction of Argentine culture 9780292779020, 9780292727908, 9780292727892

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page ix)
Introduction (page 1)
1. The Wars of Persuasion: Conflict, Interpretation, and Power in the Early Years of Facundo's Reception (page 23)
2. The Risks of Fiction: Facundo and the Parameters of Historical Writing (page 41)
3. The Wiles of Disputation: Alberdi Reads Facundo (page 67)
4. Facundo's Travels to the Metropolitan Centers (page 83)
5. The Nation Consolidated: The 1880's and the Canonization of Facundo (page 99)
6. A Classic Corrected: Rewriting the National Myths (page 142)
Notes (page 171)
Bibliography (page 195)
Index (page 213)

Citation preview

——— FACUNDO AND THE CONSTRUCTION —— OF ARGENTINE CULTURE

The Texas Pan American Series

FACUNDO AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ARGENTINE CULTURE BY DIANA SORENSEN GOODRICH

Vv

Portions of this work originally appeared as ‘‘Reading Sarmiento: Writing the Myths of National Culture,” from Sarmiento and His Argentina, edited by Joseph T. Criscenti. Copyright © 1993 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Used with permission of the publisher; and as “The Wiles of Disputation: Alberdi Reads Facundo,” from Sarmiento: Author of a Nation, Donghi, Tulio Halperi, Ivan Jaksic, et al. Copyright © 1994 The Regents of the University of California; and as “From Barbarism to Civilization: Travels of a Latin American Text,” from American Literary History (1992) Vol. 4, 3: 443-463. By permission of Oxford University Press. Copyright © 1996 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 1996

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819. (©) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goodrich, Diana Sorensen. Facundo and the construction of Argentine culture / by Diana Sorensen Goodrich.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-292-72790-8 1. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 1811-1888. Facundo. 2. Argentina—History—1810o-— 3. Argentina—lIntellectual life. I. Title. F2846.8247G6 1996

982—dc20 95-§2564

For my daughter Lisa

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1X

INTRODUCTION I ONE

THE WARS OF PERSUASION Conflict, Interpretation, and Power in the Early Years of Facundo’s Reception 23 TWO

THE RISKS OF FICTION Facundo and the Parameters of Historical Writing 4I THREE

THE WILES OF DISPUTATION Alberdi Reads Facundo 67

Vil

—_—_————_- FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE —” FOUR

FACUNDO’S TRAVELS TO THE METROPOLITAN CENTERS 83

FIVE

THE NATION CONSOLIDATED The 1880's and the Canonization of Facundo 99 SIX

A CLASSIC CORRECTED Rewriting the National Myths 142

NOTES I7I BIBLIOGRAPHY 195

INDEX 213

Vill

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

E... friends, and colleagues have contributed to the writing of this book by being listeners and interlocutors, and also by providing the practical help without which writing cannot take place. Foremost is my mother, Marta Sorensen, whose devotion and support have smoothed many wrinkles along the way. My father, Gerardo Sorensen, has always been the ultimate reading partner. To Jim Goodrich, the deepest thanks for his loyalty, kindness and companionship.

Throughout the writing of this book I profited enormously from the intelligent and generous attention offered by Sylvia Molloy. She has followed its progress with continuous support, and I am greatly indebted to her for her friendship and the shared passion for Sarmiento and his world. Josefina Ludmer, Ana Maria Barrenechea, and Walter Mignolo also offered helpful leads when the idea of this project was taking shape. My colleague Ann Wightman has been a most valued interlocutor throughout the years, at times helping me think through some questions from her vantage point as a historian. The same could be said about Jay Winter, whose sense of history and poetry furthered my dialogue with the past. To Wilfrido Corral, many thanks for his unfailing and generous bibliographical expertise. Arcadio Diaz Quifiones and David William Foster offered most valued readings of the manuscript, for which J am deeply grateful. Over

the years, I have had stimulating and sometimes heated conversations about Sarmiento with Joseph T. Criscenti, Elizabeth Garrels, Marina Kap-

lan, and Doris Sommer. I hope the following pages spark many more. IX

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The research and writing of this book were aided by a Fulbright Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a semester at Wesleyan

University’s Center for the Humanities. I am indebted to their support, which provided essential access to research materials as well as the equally necessary peace and concentration. In Argentina, Adriana de Muro from the Museo Historico Sarmiento went beyond the call of duty to allow me to access the valuable materials under her supervision. Many thanks for her kindness and efficiency. My friend Dr. Eduardo Duek worked miracles to obtain microfiches from Chile’s Biblioteca Nacional. Theresa J. May from the University of Texas Press lent her gracious and professional sup-

port throughout. My colleagues and students at Wesleyan University deserve my gratitude for their interest in my work and the intellectual stimulation they provide: I can always count on the generously intelligent input of Peter Dunn, Bernardo Antonio Gonzalez, Robert Conn, and Khachig Tololyan. Joan Jurale, Edmund Rubacha, and Steven Lebergott at Olin Memorial Library have lent their expertise and support on many crucial occasions. Thanks go to all whose fingerprints are present on the following pages; may I have the good fortune to have put their traces to occasional good use. I dedicate this book to my daughter, Lisa K. Goodrich, who keeps teaching me.

x

———— FACUNDO AND THE CONSTRUCTION ——— OF ARGENTINE CULTURE

SARMIENTO

Del tiempo que es después, antes, ahora, Sarmiento el sonador sigue sondndonos. — JORGE LUIS BORGES

INTRODUCTION

Yet another book about Facundo? A look at the daunting bibliography on this foundational book would suggest that this volume would be best left undone. But the point of departure of the pages that follow is precisely the sheer proliferation of writing that has accrued around Facundo, and the ideological rifts traversing it. For although there is general agreement about the importance of the book, and about its status as a classic of Latin American letters, there are deep disagreements about its interpretation and about the kinds of nationbuilding myths it promoted. To this day, Argentines engage in heated debates over Sarmiento’s book. To some, it is a necessary call to join the developed world and draw from European civilization in order to foster Argentine modernization. To others, it contributed to the insidious discourse on national inferiority which blocked the expression of populist and rural-based aspirations from the production of national identity. No one treats Facundo as a neutral text. Growing up in Argentina, within the somewhat eccentric environment of a British school, I was exposed in my childhood to the glorification of Sarmiento and his ideas. We sang the “Himno a Sarmiento,” invok-

ing his struggles “with the pen, with the sword, with the word” [con la pluma, con la espada, y la palabra,], we called anyone who never missed school “una Sarmiento,” and we devoted long speeches on commemorative celebrations on September 11, ‘““Teacher’s Day”—the day of Sarmiento’s death—to his lifelong dedication to education. Among my I

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earliest recollections of school readings are passages taken from Recuerdos de provincia (Paula Albarracin’s fig tree loomed as emblematic without my knowing why; Sarmiento the miner reading through the night in

Copiap6 epitomized the passion for learning) and Facundo. The latter lingered in our imagination before we knew what to make of its discursive heterogeneity; we read extracts about the problems of Argentina’s desolate spaces, about the intriguing abilities of the “track-finder” [rastreador]

or the “path-finder” [baqueano], about the “gaucho outlaw” [gaucho malo] as incarnated by a Facundo Quiroga fleeing from justice as he looked into the eyes of a terrifying tiger. Juan Manuel de Rosas, of course, epitomized the ever-present barbarism of Argentina’s conflict-ridden political life; memories of PerOn’s rule were obliquely evoked by the colorful depiction of terror in the days of the Confederation. A high school history

teacher who mentioned the enterprise of revisionismo alarmed us with the possibility that we might have to readjust our distribution of good and bad qualities, but it was not until I was a student in the Facultad de Filosofia y Letras at the Universidad de Buenos Aires that I had to confront the dismantling of the received myths. During the seventies, when the governments of Campora and Peron were giving voice to populism, Facundo was indicted as the document of the vende-patrias who had betrayed Argentina and had literally given it away to foreign interests. The attacks were launched from a variety of angles, but one consistent target was the civilization-barbarism dichotomy, which was made to stand on its head in order to read the whole book against the grain. The power and pathos of these debates left traces which I pursued in graduate school in the United States as I further delved into the vaster territories of Latin American literature. The polarity reappeared in more or less veiled but persistent ways in a panoply of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, with the risky, if seductive, qualities provided by its capacity to articulate numerous other binary oppositions so deeply entrenched in our habits of thought. I was intrigued by the possibility of following the traces of the conflict of interpretation as it pertained to Facundo’s readings in Argentina’s cultural formation. To what extent could they help account for its fractured nature, for that Argentina en pedazos, that Piglia so suggestively evokes in his latest book, centered on a scene of writing which is torn by violence; or for the metaphors of failure which underpin the Invention of Argentina as rendered by Nicholas Shumway? As one of Sarmiento’s detractors has put it, there are sarmientones who deliriously extol his virtues while other sarmientudos' condemn him with equal passion; he can be deified or vilified but certainly never set aside. In the words of one of his admirers, Sar2

————_—________————- INTRODUCTION —————miento is the essence of argentinidad, but maybe, as another one put it, that essence can only be understood as divided between him and Rosas: Sarmiento and Rosas are . . . the two genuine representatives of Argentineness in their lights and in their shadows, somewhat like the thesis and the antithesis of national life. [Sarmiento y Rosas son . . . los dos representantes genuinos de la argentinidad en sus luces y en sus sombras, algo asi como la tesis y la antitesis de la vida nacional.]?

Without subscribing to the Hegelian dialectic suggested above, this book seeks to explore the constant interplay between light and shadow which has sustained the conflicting readings of Facundo since its publication in

1845, trying to take distance from it so as to construct a reading of readings.

Attendant upon this project is a conception of writing which can be summed up by Barthes’s observation that “to write is to offer your word (parole) to others, that they may complete it.”? Rather than attempt yet another analysis of Facundo, then, I will see how the text has been “‘completed” in a plurality of ways, which, in turn, have to be seen within context-specific relations of power, institutional constraints, and other circumstances affecting the “uses” a book is put to. Hence, as a founding premise, this study conceives of the work as not only destined for the reader, but also in need of the reader to have its meanings activated and brought to life. The text, then, is an object for the active reading subject, who is a creative coproducer in a communication process that is not subordinated to the notion of a correct or appropriate interpretation—a notion the pages that follow set out to problematize. A work like Facundo, which has engendered a plurality of readings, dramatizes the unstable nature of the text itself: far from being a homogeneous bearer of meaning, it is a web of differential relationships that is not limited by the physical boundaries of the book, but that spreads over a vast network of readings claiming to legitimize it, question it, or undermine it. If a text is a dissemination of meanings, its readings stage their production. Although the text cannot be conceived of independently from its readings, the readings in turn cannot be detached from the contexts in which they obtain, nor can the interaction between different reading contexts be ignored. When the historical axis is taken into account, the succession of readings becomes part of a semiological chain in which the elements of the system interact with each other: each new reading can be affected by pre3

———————— FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE ——————

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

If Facundo’s varied readings can be said to constitute its meaning, then they can, at the same time, illustrate the extent to which there is no such thing as the objective meaning of a work. Looking at the book through the layers of readings which have accumulated on it along the diachronic axis, one is led to underscore the ways in which readings are charged with the remnants of others which provide an archaeological base of sorts and hence an intertextual dimension. The productivity of a work resides in the varied and often unexpected readings to which it gives place, in the new structures of reception which result from different interpretations. The act of “unhitching” * the work from the context of production seeks to undermine the possibility of closure in its study and to open it up to the multiple relationships which might obtain as different readers read. In turn, the readings are not context-free but, rather, determined by a number of factors that shape them. As Hans Georg Gadamer has so per-

suasively argued, the interpretation of each text is a creative event that does not merely reappropriate the textual message of the past: it also incorporates the interpreter’s present.’ Indeed, the framework of each reading will necessarily differ from the one in which it was originally constituted as meaningful. Reading is a mediation between different intellectual and cultural positions; not infrequently, it takes place in less than harmonious ways, requiring both destructive and constructive interventions which may shore up, undermine, or shatter ideas in circulation. Since what one might for reasons of expediency call the initial meaning is already caught up in the movement of history, the notion of a final valid interpretation makes little sense. Facundo’s reception illustrates the bankruptcy of such a notion and the extent to which each time tends to understand the written tradition in its own way. Arthur Danto suggests an additional difficulty: even if one were to completely describe the text’s initial

context, it would not be possible to locate it in all the right stories that would achieve this.®

If the notion of tradition must be questioned in order to accommodate a skeptical stance vis-a-vis the interaction between past and present, by taking into account the conditions under which tradition develops and changes, one might be able to track the way in which meanings are constituted and modified, consolidated and undermined. As Facundo is studied through its readings, what emerges is a process in and through which a society articulates its culture and in so doing produces and mediates conflict, giving shape to social relationships. Within the patterns that emerge, one detects the varying interpretive mechanisms deployed in dif-

4

——_——_—_——————_ INTRODUCTION ———— ferent subcultures. The cultural field appears fragmented and discontinuous; nevertheless, the complex relationships between ideology, knowl-

edge, and power present themselves as regulating the struggles for interpretive supremacy. In other words, it soon becomes quite clear that the conflicting interpretations of Facundo stem from such differences as political affiliation, conceptions of the nation, or the uses of culture. Thus, it is as interesting to trace the differences as the site from which they are produced. As I study the reception of Sarmiento’s classic, then, I will ex-

amine the institutional forces that legitimize interpretations, the allegiances of those who make validity claims about the book, the forms of legitimation deployed, and the terms in which the unresolved struggle for interpretive hegemony takes place. This entails looking into such interrelated processes as production and consumption, communication and selection, reception and action. The connection between text and practical life will be shown to be an active and fertile one; it throws light on the constitution of Argentine culture and on some of the ways in which historical consciousness is developed, so that the issues raised touch upon the reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history. It is interesting to see how national identity can be observed from the vantage point of a classic and its readings, how they constitute a repertory of conflicting interpretations, and the extent to which polemics can provide a model for understanding cultural formation. Persuaded of the social and material embedding of all modes of writing, I have grounded my descriptive and interpretive work in society and history so as to widen and deepen my concern with language and reading. Hence, I hope the scrutiny of the discursive practices engendered by a classic will make contributions not only to literary studies, but also to the related areas of history, political thought, and the examination of ideological formations. In this way, the

scrutiny would participate in the ongoing redrawing of disciplinary boundaries which locate the humanities as a site of intellectually and socially significant work. The conception of history which underpins this project eschews the Hegelian notion of comprehension as a unified process granting intelligibility to events in a homogeneous diachronic sequence. Instead, historical periods will be seen as mixtures of events emerging at different moments of their own time, marked by Foucauldian discontinuities and constructing what we might call an archive of Facundo’s readings. As Roman Jakobson points out in his Essais de linguistique générale, “Like the history of the language, historical poetics must be conceived as a superstructure, built on a series of successive synchronic descriptions.” [La poétique historique,

5

————————— FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE ——————

tout comme histoire du langage, doit étre congue comme une superstructure, batie sur une série de descriptions synchroniques successives. ] ’

A FORMULA FOR CONFLICT: CIVILIZATION VERSUS BARBARISM The tensions which have characterized the reception of Facundo derive in no small measure from the dichotomy which Sarmiento chose to account for the struggles in the post-Independence era. Although he was not its

creator, his astute appropriation of it turned it into an influential paradigm in Latin American literature, one which has engendered an archive of writing, either ratifying it or dismantling it. Such varied works as Martin Fierro or Dona Barbara, in their own very different ways, bear witness to the deep imprint of the Sarmientine formula on the construction of the culture. The dichotomy civilization-barbarism is traversed by difference: it is a double-voiced conundrum which affirms and negates, which contains the matrix for tradition and countertradition in a Nietzschean, agonistic way. Obviously an instance of the conceptual oppositions of Western metaphysics, its long life underscores the hold of this polar way of thinking on the one hand, and, on the other, the power of its “either/or” structure to foster conflict in cultural formation. The discursive field commanded by the formula has dominated the readings of Facundo as if it were both its blindness and its insight, providing a powerful conceptual tool and a fertile ground for attack. Even a cursory perusal of Facundo’s reception suggests that the polemics surrounding it have been most frequently launched

from the vantage point of the famous dichotomy. Not surprisingly, its terms end up not so much referring to a specific condition, as to problematic conceptions of social values. It is not without interest to trace the history of the terms it commands and see an instance of the workings of language, culture, and ideology. If one agrees with Emile Benveniste that the history of modern thought is linked to the creation and maintenance of ‘“‘a few dozen essential words which together constitute the common heritage of Western European languages” [quelques dizaines de mots essentiels, dont l’ensemble constitue le bien commun des langues de |’Europe occidentale],® it may be fruitful to look into the emergence of as pregnant a term as civilization. There is an eloquent conjunction between a certain experience of culture and society and the need to expand the linguistic repertory. As Lucien Febvre has pointed out, the term did not exist until the second half of the eighteenth 6

—————_—_—_—_—_—__—_————— INTRODUCTION ——_——"—-

century—a fact which provides a suggestive opportunity to ponder its roots in a conception of reason, progress, and the perfectibility of the human condition. In the history of the term, as Febvre avers, one confronts the emergence of a cultural formation: To trace the history of the French word civilization would be in fact to reconstruct the phases of the most profound revolution accomplished and experienced by the French spirit between the second half of the eighteenth century and our days. And therefore, from a particular point of view, it would be to apprehend in its totality a history whose attraction and brilliance are not limited to the borders of one state. [Faire l’histoire du mot francais civilisation ce serait reconstituer, en réalité, les fases de la plus profonde des révolutions qu’ait accomplies, et subies, esprit francais depuis la seconde moitié du XVIlle siécle jusqu’d nos jours. Et par conséquent, d’un point de vue particulier, embrasser dans sa totalité une histoire dont l’attraction, pas plus que le rayonnement, ne s’est bornée aux frontiers d’un Etat.] !°

Febvre finds the noun in printed form for the first time in 1766, though he believes it was coined earlier,!! and, indeed, both Emile Benveniste and Jean Starobinski'? note earlier occurrences of the term. Although Staro-

binski finds it as early as 1743 in Trévoux’s Dictionnaire universel, he moots its significance because it has a purely jurisprudential range of meanings. Both Starobinski and Benveniste agree that the marquis de Mirabeau may have been the one to have used it in its nonjudicial sense for the first time in his Ami des hommes (1756-1757, p. 176), where it ap- pears a number of times in ways which are not unequivocal.’ By 1798, the term had acquired considerable currency in the writings of Raynal, the abbé Baudeau, and Diderot, but its triumph only comes with the French Revolution. In the history of the English word, we may recall the story Boswell tells about how Johnson resisted admitting civilisation into the fourth edition of his “Dictionnary,” preferring “civility” to express the opposite of barbarism. It would seem that the Scotsman Adam Ferguson, from the University of Edinburgh, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society of 1767, may have been the first one to use the word in English.'* Adam Smith’s

seminal An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations (1776) contains a few uses of the word with the connotation of advancement toward a higher level of human development. For indeed, the word civilization is coined so as to cover the gaps left 7

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by other existing words, to introduce or delete modulations of meaning contained in existing ones. Thus, civilité, a very old term, alluded to honesty and politeness in manners, whereas civil had political and judicial implications. There was also a semantic cluster around the words police, policé, policie, politesse, politeia, urbanitas, all of them suggestive of law, order, administration, the city or polis, government, and opposed to their absence in the state of barbarism. The word civilization, then, was specifically needed to designate the triumph of reason in the political, intellec-

tual, and moral senses. It proclaimed the spirit of the Encyclopédie, of rational and experimental science. Its self-reflexive stance is indicative of an emergent consciousness about the development of collective life, and it is soon aware of other civilizations, while retaining a sense of critical mastery over the other. Thus, it was bound up with its opposite inasmuch as

it entailed a view of the perfectibility of human society away from the primitive, savage, barbarous early stages. Diderot sums this up in no unclear terms: “To teach a nation is to civilize it; to extinguish its knowledge

is to take it back to the primitive state of barbarism.” [Instruire une nation, c’est la civiliser; y éteindre les connaissances, c’est la ramener a |’état primitif de barbarie. . . .]'° This sense of civilization implied a culmination in a linear, ascending

historical conception: how can one not see it as a telling instance of the intertwining of language and ideology? There may also be a paradoxical quality in the term: as Jean Starobinski has perceptively argued, it may signal both the consolidation of a sense of mission and achievement and a concomitant crisis: “The withering away of the institutional forms of the sacred, the impossibility for theological discourse to retain its force as ‘concrete and absolute’ urgently invite most souls to search for substitutive absolutes.” [L’effritement du sacré institutionnel, l’impossibilité pour le discours théologique de continuer a valoir comme ‘concret et absolu’ invitent la plupart des esprits a chercher de toute urgence des absolus substitutifs.]!° The word civilization could be seen as coming to the rescue with all it entails in terms of human perfectibility and the belief in reason as an alternative to religion. The conceptual model it provided allowed for a variety of uses which referred both to itself and to its implicit counterpart (barbarism), as part of a family of concepts through which an opposite could be named in a rhythm marked by self and other. Linguists, trav-

elers, and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, found it

handy—in conjunction with its opposite—as a tool for recording impressions of the various stages of human development encountered as they scrutinized the globe and its inhabitants from their superior vantage point. The great explorer Wilhelm von Humboldt commented on this as8

INTRODUCTION ——-__ cending curb away from barbarism and towards a three-tiered system which would include Zivilisation, Kultur, and finally Bildung.’ In the course of the nineteenth century, the word took on connotations of cultural superiority as the expansionism of the West produced an ideology of empire which was at least in part justified by the idea that the inferior, savage, and barbarous peoples would be raised from their condition in the civilizing enterprise. As Roberto Fernandez Retamar has pointed out, the dichotomy civilization-barbarism cannot be detached from the ascendancy of capitalism.'® In his view, it was part and parcel of the development of capital and its concomitant need to create world markets. Attendant upon it was a degree of ethnocentrism which tended to underscore the differences between the European and the non-European. Quoting Engels, Fernandez Retamar alludes to the material implications of the dichotomy, for within the Marxist interpretation, the basis of civilization is the exploitation of one class by another. Within this context, one is reminded of Walter Benjamin’s powerful statement, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” ' In the early years of the twentieth century, the metropolitan formula was circulating in the newspapers of the Rio de la Plata area, in the ones founded during the viceroyalty (Telégrafo Mercantil, Semanario de Agricultura, Industria y Comercio, Correo de Comercio) as well as in the ones which followed the Revolution of 1810. According to F. Weinberg, it is in the Mensajero Argentino, published by Rivadavia’s followers, that the dichotomy is deployed as such for the first time.”° In a recently published book, Jaime Pellicer argues the point that it was Sarmiento’s friend and fellow exile, Vicente Fidel Lopez, who actually transplanted the polarity to the Latin American cultural shores in his graduation thesis, Memoria

sobre los resultados generales con que los pueblos antiguos han contribuido a la civilizaci6n de la humanidad.”' Sarmiento takes up its sense of struggle and history, and to chart the progress of the nation in its postcolonial phase. Although there seems to be a certain geographic determinism in his thinking whereby the land and its impact on the socialization process block the growth of a civilized society, the historical thrust which drives the formula civilization-barbarism seems to guarantee a forward movement which will culminate in the triumph of civilization, as can be seen in the final chapters of Facundo. For all those who saw themselves as immersed in the enterprise of modernization, the call to end the power of the rural caudillos, as epitomized by Quiroga and Rosas, rested on the validity of the civilizing mission. “A term which is charged with the sacred demonizes its antonym” [Un terme chargé de sacré démonise son antonyme], declares Starobinski as he 9

—————— FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE ———————

discusses the power with which the conceptual charge of civilization carries with it a negative judgement of its inverted self.?? Sustained by the powerful tropological tension of the dichotomy, the term barbarism, the “outside” of civilization, its inverted self, has a much longer history, which can be accounted for by the fact that it represents the anxiety with which the other has usually been confronted. Indeed, the word appears in a contribution to the Encyclopédie written by the Abbé Yvon for the 1751 edition—in which civilisation is absent. The word barbarous, like its close semantic relatives wild and savage, illustrates how definition can progress by negation and how difference can be accounted for by the assignation of negative or inferior qualities to what is perceived as a threat to the societal norm.?3 Further, the term marked the boundary between an outside and an inside, since for Aristotle and his commentators the barbaroi were excluded from the oikumene, or the family of man. One important impli-

cation of the word barbarous was, since Classical Greek times, that it might be adduced as a justification for enslavement. This pragmatic connection has been expounded by Lewis Hanke in his seminal book Aristotle and the American Indian, with a wealth of examples illustrating how it contributed to the discourse of domination of the Native Americans. Anthony Pagden’s work probes these terms and their Aristotelian roots, revealing the extent to which the legitimacy of Spanish rule in the six-

teenth century was tied in with the interpretation and definition of the words barbarous and barbarians. The anxiety to establish the range of possible meanings associated with these terms in writers such as Vitoria, Sepalveda, Las Casas, and Acosta suggests their problematic bearing on matters such as legality, theology, the nature of the world, and its inhabitants. As Pagden’s The Fall of Natural Man eloquently proves, a fundamental shift of focus allowed the Spaniards to justify their rule over the American Indians: no longer probing the “supposed juridical rights of the conquerors,” they scrutinized instead the nature of the people being conquered.** Drawing on the notion of barbarism was the sleight of hand which located the question of power within a new conceptual frame. Affirming or denying the putative lacks of the indians were the operations on which the nature of Spanish rule was to rest. Thus, even if a barbarian was not a natural slave, he needed the mediation provided by Christian Spain to begin to erase the marks of foreignness and gradually move from the outside to an inside. Only those equipped with civility could make that transition possible.

Of course, several chapters could be added on the uses of the word barbarism to designate the condition of gauchos, llaneros, people of African origin, or Native Americans. Even a work like the Martin Fierro of IO

INTRODUCTION ———___ 1872, so keenly aware of the plight of the dispossessed gaucho, insistently deploys terms such as salvaje or barbaro to refer to the Indian. The kind of perceptive cultural relativism that we encounter in Las Casas or Montaigne is very rare indeed. In Latin America, the most sobering reminder of the dangers of an uncritical espousal of the ideology of European civilization is Marti’s eloquent ‘“‘Nuestra América”: by 1891 the problems of adhering to the ideology of Western domination were becoming apparent. But even before the Cuban patriot made his plea against the espousal of foreign criteria for modernization, several cautionary notes were sounded

by others who were skeptical of the drive to modernize. In the 1850’s, Juan Bautista Alberdi acuitously questioned the blind acceptance of European values, frequently doing so in and through his attacks of Facundo and its impact. The Venezuelan Ramon Ramirez, in his El cristianismo y la libertad: ensayo sobre la civilizaci6n americana (1855), pointed to the ills caused by the attempt to assimilate European values at the expense of the well-being of the majority and of a truly continental identity. With the advent of the twentieth century, the legacy of Nietzsche and Freud, resistance movements, the anthropological self-awareness of thinkers like Lévy-Strauss, and the ironic, questioning stance of modernism visa-vis, the consequences of imperialism have allowed for the development of a sustained critical discourse on the implications of the problematic formula. But even early on, the whole-hearted adherence to the virtues imputed to civilization underwent questioning. A term which had gained its ascendancy with the French Revolution was placed in problematic con-

texts by those who opposed it, such as Edmund Burke, who pointed to the “savage brutality” of a state which had done away with religion and nobility. Civilization was problematized by the inclusion of barbarism within it, as a latent threat. Even the “inventor” of the word, the Marquis de Mirabeau, alluded to the “barbarism of our civilizations” and to the “false civilization,” for the word was part of a critical enterprise since its inception. A revealing set of articles serialized in El Comercio de Valparaiso in the

early months of 1848, entitled “La civilizacion: Conferencias Jerundianas” shows how if on the one hand civilization was considered as providing the qualities that were deemed necessary in the early stages of national

formation (“that degree of culture acquired by people or persons when they move from the natural state of roughness to the delicacy, elegance and sweetness of the voices, the habits and customs of educated people. Urbanitas, civilitas, comitas” [aquel grado de cultura que adquieren los pueblos o personas, cuando de la rudeza natural pasan al primor, elegancia y dulzura de voces, usos y costumbres de jente culta. Urbanitas, civili-

II

——————- FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE ——— tas, comitas]),2° on the other it is not without its clearly negative underside in terms of morals, religion, and even “the desire to acquire” [el deseo de adquisicién].2° Thus, the use of the formula is not without inherent con-

tradictions inasmuch as the positive term was in turn divided along the lines provided by a cautionary note about the dangers of decadence. Sarmiento’s astute appropriation of the dichotomy had on the one hand the advantage of generating concepts and theories, but on the other it passed on its fractured nature to the debate about Latin America’s destiny. Without tediously mapping out the lengthy repertory of texts and theories which invoke the formula, it is essential to note the important contestatory book by Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Caliban, which stands the formula on its head, claiming the identity of Caliban as the other embraced defiantly by Latin America in response to its postcolonial predicament. Fernandez Retamar both subverts the Sarmientine formula and remains within its purview, revealing how deeply it has set the terms within which the debate can be articulated: the Cuban critic is still trapped into choosing one of the two poles, unable to extricate himself from the binary logic in which the signification process is embedded.2” Moreover, as Fernandez Retamar is only too well aware of, the defiant claim of Caliban as a purveyor of identity is itself a sign of dependency: To come to terms with the Caliban in all of us implies rethinking our history

from the other side, from the other protagonist. The other protagonist of The Tempest (or, as we would have put it, The Cyclone) is not of course Ariel, but Prospero. There is no real polarity Ariel-Caliban: they are both in the service of Prospero, the foreign sorcerer.

[Asumir nuestra condicion de Caliban implica repensar nuestra historia desde el otro lado, desde el otro protagonista. El otro protagonista de La tempestad (o, como hubiéramos dicho nosotros, El ciclén), no es por supuesto Ariel, sino Prospero. No hay verdadera polaridad Ariel-Caliban: ambos son siervos en manos de Prospero, el hechicero extranjero.|”°

The resilience of the polarity has allowed it to outlive the self-reflexive

turn of our times, sometimes turning up in very contemporary debates without shedding its nineteenth-century trappings. A case in point is a discussion with Mario Vargas Llosa, Arcadio Diaz Quifiones, and Tomas Eloy Martinez in the spring of 1993, in which the exchange of views on modernization, the opening up of trade barriers following the impulse

of economic liberalism, the sale of state-owned enterprises, and the decentralization of the national economies is conducted in the terms set I2

INTRODUCTION —— down by Sarmiento, who is invoked in the conversation. After Vargas Llosa has expounded his political views, Diaz Quifiones astutely sums them up as follows: “At this point in the conversation I notice that Mario Vargas Llosa’s true model for the public space is Sarmiento, with his civilizing and modernizing discourse, and his ideas of civilization and barbarism.” [A esta altura de la conversacion advierto que el verdadero modelo de Mario Vargas Llosa para el espacio piblico es Sarmiento, con su discurso civilizador y modernizador, y sus ideas de civilizacion y barbarie.]2° Not surprisingly, the editor of the “Cultural Supplement” of Pégina 12 chooses as a title for the piece, ““La modernidad a cualquier precio,” alluding to the unresolved controversy of the postcolonial scene. An important recent contribution to Argentine scholarship on women writers, Francine Masiello’s lucid Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina,*®®© both proclaims and moots the tenacious formula, alighting on the space “between” it to explore precisely “‘a feminine gesture against binarism.” 3! Carving out an alternative

discursive space involves an attempt to transcend the binary logic inscribed in Sarmiento’s disjunction: “A third position . . . is located neither in the dwellings of the civilized nor in the fields of the barbaric: a merger of the two is pronounced in the precepts of women writers who undermine the binary logic.” 3? It is its imposing presence in the cultural field of Latin America which in part, at least, explains the fast hold of Facundo in Ar-

gentine culture: it is a machine for engendering texts and interpretive discourse.

A BOOK AND A NATION Josefina Ludmer refers to Facundo as “‘the first cathedral of Argentine culture” [la primera catedral de la cultura argentina] ** and, like Tulio Hal-

perin Donghi, sees national culture as containing and contained by the double voice of Facundo and Martin Fierro. For Ludmer, in fact, although Sarmiento stopped short of producing literatura gauchesca by not giving Facundo Quiroga himself the voice in the text, he heard it all the time (“it was the voice of his delirium, of his dream, because he had it inside him and because that was the voice of the fatherland when he wrote Facundo” [era la voz de su delirio, de su suefio, porque la tenia adentro y porque ésa era la voz de la patria cuando escribié Facundo])* and enacted the scene of gauchesca writing when Facundo Quiroga is presented choosing desertion over discipline, after having been recruited in 1810 in the Arribefios

regiment under General Ocampo.** The “empty space” (vacio) left by 13

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Quiroga in the army as he opted for his own claims to power, “‘for valor and crime, government and disorganization,” *¢ is both his absence from the patriotic regiment and from the género gauchesco. This absence also invokes the tension which sustains the civilization/barbarism divide: Barbarism dramatizes not only the confrontation with “civilization” but also a second, inner confrontation, with itself... . It contains a part of civilization, valor, and governance, associated with crime and disorganization. The double tension, towards the outside and the inside, is the best definition of Sarmiento’s text, Facundo. [La barbarie no solo dramatiza el enfrentamiento con “la civilizaciOn”’ sino un segundo enfrentamiento interior, consigo misma. . .. Contiene una parte de civilizacion, valor y gobierno, asociada con crimen y desorganizaci6n. La doble tension, hacia afuera y adentro de si es la mejor definiciOn de Facundo, el texto de Sarmiento. |]?

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

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

INTRODUCTION — persists to this day, undermining consensus and a belief in unity or, at least, community. The “guiding fiction” that Sarmiento bequeathed to the nation has been, paradoxically enough, both deeply divisive and allembracing: not entirely unlike Plato’s pharmakon, it is both the condition of difference and the hinge by which the opposing terms share a common element.*? Indeed, the most incisive readers of Argentine culture are drawn into conflating its two antagonic voices, seeing them as two sides of the same coin, or as the light and the shadow present in the cultural memory of the nation. A passage from Tulio Halperin Donghi’s José Hernandez y sus mundos deserves to be quoted in its entirety because of the pregnant insights which he brings to bear on the texts and their worlds: The cult of symmetry [between Facundo and Martin Fierro] does not quite explain the tenacity with which we continue searching in it. After so many disappointments, the enterprise retains its appeal to many in that they prefer to find in Hernandez an alternative, rather than a parallel, to Sarmiento; that secret monument of a buried literature, whose presence Martin Fierro allows us to guess, is the ideological and literary correlative of a political tradition with which they identify passionately, and whose temporary defeat offers the central theme of any truthful history of Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century; Martin Fierro is then Facundo and Hernandez the Sarmiento of that hemisphere of light which the servants of the shadows—victorious in an ephemeral way—tried to delete from national memory—with equally ephemeral results.

[El culto de la simetria (between Facundo and Martin Fierro) no bastaria sim embargo paia explicar la tenacidad con que se sigue buceando en su busca. El atractivo que, luego de tantas decepciones, la empresa sigue manteniendo para muchos deriva de que prefieren buscar en Hernandez una alternativa, antes que un paralelo, para Sarmiento; ese monumento secreto de una literatura soterrada, cuya presencia Martin Fierro permite adivinar, es el correlato ideoldgico y literario de una tradiciOn politica cuya temporaria derrota ofrece a su juicio el tema central para cualquier historia veraz de la Argentina en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, y con la cual se identifcan por otra parte apasionadamente; Martin Fierro es entonces el Facundo y Hernandez el Sarmiento de ese hemisferio de luz que los servidores de las tinieblas, efimeramente victoriosos, buscaron, con éxito igualmente efimero, borrar de la memoria de la naci6n.]*!

Halperin Donghi’s compelling prose teaches us to see the dangerous chiaroscuro in the Argentine canvas—made even more dangerous by the attempt to erase the submerged light of resistance. Such unsuccessful atT5

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tempts have produced a panoply of both worldly and textual effects, ranging from the recent horrors in the country’s history to the frequent metaphors of illness or failure deployed in the discourse about the nation. If national culture organizes and sustains communal memory, the need to redeploy and reinterpret its founding texts would be suggestive of the ways in which unresolved issues prompt revisions of the past. Reading Facundo has been one of the means of conceptualizing the conflicts of the

past and, also, of mapping out possibilities for the future, but on most occasions the effort has entailed coming to terms initially with the Sarmientine interpretation of the nation, displacing or corroborating it. As passionate an intellectual as Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, who so vividly evoked the experience of Argentine failure in his anguished Radiografia de la pampa, wrote insistently about Sarmiento, as if he needed to come to terms with the founding father in order to plot his own thinking.*? He saw Sarmiento as a “crystallization” of the national equation, as the one whose writings contained all its terms, as the “national problem par excellence,” as the “example of the Argentine being.” Martinez Estrada is trapped in the double bind which forces him to admire Sarmiento while, at the same time, subjecting his ideas to frequently critical scrutiny. If, on the one hand, he proclaims that “he and the country are the same truth”; on the other he denounces the pernicious effect of the civilizationbarbarism paradigm on the grounds that, because of it, “phantoms displaced men, and utopia devoured reality.” #3 If in Radiografia de la pampa Sarmiento is denounced as “the most harmful of those dreamers” [el mas perjudicial de esos sonadores], his Los invariantes histéricos del Facundo, however, acknowledges the extent to which his country’s deep life-themes are to be understood within the parameters established by a Facundo conceived as a forecast and a myth. The book’s title announces the aporia of a history which is arrested in the invariable fixity of a canonical work: Facundo is vaguely reminiscent of the “total book” whose existence is rumored in “La biblioteca de Babel”: as Martinez Estrada conceives of it, it would contain all the possible combinations needed to understand the nation. In fact, the static qualities that the text has bequeathed to the configuration of the Argentine problematic leads Martinez Estrada to render them as different forms of invariantes. Thus, there is the “invariante Espana,” with “structural, constitutional, specific and organic” characteristics which account for the parallels that still obtain between Spain and Argentina in the twentieth century; or “the backward structural invariable in the development of the nation” [invariante estructural de retroceso en el desarrollo del pais], which explains the institutional problems, the bad habits of the ruling classes, and the moral decline.** Much of the critical 16

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

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

—_——————- FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE ————— plains of the indigenous tribes and of the gaucho; civilization, in the cities. The gaucho has been replaced by the tenant farmer and the laborer; barbarism exists not only in the countryside but also in the populace of the big

cities, where the demagogue fulfills the function of the old country chieftain. . . . The dilemma has not changed. Sub specie aeternitatis, Facundo continues to be the best Argentine history. [El Facundo nos ofrece una disyuntiva—civilizacion o barbarie—que es aplicable, segin juzgo, al entero proceso de nuestra historia. Para Sarmiento, la barbarie era la llanura de las tribus aborigenes y del gaucho; la civilizacion, las ciudades. El gaucho ha sido reemplazado por colonos y obreros; la barbarie no solo esta en el campo sino en la plebe de las grandes ciudades y el demagogo cumple la funcién del antiguo caudillo. . . . La disyuntiva no ha cambiado. Sub specie aeternitatis, el Facundo es ain la mejor historia argentina. ]*

Trying to construct a genealogy of such interpretive positions, and of the forms of representation through which the book reached its reading public, this book sets out to unravel the question of its continued centrality in the national imaginary, while paying heed to the not infrequent contestatory attempts to debunk it. After years of often tedious reading of innumerable readings of Facundo, it became clear that the only way to make sense of the discursive excess which confronted me was to focus on a selection of moments of semantic density and interest. That has become the organizing principle of this book. If the readings of Facundo have helped construct the problematics of Argentine tradition, the question here is precisely how the contradictions and unresolved conflicts survive in cultural and countercultural formations. Further, if a classic is endowed with authority, how is this authority contested when it obtains in a discursive field characterized by strife and weak consensus? Ricardo Piglia has pessimistically and poignantly announced, “‘Facundo has been written in order to be misunderstood” [ Facundo ha sido escrito para no ser entendido]: I would like to contribute not so much to understanding it—though such an enterprise is not withOut its appeal—but to tracing the often befuddling paths of this misunderstanding. As Raymond Williams reminded us, a hegemonic position is constantly being resisted, limited, modified, but also renewed and recreated in a process which can never be cut off from power and politics: Facundo’s enduring dominance in the national scene is a case in point, so powerful and vulnerable at one and the same time. In its 1 50-year-old life we see how the nation as imagined community is truly inseparable from 18

INTRODUCTION ————____— printed works and from the production of a centrally sustained high culture which seeks to make claims for the majority as a repository of political legitimacy, without, however, silencing the countercultural forms which resist it. To study the dynamics of cultural formation through the repertory of uses to which Facundo has been put entails focusing on the sites of reading, that is to say, quite literally, the places in which it has taken place and the contextual factors which have framed interpretation. Chapter 1 examines the inaugural reception of Facundo, when it appeared in serialized form in El Progreso in 1845, and the role it played in the intricate web of writing, action, and nation-building which was being woven by the group of anti-Rosas exiles. As a feuilleton and as a book, Facundo promoted

intense debates, among the emigrés and also among the Chileans, in whose political debates Sarmiento had become involved. Chapter 2 locates the controversies surrounding the book within the problematics of genre: Facundo’s generic hybridity (the fact that it can be read as biography, history, political pamphlet, or even as a novel at times) is brought to bear on the conflict of interpretations it is trammelled in, for the lack of clear generic tracks affects the parameters of text-use. Its affiliations with historical writing in particular are scrutinized here, both in terms of the status of the discipline in the first half of the nineteenth century, and of the revealing ‘“‘Notes” sent to Sarmiento by Valentin Alsina in 1850. The latter provides an eloquent example of how reading Facundo has generated discursive practices which often leap over the book itself and carve out a space for writing against the grain. The discussion in Chapter 3 has a similar point of departure: it also examines an attempt to claim discursive and political authority by displacing Facundo’s. In this case, the reader is the incisive Juan Bautista Alberdi, Sarmiento’s most brilliant opponent in the enterprise of nation-building. Studying the prolonged polemic bitterly sustained by the two great men, I also trace the process of Argentine social and political organization as it obtains in the post-Caseros era. With Rosas out of the immediate scene, what kinds of reading does this book elicit? How is the sense of the nation bound up with its claims? Chapter 4 continues the examination of reading sites by subjecting Facundo to a migration to different cultures and to the estrangement brought about by translation. Radically changing the context of reception, the translations into English and French throw light on the forms of appropriation through which the metropolitan readers received a cultural product of the margin, producing highly revealing deformations and misunderstandings. Chapter 5 deals with the process of canonization in the 1880’s, tracing the relationships between power and discourse which lead to Facundo’s 19

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standing as an emblem of cultural authority, albeit not entirely uncontested. At a time when the ideology of modernization was embraced by the urban bourgeoisie consolidating the sense of the nation, Sarmiento’s book provided a powerful matrix for the invention of tradition, even in those cases where its conceptual scheme was called into question. Indeed, the tension between conflict and canonicity is never resolved, a point

which becomes only clearer in Chapter 6, which looks at the social changes of the turn of the century and the early years of the twentieth century, and the cultural shifts they brought about. As the complexity of the national scene grows, and the sense of community is eroded by the influx of immigration and other dramatic changes, a shared culture has an important binding effect.** Hence, dominant culture skillfully retains Facundo even as it finds ways of eliding the disjunction between canonicity and rejection. This final chapter studies the ruses which allow the book to remain within the national literary repertory even though its interpretation of Argentine reality is called into question and its denotation is weakened. The book is brought to a close with Ricardo Rojas’s 1945 El profeta de la pampa, written to commemorate the centennial of Facundo’s publication. Despite its publication date, however, Rojas’s homage can be placed within the field of the earlier celebrations of the centennial of the Revolution of 1810 (alluded to in Argentine history as simply “El Centenario”), for ideological and discursive reasons. Of course, a study of this book’s reception could well have continued to our days, but that would have fallen beyond the purview of my project. By the time the nation has worked out a set of transmitted semantic contents which can be packaged into a tradition, the terms in which Sarmiento’s book are to be read have already been defined. If communicative interaction, in Habermasian terms, has suffered significant disturbances where our text’s reception is concerned, it can be averred that the schemata deployed in the communication process are already in place in the early decades of this century. The political struggles of twentieth-century Argentina have kept the Facundo debate alive, but it has remained within the paradigm established by earlier readers. One of the most virulent attacks came from the school of historical revisionists that generated new readings of the central characters of national history. Its main thrust was to vindicate Juan Manuel de Rosas as the first nationalist hero, while, in true Manichean fashion, demolishing the reputation of those who had attacked him. Not surprisingly, Sarmiento and his works were an early target of their assaults; their nationalist tendencies sought roots in a Catholic, Spanish, and monarchical past with conservative overtones. For them, Facundo was an early in20

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

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THE WARS OF PERSUASION Conflict, Interpretation, and Power in the Early Years of Facundo’s Reception

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I. Mi defensa, Sarmiento proclaims: “My love of learning has had no other origin than having learned to read very well.” [En mi no ha tenido otro origen mi aficion a instruirme que el haber aprendido a leer muy bien.]! One of the tricks his orphaned texts play upon him is that they call into question the very possibility of reading well. This is epitomized by Facundo: though unquestionably an honored member of the Latin American canon, Facundo has been read in such divergent ways that it challenges the possibility of interpretive validity. The deferral of meaning—an inevitable condition of our dealings with language—is extended when reading becomes tangled in politically charged conflicts of interpretation. A text’s meanings are not fixed once and for all; its meanings are in part determined by the situation of its early interpreters, and contextual constraints shape the process of reception. Facundo has given life to a national literary circuit, it is a founding text, as it marks a beginning of a series of cultural phenomena centered on the book as an artifact of primary importance. This chapter will focus on a particular moment in the very eventful life of Sarmiento’s first major book: the time of its initial publication, seen as a rich cultural event. Since the study of the canonization of Facundo is closely linked with the process of elaboration of Argentine cultural myths, this chapter traces the impact of the actual coming on stage of the text itself, the avatars of its publication, its moving from pam-

phlet to book, the very immediate dialogue that it established with its readers, the way in which a text seeks out an audience as it comes on the scene, and, in doing so, is actually struggling for influence and hegemony. We tend to view a canonized book through the hindsight of later versions, or maybe through the vast repository of the complete works, and this per23

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ception may entail losing any sense of the earlier versions as different but equally vital speech acts in the world. Because the complete works, or even the annotated editions tend to reify writing as a series of complete final products, they erase any sense of their mode of production and reception, and of their interaction with contexts which were particularly powerful at the time of their publication. By looking at Facundo’s occasion and original readership, seeing the impact it had on its contemporaries and during its first few years of life, its emergence can be considered as a phenomenon inscribed in the tension between legitimation and contestation. Facundo can be viewed, as Foucault says, as “discourse in its sudden irruption; in that punctuality in which it appears, and in that temporal dispersion that enables it to be repeated, known, forgotten, transformed, utterly erased and hidden, far from all view, in the dust of books.” Rather than treating it as “the distant presence of the origin” it can be viewed as and when it occurs.” Releasing it from the inertia of the book and restoring some of its lost vitality, this chapter will examine the circulation of meanings produced as a result of its beginning. We can thus observe the material and discursive conditions of the existence of Facundo as it appeared in serial form in El Progreso, the interplay of relations it brought into being as it was read and interpreted, and some of the implications of its transformation from pamphlet to book. Of course, any attempt to recapture the initial situation of a text’s reception is itself caught up in the movement of history. Gadamer has written eloquently about the problems of the fusion of horizons, and it is as interesting to bring to the forefront what can be reconstructed as it is to note the gaps which the past makes it impossible for us to fill. Attempting to reach back to the multiple factors which came into play in the production and reception of Facundo around the decade of its publication brings home to us in a powerful way the degree to which the past is beyond reach. In part, of course, this situation is due to the dynamics of my historically situated, present subjectivity, so well defined in Walter Benjamin’s penetrating dictum: “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.” My “now” evidently conditions my understanding of the past as well as the direction in which I will seek significant information. Again, Benjamin comes to mind: “... every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”’? The image of the past which I will try to bring into existence has, of course, a purely textual status: it emerges from newspapers and letters, two discursive forms which sustained the communication among intellectuals at this time. These textual materials constitute a fabric tightly woven 24

—_—_—_—__————— THE WARS OF PERSUASION ——————_—__""—

of writing, inscription, and action. The relationship has a powerful double fit which has to do with the community of Argentine exiles living in Chile during Rosas’s era: while they were constantly in touch with each other, inscribing their doing in astonishingly numerous letters and newspaper articles, they were also keenly aware of the extent to which writing was transmuted into action. To peruse the letters and journalistic pieces written by Sarmiento and his acquaintances at this time is to become aware of

the degree to which Facundo is manipulated as a power-gaining tool. With no other one of his works was Sarmiento as concerned to have it reach those readers who might respond favorably to him as its author. He was convinced that as his readership expanded so did his prestige and that this would bring him closer to public office. There are many eloquent proofs of this in Sarmiento’s correspondence. There is a letter written on April 8, 1851, to Modestino Pizarro from his quinta in Yungay, in which Sarmiento deals with the arrangements to be made as soon as Rosas is overthrown: If that conference takes place, there would be an empty seat if I were not there. The people would miss me, their march would be incomplete and hesitant. My presence would inspire confidence in everyone and fear in Rosas only; because I am associated with ideas which are already formulated and known by everyone. Moreover, and this is the most serious thing, that conference would be subjugated by Urquiza, and I believe only my presence can safeguard the majesty of its national representation.

[En ese congreso, si tiene lugar, habria un asiento vacio si no estoy yo. Hecharanme (sic) de menos los pueblos, sera incompleta y vacilante su marcha. Mi presencia daria a todos confianza, y solo a Rosas miedo; porque a mi se ligan ideas ya formuladas y de todos conocidas. Hay mas, y esto es lo peor, ese congreso sera subyugado por Urquiza y creo que solo mi presencia puede conservarle la majestad de la representaciOn nacional.]‘

Sarmiento’s legitimation as a potential member of Congress derives from his writings, from the fact that his readers have become acquainted with his thinking. The pragmatic connection between book and action is such that on the occasion of Facundo’s second edition, Sarmiento’s choice of

words to describe it is revealing: “Civilization and Barbarism will be

bound next week—a rich, revised and augmented edition, its nails sharpened... .” [Civilizacién y barbarie quedara empastada en la entrante semana, rica edicién corregida, aumentada, afiladas las ufias.... ]° The metaphor is suggestive of the belligerent qualities that he attributes to his book, and of his conviction that it would have far-reaching repercussions in the world. When he wrote to Paz and Benavidez hoping to win their 25

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support, he saw to it that they received copies of Facundo, as though the relationship between author and book were metonymical. In the letter to Paz, written in Montevideo on December 22, 1845, Facundo is seen in the same pugnacious light: “I wrote Facundo with the purpose of stirring up the concerns of the interior provinces, and I got it through the Andes in a box.” [Con el proposito de agitar todas las preocupaciones del interior escribi el Facundo, del que hice pasar a cordillera cerrada un cajon.]¢ Sarmiento was not alone in attributing such efficacy to his writings. An eloquent letter written by Juan Andrés Ferrera from La Paz, Bolivia, encouraging him to continue his discrediting enterprise against Rosas assures him of his success in the following terms: “Aldao and Facundo will soon be two invisible powers which will drag the infamous Rosas to the gallows.” [Aldao y Facundo seran bien pronto dos poderes invisibles que

arrastraran hacia el cadalso al infame Rosas.]’ Another early reader, Wenceslao Paunero, illustrates to what extent the early reception of Facundo privileged its pragmatic dimension: “None of the Argentine writers has understood and explained the diverse elements of our society as you have. Congratulate yourself, my friend, on your beautiful work and its fruitful results.” [Ninguno de los escritores argentinos ha comprendido y explicado los diversos elementos de nuestra sociedad como Ud. Felicitese pues amigo de que su trabajo es hermoso y fecundo en resultados.]® This relationship between writing, action, and power was one of Sarmiento’s obsessions. His enemy Alberdi knew exactly how to nettle him in this regard, and he found subtle ways to berate his performance as “a journalist in the periodical press” [escritor de la prensa periddica]. Urquiza also mooted Sarmiento’s insistent claims to having waged an effective battle against Rosas with his pen, and he did so in very blunt terms through his secretary, Angel Elias, shortly before the battle of Caseros, on January 2, 1852: The General read the letter you wrote to him yesterday, and he has asked me to tell you, regarding the wonders you claim for the press in frightening the enemy, that “for years now the press in Chile and elsewhere has been screeching, and so far Don Juan Manuel has not been frightened; on the contrary, he has been growing stronger by the day.” [El sefior general ha leido la carta que ayer le ha escrito usted, y me encarga le diga respecto de los prodigios que dice usted que hace la imprenta asustando al enemigo, “que hace muchos afios que las prensas chillan en Chile

y en otras partes, y que hasta ahora don Juan Manuel de Rosas no se ha asustado; que antes al contrario cada dia estaba mas fuerte.” ]° 26

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Sarmiento’s offended answer is dated the very next day, and what he responds to is the charge against the effectiveness of the written word: It is very natural to believe that in my mind I exaggerate the influence of the press, that is, of the word. . . . But I have been the Chilean press for many years, and recently it has busied itself with nothing other than predisposing public opinion in favor of the General [Urquiza] and of the worthy enter-

prise he was about to undertake. . . . The weapons which fight Rosas are invincible; but it is also true that public opinion has abandoned him, and some part, small as it may be, must be granted to those who have had the courage to fight his power for ten years. [Es muy natural creer que yo me exagere a mis propios ojos la influencia de

la prensa, es decir, de la palabra. . . . Pero la prensa de Chile he sido yo durante muchos afios, y en estos ultimos no se ha ocupado de otra cosa que de predisponer la opinion publica en favor del sefior general y de la digna empresa que iba a acometer. . .. Las armas que combaten a Rosas son invencibles; pero también es cierto que la opinion lo ha abandonado, y alguna parte, por pequefia que sea, debe concedérsele a los que han tenido el coraje de combatir su poder diez afios.] !°

This compelling alliance between discourse and power, not limited specifi-

cally to the actual overthrow of Rosas but taken in more general terms, has had a bearing on the relationship between the reception of Facundo and the shaping of an Argentine cultural tradition, for, as Habermas might put it, the contents of a cultural tradition are the communicable meanings toward which social action is oriented. The questions which the countless readers of this book have addressed over the last almost one hundred and fifty years have touched upon the ways in which discursive practices regulate social and political relations. For indeed, as Foucault has so eloquently argued, power circulates, it functions in the form of a chain, and the production and circulation of discourse embodied in the letters and journalistic pieces connected with Facundo are defined by the ever-changing choreography of power which was being played out before and after the battle of Caseros.

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

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of characters of the pre- and post-Caseros era helped define. The connection between exile and community is strong: the “‘proscriptos”’ [exiles] (to borrow a term from Ricardo Rojas) became what in Benedict Anderson’s suggestive terms can be called an “imagined community,” which needed to fight its own sense of dispersion by turning to the binding force of writing.'' If, as Victor Turner claims, the journey is a social process, we can see the journey into exile—a pilgrimage away from the fatherland—as a meaning-creating experience.!2 Only the power of writing could grant a sense of community and of nationhood to the men who were plotting the demise of Rosas from Chile, Montevideo, Pera, and Bolivia. Anderson attributes great importance to the newspaper in the formation of the cultural artifact of nation-ness. The perusal of such newspapers as El Mercurio, or El Progreso, in which Sarmiento played a pivotal role, gives us a sense of the cohesive way in which they created an assemblage of fellow readers. Of course, these fellow readers were not limited to Argentine exiles, for they included the Chilean reading public, but the Argentine dominant intellectuals like Sarmiento, Vicente Fidel Lopez, Alberdi, Juan Maria Gutiérrez, Carlos Tejedor, and Félix Frias, established a remarkable network of communication among themselves and with their counterparts in Montevideo (Esteban Echeverria, Florencio Varela, Bartolomé Mitre, Valentin Alsina) by writing and reading letters and newspapers in a truly feverish manner. The emergence of Facundo in El Progreso must be seen

within this field: it is part of a rich, sometimes dissonant conversation among them all, and was received as such. The questions that follow are designed to determine the conditions of existence of these discursive formations: the situations that provoked Facundo together with the consequences it gave rise to. This chapter will locate this discursive event in some stories, always bearing in mind Arthur Danto’s caveat regarding historical reconstruction that “completely to describe an event is to locate it in all the right stories, and this we cannot do.” '? These “‘stories” will touch upon the contextual factors which might have conditioned the reception of the text, the forms of appropriation which were deployed, questions of distribution, circulation, readership, as well as the intricate counterpoint between consent and dissent, legitimation and contestation, which Facundo’s appearance brought into play. The first “story” deals with the author and his reading public. As Fou-

cault has put it, “The author’s name indicates the status of discourse within a society and a culture.” '* What did the name “Sarmiento” mean to the audience of the 1840’s? How was their reading of the feuilleton, as it appeared in El Progreso between May 2 and June 21, 1845, framed by the political and cultural discourses which were circulating at the time? 28

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Even though it was published in book form as early as July, 1845, it seems obvious that Facundo was a vital element of the journalistic field in which Sarmiento played so prominent a role and which Benedict Anderson considers crucial in the development of a sense of community.!5 When Sarmiento wrote to Urquiza, “I have been the Chilean press” [La prensa de Chile he sido yo], he was only mildly exaggerating. When he arrived

in Chile, the only existing newspaper was El Mercurio of Valparaiso, founded in 1827. Shortly after the publication of an article of his commemorating the battle of Chacabuco, Sarmiento was offered the editorship of the paper. His centrality was soon sustained by an intricate mesh of controversy and power contests which pertained to both Argentines and Chileans, as well as to the founding discourses of culture and politics. In the Chilean environment, his writing was drawn into the struggle between the Conservative and the Liberal parties (pelucones and pipiolos, respectively), which was played out in the founding of newspapers, in the recruitment of prestigious editors, and in the daily battling of articles. Sar-

miento’s decision to support the conservative party was reached after a careful examination of the role of the Argentine exiles in the Chilean political arena (as he explained later in Recuerdos de provincia), and after considerable effort on the part of Las Heras and Montt to recruit his services for newspapers that were being founded to promote their respective causes. Shortly after he left EJ Mercurio in 1842, Sarmiento established the first newspaper of Santiago, E/ Progreso, under the auspices of Manuel Montt. Clearly, this was the founding moment of journalistic discourse in

Chile. Lastarria and his pipiolo associates founded El Miliciano, and, later on, El Siglo. It is significant that when El Progreso began the serialized publication of Facundo, Sarmiento was involved in heated debates not only, as is well known, with Rosas’s emissary, Baldomero Garcia, but also with the “‘pipiolo”’ newspapers, most especially with El Siglo. These

debates, in part focused on the Chilean presidential elections of 1846, framed the early readings of the text with controversy. Sarmiento describes one of the peaks of the disputation in a colorful letter to his friend Pepe Posse on January 29, 1845: The people of E/ Siglo gave in to the fury which is customary among these swine when I squeeze their guts. They called me “Argentinian horse,” coward, and who knows what else. Incited by Lopez, I went to the offices of El Siglo, demanded to see the offender, they gave me no explanation, I spat on his face, and even as he was attempting to overcome the fright and wash off the affront, he tried to grab me and reached for my hair. I freed myself and pushed him away in that awful moment. I prepared myself for something 29

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serious, gentlemanly; half an hour later, dancing with joy, Santiago was filled with I know not what stories, made up to suit them, about how they had kicked me to shreds, pulling my eyes out. Two weeks later the entire Republic was brimming with stories of my guts being ripped out, etc., they were toasting in Aconcagua, the priests were preaching, etc.

[Los de El Siglo se abandonaron a todo el furor que es costumbre entre todos estos canallas, cuando les aprieto los callos. Dijéronme “caballo cuyano,” cobarde y qué sé yo. Instigado por Lopez, me dirigi a la imprenta de EI Siglo, requeri al ofensor, no me daban una explicaciOn, escupile la cara, y él entre si se le pasaba el susto, si hacia algo por lavarse la afrenta, trat6 de agarrarme, alcanz6 a los cabellos, me desasi de él y lo eché en hora mala. Yo me aguardaba algo serio, algo de caballeros; media hora después empero estaba lleno Santiago, jbailaban de gusto! de qué se yo qué cuentos, inventados a placer, me habian molido a patadas, sacandome los ojos, quince dias después la repablica entera estaba llena, de que me habian destripado, etc., brindaban en Aconcagua, predicaban los curas, etc.] '6

The press did not merely report; its writing was the arena where the power struggle was staged. A letter addressed to Sarmiento by Santiago Cueto in 1845 conveys the sense of immediate pragmatic efficacy attained by print: You are our savior and J do not doubt that you will use all your talent to defeat the Lastarrias, those infamous slanderers. ... Tomorrow’s article, like the ones to follow it all this week, will have all your talent poured into them; let them move the people of Santiago: let them feel horror for that infernal party: let them give us the victory as a result of the fear felt by those morons.

[Usted es nuestro salvador y no dudo que empleara todo su talento para dar por tierra contra los Lastarrias, infames calumniadores. . . . El articulo de majfiana, asi como todos los que sigan en toda esta semana han de ser tales que apure usted todo su talento; que muevan al pueblo de Santiago: que lo hagan tomar horror a ese partido infernal: que nos den el triunfo, por el miedo que tengan esos imbéciles.] '”

The readers of El Progreso, El Siglo, and the Diario de Santiago, which replaced El Siglo as of July 5, 1845, formed an interpretive community whose competence was marked by heated debate. Here is one example of the early reception of Facundo by Pedro Godoy, a pipiolo who wrote in El Siglo and in the Diario de Santiago: The author of Facundo created a plan, wished to call it the biography of a famous man in the annals of the Argentine Revolution, tried to describe one 30

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of the bloodiest periods in that Revolution, sought to call attention to his work, and, without the necessary knowledge, without clear ideas about politics or the events which he may have partly witnessed, . . . drawing on nothing, in sum, but his natural daring, has brought to light the web of absurdity which we are now examining. [El autor de Facundo se forj6 un plan, quiso llamarlo biografia de un hombre célebre en los anales de la revolucion argentina, pretendio describir una de las €pocas mas sangrientas de esa revoluci6n, intentd llamar la atenciOn del pablico sobre su obra, y sin los conocimientos necesarios, sin ideas fijas sobre politica ni sobre los acontecimientos que en parte, quiza haya presenciado, . . . y no contando, en suma, mas que con su atrevimiento natural, saco a luz el tejido de absurdos que ahora examinamos.] '8

Sometimes the tone of the reviews was blatantly insulting, and the struggle became such that a press jury was summoned on behalf of Sarmiento, but Godoy was absolved. In the cultural field Sarmiento’s name became associated with controversies which had to do with the construction of a truly American cultural discourse, and which implied a break with the established tradition. As is

well known, Sarmiento was deeply involved in the 1842 polemic with Bello and the strongholds of classicism, and it was played out in the daily newspapers (in this particular case El Semanario—the first weekly publication with literary pretensions to appear in Chile—and El Mercurio), which became display texts for the community of readers to participate in and consume. As in the controversy with El Siglo, it is remarkable to note how aggressive the writing is. Here is a brief sample, from Sarmiento’s pen: The editors of El Semanario want to confront us, and they will get what they want, because he who attacks the writer attacks his readers, and the reading public does not get involved in such nonsense; they like the writers to lock horns and to draw their own conclusions hearing the pros and cons of the matters which are aired. So the gentlemen of El Semanario should stop harping on the public, because we have our own diminutive little public, but it is young, and educated and in touch with the times and not with things that have the stench of rotting bacon like Classicism. [Los redactores de El Semanario quieren habérselas con nosotros, y se las habran, porque el que ataca al can ataca al sabadan, y el publico no se mete en esas nifierias; gusta que se rompan los cuernos los escritores, y sacar él solo la utilidad oyendo el pro y el contra de las cuestiones que se ventilan. 31

——————— FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE —————— Conque déjense de publico los sefiores de El Semanario, que nosotros también tenemos nuestro publiquito diminuto, pero joven, ilustrado y amigo de su tiempo y de las cosas que no huelen a tocino rancio como el clasicismo.] !”

Sarmiento’s standing in the discourse of cultural formation and in the foundation of institutions at this time is eloquently revealed by the fact that on October 17, 1843, he presented the first paper to be produced by the newly founded University of Chile. His Memoria sobre Ortografia americana provoked heated debates, and it is interesting to examine the newspapers of the time and observe the degree of spelling instability which the Memoria triggered: while some ignored Sarmiento’s suggestions, sev-

eral of them adopted them and did away with the h, v, and z, with the silent “ in such combinations as gue, gui, que, and qui. It is, of course, relevant that Sarmiento’s suggestions coincide with the foundation of the

nation’s institutions and the production of a national discourse, since clearly the new spelling model was ultimately designed to inscribe in the realm of writing a difference between Spain and the emerging nations. Another relevant factor in the context of production and reception of Facundo was, as | anticipated, the visit to Chile of Rosas’s emissary, Baldomero Garcia in April, 1845—-a month before the first “issue” of the feuilleton. This event generated a rich array of journalistic articles ranging from discussions focused on the trip’s purpose to animated commendation of the heroic attributes of an otherwise obscure Argentine exile, a certain Bedoya, who had to face prosecution as the result of having torn a label reading “‘death to the savage, filthy, repugnant Unitarists!” [jmueran los salvajes, asquerosos, inmundos unitarios!] from one of Garcia’s servants. Garcia’s presence galvanized some of the conflicts which pertained to both the inner workings of the Chilean political struggles and the agency of the Argentine exiles. As a result, tensions mounted to a point which, according to a piece written by Sarmiento on May 1 in El Progreso, announcing the forthcoming publication of the ““Vida de Quiroga,” made it imperative to bring out a text designed to halt “what may turn out to be far-reaching harm to us.” [un mal que puede ser trascendental para nosotros.] Facundo stands in the midst of this tangled web not merely because Sarmiento, as has been said, wanted to discredit Garcia and, certainly, Rosas, but because he needed to address his enemies at El Siglo. In order to undermine the authority of the pelucon newspaper (El Progreso), they had adduced that Sarmiento was being silenced in his attacks of Garcia by no other than Montt (his supporter, and, in fact, the one the pipiolos wanted to bring disrepute to) in order to avoid problems between the governments of Chile and Argentina. Sarmiento’s fiery response, entitled “Why Does El Siglo 32

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Attack Us?” [Por qué nos ataca El Siglo?] appeared in El Progreso on the very same day he announced the serialized publication of Facundo; the central thrust of his argument was that the issue at stake was freedom of speech: “So then let the freedom of the press be destroyed, as El Siglo demands, and let the orders issue from the Ministry, as El Siglo advises and condones. Only thus would they find Minister Montt’s actions dignified and enlightened.” [Pero entonces destriayase la libertad de imprenta, como lo pide El Siglo, e impartase Ordenes del ministerio, como lo aconseja y aprueba El Siglo, que solo esta vez halla digna e ilustrada la conducta del ministro Montt.]?° Thus, the questions of communicative un-

derstanding and misunderstanding were bound up with oppositional practices and situational constraints. In the “Anuncio” of May 1, Sarmiento sums it up in the following terms: “Petty and particular interests, journalists’ squabbles, and partisan aims, tend to excite passion and jealousy; these emotions, the purpose of which is to taint an individual in the eyes of public opinion, end up creating in Chile echoes of Rosas’s barbarous regime.” [Intereses mezquinos y de circunstancias, rencillas de periodistas, y propositos de partido, tienden a sublevar pasiones y celos que con el designio manifiesto de comprometer a un individuo ante la opinion publica no van a nada menos que a levantar en Chile ecos al barbaro sistema de Rosas.]?! It was necessary to occupy a different site in the struggle with a work of vaster scope, one which would grant authority by placing the debates within a broader framework and by bringing to bear on them the conceptual apparatus of the thinkers who, as he put it in the Ortografia americana, “direct today’s thinking” [dirigen el pensamiento de hoy}.

TEXT AS WEAPON: PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION The way we read Facundo now tends to reify writing in the form of the completed book. Here is a unity which we must question as artificial: it is always salutary to suspend, as Foucault says, “the material individualization of the book, which occupies a determined space, which has an economic value, and which itself indicates, by a number of signs, the limits of its beginning and its end.” The frontiers of Facundo have undergone numerous reconfigurations, always betraying their placement within a complex field of discourse, again, as Foucault put it, “caught up in a system of references, .. . as a node within a network.” ?3 As a serialized publication,

the text was read in a fragmentary way, and it was also framed by the other pieces which occupied the space of the newspapers—both within E/ Progreso and the other papers with which it established a dialogue. It is important to retain a sense of the material mode of existence of this text, 33

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its status as a publication and the forms of reception it might have invited. A piece Sarmiento wrote for El Progreso on August 30, 1845, suggestively entitled ‘Our Sin, the Feuilletons” [Nuestro pecado de los folletines], conveys both the condemnation the feuilleton inspired in the reading public

(derived, of course, from the “sinful things” which it contained) and its communicative success, facetiously yet proudly presented as a disease (“the leprosy of the feuilleton has already reached all the newspapers” [la lepra del folletin ha ganado ya todos los diarios]), which El Mercurio introduced during the early years of Sarmiento’s stewardship. While this sec-

tion favored the consumption of romantic and truculent literature (Sue and Dumas might epitomize the preference here, but Balzac was not excluded), it did not rule out nonfictional accounts of general interest: El Mercurio, for instance, was publishing the “Estractos del viaje al viejo mundo por el peruano D. Juan Bustamante” in August, 1845, only a month after El Progreso had brought out Facundo. Here was a space slightly removed from the actual news coverage, but which shared its bor-

ders and its readers and which allowed concepts to gain currency and power. As Sarmiento observed in Viajes, “A good feuilleton can be decisive in the destiny of the world by giving new direction to the spirits.” {Un buen folletin puede decidir de los destinos del mundo dando una nueva direcciOn a los espiritus.]?* Evidently, it was the desirable medium for shaping opinion at a time of crisis, and Sarmiento saw to it that its readers encountered in the pages of El Progreso journalistic pieces which would orient interpretation in a supportive way. Thus, in May and June of 1845, the readers of the folletin “Vida de Quiroga” were presented with pieces which reinforced its central thesis, such as “‘Interés de Chile en la Cuestion

del Plata” (May 8, 1945), “El sistema de Rosas” (May 28, 1945), “La causa de Bedoya” (June 2, 3, and 6, 1945), or ““Lo que a Rosas debe la América del Sur” (June 13, 1945). But the serialized folletin, with its fragmentary reception, is especially prone to the dialectics of both legitimation and contestation: a reader who then turned to El Siglo, or later the Diario

de Santiago, would encounter all the possibilities of reading Facundo against the grain. Here is one brief example taken from El Siglo, on May 20: “Facundo is a most fertile work in its nonsense, plagiarism and lies.”

[El Facundo es una obra la mas fecunda en desatinos, en plagios y en mentiras.] Another, from La Gaceta de Comercio of Valparaiso: ““Good Lord, wake up Mr. Sarmiento, shake him so that he can see himself as he is and know that he calls attention to himself only by dint of his immense insolence.” [Santo Dios despierten al sefior Sarmiento, sacudanl6 (sic) para que se mire en su estatura y conozca que solo Ilama la atencion por la magnitud de su insolencia.] El Siglo, on June 14: “The only thing Sar34

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miento will gain is that we, the people of Santiago de Chile, raise our voice to say that when they read Montt and Sarmiento they should read Bolivar

and Sergeant Pino, ... and a worn out old shoe.” [lo Gnico que lograra (Sarmiento) sera que los Santiaguinos levantemos la voz para decir a los Provincianos que cuando lean Montt y Sarmiento agan (sic) de cuenta que leen Bolivar y el Sargento Pino, ... Montt y una Chancleta vieja.|*> Aggravating things was Montt’s investiture to the Interior Ministry; by June 11 El Siglo announced, “fight to death the editor of El Progreso.” [guerra a muerte al redactor del Progreso.] In August the Diario de Santiago published a parody of Facundo with some aggressive distortions: the subject

of the biography was now Sarmiento himself, renamed “‘Pantaleon del Carrascal’’ to allude to a poor quarter of the city of San Juan, and events in Sarmiento’s life were incorporated in a derisive manner. This was no harmless scoff: Pantaleon-Sarmiento was even made to murder two federal soldiers. Evidently, what Hans Robert Jauss calls the “horizon of expectations” of the readers was deeply stamped by conflict, and the text was set in an interplay of relations existing within its textual boundaries but also outside of them. It is not surprising that by September, 1845, when Sarmiento left E/ Progreso in the midst of such heated controversy, Félix Frias made the following confidential remark at the end of a letter to

Juan Maria Gutiérrez: “Sarmiento is leaving El Progreso. He will probably go to Europe if we cannot all go back to our country. He has been made honorably useless for the press.” [Sarmiento deja El Progreso. Se ira

probablemente a Europa si pronto no podemos todos regresar a nuestro pais. Esta ya honrosamente inutilizado para la prensa.]?° When in July, 1845 the text changed its status from feuilleton to book the struggles did not subside, but there was a shift in the schemata of text use. We witness now the dynamics of circulation and distribution, the seeking out of a broader audience, and the anxiety to exert influence beyond the sphere of the political debates which were being enacted in the Chilean newspapers. The little book was received as a unit, removed from its previous fragmented journalistic frame. The text itself underwent the first of several future modifications, for there is good reason to believe that the folletin had ended after “‘jj;Barranca Yaco!!,” with the murder of Quiroga. As a book, it entered a different system of distribution than the one it had had in the journalistic medium, and the numerous letters written by and addressed to Sarmiento about this attest to the difficulties inherent in promoting book circulation at this time. Sarmiento’s plight was obviously aggravated by exile, and by the government’s hostility in the territory he wished to penetrate. Whatever the effect of the difficulties to be faced, it is

remarkable to observe how much Sarmiento wanted to be read, to have 35

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his book reach an audience which went even beyond the continental confines. Of the letters he wrote to Gutiérrez, very insistently making this kind

of request, there is one that stands out as epitomizing the reach of his anxiety for readership: “But let’s return to your mission of spreading the Odyssey throughout the world. I bet you haven’t written a word about it to your friends in France, to the National, to the Pacific Democracy, to the

Paris Review and the Revue des Deux Mondes, etc., etc.2 Come on, do it.” [Pero volvamos a su misiOn de derramar la Odisea por toda la redondez del orbe. A que no a escrito una palabra a sus amigos de Francia, al National, la Democracia Pacifica, Revista de Paris i de Ambos Mundos, etc., etc.? Vamos, agalo.]?” About fifty copies were furtively introduced to Buenos Aires, others were given as presents to the patriots in Chile, or sent to powerful figures such as Paz, Varela, Echeverria, or Rivera Indarte. In spite of such efforts, it was evidently very hard to have the book reach its

readers. Juan Maria Gutiérrez, commissioned with what seems a major portion of the burden of the distribution of the book, and who at one point assured Sarmiento he would do what was necessary so that “Mr. Fa-

cundo can parade himself along those capital cities” [para que el sefior don Facundo se pasee por esas capitales], has difficulty obtaining the books in Valparaiso: “I must warn you that I have not a single one of the copies of Facundo, neither in the bound nor in the rustic edition.” [Quiero advertirle que de los ejemplares de Facundo, ni encuadernados nia la ristica, hay uno solo en mi poder.]2° His friend Aberastain, who had helped Sarmiento gather information on Facundo Quiroga in March, writes on August 5, 1845, from Copiapo: “I have received your letter but not the forty copies of Facundo; J think they must have arrived but are delayed in the harbor. I have asked Rios, who is living there, to send them to me as soon as possible.” [Recibi su carta y no los cuarenta ejemplares del Facundo; pienso que éstos hayan llegado y estén demorados en el puerto a donde he encargado ya a Rios establecido alli que me los mande en la primera oportunidad.]?? Wenceslao Paunero, writing from La Paz, has obviously been waiting long for his copy: “I know nothing of Facundo. What devil of a route have you sent it on!” [Nada sé de su Facundo hasta ésta; ;Por qué demonio de via lo ha dirigido usted!]3° The vicissitudes of transportation made distribution tentative: a shipment of books to France, for

example, never made it beyond Cape Horn, and Sarmiento had to give away his very last copy to the Revue des Deux Mondes when he presented it for review. Small wonder, then, that writing to Gutiérrez on his way to Europe, in January 1846, Sarmiento should express his discouragement: ‘What an unfortunate book this has been! Everything, even the printing

has turned out as if Rosas had placed his hand on it.” [jQué libro tan 36

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desgraciado fue éste; todo, hasta la impresi6n, salid como si Rosas ubiese sido el que ponia la mano en él.] >! Thus, Facundo set in motion a process of circulation and distribution; it also engendered the discourse of literary criticism. A rich dialogue about it was established among the hegemonic intellectuals in Chile and Mon-

tevideo. In attempting to trace it, one is again struck by the situational nature of reading and interpretation, and by the problems of historically reconstructing the contextual constraints which are in place ina particular reading. From among the early readers of Facundo, Juan Maria Gutiérrez seems to address both issues in an intriguing way. A man with a clear sense of the need to promote the emergence of a “Poética americana” (to quote the title of an anthology he was compiling), Gutiérrez was the one Sarmiento turned to for a favorable review. The pragmatic and textual circumstances surrounding this review heighten our awareness of the infer-

ential or speculative grounds on which historical understanding takes place, of the extent to which one tentatively considers filling gaps, and then does so with varying degrees of success. The result is a suggestive mix

of adequately and inadequately explained events, and an inevitable coming to terms with the slippage between text and reading. Sarmiento sent to him the very first copy on July 24 with the following letter: “I am sending you the first copy of Facundo to see the public light. It has been infamously treated. Would you take it upon yourself to analyze it in El Mercurio, and to Say it is a splendid, magnificent, celebrated book?” [Remito a usted el primer ejemplar del Facundo que ve la luz pablica. Ha salido como una cosa infamemente tratada. ;Quiere usted encargarse de analizarlo, por El Mercurio, y decir que es un librote estupendo, magnifico, celebérrimo?]?? On July 27 El Mercurio published an unsigned review full of praise and admiration, and which gave the book credit for having understood the underlying causes of the political turmoil in Argentina; for having been written with the conceptual elegance of a philosopher and with the beauty of an artist. Palcos attributes this review to Demetrio Rodriguez Pefia, on the grounds that he was the editor of the paper, and calls it “the frankest and the most openly favorable” [la mas franca y abiertamente favorable].23 Verdevoye, for his part, considers Palcos’s attribution in the light of the letters exchanged between Sarmiento and Gutiérrez and suggests that the author might be Gutiérrez.** Antonio Pagés Larraya does not waver: he ascribes it to Gutiérrez without further consideration, and so have other critics.*5 Complicating matters is a letter written by Sarmiento to Gutiérrez on August 8 which expresses considerable dissatisfaction with the review written by him: “You have written your editorial salutation in El Mercurio and I thank you. Were I not a journalist, I would 37

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have thought the derisive comment rather heavy; but since I am of the trade, I understood that you did with Facundo what others have done with worse things. Please spare me the tasteless attempt to explain this point.” {Escribid usted su salutacion editorial en El Mercurio y se |a agradezco. Si no fuera periodista yo hubiera creido que la chanza era pesada; pero como soy del metier, comprendi que hacia usted con el Facundo lo que yo he hecho tantas veces con otras cosas peores. No vaya usted a tener la falta de gusto de entrar en explicaciones sobre este punto.]>° Now, the piece published by E/ Mercurio on July 27 (only three days after the letter with which Sarmiento sent the first copy) could hardly have inspired these comments, because it is enthusiastic in every respect. Moreover, on Au-

gust 22, while writing again to Gutiérrez about the book, Sarmiento alludes to Facundo as “my Odyssey, as you like to call it” [mi Odisea, como se ha complacido en Ilamarla usted],*’ and there is no allusion to Homer’s work in the review of July 27, nor are there any letters in which Gutiérrez suggests the comparison. At this point one is acutely conscious of the pre-

carious contact established with the past. If it is eminently textual, it is also subject to the gaps which this textuality is fraught with: either Sarmiento’s reading of the review which appeared on July 27 totally misconstrued its stance, or else somewhere in El Mercurio between the 24th of July (when Sarmiento sent the book to Gutiérrez) and the 8th of August (when he wrote to him in clear displeasure about the review) there is another review which is less favorable. Obviously, one must go back to the historical record in search for a text which might help construct a plausible explanation. Here again we are confronted with the inaccessibility of the past: all the microfilm copies of El Mercurio available in the U.S. (at Sterling Library at Yale University, the Library of Congress, and Bancroft Library at Berkeley) have one big hiatus which extends between the 30th

of June and the 18th of August. Among the complete microfilms at the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, there are no other reviews during those dates. Did Sarmiento misread the one of the 27th? Did Gutiérrez write another review which we are unable to trace? Aside from its cautionary effect, this situation is part and parcel of the early readings of this text.38 Thus, the striking interpretive instability which characterizes Facundo does not derive exclusively from the conflicts among readers, but also from discrepancies which can be detected in the same reader, and which seem to stem from the different circumstances within which his acts of reading take place. Interpretations can differ depending on whether they are framed by the private space of a letter or the public one of a newspaper. Gutiérrez voices strong reservations about Facundo contained in a

38

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letter written to Alberdi on August 6, 1845. He assures Alberdi that ‘“‘every sensible man will see in it a caricature” [todo hombre sensato vera en él una caricatura] and adds: “This book is like the portraits of our society which are sometimes painted by travelers in order to say strange things:

the slaughterhouse, the girl in intimate consort with the mulatta, the cigar on the lips of the older woman. . .. The Argentine Republic is not a pool of blood; our civilization is not measured by the progress of primary schools in San Juan.” [Es este libro como las pinturas que de nuestra sociedad hacen a veces los viajeros por decir cosas raras: el Matadero, la mulata en intimidad con la nifia, el cigarro en boca de la sefiora mayor. ... La Republica Argentina no es charca de sangre: la civilizaciOn nuestra no es el progreso de las escuelas primarias de San Juan.]° Likewise, Echeverria, who wrote a very positive appreciation of the book in the “Ojeada retrospectiva” which is part of the Dogma socialista, (“the biographical notes on the Friar Aldao and the life of Juan Facundo Quiroga are in our opinion among the most complete and original products of the pen of the young Argentine exiles” [los apuntes biograficos de Fr. Aldao y la vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga son en concepto nuestro lo mas completo y original que haya salido de la pluma de los jOvenes proscriptos argentinos,])*° expressed a different, angry reaction in a letter to Alberdi of June 12, 1850: “What has he written other than short stories and novels even by his own account? Where in his works lie the power of reason and the deep conceptions? I see nothing in them beyond fantastic lucubrations, descriptions and useless chatter.” [Qué cosa ha escrito él que no sean cuentos y novelas segtin su propia confesiOn? ;Donde esta en sus obras la fuerza de raciocinio y las concepciones profundas? Yo no veo

en ellas mas que lucubraciones fantasticas, descripciones y raudal de chachara infecunda.]*! Within the community of exiles, Facundo was judged in very mixed ways; even an admiring reader like Alsina deauthorized ihe book by writing his painstaking fifty-one notes, intending, as he put it, “not to allow errors to remain uncorrected, neither in the facts nor

in the judgement.” [no . . . dejar pasar errores, .. . acerca de los hechos como acerca de los juicios.] 4 Alsina’s corrections are the object of a sepa-

rate study in Chapter 2; for my purposes here suffice it to say that Sarmiento alluded to them in the edition of 1851 in a way which reveals the destabilizing effect they had on his own validity claims.

These “stories” beg the question of how Facundo came to occupy a central position in the accepted Latin American canon. It is a story that takes us into the early years of the twentieth century and the production of national identity myths which is associated with the “Centenario” cele-

39

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

40

a —_ TVW QO ~~ THE RISKS OF FICTION Facundo and the Parameters of Historical Writing

~~’

A. one ponders the varied and complex forms of communication which Facundo has established with its reading public, it becomes necessary to observe the textual strategies it deploys in order to invite active reception. An interesting contradiction arises: while the reader’s interest is kept alive, he or she is also confronted with considerable semantic instability. This chapter focuses on two aspects of this problematic and attempts to examine how they have contributed to its development. The first is connected with the book’s generic afhliation; the second focuses on what is implied in the possible activation of a fictive reading key, according to which Facundo would have to be read as a novel or an epic, with weakened referential links. Both processes are intimately related by their very nature, but also because readers have repeatedly focused on them. Further, they illustrate the degree to which, through generic conventions, a text is inscribed in the social praxis. As a reader performs a generic classification resorting to her literary competence, she is also participating in a social activity, namely, working (or, as John Austin would put it, doing things) with language, with a text, and with all that is implied in belonging to what Stanley Fish has called an “interpretive community.” ' Facundo and its interpreters have often located the discussion in the field of ethics; hence they lend themselves to consideration of the site where the textual and the social interact. The following discussion attempts to show how this ethical dimension operates in the interaction between the work and its readers. The generic question is addressed first, for in many ways it is at the root of the second. It is a commonplace of Facundo criticism to dwell on its generic peculiarities: since genre reinforces textual understanding from the 41

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point of view of content and composition, the encounter between text and reader is problematized by an unstable case of generic affiliation. Generic clues help the reader select, from within a multitude of possibilities, an

organizing class which operates as a program for decodification and which creates the sort of intelligibility which comes with assigning a text to a preestablished group.? Facundo does not allow the reader to keep to

a constant generic program; this is not a particularly unusual strategy, since challenging generic conventions is a frequent procedure which stimulates interest. This kind of heterogeneity is part of the literary codes which were in place at the time when the work was written.? But in Facundo the reader is forced to change programs from one part of the text to another, so that conflicting classifications obtain. It is not hard to verify all this if one turns to the history of the reception of the work. It has been read as history, as a pamphlet (even Sarmiento considered it that way on certain occasions),* as a sociogeographic study, as a biography, as a novel (and here it would suffice to quote Unamuno: “TI never took Facundo by Sarmiento, as a historical work, nor do I think

it can be very highly valued in that regard. I always thought of it as a literary work, as a historical novel” [Nunca tomé a Facundo, de Sarmiento, por una obra historica, ni creo que pueda salir bien librada juzgandola en tal respecto. Siempre me parecio una obra literaria, una novela

a base historica]*), or even as epic (“we see in it the epic of the Latin American people” [vemos en él la epopeya del pueblo latinoamericano], proclaimed Carlos Garcia Prada when the centennial of its publication was celebrated).° It is problematic to activate such different interpretive possibilities inasmuch as it implies making the text operate in registers which are not always compatible, for they establish conflicting relationships with the world. These relationships vary significantly from history to novel, to the point that the message the reader constructs is altered. One of the main aspects of this chapter is the correlation between textual strategies and the reading keys they elicit. A point of departure is the complex nature of the historical component. In an almost tantalizing way, Facundo presents itself as a history of the wars that followed Argentine independence, with its thorough accounts of battles (suffice it to recall

Chapters 9, 10, 11, and 12, which share the title “Guerra Social” and which are individually identified by means of the battles of La Tablada, Oncativo, Chacon, and Ciudadela), and of the changing fortunes of the main characters in the political scene which occurred after 1810. There are numerous passages designed to reinforce and clarify the presentation of historical events. For example, in a pertinentizing strategy in which the author “forces” the relevance of certain events, a common tactic in the 42

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text is the analysis of La Rioja and San Juan which concludes with the following generic designation, ‘““This is the history of the Argentine cities.”” Nor is there a lack of allusions to historical events as the ones which provide the textual focus, such as the following comment, “This is a fertile event in Argentine history” [Este es un hecho fecundo en la historia argen-

tina], as if through them the discussion were granted greater relevance. And yet, some of the early readers of Facundo attacked it by calling attention to its deviance from the parameters of historical writing. A comment made by Alberdi in his Escritos postumos expresses his objections in an eloquent way: “It is the first history book which has neither date nor place

for the events it narrates. It is true that such an omission provides the author the comfort of great freedom of movement. Thanks to it he moves forward, backward, he stops, he goes from one side to its opposite—all this with the logic with which a fish breaks the wave.” [Es el primer libro de historia que no tiene ni fecha ni data para los acontecimientos que refiere. Es verdad que esa omisiOn procura al autor una libertad de movi-

mientos muy confortable, por la cual avanza, retrocede, se detiene, va para un lado, vuelve al lado opuesto, todo con el movimiento légico con que un pescado rompe la onda del mar.]* Valentin Alsina, in his very often quoted correction, states the standard objection to the historical status of the book: “‘You are setting out to write neither a romance, nor an epic, but a true social, political, and at times even military history, of an extremely interesting period of our times. That being the case, it is essential not to

stray in the slightest . . . from historical accuracy and rigor.” [Ud. no se propone escribir un romance, ni una epopeya, sino una verdadera historia social, politica y hasta militar a veces, de un periodo interesantisimo de la época contemporanea. Siendo asi, forzoso es no separarse un apice .. . de la exactitud y rigidez histOrica.]° Yet, of course, the correction has the double edge so characteristic of its own claims to authority: it both points to Facundo’s distance from historical discourse and, at the same time, inserts it within the parameters of that very discourse. We may be confronting here one of the key nodes that have determined the validity claims of our book. In it, the questions of truth and historical writing seem to be playing themselves out. Consideration of the ways in which such writing was framed before the second half of the nineteenth century is in order here, if only to locate the discursive field within which this fluid text operates. In its remarkable prescience, Facundo seems to be in the very midst of the changes that were occurring in the writing of history in the middle years of the century, and its reception bears proof of the shifting definition of the discipline at the time. While Alsina echoes Cicero’s formulation that “the historian may say nothing false, he must dare 43

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to say all that is true, he must avoid partiality.” '° The association of history with epic—Alsina’s claim notwithstanding—is a long standing view as well, dating back at least to Quintilian. History belonged to the realm of letters: it was one of the forms of writing that could be practiced. Even the idea of impartially copying reality was called into question, and as late

as the eighteenth century history had kept its place in the manuals of rhetoric. In 1752, to cite a few examples, the German Chladenius reflected on the matter of point of view and its bearing on historical narrative. For Voltaire, the difference between the historian and the epic poet lay only in the nature of the material out of which their work was carved; Schiller’s 1789 lecture at Jena, ““What Is Universal History and Why Do We Study It?”’ connected the historian’s perception with his own situation, and saw him applying “‘a harmonious model to every phenomenon presented by the great theater of the world.” In fact, at the end of the eighteenth century the focus of historical writing was the narrator more than the succession of events itself. While the final days of neoclassicism saw the waning of the bond between history and literature, as the latter became aligned with the

privileged realm of Romantic poetry and the former with an account of the “real,” the great Romantic school of French historians, however, brought to bear on their writing their involvement in contemporary pollitics. Thiers, Mignet, Guizot, Barante, and Michelet were all both writers and political activists, so that their view of the past was informed by their ideology. It is no accident that Pierre Lepape, introducing the L’Herne edition of Facundo in a 1990 article in Le Monde, should have called Sarmiento “le ‘Michelet argentin,’ ” for there is a striking parallel between

the two great men in the passion that they brought to their work and in the weight of their presence on it. As Tulio Halperin Donghi has convincingly demonstrated, the ties be-

tween Sarmiento and Romantic historiography are strong, and to some extent they help explain Facundo’s problematic status.'! For not only did the members of that school eschew what we associate with positivist, purely factual history, but they also resorted to metaphoric elaboration and the polarizations that so markedly determine Sarmiento’s book. Thierry’s writing, like Sarmiento’s, is structured by sets of antitheses (law and violence, order and chaos, reason and brutal passion); as for Michelet, he conceived the historian as the one who could make out the mystery of the past and of the nation, much in the same way as Sarmiento appealed

to the “terrible phantom of Facundo” [sombra terrible de Facundo] to lead him into the depths of Argentine chaos. Only after the bitter disappointments of 1848 did Michelet retreat from his prophetic stance and turn away from his philosophical vision. Historical writing in the second 44

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half of the nineteenth century is dominated by a scientific sense of the discipline produced under the aegis of positivist thought and a concomitant concern for technical matters and documentation. The professionalization

of the discipline helped mark its boundaries and ushered out the vaster concerns that underpinned the writing of Michelet, the Thierry brothers, or Quinet. Despite the affinities of Facundo with Romantic historiography, its discursive nature remains beyond the parameters of the master discipline in its overt lack of objectivity, its privileging of opinion over the account of events, and in its bringing together of elements from other generic sources. This discursive wealth is the site of some of the controversies it was embedded in since its publication, but so is the powerful reach of the interpretive dichotomy civilization-barbarism, which so vigorously traverses the Sarmientine text. One need only consider a few comments in Hayden White’s Metahistory to gain a sense of the limitations which Facundo ig-

nores: “The four master historians of the nineteenth century [Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt] .. . agreed that history should be written without preconceptions, objectively, out of an interest in the facts of the past for themselves alone, and with no aprioristic inclination to fashion the facts into a formal system.” '? And although point of view could be accepted as part of the historian’s role, it was not the driving discursive force: “That different ‘points of view’ might be brought to bear upon the past was not denied, but these points of view were regarded more as biases to be suppressed than as poetic perspectives that might illuminate as much as they obscured.” '3 Readers have resorted to the author’s intentions to account for the peculiarities of Facundo’s historical affiliations. A case in

- point is Palcos’s explanation, which is rooted in the perlocutionary dimension: Did Sarmiento actually set out to write... a pure and simple history book? Nothing allows us to suppose it, in spite of the varied historical elements it contains. Facundo started out as a struggle against tyranny. . . . As to its depth, it cannot be said it contains history understood as the chronicle of a time, but as its explanation or interpretation. ... (¢Se propuso de verdad Sarmiento escribir . . . un libro de historia, pura y simplemente? Nada autoriza a suponerlo, a pesar de los variados elementos histéricos que contiene. Facundo fue inicialmente un libro de combate contra la tirania. ... En cuanto a su fondo, no puede decirse que contiene en la

historia entendida como crénica de una época, sino en su explicacion o interpretaciOn... .]!4 45

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The narrative strategies call attention to the narrator’s presence as he who has appropriated speech and, with it, the possibility of achieving order within chaos. That omnipresent “I” travels from one point to the other of the referential world with the “tranco ariostesco”’ one can so clearly observe in Don Quijote, for example. Sarmiento resorts to this old literary tradition to organize his thematic and geographic displacement: “I must leave Buenos Aires to return to the depths of the other provinces and see what is being planned there” [Me es preciso dejar a Buenos Aires, para volver al fondo de las demas provincias, a ver lo que en ellas se prepara] '5 or “‘Let’s go to Atiles, where an army is being prepared. .. .” [Pero vamos a Atiles, donde se esta preparando un ejército. . . .]'° In stylistic terms, the abundance of exclamations and rhetorical questions are a function of the perlocutionary dimensions of the discourse, as has been forcefully argued by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, who points to the trope which enables the ideological distortion whereby the bourgeois author “attained imaginary power over the world.” '” If, then, as we consider the historical status of the text, we verify that the reader not only has to perform generic adjustments, but that he may

begin to destabilize the bonds between text and world, we approach a boundary that marks issues pertaining to what Gotz Wienold has called “text use.” !8 It is the divide parting fiction from nonfiction, and when it is evoked in reading Facundo, it usually stems from two possible ideological positions, attempting either to avoid discussion of the book’s polemical message or setting in motion an operation whose consequences are both

textual and social. I am referring here to the reading which locates Sarmiento’s text within the discourse of lies, and which can be characterized by acomment made by Sarmiento’s friend, Dalmacio Vélez Sarsfield: “‘ Fa-

cundo as a lie will always be better than Facundo as a true history.” [El Facundo mentira sera siempre mejor que el Facundo verdadera historia. ] !?

In our century, Jorge Abelardo Ramos makes an equally sweeping statement: “‘Facundo is a beautiful lie whose artistic splendor will endure in our literary history. But the demonic character presented by Sarmiento never existed. ... Facundo is a novelistic tale. ... According to Sarmiento’s confession in a letter to General Paz, the book’s anecdotes were invented to suit his plans.” [El Facundo es una hermosa mentira, cuyo esplendor artistico perdurara en la historia de nuestra literatura. Pero el personaje demoniaco que nos presenta Sarmiento no existiO nunca... . Facundo es un relato novelesco. ... Las anécdotas del libro son inventadas a designio, confiesa Sarmiento en carta al General Paz.]2° This contamination between fiction and lies is one of the sites of interaction between text and society: here certain members of a community of readers accept or deny 46

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the factual validity of its statements. Hence the text’s power to establish bonds with the image of the real is undermined within that community, which is split along the textual divide between fiction and lies. A look at the text’s reception is in order here. Alberdi’s and Alsina’s comments which were quoted earlier are not too distant from Vélez Sarsfield’s or Ramos’s. Aside from the problem of exaggeration, which was so often imputed to Sarmiento, the words “romance” and “epic” are of particular interest not only because they involve a questionable deviance from historical discourse, but also because they integrate a paradigm which locates Facundo within the fictive space. This operation is repeatedly verified in the history of Facundo’s reception, and it is not unusual to find it in readings designed to undermine the credibility of Sarmiento’s assertions. For it is possible to consider Facundo as a work of fiction, thereby cutting off its links with the world of events, without denying its status as a powerful and suggestive text. Thus, for example, Leopoldo Lugones will extoll it as “our great political novel,” and even, in a characteristically exaggerated way, as “our Iliad,”?' even as he dismisses Sarmiento’s central argument: “. . . there were neither such barbarous nor such civilized

ones. Their differences are mere accidents which, in their variation, modify their allegiances. The two types . . . have never existed.” [... no habia tales barbaros ni tales civilizados. Sus diferencias son meras situaciones accidentales que, al variar, los cambian también de partido. Los dos tipos . . . no han existido nunca.]?* The Peronist wing of historical revisionism will proceed along similar lines, as can be verified by the fol-

lowing comment made by Luis A. Murray: “Facundo is essentially a novel, which is a genre that can do without the corroboration of data and is only connected with history proper in second or third degree. .. .” [El Facundo es primordialmente novela, género que puede prescindir de la corroboraci6n de los datos y solo en segunda o tercera instancia se vincula con la historia propiamente dicha. . . .]?3 It is not hard to detect the thread that connects Alberdi’s and Murray’s declarations: it is a question of undermining the text’s authority without diminishing its literary value; it dismisses its explanatory thesis by placing it in a sphere which weakens it. It would not be accurate to suggest that this kind of reading is the exclusive patrimony of Sarmiento’s opponents, but it is a very effective opposition strategy.24 Ezequiel Martinez Estrada unmasked it with his usual penetration: “It is those who benefit from lies and the conspiracy of silence who understand Facundo not to partake of history, nor sociology, but to be’a novel about customs. They are ignorant of the fact that such a novel embodies true history and sociology.” [Son los que se benefician con la mentira y con la confabulacién del silencio, quienes entienden que Facundo 47

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no es historia, ni sociologia, sino novela de costumbres, ignorando ademas que justamente la novela de costumbres es Ia historia y la sociologia verdaderas. | 2°

If, indeed, this opposition has flourished, it is interesting to see which textual moves it derives from, that is to say, to what extent Facundo itself brings them into being. Some of the instances in which this problematic is textually inscribed elucidate some of the ways in which the text itself contributes to the conflict. Driven by the concern to produce a text that would elicit active decodification, Sarmiento often resorts to discursive strategies which demand that the reader suspend factual reference and stop leaning on the category of referential truth, by refusing to abide by the requirement to produce verifiable enunciations.*° This happens, for example, in the construction of the character of Facundo Quiroga, which is, as Sarmientine criticism has made it abundantly clear, subordinated to the purpose of making him attractive from a literary standpoint. In Chapter 5, when Facundo is ushered into the text, there are several strategies of literary presentation and elaboration which, though not exclusive of fiction, are prevalent in it. In the incident with the tiger in the desert, the character is not identified until the narrative sequence has been finished, in order to grant it a mysterious halo which enhances the actual textual introduction of Facundo. It is evident at times that narrative elaboration is not limited to the information that Sarmiento could have obtained from his informers, but that he appeals to a process of fictionalization which can accommodate signs of omniscience such as the following one, “When our fugitive had proceeded some six leagues, he thought he heard the distant roar of the animal, and a shudder ran through him.” [Cuando nuestro profugo habia caminado cosa de seis leguas, creyO oir bramar el tigre a Io lejos, y sus fibras se estremecieron.]?’ There is also a use of detail which goes beyond the transmission of information relevant to the key events, as can be seen in the tiger’s terrifying stalking of his prey: “The beast exerted its strength in an ineffectual leap; it circled around the tree, measuring the elevation with eyes reddened by the thirst for blood, and at length, roaring with rage, it crouched down, beating the ground frantically with its tail, its eyes fixed on its prey, its parched mouth half open.” [Intenté la fiera dar un salto imponente; dio vuelta en torno del arbol, midiendo su altura con los ojos enrojecidos por la sed de sangre, y, al fin, bramando de célera, se acosto en el suelo, batiendo sin cesar la cola, los ojos fijos en su presa, la boca entreabierta y reseca.]?® The reading that is invoked activates literary criteria, not only because the narrative voice takes on the character of an omniscient narrator, but also because it focuses on certain stylistic features at the expense of the referential bonds which would legitimate the 48

——_—__—————— THE RISKS OF FICTION —————__—_ narration of events.”? Such criteria are activated on other occasions, (one of them is located in the textual antipodes of the incident with the tiger: the dramatic events that lead to the murder in Barranca Yaco), but there are other strategies that also weaken the referential bond, thereby weakening the text’s authority altogether. Among them one must consider the use of the anecdote, particularly in what pertains to Quiroga’s presentation. It is not surprising that several biographies should have been written in order to correct the Sarmientine version of Quiroga’s life and to demonstrate its inaccuracies.*° Without considering the thorny question of

“who is telling the truth,” this discussion will limit itself to observing which textual nodes promote this kind of reading. Always striving to engage the reader’s interest, while at the same time adjusting to the conventions guiding the construction of the romantic hero, Sarmiento incorpo-

rates material whose questionable veracity he himself proclaims. He comments on some of the narrative units as “fables invented by flattery” (fabulas inventadas por la adulacién]3!; as a coda for another he writes, “This may be one of the fictions with which the poetic imagination of the people adorns the types of brute force they so much admire.” [Acaso es ésta una de esas idealizaciones con que la imaginacion poética del pueblo embellece los tipos de la fuerza brutal.]>? In another case, he introduces two anecdotes with a comment which suggests a poetic and fictive reading

protocol: “The repertory of anecdotes relating to Quiroga, and with which the popular memory is replete, is inexhaustible; his sayings, his expedients, bear the stamp of an originality which gives them . . . a certain Eastern aspect.” [Es inagotable el repertorio de anécdotas de que esta llena la memoria de los pueblos, con respecto a Quiroga; sus dichos, sus expedientes, tienen . . . ciertos visos orientales.]* If, on the one hand, the character who directs the reading is granted a powerful romantic and heroic thrust, on the other, he is removed from the domain of the factual and the historic, and the reading elicited lacks the anchorage that such a domain would ensure. The same is true of certain metatextual references which share the motivation and the effect of the comments I have just observed. Not infre-

quently, the text designates itself in a metatextual vein through forms which also remove its reading from the nonverbal referent and which, instead, act as invitations to sunder it from truth categories, thereby cancelling its denotative qualities. For example: Chapter 4 opens with acommon

formula in Facundo, the purpose of which is to connect the different movements of the text and to underscore the relevance of its components: “T have been obliged to traverse the whole of the route hitherto pursued, in order to reach the point at which our drama begins.” {He necesitado 49

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andar todo el camino que dejo recorrido para llegar al punto en que nuestro drama comienza.]3* Although the text itself rules out the affiliation with the theatrical genre, the word “drama” produces certain illocutionary instability. To read a text in the dramatic key involves privileging the theatrical aspects of the events, staging them, as it were, and distancing them from the factual. The two following cases might serve as examples: the first, in Chapter 12, concludes a description of the province of Tucuman, laden with poetic qualities and focused on the exotic beauty of nature and the attraction of the costumbrista elements, with the following question, “Perhaps one might believe this description to be taken from the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ or other Eastern fairy tales, but I cannot half describe. . . .” [¢Creéis por ventura, que esta descripcion es plagiada de Las mil y una noches u otros cuentos de hada a la oriental? Daos prisa, mas bien, a imaginaros lo que no digo. . . .|35 The reading suggested here grants imagination a key role. A similar situation occurs in Chapter ro, when the story of Facundo’s amorous obsession with Severa Villafafie is introduced: “The story of Severa Villafafie is a pitiful romance; a fairy tale in which the loveliest princess is a wandering fugitive, ... ” [La historia de la Severa Villafafie es un romance lastimero, es un cuento de hadas, en que la mas hermosa princesa de sus tiempos anda errante y fugitiva, ... ]*° The effect is to conjure up a world of literary and aesthetic dimensions. This process can be further understood in light of the following observation made by Jens Ihwe: “In fictive literary texts . . . immediate reference to given particularised contexts is blocked in favour of a mediated kind of reference to possible states, processes, and relationships not necessarily compatible with those accepted for a ‘physical world’. .... What is built is rather an internal system of cross references.*’ In the case of Facundo there is an interesting relationship between what I will call fictive contamination and the controversies surrounding its reception. The boundary between fiction and lies runs the risk of fading away when a highly polemic text,

with a strong pragmatic thrust, incorporates instructions for reading which weaken its referential roots. The preceding discussion has focused on generic instability and in “invitations to fiction” (to echo Sylvia Molloy’s suggestive phrase), but there is another determining factor which manifests itself in certain fissures of the text in which the reader perceives a recognition of the problematic relationship with the real. There are two particularly interesting cases in the second edition of 1851, when, after his discussion of Cordoba and Buenos Aires in Chapter 7, Sarmiento raises the question of the veracity of his own text as he admits in a footnote his lack of objectivity, his exaggeration, and inaccuracies, motivated by the “heat of the first years in exile” [el calor de los primeros afios de exilio]. 50

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Next, in the same footnote, he includes the already mentioned reproach made by Alsina concerning exaggeration and generic hybridity. If this note

is not tantamount to a confession of error, it does, however, undermine textual authority, as does the inclusion of a number of Alsina’s notes in this edition. The risks involved in these discursive practices are more clearly understood in light of the fact that the logical definitions of fiction, error, and lies are interrelated:

(a) If a speaker S utters a statement p to a hearer/reader H describing a state of affairs in EW at tx and if p is in fact not true in the commonly shared world EW at tx and if S believes that p is true in EW then S makes a mistake. (b) If S utters p knowing that p is false in EW at tx but S intends to make believe in the truth of p in EW at tx, then S lies. (c) If a statement p is actually neither true nor false in EW at a certain tx but there can be imagined a Wj at ty in which p is Wj-true, p is a fictive statement.>®

While the remarkable vitality of Facundo in Argentine cultural formations has to do with its transcending the textual domain and penetrating social praxis, it has, however, also entailed the possibility of producing interpretations which attempt to subvert the book’s validity claims by blurring the boundaries between fiction, lies, and mistakes. Within this very risky contamination we have to locate the problematic formation of national identity, constantly pulled by conflicting validity claims. Not infrequently, the very contestatory nature of reading Facundo against the grain is the point of departure for alternative interpretations of the problems in question, as will be seen in the following section on Valentin Alsina’s attempt to debunk Sarmiento’s account of events.

BEING THERE: THE REWRITING OF HISTORY On his way to Europe in early 1846, ostensibly embarked on a trip to study educational systems but also seeking respite from the very heated controversies he was the focus of in Chile, Sarmiento stopped in Montevideo and met with the Argentine exiles there. Having spent his adult life far from the metropolitan centers of Argentine political activity—Buenos Aires and Montevideo—he now got his first personal introduction to the leaders of the resistance in Montevideo. Copies of Facundo had preceded the arrival of its author by several months, for Sarmiento had skillfully §i

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arranged the distribution of his book so that it would reach the most prominent members of the anti-Rosas struggle. Bartolomé Mitre published parts of it in El Nacional—Florencio Varela had refused to do so in El Comercio del Plata*°—and he discussed the book with Esteban Echeverria, the dean of the Generation of 1837. After his reading of Facundo, Valentin Alsina, a prominent unitario exiled in Montevideo, presented Sarmiento with a list of preliminary “friendly” corrections. Alsina’s meticulous concern for accuracy (as he saw it) led him to write fifty-one painstaking notes over the course of the following four years. Lengthy as they are, Alsina did not think he had managed to cover in them all the errors which needed rectification. In fact, in a letter dated July 9, 1951, he announces to Sarmiento that he has a continuation for his Notas, but that he has not found a safe way of mailing them to him. Therefore, he warns him not to bring out the second edition: “you must not think of the second edition you are talking about until you have received all my Notes; otherwise, it would come out with many errors and falsehoods.” (no debe pensar en la 2a ediciOn que dice, hasta no recibir todas mis Notas; de lo contrario, saldria con muchos errores y falsedades.]* Alsina’s authoritarian warning had little effect on Sarmiento; he brought out the second edition in 1851 and managed to find an excuse for having paid relatively scant attention to these proliferating amendments. For indeed, the Notas undermine the book’s authority in powerful ways: incorporating them would have meant writing a different Facundo. In a gesture that bespeaks a suggestive mixture of independence and gratitude, Sarmiento dedicated this second edition to Alsina, ostensibly thanking him for his collaboration, and yet avowing that he had made scarce use of the notes: “I have made parsimonious use of your precious notes, saving the more substantial ones for better days and more carefully thought-through works, for I have feared that the result of touching up such a shapeless work might be the loss of its primitive appearance and of the healthy and keen audacity of its poorly disciplined conception.” [He usado con parsimonia de sus preciosas notas, guardando las mas sustanciales para tiempos mejores y mas meditados trabajos, temeroso de que por retocar obra tan informe, desapareciese la fisonomia primitiva y la lozana y voluntariosa audacia de la mal disciplinada concepcion.]*! Sarmiento did make a number of alter-

ations to the third and fourth editions, some of which stemmed from Alsina’s observations. However, when the Obras completas were under-

taken in 1889, Luis Montt followed the first edition, unaware of the changes which the subsequent ones had undergone. Perhaps to remedy this omission the Notas were published in 1901, in the Revista de derecho, historia y letras directed by Estanislao Zeballos. Alberto Palcos’s 52

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splendid edition of 1938 (based on the fourth one, published in Paris by Hachette), includes Alsina’s Notas as part of the documents pertaining to the early years of the book’s life. One is struck by the unusual status of this text. Unlike the newspaper articles in which the debates about Facundo were conducted, Alsina’s notes were not intended for publication, so we as readers are interlopers of sorts, participating in a circuit of communication which was meant to include Alsina and Sarmiento alone: “I only wish to note that what is said [in this note] is not, as you can imagine, to be published yet: it is only between the two of us, as a guide for you.” [Solo me resta advertir que lo dicho en ella (la presente nota) no es, como ya Ud. lo alcanzara, para publicarse por ahora: es sOlo aqui, para entre los dos, y para guia de Ud.] * This reading of Facundo is like a conversation in writing, with brief quotations from the first edition, preceded by page and line numbers designed to allow Sarmiento to identify the passage in question. For those to whom the first edition is not constantly accessible, Alsina’s commentary needs to be relocated into the text of Facundo in order to have reading and text match up. The peculiarity of the Notas’s status notwithstanding, it soon becomes evident that they are a particularly forceful set of fifty-one corrections: Alsina’s reading is an exercise in authority. He sets himself up as the one who knows and who, endowed with the knowledge, has the power with which to dislodge Sarmiento’s account of events. There are numerous statements which reveal his overbearing sense of mastery over the material at hand and which clearly deauthorize the author even as he claims to be a friendly reader: Erase that, my friend: for aside from being a lie, it is ungrateful and unfair.

[Borre Ud. eso amigo mio: porque a mas de ser una mentira, es una ingratitud y una injusticia.] (398) For many years now I have heard about this—as about other philosophical doctrines taught in Buenos Aires—many absolute, pedantic things, full of exaggeration and nonsense, uttered with magisterial airs.

[Ha largos afios que acerca de esto, como de ciertas doctrinas filosOficas, ensenadas en Buenos Aires, he oido muchas absolutas, muchas pedanterias,

muchas exageraciones y muchas tonterias, proferidas con aire de magisterio.] (375)

What you add about Napoleon is as much of a cock and bull story as anything else. ... 53

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cosas. ...] (366) :

{Lo de Napoleon que Ud. aniade, es tan cuento tartaro, como tantas otras

In this often arrogant, mocking tone, Alsina produces a discourse of authority which, if taken as such, debunks Sarmiento’s claims to knowledge about a variety of subjects, ranging from how history is to be written, to matters of local information, such as how many estancias there can be in a province (not the ten thousand Sarmiento suggests, for a pampa with one hundred estancias would no longer be a pampa!)**, what equestrian feats are credible, how many church steeples there actually were in Buenos Aires, or the clothes worn by people who, like Alsina himself, attended the university. In the Notas, Sarmiento is presented as the absent one, whose writing leans on hearsay and not on presence, the purveyor of truth. Evidently, Alsina took the task of reading and correcting Facundo very much to heart, but one wonders about the source of his authority, and, in a more general way, about the factors that come into play in allowing interpretation to carve out a site from which to impose itself. In Alsina’s case, power is construed as emanating from the role he played in some of the events alluded to in Facundo, and from his conception of the legitimate underpinnings of historical writing. At the root of his claims lies a question of place: Alsina was a portefio, who had experienced events in Buenos Aires first-hand. Sarmiento, instead, was a provinciano from distant San Juan. Born in 1802, Alsina was Sarmiento’s senior by only nine years, but he soon became centrally involved in the government of Rivadavia and in the dealings that resulted from Dorrego’s rise to power. As a prominent lawyer, Alsina played a key role in the early years of the new nation’s formulation of its legal system, and he was eventually entrusted with the writing of the civil code. While teaching law at the University of Buenos Aires, he was imprisoned by Rosas’s men. He managed to flee to Montevideo with his family, and there he continued the struggle against Rosas as a member of the Argentine Commission and as a prestigious journalist whose articles appeared in Florencio Varela’s El Comercio del Plata and Bartolomé Mitre’s El Nacional. In Montevideo, Alsina was seen as the “legitimate leader” of the Argentine exiles.“ His political path was closely aligned with the unitario party, and it was to remain so during the post-Caseros years. However, since his father-in-law was prominent in Rosas’s government, Alsina was in the unique position of both being officially in the opposition and having domestic familiarity with the enemy.*5 Unlike Sarmiento, Alsina represented the interests of the Buenos Aires province (he was to be its governor twice, in 1852 and in 1857, when 54

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Buenos Aires seceded from the Confederation), and in his notes he frequently erects himself as an authority on the events which deal with his territorial realm. In fact, Alsina was one of the leaders of the septembristas, who on September 11, 1852, led a revolt against Urquiza’s designated governor of Buenos Aires, Vicente Lopez y Planes, with the purpose of keeping the province and its harbor apart from the Confederacion led by

Urquiza. In 1846, then, when Alsina read Facundo for the first time, he considered himself to be not only a key player in the fight against Rosas, but also someone with first-hand knowledge of the complicated events which Sarmiento’s book was claiming to thresh out.*® This insider’s knowledge lies at the base of Alsina’s concept of history.

One could say that he envisaged historiography as rooted in one seminal prerequisite: being there. Historical knowledge for Alsina relies on hearing, seeing, witnessing: all other mediating forms are suspect. He seems to envisage himself as Arthur Danto’s “Ideal Chronicler”: “He knows whatever happens the moment it happens, . . . everything that happens across the whole forward rim of the Past is set down by him.” 4” When Alsina moots Sarmiento’s assertions, Alsina usually resorts to the legitimation provided by his own experience, as if what Sarmiento taught him needed no questioning, so he can move through Facundo, red pen in hand, writing over the text. “Seeing to believe” could well be his founding pronouncement: “It may be so: but I have never heard of that great feat, either of Rosas or of anybody else, and I would like to see it to believe it.” [Asi sera: pero yo jamas he oido de Rosas, ni de nadie esa gran prueba, y deseara verlo para creerlo.] (366) At another point, to assure Sarmiento of the credibility of his own interpretation of Lavalle’s uprising against Do-

rrego, Alsina sums it up in the following characteristic way: “Do not doubt this: I’m talking about what my eyes saw deep inside” [No dude Ud. de esto: le hablo por lo que mis ojos vieron muy adentro] (405), where

the striking visual metaphor claims penetration, veracity, and access to “factual reality.” Or again, correcting the account of an incident involving Facundo Quiroga during his stay in Buenos Aires, he avers, “It did not happen quite like that. It took place near where I was, and I do not believe it was published in the newspapers.” [No fue exactamente asi ese pasaje, acaecido muy cerca de donde yo me hallaba, y el cual no me parece que se publicé en los diarios.] (422) Underpinning Alsina’s confidence in his interpretive power is that in several instances he both witnessed and took part in the events under discussion. Correcting Sarmiento’s claim that a certain order had originated in the president’s office, (la presidencia), he lends credence to his different version in the following way: “ ... having been in the Treasury Depart55

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ment since 1821, I moved to the new and national one of the Interior. I wrote the aforementioned notice in that capacity.” [...y yo, que desde 1821 estaba en el ministerio de hacienda, pasé a la nueva y nacional del interior; y en este caracter, redacté la Circular mencionada.] (381) In other instances the validating force rests with Alsina’s personal acquaintance with the persons who wielded political power. In this light, Sarmiento is

made out to be a complete outsider: as a provinciano who had spent a significant portion of his adult life exiled in Chile, one suspects that in Alsina’s eyes the writer of Facundo had had a very indirect relationship with the actors and their actions. For his part, Alsina occupies an interpretive site empowered by his centrality in the Buenos Aires arena. If, while dealing with Rivadavia’s term, Sarmiento remarks about “his pompous language,” Alsina’s commentary on this is illustrative of the extent to which he feels he can rise discursively over the text he is reading: “TI would very much like you to explain that to me... . no matter what you may have heard, in private [Rivadavia] was frank, festive and attractive.” [Desearia mucho una explicacion de Ud. sobre esto. . . . por mas que Ud. oiga, (Rivadavia) era en su trato privado, franco, festivo, atractivo.] (367-368) He is etching out an unstated opposition between hearsay (the source of Sarmiento’s knowledge) and access to a government official’s private circle of friends (Alsina’s privileged status). Not even Rosas is excluded from this personal sphere, in which Alsina’s authority rests: to assure Sarmiento of the veracity of his account of circumstances which implicated Rosas, he declares, “he himself, rubbing his hands with pleasure, told me about it in March, 1828.” [él mismo, estregandose las manos de gusto, me lo dijo en marzo de 1828.] (389) This privileging of experi-

ence as the grounding factor of historical writing brings to mind Joan Scott’s astute observation: “The evidence of experience works as a foundation providing both a starting point and a conclusive kind of explanation, beyond which few questions can or need be asked. And yet it is precisely the questions precluded—questions about discourse, difference, and subjectivity, as well as about what counts as experience and who gets to make that determination—that would enable us to historicize experience,

and to reflect critically on the history we write about it, rather than to premise our history on it.” *8 Even as Alsina grounds his authority in his own “evidence of experience,” he is laying bare the extent to which his production of meanings derives from the political and subjective site he occupies as he reads Facundo. My reading of the Notas is informed by the

desire to consider the factors which condition his experience and the strategies through which he claims authority.

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Alsina’s self-presentation as an insider is marked by emblematic references to the theme of the secrets he is privy to: his writing oscillates between what he can say because he knows and what he cannot or will not

say even though he knows too well. He plays with the rhythm marked between disclosure and concealment; what he discloses is in the writing of the Notas; what he conceals is the prefiguration of a future scene of writing. For, even as he says he is concealing, Alsina announces his intention of producing another, far more complete account of the events under discussion. In other words, he would seem to be planning a text which would replace and displace Facundo itself, a text validated by Alsina’s greater discursive authority: “At the moment I can only make these suggestions; for the proof of all of them, ’'d need many sheets of paper. If I get to write my Biographical Notes, as I have promised I would, I will go into detail

and explanations on points and matters unknown to you and to almost everyone, and which will leave no doubt as to the truth of what I am putting down here.” [Ahora no puedo sino hacer estas indicaciones: la prueba de todas ellas necesitaria muchos pliegos de papel. Si llego a escribir mis Apuntes Biogrdaficos, que he prometido a Ud., entraré probablemente en menudencias y explicaciones, sobre cosas y puntos ignorados de Ud. y de

casi todos, y los cuales no le dejaran duda de la verdad de lo que aqui siento.] (404) Alsina’s position seems to be a radical version of interpretation itself: it is characterized by a degree of dislodgment of its object. In this case, a position is being carved out for the Apuntes which will set the record straight, thanks to their author’s superior knowledge and access to secret information. He is claiming total enunciative power with a forcefulness which comes through very clearly in the following statement, strategically placed as he is concluding his Notas: “I know of no one else who could or would write these Notes; that is, someone who is so knowledgeable about so many details (and the ones I have presented, and will present, are few, compared to the ones that will be included in my Biographical Notes) or who remembers them so well.” [No conozco a nadie que

quiera o pudiera escribir estas Notas; es decir, que esté tan al cabo de tantos pormenores (y aun los expuestos, y que expondré, son pocos, respecto de los que entraran en mis Apuntes Biogrdficos) 0 al menos, que los tenga tan presentes.] (426)

In spite of his very personal involvement in the events in question, which might lead us to infer that he conceives of his role as a transcriber who can report what he has witnessed (or at least heard of first-hand), Alsina makes it clear that his mission is to safeguard the standards of historical production. Contrary to what some other reviewers of the time saw

57

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in Facundo’s mixed generic affliations (so clearly stated by the one who wrote the earliest review, in El Mercurio, on July 27, 1845: “We have an idea that might appear contradictory after having praised one of his works on its historical merits. We believe Mr. Sarmiento distinguishes himself as

our novelist.” [Tenemos una idea que puede parecer contradictoria cuando acabamos de elogiar una de sus obras por su mérito historico. Creemos que el senor Sarmiento esta senialado como el escritor de la novela nuestra... .]),4° Alsina judges the book along the lines of one exclusive

discursive paradigm—what he conceives of as history. This is, beyond question, the validity requirement he sets down from the outset, ascribing to Sarmiento the intentionality of an historian. It is as interesting to note Alsina’s very critical stance vis-a-vis the historical affiliation of Facundo as it is to ponder the complete certainty with which he assumes that he can satisfy all the requirements of historical discourse. He in fact makes patently clear the ideological operations which allow a mode of comprehension (in Alsina’s case, one we might characterize in shorthand fashion as the “first-hand approach’’), to be articulated as a discourse of “facts.” He never presents himself as interpreting, but as speaking the truth and as dispelling misconceptions. In his own eyes, his is the “official story,” as he states at the end of a lengthy note in which he sets out to prove to Sarmiento that Dorrego never did try to befriend the unitarios: “That is, my friend, the official story of Dorrego’s government in its relationship with the unitarists, from the moment of their installation in 1827, to the beginning of December 1828.” [Tal es, mi amigo, la historia oficial del gobierno de Dorrego, en su relacion con los unitarios, desde

el instante de su instalacion en 1827, hasta la aurora de diciembre en 1828.] (392) Objecting to Sarmiento’s account of the relationship between Lavalle and Rosas, in which the former surrenders power to the latter—a capitulation which a unitario would be loath to report—Alsina exclaims impatiently, ““Thus is false historical testimony spread and rooted!” [jAsi se propagan y arraigan los falsos testimonios historicos!] (410) At the end of the same note, which deals in great detail with the motivations behind Lavalle’s actions when in power, and, having acidly complained about the falsity of the accounts of this period, he cries out in imperfect French, “and

this is how history is written!” [et voila justement comme (sic) on écrit l’histoire!] (415) The impersonal on is a veiled invocation of quite another standard of historical writing which he would seem to be calling for. It is,

of course, not accidental that he chooses to express his disapproval in French, posturing as if appealing to the authority of the French masters. And indeed, Alsina may have had in mind the writings of the Romantic school of historians, who, like himself, were thoroughly committed politi58

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cally and openly active in contemporary politics. A case in point could be the Augustin Thierry of the years preceding the July monarchy of 1830, for he could well have exemplified the image of the historian as political activist. As Lionel Gossman points out, Thierry believed “that it was impossible to write history except from contemporary experience, and since it was his present concerns that told him what questions to ask the past.” ©° As is well known, it was not until 1848 that historians ceased to think of themselves as Michelet, Thierry, or Quinet had viewed themselves but, emphasizing less the visionary and public aspects of their work, began to

see it as scientific and professional. However, while Alsina may have found the model of political commitment in the French exemplars whom his impatience convokes, he certainly did not find in them a justification

for claiming to be the authoritative recorder of events he had participated in. For Thierry and Michelet established their reputations with their writings on the Middle Ages, while Alsina’s text went no further

back than a decade or two. The attempt to lay claim to a legitimizing tradition lays bare, in fact, Alsina eccentricity from that very tradition. Even as he invokes the authority of “History,” he produces a writing which gives itself away as other than history. Perhaps there is no clearer indication of this than the device with which he hopes to justify the forcefulness of his claims: the insistent “I’’ which erects itself as both witness and actor. Alsina is postulating himself as the writer statesman, as an exemplary figure who both knows what happened and also served the public interest by actively participating in the events under discussion. There are numerous examples of this omnipresent first person: if it is the election of Diaz Vélez to be Ministro General, he says bluntly, ‘““This election was owed to me” [Esta elecciOn se me debio a mi] (411); when he is referring to his suspicions of bad faith on Rosas’s part after Puente de Marquez, he describes his central role in unmasking Rosa’s dishonesty: “I do not know if I was the first to see it, but I do know I was the first one who had the courage to say it in the press... . So I wrote a lengthy communiqué (published by El Tiempo and currently in my possession). . . . Its effects were great. Men started to think and to shake off their lethargy and apathy. ... I went further. I called and held meetings in my study. .. . Everything was discussed, organized and arranged there. .. .”’ [No sé si yo fui el primero en verlo, pero si sé que fui el primero que tuvo el coraje de decirlo por la prensa. .. . Escribi pues, un largo comunicado (que publico El Tiempo y que conservo). .. . Esta publicacion fue de grande efecto. Los hombres

empezaron a reflexionar y a sacudir su letargo y apatia. . . . Hice mas. En mi estudio convoqué, y se empezaron a hacer las reuniones. . . . Alli se discutiO, organizo y dispuso todo. . . .] (412) His writing (at times avow59

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edly disfigured to mask it when circumstances required the utmost secrecy) appears on the signatures of decrees, on private notes, as if it were the persistent trace of his presence in the crucial events that preceded his exile. It is tempting to suggest that the Notas are really making one central correction which is veiled by numerous others. They are filling in a gap in Sarmiento’s book: the centrality of Alsina himself. For the twentieth-

century reader, the Notas prefigure in a textual mode the power Alsina was to attain in the post-Caseros era. One could consider the Notas in the light of these ensuing events and, as in Borges’s “Kafka y sus precursores,”

see them foreshadowed in the writing of the fifty-one corrections, thus reading the future in the past of the Notas. Some of the recalcitrant attitudes of the portevios who, like Alsina and Mitre, refused to give in to national unification, can be anticipated in the forcefulness expressed in this earlier text. Alsina’s eye is totally regulated by the preconceptions of the unitarist vision. Indeed, his very selection of passages to correct in Facundo is determined by the need to adjust the presentation of facts to the dictates of this vision. His historical practice actually confirms Michel de Certeau’s observation that “historians begin from present determinations”: his writing is controlled by its site of production—that of an exile who strives not only to regain access to power but also, and with this very purpose in mind, to present a very clean record of the unitarios’ political past.*! It is Alsina’s very blindness to this process that allows us to gain the insight which the Notas make possible—namely, the effect of ideological structures in the encoding of history. His unitarian vision acts as the interpretive paradigm which he brings to bear on Facundo and which constitutes the signified of his Notas—the very conditions in which he elaborates what can be thought about the events in question. Alsina does not occupy the usual place the traditional historian as scriptor is accorded (in the periphery of power, around it, reflecting on the power he lacks 5), but, instead, he writes within the hegemonic circle of those who exercised politi-

cal power and who expected to regain it when Rosas was overthrown. From that circle of privilege, he rewrites Sarmiento’s text, which then acts as a palimpsest where Alsina erases, corrects, and inscribes his own writ-

ing. It is not infrequent to encounter passages in which a note contains much more than what it would take to rectify Sarmiento’s assertions, for they are frequently treated as open-ended, with sufficient thematic flexibility to incorporate whatever Alsina’s sense of relevance would deem appropriate. This is why the Notas end up being far more than corrections, but, instead, a veritable exercise in rewriting. A case in point is note number 9, designed to correct Sarmiento’s misconceptions about the educa60

——_——_———— _ THE RISKS OF FICTION ——————— tional programs at the university and the Colegio de Montserrat. Having made his point, he adds, “And I will add a thought” [Y afiadire una reflexion], which allows him to further his critique of Sarmiento’s treatment of Cordoba. The discussion of its university and the Colegio de Montserrat brings up the name of its director, Jos¢ Maria Bedoya, which triggers another digression: “And since I am naming Doctor Bedoya, allow me to devote a line in his honor.” [Y ya que nombro al doctor Bedoya, permitame Ud. que consagre aqui un renglon en justo honor de él.] (371) At

times he acknowledges, “This is sufficient for this note: but I shall continue. ...” [Esto basta cuanto al punto de esta Nota: pero seguiré. . . .| (373) or “I shall end this note with an apt recollection, even though it is extraneous to the topic at hand” [Concluiré esta Nota con un recuerdo, aunque extrafio al asunto de ella, justisimo] (378), and he goes on to pay homage to a friend, Doctor Jil. If he simply corrects Facundo, Alsina does so generally by going beyond a mere rectification: he retells the entire story

with as many contextual details as can be conjured up. In note 33, for example, he dwells on a very brief passage in which Sarmiento refers to General Paz as having been cold-shouldered by the unitarios (“Rejected here, slighted there” [Rechazado aqui, desairado alla]) by narrating in a very detailed fashion not only how Lavalle had invited Paz to become “‘jefe

de Estado Mayor” in Uruguay, but also how Alsina himself had played the crucial role of intermediary and messenger between Lavalle and Paz at this time, struggling to communicate to Paz how eagerly he was welcomed by Lavalle’s people. If the note articulates an eloquent account of the extent to which Paz had met with no rejections, it also serves to engrave the

profile of Alsina the patriot, bowing to the demands of the Argentine Commission even when his health was at risk, diligently travelling between various ports on the coast of Uruguay (Colonia, Montevideo, Punta Gorda) in his capacity as Lavalle’s trusted emissary and interceding with his cousin Ferré (again, Alsina reminds us of his centrality in a network of very close connections), the governor of Corrientes, in the strained dealings with Lavalle. The same painstaking attention to detail, minor events, and personal involvement underpins note 39, with its lengthy account of the dealings between Lavalle and Rosas in Puente de Marquez, intended to prove that Lavalle was not defeated there. Thus, as Alsina corrects, he not only rectifies (according to his version of events), but he also amplifies, adds on digressions which stem from his own sense of relevance, and, in general, rewrites the account of passages he objects to. In its peculiarly

authoritarian reading mode, the Notas illustrate in a radical way what Samuel Weber claims to be the relationship between criticism and its object: “The self-identity of an interpretation will depend on what it attacks, 61

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excludes, and incorporates, in short, on its relation to and dependency on

that which it is not... .” 3 If, then, all interpretation asserts itself in an agonistic process characterized by the dislodgment of its object, Alsina’s Notas would illustrate merely a more extreme version of this operation. Reading between the lines of Alsina’s text, it is not hard to detect the

outline of a unitarist social, cultural, and political history which dates back to the years that followed the Revolution of 1810, covers the period marked by Rivadavia’s rise to power, his fall, the nature and problems of Dorrego’s governorship, the intricacies of Lavalle’s personality, and the details of Dorrego’s execution, the dealings between Lavalle and General Paz, and between Lavalle and Rosas—all reported by the privileged eye of an insider. This shadow text prefigures some key works of Argentine nineteenth-century historiography in its situatedness: it is written in Buenos Aires, regardless of where Alsina happened to be during the Rosas era. The province is seen as a self-sufficient, self-absorbed political center, whose dealings with other provinces and with Montevideo come about as a result of its struggle for hegemony. Alsina’s writing is informed by a provincial—not a national—perspective: this position was to lead to the battles of Cepeda and Pavon, which were the result of Buenos Aires’s reluctance to yield some of its privileges and join the post-Caseros emerging nation. His back is so consistently turned on the other provinces that in his discussion of the Rivadavia and Dorrego eras, he questions the structural division between unitarios and federales which is in Sarmiento’s explanatory paradigm: Back then, not even the words “union,” “federation,” “federal” or “unitarist” were heard in Buenos Aires: you will not find them in any newspaper of the time. All the affairs were centered on provincial matters: none of them focused on the rest of the Republic, nor on national organization. The two

parties were designated only as “ministerial” and “opposition”; ... When later on the Congress began to treat the question of union or federation, the previous denomination disappeared and was replaced by the one which prevails to this day—“‘unitarists” and ‘“‘federal.”’

[En esos afios, ni aun las voces “unidad,” “‘federacion,” “federales,” “unitarios,” se oian en Buenos Aires: no las hallara Ud. en ningtan diario de entonces. Todas las cuestiones rodaban sobre asuntos de la provincia: ninguna se referia al resto de la republica, ni a organizaciOn nacional. Los dos partidos se designaban Gnicamente por “ministerial” y de “‘oposicién”; . . . Cuando después el congreso empezo a tratar la cuestion de unidad o federacion, aquella denominaciOn desaparecio para sustituirla la que ha prevalecido hasta hoy—la de “‘unitarios” y “federales.” } (386-387) 62

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Not only is Alsina questioning the choice of party names and the conceptual organization they denote; he is also emptying the term “‘federales” of all semantic content, except for the negative mark. This suggests that the federales lacked a valid political program of their own, and that the only trait which defined them was their desire to stand in the way of all that

was good and new. The Notas constitute a preliminary version of the kind of hegemonic historical discourse that was going to be produced by Bartolomé Mitre in the decades to come. The reading of Facundo which they enact seeks to radicalize the book’s pro-Buenos Aires stance and further antagonize—even discursively annihilate—the political aspirations

of the interior. From his vantage point as a provinciano, instead, Sarmiento understood the term “unitario” in a different sense, to imply a concern for national organization.** Not able to articulate a national consciousness, the men of Alsina’s persuasion actually delayed the construction of the nation in the post-Rosas era, and the Notas reveal the limitations of their vision. There is another noteworthy way in which the Notas prefigure the master texts of Argentine nineteenth-century historiography, and that is in their choice of heroic myths. Like Mitre and Sarmiento when they edited the 1857 Galeria de celebridades argentinas, Alsina takes great pains to write a vindicating account of Rivadavia’s achievements and to portray Lavalle in an attractive light. Rivadavia represents the unitarist ideals of the 1820’s and as such stands as the portevo hero of the day. If Sarmiento describes the end of his presidency as a fall (“the presidency has fallen in the midst of the jeering and whistles of its adversaries’’) [la presidencia ha caido en medio de los silvos y rechiflas de sus adversarios], Alsina’s correction renders it as a voluntary act greatly regretted by his supporters and inspiring both surprise and respect in his opponents. The one criticism Alsina directs at Rivadavia is that he stepped down from power, which is hardly a criticism at all. Lavalle’s portrayal is more complex and ambivalent, yet it has the discursive power to contribute to the construction of the myth. Among the prominent Argentines of this period, Lavalle occupies a significant place in the collective imaginary: there are ballads written about the heroic trek undertaken by his men to have him buried in Bolivia in order to keep his Rosista enemies from brutalizing his remains, and a celebrated novelist like Ernesto Sabato draws on the popular Lavalle lore in his Sobre héroes y tumbas. Alsina’s Notas represent a contribution to the mythifying discourse on Lavalle to the extent that they create a fallible yet very appealing figure: ‘““This man, whose memory is very dear to me, who was so brave, so disinterested, who was such a good family man, whose services were so 63

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good, whose wishes were so pure and patriotic, with such gentlemanly feelings, great talent, and good diction, lacked, however, other indispensable qualities in a public man... .” [Este hombre, cuya memoria es para mi muy querida, tan valiente, tan desinteresado, tan buen padre de familia, de tan buenos servicios, de deseos tan puros y patridticos, de sentimientos tan caballerosos, de buen talento, de buena dicciOn, no tenia, sin embargo, otras varias dotes, indispensables para constituir un hombre publico. .. .] (404) As Alsina goes on to explain, Lavalle’s defects resided in a certain self-willed quality, an unwillingness to take criticism, and a certain propensity to become bored in the face of difficulties. However, Alsina is quick to point out the heroic nature of his participation in the anti-Rosas struggle, undertaken with the imprint of a Romantic hero: (The fight against Rosas in 1829] “was undertaken by him in a volcanic eruption of the noblest, most generous feelings excited by the news of the Mazas’ murder... .” [(La lucha contra Rosas en 1829) la acometiO en una volcanica erupcion de los mas nobles y generosos sentimientos excitados con la noticia del asesinato de los Mazas. . . .] (405) Some of Lavalle’s actions are presented as having the daring—almost reckless—qualities that Sarmiento attributes to Facundo Quiroga. A case in point is an event which took place on the eve of the signing of the pact of June 24 between Lavalle and Rosas. Having arrived at Rosas’s headquarters at the estancia de Miller, where the two rivals had agreed to meet, and not finding Rosas there waiting for him, Lavalle, unlike Rosas (who, in fear and suspicion, had temporarily removed himself from the premises) flaunted his heedlessness of danger by calmly going to sleep in what might have been Rosas’s bed. Alsina provides the following coda to the narration: “Rosas arrived; they say he stood and contemplated this singular man as he slept. ‘I wouldn’t be sleeping!’ (he must have been saying to himself). There is something characteristically noble and imposing in Lavalle’s trust.” [Vino Rosas; y cuentan que se paro y estuvo contemplando en su suefio a aquel hombre singular. jNo lo haria yo! (estaria tal vez diciendo entre si) Hay en ese rasgo de Lavalle, en esa confianza, algo de caracteristico, de noble e imponente.] (410) Even if lacking in the steadfast determination desirable in a statesman, Lavalle emerges as worthy of interest and admiration; temperamental, but with a touch of greatness. Nor are his shortcomings translated into defeat: if Sarmiento considers the pact signed between Rosas and Lavalle as a surrender, Alsina refutes that, assuring him that it was an agreement to call general elections to the Sala de Representantes broken by Rosas and his machinations. Hence, he is rewriting the historical record of the events at Puente de Marquez to delete any traces of weakness in Lavalle while underscoring Rosas’s deceitful nature. Alsina even redis64

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tributes the relative importance attributed to the political players in Facundo: General Paz, for example, is given a secondary place, considerably removed from the almost Messianic centrality he occupied there. As we have seen, Alsina’s reading is prey to blindness when it comes to the ideological constraints which color his interpretive moves. Nevertheless, there are a few occasions when it is enlightened by powerful insights

which probe the very logic of Sarmiento’s conceptual enterprise. Like Alberdi and many other future readers of Facundo, Alsina moots the validity of the polarity between civilization and barbarism which underpins Sarmiento’s discussion, yet, unlike them, he goes a step beyond by not merely inverting the terms but actually questioning the logic of the oppositional, polar system he is erecting. In order to trace Alsina’s line of reasoning, it will be necessary to touch upon the way in which he addresses the epistemological questions raised by his objections. From the outset, in note 2, Alsina articulates his criticism of the basic error behind Sarmiento’s work: what he calls his “propensity to systems,” which accounts for frequent exaggerations and a general neglect of accuracy: ““This is why it

is natural that, upon finding an event which bolsters your ideas, you should exaggerate and amplify it; and that when you find one that does not fit into your system, or that contradicts it, you sweep it aside, or you disfigure it, or interpret it.” [De aqui nace naturalmente que, cuando halle un hecho que apoye sus ideas, lo exagere y amplifique; y cuando halle otro que no se cuadre bien en su sistema, 0 que lo contradice, lo hace a un lado, o lo desfigura o lo interpreta.] (365) When he takes this problem up again in note 39, Alsina’s reasoning becomes interesting and suggestive, for he transcends the logic of binary oppositions (civilization/barbarism, city/ country, culture/nature, and all the subsequent polarities engendered on this basis) by claiming that the oppositions themselves cannot be made to adhere to a fixed pattern. By examining the ways in which the system city/ country can be displaced, so that the logic which separates and distinguishes one from the other ceases to obtain, Alsina is actually proving that the axiom need not apply in all cases, and that therefore one cannot locate a fixed ground that is not caught up in a potential web of other relations: °° ... in order to establish your theory as a general and certain doctrine, it would be necessary for there to operate in that struggle, on the one hand, the countryside exclusively, and on the other, the cities. This has never happened, nor will it ever happen. There have always been country men or gauchos in favor of the cities; and in favor of the montoneras people from the

cities; the shotgun, the montonera’s spear are a product of the cities, a product of the arts and of civilization. Yet if the great urban powers are not 65

——————— FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE ——— properly utilized, and, on the contrary, it appears as though they are annihilated, then the balance of passions is broken: then the city is not acting as

acity.... [ ... para poder sentarse la teoria de Ud. como doctrina general y segura, seria preciso que en esa lucha obrasen, de un lado, exclusivamente las campafias, y de otro exclusivamente las ciudades: y esto ni ha sucedido ni sucedera jamas. Siempre hubo a favor de las ciudades, hombres de las campafias o gauchos; y a favor de las montoneras, hombres y elementos de las ciudades: la tercerola, la lanza del montonero, son un producto de las ciudades, un producto de las artes, de la civilizacion. Mas si los grandes poderes de ésta no son aprovechados, y si, por el contrario, se obra de un modo que parece dirigido a inutilizarlos, entonces se rompe el equilibrio de las pasiones: entonces la ciudad ya no obra como ciudad. . . .] (403)

The semantic neatness of Sarmiento’s polar structure is blurred and therefore undermined—actually displaced, since the space demarcations cease to exist and the qualities of the country can move into the city and vice versa. Alsina’s distaste for systems affords him the insight to transcend the duality which traverses Sarmiento’s thinking in Facundo. Alsina’s Notas have received little critical attention except for one or two frequently quoted passages. Yet in a way they are eloquent proof of why reading Facundo has led to the production of a discourse teeming with the tensions and struggles that characterize the process of formation of the nation’s identity.

66

TT aee™”—sSsC TH REE ~~ THE WILES OF DISPUTATION Alberdi Reads Facundo

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B ecause of Facundo’s controversial nature, its readings produce a vast discursive field on which the struggle for power is staged. As was seen in Chapter 1, the initial reception (conceived not as a point at which its meanings were stabilized or definitively established, of course, but as the first and founding layer in a long process of accumulation and cross-fertilization), had a certain founding effect as a point of discursive departure because the early readers started off some of the major controversies which were to surround the text in a sustained way.!

The early readers of Facundo were deeply influenced by the struggles that preceded and followed Rosas’s dictatorship, and their views sprang from their relationship to the strife for interpretive and political hegemony. This chapter deals with one of the most heated episodes of what I am calling, in a broad sense, the contemporary reception of Facundo: the long drawn out polemic between Sarmiento and his rival Juan Bautista Alberdi. While this polemic does not deal exclusively with Facundo, it is of significant interest to the study of its readings. Alberdi’s challenge to Sarmiento’s book is the most powerful one not only because of the weight of his arguments and his conceptual framework but also because it soon

becomes evident that this is the terrain on which they are waging the struggle for discursive and political supremacy. As he sets down his disagreements with the book’s assertions, Alberdi deploys them to show that Sarmiento is altogether mistaken, fails to understand Argentine reality, misrepresents conflicts—in other words, on account of his duly demonstrated cognitive incapacity, he does not deserve either his readers’ trust or, more importantly yet, access to political power. It is an interesting episode in the richly woven relationship between discourse and power. 67

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READING A POLEMIC “Tt is the act of analysis which seems to occupy the center of the discursive

stage, and the act of analysis of the act of analysis which in some way disrupts that centrality. In the resulting asymmetrical, abyssal structure, no analysis—including this one—can intervene without transforming and repeating other elements in the sequence.”? Why does reading an epistolary polemic like the one which occupies me here subvert any possibility of attaining what Barbara Johnson calls “a position of analytical mastery?” It seems that what we have here is a system of multiple gazes (metareadings) which are superimposed upon each other, producing a somewhat distorting effect. Some of Alberdi’s texts (the ones presented here) are essentially his transcriptions of his act of analysis of Facundo. Because of their argumentative thrust they radicalize the inevitably positional nature of interpretation, the space which a text opens up for dialogue, difference, or disputation. Our own reading is somehow housed within that same space, for how do we reach a point beyond the text of the polemic, a verdict of sorts which might unravel the play between truth and fiction, message and feint, so as to proclaim a victor? Even if some critics have confidently granted the victory to Alberdi because of his calmer, more rational stance, it seems that such a proclamation entails a certain blindness to the critic’s own act of analysis, to his sense of values and interpretive priorities. In fact, at the root of a polemic’s discursive formation lies a certain contradiction: while it is underpinned by the dichotomy between truth and imposture, right and wrong (by which Western discourse has been obsessed), it stages the very impossibility of deciding between them. In a polemic such as the one which involved Sarmiento and Alberdi, the purely cognitive and referential elements (what might be “knowable”’) are overshadowed by the constant negation and by the will to argue, to dispute. As readers, we are caught up in a complex mechanism of wills which problematizes our own interpretive moves. Yet confronting a polemic and the issues it raises seems relevant not only from the point of view of the Sarmiento studies which occupy us on this occasion but also as one more way of broadening the field of literary studies by not restricting it to its belletristic manifestations. Studying this genre through the famous dispute between two such founding figures as Sarmiento and Alberdi may help throw light on what some call the “literature of ideas.” This chapter will focus on one of the two disputants, Alberdi, as a reader of Sarmiento. As we take up the reading of Alberdi’s reading, we confront a deceptively simple question: how should we read it? What texts make up the discursive entity that criticism has called “the polemic between Alberdi 68

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and Sarmiento?’ When does it start? Borrowing a term from Gerard Genette, what are its “‘seuils,”” what constitutes its paratext,? how do we de-

marcate reading contexts which help us understand why the dispute arose? This kind of polemic seems to spill over the textual domain, not in a naively referential sense, but in a clearly pragmatic one: Sarmiento and

Alberdi are resorting to writing as a way of talking about acting in the world. Their writing is therefore trammeled with the problems of doing: in an Austinian way, we might say that this is discourse heavily laden with

illocutionary and perlocutionary forces. In order to grapple with these problematic demarcations, editors of Alberdi’s and Sarmiento’s works have resorted to supplementing the publication of the two central bodies of the polemic (Alberdi’s so-called Cartas quillotanas and Sarmiento’s Las

ciento 'y una) with what one of them aptly called “explanatory documents.” The polemic does not produce its own reading contexts; it begs to be contextualized as if it could only stand in the center of a complex web of concentric circles—it is not a self-sufficient text.* Let me clarify my

point with examples. In the Quillotanas, there is a significant paratext entitled “Brief Notice to Inform the Reader” [Breve noticia para informar al lector] which attempts to create a meaningful reading context for the letters which follow by citing the following relevant texts: Sarmiento’s ‘Ad Memorandum,” written when he left Urquiza, and dealing with the events preceding the battle of Caseros; his ‘““Yungay Letter” [Carta de Yun-

gay], addressed to Urquiza on October 13, 1852; his Campana en el Ejército Grande of 1852, preceded by a letter to Alberdi through which he dedicated the book to him.* Sarmiento’s text is thus incorporated into Alberdi’s: the Cartas are preceded by Sarmiento’s letter of November 12, 1852, dedicating his Campana en el Ejército Grande to him. Alberdi’s Cartas quillotanas are thus framed by Sarmiento’s dedication of one of his own works to Alberdi—a text whose prefatory force was actually directed to the Campana and not to the Ouillotanas. Ina similar attempt to significantly frame and contextualize the two main texts which constitute the body of the polemic, the editors of Sarmiento’s Obras completas named

volume XV Las ciento y una but included before them more than one hundred pages of what they entitled “‘Preliminares.” Although the pieces are heterogeneous in nature, some are journalistic, others are letters or proclamations signed jointly by Sarmiento and other Argentine expatriates living in Chile after Caseros—such as Juan Gregorio de Las Heras, Gabriel Ocampo, and Juan Godoy—they are strung together by one common theme: the post-Caseros struggle for national organization, the political scene upon which the polemic is staged. These examples demonstrate the extent to which a polemic can present, 69

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in a somewhat radical, exacerbated manner, a problematic of limits and demarcations which texts often pose. If, as Michel Foucault argues in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the frontiers of a book are never clear-cut,® as we approach the struggle enacted in these complex textual configurations

we are dealing, in more or less intense ways, with crucial aspects of the discussions on texts, their identity, their circulation, and the ways in which their mode of existence constitutes a preamble for the act of reading. What is called today in shorthand form Cartas quillotanas was not originally constituted as a unified book: the first four letters were published in Valparaiso by the Imprenta del Mercurio in 1853 with the title Cartas sobre la prensa y la politica militante de la Republica Argentina. A supplemen-

tary text was published later on in the same year: Complicidad de la prensa en las guerras civiles de la Republica Argentina. The 1853 edition of Montevideo lacked this second text, but all later ones subsumed both under the shorter title Cartas quillotanas.’ Indeed, the ‘“‘system of references” is particularly rich in the case of this polemic because the textual concatenation extends over a vast diachronic span: aside from the Quillotanas and Las ciento y una surrounded by the supplementary texts discussed above, there are other books which continue the polemic. After the Constitution of Santa Fe was approved, Sarmiento’s negatively critical Comentarios were published, followed by Alberdi’s Estudios sobre la Constitucién Argentina de 1853 en que se restablece su mente alterada por comentarios hostiles y se designan los antecedentes nacionales que han sido base de su formacion y deben serlo de su jurisprudencia. All this in 1853. But the flexible frontiers of the debate were extended through the decades: in the 1880’s Alberdi continued the struggle in his Facundo y su bidgrafo published in his Obras postumas in 1895.° This is a discursive phenomenon with unstable boundaries at the beginning and at the end, and hence lacking a “last word” to mark a point of closure. Since it pertains to the reception of Facundo, it has contributed to the controversies surrounding it. As this chapter focuses on Alberdi’s Cartas quillotanas, it is with an awareness of the somewhat artificial and arbitrary nature of the choice. Perhaps it will suggest points of departure for productive discussions of other sections of the polemic. One of the most striking features shared by both the Quillotanas and Las ciento y una is the strong dialogic function which underscores the communicative aspect inherent in any text. Since they are letters, they have a strong pragmatic thrust derived from the kind of speech situation they presuppose: writing fulfills a mediatory function between the addresser and his or her addressee, who are separated by time and space.? The “T’ and the “you” which underlie the dialogic situation are markedly pres70

= THE WILES OF DISPUTATION —————————_ ent here, but not in their conventional manifestations. The disputational nature of the genre promotes interesting deformations which lead to what Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni has called “‘a dialogue of the deaf,” in great part due to the ways in which the “I” constitutes itself as the founding subject.!° Alberdi’s Cartas quillotanas take skillful advantage of the dialogic movement of the letter and of the mediation provided by the physical absence of his opponent in order to invoke him, question him, and yet remain as the sole source of discursive authority. He both asks and answers the questions, thereby silencing Sarmiento’s voice and proclaiming his own opinions: When Rosas fell and the opportunity arose for you to establish the “authority” to create the regular government of the Republic, what did you do? You forgot your maxims of 1845, in order to go further in political backwardness than the very unitarists of 1829 whom you condemned at the time. [Caido Rosas y llegada la oportunidad de fundar la “autoridad” de crear el gobierno regular de la Republica, ;qué ha hecho usted? Olvidar sus maximas de 1845, para ir mas lejos en atraso politico que los unitarios de 1829, condenados por usted en ese tiempo.] !! What about your ten years of service in the press? I will estimate them, not in order to deny their merit, but so as to gauge them realistically, and to draw the just conclusion that your writings do not make you the president of the Argentine Republic by natural right. ... Your works of “‘ten years” are documents which work against you today. [Qué son sus servicios de diez afios en la prensa? Voy a estimarlos, no con el fin de negar su mérito, sino con el de estimarlo tal cual es, para sacar una conclusiOn de justicia y de paz, a saber, que sus escritos no lo hacen a usted presidente de la Republica Argentina por derecho natural... . Sus trabajos de “diez anos” contra Rosas son hoy documentos que obran contra usted. ]

(50-51)

Obviously, Alberdi presents himself as reading Sarmiento’s texts and actions more acuitously than the author himself might be able to: the “TI” overwhelms the “you” and turns him into a mere rhetorical device. But there is more: this “you” has a slippery identity, the result of a doubling whereby at times it refers to Sarmiento and at times it is a gesture which implicitly invokes a third party who is witnessing the discursive process and sharing Alberdi’s points of view: This book [referring to Facundo] is the most impartial one written by Mr. Sarmiento. 71

———_———— FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE —————— [Ese libro (referring to Facundo) es el mas imparcial de cuantos ha escrito el senor Sarmiento. ] (53) Exaggeration led Mr. Sarmiento to define Quiroga in the following terms: “his type exemplifies the most naive character of the Republic’s civil war, the most American figure of the revolution.” He thinks he is explaining the Argentine revolution with the life of Facundo Quiroga, because he thinks it accounts for one of the two tendencies. [Llevé la exageraci6on el sefior Sarmiento hasta definir a Quiroga: “el tipo mas ingenuo del caracter de la guerra civil de la Repablica, la figura mas americana de la revolucion.” El cree explicar la revoluciOn argentina con la vida de Facundo Quiroga, porque cree que él explica suficientemente una de las dos tendencias.] (53)

Here Sarmiento becomes a third person who is observed and evaluated by Alberdi and his implicit reader; together they constitute a sort of communal “we” which points at a “him,” who is silenced in the process and powerfully discredited. In this shifting relationship, it becomes clear that the dialogue is fictive, that the identity of the participants depends on the suasive rhythms regulated by an ever-present “I.” This is, in a way, the mecha-

nism which assures the survival of the polemic: the dialogue seldom “takes,” except for a few common points which the debaters touch upon as points of departure. A polemic like the one which engaged Alberdi and Sarmiento so intensely rests for its survival on the mediatory powers of writing, for an oral encounter would force them to address their disagreements in more direct ways. '!?

THE USES OF THE AUTHOR As he manipulates the dialogic situation, Alberdi deploys interesting strategies of evocation of Sarmiento the author. The “‘you” he is addressing in his third Carta quillotana (which will be examined more closely now) is primarily constituted as the author of Facundo, since the letter focuses on this key text in order to posit a mimetic relationship between the author and his book: “‘Facundo o civilizacién y barbarie represents you more completely than any of your other writings. It is your most famous publication both in fact and in your own opinion.” [El Facundo o civilizacion y barbarie \o representa a usted mas completamente que ninguno de sus escritos. Es su publicacion mas célebre en la realidad y a los ojos de usted mismo.] (52). In a reversal which characterizes Alberdi’s de72

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bating style, he unexpectedly goes on to declare that while it was originally written against Rosas, “it works against you now because you are against your book” [viene a servir hoy contra usted por haberse puesto en oposicion con su libro]. (52) This reversal amounts to subverting the author’s

intentions and, in a general sense, illustrates how interpretation can cut itself off from authorial intentions: here is an instance in which Derrida’s vision of the “orphaned text” can be materialized.!3 Indeed, Alberdi goes on to read Facundo against the grain, making it “say” things its author would not have accepted. Moreover, as he is discussing it almost eight years after its publication, he judges it on the basis of the events which followed Rosas’s fall in 1852, thus radically modifying the contexts of production and reception. Alberdi sets out to read not only “the history of barbarism and the process of Argentine caudillos” {la historia de la barbarie y el proceso de los caudillos argentinos], but also “the history and the process of the mistakes of Argentine civilization as represented by the ‘unitarist party’ ” [la historia y el proceso de los errores de la civiliza-

cion argentina representada por el “partido unitario”] (52)—the very party Sarmiento was trying to praise and defend. Alberdi’s (man)handling of Sarmiento’s authorial persona can be addressed in Foucault’s terms, centered on the “modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses.” ‘4 What marks the reading performed by the “Tercera carta” is that even as Alberdi quotes extensively from Facundo (sometimes strategically praising its assertions), Sarmiento never really remains the source of its significations: they are modified and reappropriated by Alberdi for his own purposes. A case in point is the following commentary, which follows the transcription of an

early passage in the book dealing with the nature of the “‘caudillo Facundo” as “true expression of a nation” [expresiOn fiel de una manera de ser de un pueblo]: To present Facundo Quiroga—one of the most wicked men in world history—as ... the mirror image of the Argentine Republic, is the greatest insult flung at this good and honest nation. . . . Yet the insult lies only in exaggerating a fact which may be partly true deep down. If you remove the author’s exaggerations, a historical truth already seen by others will remain, namely, that the system of caudillos is the natural fruit of the desert tree and the colonial past. [Presentar a Facundo Quiroga—uno de los mayores malvados que presenta la historia del mundo—como.. . el espejo fiel de la Republica Argentina, es el mayor insulto que se pueda inferir a ese pais honesto y bueno. .. . Pero el

73

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el caudillaje y su sistema son frutos naturales del arbol del desierto y del pasado colonial.] (54)

Two mutually reinforcing strategies are deployed above: the devalorization—and even condemnation—of Sarmiento’s cognitive claims, followed by the appropriation of their salvageable residue as what others (perhaps Alberdi himself) had already pointed out. In the process, Sarmiento’s authority is destroyed: as an author, he is used as a target whose statements, having been made public through the mechanisms of publication, are open to questioning, disagreement, and condemnation. The strongest blows are reserved for Sarmiento’s valorization of himself as an author—in fact, a major portion of the third letter attempts to debunk the authorial figure from the position of superiority it may have claimed for itself. Adolfo Prieto has written an insightful study of this very aspect of the polemic as observed from the angle of Sarmiento’s response in Las ciento y una, and, in many ways, what can be added is of minor importance.'5 As Prieto has amply demonstrated, Alberdi accuses Sarmiento of arrogating to himself the status of a political myth and of postulating himself as a candidate for the nation’s presidency. What I would like to examine here is the double-edged sleight whereby Alberdi modulates his attack on the writer to avoid disqualifying himself from the position of authority which is at issue in the polemic. The discursive insertion of the writer resorts to the age-old opposition between word and action, arms and letters: There is no doubt that there is glory in having written for ten years against the tyrant; but there is much more glory in having defeated him on the battlefield. Who would confuse Mme. de Stael’s glory with Wellington’s, as victors over Napoleon? ... Who has matched the glory of the word and that of action? So now: having attacked Rosas with words and not overthrown him, you instantly forgot the glory of the one who did defeat him, not with words, but with deeds... .

[No hay duda que haber escrito diez afios contra el tirano de la Repablica es un titulo de gloria; pero es mucho mayor el de haberle volteado en campo de batalla. ;Quién confundiria la gloria de Mme. de Stael con la de Wellington, como vencedores de Napoleon? .. . ¢Quién ha igualado la gloria de la palabra a la gloria de la accion? Pues bien: usted que ataco a Rosas de pa74

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labra sin bajarle del poder, usted ha olvidado en un instante la gloria del que le derroco, no de palabra, sino de obra.] (49)

Other similarly eloquent passages could be cited to illustrate this opposition; several of them also usefully demonstrate Alberdi’s proficiency in the field of European culture. At first, then, it would appear as though he is disqualifying the writer as such—and therefore himself—from access to political power (“Is literary glory part of the credentials for government anywhere? The writer prepares but concludes nothing.”’) [;la gloria literaria es antecedente de gobierno en ninguna parte? .. . El escritor prepara, pero nada concluye.] (50) Soon, though, it becomes clear that Alberdi has in mind a restricted kind of writer, and he masterfully works out an unstated opposition between the deserving and the undeserving writer. The undeserving one is the journalist, as epitomized by Sarmiento himself, of course. (A reading of Las ciento y una immediately reveals that such a professional categorization stung Sarmiento to the quick, for it reduces his authorial status in several ways.) In the first place, Alberdi performs a sweeping operation of reduction: he minimizes Sarmiento’s contributions to the affairs of their country by reminding him that as a journalist working for the Chilean press, he could only deal with the problems of a foreign

nation in a secondary way: “The portion devoted to Argentine affairs would amount to one-fifth of the collective writing. From the ten years we have to subtract those you spent travelling in Europe. According to this,

your lengthily computed ten years’ journalism for the Republic are reduced to two.” [Representaria una quinta parte de la redacciOn colectiva, la parte consagrada a los asuntos argentinos. De los diez afios hay que deducir los que ha viajado usted en Europa. Tenemos, segtin esto, que los diez afios de trabajos periodisticos de usted sobre la Repablica Argentina, largamente computados, se reducen a dos.] (§1) This is one of the few instances in which Alberdi sets aside his heavily charged rational tools and turns to humor in order to undermine his enemy’s insistent claims of long

years of service to the nation through his writings, for it is obvious that the kind of computing proposed in the passage quoted above has no claims to any kind of mathematical verisimilitude. Having reduced the length of the service, Alberdi goes about reducing its quality: as a journalist Sarmiento received a salary from the Chilean press. Implicit here is the

presupposition that he was inserted in a system of dependencies which deprived his work of the disinterested nature assumed to be the hallmark of patriotic writings. It is eloquent that as Alberdi moves about in the arena where the articulation between discourse and power is worked out he should tacitly suggest that the power of a journalist’s assertions is un75

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dermined by his subordination to the owners of the newspapers: he is still a considerable way away from the professionalization of the writer which was to cause considerable anxieties in the latter part of the century: “I will not deny your patriotism, nor will you deny me that you have always published newspapers for pay, as an honest way of earning a living. Thus, they express not only patriotism but needs met as well.” [No negare su patriOtismo, pero no me negara usted tampoco que siempre ha escrito periOdicos por su sueldo, como medio honesto de ganar el sustento de su vida. Ellos expresan, pues, a la vez que patriotismo, necesidades satisfechas. | (51) The final blow is reserved for the kind of writing which is produced by the journalistic activity: it lacks the carefully meditated qualities which are required of a statesman: ‘““The qualities of a statesman—reserve, sustained meditation, patience—would be a journalist’s undoing. He does not have to think as he writes—not to say after.” [La reserva, la medita-

cion detenida, la espera, que son las cualidades del estadista, serian la ruina de un periodista, que no tiene que pensar al paso que escribe, por no decir después.] (66) Sarmiento’s standing as an author has by now been

totally discredited by assigning it to the sphere of journalism. What remains to be seen is how Alberdi manages to safeguard his own standing as a writer and to avoid undermining his own stature at one fell swoop which could debunk the author function in general. He does so by referring rather obliquely to writings which deal with what he calls “public science,” turning to the term “‘science” in order to suggest the serious, carefully thought through nature of its assertions, and to suggest an opposition with the rash practices of journalistic discourse. It is not hard to see the ideas which are to be inferred from this opposition: if the “public science” (i.e., political science), provides, as Alberdi claims, the competence a statesman needs, who is most suited to enact such competence than the author of the Bases himself? Through the pairs of oppositions think/write (political scientist) versus not to think/write (journalist), Alberdi is in a way presenting his own credentials as an author who does bear the mark of authority. It is tempting to repeat Alberdi’s handling of Sarmiento’s claims by applying them to him as well, suggesting the possibility that in the empty space left by a discredited journalist we can instate a different kind of author: the careful, professionally trained political

scientist. In this instance, it can be said that as we read Alberdi reading Sarmiento we encounter a degree of self-transparency which opens up the possibility of reading Alberdi. There is one particularly significant passage which finally vindicates the writer precisely as it points to the kind of text which Alberdi himself has produced: “Political science does not owe you a treatise, nor a piece of historical writing to which the statesman or the 76

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Law student can turn.” [La ciencia politica no le debe un libro dogmatico, ni un trabajo histOrico de que pueda echar mano el hombre de Estado 0 el estudiante de derecho publico.] (66) This statement carves out a prominent place for the author of such works as the Fragmento preliminar al estudio del Derecho (1837), La Republica Argentina a 37 anos de su Revolucion (1847), and the influential Bases y puntos de partida para la organizacion politica de la Republica Argentina (1852), which played such a central role in the drafting of the Constitution of 1853. In a subtle way Alberdi has established the direction in which discourse and power can fit into each other, and cancelled out the claims put forth by his enemy’s writing. For, indeed, not even Facundo is spared on the grounds that it is nei-

ther a history book nor a “libro de politica”: “It is a biography, as you yourself call it; almost a romance, because of the ideal in it, in spite of its philosophy, which nowadays is not even lacking in drama.” [Es una biografia, como usted mismo lo Ilama; casi un romance, por lo que tiene de ideal, a pesar de su filosofia, que no falta hoy ni en los dramas.] (66)

THE WILES OF DISPUTATION This section examines the devices by which Alberdi’s argumentation is emplotted, and by which the refuted discourse is incorporated into the refuting one. His reading of Facundo in the third quillotana is in many ways an aggressive form of reappropriation of Sarmiento’s text designed to discredit its cognitive claims. Despite its hostile slant, it highlights a difficulty inherent in critical work, namely, how to weave one discourse into the other. In Barbara Johnson’s terms: The question of how to present to the reader a text too extensive to quote in its entirety has in fact long been one of the underlying problems of literary criticism. Since a shorter version of the text must somehow be produced, two solutions constantly recur: paraphrase and quotation. Although these tactics are seldom if ever used in isolation, the specific configuration of their combinations and permutations determines to a large extent the “plot” of the critical narrative to which they give rise."

As Alberdi reads Facundo, obsessively probing its—to him—totally mistaken conception of the unitarian party, and of the distribution of civilization and barbarism in Latin America, he often resorts to quotation in order to present both Sarmiento’s text and his own conclusions. He thus emplots his interpretation in a double weave, leading his reader through an intricate texture which is framed and controlled by his own designs. 77

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When he discusses the question of the caudillaje as a natural consequence of the colonial past and what he metonymically calls the desert—a shorthand for the negative influence of the environment—he introduces a long series of quotations whereby he presents significant portions of Chapters I, 2, and 3. It is interesting to observe how Alberdi culls from these three chapters passages which produce a coherent exposition of Sarmiento’s ideas while at the same time directing the discussion for purposes of his own. One could actually read Alberdi’s collage paying no attention to the typographical marks which acknowledge the absent portions and find an almost seamless text which can be read without the traces of omissions. And yet, while not doing violence to Sarmiento’s argument, Alberdi is performing a series of reductions which have the effect of underscoring the presentation of one of Facundo’s theses, namely that the geographic environment has conditioned the forms of human development and socialization in the plains. He omits anecdotes and examples, as well as the descriptions of the track finder, the path finder, and the gaucho outlaw in order to focus on what he calls “fa philosophical truth.” (57) Moreover, Alberdi reminds us of his controlling presence by not only framing Sarmiento’s discourse with his own, but also by inserting parenthetical commentaries which weaken the claims of Sarmiento’s presentation. Thus, after the comparison between the loneliness of the Argentine plains and the area between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates—couched in rather lofty, spiritual terms, because Sarmiento is taking himself very seriously here— Alberdi inserts the following destabilizing comment: (“‘we had better remember that at this time the author had never been either to the ‘Pampa’ or to the Asiatic plains”’) [(bueno es recordar que el autor no conocia entonces ni la “Pampa’’ ni la llanura asiatica)]. (54) In another case, he interrupts a passage in order to underscore the relevance of the point he is

leading up to with a “Let’s not forget that ...”’ [No olvidemos que... ], directed to an implicit reader who is guided along deliberately.” The framing devices deserve mention as well: Alberdi takes on a magnanimously objective and even laudatory voice as he goes about borrowing from Sarmiento’s text: “Mr. Sarmiento explains this politico-historical truth [alluding to the influence of the environment], which he ignores today, with such felicity of expression and meaning that he deserves to be quoted.” [El sefior Sarmiento explica esta verdad historico-politica, que él desconoce hoy, con un éxito de expresiOn y de sentido, que lo hacen digno de reproduccion textual.] (54) Likewise, at the end of the unusually long transcription from the first three chapters, he announces less convincingly: “There you have Mr. Sarmiento’s depiction of the land, man and life in normal circumstances in the Argentine Republic. I cannot answer for the 78

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accuracy of the judgements; but I recognize endless talent and a lot of truth in them.” (He ahi la pintura que el sefior Sarmiento hace del suelo, del hombre, de la vida, de la sociedad normal de la Repiblica Argentina. No respondo de la exactitud de las apreciaciones; pero reconozco que hay infinito talento y mucho de verdadero en ellas.] (57) Read together, both passages suggest that what is being privileged is the felicity of expression, at the expense of the cognitive claims. Their validity is frontally attacked through a rhetorical manoeuvre of counter argumentation.'® Having presented Sarmiento’s views, Alberdi proceeds to draw quite different conclusions from those envisaged by him, moving out of the field demarcated by the events the book deals with (the Revolution of Independence, the life of Facundo Quiroga, the Rosas dictatorship) and into the aftermath of the overthrow of Rosas. Alberdi uses Sarmiento’s theory of the environmental influence to advance the following conclusion: “That philosophy led directly to the adoption of tolerant, patient and moderate measures. . . .” [Esa filosofia conducia derecho a la adopci6n de una politica tolerante, paciente, moderada. . . .] (58) From this point on, he is free to jump out into the scene of the issues addressed not by Facundo, but by the polemic, namely, how to deal with Urquiza and with the question of national organization after the battle of Caseros. Alberdi wishes to condemn the policies of the old unitarian party, which believed that the caudillaje could be annihilated, not with the moderate, patient policies advocated above, but in a sudden, violent way: “The attempt was made to remedy the despotism of backwardness with that of violence: violence with violence” [se quiso remediar el despotismo del atraso con el despotismo de la violencia: la violencia con la violencia.] (§8) Having traced his opponent’s thinking in careful detail, Alberdi has carved in it his own opinions, adding to them the weight of a meticulous reading. Here we see the workings of interpretation and the points of articulation in which the freedom of reading is embedded: in this case they are located where space is made for diverging conclusions which, in turn, produce semantic dissonance in the text. There is another instance which illustrates Alberdi’s artful appropriation of Sarmiento’s book and which I will touch upon briefly. Once again, Alberdi is quoting from Facundo (reinforcing the authority of his reading), but this time the form of emplotting the quotations is more elaborate. Resorting to a complex syntactical orchestration of subordinate adjective clauses, he strings together short descriptive passages taken from the same first three chapters linked by his own conjunctive and subordinating elements. The accumulation is effective; it builds an anticipatory momentum which culminates in Alberdi’s formulation of a question which, while having the status of a veiled conclusion, has the added advantage of allowing 79

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a categorically negative answer from the man who has, inexorably, the last word. Here is a brief sample of this artful operation: “And, in fact, in those plains ‘which according to the philosophers prepared the way to despotism’; which as far as roads are concerned ‘will long be subject to the savage law of nature’; ‘whose extension gives life a certain Asiatic imprint,’

... did the party which was hostile to ‘caudillaje’ attempt to establish a government with some of the Asiatic qualities attributed to them? Not in the least.” [Y, en efecto, sobre esas Ilanuras, “que segutn los fildsofos preparaban las vias del despotismo”; que en materias de camino “recibiran por largo tiempo la ley de la naturaleza salvaje”; cuya “extension imprime a la vida cierta tintura asiatica,” .. . ¢Intent6 el partido hostil al “caudillaje’’ establecer un gobierno que tuviese algo de asiatico como el suelo de su aplicacion? Nada de eso.] (60) This final “not in the least” has its illocutionary effect reinforced by a preceding question which claims to stem from the very tenets of the book. What it denounces, in many ways, is the gap Alberdi is observing between a way of decoding national reality and the forms of political action which spring from it. In this particular instance, having quoted Sarmiento’s text, he is not disagreeing with its conceptual edifice as much as with its distance from the actions taken under its aegis.

While Alberdi manipulates the uses of quotation to disagree with the conclusions or the pragmatic implications derived from his opponent’s text, he turns to paraphrase and elliptical allusion when he categorically declares him to be wrong. In these instances, emphatic assertions immediately follow statements which invalidate Sarmiento’s claims: “You place the Middle Ages and the old Spanish regime in the ‘countryside,’ and the nineteenth century and the modern regime in the ‘cities.’ What we see teaches us that it is not so.” [Usted pone en los ‘““campos”’ la Edad Media y el antiguo régimen espanol, y en las “‘ciudades” el siglo XIX y el moderno régimen. La vista nos ensefia que no es asi.| (65) What follows is a thorough refutation of the polarity which underpins Facundo, and which is the basis for the deepest philosophical disagreement between Alberdi and Sarmiento. In a cogent discussion which will be taken up again in Facundo y su bidgrafo, Alberdi advances the first materialist explanation of the forces at work in nineteenth century Argentina. While not a reader of Marx or Hegel, he reached their thinking through Herder, Savigny, Lerminier, and Cousin. The materialist theories of Saint Simon and the economic writings of Adam Smith exerted a powerful influence on Alberdi’s thinking, and thanks to them he was able to propose an interpretive paradigm which was not bound to Sarmiento’s powerful formulation. In a process of conceptual accumulation, Alberdi piles up the arguments which set 80

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out to vindicate the country and its people from the standpoint of their contribution to the wars of independence and of what he calls “the new existence of this America.” (65) As he discusses these ideas, the refuted discourse is temporarily bracketed, pushed aside so as to be overcome by the refuting one. In the process, Alberdi succeeds in articulating a view of the continent which powerfully foreshadows Marti’s brilliant and programmatic “Nuestra América” of 1891, written when the relationship between the hegemonic countries and Latin America was altering the dichotomy civilization/barbarism and the values assigned to it. This is Alberdi’s 1853 version: “And common sense in South America is closer to immediate, throbbing reality than are the books sent to us by the Europe

of the nineteenth century, which will be the Spanish America of the twenty-first century. Thus, the Argentine gaucho, the landowner, the busi-

nessman, are ail better suited to practical politics than are our raw stu-

dents of Quinet and Michelet—masters known by all, except South America.” [Y el buen sentido en Sud América esta mas cerca de la realidad inmediata y palpitante, que de los libros que nos envia la Europa del siglo XIX, que sera el siglo XXI de Sud América. Asi el gaucho argentino, el

hacendado, el negociante, son mas aptos para la politica practica que nuestros alumnos crudos de Quinet y Michelet, maestros que todos conocen, menos Sud América.] (59) We hardly need to be reminded of the intertextual ring of Marti’s propositions: ““That is why the imported book has been defeated in America by natural man” [Por eso el libro importado ha sido vencido en América por el hombre natural], ““A decree by Hamil-

ton cannot stop the jostle of a plainsman’s horse” [Con un decreto de Hamilton no se le para la pechada al potro del Ilanero], or “the good leader in America is not the one who knows how to govern the German or the French, but the one who knows what elements his country is made up of.”’ [el buen gobernante en América no es el que sabe cOmo se gobierna el aleman o el francés, sino el que sabe con qué elementos esta hecho su pais.]'? Although in his Cartas quillotanas Alberdi is not developing these ideas as thoroughly as he does in Facundo y su bidgrafo, where he maps out a distinctly materialist account of the role of the countryside as representing civilization, “expressed by the production of its natural riches, which are the source of national wealth” [expresada por la produccion de su riqueza natural, en que la riqueza del pais consiste],”° it is within the frame provided by his attacks on Facundo that he launches his inverted version of the interpretive formula. No matter how meticulously critical of Sarmiento’s book Alberdi remains, he is always willing to grant Facundo a hegemonic standing in the studies of the country’s affairs and in Sarmiento’s oeuvre. And yet, as is 81

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clear by now, there is a certain degree of mauvaise foi in the relevance bestowed upon it. I referred earlier to the change he brings about between the context of production and that of its reception: by reading Facundo in 1853, Alberdi can make it say things against its author. Indeed, it is claimed to be a condemnation of Sarmiento and of “the errors of Argentine civilization as represented by the ‘unitarist party.’ ” (52) Wittingly or unwittingly, Alberdi falls prey to the contradictions of his own game: having praised the book for its ability to unmask the errors of the unitarios (a gesture which obviously implies letting the author’s intentions go by the wayside), he then finds himself condemning it as “the catechism of that false doctrine.” (66) Of course, rather than viewing it as a contradiction, we might attribute it to the rhythms of disputation, carefully regulated so as not to be overwhelmed by its perpetually negative thrust. For Alberdi metes out criticism in different guises—one of them is a disguise of the negative tucked into the folds of praise. The final effect reminds us of his

legal training, which allowed him to deal his blows with the modes of procedure of a court case. In many ways, Alberdi’s polemical reading of Facundo metonymically inscribes the trace of future readings, as it prefigures many of the controversies which have traversed it since. As part of a study of the book’s initial reception, it enacts and transcribes the workings of interpretation: it enacts them because, by dint of its very generic nature, it is writing which wants to transgress its own boundaries in order to reach the realm of doing; it transcribes them because, in order to do and to fight, Alberdi records his reading—the elusive act of analysis Barbara Johnson was interrogating above. Towards the end of his life, Alberdi gave away the main secret of his wiles: “In a way, Facundo is the most instructive of Argentine books, as long as one knows how to read and understand it. He who does

not understand it the opposite way to how the author expects it to be understood, does not understand Facundo at all.” [El Facundo es, en cierto modo, el mas instructivo de los libros argentinos, pero a condiciOn de saberlo leer y entenderlo. El que no lo entiende al revés de lo que el escritor pretende, no entiende el Facundo absolutamente.|?!

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a ——__—OCsE OUR _sFACUNDO’S TRAVELS) cundo is in a way a gloss on the elusive French phrase, proving Sarmiento’s determination to help ideas survive the ravages of tyranny during his exile in Chile. As has been seen, his text was meant to travel, to be read not only

back in Argentina, where it would contribute to the fight against the tyrant Rosas, but also in Europe and the United States, where it would sway public opinion in favor of his political cause. After all, is not this transnational reader implicit in the choice of a foreign language with which to slip

into the act of writing? The dynamic of appropriation set in motion by these displacements is charged with a deforming effect already at work in the act of cultural borrowing that Sarmiento himself performs, and that prefigures the fate of Facundo as it migrated. When he inscribed the phrase “On ne tue point les idées” on the rock on his way to Chile, attributing it to Fortoul, Sarmiento subjected it to a process of transformation typical of cultural annexations. Only in his case an error underscores the transformation: he got both the quotation and its author wrong. The closest one can get to the phrase is Diderot’s ““On ne tue pas de coups de fusil aux idées,” a maxim which he might have encountered in the Revue Encyclopédique, read by the members of his generation as a source of European culture. The phrase reached him ina characteristically mediated way, as the epigraph of an 1832 article written by Charles Didier entitled ‘“‘Les doctrines et les idées.”* This instance of creative misrepresentation characterizes the cultural practice this chapter will examine: the innovating, transforming, misrendering, mistranslating yet productive effects of cultural circulation and migration. This cultural practice can be traced first in Mary Peabody Mann’s 1868 translation of Facundo. The book that was

presented to North American and English readers is heavily marked by the need to bridge the hemispheric cultural gap and, hence, indicates the framing devices meant to overcome such a gap but which may actually moot the possibility of effectively overcoming it. The second one is Facun-

do’s first foreign review by Charles de Mazade in the Revue Des Deux Mondes—a reading which reveals the preconceptions which a foreign gaze brings to bear on the South American other. As Facundo was translated into French and English, it was exposed to equally telling forms of productive misreading as Diderot’s dictum was in Sarmiento’s hands. Reframed by a new context of reception, it was drawn out of its native cultural place, maimed by the removal of significant chap-

ters and then repackaged with the aid of presentational devices such as prefaces, footnotes, glossaries, and appendixes. Thus, it was made ready to occupy a new site in a different field of cultural and political discourses in post-Civil War America and in the France of Louis Philippe and Guizot,

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becoming in some ways a new cultural artifact and revealing in the process the intricate web of raw material factors and highly mediated textual ones which rendered the book to its foreign audiences.

In this context, a question to consider is how a strategic location is produced in order that a text like Facundo can become translated into the languages of power. In other words, how precisely does cultural capital circulate? What are some of the concrete factors engineering this circula-

tion? In the mid-nineteenth century, long before the so-called boom brought Latin American literature to the attention of foreign readers, this process entailed a very concrete kind of mediation: the author himself literally brought the book to the metropolis, often knocking on many doors and making the contacts which would lead to publication. This is particularly clear in the case of the early and partial French translation of 1846— a telling little story Sarmiento narrates in the account of his travels: 5 I bring the key to two doors in order to penetrate Paris: the official recommendation of the Chilean government and Facundo; I have faith in this book. So, I arrive in Paris and I try out the second key. Nothing! ... | wanted to tell every writer J ran into !io anco! but my book was in bad Spanish, and Spanish is an unknown language in Paris, where the wise men believe that it was only spoken in the days of Lope de Vega or Calderon; after that it degenerated into a dialect which is unmanageable for the expression of ideas. Therefore, I have to spend one hundred francs in order for an Orientalist to translate a part for me.® He translates it, and I give it to a friend who is to recommend it to the journals. Two months have gone by between translating and reading, and he says nothing to me. What’s happened to my book? I’m reading it. I get a bad feeling about this. I return later, I inquire about my manuscript and he tells me, “I find it... rather vague .. . there is novelty and interest, but... .”’ The truth is that he hadn’t read a word of it. Who reads what has been written by someone who is judged to be inferior to ourselves?’

The story does have a happy ending: a friend introduces him to the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, who eventually gets round to reading it, and when he does, his attitude toward Sarmiento undergoes a dramatic transformation— Facundo had opened the key to Paris after all, its author wants to suggest. In the larger scheme of things, I suspect the other key provided by the government of Chile played the instrumental role, since back in 1846 Sarmiento was an obscure figure, and the attention he received sprung from his being the official representative of a South American republic in search of educational programs. Some twenty years later, 86

TO sss>>oomoumum=_—CFACUNDO’S TRAVELS | when the English translation appeared, Sarmiento’s standing was much more prestigious, having occupied several government posts in Argentina and risen to prominence as a journalist. In fact, the appearance of the English translation coincided with Sarmiento’s candidacy to the presidency of Argentina, and it was clearly meant to contribute to its author’s prestige by making him known to English and North American readers, thus proving to his countrymen that he commanded the respect of foreign audiences. Here discourse and power intersect in the starkest terms. Since 1865 Sarmiento had been living in the U.S., as Minister Plenipotentiary from Argentina. Getting his book translated and published by Hurd and Houghton culminates his intense efforts to locate himself near the center of North American cultural life. As Minister Plenipotentiary, he directed his energies to the related enterprises of learning about the North American educational system and getting to know the cultural and political figures of the nation he admired. By the turn of the century the professionalization of the writer would lead to severing the ties between writing and political action; in the 1860's, Sarmiento still had reason to be confident that the forging of nations and of texts went hand in hand. While in the U.S., he founded a magazine called Revista de Ambas Américas |Magazine of Both Americas], designed to achieve what the Revue Encyclopedique had done for his generation, namely mediate between the dominant and the emerging cultures, helping the new ideas which had shown their effectiveness in the North travel to the South. The magazine was greatly valued and it received considerable support from different Spanish-American countries, including a subscription for two hundred copies from President Juarez of Mexico. It contained letters from American educators and it dealt with a matter of great concern in the U. S. at the time: the controversy over a national office of education.’ The magazine went through four numbers and it was interrupted by Sarmiento’s departure from the U. S. in 1868, on the eve of his election to the presidency. He also turned to the

social efficacy of biography: he wrote a Life of Lincoln in 1865, only a few months after the president’s murder. Manipulating the genre for the sake of its exemplary power, Sarmiento intended the book for the elementary schools of Argentina, where he strove to make the U.S. known, setting it up as an example to be emulated. In the same vein, in New York in 1865 he wrote a book entitled The Schools: Basis for the Prosperity and for the Republic in the United States. The title indicates the belief that there is a deep connection between the educational level of the people and the success of a political and economic system. The book owes a great debt to the thought of Horace Mann: it contains many of his ideas and a short biography of him as well. 87

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Sarmiento’s connection with Horace and Mary Mann played a key role in the transplantation of Facundo to the U. S. He had met them in 1847, during an earlier trip, when, having obtained a letter of introduction during his Atlantic crossing, Sarmiento travelled to West Newton and spent two days with the Manns. Mary’s role as a translator for Sarmiento may have begun then, for, by speaking French with him, she made communi-

cation possible. Horace Mann gave Sarmiento copies of his writings, speeches and reports, as well as many letters of introduction to prominent people.? The Manns and Sarmiento shared the belief that education was crucial for consolidating democratic institutions, and there is a striking parallel between the lives of these two founders of educational institu-

tions. What Horace Mann had sought to appropriate from the English educational system for his emerging nation was replicated in Sarmiento’s own feverish borrowings from the North American system. These dou-

blings extended to the textual field: while Sarmiento translated Mrs. Mann’s biography of her husband into Spanish, she in turn translated Sarmiento’s biography of Facundo Quiroga into English, in a friendly barter

of texts and status. This was a time for nation-building in both hemispheres: in the U.S., of course, the drive for it was partially spurred by the aftermath of the chaos and conflict of the Civil War; in Argentina the ini-

tiative was rooted in the expectation that Rosas’s era was drawing to its end.

When Sarmiento arrived in the U.S. the second time, in May, 1865, circumstances had changed a great deal: Rosas had been overthrown, and as the Argentine ambassador he was in a position to further the contacts made in 1847 in a productive way. Horace Mann had died in 1859; in a letter written to his widow very soon after his arrival, Sarmiento paid homage to his memory while reminding her of their acquaintance: ‘“‘Perhaps you will not remember me; but if an appreciation of Mr. Mann were helpful in gaining your friendship, let me assure you that no one has had a greater estimation of his character and service to humanity.” '° Later in that month he sent her a copy of Facundo (a book he had identified to his close friend Dalmacia Vélez Sarsfield as “‘my parrot and my cannon,” alluding to its power as a means of introduction), and by September he was asking her to undertake its translation into English: “Are you blessed with an abundance of spare time and goodwill to undertake the translation of Civilization and Barbarism? Were you disposed to do it, I would feel particularly proud to see on the title page of a book written by Mr. Sarmiento the name of Mrs. Mary Mann.” " She agreed to do it “as a work of love,” as she was to tell Longfellow in a letter of 1868, in which she requested his help with two passages, assuring him that the English version “will 88

oo, OFACUNDO’S TRAVELS). prove interesting and give the public at least a good geography and history lesson.” '* Having spent some time in Cuba with her sister Sophia in 183 3,

Mrs. Mann knew enough Spanish to undertake the project, and it is not hard to find reasons for her interest in it. Sarmiento was keeping her husband’s memory and interests alive way beyond the confines of the state of Massachusetts, but he also was a loyal friend to her, as is proven by a correspondence of almost four hundred letters exchanged between them until the year of her death, in 1887. Moreover, having been actively involved, with her sister Elizabeth, in teaching before she had even met Horace Mann, her concern with Sarmiento’s initiatives was part of her lifelong interest in education.!?

Mary Mann’s translation bears many traces of the cultural migration which she put into effect. First of all, a title change was in order, since the name Facundo lacked the emblematic value easily recognized by Argentine readers. So, instead of Facundo o civilizacion y barbarie, the English version reads Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants, or Civilization and Barbarism. As a presentational device, a title suggests

thematic possibilities: if the choice of a name (Facundo) would lead a reader to expect the parameters of biographical writing, the new title displaces the individual and privileges the gaze of an outside observer intent on the spectacle of tyrant-ridden Argentina. Through this grid it was possible to filter the chaotic scenes of tyranny and gaucho outlaws into the consciousness of the Northern readers. I would like to suggest that this title change may lead to a reexamination of the work, since it is possible to read the first few chapters under the aegis of the English title and confirm that it does work as a travel book, which, in turn, alludes to the crisscrossings and round-trips that can be mapped out in the routes of cultural circulation. Recent scholarship has made interesting claims about the influence on Latin American writing of the discourse produced by European scientific travelers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as providing

a paradigm with which to apprehend the New World. Their power as master narratives was such that they have left significant traces in Facundo itself, a point which has been elegantly argued by Roberto Gonzalez Ech-

evarria.'* Sarmiento’s self-legitimating gestures result in the epigraphs from such travelers as Alexander von Humboldt or Captain Francis Bond Head, but their discourse is also embedded in deeper, less explicit ways. What Foucault would call the exteriority of this will to knowledge is pow-

erfully at work in the protocols of reading through which Facundo was assimilated in the metropolitan countries. What Facundo and other foundational Latin American texts, such as da Cunha’s Os Sertoes (1902) or Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1880), had appropriated was part and parcel 89

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of the European enterprise of political expansion which had surged since

the end of the eighteenth century. Like Napoleon’s emblematic trip to Egypt accompanied by dozens of savants who were to produce the twentythree enormous volumes of the Description de l’Egypte between 1809 and 1828, Western domination rests on descriptive taxonomies, on accounts of territories, statistics, landscape description, and other discursive forms which domesticated the planet and made it recognizable. The power of the resulting discourse is such that when a Latin American takes up his pen in the nineteenth century in order to take stock of his own world, he turns to the authority of the travelers’ master code. Sarmiento illustrates this point when, in the first three chapters, he needs to present the “Physical Aspect of the Argentine Republic, and the Forms of Character, Habits and Ideas Induced by It.” Here he is faced with providing a description of the plains or pampas which he has never visited, for his travels had been limited by

his very scarce means and by the constraints of exile. So he turned to Humboldt’s “‘On Steppes and Deserts” for a description—once again, as in the case of the phrase he erroneously quoted as Fortoul’s, attributing it to the wrong author.'5 The European traveler’s discourse presides over Chapter 1 both in its descriptions and in its epigraph, which reads with an appropriately grandiose tone: “The extent of the pampas is so prodigious

that they are bounded on the north by groves of palm trees and on the south by eternal snows.” '¢

Sarmiento also turns to Orientalism to render familiar the South American other. One is indeed struck both by the insistence with which Orientalism is deployed as a system of comparison—particularly in the early chapters of Facundo—and, concomitantly, by the formidable structures of cultural domination which were produced by the West. In his attempt to translate the chaos of the Argentine Republic in the days of the tyrants to his metropolitan audience, Sarmiento affiliates himself with the forms of representation of the Orient generally associated with Napoleon’s project to dominate Egypt, and hence with French colonial ambi-

tions in general.'? The genealogy of such phrases as “the Babylon of America,” “American Bedouins,” or of many comparisons such as “like the chief of an Asiatic caravan” is revealed in several of the chapter epigraphs and in the main body of the text itself. Sarmiento’s sources were, borrowing Edward Said’s phrase, “the textual children of the Napoleonic expedition.” One example will show how the transfer is engineered. In Chapter 1 he makes the outlandish claim that “there is something in the wilds of the Argentine territory which brings to mind the wilds of Asia; the imagination discovers a likeness between the pampa and the plains

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TTT soomnmmnm—™_ FACUNDO’S TRAVELS lying between the Euphrates and the Tigris.” '8 Never having stepped beyond the borders of Argentina and Chile, Sarmiento may have been re-

sorting to a textually stimulated imagination, but we may ask whose imagination would operate the leap between the Mesopotamian plains and the Argentine pampas. The answer lies in a quotation preceding this passage: the leap needs the springboard provided by a text from Volney in which the rising moon is described at the ruins on the Euphrates river: “The full moon in the East rose on a bluish background on the Euphrates River plains.” [La pleine lune a |’Orient s’élevait sur un fond bleuatre aux plaines rives de l’Euphrate.] The Comte de Volney was a French traveler whose Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie of 1787 was one of Napoleon’s textbooks during the Egyptian conquest—his hostility to Islam, couched in the most objective terms, had the advantage of validating French colonial ambitions. Woven into Sarmiento’s text, how could it not color it with its own ideological strands? !° These various traces of the ruling discourse betray the imprint of European supremacy and its effect on the migration of texts. They also suggest that the transplantation of Facundo to the cultural soils of the northern hemisphere was considerably facilitated by an easily recognizable archive of allusions and references. Thanks to these cultural boomerangs Facundo crossed boundaries with ease, eliciting the interpretive paradigms of a travel book. The process was furthered by the text’s main thesis, namely, that European civilization and all its trappings were to abolish the backwardness of native barbarism; but the elaboration of this argument in the terms which a foreign reader would find congenial was indispensable. It would seem that even as it reads about the other, the discourse of domination is doomed to keep reading itself, to find its own image reflected in the new. Or is that the secret of its success? Not in every instance, however, is the mediation so felicitous. Mary Mann’s attempt to bridge the gap between Facundo’s world and its foreign audience suffers from the difficulties entailed in easing the puzzlement of North American readers encountering the narration of the political chaos following the wars of Independence. The laborious preface with which she

presents her translation eloquently reveals the problematic nature of bringing one culture to the attention of another. It is rife with the complications of contextualizing the events surrounding Facundo Quiroga’s ac-

tions and their connection with the implicit protagonist of the book— Juan Manuel de Rosas. The strategies that Mrs. Mann deploys for supplementing the information in Facundo reveal an understandable lack of objectivity regarding the events—after all, as the author’s friend and the one

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who had toiled through the translation she wants the book’s theses to be well received. She also reveals a sometimes alarming lack of accuracy and of narrative competence. The correspondence between Mrs. Mann and Sarmiento shows her avidly seeking information, and he wrote several letters providing sketchy answers to her questions, but the opacity of the material to foreign eyes presented a considerable challenge.” It is telling that while Sarmiento chose to begin the book with the description of the land and its effect on “man,” the translator’s demarcation of a significant point of departure is of an entirely different epistemological nature. Her preface rewrites or supplements Sarmiento’s own beginning, going all the way back to the sixteenth-century foundation of Buenos Aires, as if her readers could not make sense of the text unless they bracketed the land and witnessed the coming of the Europeans on the scene, thus inverting the direction of fit that Sarmiento suggests. She botches her accounts of the difficulties in settling the area of Buenos Aires, of establishing the Spanish viceroyalties, of the nineteenth-century Independence movements, of the early attempts at forging political order and their failures, of Quiroga’s and Rosas’s exploits, and, going beyond 1835 (when the book ends), she describes Rosas’s demise and the ensuing problems. Her point of closure, not surprisingly, coincides with the very reason for the publication of the book in the U.S.—Sarmiento’s presidential candidacy. The reader of her painstaking yet benighted efforts at summarizing an immensely complex period of almost four centuries is alarmed at the spectacle of chaos which besieges her. At times she is led astray by linguistic estrangement, getting names completely wrong, often making an area

or an agent unidentifiable. There are instances of narrative ineptness, as the following passage illustrates: “The Unitario forces, who, with their leaders, had emigrated from Buenos Aires, occupied the Province of Cérdoba, under the orders of General Paz, who was caught by a lasso at the head of his army, and thus made prisoner.”?! Notice how we simultaneously read about the successful occupation of Cordoba by Paz and his demise after being imprisoned, as if in one fell swoop she collapsed the pinnacle of his success and the depth of his defeat without however relinquishing the expendable detail about the lasso with which he was caught. Knowledge gaps produce the impression that historical change comes

about without rhyme or reason: Mrs. Mann lacks a master code with which to emplot her account because she is overwhelmed by the unfamillar, tumultuous disarray to be contended with. Her account of the movements of Independence from Spain furnish another example of how problematic it is to construct a narrative representation without the knowledge

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—_ = FACUNDO’S TRAVELS that would permit a plausible explanation. Mrs. Mann leaves out the crucial role of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and proposes the following sequence of events: “At this period arose two rival parties, the European

and the American. Ferdinand VII was at that time dethroned; and this trouble in Spain, added to the ideas suggested by the French Revolution, increased the difficulties in South America. The first of January, 1809, a conspiracy, supported by the Europeans, presented themselves in the public square of Buenos Ayres and demanded the deposition of the viceroy and the establishment of a governmental junta.” 2? The identification of the rival parties as European and American is misleading, since they did

not divide along such neat lines, and, in fact, were fractured by many other factors. The fall of Ferdinand VII seems to be the product of sheer chance; the date of the establishment of the junta, which is one of the two main historical events celebrated by the Argentine “invention of tradition” (May 25, 1810) is wrong. There are times when Mrs. Mann’s position as an outsider gives itself away in the recognition of the strangeness of the land and its inhabitants, as when she describes the gauchos as “a peculiar race of men that is seen in the pampas.” This flawed preface stands in place of Sarmiento’s own preface to the first edition, which had provided the reader with an interpretive paradigm needed to make sense of the book, explaining his aims and his reasons for choosing Facundo Quiroga to explain the chaos raging during Rosas’s dictatorship. He had left it out of the third edition on which the translation is based, and one reason that such an effective presentational device was not put to any use was set down in a letter Sarmiento wrote to Mrs. Mann, in which he explained that he did not have the introduction with him in the U.S. It seems that Mrs. Mann was weighed down by cultural estrangement, by the effort of conceptualizing in the raw, without the aid supplied by the systems of thought which Sarmiento skillfully adapted from his readings in the hegemonic culture. Her venture into historical discourse

further complicates things, for her data is alternately too full and too sparse: she struggles to tell the whole story since the Spanish conquest without managing to produce a meaningful representation hinged on cause and effect. What she lacked in narrative felicity, though, she made up for in her efforts to reassure the reader by promoting both the myth of the author, on the one hand, and the prestige of the U.S. and its institutions on the other. The preface takes as its point of departure not the work but “Colonel” Sarmiento as the founding subject who is to privilege it with the assurances of a plenitude of meaning. Reading Facundo is valorized by attributing it to the man who has been carried “to the proudest

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position before his country which any man since San Martin, the hero of its independence, . . . has ever occupied.” He is erected as the source of signification capable of reordering the chaotic historical narrative and as the visionary agent of history who will save his country, as she claims in her closing words—‘“‘[his countrymen’s] wild cry of agony now summons him to their aid.” 2* So powerful a validating force warrants the addition of selections from Recuerdos de provincia at the end of Facundo. The result is that the book’s identity is modified and, in spite of what the title announces, it contains many pages about Sarmiento himself, in a combination of passages taken from his autobiography and various other texts which, gathered together, provide a detailed account of the author’s many achievements. In a complementary gesture which reveals an equally flexible conception of the work, the last two chapters of Facundo are omitted. Faced with the possibility of becoming president, Sarmiento removed the programmatic portions in which he had sketched out his project of national organization after the demise of Rosas. For who would want to be held so clearly accountable by a vision articulated years earlier? The book was thus repackaged to attain maximum efficacy in the quest for attention and power. Further reassuring the North American reader was Mrs. Mann’s insistence that Sarmiento deeply admired U.S. institutions and that he intended to persuade Argentina’s “most advanced men” to model their government “upon that of the U.S., which is their prototype, and to which they now look, rather than Europe, for light and knowledge.” > Even in its most confusing moments, Mrs. Mann’s framing of the text allowed it to win the approval of the audience at which it was aimed.”* This repackaging underscores the productive effects of reception, for the English version is teeming with gestures which appeal to its intended readers, and which, if judged by an unsigned review that appeared in the New Englander in October of 1868, had the desired effect. Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants was construed as confirming the success of the North American system of government—a success, in fact, which “is modifying the character of other nationalities as a mere Utopia never could do.” 2’ The very point of the review is to show the growing ascendancy of the American model in a hemispheric context. While the reviewer does give an account of the early chapters of Facundo, mapping out the forces involved in the struggle between civilization and barbarism, and quoting from Sarmiento’s colorful descriptions of the different kinds of gauchos in the early chapters of the book, he avers at the outset that his interest in the book is framed by the desire to emphasize the exemplary status of his own

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TT manrr™_s FA CUNDD O'S TRAVELS nation: “But it is our purpose here . . . to show something of the kind of life led by an unimportant state of South America in its attempt to realize within its territory the ideas of republican government set in motion by the success of the United States .. .”2 In an America emerging from the bloody struggle of its own Civil War and the murder of President Lincoln, Facundo could be read as the inverted image of “the glory, intelligence, and strength of this republic,” 2° but it also acted as a textual space in which the tensions within the context of reception could be inscribed. A case in point is The Nation’s review, which reflects the ideological rift between North and South that outlasted the Civil War. The reviewer turns to Facundo to further the condemnation of the recently defeated South and to suggest that the horrors of Rosas’s regime, so vividly described by Sarmiento, bear a strong resemblance to the seceding states: ““We have been struck, in reading these pages, with nothing more than with the close resemblance of the gauchos, as a class,

to Southern slaveholders as a class. The latter, to be sure, were purely agricultural, the former cattle-raisers only—yet almost equally scattered, equally idle and averse to profitable exertion, equally lawless.” >° Sarmiento’s description of gaucho mores and of Rosas’s regime is compared to “Mrs. Stowe’s account of Legree’s plantation”; the “‘perversion of language which still lingers in the mouths of the Democracy” is mirrored in the public discourse induced by Rosas’s confederacy. The parallel is nei-

ther borne out by Sarmiento’s book nor by the plantation-determined structures of Southern society: it bespeaks what might be described as “the

needs of interpretation”: in its English version of 1868, then, Facundo helped to reinforce the utter failure of the Southern enterprise. Thus, the overall effect of reading it was to bolster America’s sense of nationhood by

setting it off against the upheaval which still held many of the South American republics in its grip. The spectacle of barbarism reinforced the experience of civilization which the mid-nineteenth-century American public was seeking to solidify. After all, there is a rather cathartic effect to be gained by turning to the other for that which one is trying to exorcise at home.3! Facundo’s migration to the metropolitan culture in the nineteenth century is suggestive of the processes through which one culture constructs representations of the other, and its reception maps out some of them. Here again, the New Englander review provides revealing proof: ‘|. . mor can it be without advantage to us to see ourselves reflected in this mirror, and to get some oblique light cast upon our American civil liberty from the image set up on those South American plains.” >? Such a reading is bound to respond more to the culture that produces it than to

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its putative object. The image in the mirror will be a distorted one: the South American other can only provide a vision of the deformation (or malformation) of political institutions which will act as a cautionary tale.

THE TRICKS OF PRAISE: FACUNDO IN FRANCE The strategies of appropriation had a much harsher edge when Facundo travelled to France, where interpretation as an exercise in power and authority was exacerbated in telling ways. Sarmiento was convinced that the first foreign review, which he took such pains to obtain, would assure the book’s standing. Proof of his satisfaction with this review is that he published it in the second Spanish edition of 1851, as if to certify European approval. A closer reading of Charles de Mazade’s 1846 piece in the Revue des Deux Mondes reveals that while superficially praising Sarmiento for his work (seen as “‘one of the rare testimonies which come to us of the intellectual life in South America’’>3), it is one of the harshest and most damning documents produced by the discourse of European supremacy about Latin America. This text needs to be read as the intersection of the political and cultural forces which provided a context for Facundo’s reception in France. The site it occupied had as much to do with the problems attached to Rosas’s foreign policy as with some of the debates of the July monarchy of Louis Philippe; their conjunction produced its conditions of existence. In the long history of European intervention in the River Plate region there were several blockades of the harbors of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. When Sarmiento set out for Europe in 1846, both France and England were embarked in a joint blockade of the Buenos Aires harbor. The reasons are too complex to go into but derive from Rosas’s interference in English and French commercial interests by controlling customs duties and the access to key harbors. For Rosas’s Argentine political enemies (like Sarmiento), foreign intervention was most desirable in this case, because it would help bring about his demise. Imagine their disappointment, then, when in 1846, Lord Palmerston, succeeding Lord Aberdeen to the Foreign Office, declared the blockade illegal (he was keenly aware of its

detrimental effects on commerce) and persuaded Guizot, head of the French government, to suspend their participation in it as well.*4 Sarmien-

to saw his arrival in Paris (in May, 1846) as one very important opportunity for exerting pressure in favor of the blockade before it was altogether dismantled. Meetings with the French Admiral Mackau and even with Guizot himself produced disappointing results. So Sarmiento turned 96

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to the head of the opposition, Thiers, who embraced his cause at the parliamentary debates for obviously strategic reasons. His speech stridently evoked French colonial ambitions in the area and he called Montevideo

(the Uruguayan city which would benefit from the blockade) “a true French colony” which should not be abandoned by France. Charles de Mazade’s review rests on Thiers’s claims and reproduces their logic while elaborating a compelling case for the need to ‘“‘defend the cause of civilization.” Thus Facundo was located in the French political arena in a way

which was only apparently congruent with its larger conceptual argument. For even if Sarmiento decried the barbarism of Facundo Quiroga, Juan Manuel de Rosas and of the gauchos who supported them, he did not make the case for colonialism in the brutally unequivocal way in which de Mazade phrased it. Here we see the dangers of interpretation: by evoking Sarmiento’s polarity (civilization versus barbarism), it was possible to reach the conclusion that European civilization surely had to obliterate South American barbarism by concretely occupying it and submitting it to French rule. De Mazade’s strategy of persuasion is grounded in the condemnation of américanisme. The shift from barbarism to americanism brings about a significant change in geographic specificity: now the nefarious qualities

of barbarism are extended to cover what he calls “les Républiques du Sud,” as though the entire South American continent became subsumed in it. Sarmiento himself deploys the term “americanismo” ironically in the final chapters of Facundo to mimic Rosas’s nationalistic rhetoric, but de Mazade elides Sarmiento’s parodic slant and appropriates the term to degrade the whole of South America. So he entitles his review “De I’ Américanisme et des Républiques du Sud” and totally ignores Sarmiento’s book during all of the first portion, focusing instead on what he describes as the

“moral infirmity of these new populations” and the “sort of savage infancy of the indigenous races” which, further degraded by Spanish colonization have produced “‘the veritable plague of these young countries, the chronic disease against which it is necessary to fight.” 35 There is one con-

sequence of this barbarism which this text is most concerned with—one which is barely touched on by Sarmiento in Facundo—and it is the way in which foreigners are treated in these republics. Much of the review is an impassioned defense of what de Mazade calls “the rights of foreigners” in such countries as Nicaragua, Mexico, Chile, Paraguay, and, of course, Argentina. The fact that one of the main reasons for the French blockade had been precisely the issue of the benefits extended to Frenchmen living in the River Plate area indicates how Facundo is used to drive a political argument home. This becomes more dramatically clear in the conclusions 97

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drawn at the end of the review. Having paraphrased, quoted, or summarized Sarmiento’s account of the geographic and human forces that shape the struggle between civilization and barbarism, he appeals to it as uncontestable evidence of the need literally to conquer these barbarous republics: “By forcing the European powers to use weapons against it [the ‘brutal and blind patriotism’ of the Rosas era], it has thrown light on a fact which sums up the relationship between the two worlds, and it is that Europe is fatally pushed to make the material conquest of America, if she does not peacefully achieve its moral conquest.” >* Thus, in 1846, de Mazade espouses the rhetoric of European imperialism to legitimate its ventures, which all set out, as he puts it, “to transform the world.” He presents the blockade of Buenos Aires as part of the overall enterprise which led England to North America and to India and “the genius of France” to Africa: “They are all the same symptoms, the same efforts on the part of the conquering civilization.” There is a somewhat poignant irony in a Latin American text being the palimpsest upon which is inscribed the discourse of its own domination. And while Sarmiento alluded to this review with great pride—it was, after all, the legitimating agerit from the metropolis—de Mazade considered the book a mere “‘petit livre” with the dubious honor of being “‘one of the rare testimonies of the South American intellectual life which reach us,” bearing with it “the savage perfume of the poetic flowers of the pampa.”’ 38

Nevertheless, the wiles of misreading are such that this review ended up contributing to the canonization of Facundo: what mattered back in South America was that the celebrated Revue des Deux Mondes had considered the book worthy of its attention. Sarmiento in turn may have performed his own appropriative sleight of hand by having the review published with the second edition, confident that the mere fact of its existence far outweighed the negative thrust of its comments on South America. It had the designed effect: what it had to say, with the exception of a few emblematic passages which have been quoted many times—hardly mattered. Like Facundo, the review also travelled in fragments: it was not read in its entirety. This might be one of the final ironies of the trip back home: the foreign review was in a way stripped of its political agenda and made into a mere gesture of approval. Of course, this is a minor triumph in the larger scheme of historical events, but it suggests other possible strategies of oblique resistance which might be put to work in the avatars of cultural circulation. Borrowing, transforming, reading, or misreading, the strong and the weak are playing all the tricks through which self and other engage In conversation.

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THE NATION CONSOLIDATED The 1880's and the Canonization of Facundo ——

I. most of Latin America, the 1880’s were a time for modernization and nation building. In Argentina, material circumstances were propitious for the imposition of a centrally sustained high culture which appeared as the natural repository of political legitimacy, and which helped construct the field of meanings and symbols associated with national life. The liberal nation conceived by the Generation of 1837 was finally in place in the 1880’s. The Generation of 1880 set out to fulfill the prophecies that dated back to the Revolution of 1810, as they actualized the mandate to construct a nation-state. They are the ones who forged a national ideology that, despite considerable transformations, continues to be Argentina’s self-image as a modern nation. This material and conceptual configuration bolstered Facundo’s hegemony as a Janus-faced text which contained both a diagnosis of the ills to be avoided (such as the unruly rural forces, refractory to progress) and a prophecy being fulfilled as the land and its institutions were modernized. Facundo’s strategic location in the center of a complex web of factors accounts for its remarkable affiliation with the achievements of this generation. Indeed, one is struck by the numerous points of convergence between text and world: Facundo lends itself admirably to being read as a blueprint for modernization. Hence it is in the 1880’s that the controversies surrounding the text are, if not silenced, at least muffled sufficiently to allow for its canonization. One obviously powerful reason for its canonization is Sarmiento’s rise to the presidency in 1868. As Chapter 1 indicated, Sarmiento showed his awareness of the crucial relationship between writing and power early in his career, always using it to his advantage. Although he had written sev99

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eral other books by 1868, he looked upon Facundo as validating his claims to political office, and it is not by chance that he brought out a third edition in 1868, in New York, the first English edition in the same year, and the fourth Spanish one in Hachette in 1874, the year his presidency

ended. The contents of the book depended on the circumstances of its publication: the 1868 edition was stripped of the final programmatic chapter (“Presente y porvenir”), perhaps because at the beginning of his presidency Sarmiento did not want to be held down by old programs. The fourth edition, published the year his term ended, does have the missing chapter, which might then be construed to be proof of Sarmiento’s strength of purpose and vision.' His presidency was riddled with enormous problems such as cholera and yellow fever epidemics, the War with Paraguay, ongoing conflicts with powerful caudillos like Lopez Jordan and the Taboadas, the resurgence of the Indian resistance led by the pow-

erful caciqgue Calfuncura, frontier confrontations with Chile, and the pressing question of national poverty. Nevertheless, Sarmiento has gone down as a progressive president thanks to his achievements in education, to the foundation of national institutions, to important pieces of legislation, and to major improvements in the areas of public health, public works—most particularly, railroad construction—and land development.” At the close of his term, in 1874, as Roberto Cortés Conde put it,

“economic growth placed Argentina among those nations having the highest per capita income in the world.” > Despite the conflicts, then, there was no denying that the modernizing, “‘civilizing” injunctions of Facundo were the driving force behind this presidency. As only the second president

of a united Argentina which had been torn by the conflicts between Buenos Aires and the Confederation in the post-Caseros era, Sarmiento did a lot to strengthen a centralized state and lay the foundations for the cultural and national enterprise of the 1880's. Perhaps no effort bore more bountiful fruit than the educational one, for the production of a standardized, homogeneous, and centrally sustained high culture is a crucial preliminary step in the way of solidifying national legitimacy.* The foundation of schools, teacher-training institutions, public libraries, together with the gathering of teaching materials and equipment, helped pave the way for the constitution of modern Argentina, acting as a central, unifying force with which to overcome the local fragmentation of the caudillo days. Ironically enough, it was necessary for Sarmiento to move away from the seat of political power for his achievements to be hailed and for his writings to be canonized. For the prestige of the first magistrate did little to silence the unrelenting opposition voiced by Congress and the press— much of it actually coming from his former friend and political ally, Bar100

—_——————- THE NATION CONSOLIDATED —————— tolome Mitre. Sarmiento had to step down from the fray of public debate for his figure to be turned into a national symbol. Even after his presidency ended he had to face severe disappointments in his public ventures: several of his candidacies to office were defeated, and he was forced to resign from El Nacional, the paper in which he continued to voice his opinions,

because its owner and publisher objected to his opposition to Juarez Celman’s presidential candidacy. But when he moved away from the central scene of national politics,

things began to change. In 1884, on his way back from trips to Uruguay and Chile, passing through Mendoza and San Juan, Sarmiento was greeted by the magnificent ovations which are reserved for national heroes. In his native province, the schoolteachers had prepared two arches of triumph, with their pupils lining the streets and crowds of enthusiasts cheering him.’ In 1885, Congress passed, and President Roca signed into law, the publication of his Complete Works, to be undertaken by Luis Montt. An article in El Nacional called Facundo “el Quijote de América.”’* A group of students acclaimed him in the festivities for his seventyseventh birthday. As his health deteriorated and his doctors suggested that

he spend his winters in the warmer climate of Paraguay, reports of his failing health were telegraphed to President Juarez Celman, and followed with interest in the press. Upon his death, Sarmiento’s figure was monumentalized. Newspapers in every corner of the Republic, from Salta to obscure provincial towns like Mercedes and Carmen de Patagones reported the news of his death, and included lengthy, laudatory biographical essays. The eulogies were unstinting in their praise of the man and his books: Sarmiento was now the object of national worship. Salta’s El Diario Popular, for example described him as “‘the eminent statesman, the first educator, the noblest apostle of civilization, the patriot whose productive and exemplary life fills the history of two generations” [el hombre de estado eminente, el primer educacionista, el mas noble apostol de la civilizacion, el patriota que llena la historia de dos generaciones con su vida fecunda y ejemplar].’ Montevideo’s La Razon had a revealing piece in which praise for Facundo was folded into the tribute to its author: “Many books written in America are more true, far more complete and erudite than Facundo, but none has a higher genius, more colorful phrases, nor a more vigorously developed

central idea governing the work.” [Muchos libros se han escrito en América mas veridicos, inmensamente mas completos y eruditos que el Facundo, pero ninguno con mas elevaci6n de genio, con mas colorido de frase ni en que mas vigorosamente se desenvuelva la idea fundamental que domina la obra.]® The reception given to his remains had the trappings of IOl

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national worship: it was, as one newspaper put it, “an imposing reception.” As soon as the news of his death in Asuncion was received in Buenos

Aires, the Ministry of War sent a boat up the Parana River to bring his body back to Argentina. At his arrival, he was greeted at the harbor by a procession of delegates from different institutions, by speeches given by Minister of Education Eduardo Wilde and by Carlos Pellegrini as Senate representative. Newspapers show vast numbers of carriages awaiting at the docks, as well as streets decorated with signs of mourning and lined with crowds. Even Paul Groussac, whom Sylvia Molloy has deftly described as “the acerbic French critic turned self-appointed mentor of the Argentine intelligentsia,” ° gave a speech in which he spoke in the highest terms of the man and his masterpiece, Civilizacion y barbarie. El Nacional seemed to be aptly summing up the occasion by entitling its article “Sarmiento’s Apotheosis” [La apoteosis de Sarmiento]. The defeats of his old age, the struggles of his presidency, the rivalries which had been at the root of many of the controversies he was associated with, were all bracketed if not dispelled at this time of hero-worship. This acclaim was the result of a complex system of linkages between power, knowledge, institutions, intellectuals, population changes, and the state, as they intersected at the end of the nineteenth century in Argentina. The authority granted to the man and his writings was not a mere vagary sprung from the tears of loss; it involved the concurrence of ideological programs between the author and the generation of readers who canonized him in the 1880's as they seemed to be enacting the protocols of civilization described in Facundo. The consolidation of a hegemonic ideology which took place at this time owes a lot to Facundo; the analysis that follows attempts to trace the points of convergence which led to the preferential status accorded to it. The hegemonic standing of the Generation of 1880 is bound up with the financial and political power of a land-holding bourgeoisie that was imbued in ideas of progress, civilization, and the supremacy of the West. Focused on the port city of Buenos Aires, they had what Noé Jitrik has dubbed a “port mentality,” with their eyes on what lay beyond the shores

of the Southern Hemisphere, in the advanced societies of the North.’ Theirs was the usual predicament of the postcolonial society, attempting to meet the dominant standards of the cosmopolitan powers, while coming to terms with the inadequacy of their own. Positivism was the philosophical matrix which articulated their driving force—the call for progress. Here Facundo, as a prepositivist text, provided a useful bridge with the Spencerian ideas which were to hold such sway in the Latin American intellectual scene. Sarmiento himself was to lay claims to a Spencerian To2z

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turn of mind in the latter part of his life, stating in his usually assertive way, “I get along with Spencer, because we follow the same road” [Con Spencer me entiendo, porque andamos por el mismo camino].'! Facundo’s anti-Hispanic thrust was congenial with a philosophical trend which went to France and England for its roots. In France, of course, it followed a line

linking Saint-Simon and Comte, whose motto of “Order and Progress” resonated deeply with the liberal '? oligarchy emerging in Argentina in the eighties. In England, Herbert Spencer’s progressive evolutionism, which turns progress into a universal law, guaranteed the rule of civilization over the atavisms of barbarism. The bourgeoisie’s sense of mission furthered the implantation of European models of modernization and put into practice the motto coined by Alberdi, “To govern is to populate” [Gobernar es

poblar], so powerfully elaborated in the initial and final chapters of Facundo. While measures designed to encourage immigration were passed during Sarmiento’s presidency, it was really in the 80’s that they bore fruit:

1889, the record year, yielded 200,000 immigrants (as opposed to the decade 1850-1860, with a total of 5,000).!3 Although this increase in immigration was to present future problems, in its initial phase it was regarded as part of a welcome sign of population growth and development which was accompanied by foreign investment and significant exports. The economy showed impressive figures: in 1869, imports and exports totalled 37 million pesos oro; in 1880, 104; and in 1889, 250.'* The success in attracting foreign investment made modernization projects possible. Most of them were undertaken with funds raised by British compa-

nies, particularly Baring Brothers, which played an important role in railroad construction. The railroad—that powerful sign of progress that so deeply captivated the nineteenth century Latin American imagination—was seen as the solution to the lack of communications and sociability decried by Sarmiento in Facundo. The national government promoted a veritable fever of railroad building: from 1887 to 1889 alone, sixty-seven national concessions for railroad building were approved." Since the lowering of transport costs was one of the preconditions for the development of an export economy, the extension of the railroad tracks was seen as key to the nation’s future. Further, as miles and miles of land were incorporated into the national borders after the Campania del Desierto, the railroad helped stake out the claim to the new territories. A case

in point is the Southern Railroad, which in the decade of 1880 added a total of 725 miles of track to fill in the zone which had been taken from the Indians.'* The “railroad fever” reached such proportions in Argentina that by the early 1890’s over 13,000 km of tracks had been set down— quite an exceptional number even by metropolitan standards.’ Its conse103

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quences were manifold; among them was the nation’s growing dependency on foreign capital, the decline of the interior’s craft-based industry, and the increasing centralization of the economy on Buenos Aires, the hub of the railroad system. It was in 1880 that the prolonged debate over the capital city drew to

a close, and Buenos Aires became the seat of the federal authorities. Without going into the debate itself, which has been amply covered by the

literature on the period, it is useful to consider the implications of the privileging of urban space which accompanied capitalization. The centralization of the state, which was previously mentioned, was furthered by having the business of government conducted in the powerful port city,

which, in turn became the object of beautification projects and public works initiatives. In the old debate between the country and the city, a new relationship of the state to urban space was being worked out, further privileging the city. The Buenos Aires of the 1880’s was the elegant city planned by Intendente Torcuato de Alvear, whose vision of space was borrowed from Haussmann’s Paris. Gas lighting, imposing public buildings, trolley cars, and other trademarks of modernization evoked the Paris of the Second Empire as it has been brilliantly described by Walter Benjamin.

The haute bourgeoisie whose mansions flaunted valuable objects purchased in Europe, turned its back on the country from which its wealth emanated. In a concomitant gesture, the labor of the immigrant was valued above that of the gaucho, whose unwillingness to work had been decried in Facundo.

In its urge to bring about national consolidation, the Generation of 1880 produced many pieces of legislation which shaped the civil society they willed into place. Beholden to the rational tenets of positivism, but

also to the commitment to attract Northern European immigrants, its members formulated and passed laws which undermined the sway of the Catholic Church on education and on civil matters. This was not accomplished without acerbic debates which polarized public discourse between the Catholics and the modernizers. One crucial measure was the passing of Law 1420, in 1884. Together with making schooling obligatory and free, it decreed the state’s authority over matters pertaining to education, thus guaranteeing that the Church would not restrict the religious freedom needed to foster Protestant immigration. Law 1420 is the legal offspring of Sarmiento’s educational enterprise, and its formulation is tied in

with the 1870 foundation of the Escuela Normal de Parana, which became a bulwark for the transmission of positivist principles in the field of education. As superintendent of the General Council of Education, a post he occupied in 1881, Sarmiento prepared the way for the final approval 104

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of the law in 1884. Within the same ideological framework, laws institutionalizing civil marriage and the Civil Register were approved. One could well surmise that Sarmiento’s anticlericalism (despite its distant Enlightenment roots), was having the last word. A number of other measures taken at this time attest to the will to construct the modern nation. As Nicos Poulantzas has made clear, one of the arguments adduced to make of economic unity a central aspect of national consolidation is the need for the unification of the internal market by monetary union: “The State itself works to constitute the modern nation in its economic dimension by homogenizing, under the aegis of commodity capital, the space of the circulation of commodities and capital.” "8 To this end, the Roca administration established the national monetary system [sistema monetario patrio], creating the “peso argentino,” worth five gold pesos. Taken in conjunction with railroad construction and the centralization of customs duties in the newly established federal capital, these measures substantially eased the way for the flow of goods and the consequent participation in the international circulation of capital. As Poulantzas argues, though, other more subtle shifts have an important part to play in national formation: they are the “more fundamental changes of the underlying conceptual matrices of space and time.” !? The question of space resonates interestingly with the subject of frontiers and national territory that so keenly occupied the government’s attention at this time. Rather than merely consolidating a national unity which was already more or less in place, the modern Argentina of the 1880’s actually set itself up in the process of constructing this unity. Hence the powerful drive behind the acclaimed 1879 Conquista del Desierto (it was, indeed, no coincidence that the key credential for Roca’s rise to the presidency was his leadership of it); the effort to occupy the territory of the Gran Chaco

in the North, held by the Toba, Mataco, and Mocobi Indians (which, though started in 1884, was only successful in 1911, after many bloody battles); the numerous trips undertaken by explorers, geographers, and naturalists to map out the hitherto unexplored areas and to incorporate them into the national economy by drawing roads; finding fertile lands; and making their occupation feasible. What has been aptly called the emerging “territorial consciousness” ”° led to the publication of the Atlas de la Republica Argentina (1885-1892) and the Mapa de la Republica Argentina (1896), and to the creation of national territories in La Pampa, Neuquén, Rio Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz, and Tierra del Fuego in the South and Southwest, and Misiones, Formosa, Chaco, and Los Andes in the North. The concern for borders included provincial ones: laws were passed establishing limits between the provinces of Buenos Aires, Cor105

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doba, San Luis, and Mendoza.?! A growing population was now fixed in space, held together by the centripetal force of institutionalized borders, while great new stretches of land were becoming part of the central economy.

The matrix of time has to do, of course, with the inventions of history and tradition, which were designed to store up the memory of the nation and its people. The emerging national discourse inscribed the forwardlooking tension between past and future, portraying the present as the culmination of political legitimacy. The decade of 1880 witnessed the publication of Mitre’s Historia de Belgrano and the initial volumes of Vicente Fidel Lopez’s Historia de la Republica Argentina.** Mitre’s work is particularly revealing of the strategies through which national identity is constructed; as Tulio Halperin Donghi has forcibly argued, Mitre’s exemplary accomplishment was to depict the present as the synthesis of all the forces in contestation.23 However, while his successful vision constituted the locus of meaning for nationhood, it was grounded in a political notion of narrative historiography which could no longer be sustained once the Romantic conception of historical discourse which had underpinned it was on the wane.** Moreover, at a time when the political scene did not reflect the notion of organic democracy which had underpinned the Historia de Belgrano, politics could hardly be held up as a paradigm through which to produce the image of the nation. In fact, Mitre’s later Historia de San

Martin shows signs of the weakened thrust of the narrative, political frame. The way out of this impasse, Halperin suggests, was provided by Sarmiento in his Conflicto y armonias de las razas en América, where he deployed the tools of the new social sciences; I would argue that he also did so in Facundo, even though it, too, was a product of Romantic historiography. What the earlier work offered was the explanatory thrust of anthropological and sociological insights: disturbing as they had been to

readers like Alsina and Alberdi, they could be seen as models by the readers of the 1880’s, who were seeking new ways for encoding national discourse. Indeed, Facundo’s strategic location was reinforced by its refurbished version, Conflicto y armonias, which could well be described as Sarmiento’s rewriting of his former book. His two books supplied a matrix for alternative visions of history, and one which was strengthened by the prevalence of their ideological program. A case in point is Jose Maria Ramos Mejia’s early work, Las neurosis

de los hombres célebres en la historia argentina (1878-1882), written, it can be said, under Sarmiento’s tutelage. As José Ingenieros avers in his introduction to the third edition of 1927, Ramos Mejia and his contemporaries “received from Sarmiento the double impulse of action and 106

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ideals” [de Sarmiento recibian el doble impulso de la accion y del ideal],?° for he lent them not only intellectual support, but also made the pages of the newspaper El Nacional available to them for the publication of their writings. If in 1927 Ingenieros was judging the efforts of young men like

Ramos Mejia, Pellegrini, Lucio Lopez, Cané, and Gallo as proof of an “intellectual awakening” characteristic of “the group that on another occasion I have called the generation of ‘el ochenta’ ” [la que en otra ocasi6n he denominado la generacion “del ochenta”’ ],2° he was ready to see the phenomenon as the result of Sarmiento’s efforts: “This intellectual renovation took place, to a great extent, under Sarmiento’s tutelage; he spent years struggling to introduce its essential elements.” [Esta renovaci6n in-

telectual se oper6, en buena parte, bajo la tutela de Sarmiento; muchos anos brego por introducir al pais sus elementos iniciales.]*” Ramos Mejia brings to bear ideas culled from Comte, Charcot, and Claude Bernard, regarding biology, phrenology, and nervous diseases, on the study of Rosas, and of other personalities in the nineteenth-century history of the area. Proof of the psychiatric underpinnings of his study are the titles of some of the chapters: “El histerismo de Monteagudo,” “El delirio de las persecuciones del Almirante Brown,” or “La melancolia del doctor Francia.” Part I of the book is devoted to his study of Rosas’s many nervous disorders, which include no less than an epileptic virus, neuropathic attacks, homicidal leanings, and moral imbecility. While this seems to be a far cry from the conceptual mold in which Sarmiento cast Facundo, its imprint is clearly visible in Ramos Mejia’s text. To begin with, the latter echoes the passionately negative presentation of the dictator in a striking way: it would seem as though Ramos Mejia’s almost exclusive source for the study of the Rosas period had been Facundo. There are frequent explicit references to it—some of them deal with Facundo Quiroga as an example of the terror the population was subjected to, and its effects on collective psychology. Sarmiento himself was taken aback by the disfigured image of his own writing produced by Ramos Mejia’s writing, and obliquely alluded to his own exaggerations in chiding Ramos Mejia for them: “I would advise the young author against faithfully accepting all the accusations made against Rosas in those days of strife. This would be in

the best interest for understanding the doctrines that would explain the true facts.” [Prevendriamos al joven autor que no reciba de buena ley todas las acusaciones que se han hecho a Rosas en aquellos tiempos de combate y lucha por el interés mismo de las doctrinas que explicarian los hechos verdaderos.]2* The advice of this regretful polemicist does little to dispel the legend-forming impetus of his forty-year-old book. But it does speak to the power it exerted in the forms of historical representation 107

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which were being worked out in the 1880's, affiliating itself with other works and audiences. In a more general sense, it throws light on the ways culture transmits and reproduces itself. Cultural reproduction seems to be what Facundo is engendering at this time, if we are to judge by the publication of a number of Rosas-centered books bearing its ideological imprint. This publication trend has to do with the powerful combination of a compelling book and a dictator who is firmly ensconced in the collective imagination.2? Among them, one could name Ramos Meyjia’s Rosas y su tiempo (1907), Mariano Pelliza’s La dictadura de Rosas (1894), and, slightly later, Manuel Bilbao’s Historia de Rosas (1919). Even a book dealing mostly with Echeverria’s Dogma

socialista, by Ernesto Quesada, bears the catchier—though unquestionably misleading—title La politica liberal bajo la tirania de Rosas (1873). In a populist vein, Eduardo Gutiérrez’s Juan Manuel de Rosas: los dramas del terror (1882) provided a mythified, highly dramatized version of the dictatorship under the guise of the reign of terror.*° Tradition being essentially plural, it also produced at this time counterhegemonic texts which articulated the voices of resistance. Aside from the loud and clear one of the powerful literatura gauchesca, epitomized by El gaucho Martin Hierro (1872 and 1879)", it was at this time, in 1881, that Adolfo Saldias brought out the first volume of his ambitious Historia de la Confederacioén Argentina: Rosas y su época. Earlier, Lucio V. Mansilla had published his ambivalent and at times highly contestatory Una excursién a los indios ranqueles (1870), which often reads as an impassioned dialogue with Sarmiento the president and the author. Solané, a play published in 1881 by Francisco F. Fernandez, and based on events which took

place in Tandil in early 1872, is a denunciation in dramatic form of the Europe-facing policies bolstered by Sarmiento’s legacy as epitomized by his spurious dichotomy between civilization and barbarism. There is no dearth of material to prove that even as it was being canonized, Facundo was being contested. The all-encompassing positive paradigm, which would seem to emerge

from the enterprise of the Generation of 1880, belies its deeply divided consciousness. The drive for progress and national fulfillment is actually predicated upon the pitfalls of Sarmiento’s dichotomic formula, which has been internalized so that it guides the interpretation of reality in polarized terms. The Argentines of 1880 are caught up in proliferating binary oppositions, which are the intellectual offspring of the master one posited as the interpretive clue in Facundo. Derived from it are the oppositions between country and city, gaucho and immigrant, agriculture and cattle rais-

ing, Argentina and Europe, North and South, matter and spirit. The 108

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Manichean movement destabilizes the apparent solidity of the construction of the nation, and when it is challenged by emerging social, political, and economic relations, it resorts to shifts in the ideological map which significantly alter its configuration. The year 1890 could be picked as the turning point for the undoing of the exteriority of success: the following chapter charts the ways in which culture coped with the various forms of dislocation which ensued. The remains of the present chapter will focus on three quite different texts which speak to the varied ways in which Facundo affiliated itself

with its audience, and to the manner in which it was used in order to construct representations of the self and the nation. As a canonical book, it is read under the aegis of its authority: in some ways, it charts what can be said, creating the conditions for the production of other statements within its field. The first text I will examine is Sarmiento’s own Conflicto y armonias de las razas en América. It interests me from the standpoint of a rereading/writing of Facundo produced in different material conditions (indeed, the context of production has greatly changed in the forty-odd years separating both books), within different disciplinary formations. Next, I take up Joaquin V. Gonzalez’s La tradicién nacional, which I see as an exercise in cultural and social engineering designed to organize and institutionalize Argentine tradition, and I map out the traces of Facundo in this operation. Finally, my reading of Lucio V. Mansilla’s Una excursién a los indios ranqueles observes the loci of resistance from which a classic’s powerful authority can be contested.

A FACUNDO GROWN OLD: CONFLICTO Y ARMONIAS DE LAS RAZAS EN AMERICA There is a question at the beginning of Sarmiento’s last major book which so poignantly dramatizes his problematic experience of the nation that I am bound to quote it in its entirety: Are we European?—So many copper-colored faces prove us wrong! Are we indigenous?—The disdainful smiles of our blond ladies may give us our only answer.

Of mixed race?—No one wants to be that, and there are millions who would not wish to be called either American or Argentine. Are we a nation?—A nation without a blending of accumulated materials, with neither tightening nor foundation. Argentines? —Until when and since when, we better become aware of it. 109

——_————- FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE ——————— [Somos europeos?—jTantas caras cobrizas nos desmienten! iSomos indigenas?—Sonrisas de desdén de nuestras blondas damas nos dan acaso la unica respuesta. ¢Mixtos?—-Nadie quiere serlo, y hay millones que ni americanos ni argentinos querrian ser llamados. Somos Nacion?—Nacion sin amalgama de materiales acumulados, sin ajuste ni cimiento? ¢Argentinos?—Hasta donde y desde cuando, bueno es darse cuenta de ello.]*3

We are left in a no-man’s-land, in the landscape of undecidability, bereft of either an origin or a viable source of identification. Rather than being gathered in the fold of community, Sarmiento seems to suggest, Argentines are doomed to disjunctions and separation. Not even the certainty of a common name provides the needed anchorage in time and space—hence

the urgency of the question about borders (“hasta donde”) and history (“desde cuando”). He conceives of his predicament in terms of what Partha Chatterjee calls “Eastern nationalism,” which “has appeared among peoples recently drawn into a civilization alien to them, and whose ancestral cultures are not adapted to success and excellence by... cosmopolitan and increasingly dominant standards.” >4 Unlike the practitioners of Eastern nationalism, though, Sarmiento cannot fall back on the notion of a preexisting identity which could be reequipped in order to meet the demands of modernization, since the very reason for his concern is the lack of a cultural or ethnic base on which to build national consciousness. We are led to ask, then, about the conceptual strategy Sarmiento deploys to

address his questions, and about its insertion in the ideological frame which sustains it. Conflicto y armonias sets itself up as a rereading of Facundo, as a new, transformed, grown-up version of the earlier text: “This book would like to be Facundo grown old. It is or it will be, if I manage to express my idea, the same book in a scientific mold, founded on modern sociological and ethnographic science.” [Tiene la pretension este libro de ser el Facundo llegado a la vejez. Es o sera, si acierto a expresar mi idea, el mismo libro, cientifico, apoyado en las ciencias sociologicas y etnologicas modernas.] 35 It is somewhat intriguing that this Facundo grown old should so presciently pose the question of the nation as a problem in 1883, when the belief in a consolidated Argentine state swayed most of the members of the Gen-

eration of 1880, and did not lose its hold until the 1890’s and the early years of the twentieth century. Aside from the fact that Sarmiento’s perspicacity would allow him to sense the ambivalences that haunt the idea I10

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of the nation even before they became too pressing, we can speculate there

were other motives at work. One telling passage suggests a comparison with the achievements of his presidency, which ended in 1874: “This year’s income is the same as 1873’s: education has decreased; immigration is half what it was then.” [Tenemos este afio la renta de 1873. La educacion comin ha decrecido; y la inmigracion es hoy de la mitad de la cifra que alcanzo entonces.]*° The disparaging view of Argentina which this book puts forward, then, could be seen as the discourse of opposition to Roca’s presidency—a discourse Sarmiento articulated vigorously in the pages of El Nacional and, later, of El Censor. He could well be suggesting

that since his departure from office the wheels of progress had stopped turning—a likely response to his electoral defeats of the early 1880’s. It is

striking, moreover, that Sarmiento’s assertions regarding the economy, education, and immigration would not be borne out by the actual record of growth which characterizes the period. It would seem that he was anticipating by a decade the problems which were to demand public attention in 1890: a question of blindness to the achievements of the present, maybe, or insight into the difficulties of the future.>” If, as I have been arguing, the Generation of 1880 seemed to have found inspiration in Facundo for its drive to modernize, does Conflicto y armonias suggest that the earlier book had been misread? How does it address the conceptual space that separates the vision of 1845 from the results it engendered in 1880? A possible answer emerges from the confrontation of the two books. Facundo’s final chapter, ‘“‘Presente y porvenir,” supplies a clue to the disjunction between the program and its execution. Anticipating the fall of Rosas, Sarmiento envisages the massive arrival of industrious immigrants who will perform the miracle of modernization in the

space of ten years: “Industrious European immigrants will head for the River Plate; the New Government will distribute them throughout the provinces: the engineers of the Republic will design cities and towns for them to live in, and fertile lands will be allocated to them. In ten years all the river banks will be covered with cities, and the Republic will double its population with active, moral, and industrious dwellers.” [La inmigracin industriosa de la Europa se dirigira en masa al Rio de la Plata; el Nuevo Gobierno se encargara de distribuirla por las provincias: los ingenieros de la Republica iran a trazar, en todos los puntos convenientes, los planos de las ciudades y villas que deberan construir para su residencia, y terrenos feraces les seran adjudicados, y en diez afios quedaran todas las margenes de los rios, cubiertas de ciudades, y la Republica doblara su poblacion con vecinos activos, morales e industriosos.]3* These eager immigrants would provide what the emerging nation lacked: with “a million

IIit

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civilized men” “‘teaching us to work, exploiting new sources of wealth, and enriching the country with their property” [ensenandonos a trabajar, explotando nuevas riquezas y enriqueciendo al pais con sus propiedades], how could success be elusive? The problem, of course, was that the Scot-

tish and German gauchos did not make up the bulk of the immigrant mass. In Conflicto y armonias Sarmiento voices his disappointment with the region’s failure to avail itself of the “Saxon privilege” [privilegio sajon] as successfully as North America had managed to do it: this helps to explain the disjunction between the two books. It also explains what we might call the paradigm shift between them: the earlier book, produced under the aegis of Enlightenment and Romantic cultural formations, is replaced (if not superseded) by one which relies on a positivism imbued in Darwinian evolutionism and Spencerian thought. The influence of land and geography is displaced by race as an explanatory master code. Hence the many unsavory passages which mar Conflicto y armonias, as it dwells on the hypostatized racial inferiority afflicting Spanish America. While Facundo had played out the barbarism versus Civilization binary opposition, Conflicto y armonias stages the conceptual tension between North and South: the polarizations still hold fast. History is framed by the conceptual authority of race, and race is the form of representation which accounts for the political success of the North and the failure of the South. Nancy Stepan has demonstrated the ascendancy of a racialist theory of science in the second half of the nineteenth century, and its connection with biological pessimism. Rooted in the belief in the fixity of racial natures, racial science superseded the explanatory power of cultural and social paradigms. Echoing the prominent Scottish anatomist, Dr. Robert Knox, Sarmiento was now embracing the wildly held belief

that the key to human history and destiny was to be found in distinct racial types. It is not accidental that this paradigm shift, which took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, should help explain some of

the differences separating Facundo from Conflicto y armonias.?? Nor must we forget that Sarmiento’s enthusiasm for Darwin’s ideas provided scientific language with which to express old prejudices, since it became possible to portray the “inferior” races as those which had evolved least far up the evolutionary ladder.

The book’s organization is subordinated to the North/South dichotomy: after an introductory chapter dealing with the South American races (quichuas, guaranties, arauco pampeanos, mixed races, and blacks), follows a second part dealing with the races in South America, and a third on the races in North America. Going all the way back to the origins of the Aryan race, and even summarizing some of the key events in European T12

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history (such as the Crusades, the Renaissance, the discoveries of scientists and explorers), Sarmiento attempts to emplot the events in world history so as to show that the North fared so well because it was colonized by a superior race which avoided miscegenation. What follows is a shocking example of his reasoning: “Thus the North American is the Anglo-Saxon, free from miscegenation with races lacking in energy, with intact political traditions which are not degraded by races inept for governing, which are part of prehistoric man, fierce as a grey bear (which shares man’s life in the North American forests), .. . lazy, dirty, a thief as he is in the Pampas; drunk and cruel as he is in the whole world.” (El norte-americano es, pues,

el anglo-sajon, exento de toda mezcla con razas inferiores en energia, conservadas sus tradiciones politicas, sin que se degraden con la adopcion de las ineptitudes de raza para el gobierno, que son organicas del hombre prehistorico, bravo como un oso gris, su companiero de vida en los bosques de los Estados Unidos, . . . perezoso, sucio, ladron como en las pampas y ebrio y cruel en todo el mundo.]*° In this vein, he describes the characteristics and the exploits of the Quakers, the Puritans, and patriotic figures such as William Penn, Madison, Monroe, and the Adams. In a rather disorderly medley of social, cultural, and political approaches, Sarmiento concludes this section with a number of seventeenth-century documents designed to show the political organization of Connecticut and Rhode Island: presumably, their exemplariness would make them perti-

nent. The inferior, Southern half of the hemisphere is doomed by the double curse of the Indian substratum and the Hispanic colonizer: ““What distinguishes Spanish colonization? The fact that it was accomplished by its own race, which had not left the Middle Ages when it went to America, absorbing there a servile, prehistoric race.” [En qué se distingue la colonizacion espanola? En que la hizo un monopolio de su propia raza, que no salia de la Edad Media al trasladarse a América y que absorbio en su sangre una raza prehistorica servil.]*! Thus, Sarmiento’s book develops the discourse of Southern inferiority, pitting the two parts of the continent one against the other by deploying the epistemological tools of his time to provide a deterministic account of Spain’s very negative influence on her colonies, the perversity of the Church and the Inquisition, and the lack of political maturity it saddled its colonies with. Not even the independence movements are given credit for their achievements: Sarmiento claims that they were devoid of political consciousness, unlike the North American

colonies, which fought for their independence to defend a question of constitutional law. It seems deeply contradictory that the discourse of Western supremacy should be espoused to articulate a treatise on the Latin American nations. 113

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The book seems doomed by the questions it opens with: Sarmiento’s sub-

ject position is displaced from his native soil, seeking solutions in the North. It is not by chance that it was dedicated to Mary Mann: a reader ensconced in the comfort of a superior cultural home could find Conflicto

y armonias more congenial reading. Nor is it surprising that this “ Facundo grown old” should never have been fully accepted in the canon of Argentine literature: it contains too bleak a picture of the nation at a time when the need for tradition could hardly accommodate the discourse of inferiority. In fact, the sense of displacement which prevails in it would suggest an enunciatory position established in the discourse of imperialism. This becomes patently clear in some marginal passages dealing with the black race and the conquest of Africa and India. It is not fortuitous that this book, finished in 1882, should advance some of the ideas that sustained the ‘“‘age of empire” which is considered to have formally begun in 1878, with the “scramble for Africa.” 42 Sarmiento’s lifelong commitment to assimilate hegemonic culture turns him at times into a ventriloquist for it, donning “imperial eyes” to gaze at the African continent as the space for commercial and imperial expansionism: * “. . . the represen-

tatives from Italy, from Prussia in other directions, France extending South in its African territories, planning railroads, and even England in white Africa, or in its black, Arabic, Mediterranean, or Southern areas, with Setiwayo, the Eastern shores of the Zambeci, and the diamond mines—the world is full of the rumors of Africa, of the discoveries, greatness, splendor of Africa, because everyone feels its hour of justice, dignity and redress has come.” [. . . los representantes de la Italia, de la Prusia en otras direcciones, la Francia prolongandose al Sur desde sus posesiones de Africa proyectando ferrocarriles, y aan la Inglaterra en el Africa blanca, o felata, o arabe, del Mediterraneo, como en el extremo Sur, con Setiwayo, y las costas orientales del Zambeci, y las minas de Diamantes, el mundo solo esta lleno de los rumores de Africa, de los descubrimientos, grandezas, esplendores del Africa, porque todos sienten que le ha llegado su hora

de justicia, dignidad y reparacion.]** Having read his Harriet Beecher Stowe (whom he quotes in considerable length), and having spent time in the U.S. after the defeat of the South, Sarmiento is ready to wave the banner of the antislavery movement, but he is blind to the implications of the expansionist mercantile enterprise of Livingstone and Stanley, or of the blunt empire-building of Brazza. Instead, he portrays them as preparing the future of Africa, presumably inspired by philanthropic motives.** With the European book always in his hand, Sarmiento reads his nation from the outer vantage point provided by it, in a dialogue with the ideal North-

ern reader (Mrs. Mary Mann). Not surprisingly, he is tangled in the 114

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paradox which beset the abolition movement, as it contested the moral foundations of slavery while it upheld the belief in the inferiority of the non-European races. Steeped in the imperialist discourse of the late nineteenth century, Con-

flicto y armonias could be said to erase the foundational gestures of its younger version. If Facundo had pointed to the power of nature and the struggle between civilization and barbarism as the cornerstone for a national literature,** this ‘‘ Facundo grown old” turns its back on such scenes in order to focus on the success achieved elsewhere. This is only one of the

possible ways in which Facundo could have been reread and rewritten— it is the one in which the machinery of foreign cultural appropriation has started to spin in a vacuum, and has ended up displacing the site of enunciation. Sarmiento produces an interpretation of his nation (and the South American continent) which partakes of the disciplinary archives of his time, but which severs it from the emerging nationalist discourse—consuming imported culture in the periphery can produce a sundered historical identity. A telling revelation of this disjunction is his invective against La Araucana, presented as a poem about an Indian nation which had the power to stop the conquest—thus giving literature the perverse effect of undermining European conquest: Unfortunately, the men of letters—and even the generals—of those days, were more poetic than today’s, and for the sake of writing an epic poem,

Ercilla turned Caupolican into an Agamemnon, Lautaro into an Ajax, Rengo into Achilles. . .. Unfortunately, the story was so believable that the Spaniards who read the Araucana in the cities felt afraid, . . . the Spanish monarchs ordered a cease-fire and recognized the glorious independence of the heroic araucanos which they hold to this day. .. . A bad poem, then, has stopped the conquest in that area. [Desgraciadamente, los literatos de entonces, y aun los generales, eran mas poéticos que los de ahora, y a trueque de hacer un poema épico, Ercilla hizo del cacique Caupolican un Agamemnon, de Lautaro un Ayax, de Rengo un Aquiles. . .. Desgraciadamente, tan verosimil era el cuento, que a los espafioles que leian la Araucana en las ciudades les puso miedo el relato, . . . y los reyes de Espafia mandaron cesar el fuego y reconocer a los heroicos arau-

canos su gloriosa independencia. que conservan hasta hoy. ... Una mala poesia, pues, ha bastado para detener la conquista hacia aquel lado.]*’

The 1915 preface written by José Ingenieros takes Conflicto y armonias as a companion text to Facundo, and makes his praise for the latter reso115

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nate in his reading of the former. Quoting from his speech of 1911, delivered in honor of the centennial of Sarmiento’s birth, Ingenieros reveals to what extent Facundo had been incorporated into the canon, and provided a master code for reading Conflicto y armonias. The encomium is so hyperbolic that it borders on the ridiculous: “One could say that the soul of an entire nation is poured into its phrases, like an avalanche. A book... becomes as decisive for a civilization as the tumultuous inrush of infinite armies. And its word is a pronouncement: an era of barbarism represented by a proper name is mortally wounded. Its words allow for no corrections and escape criticism.” [En sus frases diriase que se vuelca el alma de la naciOn entera, como un alud. Un libro . . . tornase tan decisivo para la civilizacion de una raza, como la irrupciOn tumultuosa de infinitos ejércitos. Y su verbo es sentencia: queda mortalmente herida una era de bar-

barie, simbolizada en un nombre propio. . . . Sus palabras no admiten rectificacion y escapan ala critica.]*® The later book is presented as the evolution of the earlier one, in true positivist fashion: from the philosophy of history, Sarmiento moves to Spencerian sociology. What is eloquent is the uncritical assimilation of the racist discourse that runs through Conflicto y armonias by a man of progressive political ideas and a member of the Socialist Party. A passage designed to summarize Sarmiento’s argument reveals Ingenieros’s uncritical adherence to it: ““Whereas the English

in North America had Anglo-Saxon females, keeping their psychology pure by maintaining the purity of their blood, the Spaniards generated offspring with indigenous women, mixing their psychological defects with those of the inferior conquered race. . . .” [Mientras que los ingleses tuvieron en Norte América hembras anglosajonas, conservando pura su psicologia al conservar la pureza de su sangre, los espafioles se cruzaron con mujeres indigenas, combinando sus taras psicologicas con las de la raza inferior conquistada. . . .]*? Clearly, the force of positivist thinking could account for Ingenieros’s continued immersion in it and in Sarmiento’s appropriation of it, but in 1915 there could hardly be wholehearted acceptance of the anti-Hispanic thrust so powerfully voiced in Conflicto y armonias. One is reminded here of Freud’s observation about the polarized

feelings that hold a community together: “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left to receive the manifestation of their aggressiveness.” *° The other, personified here as the Indian and Spanish racial mix, would be rejected in the creation of the national self. Ingenieros’s agency in the circulation of this book in 1915 is crucial to the understanding of his preface: this edition is part of the emerging canon of Argentine literature, one in the “ediciones de obras nacionales” published by La Cultura Argen116

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tina, a publishing venture directed by him. Within this collection, the book had to be rendered relevant to the enterprise of cultural construction. Ingenieros, the son of an Italian immigrant, proclaims the solution that Sarmiento advances in Conflicto y armonias, it was none other than “the regeneration of the Argentine race by the progressive substitution of Hispano-indigenous miscegenation with new elements” [la regeneracion de la raza argentina, por la sustituciOn progresiva de nuevos elementos al mestizaje hispano-indigena].5' His reading is rendered in the terms provided by eugenics, which gained great ascendancy in the early decades of the twentieth century. Its imprint is clear in Ingenieros’s belief in the possibility of Argentine racial improvement by promoting the breeding of the existing population with superior human stock. If Sarmiento provides the racist paradigm within which Ingenieros can insert his own program for eugenics, he also draws him into the trap constituted by the disciplinarian matrix which Ingenieros draws on in order to validate his discourse. Lest it should be assumed that the notion of racial improvement might fold in all the immigrants into the regenerated gene stock, Ingenieros ends his preface quoting Sarmiento’s injunction to be like the United States, and reinforcing it in the following terms: “‘Yes. Let us be like them, a new race sprung from the Caucasian trunk, given expression to in a fertile and gen-

erous nature, capable of inspiring great future ideals and of marking a stage in the future history of human civilization.” [Si. Seamos como ellos, una raza nueva desprendida del tronco caucasico, plasmada en una naturaleza fecunda y generosa, capaz de alentar grandes ideales de porvenir y de marcar una etapa en la historia futura de la civilizacion humana.]*2 The integrative force of optimism might obscure the limiting actuality of Sarmiento’s stated preference for Anglo-Saxon immigrants: Ingenieros’s final move, despite the enthusiastic cohesion it would envisage, is actually dramatizing the internal contradictions of the attempt to articulate cultural differences, thereby underscoring the structural ambivalences which beset the concept of the nation.

THE ROOTS OF PATRIOTISM: JOAQUIN V. GONZALEZ’S LA TRADICION NACIONAL In striking contrast with Sarmiento’s discourse of failure, Joaquin V. Gonzalez invents Argentine tradition by celebrating precisely the ethnic roots so stridently decried in Conflicto y armonias. What is remarkable is that Gonzalez produces such a different cultural message while remaining under the textual tutelage of Sarmientine writing. 117

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Gonzalez’s (1863-1926) life and writing are very much a part of the Generation of 1880. Born, like Facundo Quiroga, in La Rioja, he obtained

a law degree from the Universidad de Cordoba and went on to play an important role in legislation and higher education. He was closely associated with the Universidad de la Plata, as education minister at the time of its founding, and then as its president. Like Ricardo Rojas, whose work at the Universidad de Buenos Aires was to be so important, Gonzalez’s involvement in higher education contributed to the construction of a national culture. He straddled the literary and the legal fields; in the latter he authored the progressive Codigo de Trabajo under Roca’s administration, as a response to demands for change, and as an alternative to the violent repression with which labor unrest had been met before. There is an interesting dialogue in Gonzalez between what could be construed as a conservative slant in La tradicion nacional (1888) and Mis montanas (1893), on

the one hand, and, on the other, the astute awareness of the changing social and economic landscape emerging from the growth of the urban proletariat, immigration, and industrialization. Unlike some of the other members of his class who turned to repression under pressure from labor demands, Gonzalez opted for a strategy of appeasement and tried to coax his kind into facing change in the following terms: “‘As the ignorance and prejudices of the higher classes give way to a more enlightened awareness of the scientific stages marking collective life, their harshness will disappear, and the exclusionary or repressive measures leading to punishment Or extermination will be replaced by legal solutions and a justice system” [A medida que las ignorancias y prejuicios de las clases superiores cedan su lugar a una conciencia mas ilustrada sobre las fases cientificas de la vida colectiva, su rigor desaparecera, y en vez de las medidas de exclusiOn o represiOn violenta a manera de castigo o exterminio, se buscaran las soluciones juridicas y las formas de la justicia que se avienen con todas las situaciones y conflictos entre los hombres y las clases.]°? Equally perceptive of the needs of this “vida colectiva” was his recovery of a rural, folk culture, performed at the time when its forms were no longer truly alive. Moving all the way back to what he calls, in contrast with Sarmiento, “‘la gran naciOn quichta,” his ambitious book reconstructs the pre-Columbian civilizations in celebratory terms, tracing their continuity with a nineteenth-century nativistic tradition. As Angel Rama has noted in his La ciudad letrada this operation is a triumph of the “lettered city” as the cen-

tury draws to a close and the national literatures are being produced. Precisely when the powerful immigrant flux brought about a revision of what constituted the true Argentina, a community is reinvented by the city, using the materials provided by the country and its distant past. This 118

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obviously involves a process of genealogical retrieval, which confers upon the whole a sense of the organic links binding past and present. History is rewritten in a positive vein, promoting an experience of the archaic which

is superimposed on the modern. Moreover, it is seen as the site for the active, conscious production of a literary discourse which would result from an operation of disinterment of the past. Hence, it is created by a collaborative effort between archeologist, historian, and poet, and it crosses the boundaries between fictive and nonfictive discourses in a symbolically and emotionally charged process. The following passage illustrates the convergence of elements which Gonzalez brings forth: “If national literature were unable to penetrate the secret of its past, and unearth from the pre-Columbian tombs and temples all the treasures of Quichua

thought, what a splendid field there would be for it in the works of archaeologists and historians! How many legendary, fantastic, or historical characters has America provided from the remote past for immortal poems throbbing with native genius, tropical sap, the perfume of the jungle!” [Si la literatura nacional no pudiera penetrar en el secreto de su pasado, y desenterrar de las huacas y los templos todos los tesoros del pensamiento quichia, j;qué espléndido campo, no obstante, encontraria para sus creaciones en lo que conocemos de él por los trabajos de arquedlogos e historiadores! jCuanto personaje ya legendario, ya fantastico, ya historico nos presenta la América desde los tiempos mas remotos, que pudieran ser objeto de poemas inmortales en los que respiraria el genio indigena, la savia tropical, el perfume de las selvas!]*> Obviously, this program can only be brought to fruition if it is accompanied by a positive reevaluation of the materials to be deployed. Gonzalez goes much further than merely acknowledging the fertile source provided by the native; he proclaims its

cultural superiority in an attempt to debunk the belief in European supremacy which undergirded liberal thought. He asserts that the traditional poetry of nations such as England, Germany, Switzerland and France would pale by comparison with the treasures already alluded to. La tradici6n nacional combines a programmatic approach with the ac-

tual invention of a tradition, in the sense sketched out by Eric Hobsbawm.°¢ The book is constituted by an effort to gather the materials to be incorporated, showing their potential for inspiring the desired effect: it is really about the uses of culture. The inventory he draws up covers a varied array of practices: history and poetry, but also legends and songs. He invites the poets to sing the “legend of the Andes” by invoking its epic proportions: “Human thought will never conceive of another epic as long as the legend of the Andes is not sung. As the Caucasus gave Aeschylus the colossal Promethean Trilogy, the future American poet will find in the An119

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dean summits an equally great epic trilogy.” [El pensamiento humano no concebira jamas otra epopeya mientras no se cante la leyenda de los Andes. Como el Caucaso dio a Esquilo la colosal trilogia de Prometeo, el futuro poeta americano hallara en las cumbres andinas una trilogia épica tan grande como aquélla. .. .] (vol. 1, 69) At times Gonzalez’s prose would seem to invoke the poetic voice of a Neruda in his Canto general, as when he laments the absence of a witness to keep alive the memory of a lost

people: “And no one has gathered or sung that final moan of virginal America... and the tears of so many martyrs dried in its heart, they melt into the enemy’s fire, or multiplied in slavery.” [Y aquel gemido postrero de la América virgen . . . nadie ha recogido ni cantado, y las lagrimas de tantos martires se secaron en su corazon, se fundieron en el fuego enemigo, o se multiplicaron en la esclavitud.] (vol. I, 71) Aware of the power of the emotional and the symbolic in the workings of tradition, Gonzalez culls elements from the repertory of the nation’s past and present in order to bolster the love of country, which he compares to religion and which he ranks as “the spirit’s first need” [la primera necesidad del espiritu]. Reading his book elicits both admiration for his insights into the needs of national construction on the one hand, and, on the other, impatience at the inflated rhetoric deployed to articulate them. A twentieth-century reader resists the hyperbolic insistence with which national sentiment is invoked; she is tempted to read against the grain such passages as the following one: The Argentine Republic is that statue chiselled in the granite of the Andes, from whose Cyclopian slopes it inherited its rigid and harmonious forms. Its feet are settled on plains traversed by rivers flowing into the sea and embroidered by tropical jungles which sustain eternal youth; its hair ripples on the colossal back, like a torrent falling off the mountain, and from its brow springs a flash of lightning which reveals a crater in its cranium. [La Republica Argentina es esa estatua cincelada en el granito de los Andes, de cuyos flancos ciclopeos heredo sus formas rigidas y armonicas a la vez. Sus pies se asientan sobre una Ilanura surcada de rios inmensos que tributan al mar, y bordada de selvas tropicales que mantienen la juventud eterna; su cabellera ondea sobre el dorso colosal, como un torrente despenado de la montana, y de su frente brota un relampago que revela un crater en el craneo.] (vol. II, 277)

When emotions are not called forth by rhetoric, Gonzalez turns to the power of the mysterious, as when he delves into the role of the devil in the Argentine literary tradition (particularly in Obligado’s Santos Vega), and I20

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in the peasants’ perception of the world. A lengthy discussion of witches both in European and pre-Columbian cultures concludes with the assertion that they are part of the devil’s work: “Satan has his witches to convey the magic forces of his somber science.” (Satanas tiene sus brujas para manifestar por su medio las fuerzas magicas de su sombria ciencia. | (vol. I, 153) In passages like this one, Gonzalez slides away from the programmatic and gives in to the mystery he is trying to evoke, as if seduced by his own discursive impetus. One of the areas he ventures into more assiduously is, of course, the historical one. Plundering the archive of colonial history and the repertory of heroic figures, Gonzalez manages to place himself above or beyond the fray of political strife in order to build the cult of heroes and military victories. However, Gonzalez is firmly entrenched in the liberal, anti-Rosas camp, and his all-inclusive gallery of heroes and heroic events is, as all tradition, selective. Even as it proclaims itself as embracing all the national ingredients, it remains within the boundaries provided by the ideology that underpins it. This accounts for occasional contradictions between the professed objective of producing a positive, inclusory repository of national figures and what we could call derogatory, racist slips. Thus, although he refers to the gauchos, the Indians, the people of mixed race, and the caudillos in affirmative terms, in a few instances he is tripped up by the racist discourse of the time: while he may proclaim, for instance, the gaucho’s ethnic vigor in the following glowing terms—‘“‘The gaucho is the

genuine fruit of tradition, he is the healthy fruit of the blending of the native and the European” [El gaucho es el fruto genuino de la tradici6n, es el fruto lozano de la amalgama del indigena y del europeo]|—he may undermine them in passages such as this one: “The religion of that degenerate gaucho was made up of a vague idea of the principles which animate belief, but stupid superstitions were strongly rooted in his soul, degraded by the distance from the centers of culture. Dominated by instinct rather than intelligence, by passion rather than reason, his religion was, in fact, his bitterness or his ambition. . . .” [La religion de ese gaucho degenerado consistia en una idea vaga de los principios que animan la creencia, pero si arraigaban en su alma con fuerza las supersticiones estapidas, degradadas por el alejamiento de los centros cultos. Dominando en ellos el instinto mas que la inteligencia, la pasion mas que el raciocinio, su religion eran, en verdad, su rencor o su ambicion. . . .| (vol. II, 63, 136) Despite these occasional ideological markers, Gonzalez appeals to a celebratory stance in order to buttress up his review of history. The Argentine nation is framed by the Revolution of 1810 at one end and by Caseros at the other: ‘‘Caseros is the stage for a new redemption, just as May was

I2I

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the space for genesis.” [Caseros es el teatro de una nueva redenciOn, como Mayo fue el espacio de un génesis.] (vol. II, 275) If Sarmiento’s interpre-

tation of the Revolution of 1810 had seen it lacking political maturity, Gonzalez, instead, sees it as admirably enlightened: ‘“‘Never was a human

revolution more logical in its antecedents.” [Jamas una revolucion humana fue mas logica en sus antecedentes.] (vol. I, 25) Even the “‘masses” so stridently disparaged both in Facundo and in Conflicto y armonias are vindicated as formidable and strong (vol. II, 133). The heroes of the wars of Independence are fervently celebrated. San Martin is hallowed by a set of rhetorical moves based on the simile so as to equate him with the natural greatness of the landscape in which his great deeds were accomplished. Similar strategies erect the figures of Belgrano, Brown, Buchardo, and a number of other lesser figures in order to provide the nation with heroes furnished with the desired exemplariness. In this enterprise, Gonzalez gives enthusiastic credit to the writers who had the vision to anticipate him, such as José Joaquin Olmedo or Olegario Andrade, who knew how to manipulate the relationship between history

and poetry so as to produce the aura of myth: “ . . . taking as its base human and social action, [traditional literature] explains, develops, and adorns it with poetic fantasy, enveloping the events in the life of infant societies in an aura of light and perfume” [ . . . tomando como base los hechos humanos y sociales, (la literatura tradicional) los explica, desenvuelve y adorna con la fantasia poética, que rodea como una aureola de luces y perfumes los acontecimientos de la vida de las sociedades en infancia]. (vol. I, 133) The economy of tradition at work here accommodates even the negative forces which inspire fear and rejection. Since tradition must store and elaborate on a common history, infusing it with the power of fantasy and emotion, Gonzalez insists on the need to formulate and give shape to its mournful side. He regrets the gradual loss of the memory of the regrettable events that took place during the era of anarchy, for he sees in them the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy. In a striking manipulation of cultural materials which might seem culled from the techniques of the feuilleton as it was successfully practiced by Eduardo Gutiérrez (whose Juan Moreira was first serialized in a newspaper in 1879-1880), Gonzalez proclaims the need to pave the way for the “religion of patriotism” by using the image of the tyrants and the portrayals of bloody scenes: ... you shall always see the images of the tyrants and bloody scenes, sometimes inspiring weeping, other times horror, always creating a painful

impression. ...

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[... veréis siempre asomar la imagen de los tiranos y los cuadros de sangre, provocando unas veces el Ilanto, otras el horror, pero siempre la impresion dolorosa. . . .] (vol. II, 146)

The sight of the fatherland torn by scattered sons embittered with their brothers will lead us to a sublime embrace. [El espectaculo de la patria desgarrada por sus hijos dispersos y ensafiados con sus hermanos, nos impulsara a estrecharnos en un abrazo sublime.] (vol. II, 147)

To evoke such feelings, he constructs a Dantesque vision in which he stages military scenes succeeded by cataclysms and civil struggles, com-

plete with red smoke emanating from the depths of the earth, cries of agony, seismic reverberations, and ghosts ascending in the shadows. The Romantic sublime at work here might seem a hyperbolic version of the opening words of Facundo’s introduction, where the “terrible phantom of Facundo” holds the dark secrets the book will attempt to decipher. Indeed, despite the very positive value assigned by Gonzalez to the rural and the native, sections of his book seem so closely inspired in Facundo that it reads like an overstated rewriting of it. In the task of erecting the

national tradition, Facundo holds a wealth of materials which can be appropriated regardless of the paradigm within which Sarmiento had inserted them. Seeking to suspend the dichotomic tensions which had sundered Facundo, Gonzalez reshapes it with an all-embracing gesture designed to promote the love of country. He beckons the combined forces of the aesthetic and the emotional in order to exhort his fellow Argentines to be patriotic. Since he has no recourse to the romantic passion so astutely manipulated by the novelists who had embarked on the same enterprise, Gonzalez has to make do with the related emotions of fear, sadness, grief, horror, and admiration.*’ Their combined effect aims at subsuming the exclusionary logic of the civilization versus barbarism divide in a discourse presumably regulated by national passion. At times it seems as though the point of departure is the already cited passage at the beginning

of Facundo’s Chapter 2, which would be a textual springboard for a greatly overwritten new version.°® Gonzalez works on the two most fertile loci of representation: the natural scenery and the character of Facundo Quiroga. The former is depicted in Sarmientine terms, characterized by loneliness and extension: Loneliness and unlimited expanses carve deep spiritual peaks where passions and instincts simmer until the inevitable explosion is produced... .

123

——————— FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE —————— [La soledad y la extension ilimitada cavan simas profundas en los espiritus, y en ellas fermentan las pasiones y los instintos, hasta que la explosion necesaria se produce. ... ] (vol. II, 162) But that sober and continuous struggle for life which resembles the aridity of the plains lacking in greenery, at times engenders the indolent fatalism of the Arab.

[Pero esa lucha continuada y sombria por la vida, que se asemeja, por su aridez, a sus llanos sin verdura, engendra a veces el fatalismo indolente del arabe.] (vol. II, 189)

Numerous passages like the ones just quoted attest to the textual presence of Facundo in the work under discussion. As to Quiroga himself, Gonzalez’s strategy of representation is to take him to the extreme consequences of what was sketched out by Sarmiento. Thus, he is rendered in terms of Shakespearean tragedy and of primitive epic, so that he can be assimilated into the nation’s genealogy. Like Sarmiento, Gonzalez advances a distinction between Rosas’s cold and calculating disposition and Quiroga’s spontaneous and passionate one: “[{Rosas] is a heartless slaughterer, loaded with blood. ... Facundo, on the contrary, is a character of Shakespearean tragedy, who does not lose his somber gravity, but who concentrates to the point of bursting into tragedy.” [(Rosas) es un degollador desalmado,

cargado de sangre. . . . Facundo, por el contrario, es el personaje de la tragedia shakesperiana, que no pierde su gravedad sombria, sino que va concentrandose cada vez mas hasta que estalla en la catastrofe.] (vol. II, 197, 198)

In Quiroga, then, Gonzalez finds the source for tradition-building, and he

taps it with unrelenting drive, elaborating on the popular songs which evoke his deeds, the stormy love affair with Severa Villafafie, the many places ravaged by his destructive forces, and the people who suffered as a result of them. His celebratory tone allows him to cannibalize the most gruesome events in the spirit of incorporating ‘“‘todo ese enjambre de seres

fantasticos que cantan en la noche canciones arrobadoras.” (vol. II, 215) Needless to say, Gonzalez is unabashedly venturing into the mythifying effects of cultural manipulation, operating within the rhetorical conjunction between the depiction of grandiose natural scenes and their assimilation by the human figure. The resulting monumentalizing effect coincides, not surprisingly, with the end of the power of the caudillos and their receding into the harmless space of myth. The forty-odd years that separate 124

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Facundo from La tradicion nacional allowed for the nostalgic evocation of what had once posed the problem of national fragmentation; in 1888, it was transmuted into a myth that enabled cohesion. Hence, canonization proved to be a handy legitimating operation: it harmonized the dislocated materials of tradition without sacrificing their emotional hold.°*? Nevertheless, Gonzalez’s frantic praise for the book contains the seeds of a delegitimating strategy, which will become common in years to come. By highlighting its literary merits, he undermines its credibility in the realm of the nonfictional. Damning with praise, not only stretching the reader’s credibility by equating Facundo with the Dantesque period it describes, Gonzalez avers, ““And when historic truth threatens to destroy artistic form—because truth can sometimes be inharmonious—he does not doubt for an instant, and with the enthusiasm of an artist, he is creative wherever it is necessary to save aesthetic charm.” [Y cuando la verdad historica amenaza destruir la forma artistica, porque Ja verdad suele ser inarmonica a veces, no duda un instante, y con el entusiasmo del artista, crea donde es necesario salvar el encanto estético.] (vol. II, 230) As if unsure that literary discourse can alone provide the sort of national enthusiasm he wants to generate, Gonzalez turns to the power of the religious, with remarkable insight into how nationalism is mystically inflected from the religious cultural systems from which it derives.©° He equates the two emotions, as was remarked previously, and he plunders the religious vocabulary on several occasions, as when he calls Facundo, Rosas, and Aldao “the horrible trinity .. . of our history” {la horrible trinidad . . . de nuestra historia]. (vol. II, 231) That this array of discursive strategies is part of a conservative agenda becomes clear not only because of its penchant for nostalgia and for the values of the past; at times it is explicitly articulated as a response to “the thunder of the revolution of progress” [estruendo de las revoluciones del progreso], which has harmful effects: “it deafens and distances us from those glorious times.” [nos ensordece y nos aparta de aquellas épocas de gloria.] This agenda resonates interestingly with the return to the native which was to be operated in the early years of the twentieth century as an attempt to shut out the immigrant threat. Writing in the city, deeply involved in the aftermath of the capitalization of Buenos Aires and in the state’s confrontation of the ethnic changes brought about by immigration, Gonzalez tries to freeze the national being as constituted in the country: The color of legend and the tone of the plainsman’s song change when they enter the city limits, because that is where history is elaborated, and the fantasy of poetry vanishes in contact with positive truth. That is why the 125

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troubadours who sing our intimate tradition are disappearing from the face of our land... and soon, when the century’s inventions pour into the scenes of such somber drama waves of men of different and indifferent races, not a trace will be left on our land of its past heroes, not even of the terrifying

ones.... [El colorido de la leyenda y el tono del cantor de la Ilanura, cambian al penetrar en el recinto de la ciudad, porque alli se elaboran los materiales de la historia, y las fantasias del poema se desvanecen al contacto frio de la verdad positiva. Por eso van desapareciendo de la superficie de nuestros territorios esos trovadores que cantan la tradiciOn intima... y pronto, cuando ya los inventos del siglo derramen en los escenarios de tanto drama sombrio, oleadas de hombres de razas distintas e indiferentes, no habra quedado en el suelo ni un rastro de los pasados héroes, siquiera los del terror. . . .] (vol.

II, 207-208)

As was to be expected, the garnering of tradition which Gonzalez performs to stave off this threat ends up producing statuary forms with the fixity of stone.

WRITING BEYOND THE MARGINS: LUCIO V. MANSILLA’S UNA EXCURSION A LOS INDIOS RANQUELES Leaving the Fuerte Sarmiento behind on March 30, 1870, Lucio V. Man-

silla ventured out into territory held by the ranqueles Indians, whose chieftain Mariano Rosas was to confirm a peace treaty which Mansilla had negotiated in a preliminary way on behalf of the national government. Beyond the frontier—itself a key factor in the mechanism of power and containment through which the nation-state completed its territorial expansion—in the no-man’s-land framed by the two names which mark the avatars of power (Rosas and Sarmiento), Mansilla explores the possibilities of challenging and perhaps subverting the authority that had relegated him to a marginal post as frontier commander. Una excursion a los indios ranqueles can indeed be read as an attempt to find a discursive space from which to launch an attack on Sarmiento’s writing and on his presidency. How can a disempowered discourse be legitimized and, concomitantly, help reverse the hierarchy which controls it? In a provisional way, we can anticipate that Mansilla’s strategy is to slip in and out of the boundary line between the inside and the outside, exploiting his eccentricity. The result is the production of shifting subject positions in a titillating game of masks 126

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which turn marginality into an interesting as well as a contradictory locus of enunciation. As Rosas’s nephew, Mansilla led a life marked by constant attempts to recover the power lost by his family after Caseros, in actuality attempting the move from the margin to the center, managing to come very close to it but always relegated to the margin in the end. His relationship with Sarmiento epitomizes these failed moves, but it was part of a recurrent pattern. The ministerio to which he aspired never materialized, even though he occupied a number of prestigious posts in the Congress and in the diplomatic world. Although the ties of friendship connected him with presidents Sarmiento, Avellaneda and Roca, his political fortune had a tantalizing way of never quite moving beyond the threshold of success. In 1898, at the age of sixty-eight, during Roca’s second presidency, the peripatetic Mansilla returned from Paris to Buenos Aires in the hope of finally being

named minister, only to have his hopes dashed as they had been thirty years earlier. As late as 1907, when he made his last trip to Buenos Aires from Paris, Mansilla misread the public’s interest in him and the warm welcome of his friends and admirers as signs of political power, but they never materialized into high office. The circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of Una excursion bear examination because they are bound up with the construc-

tion of the subject in the text. At the root of this book lies a bitter disappointment with Sarmiento’s unwillingness to appoint Mansilla to a ministry. As a friend of Sarmiento’s adopted son Dominguito and as an influential officer in the army during the War with Paraguay, Mansilla had

become actively involved in Sarmiento’s nomination to the presidency, and was the one who announced it to him in the United States. When the Club Libertad met in February to choose its candidate, Mansilla and Rufino Varela were the ones who nominated Domingo Sarmiento. Fueled by the sense of his ascendancy and by a letter written by Sarmiento after Dominguito’s death, offering him “all that a father can offer the friend, companion and leader of his ill-fated son” [todo lo que un padre puede ofrecer al amigo, companiero y jefe del hijo malogrado}],®' Mansilla is said

to have presented himself at Sarmiento’s residence with a list of possible nominees for the future cabinet. At the sight of Mansilla’s name, Sarmiento abruptly exclaimed: “You a minister! Listen, I shall need a very brainy cabinet to moderate myself. They brand us as crazy—you less than me, maybe because you are less entitled to it still. Together we would be unbearable... .” [j Usted ministro! Hombre, necesitaré un ministerio muy sesudo para morigerarme a mi mismo. Nos tildan de locos; a usted menos que a mi, tal vez por no haber adquirido méritos para ello todavia. Juntos 127

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seriamos inaguantables. . . .]®* Martin de Gainza became minister of war, and Mansilla ended up as comandante de fronteras (frontier/border commander) in Rio Cuarto, under the orders of General Arredondo. With his taste for theatrical flourish, Mansilla portrayed himself as an actor with-

out a role and without a place in the political representation he himself had organized: “At this time in my life, I play the role of someone who finds no space, not even standing, at the great political production that he himself has organized.” [En este momento de mi vida represento el papel de un concurrente que no halla lugar, ni de pie, en la gran representacion politica que él mismo ha organizado.]® The ensuing displacement is the primal scene for Una excursion a los indios ranqueles—both for the trip and for its textual inscription. It was exacerbated by the very negative effect of Mansilla’s initiative: upon his return, he was removed from his job and forced to return to Buenos Aires. In May, 1870, the newspaper La Tribuna of Buenos Aires started printing Una excursion in serialized form. By November it appeared as a book. How does Mansilla use the space of writing to respond to the affronts he was subjected to? One of the strategies he contrives is the setting up of a stage on which the “I”? as consummate performer beckons a sympathetic addressee and dazzles him® with his moves. Mansilla’s penchant for the theatrical has been commented on by several critics,®* and in Una excursion it implies a complex crafting of both the subject and the audience so as to enlist support. The effect is to stake out a space in which an apparently counterhegemonic discourse can circulate, exploring the multiple positions from which to address the structures of power represented by Sarmiento as author and as president. One can imagine Mansilla ad-

dressing both Santiago Arcos, to whom the “letters” are dedicated, and also, in a more general way, the sort of supportive friends who had put together a “banquet of redress” for him in Buenos Aires on his return from Rio Cuarto, in June, 1870. Astutely modulating their attention and their

response, his show contained an array of contrivances both serious and funny, flirting with concealment and disclosure. Master magician exemplaire, Mansilla is himself and the other, as in the famous Witcomb photographs which attracted crowds on Florida Street. He even affects the audience with his tricks, giving its identity a shifting, unstable quality. Thus, while he is ostensibly writing Una excursion as a series of letters to his friend Santiago Arcos, he acknowledges the problematic nature of this reception from the very start, stating he does not know where Arcos is or where he can be found.* If Arcos may be elusive as a reader, he performs a metonymic function which admirably represents the type of audience Mansilla wishes to invoke. Like Mansilla, Arcos was a man of means who 128

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had travelled a great deal, had spent time on both sides of the civilization/ barbarism divide, was well read and yet able to enjoy the pleasures and challenges of rural life in Latin America. An author in his own right, Arcos had published a book revealing his knowledge of the question at hand,

Cuestion de los indios: Las fronteras y los indios (1860), a later work entitled La Plata: Etude historique (reviewed rather cursorily by Mansilla himself in La Revista de Buenos Aires®), and, in Spanish, his Cuentos de tierra adentro, displaying his knowledge of rural mores.®? He spent a major portion of his life in Spain and France: like Mansilla, he was a true connoisseur of the hegemonic world.” Arcos and his kind would provide the ideal audience for Una excursion: so well acquainted with the refinement of life in the Club del Progreso or in the Parisian salons that he could

comfortably take distance from it and enjoy the sort of tourism undertaken by Mansilla. It is, indeed, not accidental that he chose the title “Una excursiOn” for the book. As Julio Ramos put it, it is a “new type of touristic exercise”: one which entails exploring barbarism,”! in the same vein in which a seasoned traveller chooses remote corners of the world to satisfy his need for the new. Hence, the introductory remarks to Arcos: ... after touring Europe and America, after having lived like a marquis in Paris and like a guarani in Paraguay, having eaten mazamorra in the Rio de la Plata, charquican in Chile, oysters in New York, macarroni in Naples, truffles in Périgord, chipd in Asuncion, I remember one of the great ambitions of your life was to eat an omelette made with the eggs of the bird from the Pampas in Naguel Mapo, which means “The Tiger’s Place.” ([. . . después de haber recorrido la Europa y la América, de haber vivido como un marqués en Paris y como un guarani en el Paraguay; de haber comido mazamorra en el Rio de la Plata, charquican en Chile, ostras en Nueva York, macarroni en Napoles, trufas en el Perigord, chipd en la Asuncion, recuerdo que una de las grandes aspiraciones de tu vida era comer una tortilla de huevos de aquella ave pampeana en Naguel Mapo que quiere decir “Lugar del Tigre.] 72

In that spirit, Mansilla can boast of wanting to make this trip as much as any low-ranking secretary may long for a post in the Parisian embassy, of preferring to sleep under the stars to being subjected to a hotel bed in

Rosario, of being just as happy comfortably seated in an armchair as around the campfire with his soldiers, of enjoying a meal at the Club del

Progreso as much as the puchero he shared with Mariano Rosas. His worldly wisdom and refinement allow him to adjust while at the same time making him ever ready for the new and different. I29

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Since his intended readers share these qualities, Mansilla knows how to provide the pleasures they expect. They can travel vicariously with him, and they can enjoy the staging of the amusing encounters between Mansilla and the ranqueles as third-party observers in a double entendre with

the former at the expense of the latter. That is why Mansilla can afford to present himself in ridiculous situations: dramatic irony allows the audience to see—and enjoy—the ranqueles confronting a representative of civilization who has to bracket his superiority temporarily. Mansilla dwells on passages where he is subjected to the social protocol imposed by the ranqueles, as a comical victim of their long-winded speeches or of their drunken revelries, and he comments on them to a reader who 1s ready to laugh at and appreciate his plight: ““You cannot imagine how funny and ceremonious these barbarians are” [No hay idea de lo comicos y ceremoniosos que son estos barbaros], (vol. I, 174) he remarks after hearing their lengthy greetings; forced to pick up the Indians one by one, crying a vociferous “jjaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” as he struggles with their weight, he supplies the following interpretive passage: ““That was a passage fit for a comedy. I almost exploded and my lungs almost burst, because this business of uttering a yell that can make the earth shudder at the same time as one bends over to pick up a weight greater than one’s own is a Serious one

from the standpoint of organic physiology. But, above all, it is funny.” [Aquello fue pasaje de comedia, casi reventé, casi se me salieron los pulmones, porque esto de tener que dar un grito que haga estremecer la tierra al mismo tiempo que el cuerpo se encorva, haciendo un gran esfuerzo para levantar del suelo un peso mayor que el de uno mismo, es asunto serio del punto de vista de la fisiologia organica; pero mas que a todo se presta a la risa.] (vol. I, 204) There are many passages like this one, inviting the addressee to both commiserate and laugh with the narrator: one of the many faces of the book is jocose, almost carnivalesque. Exploring the discursive space of the margins, the enunciative site shuns a univocal authorial attitude and operates instead with a shifting mode of representation of both self and other. It can indulge in the depiction of the ridiculous—applied

to the ranqueles and to himself—because in other instances it adopts a different, earnest attitude, which is presumably attenuated and made more palatable by the entertaining qualities of the burlesque. So while, as we shall see, Una excursion undertakes an explicit attack on the ideology that pits civilization against barbarism, it also displays barbarism at its most unpleasant. The same ramqueles that are sometimes held up in admiration are on several occasions depicted as simply disgusting. Mansilla is often the victim of their dirty greetings and of their drunken stupor, manifested as aggressive behavior and a profusion of bodily fluids: 130

——_—_———— THE NATION CONSOLIDATED —————"——... they kissed me with their dirty, drooling, alcoholic, painted mouths. [... me besaban, con sus bocas sucias, babosas, alcohOlicas, pintadas.] (vol. I, 207) I did not want night to fall while I was with that foul-smelling rabble. Their bodies, contaminated by the ingestion of mare’s flesh, gave out nauseating emanations; they burped without control: each belch was like the one of a pig fattened on garlic and onions. Wherever there are Indians, there is a stench. [Yo no queria que me sorprendiera la noche entre aquella chusma hedionda, cuyo cuerpo contaminado por el uso de la carne de yegua, exhalaba nausea-

bundos efluvios; regoldaba a todo trapo, cada eructo parecia el de un cochino cebado con ajos y cebollas. En donde hay indios, hay olor a azafétida. ] (vol. I, 255)

Walking into an Indian’s tent, he has to contend with all sorts of creatures crawling up his legs; in the middle of the night he is accosted by a drunken, slobbering ranquel who has collapsed on top of him. Cultivating his elegantly disengaged attitude towards the trappings of civilization, Mansilla

is constantly shown parting with his belongings in order to satisfy his greedy hosts, who take his fancy red cape, his dagger, his ivory, and silver boleadoras, socks, kerchiefs, shirts, gloves (playfully misrepresented as hand-boots), and his fine Rodgers shaving blade, which becomes a symbol of the cultural inferiority of the Indians, for they do not know the proper use to put it to. The incident with the blade provides an illustration of the textual staging constructed here: having given it to Baigorrita, Mansilla is shocked to discover that such a sophisticated grooming tool is turned into

a tobacco chopper. Unable to make Baigorrita understand the nature of his blunder, Mansilla resorts to a more effective handling of the incident by turning it into a story: I was looking for somebody to whom I could tell what use my fine shaving razor blade was being put to. So I went in search of one of my pilgrimage companions. . . . I called them aside, they made a circle, leaving me in the center, and I told them the story, laughing out aloud.

[Buscaba a quién contarle el uso que mi compadre hacia de mi rica navaja de barba. Fui, pues, en busca de mis companfieros de peregrinacion. . . . Les llamé aparte, hicieron una rueda, dejandome dentro, y les conté el caso, riendome a carcajadas.] (vol. II, 67) 131

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The communicative situation enacted in this passage epitomizes the relationship between text and reader which takes place in the text: those who know better get to hear the tale and to have a good laugh. Their enjoyment may also derive from observing Mansilla temporarily adopt barbarous attitudes, ostentatiously staging his rude behavior, as when he cleans his toenails during a meal. What makes for the reader’s pleasure is not only Mansilla’s behavior, but also the thrill which it causes the ranqueles, seduced by what they mistakenly interpret as “the conquest of barbarism over civilization.” (vol. II, 63) Even in passages where the humor is attenu-

ated, one can sense the appeal to the sophisticated reader of passages where the author sees through the ranqueles’s futile attempts to outwit him. A case in point is Mariano Rosas’s request that Mansilla and his men stand and wait upon their arrival, a stratagem the latter can identify as an

attempt to scrutinize and size up the newcomers. Promoting a private bonding with his peers, Mansilla makes a telling evaluation: In the midst of their sly secrecy and studied malice, the savage and the backward people are always somewhat naive. They think it is easy to fool the foreigner. The pride of ignorance is con-

stantly present, beginning with the belief that they know more than their fellow-beings. . . . Mariano Rosas thought he was fooling me. [En medio de su disimulo y malicia genial y estudiada, los salvajes y los pueblos atrasados en civilizaciOn tienen siempre algo de candorosos. Ellos creen cosa muy facil enganar al extranjero. El orgullo de la ignorancia se traduce constantemente, empezando por creer que se sabe mas que el projimo. ... Mariano Rosas creyo enganarme.] (vol. I, 196)

The reader’s support is at times enlisted in order to gain a sympathetic ear for a self-deprecating narrative “I” who disarmingly reveals his weaknesses and his doubts and who can poke fun at himself. One can detect Mansilla’s grappling with the sense of his fragile political standing in passages addressing Santiago Arcos directly, asking him in a studied, lighthearted tone if he does not think that the excursion is a waste of time, or acknowledging the marginality of his undertaking by declaring that since he cannot sing the glories of his sword, he has had to resort to describing the ranqueles and their ways. In these instances he indirectly confronts

the disappointment which motivated the text by disparaging his own importance in the intimacy of the dialogue with his peers. At times the tone becomes openly parodic, as on the occasions when he toys with the Lucius Victorius Imperator dreams, where the irreverent presentation of 132

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his undertaking and of the rhetoric which might uphold it are insistently enacted. Yet this apparent modesty allows Mansilla to display his superior skills

both as an army commander and as a writer, always self-consciously aware of the dynamics between power and discourse in the worlds of the “barbarians,” of the “civilized,” and of his text. One thing he knows he alone can do in the circumstances is to translate one culture into the other, to maintain a critical attitude on civilization but to flaunt his mastery of

culture and languages so as to render the barbarous in sophisticated terms. Mansilla is a dexterous transculturator with a taste for dissonance, so he playfully shows his erudition in contexts which both invite and sub-

vert it. Thus, he indulges in quoting Manzoni, only to pull the ground literally from under his head as he discovers that he had been resting on a groundhog while he was having the vision of greatness Manzoni’s verses had conjured. When Epumer collapses in a drunken stupor, Mansilla renders his fall by merely quoting, “And I fell, like a dead body falls!” [E caddi, come corpo morto cade!] (vol. I, 257); Mariano Rosas is likened to Bismarck when it comes to assessing military strength; a soldier’s amorous plight is interpreted in the light of Byron’s thoughts on women. It hardly matters that the connections are strained; Mansilla is out to perform for his audience, and he wants to dazzle with his skills. Perhaps no passage more clearly illustrates his suspect flirting with his own unworthiness than the one in which he starts off proclaiming: “I am like the fools. I never have premonitions in my dreams.” [Yo soy como los patanes. Nunca tengo presentimientos en suefios.] (vol. II, 199)—only to exhibit his erudition by a series of comparisons with Hesiod, Scipio, Alexander, and Hercules. If later on he writes an invective against learning, it loses ground to its dazzling display throughout the text. (vol. II, 244) Although Mansilla artfully belittles himself in the flirtatious ways that

have been described, he very carefully grooms an image of authority among his subordinates. Colonel Mansilla is always in control of his men, even when he sits around the fire with them to listen to their stories and lend them his friendship. If Rufino Pereira’s drunken behavior jeopardizes the colonel’s image in front of the ranqueles or the other soldiers, Mansilla’s very angry reaction leaves no doubt as to who is in charge, for he knows that the consequences of losing their respect are fatal. His very uneasy dealings with the stranger believed to be one of Calfucura’s spies reveal the discomfort caused by someone who does not clearly perform the role of the subaltern. The narrator may playfully dwell on some questionable ineptitude when only his reader will witness it, but the dealings with his men show him in full control of his authority. 133

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Within this carefully crafted if shifting locus of enunciation, Una excursi6n maps out a mode of representation of otherness which also serves as the point of departure for a critique of government policies. To accomplish this, Mansilla posits yet another interlocutor: a deliberately ambiguous “we” turned into the target of his attacks. Conveniently cloaked in this communal guilt, Mansilla can denounce the Sarmientine model while seeming to be a part of it. Transposing Homi Bhabha’s observation that “in the colonial margin the culture of the West reveals its ‘différance’ ” ”? to the economy of space which obtains in Mansilla’s postcolonial context, it is tempting to say that the marginal lands beyond the Fuerte Sarmiento allow for the articulation of a self-conscious reflection on the hegemonic values embodied in “‘civilization.”” Embedded in the narration of the dealings of Mansilla with his hosts lies a small treatise on the ills of Facundo’s conceptual scheme and of its author’s presidential policies. Time and again Mansilla blames this “we” for the failure to educate the ranqueles

and to value “our” native men, for the civil wars which are rooted in “our” feuds and hatreds, for the selfishness of the cities, which keep the rural proletariat in a state of ignorance and stupidity, for “‘our” oppressive ways. The allusions to Sarmiento are barely veiled in this critical space, as the leader of the “bad government” which is decried. In some instances the attack is so specific that we see through the mask of the communal “we”: The obsession with imitation wants to strip us of everything: of our national

physiognomy, of our habits, of our tradition. They are turning us into a people fit for an operetta. We have to play all the roles, except the one we can play. They try to persuade us with the institutions, with laws, with the progress of others. Undoubtedly, we move forward. But would we not have moved further studying the problems of our orga-

nization with other criteria and seeking inspiration in the real needs of our land?

[La monomania de la imitaciOn quiere despojarnos de todo: de nuestra fisonomia nacional, de nuestras costumbres, de nuestra tradicion. Nos van haciendo un pueblo de zarzuela. Tenemos que hacer todos los papeles, menos el que podemos. Se nos arguye con las instituciones, con las leyes, con los adelantos ajenos. Y es indudable que avanzamos. Pero, sno habriamos avanzado mas estudiando con otro criterio los problemas de nuestra organizaciOn e inspirandonos en las necesidades reales de la tierra?] (vol. I, 236)

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Anticipating the attacks on immigration which were common towards the end of the century, Mansilla cries impatiently, ‘“‘And, to look even better,

crying out for people, asking for immigration!” [;Y para lucirse mejor, todos los dias clamando por gente, pidiendo inmigracion!] (vol. I, 250) Within this discursive frame, he repeatedly scorns “civilization” both for its neglect of its obligation to the “barbarous” as well as for its hypocrisy. As the writing subject takes on a serious, critical stance, he concomitantly develops the praise for the ranqueles and their mores. Apparently oblivious to the implications of his insistent references to them as “these barbarians,” Mansilla elaborates on their many virtues and values, pointing to their Christian traits, their generosity, their hospitality, and their admirable respect for animals. On occasion, even in those situations which invite disparaging remarks, he produces a reinterpretation of the ranqueles’s behavior in comparative anthropological terms. A case in point is Baigorrita’s claim, upon Mansilla’s departure from his tolderias, that the eagle he has sighted is actually pointing their way. Mansilla catches himself on the verge of laughing at Baigorrita and then remembers that he indulges in equally superstitious behavior when he shuns a party of only thirteen or when he avoids killing spiders at night. Then comes the levelling anthropological meditation: “There is a world in which all men are equal; it is

the world of worries.” [Hay un mundo en el que todos los hombres son iguales; es el mundo de las preocupaciones.] (vol. I], 110) After a trying day spent in lengthy discussions with Mariano Rosas and Baigorrita about the treaty which motivated Mansilla’s trip, he elaborates a series of reflections about the relationships between politics, government, and the people which place the day’s events in a completely new light. Mansilla’s interpretive effort locates the caciques’s negotiations within the context of the “civilized world,” with allusions to Napoleon III and to the Argentine government, so as to flatten differences and promote assimilations. But here again, this apparently counterhegemonic discourse is destabilized by the very terms with which it makes its claims—“Dwarfs give us the measure of giants—barbarians of civilization” [Los enanos nos dan la medida de los gigantes y los barbaros la medida de la civilizacion] (vol. I, 162)— he avers in conclusion, undermining the positive thrust of his statement by the disparaging implications of “dwarfs” and “barbarians.” There is, indeed, no position from which the writing subject can avoid the pitfalls of the political unconscious in which he is embedded. If writing in the margins allows him to question the hegemonic system, it is also insidiously besieged by the mental structures sanctioned by that system. When he selfcritically exclaims, ““We proclaim that we are wise, that we read and study

135

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so much—what for? To look down on a poor indian, calling him, barbarous, savage. ...” [Tanto que declamamos sobre nuestra sabiduria, tanto que leemos y estudiamos, ¢y para qué? Para despreciar a un pobre indio, llamandolo barbaro, salvaje. . . .] (vol. II, 244), the irony is not lost on the reader, who has repeatedly stumbled upon those very words throughout the text. Moreover, Mansilla is doomed to produce a discourse riddled with contradictions by the material conditions which took him to the ranqueles in the first place. For indeed, the excursion is not merely disinterested tourism after all: Mansilla is negotiating a treaty with the ranqueles, and in order to get it ratified he deploys with stunning conviction the arguments in favor of taking their land away from them. Notwithstanding the numerous passages berating the treatment of the ranqueles, Mansilla proclaims the supremacy of the Christians in no uncertain terms. When Mariano Rosas accuses them of taking their lands away (and this is unquestionably the heart of the matter), Mansilla dismantles the ranqueles’s claim to the lands of their forebears by stating that the land did not belong to the Indians, but to those who made it productive through their labor. It is here that he discloses the real nature of his enterprise, and its affiliation with the program of economic development which the government is propounding: “The Government forces have occupied Rio Quinto to safeguard the frontier’s security; but those lands do not belong to the Christians yet; they are everyone’s and no one’s; some day they will belong to one, or two, or more, when the Government sells them in order to breed cattle on them, to grow wheat, corn.” [Las fuerzas del Gobierno han ocupado el Rio Quinto para mayor seguridad de la frontera; pero esas tierras no pertenecen a los cristianos todavia; son de todos y no son de nadie; seran algun dia de uno, de dos o de mas, cuando el Gobierno las venda, para criar en ellas ganados, sembrar trigo, maiz.] (vol. II, 148) When the argument heats up, Mansilla has no qualms about brandishing the argument of cultural superiority with a fierceness which undermines the rhetoric of equality he so carefully elaborates in other instances: “You are ignorant people who do not know what you are talking about; if you were Christian, if you knew how to work, you would know what I know; you would not be poor, you would be rich. ... You know nothing because you cannot read, because you have no books.” [Ustedes son unos ignorantes que no saben lo que dicen; si fueran cristianos, si supieran trabajar, sabrian lo que yo sé; no serian pobres, serian ricos. . . . Ustedes no saben nada, porque no saben leer; porque no tienen libros.] (vol. II, 149) After all, Mansilla’s dazzling discursive stratagems cannot obscure the fact that his book belongs to the literature of exploration which was so deeply con136

—_—_—_—————._ THE NATION CONSOLIDATED ————— nected with the general enterprise of economic expansion prevailing in the nineteenth century. It is not fortuitous that Una excursion was awarded a prize by the International Geographic Congress of Paris in 1875: the kind of knowledge it provided about hitherto uncharted territories was highly valued.” If we place the book within the broader European context of the literature of exploration, it becomes immediately apparent that Mansilla is conforming to aspects of the contemporary cultural production focused on making more lands productive and turning the population into labor. So although he shares with his metropolitan readers the rhetoric of “anticonquest,” as Mary Louise Pratt has aptly named the attempts to vindicate

native cultures while still assimilating them to European cultural paradigms,”> he frequently gives away his interest in the qualities of the land he is exploring, the kinds of grass that grow, the availabilty of water, and the number of animals which could be satisfied by it. His enthusiasm for the economic potential of the area may give him away in occasional exclamations like, “A knowledgeable and hard-working rancher would make a fortune there in a few years.” [Un estanciero entendido y laborioso alli haria fortuna en pocos anios.] (vol. I, 88) His enthusiasm is also reflected in visions of the future greatness of the Argentine Republic, such as the

following one, “... I thought for a moment about the future of our Argentine Republic the day when civilization—which will come with freedom, peace, wealth—invades those deserted lands, which are deprived of beauty, lacking in artistic interest, but adequate for cattle breeding and agriculture.” [... pensé un instante en el porvenir de la Republica Argentina el dia en que la civilizacion, que vendra con la libertad, con la paz, con la riqueza, invada aquellas comarcas desiertas, destituidas de belleza, sin interés artistico, pero adecuadas a la cria de ganados y a la agricultura.] (vol. I, 100) Perhaps the most telling passage is at the close of the book, when Mansilla and his men are returning to the Fuerte Sarmiento after his eighteen-day trip. Having described the qualities of the lands— already designated as campos, with the ring of economic exploitation— he again foresees their “grand future” and asks rhetorically when that “pink dawn will shine upon them.” The answer is equally rhetorical, and it confronts in one fell swoop the imminence of the ranqueles’s extermination: “Oh! When the ranqueles have been exterminated or reduced in their numbers, christianized, and civilized.” [;Ay! Cuando los ranqueles hayan sido exterminados o reducidos, cristianizados y civilizados.] (vol. II, 266) One is tempted, then, to read Una excursion as affiliated with the apparatus of notation and of writing which enabled the surveillance through which the nation’s space and identity could be organized. Bringing the other into play within this reconfiguration of the national form is, 137

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as Homi Bhabha has suggested, a strategy of nationalist discourse: by absorbing marginal elements in the panorama, it is relying on otherness to construct an image of the whole. Mansilla’s book allows for the percep-

tion of an Argentina which can integrate the Indian and the gaucho (a national type greatly praised and defended here) into a landscape of productive campos. To quote Bhabha, “The nation reveals, in its ambivalent and vacillating representation, the ethnography of its own historicity and opens up the possibility of other narratives of the people and their difference.” 6 Thus, the different kinds of identity (“the otherness of the peopleas-one”’ which Bhabha alludes to) allow for the assimilation of Argentina’s plural ethnographic strands into a national composite. Here might lie the prescience of Una excursion a los indios ranqueles: while it vindicates the ranqueles’s way of life, it faces up to the needs of economic development— the Indians have to be civilized or exterminated. That almost a decade

later his friend Julio Argentino Roca undertook the Campafia del Desierto, should not come as a surprise: Mansilla’s text had taken it upon itself to both produce the knowledge about an important tribe and to sing their swan song. One would like to think that he would have advocated a less violent approach, but the ground for the Campana is charted by him. Through his writing he not only provided a useful archive which mapped out a scarcely known area about to become part of the national territory, but he also addressed what Hayden White has described as ‘“‘an area of problematical experience that cannot be accommodated easily to conventional conceptions of the normal or familiar.” ’’ By venturing into Tierra Adentro, and observing its “wild men,” Mansilla learned about the ranqueles and raised the question of who is an Argentine, at the same time as he gained critical focus on the conditions of civilized existence. Unfortunately, his insight did not suffice to stop the alienation and destruction which lay ahead, and knowledge, as is usually the case, became the handmaiden of power.

A POSTSCRIPT ON FACUNDO Harold Bloom has taught us about the belatedness of revisionary writing,

and it is tempting to partially transfer his theory of poetic tradition to the complex relation in Una excursién between Mansilla and the precursor he is attempting to surmount and displace—Sarmiento. Mansilla’s book evokes Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” precisely because of the ambivalence between resistance—often thinly veiled criticism—and allusion. Even as it defies the central dichotomy of Facundo, unmasking the ills of 138

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civilization in their many forms, inviting his reader to reassess previously

held assumptions about barbarism, the shadow of Facundo the strong text looms over it.’8 If Sarmiento’s book opens with the “immense extension” of the Argentine pampas, barely populated except for the undiffer-

entiated indigenous horde, lying in ambush and ready to attack, Mansilla’s sets out to correct that both by means of topographical information and by providing that “horde” with an identity rooted in its voice. Within

the literature of exploration, Una excursion is quite exceptional in its lending the ranqueles the gift of speech within the text, even at times making careful note of their choice of words. Mansilla resorts to direct speech to allow his different interlocutors in the ranqueles community the chance to speak, to become differentiated subjects. In fact, his interest in the ranqueles leads to linguistic information on their complex conversation protocol, or on the way in which they count. Privileging the exploring eye, Mansilla’s testimonial account claims to substitute the mistaken descriptions of the pampas by impatiently decrying the inaccuracies perpetrated by his predecessors: ““What descriptive errors have been made by those who depicted the Pampa assuming it to be in all its vastness an immense plain!”’ [Los que han hecho la pintura de la Pampa, suponiéndola en toda

su inmensidad una vasta Ilanura, jen qué errores descriptivos han incurrido!} (vol. I, 92-93) Obviously correcting Facundo’s rendering of the topos of the immense, empty land, he proceeds to map out difference where there had been an absence of distinctions, and he elaborates on the errors that have led to misrepresentations of the omba and the cactus, or on the exact configuration of areas that he names in ways other than ‘“‘pampas.” Much the same could be said about the gauchos: if Sarmiento

sees them as barbarous and works out a Romantic typology of them in order to privilege the “gaucho outlaw” as a focus of textual attention, Mansilla provides a rich repertory of gauchos who tell their life stories in ways which anticipate Martin Fierro’s.”? Harking back to Facundo—but not naming it—he remonstrates about those who have never seen the gaucho and are ignorant about the difference between a paisano gaucho and a “gaucho,” because they are ensconced in their urban milieus and prefer to travel abroad than to get to know their own land, choosing to “swallow up the miles by railroad” instead of “enjoying the primitive pleasure of going by cart.” (vol. II, 130) As if to underscore the conflictual relationship with Facundo, there are passages in Una excursi6n which magnify the precursor text by setting themselves up as feeble rewritings of it. One in particular bears analysis because its coda turns to Sarmiento directly, as if to suggest that the imprint of his name were the device through which the story became perti139

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nent. It is one of the few tales that Mansilla himself narrates around the campfire, and he claims to have borrowed it from his narratee, Santiago Arcos. In it, a muleteer who had once fought with Facundo Quiroga and was trying to flee from justice got his long hair caught in a locust tree as he attempted to hide in a forest. He did manage to evade his followers by craftily pretending to be dead and crying in a ghostly tone, “Long live Quiroga!,” which had the desired effect of inspiring their terror and their flight. But the muleteer’s efforts to disengage himself from the tree were to no avail, and he ended up perishing of starvation. Mansilla’s rendering of his death is farcical, claiming that it was not caused by lack of food, but, instead, by indigestion, for the man had eaten his own shirt. The story’s playful coda merits quotation: So I came in along one path and left along another. I do not know if my audience will enjoy this story. ... Iam a porteno [from the port-city of Buenos Aires] from the district of San Juan, and no one is a prophet in his own land. And that is why Sarmiento, being from San Juan, is the president, as the fulfillment of one of my Paraguay prophecies. [Y entré por un caminito y sali por otro. No sé si al pablico le gustara este cuento. ... Yo soy portenio, del barrio de San Juan y nadie es profeta en su tierra. Por eso Sarmiento, siendo de San Juan, es Presidente, habiéndose cumplido con él una de mis profecias del Paraguay.] (vol. I, 105)

The story invokes Facundo Quiroga and Sarmiento in telling ways. Not only does the hapless muleteer appeal to the fear Quiroga’s name evokes as the prototype of the powerful “gaucho outlaw,” but his ill-fated diversion into the forest repeats (changing its outcome and narrative tone) the very successful one dazzlingly portrayed by Sarmiento when Quiroga makes his sally into Facundo. Both men were fleeing justice; in both instances a locust tree (algarrobo) is centrally involved in the story’s outcome. But Mansilla’s story has a deflationary outcome: it repeats its antecedent only to underscore the impossibility of producing a master text like Sarmiento’s. If in Facundo the story serves to find a narrative origin for the country leader’s nom de guerre (The Tiger of the Plains), in Una excursion all we have is a ghostlike invocation which only prefigures the muleteer’s death. In an oblique and intriguing way, Mansilla alludes to these differences in his metatextual commentary at the end of his tale: the statement, “That is why Sarmiento .. . is the president,” cannot fail to 140

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remind the reader of the power that writing produced for one man but not for the other. Mansilla, like his muleteer, is sometimes trapped by the very authority figure he would like to supersede.*°° There are other instances in which Mansilla leads his reader, to borrow a phrase from Harold Bloom, “not [to] see directly, but mediately through the precursor,” ®! such as when he echoes Sarmiento’s lengthy meditation on the color red, calling attention to the marginality imposed on him by his close family ties with Rosas and showing the price he has had to pay for innocently wishing to wear a red cape. Again, Mansilla’s version attempts to invert the precursor text with the insight derived from a marginal subject position. David Vifias has persuasively argued that Mansilla’s writing after 1880 (particularly his Entre-nos: causeries del jueves, of 1889-1890) consolidates the oligarchy’s sense of the sacred nature of its own mission by constantly promoting its experience of intimacy and agreement in his texts.*? Although this strategy is already in place, as has been argued above, in the earlier Una excursion a los, indios ranqueles, it does not suffice to overcome the uneasiness about his marginality in the post-Caseros years. Nor does it suppress the contradictions which beset him as he undertakes to criticize civilization while remaining committed to it, and to displace a writer and a president whom he once supported. Sitting on the fence, or watching the world upside down as he was wont to do during the Paraguay War, Mansilla indulges in the eccentric vantage point but also pays the price for it.®

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205

——————— FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE —————_ Romero, Luis Alberto. “Sarmiento: testigo y testimonio de la sociedad de Santiago,” Revista Iberoamericana 143 (1988): 461-475. Rosa, José Maria. El revisionismo responde. Buenos Aires: Eds. Pampa y Cielo, 1964. Sainz de Medrano, Luis. “El arte de contar en Sarmiento,” Cuadernos para Investigacion de la Literatura Hispanica 1 (1978): 165-173. Salas, Julio C. Civilizaci6n y barbarie. Caracas: Ediciones Centauro, 1977. Salomon, Noel. Realidad, ideologia y literatura en el Facundo de D. F. Sarmiento. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983. ——.. Etudes Américaines. Bordeaux: Editions Biere, Bibliothéque de L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes Hispaniques, 1980. Sanchez Reulet, Anibal. “La generacion de Sarmiento y el problema de nuestro destino,” Sur VIII (1938): 35-46. Santomauro, Héctor N. La generacion argentina de 1880. Buenos Aires: Unicornio Centro Editor, 1992. Sarmiento, Domingo F. Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Luz del Dia, 1948. ———. Viajes. Buenos Aires: Editorial Belgrano, 1981.

———. Facundo. Prélogo, Noé Jitrik. Notas y cronologia, Nora Dottori, Silvia Zanetti. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977. ———.. Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; or Civilization and Barbarism. Trans. Mary Peabody Mann. New York: Macmillan, n.d. (first published in 1868). ——.. Civilisation et barbarie; moeurs, coutumes et caractéres des peuples argentins: Facundo Quiroga et Aldao. Trans. A. Giraud. Paris: A. Bertrand, 1853. ———. Conflicto y armonias de las razas en América. Buenos Aires: La Cultura Argentina, 1915. ———. Recuerdos de provincia. Buenos Aires: Biblioteca de La Nacion, n.d. ——. Polémica literaria. Buenos Aires: Editorial Cartago, 1955. ———. Cartas de Sarmiento a la Senora Maria Mann. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, 1936. Scarano, Monica E. “La produccion literaria de Sarmiento como metatexto cultural: el concepto de ‘cultura americana,” Revista Interamericana de bibliografia 41 (1991): 224-232. Scobie, James. Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 1870-1910. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. ———.. Argentina: A City and a Nation. New York & London: Oxford University Press, 1971. ———. La lucha por la consolidacion de la nacionalidad argentina, 1852-1862. Trans. G. de Civiny. Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1964. Segreti, Carlos A. La correspondencia de Sarmiento. Primera serie (1838-1854). Cordoba: Poder Ejecutivo de la Provincia de Cordoba, 1988. Shumway, Nicholas. The Invention of Argentina. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

206

_ BIBLIOGRAPHY Solberg, Carl. Immigration and Nationalism: Argentina and Chile, 1890-1914. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970. Soler Cafias, Luis M. San Martin, Rosas y la falsificacion de la historia; las inexactitudes de R. Rojas. Buenos Aires: Eds. Theoria, 1968. Soler, Sebastian. ‘‘Leccion de actualidad,” Sur VIII (1938): 47-56.

Sommer, Doris. “Plagiarized Authenticity: Sarmiento’s Cooper and Others,” Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991: 52-82. Stabb, Martin S. In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. Stern, Mirta. “Una excursion a los indios ranqueles: espacio textual y ficcion tipografica,” Filologia XX (1985): 117-138. Taborda, Saul A. Facundo, critica y polémica. Buenos Aires: Perrot, 1959. Tamagno, Roberto. Sarmiento, los intelectuales y el imperialismo inglés. Buenos Aires: Pena Lillo Ed., 1963. Teran, Oscar. Positivismo y nacién en Argentina: Con una seleccion de textos de J. M. Ramos Mejia, A. Alvarez, C. O. Bunge y José Ingenieros. Buenos Aires: Puntosur Editores, 1987. Torres Roggero, J. La cara oculta de Lugones. Buenos Aires: Eds. Castaneda, 1977.

Tri, Segundo A. “Las ideas historicas en Sarmiento,” Humanidades XXXVII (1961): 301-311. Verdevoye, Paul. Domingo F. Sarmiento: Educateur et publiciste (entre 1839 et 1852). Paris: Institut des Hautes Etudes de |’ Amérique Latine, 1963. ———.. “Civilizacion y barbarie.” Correo de los Andes 54-55 (1988-1989). Vicini, Salvador R. ‘‘Humboldt y Sarmiento,” Filologia VII (1961): 179-185. Vinas, David. Literatura argentina y realidad politica. Buenos Aires: Ed. Jorge Alvarez, 1964. Vitier, Medardo. “El Facundo de Sarmiento,” Del ensayo argentino. México: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1945: 63-73.

Vivian, Dorothy Sherman. “The Protagonist in the Works of Sarmiento and Cooper,” Hispania XLVIII (1965): 806-810. Weinberg, Félix. ““El presidente electo Sarmiento en Buenos Aires, testimonios del periodismo portefio de 1868,” Humanidades XXXVII, 3 (1961): 313-56. ———. “La antitesis sarmientina ‘Civilizacion-Barbarie’ y su percepcion coetanea en el Rio de la Plata,” Cuadernos Americanos 13 (1988): 97-118.

Woodward, Lee, ed. Positivism in Latin America, 1850-1900: Are Order and Progress Reconciliable? Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath & Co., 1971. Yunque, Alvaro. La literatura social en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Ed. Claridad, 1941. Zarate, A. Facundo Quiroga, Barranca Yaco: Juicios y testimonios. Buenos Aires: Ed. Plus Ultra, 1985.

Zea, Leopoldo. “Una filosofia de la historia hispanoamericana,” Cuadernos americanos XXIII (1945): 156-157. ——.. “El proyecto de Sarmiento y su vigencia,” Cuadernos Americanos 13 (1988): 85-96. 207

———_————— FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE ———_ Zalazar, Daniel E. La evolucion de las ideas de Domingo F. Sarmiento. Somerville, N.J.: Spanish Literature in U.S.A., 1986.

General Works

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Angenot, Marc. La parole pamphletaire. Paris: Payot, 1982. Barker, F., P. Hulme et al., eds. Literature, Politics, and Theory. London & New York: Methuen, 1986. Banuls, André. “Les mots culture et civilisation en francais et en allemand,” Etudes germaniques (1969): 171-180. Barthes, Roland. “Littérature et signification,” Tel Quel 16 (1964): 3-17. Béneton, Philippe. Historie de mots: culture et civilisation. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationales des Sciences Politiques, 1975. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. London: Fontana Collins, 1977. Benveniste, Emile. Problemes de linguistique générale. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1966.

Bhabha, Homi, ed. Nation and Narration. London & New York: Routledge, 1990.

———. “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Literature, Politics and Theory. Francis Barker et al., eds.: 148-172. ———. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” Nation and Narration: 291-322. ——.. The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge, 1994. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Tokyo: United Nations University, 1986. Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Cuvillier, A. Nouveau Vocabulaire philosophique. Paris: A. Colin, 1956. Danto, A. C. Analytical Philosophy of History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. ———. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. David Allison. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Trans. E. Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: NLB, 1976. Febvre, Lucien. Pour une histoire a part entiére. Paris: Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 1962. 208

OO _ BIBLIOGRAPHY Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976. ——_—. “What Is an Author?” Textual Strategies. J. Harari, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979: 141-160. ———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews @ Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

——. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A. M. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Hogarth, 1961.

Gadamer, Hans Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. and ed. David Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

———. Culture, Identity and Politics. London & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Genette, Gérard. Seuils. Paris: Seuil, 1987. ———. Fiction et Diction. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Gossman, Lionel. Between History and Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. New York & London: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Ihwe, Jens. “On the Validation of Text-Grammars in the ‘Study of Literature,” Studies in Text Grammar. Eds. J. S. Petofi and H. Rieser. Dordecht: Reidel, 1973: 300-348. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. M. Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.

——. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Trans. M. Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Johnson, Barbara. ‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” Literature and Psychoanalysis; The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Shoshana Felman, ed. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982: 457-505. Kamboucher, Dennis. “The Theory of Accidents,” Glyph 7 (1980): 149-175. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. “La polémique et ses definitions,” Le Discours polémique. Lyons: P. U. L., 1980. Kracauer, Siegfried. History: The Last Things before the Last. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Lewis, David. “Truth in Fiction,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): 34-46. Maravall, José Antonio. Antiguos y modernos: la idea de progreso en el desarrollo de una sociedad. Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1966.

McHugh, Peter. Defining the Situation: the Organization of Meaning and Social Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. 209

———_————- FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE —————

Murphy, Agnes. The Ideology of French Imperialism. Washington: Catholic University of America, 1946. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. W. Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books, 1969. Noakes, Susan. Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Poulantzas, Nicos. State, Power, Socialism. London: NLB, 1978. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Said, Edward. “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Communities,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 1-26. ———. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. ———. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. ———, F. Jameson, and T. Eagleton. Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Schmidt, Siegfried. ‘“‘A Pragmatic Interpretation of ‘Fictionality,’” Pragmatics of Language and Literature. T. van Dijk, ed. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1976.

Scholes, Robert. “Deconstruction and Communication,” Critical Inquiry 14, 2 (1988): 279-295.

Scott, Joan. “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, 4 (1991): 773-797: Slawinski, Janusz. “Reading and Reader in the Literary Historical Process,” New Literary History 19, 3 (1988): 521-540. Starobinski, Jan. Le reméde dans le mal: Critique et légitimation de Il’artifice a lage des Lumieéres. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Stepan, Nancy. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800-1960. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982. Turner, Victor. “Social Dramas and Stories about Them,” Critical Inquiry 7, 1 (1980): 141-168. ———. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1974. ———. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Place, 1967. ———. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Place, 1978.

Weber, Samuel. Institution and Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

———. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. ———. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

210

—— _ BIBLIOGRAPHY —_ Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. ——.. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. ——. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Yacobi, Tamar. “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem,” Poetics Today 2, 2 (1981): 113-126.

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INDEX

Aberastain, Antonio, 36 Barranca Yaco, 35, 49

Aberdeen, Lord, 96 Barthes, Roland, 3

Alberdi, Juan Bautista, 11, 21, 26,39, | Bases y puntos de partida para la or-

43, 47, 67-82, 103, 106, 144, 160, ganizacion politica de la Republica

163, 165,176 Argentina, 76

Aldao, 26, 39, 178 Bedoya, José Maria, 61 Alsina, Valentin, 19, 28, 39, 43, 44, Benavidez, Nazario, 25

47, 51-66, 106, 169, 179 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 24, 84, 104, 174

Altamirano, Carlos, 153 Benveniste, Emile, 6, 7

American, 72 Bhabha, Homi, 134, 138 Americanismo, Amé€ricanisme, 97 Bilbao, Manuel, 108

Anderson, Benedict, 28, 29 Bloom, Harold, 138, 141 Arcos, Santiago, 128, 129, 132, 140, Borges, Jorge Luis, 2, 17, 158, 189

188 Buenos Aires, 51, 62, 63, 92, 93, 102,

Argentine culture, 13, 158 104, 105, 127, 140, 143, 144, 150,

literature, 146, 151, 164 157, 162, 164, 182

Republic, 39, 137 Bunge, Carlos O., 147 Ariel, arielismo, 146

Atlas de la Republica Argentina, 105 Calfucura, 133

Austin, John, 41 Camparia (Conquista) del Desierto,

Austinian, 69 103, 105, 138

Avellaneda family, 149 Campana en el Ejército Grande, 69

Avellaneda, Marcos, 127, 186 Cané, Miguel, 107 canon and canonization, 19, 23, 39,

Baigorrita, 131, 135 125, 146, 149, 151

Bancroft Library (Berkeley), 38 Cartas quillotanas, 21, 69, 70, 71, barbarous, barbarism, barbarian, 10, 72, 81 14, 73, 84, 95, 98, 129, 133, 135; Cartas sobre la prensa y la politica

139, 147 militante de la Republica Argen-

Baring Brothers, 103, 143, 190 tina, 70 213

————————— FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE ————

Caseros, Battle of, 19, 26, 27, 28, 54, de Gainza, Martin, 128

60, 69, 79, 100, I2I, 127, 141 de Mazade, Charles, 85, 96, 97, 183 caudillos, caudillaje, 78, 79, 80, 100, Derrida, Jacques, 73, 180, 181

121, 124, 162, 192 Diderot, Denis, 85

centennial celebrations, Centenario, Didier, Charles, 85

39, 1§1, 1§2, 153 differance, 134, 188

Cepeda, Battle of, 62 Dogma socialista, 39, 160

Chacon, Battle of, 42 Dona Barbara, 6

Chile, Chilean, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33,37, | Don Segundo Sombra, 147

51, 56, 69, 75, 85, 86, 100, IOI Dorrego, Manuel, 54, 55, 58, 62, 179 conservatives and liberals in, 29

National Library, 38 Echeverria, Esteban 28, 36, 52, 108,

University of, 32 160, 168, 176, 179

Ciudadela, Battle of, 42 education, 88, 111

civility, civilité, 7 El Censor, 111, 186 civilization, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 82,95,97, | El Comercio del Plata, 52, 54, 189 102, 116, 130, 133, 134,135,137, El Diario de Santiago, 30

147, 169 El Diario Popular, 101

civilization versus barbarism, 2,6, 11, El Mercurio, 28, 29, 31, 34, 37, 38, 58 65,77, 81, 94, 97, 108, 112, I15, El Nacional, 52, 54, 101, 102, 107,

129, 130, 163, 168, 169, 172, 173, III, 172, 186

174, 187 El payador, 147, 1§8, 185

Civil War, American, 95 El profeta de la pampa, 20, 165 Club del Progreso, 145 EI Progreso, 28, 29, 30, 32, 335 34,

Colon, Teatro, 145, 153 35,173

Comentarios a Civilizacion y barbarie — El Semanario, 30, 31

O sea compadres y gauchos, 147 El Siglo, 29, 30, 31, 32, 335 35 Complicidad de la prensa en las gue- El Tiempo, 59, 156 rras civiles de la Republica Argen- Enlightenment, 112

tina, 70 Estudios sobre la Constitucion Argen-

Comte, Auguste, 103, 107 tina de 1853 en que se restablece su Confederation (Argentine), 100 mente alterada por comentarios Conflicto y armontas de las razas en hostiles y se designan los antece-

América, 106, 109—117, 122 dentes nacionales que han sido base Congress (Argentine), 100, ror de su formacion y deben serlo de su

Constitution of 1853, 77 jurisprudencia, 70

Cordoba, 61 eugenics, 117

Cortés Conde, Roberto, 100 European expansion, 90, 186, 189

cultural circulation, 89

cultural tradition, 27 Facundo y su bidgrafo, 80, 81 Febvre, Lucien, 6, 7

Danto, Arthur, 4, 28, 55 federales, 62, 63 Dario, Rubén, 146, 152, 155 Fernandez, Francisco F., 108

Darwin, Darwinian, 112 Fernandez Retamar, Roberto, 9, 12 de Alvear, Torcuato de, 104 feuilleton, folletin, 34, 122

de Certeau, Michel, 60 Fish, Stanley, 41 214

INDEX Fortoul, 83, 84 Hernandez, José, 15, 185, 189 Foucault, Foucauldian, 5, 24, 27, 33; Hispanic, anti-Hispanic, 116, 146 70, 73, 89, 192 Historia de Belgrano, 106

founding text, 23 Historia de la literatura argentina, Fragmento preliminar al estudio del 164, 165

Derecho, 77 Historia de San Martin, 106

France, 84, 96, 98, 103, 129, 156, Historia de Sarmiento, 154, 158-163

183, 190 historical revisionists, 20, 21

Freud, Sigmund, 11 Hobsbawm, Eric, 119 Frias, Felix, 28, 35

frontier, 126 imagined community, 28, 29

Fuerte Sarmiento, 134, 137 immigrants, immigration, 103, 104, III, 112, 125, 135, 143, 144, 145,

Gadamer, Hans Georg, 4, 24 . 164 ae _ .

Gaffarot, Eugenio, 147, 148, 150 imperialism, imperialist expansion,

Galeria de celebridades argentinas,63, ian find ind Galvez, Manuel, 146 indian (indios), indigenous, 121, 129 Garcia, Baldomero, 32 Ingenieros, José, 115, 116, 117 h gauchesco genre, 14, 108, 166 Jakobson, Roman, 5

gaucho, 81, 121, 138, 139, 140, 147,

158, 162, 163, 183 , 102, 142, 160 Jitrik, Noé, .. Johnson, Jockey Club, 14568 Barbara, Generation of 1880, 102, 104, 107, Jauss, Hans Robert, 3 5

Gellner, Ernest, 21, 184 Generation of 1837, 52

108, 110, 188 Juan Moreira, 122

Genette, Gérard, 69 Juarez Celman, Miguel, ror, 142, Geographic Congress of Paris (1875), 43> 144

137 Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine, 71

Godoy, Pedro, 30, 31

Gonzalez, Joaquin V., 109, 117-126, labor unions, 145

147, 153 La ciudad letrada, 118

Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto, 89 La Gaceta de Comercio, 34

Gossman, Lionel, 59 La Guerra gaucha, 158 Groussac, Paul, 102 La Nacion, 153, 164, 185

Guemes, Martin, 158 La Razon, 101

Guiraldes, Ricardo, 147 La Republica Argentina a 37 anos de

Guizot, Francois, 44, 85, 96, 175 su Revolucion, 77 | Gutiérrez, Eduardo, 108, 122, 185 La restauraci6n nacionalista, 144, 164 Gutiérrez, Juan Maria, 28, 35, 36,37, La Revue Sud-Ameéricaine, 156

38, 176, 179 Las ciento y una, 69, 74,75

Las neurosis de los hombres célebres

Habermas, Jurgen, 27 en la historia argentina, 106 Halperin Donghi, Tulio, 13, 44, 106 Lastarria, José Victorino, 30

Hanke, Lewis, 10 La Tablada, Battle of, 42

Hegel, 3, 5 147

Head, Francis Bond, 89, 182 La tradici6n nacional, 109, 118-126,

215

—_——_——————- FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE —————

183 103, 104

Lavalle, Juan, 55, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, modernization, I, 13, 20, 99, 100,

League of Nations, 156 Molloy, Sylvia, 50, 102, 181 Levene, Ricardo, 153 Montevideo, 26, 28, 37, 51, 54, 62,

Lévy-Strauss, Claude, 11 70, 97

liberal, liberalism, 145, 184 Montt, Luis, 101 Library of Congress, 36 Montt, Manuel, 29, 32, 33, 35, 182 Life in the Argentine Republic in the Moreno, Mariano, 160 Days of the Tyrants, or Civilization Murray, Luis A., 47 and Barbarism, 89, 94

Life of Lincoln, 87 national identity, 66, 153

Lincoln, Abraham, 95 and myths, 39, 137, 151, 170 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 88 national tradition, 122, 123, 125, 126,

Lopez, Lucio, 107 146, 151, 187

Lopez, Vicente Fidel, 28, 106, 172 Neruda, Pablo, 120

Lopez Jordan, Ricardo, 100 New Englander, 94 Lopez y Planes, Vicente, 55 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 11, 146, 154 Los invariantes historicos del Fa-

cundo, 16 Odas seculares, 152, 158

Louis Philippe, 85, 96 Odeon, Teatro, 157

Ludmer, Josefina, 13, 14 Oncativo, Battle of, 42 Lugones, Leopoldo, 47, 147, 149, Orientalism, 90, 182 152, 154-163, 185, 191 Pagden, Anthony, ro

Mackau, Admiral, 96 Pages Larraya, Antonio, 37 Mann, Horace, 87, 88 Palcos, Alberto, 37, 45, 52 Mann, Mary Peabody, 85, 88—96, Palmerston, Lord, 96

114, 182, 183 Paraguay, IOI, 129, 141

Mansilla, Lucio V., 108, 109, 126— Paunero, Wenceslao, 36

141, 187, 188, 189 Paz, Jose Maria, 25, 26, 36, 46, 61,

Mapa de la Republica Argentina, 105 62, 65, 92, 168

Marti, José, 11, 81, 146 Pellegrini, Carlos, 102, 107, 145 Martinez Estrada, Ezequiel, 16,17,47 Pelliza, Mariano, 108

Martinez Pastoriza, Benita, 159 Pena, David, 149, 150 Martin Fierro, 6, 10,15, 108,139,147, Peregrinacion de luz del dia, 144 153,154, 157, 158, 162, 185, 189 Peron, Juan Domingo, 2, 164

Masiello, Francine, 13 Peronism, 21

Memoria sobre ortografia americana, Peronist, 47

32, 33 peso argentino, 105, 143

Menem, Carlos, 21 Piglia, Ricardo, 2, 18

Mexico, 87 polemic, 67, 68, 69, 72, 74, 79, 82 Michelet, Jules, 44, 58, 81, 173, 175 positivism, 104, 108, 116, 146

Mi defensa, 23 postcolonial, 134

Mis montanas, 118 post-Independence era, 6 Mitre, Bartolomé, 28, 52, 60, 63, 101, | Poulantzas, Nicos, 105

106, 160, 185 Pratt, Mary Louise, 137 216

INDEX — Prieto, Adolfo, 74 Romantic, Romanticism, 44, 58, 64, Puente de Marquez, 61, 64 106, I12, 123, 139, 178 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 2, 3, 19, 20,

Quesada, Ernesto, 108, 153 25, 26, 28, 32, 33, 36, 375 525 54,

| 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 67, 71,

race, racism, 112, 117, 121, 146, 147, 73,74, 84, 85, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94,

156, 161, 167 96, 97, 98, 107, III, 121, 124,

Radiografia de la Pampa, 16 125, 127, 141, 147, 150, 162, 181,

railroads, 103, 105, 114, 143 185, 188

Rama, Angel, 118, 147 Rosas, Mariano, 126, 129, 132, 133,

Ramos, José Abelardo, 46 136 Ramos, Julio, 129, 151

Ramos Mejia, José Maria, 106, 107, Sabato, Ernesto, 63

158 Saenz Pena, Luis, 143

ranqueles indians, 126-141 Saint Simon, Claude, 103 reading, readings, 3, 4, 47, 49, 52,62, | Saldias, Adolfo, 108, 178

69, 79, 93, 167 Sarmiento, Dominguito, 127

reading public, 28 Scott, Joan, 56

reception of Facundo, 6, 42, 50, 67, Shumway, Nicholas, 2, 14

82, 84,94, IOI, I§1 Sociedad Rural Argentina, 145

Recuerdos de provincia, 2, 29, 94, Spain, 113, 129, 146, 152

153, 161, 177, 179 Spencer, Spencerian, 102, 103, I12,

Renan, Ernest, 21, 146 116

resistance, 98, 153, 154 Starobinski, Jean, 7, 8, 9 Revista de Ambas Américas, 87 Stepan, Nancy, 112 Revolucion de 1810 (Argentine Revo- _ Sterling Library (Yale), 38 lution), 30, 31, 62, 79, 93, 99, 121, | Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 114 122, 142, 143, 1§1, 161, 162, 183

Revolution of 1890, 145 Taboada family, 100 Revolution of 1930, 157 Tejedor, Carlos, 28 Revue des Deux Mondes, 36, 85, 86, The Nation, 95

96, 98 The Schools: Basis for the Prosperity

Revue Encyclopédique, 85 and for the Republic in the United

Rio Cuarto, 128 States, 87

Rivadavia, Bernardino, 54, 56, 62,63, Thierry, Augustin, 44, 45, §9, 175,

150, 178, 183 179

Rivera Indarte, José, 36 Thiers, Adolphe, 44, 97 River Plate, blockade of, 96 Turner, Victor, 28 River Plate area, 97, I11, 129, 143,

183 Una excursion a los indios ranqueles,

Roca, Gen. Julio Argentino, ro1, 105, 109, 126-141 118, 127, 138, 142, 145, I91 Union Civica Radical, 142

Rock, David, 152 Unitarios (unitarists), 52, 54, 58, 61, Rodo, José Enrique, 146 62, 73, 82, 92, 179 Rojas, Ricardo, 20, 28, 144,147,149, United States, 84, 85, 94, 95, 117, 127,

153, 158, 163-170, 187 145,146, 1§2 217

—————— FACUNDO AND ARGENTINE CULTURE ——— Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2, 54, Vargas Llosa, Mario, 12, 13

118, 164 Vélez Sarsfield, Dalmacia, 88 151, 164 Villafafie, Severa, 50, 124

Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, 149, Verdevoye, Paul, 37, 176

Universidad de Cordoba, 118 Virias, David, 141, 155, 163 Universidad de la Plata, 118 Volney, Comte de, 91 Uriburu, José Evaristo, 157, 164 von Humboldt, Alexander, 89 Urquiza, Justo José de, 25, 26, 27,29, | von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 8 55979

Uruguay, 61 War with Paraguay, 100, 127 utilitarianism, 146 Weber, Samuel, 61

White, Hayden, 45, 138

Varela, Florencio, 28, 36, 52, 178 Wilde, Eduardo, 102

Varela, Rufino, 127 Williams, Raymond, 18, 147

218