on the dark side of the archive the...mark a. herna´ndez, figural conquistadors: rewriting the new...

On the Dark Sideof the Archive

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The Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and TheorySeries Editor: Anı́bal González, Yale University

Dealing with far-reaching questions of history and modernity, language and self-hood, and power and ethics, Latin American literature sheds light on the many-faceted nature of Latin American life, as well as on the human condition as awhole. This series of books provides a forum for some of the best criticism onLatin American literature in a wide range of critical approaches, with an emphasison works that productively combine scholarship with theory. Acknowledging thehistorical links and cultural affinities between Latin American and Iberian litera-tures, the series welcomes consideration of Spanish and Portuguese texts and top-ics, while also providing a space of convergence for scholars working in Romancestudies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and literary theory.

Titles in SeriesAmy Nauss Millay, Voices from the fuente viva: The effect of Orality in Twentieth-

Century Spanish American NarrativeJ. Andrew Brown, Test Tube Envy: Science and Power in Argentine NarrativeJuan Carlos Ubilluz, Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski in

the Latin American Erotic NovelMark A. Hernández, Figural Conquistadors: Rewriting the New World’s

Discovery and Conquest in Mexican and River Plate Novels of the 1980s and1990s

Gabriel Riera, Littoral of the Letter: Saer’s Art of NarrationDianne Marie Zandstra, Embodying Resistance: Griselda Gambaro and the

GrotesqueAmanda Holmes, City Fictions: Language, Body, and Spanish American Urban

SpaceGail Bulman, Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in

Contemporary Latin American TheaterAnne Lambright, Creating the Hybrid Intellectual: Subject, Space, and the

Feminine in the Narrative of José Marı́a ArguedasDara E. Goldman, Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the

Hispanic CaribbeanEva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe, The End of the World as They Knew It: Writing

Experiences of the Argentine SouthRaúl Marrero-Fente, Epic, Empire, and Community in the Atlantic World: Silvestre

de Balboa’s Espejo de pacienciaSharon Magnarelli, Home Is Where the (He)art Is: The Family Romance in Late

Twentieth-Century Mexican and Argentine TheaterYolanda Martı́nez-San Miguel, From Lack to Excess: ‘‘Minor’’ Readings of Latin

American Colonial DiscourseJulia Cuervo Hewitt, Voices Out of Africa in Twentieth-Century Spanish Caribbean

LiteratureJuan Carlos González Espitia, On the Dark Side of the Archive: Nation and

Literature in Spanish America at the Turn of the Century

http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/univ_press

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Nation and Literaturein Spanish Americaat the Turn of the

Century

Juan Carlos González Espitia

LewisburgBucknell University Press

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� 2010 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp.

All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use,or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner,provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid di-rectly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massa-

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

González Espitia, Juan Carlos.On the dark side of the archive : nation and literature in Spanish America at

the turn of the century / Juan Carlos Gonzalez Espitia.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-8387-5736-9 (alk. paper)1. Spanish American fiction—19th century—History and criticism.

2. Spanish American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Nationalcharacteristics, Latin American, in literature. 4. Latin America—Intellectuallife—19th century. 5. Latin America—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title.

PQ7082.N7G684 2010863�.5093588—dc22 2009011145

printed in the united states of america

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To las chicas de mi vida: Birgitte, Maya, and Alba. (And Mabuki.)Basta con empezar el dı́a y saber que están aquı́.

A mi madre

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Contents

Acknowledgments 9

1. Introduction 13

2. Ominous Lucı́a 40

3. Nation: Prosthesis, Writing, and Incest 76

4. Blood Matters 107

5. Morbus Gallicus: Horacio Quiroga’s Originary Disease 148

6. A Final (Re)Mark: Fernando Vallejo’s Gleaming Origins 177

Notes 206

Works Cited 236

Index 247

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Acknowledgments

I HAVE SO MANY PEOPLE AND INSTITUTIONS TO THANK FOR THEIRinvolvement with this project that the length of a book chapterwould not suffice. I will try my best to write an abstract. At theinitial stage, when this book was a dissertation, I received financialsupport from the Department of Romance Studies and the SageGraduate Fellowship at Cornell University. The support I received,in the form of a research and study assignment leave and a juniorfaculty development award at the University of North Carolina atChapel Hill, was key to completing this project.

I wish there were some editorial convention that would allow meto include a ‘‘spiritual coauthor’’ in the copyright. If my wisheswere to come true, the name of my best friend Stuart Day would beon the cover of this book: thank you for helping me find my path tolive and write in America. I want to thank my dissertation commit-tee at Cornell: Debra A. Castillo, my wonderful director; EdmundoPaz-Soldán; Trevor Hope; and John W. Kronik, who gave perennialguidance. For his exemplary advice, I would like to express my pro-found gratitude to the late professor Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot. Ialso want to thank Anı́bal González Pérez, my editor, for his pa-tience and for giving me such a great opportunity to be part of hisbook series.

If you can read the following pages, it is thanks to the patienthelp of many readers. Elizabeth Kissling did initial translations oforiginal chapters in Spanish. Anne Tordi, Jonathan Risner,Gretchen Moehlmann, Jenny Bennett, Sarah-Frances Wallace, andHelia Patricia Rodrı́guez Alvaredo helped me out of my grammarand style agonies. The comments and valuable insights of myfriends and colleagues Nancy LaGreca, William G. Acree, Christo-pher Conway, John Charles Chasteen, Marı́a Salgado, and CarlosAbreu Mendoza have made this a much better work. Julia Kruzehelped with the translation of Fichte’s intricate German. The edito-rial teams at Associated University Presses and Bucknell UniversityPress have been an example of professionalism and collegiality.Thank you.

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10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without my fairy godmothers, mine would be a sad tale. Theybelieved in me from the very beginning: Doris Amanda Espitia Aré-valo, my mother, tirelessly encouraging me; my cheering sisters,Pilar Amanda González Espitia and Juana Espitia Arévalo; and mydear Erlinda Chitiva, always in my memory. Betty Osorio andMarı́a Antonia Garcés helped me to have a second chance in life.All of you have helped to prove that fairy tales do come true.

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1Introduction

IT WAS IN A WARDROBE THAT I FOUND THE FIRST NOVEL I EVER READby José Marı́a Vargas Vila. I must have been about twelve years old.The book had been stripped of its cover. I suppose someone hadremoved it so that a tender soul like mine would not be attracted bythe image of a half-naked woman. Or maybe it was because thissomeone was afraid of being caught with such a disreputable text.Nevertheless, I think I read the book precisely because of its inde-terminate, enigmatic aura. It was camouflaged between old mathbooks, manuals on good manners, reading and writing textbooks,and other publications—the remnants of someone’s high school ed-ucation. It is odd that the book was there. I am certain that VargasVila’s novel was not part of the syllabus of any of the classes thatmy older sister took in her school that was run by the nuns, nor wasit used in my school run by Jesuit priests. Someone at home hadbought the novel, very likely on the sly, to enliven what we couldcall an ‘‘extracurricular’’ pastime. Perhaps it was one of my aunts.Or could it have been my own mother?

The novels we read at school had no covers with half-nakedwomen, or anything else with dubious aesthetic qualities. They alloffered imposing vistas of my country, sketches of melancholic-looking characters, or simply bare titles on fake leather bindings.Along with Aurelio Baldor’s algebra course, and Margarita Peña’shistory textbook, Jorge Isaacs’s Marı́a (1867) and José Mármol’sAmalia (1844) were two of the books that paraded over my always-messy school table.1 I must confess, though, that for a twelve-, thir-teen-, or fourteen-year-old, these novels were an academic duty notto be compared with Ibis (1899) by José Marı́a Vargas Vila,2 theold book in the wardrobe. Ibis was for me the epitome of adventureand enticing sensuality. On one of its pages there was a beguilingdescription of a woman in the act of changing her clothes; there wasalso a critical view of my country’s society at the end of the nine-teenth century, and heavy paragraphs opposing religion and defend-

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14 ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE ARCHIVE

ing suicide. In short, all of the issues abhorred by the priests backat school.

These high school novels resurfaced several years later, when Iwas an overly self-assured graduate student far from my home inColombia. I was reading Foundational Fictions: The National Ro-mances of Latin America by Doris Sommer.3 Then and now, Som-mer’s book is as impressive and seemingly fissure-free as its cover.It shows the relationship between romantic novels and the need tocraft a constitutive national discourse in Latin American countriesafter the nineteenth-century independence movements. One ofSommer’s main goals is to outline an erotics of politics as revealedin novels like Marı́a, Amalia, Sab, or O Guaranı́.4 In her opinion,the relationship between erotics and politics is at the heart of thefoundational discourses in which ‘‘natural’’ heterosexual love is thenorm.5 She affirms that the ever-present erotic pulses that sustainthe energy of these novels are channeled through socially and mor-ally sanctioned—and hoped for—unions, through obliteration ofrace or provenance, through procreation, or through so-called ‘‘mo-dernity,’’ in order to constitute them as material for the building ofthe nation. The taxonomic tool proposed by the author is that of aproductive erotics, more inclusive in principle than the classic divi-sion of works into indigenista, historic, romantic, or realist fic-tions.6 Sommer’s desire is to find an alternative initial point forfoundational narratives, different from that of realism. She exploresliterary manifestations, such as erotic dynamics, that could serve asalternatives to plasticity, the autonomous presence of charactersand their relationships considered by Georg Lukács (Hungary,1885–1971) as cruxes of realism.7

After reading Sommer’s book, I was uneasy with what the possi-ble classification of my ‘‘extracurricular’’ Vargas Vila text wouldbe in the scheme of nation building—especially if one were to agreethat there was a connection between the erotics portrayed in novelsand what could be seen in empirical, historical accounts of the era.I asked myself whether—given that the novels written by someonelike Vargas Vila were informed by an erotics component à la Som-mer, not to mention their bare erotic imagery, yet were clearly op-posed to the reproductive spirit—this meant they were not part ofthe foundational mood. Or if they were related to the foundationalmood, was this only because they were oppositional and thereforeworthy only of being excised? I questioned also whether writingsthat diverge from a nuptial narrative, that is, a narrative that praiseshomogenization and governability, were to be labeled as ‘‘anti-foundational.’’ The search for answers to these questions led me ex-

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1: INTRODUCTION 15

peditiously to other texts that shared with Vargas Vila an antiestab-lishment or sterility-prone quality. I found that not all of these textswere evicted from the class syllabi of the schools at which I studied.In fact, some of them are frequently read in scholarly institutions.No need to destroy book covers. Nevertheless, the texts I examinedshowed with unusual clarity their opposition to what is considereda foundational fiction.

The theme of this book is the somber, non-foundational narra-tives that—while they often take sterility as their subject—are any-thing but sterile. In them the nation is not the protagonist of aportrayed or desired happy-ending story. The task of the six chap-ters of this inquiry is to establish a critique—that is, an examina-tion, debate, and supplementation—of the valuation of nineteenth-century romantic, realist, and naturalist novels in Spanish Americaas founders of the national identity. Even if these texts contradictthe building of the nation purportedly promoted in romantic narra-tives, my intent is not to situate them as a substitute. Instead, I hopeto show how the foundational fictions that incarnated the romanticpolitical ideas of the time must be supplemented by fictions of amore obscure complexion. Thus, I delineate a critique of romantic,realist, and naturalist fictions as pedestals of national identity. I ex-plore the process of negation and confinement imposed upon thelesser-known texts of José Martı́, Clemente Palma, Horacio Quiro-ga, and José Marı́a Vargas Vila in the 1800s and early 1900s, aprocess that extends its features and consequences to contemporarywork, for example that penned by Colombian author Fernando Va-llejo.

In the final chapter, dedicated to Vallejo, I show how reformula-tions of nineteenth-century ideas, especially those of Malthusian-ism and Darwinism, resurface in his novels and essays, showing theever-presence of the dynamics of the archive.8 I study how theproblems I have explored in authors at the end of the nineteenthcentury are equally encountered in the present turn of the cen-tury—or the turn of the millennium, if one is in an apocalypticmood. Yet instead of the movement from the constructive narrativesto the unproductive ones, as shown in the first four authors, Valle-jo’s contemporary production has been critically ascribed, andcritically accepted, as representing an aggressive, iconoclastic, dis-solvent mood from its very inception. Yet I show how his discoursehas (ironically) a disquietingly luminous, orderly, cohesion-seekingliterary origin. Contemporary approaches to Nietzsche, in conjunc-tion with the earlier inclusive, or at least gracious, reception of thework of authors like Luis-Ferdinand Céline (France, 1894–1961),

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Emile Cioran (Romania, 1911–95), or more recently Charles Bu-kowski (Germany-U.S., 1920–94), has allowed for a reading of thediscourse of Vallejo not necessarily as a destructive narrative to besuppressed. In fact, it is a destructive writing that has now been ac-cepted as a possibility for inclusion in the open archive, or at leastfor a place at the threshold between the carnero, a concept I willexplain later, and the light of day. However, once again, critical ap-proaches have tended to put aside elements that are undeniablypresent in Vallejo’s work, such as vulnerability, sensibility, nostal-gia, or even the substratum of desire for commonality or an Arca-dian past. The production of the five authors I study has been onlypartially assessed; this incomplete consideration points toward theexistence of a ghostlike, troublesome presence. I propose the studyof these ‘‘a-foundational’’ novels as possibilities for a contrario na-tion building. At the same time, I show the intersection of the ideasin these writings with the decadent mood.

Archive, Carnero, Supplement

My considerations regarding the ambiguous link between desireand oblivion, and the obstinate immanence of what is supposed tobe forgotten, benefits from Jacques Derrida’s ideas on the archivefrom his short book on Freud, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impres-sion.9 The core of this group of narrative works opposed to theromantic movement—which makes them a useful tool for investi-gating the idea of nation building—is closely related to Derrida’sidea of the supplement as treated in his Of Grammatology (1967).10Nevertheless, I have framed variations upon Derrida’s ideas, usingthem as instigators of my own investigation. In general, the ideasabout archive and supplement have evolved in this study toward theconsideration of images, places, texts, and objects—which I desig-nate with the general and equalizing term of ‘‘documents’’—ascomplement-able and complementary.

The archive, as a physical space, serves to guard, consign, or rel-egate documents. As in any other place in which documents arekept, it has a section open to the public and another concealed orbanned except for authorized persons. The documents that for onereason or another someone has deemed useless, confidential, ordangerous, are stowed away in this type of inaccessible location.Thus, I want to rename the public area of the archive with the broadterm of ‘‘open archive,’’ and the banned section where the relegatedor discarded elements are relegated I will call the carnero [loosely

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1: INTRODUCTION 17

translated, ‘‘annex’’].11 In Spanish, carnero was the name given tothe place to which dead bodies were relegated, and, by extension,also to the place where useless books were thrown.12

Items that are now in the carnero have, or could have been, in theopen archive. With time, something that is now part of the openarchive could end up in the carnero. The open archive exists thanksto the carnero, and vice versa. Neither one precedes the other; bothwere formed simultaneously. Each contains the fundamental natureof the other; both are equally important.

In transferring the image of the physical space in the archive ofnarrative documents—in this case, as a mnemonic space—there isa movement that seems to go from the open archive toward thecarnero. At first consideration this displacement seems to bemerely generative, something like a cleaning up of the shelves tokeep everything in order. Everything appears to be neat and orga-nized, but such a view of the dynamics of the archive is the resultof not knowing, or not taking into account, that there is somethingbehind the dividing wall between the two spaces. Once that divid-ing wall forms part of the consideration of the narrative archives,one realizes that the displacement is not generative, but organic,that is, reflecting the interdependent quality of the elements that arepart of the archive as a whole. The presence or absence of a docu-ment on the shelves of the open archive is not related to the year ofpublication, to the name of the author, to the literary movement towhich it belongs, or to its literary genre or aesthetic qualities. Itsabsence or presence relates to the usefulness or convenience that itrepresents to those in charge of organizing the archive. While Iargue that the assignment of each item is in the hands of the particu-lar or institutional ‘‘archivist,’’ I am not interested here in delvinginto the process of institutionalization or authorization of the ar-chive’s organization. A separate study would be necessary to dis-cern the politics of the process and its consequences. For the personin charge of assigning order to the documents, I have preferred touse the clerical-sounding name ‘‘archivist’’ over the more preten-tious ‘‘Archon.’’

I am interested in studying how, for example, despite their cleartemporal and aesthetic differences, one could find on the same shelfof the open archive a book by Jorge Luis Borges next to a nine-teenth-century street pamphlet, next to Cervantes’s Quixote. In thesame manner, when one examines the so-called ‘‘foundational fic-tions,’’ it seems as if they are the clear and exclusive exponents ofa period, disconnected from texts that are not related to the repro-ductive or social goals of unity. There is a diametrical difference if

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things are seen from the perspective of the dynamics of the archive,a difference that allows us to see how constructive discourses, suchas those of the foundational narratives, can go hand in hand withdiscourses of obliteration. The whole point is that dividing wallsare ubiquitous, movable, and intangible.

I am using the interaction between open archive and carnero onpurpose, instead of the more common distinction between canonicaland marginal. My reason for this goes beyond mere semantics. Byusing the binary canonical-marginal, the discussion focuses on lit-erary texts in terms of movements or genres. As a result, in theprocess one may lose the possibility of effectively incorporatingdocuments that are not necessarily literary in the strict sense of theword (paintings, coins, or editorials, for example), yet are part ofthe complexity of nation building. Furthermore, discussions on thecanonical dwell on discursive strategies related to exclusion. Inother words, ‘‘either’’ and ‘‘or’’ are the disjunctive conjunctions thattraverse the discourse of the marginal and the canonical. Substitu-tion or difference would be the available critical possibilities. Whenusing a canonical discourse, a text or an author cannot belong si-multaneously to two different, or even opposing, discourses—sucha move would go against the aim of marking boundaries.

By using the interaction of carnero and open archive, I will showrelationships resulting from an inclusive disposition. The predomi-nant conjunctions in this discourse would be the copulative ‘‘both’’and ‘‘and,’’ or at least their possibility. From this perspective, thereis a potential for documents and authors to be part of different,complementary, and even opposing discourses at the same time. Italso allows for the integration of the non-literary documents men-tioned above. Conforming to a certain set of features does not resultin one component excluding another from the archive. The fact thata document or an author is ambiguous and polyphonic does not re-sult in condemnation or need for expiation. An archival perspectiveallows for complexity and provides ground for leniency in the de-sire to subdue inevitably subjective thoughts into preconceivedstructures. In this sense, an archival approach is also an intimidatingtool that leaves the researcher on unstable—but ultimately fruit-ful—ground. I must confess that the method of the canonical-mar-ginal is very convenient if one wants to avoid the embarrassingmoments, for example when we are teaching, in which the text orauthor presents varying or incomprehensible traits. With the canon-ical approach, together with that of the genres approach, there is amodel with few disjunctions; if the embarrassing example does notfit the model, it is appropriately defined by exclusion. The parame-

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1: INTRODUCTION 19

ters of the canon claim immovable results, invulnerable conclu-sions, and all-encompassing discourses.

The ‘‘archivist’’ I defend exercises the same kind of power I justcriticized by signaling the traits that inform the selection of certaindocuments of the archive. Yet the consequences of such a pursuitare temporary by definition, subject to change, to additions and re-ductions. The dynamics of the archive cannot result in institutional-ization, since from its inception it is understood that the selection isprovisional and brittle. For the case of nation building, the strengthof the archive lies primarily in its elasticity and the lushness of in-terpretations resulting from the possible inclusion of elements thatgo beyond novels, poetry, and essays, in other words, beyond ‘‘highwriting.’’

One of the consequences of the canonical-marginal distinction isthat the processes of institutionalization do not end with mere clas-sification. Gradually, the features derived from and applied to iso-lated documents end up being used to harness the whole personaand production of the authors. As I show in the chapter on HoracioQuiroga, for example, his writing of the period of time during andright after his journey to Paris (1900) is assessed by EmirRodrı́guez Monegal by comparing it with Quiroga’s latter canon-ized texts, such as ‘‘La gallina degollada’’ (published in 1925).13Alternatively, an archival approach can study the document individ-ually and contrast it with other documents, from different origins,but from the same moment—that is, Quiroga of 1900 comparedwith his world in 1900, and not with himself as the accomplishedauthor of 1925, 1937, or of 1961, when Rodrı́guez Monegal pub-lished his book on Quiroga’s literary origins: Las raı́ces de HoracioQuiroga (1961). This approach does not deny the plausibility—andneed—of comparing different works, from different periods of anauthor’s career, in order to see the ‘‘progress’’ of their literary pro-duction. At the same time, however, it attempts to relax the urgeto establish generalizing attributes, and to reduce the influence ofauthoritative categories.

At first glance the documents in the carnero represent an ambigu-ous panorama. Although absent, these documents seem to be ever-present, as if they had spectral qualities. By affirming that the pro-cess of destruction or expulsion is muted or surreptitious, Derridahelps to clarify the process by which the post-independence novelsare consigned in the archive. These documents, displaced towardthe carnero, appear as if vanishing, or as existing only in disguise.Their immanence can be detected only in their supplementary ap-pearance: ‘‘The death drive tends thus to destroy the hypomnesic

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archive, except if it can be disguised, made up, painted, printed,represented as the idol of its truth in painting.’’14 This claim can beapplied both to the productive, foundational fictions, and to the fic-tions of the same period, or shortly afterwards, which portray thatwhich is barren. The disguising of the death drive can be seen bothways (barren productive), sublimated in both directions. The differ-ence rests on the sanctioning of one and the censure of the other.What Derrida calls mal de archive is the feared, hidden sicknessthat for the specific case of the Spanish American countries wouldcorrode the basis of national conformation. Like many a disease, itcan remain latent, stalking the documents that defend a domesti-cated version of the destructive impulses. The spectral mood of themuffled documents interferes with their being located but, never-theless, in conjunction with the accepted and sanctioned discourses,they constitute what I have called the archive. The archiving anddisplacing process is so forceful that it becomes inapprehensible;such dynamism incorporates and constitutes new elements at thesame time as it displaces and buries others.

It could be claimed, then, that my project is marked by the desireto revalue and reconstitute the novels that are on the dark side ofthe archive, in the carnero, as part of that which is considered foun-dational. To this I should respond that they need not be defended asdocuments to be reconstituted, since as part of the whole archivethey are already foundational. It could also be alleged that I want topush these documents toward the open archive. That is not my in-tention, and even if it were, this would be an aspiration doomed tofail. An archival approach like the one I am proposing in the endextols documents that have been chosen subjectively. Complianceis in the eye of the beholder. What I can say, though, is that eachreorganization of the archive—and this study is one of them—isperishable. In this sense, I am not proposing the creation of a paral-lel open archive, nor affixing these novel-documents to the open ar-chive. Again, this would go against the dynamics of the archive; ifinstituted as superior in hierarchy, there would rapidly arise a newgroup of documents that would serve as their complement. Move-ment and relocation in the archive is necessarily constant, variable,and arbitrary. By creating an alternative archive, or by advocatingtheir assimilation to the open archive, I would fall into the trap ofnot understanding that the novel-documents that I study here havean internal lack that begs for completion by works with alternativefeatures, ad nauseam.

The relationship between emptiness and supplement is not some-thing that rests solely on the abstract level. It is experienced in a

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1: INTRODUCTION 21

polymorphous way in each of the works studied. Martı́ presents thefinal abyss as the murder of the idealized feminine character at thehands of Lucı́a Jerez, who is a powerful and bleak woman whotakes control of her destiny and sacrifices her own reproductivepossibilities with the idealized masculine character.15 In VargasVila’s Lirio negro,16 the struggle to find wholeness results in theconsummation and repercussions of incest between a father and anillegitimate daughter—after the illegitimate son has been killed bythe father himself. In Palma, the search for wholeness is displayedas the possibility of sexual exchange between a living man and thespecter of a woman. In Quiroga, I reveal emptiness as the need todecipher a hidden text in order to show the link between writingand illness, between literary production and venereal disease. InVallejo the emptiness evidenced in the loss of an Arcadian pastbrings hope only in, and for, obliteration (except in El reino miste-rioso o Tomás y las abejas,17 a 1975 play, which will prove an inter-esting exception the author would prefer we ignore). In this way,the ambiguous relationship between creation and destruction is con-stituted as a deficient origin that calls for aesthetic answers in orderto interpret the Spanish American reality in times of crisis.

In each text the supplement is openly manifest in the constantpreoccupation with ideas of replication, doubles, alter egos, themanagement of blood or bloodlines, or restlessness about the repro-duction of psychological deficiencies from one generation to thenext. The gathering of books and bibelots, or the penchant for de-scribing the decoration of spaces, would seem something merelyaesthetic at first sight. Yet in fact it establishes a direct relationshipbetween supplement and ornamentation. The adornment is some-thing added in order to enhance or disguise something that liesbeneath. All of these authors show eminent interest in the enumera-tion of books, ideas, or objects connecting the Spanish Americanreality and the world beyond. The collecting of valuable tangible orallegorical elements also indicates that the ornamentation intends toexpose the refinement of the inhabitants of the enclosed space andat the same time to deflect the view from the inadequacies of thereal world beyond such protected space: outside there is poverty,ignorance, or relapse. Reality is annoying in these narratives. It isembodied, for example, by the indigenous groups that are not partof the social contract outlined in a novel (Martı́’s Lucı́a Jerez), orepitomized in other books by the crowds of countrymen that arebeing manipulated by either politicians or church representatives,as in Vargas Vila’s Lirio negro.

Supplementation is also manifested in a manner that I call ‘‘pros-

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thetic.’’ As with the orthopedic term, I understand the prosthetic assomething that replaces a missing element, but does so artificiallyand/or temporarily. To this sort of manifestation belong the recur-rent title changes, the addition or deletion of parts of a written text,the creation of preliminary or explicatory fragments, the use ofpseudonyms, and the proliferation of intricate passages calling forsecond readings or further analysis. In Vargas Vila’s novel, studiedin the third chapter, the issue of the prosthesis becomes literal.Flavio Durán’s hands are a prosthetic replacement of the ones lostin Europe because of the jealousy of his abandoned lover. Interest-ingly, Durán’s celluloid hands become the adverse instrument usedin his home country to kill his own son and to denude his daughterin the closing abyssal consummation of incest.

In this book I want to dust off supplementary documents of thissort, but I understand that much of their dissolving power rests onthe fact that they have been hidden or relegated. Their perceivedmarginality gives them strength to define surreptitiously the con-tours of the open archive. It is only after being displaced toward thecarnero that they can be studied now as part of the dialogue of theconstitution of the nineteenth-century Spanish American nation. Ido advocate for recognition of these texts, but recognition as a wayof reaping the critical benefits of re-knowing, re-viewing, or ac-knowledging. My approach seeks the benefit of avoiding the com-plex disjunction of a diachronic or synchronic study, which ingeneral leaves the aftertaste that the thesis is constraining the con-tent to conform to a fixed scheme. The study of these documents inthe carnero, and at times in the open archive, will allow me to for-mulate a hybrid discussion that takes advantage of both synchronyand diachrony, that is, constant openness to reconsideration andcomparison. Figuratively, I will act like an archive technician, anarchivist, describing the location and condition of a document deepin the vaults, noticing its relationship with the documents that areup there in the open, public archive. Of course, not all of the docu-ments are included in this sample—in the archive all judgments areprovisional—but I believe they will work in their restricted condi-tion of examples. Other non-literary documents could, and should,be included in order to examine my proposal in more depth: photos,publicity announcements, museum expositions, legal documents,school books, editorials, oral accounts, and medical records, amongothers.

From the perspective of the archive, foundational narratives arenot the result of spontaneous generation. They are the result of thecreation of possible worlds proper not only to the literary mood,

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1: INTRODUCTION 23

but to human disposition. Constructive foundational narratives aremanifested as a visible monument, chiseled and restricted by theintangible forces of nonreproductive documents and by the docu-ments portraying compliance to prevailing moral rules. A deeperlook into an archival proposal shows the plausibility of the claimthat constructive foundational narratives are visible thanks to some-thing amorphous that lies beneath. Such a substratum might not beapparent, or we might not have been allowed to see it. Every foun-dation has a foundation, in the same way that every open archivehas a carnero.

Once again, the ideas about the supplement in Jacques Derrida’sOf Grammatology are useful at this crux. The term ‘‘supplement’’has a double quality, both additive and substitutive. In the sense of‘‘to substitute’’ or ‘‘to supplant,’’ it indicates that every time it com-pletes something, it is substituting it at the same time. For that rea-son, it can end up being not that which completes, but that whichmust be completed. In the sense of ‘‘to complement,’’ it offers whatwas missing in order for something to be whole. This would indi-cate that for a supplement to exist, it is necessary that what wasthought to be whole is actually incomplete. In the archive therewould be an ‘‘originary lack’’ that constantly begs for complemen-tation. The supplement is, then, at the same time, something thatmust be added for something to be whole, and something that whenadded acts as excess: ‘‘But the supplement supplements. It addsonly to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; ifit fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image,it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory [supplé-ant] and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern in-stance which takes-(the)-place [tient-lieu]. As substitute, it is notsimply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief,its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness.’’18

For the present study, the supplement is what I have called thecarnero. The carnero, and the documents residing in it, add some-thing to what was supposedly already complete; they constitute anamendment to the belief that the open archive is a unit with no fis-sures. This supplementarity does not imply that any of the compo-nents should be obliterated: if documents that are marked by adecadent mood, for example, also supplement realist or romantictexts, this does not entail that the latter must be expelled. In thisarchival approach there would always be a lack or an excess of doc-uments, depending on the whim or agenda of the archivist. My in-terest is to widen the perspective regarding the foundational fictions

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at the end of the nineteenth century, and to indicate the possibilityof connecting their nature to other literary productions.

Many of the elements I incorporate into my view of the archiveare parallel to those of Roberto González Echevarrı́a in his Mythand Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative.19 GonzálezEchevarrı́a’s insight has encouraged me to continue on this path ofinquiry, especially because of his recognition of the genealogicalelement that seems to be slighted in Sommer’s book. I have a simi-lar approach to González Echevarrı́a’s concept of the archive as aconstruct that ‘‘keeps, culls, retains, accumulates, and classifies.’’20I also agree with his claim regarding the presence of multiplesources that can act as masterbooks for an archive document—forexample, the Encyclopedia and The Thousand and One Nights asmasterbooks of the archival document entitled Cien años desoledad—in which ‘‘neither book seems to have a priority over theother. Both have a prominent place within the Archive, providingtheir own form of pastness, of documentary, textual material.’’21This equalized and equalizing feature is part of what I have calledthe ‘‘organicity’’ of the archive. I join González Echevarrı́a in fol-lowing Foucault’s signaling of death as the structuring principle ofthe archive.22 I share his acknowledgment of his method, or minefor that matter, of using the image of the archive as an assumptiveor arbitrary way to see literature and history.23 I could not be morein agreement with his statement that ‘‘the Archive does not canon-ize, because the first law of the Archive is a denial, a cut that orga-nizes and disperses.’’24 I would have liked to state, as poignantly asGonzález Echevarrı́a does, that ‘‘the Archive absorbs the wayward,the trivial, and the marginal and turns them into knowledge andpower,’’25 or that ‘‘the Archive questions authority by holding war-ring discourses in promiscuous and mutually contaminating conti-guity, a contiguity that often erases the difference separatingthem.’’26 In fact, when I arrived at page 175 of González Echeva-rrı́a’s extraordinary book, I felt that all my work to ground the ideaof the archive as a useful one for my purposes in the nineteenth-century had become surfeit: ‘‘The Archive cannot coalesce as a na-tional or cultural myth, though its make-up still reveals a longingfor the creation of such grandiose politico-cultural metastory.’’27

I agree that these are the characteristics of the archive. Yet myapproach differs from González Echevarrı́a’s overarching perspec-tive, which seems not to follow a distinction between what the ar-chive is and what an archival fiction is; in other words, thedifference between a book and a library, even if that book happensto illustrate vividly the contents and dynamics of the library. By

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1: INTRODUCTION 25

using archival fictions, namely, Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidosand Garcı́a Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, the author wants toestablish the possibility of an archetypical and all-encompassingview, the certainty of ‘‘a clearing in the jungle,’’ as if there werethe likelihood of a clean slate or starting point to understand LatinAmerican narrative. As I have stated before, my conceptualizationof the archive is that of its ingrained supplementarity: there is nostarting point, because the starting point needs a starting point.When the archetype is created, an alternative view for said arche-type will immediately arise. The archetype, as seen by GonzálezEchevarrı́a, accumulates, classifies, and culls; the archive, as I un-derstand it, does this and, in addition, hides, veils, and buries as partof a never-ending fluctuation. In this constant fluctuation, it assertsand denies at once the possibility of archetypes as explanatorytools.

It is his faith in the archetype as a unique interpretative tool thatauthorizes González Echevarrı́a to accept Cabrera Infante’s Trestristes tigres or Borges’s ‘‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’’ as true, ar-chive-worthy, Latin American narratives, while at the same timemistakenly rejecting Isaacs’s Marı́a or Gamboa’s Santa as mereechoes—I would have preferred he had labeled them with the archi-val term of ‘‘mimicking’’—of European models, and thereforemore fitting to European, not Latin American, historiography.28This expulsion is the result of considering the archival fiction andthe archive as one and the same, and therefore contradicting thepreviously stated (and accurate) claim that the archive does not can-onize. For all their failures, the novels of Isaacs and Gamboa, forexample, are certainly part of the archive. For all their imitation andsupposed disappointment, they have also been turned into knowl-edge and power. They might not be part of a certain ordering of thearchive established by an archivist, but they cannot be stripped oftheir quality as documents of the archive that they acquired fromthe very moment of their inception.

In the same fashion, it is my opinion that one cannot claim thatthere can be new archives; I argue that there are only new orderingsof the archives that may appear as true points of departure, as pros-thetic clearings in the jungle. The truth is that the jungle, the ar-chive, ends up swallowing everything, including the manuscriptthat pretended to be its mirror. I must stress that this is a clarifica-tion stated, yet not followed, at several points in González Echeva-rrı́a’s book. The author goes so far as to affirm that the archivalfictions written by Fuentes, Carpentier, or Garcı́a Márquez are a‘‘simulacra of the original Archive,’’29 and therefore supplements of

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the archive itself: tools and archive-ordering methods to read LatinAmerican narrative. In this sense, these archival fictions are as par-tial or incomplete as any other document in the archive. Yet Gonzá-lez Echevarrı́a’s discourse conflictingly implies that these archivalfictions are some sort of meta-archives containing the way to inter-pret the narrative production in Latin America. Commenting on theprocess of creation and postponed conclusion of Doña Bárbara, thecritic asserts that ‘‘Englekirk, an unwitting projection of Gallego’sauthorial persona, will write his article as a kind of meta-end toDoña Bárbara, and anticipate the major figure in modern LatinAmerican fiction: the Archive, or repository of stories and myths,one of which is the story about collecting those stories and myths.The inaugural archival fiction in that recent tradition would be theother text that issued from that summer of traveling through Vene-zuela, Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos.’’30

What Englekirk anticipates is not the Archive, with a capital A,but precisely the very valid idea of the archival fiction. Analo-gously, archival fiction, not the Archive, is a useful tool to interpretmodern Latin American fiction. The fluid quality of Archive is alsoeffective in the interpretation of other fictions, modern or not.Through millennia, the archive is a constant presence; this is illus-trated by the very etymology of the word, which takes us back tothe Greeks. The Archive was there before Carpentier, Englekirk,Gallegos, or Sarmiento; the Latin American archival fiction, thisnew way of seeing the Archive, probably not. Consequently, it ismy contention that no narrative can be created beyond the Archive;somehow it would be part of the Archive’s (inenarrable) vortex.

Despite my criticism, I am indebted to González Echevarrı́a’sotherwise incisive ideas regarding the archive, particularly for hiseffort to translate the views of Foucault in order to provide a valu-able approach to the specifics of the Latin American case. Thisbook is an attempt to study fictions that are part of the archive’sdynamics—the part I have called ‘‘the dark side,’’ or the carnero—framed in Spanish America between the 1870s and the early 1900s,and then with a leap to the beginning of the 2000s in order to showthat such dynamics are also present in contemporary literary pro-duction. In accordance with González Echevarrı́a, I view thesenineteenth-century narratives as purporting ‘‘to be a probe into theorigin, an origin that is found in the Other, that Other Within whois a purveyor of violence.’’31 I agree that these narratives representa hidden search for origin masked as the foundation of an origin.These narratives are not, as Doris Sommer argues, a generativeclaim translated into literature,32 but rather a genealogical claim be-

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1: INTRODUCTION 27

cause of their very search for origin. In fact, the texts permeated bya decadent mood that I approach here are a radical illustration ofGonzález Echevarrı́a’s assertion, especially because their charac-ters amalgamate in their persona the ultimate accomplishments ofthe familial past, and also its ultimate failure. If we are to followthe periodization of Latin American narratives outlined by Gonzá-lez Echevarrı́a, the novels of decadent mood that I study seem tovacillate between the Humboldtian, naturalistic, scientific meta-frame that the author assigns to nineteenth-century fictions, and theanthropological meta-frame preoccupied with myth and languagethat he assigns to fictions immediately after the novela de latierra.33 It is this vacillation, and the fact that these fictions are re-lated to a decadent atmosphere, that makes them an interesting sub-ject of study regarding the carnero, that obscure side of the archive.

Decadentism, Decadence, Decadent Mood

It is necessary to examine the characteristics of the texts I havechosen as acting supplementarily in respect to the literary docu-ments of the open archive at the end of the nineteenth century inSpanish America. In a plain, merely aesthetic and thematic sense,these documents incarnate an instance of the main lines of deca-dentism. In Europe, decadentism was a movement led by authorssuch as Joris-Karl Huysmans (France, 1848–1907), Thomas deQuincey (England, 1785–1859), Charles Baudelaire (France, 1821–67), Walter Pater (England, 1839–94), Paul Verlaine (France,1844–96), and Gabriele D’Annunzio (Italy, 1863–1938). In broadterms of periodization, their production derived from the naturalistmovement. Realism, naturalism, and decadentism served as re-sponses to romanticism, but decadentism intensified the naturalists’unpleasant depictions of heredity or the environment to the point ofshaking the very root of what was considered the moral contract ofsociety, and therefore becoming identified as maudit, damned. Onlythat which exceeds the moral boundaries of society is given such aname.34

Spanish American realist or romantic fictions, from the secondhalf of the nineteenth century on, shared with the European modela preoccupation with the relationship between the environment andits inhabitants. This relationship was also connected to the portrayaland idealization of what the nation supposedly was and supposedlyshould be. In the same fashion, European and Spanish Americantexts imbued with decadent features had a parallel inclination to re-

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tool the general characteristics of decadentism; one example is theuse of enclosed spaces as a way to relate contradictorily to this por-trayed and idealized world. It is not a coincidence that artificial par-adises, so common to French and Italian decadent literature, arefurbished anew in the literary proposals of most of the authors ap-proached in this study, using different materials and arriving at dif-ferent corollaries.

Both European and Spanish American decadent writers were es-pecially interested in genealogical themes, in the description of en-tangled or difficult family interactions, in individuals with bloodtarnished by exhaustion, or in characters diseased as a result of en-dogamic sexual exchanges. In literature, the decadent genealogicalapproach did not merely depict a break with the past and then pro-duce a new generational sequence bare of precedents. One of themain features of this literature was that it showed how, in the lastportrayed generation, there was a synthesis of extreme refinementvis-à-vis an extreme moral and physical disintegration experiencedby an individual. These texts are marked by barren, unproductiveexchanges. The desire to escape from reality through experimenta-tion with hallucinogens, liquor, or even exchanges with reputedother-worldly entities, is paired with a desire to dwell in exoticspaces as a way to evade the world outside. Spaces are crowdedwith foreign objects in which reality is artificially reproduced; thenatural component becomes a failed echo trying to mimic artifici-ality.

Decadent characters long for something beyond the real. Excessand proclivity to crowd the senses resulted in hyperesthesia—thatis, excessive sensibility, over-feeling—or in synesthesia—the im-pressions of one of the senses used to describe the impressions ofanother sense, a sound used to describe a color, for example. Suchexcess also led to opposition against what society considered natu-ral. The conflict with prevalent moral rules was exemplified throughthe depiction of relations in which the boundaries of accepted sexu-ality were attacked, through the caustic disparagement of the eccle-siastical institution, or through the frontal attack to any orthodoxfoundation. The quest for something beyond the real, in thedecadent mood, developed in a contrary, and sometimes comple-mentary, way related to a mystic disposition. This proximity tomysticism would distance the reader from the comfort of dogmaticreligious preconceptions as the only path to understand the humansoul.

Instead of an obedient female character, that is, a fertile groundfor progeny and patriarchal perpetuation, the decadent mood offers

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1: INTRODUCTION 29

a contradictory woman, often called ‘‘fatal,’’ radically sexed andsexualized—even if sometimes in a veiled fashion—impervious,the owner of her (own) self. Nevertheless, such portrayal did notnecessarily mean that authors and readers saw these feminine char-acters as positive and desirable for society. In Spanish America andin the texts analyzed here, this woman becomes the protagonist inMartı́’s novel, Lucı́a Jerez, or Vargas Vila’s Germania in Lirionegro, or Leticia in Palma’s ‘‘Leyendas de haschischs,’’35 or the ter-minally ill young woman of Quiroga’s short story dedicated to Isa-bel Ruremonde.36 The women of the decadent mood force men toengage in a new logic, in which the stability of energy fluxes—represented in an economy of blood, of lasciviousness, or ofpower—is mirrored by a search for a stable relationship betweennormalized genders.

In the case of Spanish America, what forced these mainstreamdocuments to be relegated to the carnero was their unwillingness toexercise a constructive influence over the social or political realityof their moment. As I will show later, crisis is the flesh and soul ofthe decadent mood, for the goal of the decadent crisis is crisis itself.For these authors, art has no direct relationship to ethics; instead,art is closely linked to aesthetics. These authors deemed it moresensible to experiment with that which produces pleasure here andnow than to question how to ameliorate the present reality (al-though pleasure could bring momentary relief from that reality). Ormaybe their pose hid a desire for shifting societal values; this wouldexplain the fact that the iconoclastic explosion found in the pagesof the decadent documents was enough to make them appreciatedby the sectors of society that had been forced to the margins. Thedissolving power of their discourse turned these texts into a clearriposte to the respectable writers and documents placed in what Ihave named the open archive.

In an article titled ‘‘La recepción del decadentismo en His-panoamérica,’’ a firm base for what could be an in-depth study ofthis subject, Jorge Olivares explains the difficult relationship criticsand open-archive writers had with the production of authors experi-menting with decadentism.37 If European decadentism was the out-come of a civilization at the precise moment of its peak andimminent decline, how could a young, immature continent, repletewith vibrant energy, use the very same tools and strategies of itsold world counterpart? The obstinacy in adhering to that Europeanmovement could not be anything but a pose, a copying, an echoing,of the European mode.

This criticism did not recognize that what was actually happening

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was emulation—appropriation, the retooling of ideas, form, andmethods—and not copying. Emulation does not mean repetition butthe reformulation of an idea in order to make sense of it in terms ofequality. Carlos Dı́az Dufoo’s text of the time, quoted by Olivares,explains how the process of emulation could have made sense then:

El error consiste en imaginar que las jóvenes generaciones americanasno han sido heridas por las desgarradoras dolencias que se han apode-rado de las almas contemporáneas del otro lado del mar.

[The mistake is to assume that the young American generations havenot been wounded by the heartrending sufferings that have taken holdof the contemporary souls on the other side of the Atlantic.]38

Spanish American decadentism is the articulation in literature—previous to that of modernismo—of modernity both as a tantalizinggoal and as a complex present reality. The burning question at thecore of these fictions and poems is how to incorporate modernity,incarnated by Europe, into an American discourse. One of the de-velopments of such a predicament is that of the artificial paradisesI mentioned before. These enclosed pretensions of a foreign reality,as seen in Vargas Vila, Quiroga, Martı́, or Silva’s De sobremesa(the latter is not analyzed in this study, although his presence is per-sistent throughout all the chapters),39 are nothing but the desire toincorporate Europe, even if it means doing so artificially. Indeed,these artificial paradises are not exoticized replicas of Africa, theFar East, or the Middle East—the generalization is intended—butactually transplantations of Europe into the harsh reality of a slow-progressing Spanish America. Indeed, a predicament is just that, amoment of perplexity. Ultimately, bewilderment informs the de-sired establishment of identity for the countries in their cohesion-seeking process. It is this predicament, decadentism and its pro-jected solutions—or better yet, its disillusions—that constitutes thelink between a free Spanish America and its modern, obscure objectof desire.

Even if the aesthetic, thematic, or stylistic elements of decadent-ism are relevant—as a matter of fact, I frequently use them as ex-planatory tools or in support of my arguments—this study does notderive its results from them. I do not purport to establish strict simi-larities or differences between literary decadentism in Europe andin Spanish America. Nor is it my pretension to affirm or deny thatthe Spanish American movement was isolated from, or associatedwith, the literary work in Spain at the time, or to determine whether

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1: INTRODUCTION 31

it complies with or defies the axioms of French, Italian, or Englishdecadentism. I do not intend to show that the features of decadent-ism in end-of-the-century Spanish American literature should bestudied apart from modernismo, although my findings point towardthat claim and ask for further exploration at another time.

The purpose of the distinction between ‘‘decadentism’’ and ‘‘thedecadent mood,’’ or ‘‘that which is decadent,’’ is to establish differ-ences between the European aesthetic movement (decadentism) andthe conditions and implications of a conformation of the world (thedecadent mood) in Spanish America. No doubt, as I have illustratedbefore, there exist undeniable points of contact between the Euro-pean aesthetic movement and the artistic production in LatinAmerica. The difference that I want to highlight is fundamentallyin the setting in which each one of these manifestations took place.Using the term ‘‘decadent mood’’ allows me to establish connec-tions without relying on historical conditions, whereas ‘‘decadent-ism’’ forces an approach in which the nineteenth-century Europeanmovement is instituted as a model and the Spanish American pro-duction as a simple, and for some lesser, mirroring image of suchmodel. Spanish American texts demonstrate a problematization ofthe features of decadentism whose sociopolitical consequences en-gage them in a very different fashion with respect to their counter-parts in Europe. In this sense, the term ‘‘decadent mood’’ aids inthe understanding of the features and sociopolitical consequencesof what is decadent in the literature of Spanish American countriesafter the wars of independence.

This study examines ideas of sterility as a result of murder, in-cest, opposition to racial mixing, the generational gap, the economyof blood, the changing roles of women, the examination of sexual-ity in terms that conflicted with accepted moral standards, and thechallenge to hierarchy. With the term ‘‘decadent mood’’ I intend tohighlight the general features of thought in times of crisis, detachedfrom a determined historical time or from a relation to the literarycurrents at the end of the nineteenth century. The relationship be-tween decadentism and crisis is taken from The Philosophy of Dec-adentism: A Study in Existentialism, by Norberto Bobbio.40 In hisbook, Bobbio drafts a parallel between the turn of the nineteenth-century aesthetic movement and the existentialist ideas of Karl Jas-pers and Martin Heidegger. He asserts that the breakthrough of theidea that what human beings claim as Truth—Liberty, Republican-ism, or Liberalism, to mention a few relevant ideologies for theSpanish American case—is accompanied by an explosion of cha-otic vitality and exuberance. It is from that disorderly exuberance

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and vitality that crisis emerges. The decadent mood at the end ofthe nineteenth century is a critical part, and critical consequence,of the romantic vision of literature and politics in which ideas aresubsumed into the regulation of an external and almighty nature.Truth, for example, until then considered monolithic, becomes ajumble of multifaceted pretensions of truth denuded of agency.Such was the state of things for the former Spanish colonies inAmerica once they acquired their abrupt independence: the formu-lation of countless possible futures, programs, desires, plans, or im-provisations ultimately became an obstacle to the emergence ofnation and liberty itself. If there is a lack of a monolithic truth, theindividual becomes apathetic; the moral dicta that until then areable to constrain him are put aside and replaced by what is superfi-cial and simply, immediately gratifying. Crisis is decadence, deca-dence is crisis.

The reaction to this lack of telos (final purpose or goal) is a con-stant struggle against anything that represents authority. As will beillustrated throughout the book, decadence as crisis is shown bymeans of the consideration of the will as something exceptionallyindividual. Individual will is so exalted that anarchy turns out to bea plausible answer to the relationship of the subject and his world.As a result, crisis is no longer endured by the totality of society’smembers, but painfully experienced by the subject alone. This factis not to be considered an injustice—justice and injustice are theresulting categories of a social contract—but as the realization ofthe individual’s will. In consequence, authority loses immanence,and the moral dicta safeguarded thus far by such authority becomeprovisory and variable. The decadent individual is in constantstruggle with any form of authority desiring to limit his or her de-sire to communicate crisis. Hence, Bobbio’s description of the dec-adent individual is a faithful portrait of the feminine and masculinecharacters that populate the texts I study: ‘‘Potentially the singleman is always a heretic or a rebel who, to serve his individuality,avoids and, if he thinks fit, condemns society.’’41 Such is the pros-pect for Spanish America at the time the first four authors I evaluatewere in different stages of literary production. José Martı́ expressesthis mood timidly as the possibility of the incompetence of a ro-mantic male hero and the triumph of a decadently heterodox hero-ine. In José Marı́a Vargas Vila the crisis acquires the shape ofcontempt for the ineptitude of politicians and the clash with thechurch. In Clemente Palma, decadence is translated as a futilesearch through what is considered sterile, through death, andthrough the hesitant move of condemning and defending the pro-

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1: INTRODUCTION 33

cess of interracial breeding—that is, bloodlines. In Horacio Quiroga,the complex relationship to modernity takes the shape of a venerealdisease that estranges the individual from the world of progress andsolace incarnated in Paris. In the contemporary Fernando Vallejo,the crisis consists of understanding that the nation is a void or a lie.The characters in these texts are not the much-loved examples ofliveliness, moral rectitude, or change-producing capacity portrayedin other fictions of their time. On the contrary, since they are notcapable of acting, they are antisocial or asocial: ‘‘a-foundational;’’if active, what they produce is barren, lost in extravagance, lost inexcess. If part of the social sphere, they are not exemplary models;they are a sore on society’s body. They are ‘‘raros’’ [‘‘odd’’]. Andwhat is uncommon can be admired, yet not necessarily appreciated.

Now, then, if what is decadent is represented as individuality, astension in front of or in opposition against the institutions repre-senting power, this would mean that social cohesion is destined todisintegrate slowly. At least, that seems to be the hidden program ofdecadent fictions. Such dissolution knowingly created by the writerconstitutes a major problem for the generalized project of the Span-ish American countries after independence. The disintegratinggerm would have contaminated the constructive project from itsvery inception, long before the promised unifying process to be de-veloped after the liberation from Spanish colonial rule would havetaken place.

While the desire at the core of the so-called (constructive) foun-dational narratives is to imagine or signal possible prospects for thenation, in the decadent narratives the goal of the depicted crisis iscrisis itself. Crisis is not devoted to becoming the previous stage toits own solution; Bobbio indicates that for the decadent individual,‘‘the crisis is not a subject for reprobation or a springboard for aleap forward, but his own destiny, his own last refuge; and to whomhis humiliation is a pleasure, and almost an exaltation of his ownlack of any support.’’42 The hopeless way of thinking that can becalled ‘‘the decadent’’ results in the devastation of the productivevalues of social harmony typical of romanticism or republicanism.All of the texts analyzed here, with the exception of one text byVallejo, end without closure. After the final ‘‘period’’ there is onlyemptiness. From the point of view of the supplement, the idea ofemptiness refers to the need for completion for any document in thearchive. These literary documents promise nothing to the reader;after the last page there is neither hope nor faith, because hopeless-ness and lack of belief are their flesh and blood. That is their appeal.These fictions have no overt moralizing interest, no explicit lesson

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in their entrails to shape the behavior of the reader. If any, theirinterest is demoralizing. They have no pretension to be positivelyidealized archetypes, but are simply artistic expressions. For thedecadent mood, sententious morality is the manifestation of medi-ocrity attempting to control all the members of society by makingthem the repetition of a model without autonomy; the extreme indi-viduality pursued by the decadent mood is based on rejecting thepossibility of a communal morality. Any initial indication of ahappy ending in these narratives results in crushed dreams. Onmore than one occasion it seems as if the narrator is rejoicing inabandoning the reader amidst the initial hope turned into anguishand the foretold disaster. In these novels everything is impregnatedwith diffidence, ignorance of the future. The only certainty is theimpracticability of salvation or of a bountiful world. Bobbio indi-cates that ‘‘the idea of inexorable progress gives way to that of inex-orable frustration, and security to insecuritas as an essentialcharacteristic of man.’’43 Decadentism as emptiness, as insecurity,as no possible future, as a defense of what is barren, is the refugefor humanity in times of crisis, and, in this case, is the shelter forthe crisis lived by the societies of the authors I discuss.

Memory, Oblivion, Expulsion, Inclusion

Nonpropitiatory fictions, foreign to the didactic goal of setting a‘‘good example,’’ become incidental and ultimately are relegated tothe carnero. By pointing out these texts, dusting them off, studyingthem, and in due course putting them back on the shelves, we re-mind ourselves of the organicity of the archive and of the frailty ofinflexible categorization. As a result of this exercise of discoveryand occultation, the correlation between memory and oblivion be-comes apparent. Every foundationally productive mnemonic land-mark is erected over a nonproductive substratum. There is no doubtthat memory is an essential part of nation building. Yet it is alsotrue that memory is necessarily a supplement to oblivion. When afoundational fiction becomes, or intends to be, a projected arche-type for the nation, it does so standing over, and at the side of, thenonproductive fictions of the kind we will study here.

Nietzsche, in my opinion the most representative thinker of theend of the nineteenth century in the West, clearly states in his Onthe Genealogy of Morals that memory is constituted and preservedin blood.44 Memory is embalmed in pain and sacrifice. In clear op-position to the decadent subject, who actually prefers to dwell in an

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1: INTRODUCTION 35

isolated space, the subject of foundational fiction submits to thepainful promise of inscription in memory with the illusion of beingestablished amidst the dreamt nation:

With the help of such images and procedures one eventually memorizesfive or six ‘‘I will not’s,’’ thus giving one’s promise in return for theadvantages offered by society. And indeed! with the help of this sort ofmemory, one eventually did come to ‘‘see reason’’!—Ah, reason, seri-ousness, mastery over the emotions, the whole murky affair which goesby the name of thought, all these privileges and showpieces of man:what a high price has been paid for them! how much blood and horroris at the bottom of all ‘‘good things’’!45

In the chapters dedicated to Clemente Palma and Vargas Vila, itwill indeed become apparent how the spectral presence of the mem-ory, represented by the fluxes of blood and pain, becomes a prob-lematic axis for the building of the nation. If, with nineteenth-century intellectuals like Ernest Renan or Johann Gottlieb Fichte,we acknowledge memory as the foundation of the nation,46 an un-settling question occurs: what type of nation arises when the mem-ory is marked by catastrophe, shame, or destruction? The mythicalerection of a very fertile nation portrayed in productively founda-tional fictions could only be carried out, then, over the base ofbarren, purposely relegated, foundational fictions. Once again,Nietzsche’s words help us understand how the dark side of the ar-chive must be taken into account in order to have a clear vision ofwhat a Spanish American nation would be, imagining itself underthe parameters of the West: ‘‘But have you ever asked yourselvesoften enough how much the setting up of every single ideal on earthhas cost? How much reality had to be defamed and denied, howmany lies sanctified, how much conscience disturbed, how much‘‘god’’ sacrificed each time to that end? In order for a shrine to beset up, another shrine must be broken into pieces: that is the law—show me the case where it is not so!’’47

Silenced, removed to the darkness of the carnero, the barrenfoundational fictions act as a substratum. Meanwhile, the vital spiritpermeating the documents of the open archive becomes more evi-dent: these fictions struggle to construct an organized and hierar-chic space that fosters the preservation of the nations wishing to be,at the same time, independent and part of the concert of nationsfrom which they achieved their independence. The claim that theseliterary works clearly illustrate an idealized prospect of the futureis completely admissible, but it must be added, according to Freud,

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that ‘‘what has belonged to the lowest part of the mental life of eachof us is changed, through the formation of the ideal, into what ishighest in the human mind by our scale of values.’’48

Doris Sommer claims, ‘‘without a proper genealogy to root themin the land, the Creoles had at least to establish conjugal and thenpaternity rights, making a generative rather than a genealogicalclaim.’’49 If my examination is taken into consideration regardingthe need to expand our view of the relationship between Eros andpolitics in the literary documents, after the wars of independencefrom Spain, the need to widen the spectrum of the study of suchdocuments will be noticeable. It would be necessary to incorporatenot only the type of narratives in search of a generative way out,but those searching for a genealogical departure as a possibility ofthe construction of the national identity. Nevertheless, a genealogi-cal search is not necessarily a laudatory exploration of origins, butan assessment of origins to demystify them and to reformulatethem. My analysis follows the genealogical criticism found inNietzsche when he explains how origins are formulated anew as thenatural essence of humanity and are later institutionalized in restric-tive conventions that we know as moral laws.50

The realist novel in Spanish America embarked on a historicalsearch for origins in order to provide a fixed and totalizing startingpoint, one that would offer a feasible space to constitute the na-tional entity. The idea of a need for a starting point is also applica-ble to the idealized and idealizing realm of romantic literature, butwhat is clear is that the tangible constitutive elements after indepen-dence in Spanish America were, to a great extent, reactive, sponta-neous, provisional answers. Granted, they were imbued with apositive search for newfound productive goals, but they were notnecessarily the result of a much-planned scheme once liberty fromSpain was achieved. There was also a building of the nation stem-ming from the colonial projects that were already in place. Even ifit is not, or was not, accepted publicly, there was not necessarily aradical cut from the colonial, Spanish, past. Both its damaging andits productive features remained throughout the republican projects.Even the process of building the nation in the generative fashionasserted by Sommer has at its core a genealogical seed. If one is tomake a comparison, the processes of nation building in countriespreviously colonized are very similar to processes present in the pe-riods of generational transition inside families. In order to establishself-determination, a member of the family might decide to severany connection with the other members, including parents or sib-lings. This radical severing of familial ties is called by family thera-

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1: INTRODUCTION 37

pists Michael Kerr and Murray Bowen a ‘‘cutoff’’: ‘‘Emotionalcutoff is a concept in systems theory that describes the way peoplemanage the undifferentiation (and emotional intensity associatedwith it) that exists between the generations. The greater the undif-ferentiation or fusion between the generations, the greater the likeli-hood the generations will cut off from one another.’’51 However,this theoretical approach states that the radical ‘‘cutoff’’ has as ageneral consequence the repetition of previous familial patterns:‘‘Cutoff may relieve immediate pressure and lower anxiety, but theperson’s vulnerabilities to intense relationships remain unchanged.The more complete the cutoff with the past, the more likely it isthat a more intense version of the past (or its mirror image) will berepeated in the present.’’52 If one is to apply these considerations tothe circumstances of independence and the generative as opposed tothe genealogical project, one will find that although these countriesrepeated the negative patterns of the previous generation, therewere also changes resulting from the comparison with the preced-ing period. One of those changes was indeed the need to see theresults of possible relationships between social groups of diverseeconomic or racial origin. The works studied here are related to theproductive fictions because of their common interest in scrutinizinggenealogical relationships, even if they appear as generational. Yetsuch scrutiny did not necessarily mean that they tried to offer solu-tions or hope in order to overcome the burden imposed on thesesocieties by three hundred years of numbing colonial rule.

The possibility of a supplementary reading like the one I am pro-posing here could be criticized by those defending the strength ofconstructive foundational fictions, arguing that the works I am link-ing to the discussion are simply a minority. Following Sommer, itcould be claimed that there was a much more powerful body of nar-ratives of the romantic type in which sentimental relationships cor-responded to a political necessity of reproduction and generativeaugmentation: ‘‘Tensions exist, to be sure, and they provide muchof the interest in reading what otherwise might be an oppressivelystandard canon. But what I am saying is that those very tensionscould not be appreciated if the overwhelming energy of the bookswere not being marshaled to deny them.’’53 This assertion is furtheremphasized when Sommer declares that writers ‘‘didn’t necessarilyworry about writing compensatory fabrications as fillers for a worldfull of gaps.’’54 I fundamentally disagree with both claims. I dis-agree with the first because a surge of so much energy in order todefend the need for a consolidation of national identity (using fam-ily as a tool and homogenization as a method) would only be neces-

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sary if at its core had existed an equally powerful force that, bothliterarily and concretely, would neutralize the reproductive, con-cord-seeking energies amongst interests and factions. A surge of somuch energy would come not from the supposed need to show thegreat benefits that would result from implementing their construc-tive beliefs, but from the desire to produce a visible, effectivediscourse opposed to a reality that, mutely, corroborated the de-struction, the opposition of equals, or the failure of the foreign-in-spired governmental methods that were being implemented.Regarding the second assertion, I hold that the expelled narrativesare in fact ripostes to, or origins of, the supposed gaps not coveredby the works deemed as positively foundational. These gaps do notfunction, as Sommer seemed to perceive, as voids; they are insteadintegrated as a hidden substratum of the visible foundations, incar-nated by the narratives of the open archive. The supposed vacuumleft by the fractures does not remain as a void; it has already beenfilled by ideas opposed by the mainstream culture. The fact thatthey are placed in the ominous carnero is a completely differentissue, more related to institutionalization than to reality. It couldalso be argued that the romantic fictions we now study as the mostrepresentative works of the nineteenth century are in fact a smallgroup of literary works in comparison to the massive productionof popular literature, decadent literature, and other texts for quickconsumption that flourished with the easier access to printingpresses.

These obscure revelations seem to oppose any example of a lumi-nous future. I compare the move to favor reproductive-orientednarratives with the need to create a monument of unity to be wor-shipped. Unblemished items tend to command attention as primeconstituents of the model. What is filled with clear light is turnedinto a monument, into an example for the future. Foundationalfictions are the equivalent of a statue publicly exposed to be ad-mired. It is expected that time, rain, and sun will create the greenpatina that justifies the reason for the statue and legitimates its pres-ence as a model. At its feet there are inscriptions in uniform lettersthat sing praises to what the monument represents. Historical dates,battles, agreements, decisions, like underlined words from the past,are inscribed in the hard stone. The statue rests over a structure cov-ered by marble slabs that enhance its height, its pretense of perma-nence.

The patina of literary monuments is the result of the posteriorrepetition of their traits in texts or documents of all sorts. The liter-ary commentary, the scholarly quotation, and the inclusion in the

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1: INTRODUCTION 39

curriculum of educational institutions—like the one I spent time atwhen I was twelve years old and prone to search in old wardrobes—are the time, rain, and sun that endorse the exemplary condition ofwhat has been written. The inscriptions at their feet are engravedby later texts that imitate the same formula. This reproduction orrepetition in new texts emphasizes the success of the primary worksand reinforces the significance of their emergence. Repetition en-hances the prominence of the literary monument and gives it anaura of imposing, stable, and impenetrable attributes.

Yet the monument is a construction that covers a sepulcher. It isan aesthetic (cosmetic) product that intends to conceal somethingunpleasant and lugubrious. It can also be a geographical mark thataspires to keep a memory of the past from sinking into oblivion.The monument wishes to fix a reality that threatens to decomposeinto an ideal state of perfection. What is apparent—the beautiful,the praiseworthy, the desirable—covers the remains, the detritus ofwhat was and no longer is. The monument is thought of as the be-ginning of the history that presides over a community; it is the seedof what is shared or what is desired to be shared. The monumentis not considered as the end of something that is interred; from itsconception it pretends to be a foundation itself.

The rites of unity, of search for common strength, are performedencircling the monument. At its door, flowers or olive wreaths aredeposited; addresses to courage or unity are issued there. If thefoundational novels are the monument that is visited, praised, andturned into an example, then it should be asked: what are the ashesand remains that rest under the earth, hidden from our eyes? In thisstudy I show that they are the buried narratives that did not consoli-date the reproductive or harmonic thrusts of romantic or realistfoundational fictions: the literature with decadent, supplementaryfeatures, the narratives that monitor crisis as a medium and as agoal. Without these stories there would be no visible monument, forwhat we see are the sublimated results, as contrast and response, ofthe impulses considered destructive to the common well-being. Theintent of my work is to inspect the crypt under the monument.

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2Ominous Lucı́a

THIS CHAPTER’S TITLE COMBINES THE TWO TITLES UNDER WHICH JOSÉMartı́’s only novel has been published. Amistad funesta [An Omi-nous Friendship], which later became Lucı́a Jerez, exposes the dy-namics of the archive on every page, from its metamorphosed titleto the differences in its dates and places of publication. The novelis also marked by the myriad ways it has been judged by criticsand by the process of concealment and revelation it has undergone.However, that the work was initially published under a pseudonymand only later claimed by its author inspires an engaged interpreta-tion. In this chapter I show how the logic behind supplementarityand the logic behind the archive I exposed in the introductory chap-ter become evident when the interpretation of literary documents ismediated by their classification, as well as by the time, place, andmanner in which they reach the reading public. The passive role ofwomen as represented in previous romantic novels, although attrac-tive to Martı́’s aesthetic views, becomes clearly ineffectual for hispractical goals of political change at the time. I argue that thechange in the title and Martı́’s eventual inclusion of his name asauthor of the novel are the result of his timid recognition of the needfor a strong, self-determined, sometimes overpowering woman inhis program of cohesion and strengthening of the Spanish Americanations, even if this meant going against the grain of his convictionthat women should be as ‘‘fragile vases of mother-of-pearl’’ con-taining purity and conformity.1

In this study I have chosen not to analyze the aesthetics of Lucı́aJerez, its connection with the modernist movement, or its symbolisttropes. Nor will I focus on the plausibility, or lack thereof, of anautobiographical interpretation or the possible characteristics of ahero in Martı́’s work. Other critics have already studied these ele-ments exhaustively.2 Rather, my objective is to examine the work’santithetical concept of nation building as it is represented in itsmain character. As occurs with other authors studied in this book,

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2: OMINOUS LUCÍA 41

sterility and discord seem to be haunting factors that interrupt thereverie of a dreamed nation. I will explore the consequences result-ing from changes in the text’s title and the revelation of its true au-thor—that is, the changes in their inscription, or enrollment, intothe archive. This approach will illustrate how Martı́ experienced amoment of doubt and contradiction about what he had thus far envi-sioned as women’s roles, and how his construction of a femininefigure that deviates from the precepts assigned to women becomes aparadox, since the conduct of such a figure brings about unexpectedpolitical consequences. Finally, I will demonstrate how the novel’sindigenous component complicates the construction of an egalitar-ian social project.

Changing Inscriptions, Changing Interpretations

The first step of this inquiry is to study how and why Amistadfunesta became Lucı́a Jerez, that is, how different titles, and differ-ent places of publication, demand a dual critical interpretation ofthe text. The answer to these questions rests in the study of howLucı́a’s character reflects the changes in the feminine role as per-ceived by Martı́ in his reading of European literature and art, andhow she embodies the changing qualities of women in SpanishAmerica.

Martı́’s novel has been published with different titles, under apseudonym as well as his real name, in newspaper and book form,and in different countries. Each alteration represents a reshufflingof archival meanings. The text first appeared in 1885 with the titleof Amistad funesta, published in El Latino-Americano, a New Yorknewspaper.3 The second edition, published as part of Martı́’s Obrasde Martı́ in Berlin (1911), preserved the original title.4 Nonetheless,the inclusion of Martı́’s

on the dark side of the archive the...mark a. herna´ndez, figural conquistadors: rewriting the new...

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