Cosmopolitanism in the Americas (Comparative Cultural Studies)

Comparative Cultural Studies

Camilla Fojas

Cosmopolitanism in the Americas

PURDUE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Comparative Cultural Studies Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Series Editor Comparative Cultural Studies is a contextual approach in the study of culture in all of its products and processes. The framework is built on tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and cultural studies and on notions borrowed from a range of thought such as (radical) constructivism, communication theories, systems theories, and literary and culture theory. In comparative cultural studies focus is on theory and method as well as application and where attention is on the how rather than on the what. Colleagues interested in publishing in the series are invited to contact the editor, Steven Tötösy, at . Volumes in the series are: Comparative Central European Culture. Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2002. 190 pages, bibliography, index. ISBN 1-55753240-0 (pbk). Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies. Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2003. 356 pages, bibliography, index. ISBN 1-55753-288-5 (ebook), ISBN 1-55753-290-7 (pbk). Sophia A. McClennen, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language, and Space in Hispanic Literatures. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2004. 240 pages, bibliography, index. ISBN 1-55753-315-6 (pbk). Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America. Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Earl E. Fitz. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2004. 266 pages, bibliography, index. ISBN 1-55753-358-X (pbk). Feng, Jin. The New Woman in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Fiction. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2004. 240 pages, bibliography, index. ISBN 155753-330-X (pbk). Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje’s Writing. Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2005. 154 pages, bibliography, index. ISBN 1-55753-378-4 (pbk). Camilla Fojas, Cosmopolitanism in the Americas. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2005. 160 pages, bibliography, index. ISBN 1-55753-382-2 (pbk).

Camilla Fojas Cosmopolitanism in the Americas

Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright 2005 by Purdue University. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America ISBN 1-55753-382-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fojas, Camilla, 1971Cosmopolitanism in the Americas / Camilla Fojas. p. cm. -- (Comparative cultural studies) Includes index. ISBN 1-55753-382-2 (pbk.) 1. America--Civilization--19th century. 2. America--Intellectual life--19th century. 3. Cosmopolitanism--America--History--19th century. 4. Literary movements-America--History--19th century. 5. American literature--19th century--History and criticism. 6. Latin American literature--19th century--History and criticism. 7. City and town life in literature. 8. Latin America--Civilization--European influences. 9. Pan-Americanism--History--19th century. 10. America--Politics and government-19th century. I. Title. II. Series. E20.F64 2005 306'.097'09034--dc22 2004028058

CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Cosmopolitanism in the Americas: Becoming Worldly, Becoming Modern

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Chapter One Thresholds of Cosmopolitanism: Prefaces to Modernity and Other-Worldly Readings

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Chapter Two Cosmopolitan Topographies of Paris: Citing Balzac

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Chapter Three Cosmopolitan Decadence: Writing Inversions

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Chapter Four American Cosmopolis: The World’s Columbian Exposition and Chicago across the Americas

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Chapter Five Literary Cosmotopias: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Ariel and Cosmópolis

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Conclusions (and Querying the “Other” Cosmopolitanism)

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Works Cited Index

139 147

Preface Before the turn of the nineteenth century, the “Americas” referred to the shared histories of revolutionary independence across the hemisphere. Yet, the term had contested meanings depending on the context of its use. Lester Langley notes that even before the Latin American wars of independence, the term “American” came to serve as a symbol of cultural unity against the Spanish. He cites Thomas Jefferson’s description of the Americas as “one hemisphere” with different systems of interest, yet in which all nation states of the Americas were made to suffer from the ravages and wars of European tyranny (32). In his exploration of the “essence” (“la esencia”) of Latin America, Leopoldo Zea found that the term and place was incomprehensible without contending with its counterpart, Anglo-Saxon America: “in order to be legitimate, it has to encompass both Americas” (“para ser legítima, tendrá que englobar a ambas Américas”) (9). Yet the histories of north and south are different and even ideologically counterposed; Spain and Portugal conquered and colonized Latin America to disseminate Christianity, while the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the United States by Europe was a consequence of the destabilization of the values of Christianity in order to elaborate new ones (see Zea). One has roots in modernity and modernizing ideas, while the other was hitched to the backward pull of Spain and Portugal. By 1898, peninsular Spanish influence in the colonized world was in decline while the U.S., after strategic military and economic successes against Spain, rose to rapid prominence. Cosmopolitanism provided a loose theoretical framework for coming to terms with this hemispheric dynamic; in Latin American cultural productions, it meant making use of Western European culture to fortify national identity and domesticate the universals of spirit and justice to defend against U.S. materialism. For U.S. and Latin American states, cosmopolitanism was a political catch-all for relationships across the Americas; for the Organization of American States’ mission of hemispheric security, peace, and free trade. The term had many different meanings in the Americas, dependent upon the part of the hemisphere in which it traveled; on the one hand, it was a theoretical tool for cultural decolonization, yet for the north, it encoded a new form of colonization under the alibi of hemispheric peace. As this diversity of uses attests, cosmopolitanism is most meaningful in practice, in context, and in the very specificity that the

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term seems to avoid. It is perhaps most meaningful in its applied localities: each instance of its manifestation belies the difficulties of its universal aspirations. During the rise of American hemispheric politics, there were several literary movements circulating under the principle of cosmopolitanism. Critics discuss the international cosmopolitan literature movements of the turn of the century almost exclusively as a European and Euro-American phenomenon comprising writers like Henry James, Gertrude Stein, or Oscar Wilde. However there was a vital literary cosmopolitanism in Latin America conversant in the European tradition while at work on the creation of a national literary culture—this movement was called modernismo for its principle of modern innovation. For Federico de Onís, modernismo meant the integration of literatures of Latin America into universal literature, what many critics have noted as the first independent literary movement; the first sign of independence, the first real cultural rupture from Spain’s colonial legacy and assertion of cultural parity with the United States. Cosmopolitanism in the Americas represents a comparative cultural studies approach to the issues of cosmopolitanism during the rise of international political organizations and global literary communities (for the emerging field of comparative cultural studies, see Tötösy de Zepetnek). This book provides a wider and comparative context for the study of cosmopolitanism focused through a Latin American consumption of Western European and Euro-American literary culture in modernity. The political cosmopolitanism of U.S.-based American unity or the “our America” (“nuestra América”) of Pan-American defensive unity were the acceptable cosmopolitanisms, yet there was another cosmopolitanism, one that was less politically overt, less acceptable—but not, as some critics claim, politically inert. The “other” cosmopolitanism was a kind of cultural transvestism, a taking on of the markers and characteristics of major foreign urban centers in a way that would alter and “modernize” gender/sexual self-representation. This cosmopolitanism was a way of experiencing the city either by writing about it or reading about it. Literature was key to creating sympathy and empathy through identification while it promoted the values of diversity and of open-mindedness to the modern, the new, the outrageous, and the queer—all things found in the modern metropolis. Cultural acclimation to radical alterities of sexual, gender, and cultural queerness was considered a route to modernity and to building national literary cultures. Being cosmopolitan meant eliminating the burden and bad reputation of colonized backwardness, entering larger cultural and economic markets, and eventually marking a place in international culture. A nagging problem with any comparison is the implicit hierarchy that privileges one national or institutional context over another; in this case, one type of cosmopolitanism that establishes Europe as the origin and center to a peripheral Latin American derivation. The relationship of centers to peripheries demands historical context and theorization or it risks becoming politically neutral. There have been numerous theoretical scuffles over the political meaning of texts, whether

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third world texts are necessarily allegorical, whether literature is always only an elite occupation, whether criticism merely objectifies literature, and whether culture can be unhinged from the high-low/center-periphery divide. Prior to the advent of mass cultural productions like cinema or television; literature, journalism, and journalized literature were the primary and dominant media outlets. Moreover, the modernistas, as Angel Rama has discussed at length, collapsed the divide between literature and journalism by working as journalists and writing as poets and writing as poets while working as journalists. They exploited liberal capitalism to create a market for their work, to expand their influence, and support themselves. This study is not limited by the disciplinary boundaries of literary studies, but examines literary and cultural contact that was both thematized and encouraged by Pan-American writers. In this work, I am concerned with why and how European and North American texts and contexts, literatures and cities, are consumed. Comparative cultural studies implies contact and consumption (i.e., process) and examines how texts are metabolized rather than how they are counterposed. By exploring modes of consumption, I am concerned with how literature functions, how it is instrumentalized, how it makes and moves subjects, and how it creates relationships across territories and time. I focus on turn-of-the-nineteenth-century definitions of cosmopolitanism because it is a time of transition, of wide and wild changes most evident in the major urban centers of the world, in the fast-paced international and urbane culture of the metropolis. The city was used to broker modernity, as a place where the modern was in practice, and as a partial manifestation of the ideal cosmopolis. Cosmopolitanism describes the culture associated with these new urban entities, while it is also a political sign of international diplomacy and justice, a sign of world-wide hospitality for the outcast, the exiled, migrants, foreigners, and travelers. Note: Unless otherwise noted and in cases where English translations were not available, all translations are mine. All diacritical marks are as they appear in the original texts.

Acknowledgments This work was written and rewritten with the support, mentorship, and relentless encouragement of various colleagues and institutional assistance. I began a major portion of this work while in residence at the International Center for Advanced Studies Project on Cities and Urban Knowledges at New York University under the scholarly direction of Thomas Bender. I thank Jennifer Wicke for reading earlier versions of this text. I am indebted to my committee chair, Sylvia Molloy, and committee members of Gerard Aching, Ana Dopico, Avital Ronell and George Yúdice for their critical insights and suggestions. I am grateful to the Andrew C. Mellon Foundation, the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Council, the DePaul University Research Council, and to the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies for research fellowships that aided in the completion of this work. I am also grateful for the research assistance of Elizabeth Ávila and Mariana Calderón. I thank the editor of the Purdue University Press series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, and the anonymous readers for the opportunity to publish this work with Purdue. I am deeply indebted to Sandra Franco for her meticulous reading, her care, and support. Finally, I thank my parents, Joyce Spindler Fojas and Louis Baas Fojas, and my sisters, Sofia, Olivia, and Rebecca, for their support and encouragement. An earlier version of chapter two appeared previously in a special issue of Comparative Urban and Community Research 7 (2001): 181–205. I thank the journal for the permission to include the text in this book.

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INTRODUCTION Cosmopolitanism in the Americas: Becoming Worldly, Becoming Modern

American Cosmopolitics The Free Trade Area of the Americas, potentially the largest free trade agreement in the world, far surpassing the North American Free Trade Agreement, has a long history; in fact, it is the culmination of cosmopolitan theories of a Pan-American community founded on the universals of peace, justice, and equality. The PanAmerican movement originated in Latin America; it began as an ideal of southern hemispheric unity by Simón Bolívar, the great Venezuelan liberator, in his “Jamaica Letter” of 1815. Bolívar writes about a pacific union of nations and territories across Latin America that would protect against interventions from colonial powers and ensure freedom for self-rule. This ideal derives from international political thinking with roots in the Enlightenment reorganization of the world, from the writings on European pacific unions from Abbé de Saint-Pierre and JeanJacques Rousseau to those on perpetual peace by Immanuel Kant. Kant clearly delineates the theoretical principles for achieving perpetual peace among nations while asserting cosmopolitanism as the fullest measure of human achievement. For Kant, cosmopolitanism is a “universally philanthropic” policy that would ensure peace among nations and grant individuals the right to international hospitality or “the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory” (“Perpetual Peace” 105). Kant’s philosophical program has the contradictory ideological purposes inherent in Enlightenment values; he promotes humanist ideas while his work has been foundational for hierarchical theories of race, severely undercutting Enlightenment claims to universal principles of justice. The violent legacy of these universals—unveiled by critics like Fanon, Arendt, Adorno, and Horkheimer—is a major critical blind spot of the cosmopolitans. Yet the expediency of the Pan-American quest for security from modern colonization justified, to some degree, this political shortsightedness. 1

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Bolívar’s cosmopolitan ideal came to fruition in 1826 with the InterAmerican Congress of Panama or “The Great American Assembly,” where its constituents—belatedly including the United States, whose delegates arrived after the meeting adjourned; and Brazil, then still a monarchy—discussed matters such as treaties of union and a permanent league and confederation of American states (Haring 44–45). The place of the United States at this first great congress was contested; Bolívar had worried that inviting the U.S. would antagonize England, whose allegiance was needed in the struggle against Spain, but Central Americans believed that the U.S. deserved to be included (Langley 49–54). The U.S., however, was not as enthusiastic about a politically driven defensive alliance, since mutuality, collaboration, and concession have never been defining virtues of the colossus of the north. In the end, fantasies about hemispheric justice and equity were soon punctured by the reality of an aggressive U.S. campaign to enlarge its economic, cultural, and territorial mass. Although Latin America would no longer be attacked or exploited by Spain, Bolívar’s ideals of Inter-Americanism would be colonized by North American politics under the ideology of the Monroe Doctrine; announced by James Monroe in his presidential address of 1823, this policy sought to limit European colonization in post-independence Latin America, though the United States would violate this principle in 1848 with its war with Mexico and the annexation of approximately one-third of Mexico’s territory. With the Monroe-indoctrinated Pan-American union, the U.S. could pass itself off as embracing the concerns of Latin America in the guise of hemispheric security. In the late nineteenth century in the Americas, cosmopolitan thinking culminated in the Organization of American States (OAS), established by the treaty of Bogotá in 1890. The OAS is the oldest international peace-keeping organization and served as a model for the League of Nations and the United Nations, both global pacts to protect human rights, promote global peace, and encourage development and is similar to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), under which the U.S., Canada, and other European countries banded together to promote peace and protect each other from attack. At the same time, several cosmopolitan literary movements began circulating ideas related to those of the cosmopolitical organizations. Various international writers attached their ideals to the utopian conception of a world-wide literary cosmopolis and the aesthetic principles of cosmopolitanism. Attesting to the force of this new movement was the sudden proliferation of texts bearing the title “cosmopolis”: Paul Bourget’s novel Cosmopolis originally appeared in French in 1892, Czech in 1892, English in 1893, German in 1894, Spanish in 1895, and Italian in 1930; Ricardo Rojas’s Hispanophone text, Cosmópolis, appeared in 1908. Several international journals with the same title emerged almost simultaneously, establishing an archive and repertoire of the writers involved in the work of literary diplomacy. There was the Hispanophone Cosmópolis from Caracas, Venezuela (1894–95); the trilingual French, German, and English Cosmopolis from

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London and New York (1896–98); and the Peninsular Spanish Cosmópolis (1927–31). Each journal sought a wide international literary readership and market through which writers could share ideas and expand their influence. These texts would create an international community of readers who would advance the project of world-wide understanding and peace among nations.

Cosmomodernists In Latin America, the cosmopolitan literary movement began with a group of writers loosely bound by a common affinity to literary modernismo, a movement of cultural and literary renovation and reinvention. These poets and writers— Julián del Casal, Rubén Darío, José Enrique Rodó, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, José Asunción Silva, among others—held faith in worldliness as crucial to a revolutionary style, a style that would add color and vitality to language and change the way people think about and define the world. Latin American modernismo was inherently cosmopolitan; it often took elements from international art and thought—from, for example, Decadence, Aestheticism and Symbolism, Occultism, Romanticism, Greek mythology, and German philosophy. Many critics of modernismo found cosmopolitanism to be an amnesic avoidance of the past, and the difference represented by the cosmopolitans was considered unworthy of integration into American national identity. The cosmopolitans were too bohemian; they contemplated the odd and the outcast, the perverse, and the precious. They were engaged in wayward pursuits and an idle life of repose: cruising Havana with unspeakable desires, lounging in Parisian cafés, in love with their sisters, obsessed with the unnatural, with pleasure and sensuality. They were captivated with the metropolises and culture of Europe and the Americas—Paris, Rome, Chicago, New York, Mexico City, Havana, Bogotá and Buenos Aires—and in their search for modernity, some critics claimed, reflected little on the legacies of colonialism. Or so the story goes. This book emerges out of the aporia between cosmopolitanism as a political sign of international diplomacy and justice and the “other” practice of modernista cosmopolitanism as the consumption and display of international luxury items and cultural production. I argue that, as a postcolonial practice from the margins of world culture, these two senses of cosmopolitanism are not mutually exclusive. Latin American cosmopolitan cultural producers indulged in the pleasures of experimentation, exploration, and discovery—activities associated with the colonial imagination and imperial sovereignty—and in creative practices spurred by ambitions for international cultural impact, cultural independence, and the creation of a Pan-American readership hospitable to new and eccentric ideas. For instance, Cathy Jrade characterizes the milieu of modernistas José Asunción Silva and Julián del Casal as “colored by an attraction to elegance and indulgence” and full of “imported styles, luxury items, and cosmopolitan trends” (53). Yet, she also de-

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scribes cosmopolitanism as a syncretic search for national identity or a “manifestation of a complex and profound search, a search that led modernista writers to embrace diverse aspects of high culture from all corners of the world with heady enthusiasm in the expectation of finding . . . a sense of identity that is clearly Latin American” (14). For Iris Zavala, modernity would prove the “third way out” between U.S. imperialism and European colonialism (Colonialism and Culture 9). She claims: “If European modernity in the first years of this century was still caught between a classical past, an indeterminate technical present, and an unknown future, and was divided between a semi-aristocratic order, a semi-industrialized capitalist economy, and a semi-emergent labor movement (from Anderson 1988, 326), it could be said that a Latin American contesting modernity shares few of these characteristics. In reality, it presents an alternative to all of them” (7). Zavala describes modernismo as an “anti-institutional discourse” (“un discurso anti-institucional”) that “seeks answers to essential questions” (“se buscan respuestas a preguntas esenciales”) of American identity (6): “What is American? What is modern? How do you enter modernity? What is the function of art? Who are the moderns? What does the new myth of Ariel represent? What does the new American mean? What does the twilight of Spain mean to the young republics? What is the triumph of Caliban?” (“¿Qué es lo americano? ¿Qué es lo moderno? ¿Cómo entrar en la modernidad? ¿Cuál es la función del arte? ¿Quiénes son los modernos? ¿Qué representa el nuevo mito de Ariel? ¿Qué significa lo nuevo americano? ¿Qué representa para las jóvenes repúblicas el crepúsculo de España? ¿Cuál es el triunfo de Calibán?” (Rubén Darío 6). Zavala notes that modernistas sought “a cosmopolitanism that circumvents the closed circle of traditional and conservative provincialism in the search for a community of shared ideas and interests” (“un cosmopolitanismo que evade el cerrado círculo del provincianismo tradicional y conservador, en la búsqueda de una comunidad de ideas e intereses”) (Rubén Darío 14). This movement shared the political ideals of autonomy and integration, but pursued these ideals from a cultural and literary vantage. Latin American cosmopolitanism was part of an overall aim to create a national cultural identity that was completely modern and completely opposed to a colonial heritage. To this end, these poets and writers were largely successful. For Angel Rama, modernismo inaugurated the first poetic independence of América (Los poetas modernistas), while for José Luis Martínez it was the first sign of a rupture with Peninsular literature and the first time that the colonial influence was reversed, that Latin American literature influenced Peninsular letters (29–49). Saúl Yurkievich describes the modernists as the first anti-imperialist Pan-Americans (“los primeros panamericanos antiimperialistas”) (A través de la trama 12). Cosmopolitanism from the margins meant making use of European culture to rebuild national culture and to establish equitable dialogues between

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centers and peripheries. Yet, the modernista cosmopolitans suffered bad reputations for what was considered an insalubrious postcolonial condition, specifically bad consciousness and an unfortunate obeisance to colonial centers of power, often described as “el mal de Europa,” in the infamous phrase of Manuel Gálvez. European cosmopolitanism in and of itself was regarded as a perniciously colonizing project. Like the expanding circumference of the central cosmopolis of the Roman empire, late-nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism was an outgrowth of imperialism, which colonized every metropolis around the world. In Barbara Hernstein-Smith’s critique of “self-privileging” value systems she notes how “the self, even as it is transformed by its interactions with the world, also transforms how that world seems to itself, its system of self-securing is not thereby unhinged nor is it ‘corrected’ by cosmopolitanism” (54). Indeed Europe, the “self” in question at the turn of the nineteenth century, maintained its privilege as the ultimate point of cultural reference; this sense of propriety fails to be hospitable, since “in enlarging its view . . . it may become all the more imperialistic, seeing in every horizon of difference new peripheries of its own centrality, new pathologies through which its own normality may be defined and must be asserted” (54). Cosmopolitanism from the margins offers a counterpoint to European cosmopolitanism; it meant increasing and expanding worldviews by adding new points of reference, new contexts, and understandings of social and cultural phenomena. “Cosmopolitanism” has always been a contested term, then and now. Recently, it has gained new currency as a hopeful sign of justice and human rights for foreigners, undocumented workers, exiles, refugees, and migrants during a time of rising state control over national borders. The proliferation of work on cosmopolitanism attests to the multiple ways of interpreting the term and its practices, ways that have changed over time and in each context of use. There are some commonalities in the historical use of the term; for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “cosmopolitanism” as the state of “belonging to all parts of the world; not restricted to one country or its inhabitants; having characteristics which arise from, or are suited to, a range over many different countries; free from national limitations or attachments.” From its early classical Greek and Roman usage, “cosmopolitanism” connotes universal citizenship or, as Scott L. Malcomson characterizes it, an empire-based patriotism: “when the Roman cosmopolitans were patriotic, then patriotism contained multitudes” (233). Any return to cosmopolitanism may follow various routes, from the Stoics, Alexander the Great, the Encyclopedists, the Enlightenment, and different sectors of modernism to the current cultural conditions of late global capitalism. Cosmopolitanism as a field of study approaches the multiple geographies of any site, the hidden many that constitutes any topography, text, corpus, landscape, scene, or thing. The questions raised by cosmopolitanism are as unique as the kind of work it performs. Martha Nussbaum, drawing on Kant, emphasizes the ethical duty of the world citizen over the solipsism of the national; though her model has come

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under attack for lack of critique of global capital or consideration of international postcolonial dynamics, her optimism points to the need for new forms of justice in international relations. Many critics find that adding to the term is the only way of negotiating its semantic difficulties and political ambiguities. Bruce Robbins notes that this revisionary practice has generated many versions of cosmopolitanism, including Benita Parry’s “postcolonial cosmopolitanism,” David Hollinger and Mitchell Cohen’s “rooted cosmopolitanism,” Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “African Cosmopolitanism,” and Homi Bhabha’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” all of which point to an attempt to rethink cosmopolitanism from the margins (1). José David Saldívar calls the recovery of a Pan-American genealogy “critical cosmopolitanism,” referring to the expansion of “America” to include both sides of the lateral and imaginary border bisecting the hemisphere (4). David Harvey notes that the very multiplicity of meanings plaguing cosmopolitanism hinders its political purchase, making it difficult to put it into practice (“Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographic Evils” 272). Walter Mignolo diagnoses a great need for a “critical cosmopolitanism” to counter the shortcomings of cosmopolitanisms of “global designs” (“Christianity, nineteenth century imperialism, or late twentieth-century neoliberal globalization”) and “emancipatory” cosmopolitanisms (“Vitoria, Kant, or Karl Marx”), that is, to “reconceive cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality” (158–59). Critical cosmopolitanism would acknowledge the conflict of competing values and terms: centers and peripheries, traditional and universal, colonial and postcolonial, civilization and barbarism, and modern and atavistic. The debates between cosmopolitanism and provincialism often reaffirm the opposition between central and peripheral cultures, which has existed since the origin of colonialism in Latin America. Fernando Ainsa’s abbreviated history of colonial use and misuse in Latin American letters describes cosmopolitan parody as a source of “bad copies”: “Projects meant to be models of ‘other worlds’ simply turned out to be ‘bad copies’: first as an imitation of Spain, and then as liberating and civilizing forces, although they were merely ‘imports’ from England, France, and the United States” (1). Ainsa interprets the model/original dialectic as part of Latin American historical discourse of “antinomies” that create vast inequities: “From Christopher Columbus’s letters and the first chronicles and accounts of the New World to the essayists and writers of our day, America has defined itself as a continent of extremes and excesses, of realities polarized by irreducible antinomies, with a history composed of tensions, clashes, and discontinuities and with a society built on inequalities and asymmetries” (1). Ainsa analyzes historical forces rather than aesthetic designations, since, in his view, theoretical concepts like transculturation or hybridity have limited historical force and cannot efface such a long history of cultural opposites. In these discourses, cosmopolitanism is always on the side of modernity, as an appealing sign of leisure against work, urban against the rural, and centers against peripheries. This schizoid structure in not

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just the fanciful systematization of critics such as Ainsa, but, as he makes clear, the opposing forces of a historical process wrought by colonization in which philosophical concepts cannot intervene. Roberto Schwarz, speaking in terms of twentieth-century Brazil, also refutes theorizations that ignore “historical imperatives” and cautions against optimistic interpretations of cultural adaptations of Euro-American models (7). Although these debates are played out over postmodern or late capitalist cultural terrain, the issues of identity and imitation are unresolved inheritances from an earlier era. For Schwarz, the contradictions of imitation create a gulf between the “real Brazil” and the “ideological prestige of the countries used as models” (2). In his estimation, the desire to overcome a native “provincialism” has energized massive and continual transformations in the literary studies curriculum of universities. The search for new intellectual models is less a response to cultural needs than a capitulation to intellectual fashions and their inevitable obsolescence by surpassing trends: “The disappointing impression created, therefore, is one of change and development with no inner necessity and therefore no value. The thirst for terminological and doctrinal novelty prevails over the labour of extending knowledge and is another illustration of the imitative nature of our cultural life. We shall see that the problem has not been correctly posed, although we may start by accepting its relative validity” (Schwarz 2). Schwarz suggests that imitation should be a strategy reserved for the exhaustion of local models, and writers and intellectuals should “avoid copying metropolitan trends in order to achieve an intellectual life with greater substance” (3). He is not a purist in search of “genuine (i.e. unadulterated) national roots,” yet he is in search of better working models for the enhancement and production of a sovereign cultural nationalism. He questions the relativizing moves of the deconstructionist neutralization of hierarchies. He finds this strategy, which first grew on French soil (although deterritorialized Algerian and gay), eagerly adopted by the underprivileged, underrepresented, and underdeveloped to their further disempowerment: One can easily appreciate how this would enhance the self-esteem and relieve the anxiety of the underdeveloped world, which is seen as tributary to the central countries. We would pass from being a backward to an advanced part of the world, from a deviation to a paradigm, from inferior to superior lands (although the analysis set out to suppress such superiority). All this because countries which live in the humiliation of having to imitate are more willing than the metropolitan countries to give up the illusion of an original source, even though the theory originated there and not here. Above all, the problem of mirror culture would no longer be ours alone, and instead of setting our sights on the Europeanization or Americanization of Latin America we would, in a certain

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Introduction

sense, be participating in the Latin Americanization of the central cultures. (6) Although he does not completely abandon optimism about the potential disruption to the original model, he questions the viability of a conceptual break with the cultural status and primacy of origins. Yet, the terms “copy,” “imitation,” and “parody” are not simple synonyms for “mirror”; the latter term would suggest a repetition without difference and ignore the complexities of representation. Zavala describes the relationship of centers to peripheries not as simple mirroring, but as anatropism: “I have always been inclined to think that the colonial and postcolonial eye is anatropic; that we see the colonialist metropolitan space in an epistemologically inverted image” (Colonialism and Culture 1). In this visual schema, the hero of the colonial texts—“the valiant hero, the dashing soldier, the adventurous navigator”—is the “tyrant, or the murderer, or the exploiter” (1). Zavala explores anatropic inversion through the split screen of modernism in Latin America, which casts back the aporias of Western Europe. She sets out a difficult task of explaining modernization in Latin America without lapsing into Eurocentrism. Likewise, Nelly Richard describes cultural parody as a “decolonizing strategy” that unhinges the hierarchy that orders the center from the periphery: “To be the peripheral extension of models centrally promoted by the metropolitan networks means to belong to a culture distinguished as secondary with respect to the anteriority and superiority of the model, to a culture of ‘reproduction,’ in which each image is an image of an image reproduced until the very idea of an original is lost in the distance” (158). From the historical position after a postmodern cultural turn, Richard is interested in the simulacral imitation of European codes that would ridicule the very notion of some ex-nihilo original: “In refunctioning the copy as its colonial heritage, the periphery disorders the foundational protocol of the before and after, reinaugurating itself caricaturistically as the pre of the post” (159). By undermining the legitimacy of universals, taming their arrogance with relativism, and casting suspicion on claims to cultural dominance, the postmodern periphery knocks Western Euro-American culture off its pedestal. Schwarz would argue that these claims ignore the brute realities of many Latin American nations, the realities of heterodox modernization, of deeply entrenched poverty, devastating colonial histories, and the exploitations of globalization. But perhaps such contradictory stances are not at cross-purposes; Richard’s strategy is to demythologize Europe, to offer a shift in perspective that might hinder the further consolidation of metropolitan centers of power or seriously damage the auratic hold of Euroculture on the periphery. Richard asks instead: “How does the discourse of the postmodern . . . intervene (disorganize, reformulate) the way that Latin America has had of imagining itself under modernist dependency?” (157). She describes colonial difference as a form of masquerade, as a pose and performance: “I am, as a Latin

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American, obligated, in the absence of originals, to take advantage of my deficit of originality, exaggerating the copy as a self-parodying vocation, pasting over cosmetically my lack of identity-property with the device of the disguise, the allure of the borrowed or stolen, the ornamentality of the artificial” (158). This recalls Sylvia Molloy’s analysis of the “pose” in fin-de-siècle discourses as an “oppositional practice” and a “decisive cultural statement,” rather than the mere miming of foreign fashions (“Politics of Posing” 184). The pose, masquerade, mimicry, and parody are strategies of identity formation after the violent legacies of postcolonialism. In the afterword to Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference, Alberto Moreiras reflects on the various critical models anticipating the course of Latin American identity. In his estimation, postcolonial identity falls off its marginal edge into the trap set by logical “difference” games: difference, in its most critical formulations, is not quite understood as resistance to identity; only as its underside. A fallen but very powerful dialectic seems to be operating here, organizing a swampy discursive field within which any substantive positing of identity as difference (i.e. Postcolonial identity as difference from the metropolis); and within which any radical appeal to difference is immediately overturned by the necessary co-positing of difference as identity (postcolonial difference as identity against the metropolis). (205)

Identity implies difference, it points to some constitutive and excluded outside unless, as Amaryll Chanady affirms, identity and alterity are woven into an open model of subject-constitution. This brings us to the chorus of critical work on hybridity and transculturation in Caribbean and Latin American cultural productions. Moreiras gently pushes this work out of the frame of reference, since “the ongoing celebration of hybridity and multiculturalism in the Latin American context may be just as politically paralyzing as it is emotionally comforting” (208). This excursus does not lead us out of identity or away from it, but to and from it. Moreiras uses the preceding critical work of the volume on constructions of Latin American identities to enter his plea to demythologize identity as some organic outgrowth of history, as something taken for granted as a desirable incorporation of the nation, as the proper proclamation of national emancipation, where “identity” is beyond reproach as an idealized state of pure integrity. The search for identity, painstakingly sought by critics like Leopoldo Zea, is what Moreiras diagnoses as the “conditions in which we, as Latin Americanist critics, find ourselves today. The symptom (identity) has become the disease” (209). This last remark is addressed to those troubled by identity, an “us,” Latin Americanist critics, a designation that seems as exclusive as it is exclusionary. My own hesitation about the identity of the critic is an unhappy suspicion about the institutional, professional, and social endorsement that determines publicity; that

10

Introduction

determines who speaks/writes, who listens/reads, and who gets to play critic to some unworthy pundit. Is the “Latin Americanist critic” the last identity standing? Is it not subject to review and critique? The answer suggests that the disease is rather difficult to inoculate against, a conclusion to which Moreiras himself would likely agree. These are questions the modernists sought to answer in late-nineteenthcentury cosmopolitanism, an era prior to the onset of late capitalism, before the optimisms of cosmomodernity had lapsed into a pessimistic reality. In this prelapsarian utopia on the cusp of the rise to global power of North America, the modernistas contemplated strategies to get beyond the impasses of identity and colonial ressentiment, of being defined and constituted negatively by and against cultural centers of power. Cosmomodernists addressed this dilemma by moving questions of identity into a more abstract and ideal realm, a realm unencumbered by political exigencies, but that imagined future cultural formations based on hospitality and justice. Cosmopolitans looked beyond the local, beyond home, to elsewhere, often Europe, to initiate international cultural dialogue and discussion. Cosmopolitanism was a convenient shorthand for discussing dynamic identities drawn out and across unbounded and ever changing texts and contexts.

Modernista Cosmopolitanism Modernista cosmopolitanism describes a type of cultural consumption. For Angel Rama, literary imitation is best described through Fernando Ortíz’s anthropological concept of “transculturation” or the process of redeploying European texts through adaptation to local codes based on Oswald de Andrade’s antropófago movement: a strategy of irreverently swallowing up and digesting foreign originals to nourish national cultures. Luis Monguío describes modernista cosmopolitanism as a means of both imitating and outdoing Euroculture through the “imitation and the possession of the cultural virtues of the European metropolis” (“la imitación y la posesión de las excelencias culturales de las metrópolis europeas”) (163). Imitation, these concepts propose, is not always a practice of internalized colonization; it does, undoes, and potentially outdoes the model, while it may even efface it. Gustavo Pérez Firmat argues for the cosmopolitanism of criollist literature, since “foreign books are not incompatible with American feeling; indeed, American feeling is nothing other than a certain way of reading foreign books” (8). Likewise, Arturo Torres Rioseco describes how influence matters less than affect; he remarks that the poems of Darío may draw on foreign influence, yet the “emotions [are] intimately ours and without antecedents from any other literature” (“íntimamente nuestra y no tiene antecedentes en ninguna literatura”) (10). He substantiates this sense of a copy without an original with Darío’s own words: “My muse is mine in me. Which is to say: I neither imitate nor have imitators; I am my-

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self” (“Mi musa es mía en mí. Es decir: ni imito ni tengo imitador; soy yo”) (27). Fernando Alegría describes the modernista turn to Europe and the United States as a search for inspiration, sought primarily in scandalous decadent artists like Francia de Gautier, Catulle Mendès, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Barbey D’Aurevvilly, Oscar Wilde, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Edgar Allan Poe. The modernistas imitated other aesthetic styles, but they were also reacting to the culture around them, the culture of pragmatism and the dominance of the commercial, industrial, latifundist, and political domains in social life. They found reprieve from the din of industrialism in a world of spirituality, beauty, imagination, and intensity of sensual experience and extolled the virtues of “the effect for the sake of effect” (“el efecto por el efecto”) (Alegría 24). With the fanaticism of a recent convert, modernistas compensate for the vacuities of modernity with a strident intensity that has often been mistaken for political poverty. Yet for Eduardo L. Chavarri, strategically, there is no other way to shock people from their amnesia and ennui, to show people how they are alienated from experience by their fine homes, telephones, and other conveniences of modern life (21–27). Although the modernists are charged with being escapist and antisocial, Angel Rama makes the shocking claim that they did not seek respite from the market nor were they beyond it; instead they were inextricably of the market. Whereas Alegría voices a critical commonplace that modernists do not constitute a literary tradition because of their wayward individualism and their principle of contradiction and equivocation, Rama would describe modernismo as a genre of market liberalism best iconized in the major urban centers of Latin American and the rest of the world. In an early essay on modernismo and the market, Rama draws on Ernst Fischer’s characterization of modern art’s acclimation to and determination by the economic market. Modern poets, though against the neutralization and deleterious effect of the market, “sought a way to get beyond paralysis” (“buscaron el modo de salir de la parálisis”) by making use of the cardinal features of modern culture (Los poetas modernistas 3). Rama finely articulates modernismo’s new turn by ushering in its foundational principle of subjectivation (“subjetivación”), an aesthetic principle complicit with the basis of liberal economic structures whose key features are autonomy and individualism. Modernismo is inextricable from capitalism, from the rapid induction of the world into the global market; indeed, where there was modernization brought by neocolonial flows of capital, there was aesthetic innovation. The basic features of the modernista aesthetic—acceleration, innovation, and individualism—gestate and rise out of the postindustrial metropolis and the capitalist institutions that serve metropolitan needs. For Bernardo Subercaseaux, turn-of-the-century cultural movements cannot be extricated from “a process of modernization” (“un proceso de modernización” (129), which he defines as being without beginning or end and neither homogeneous nor universal. Like many critics of modernity in the Americas, Subercaseaux links political and economic modernization and cultural

12

Introduction

modernity. However, he claims that each instance of modernity is particular to its local conditions and should be analyzed accordingly. Literary modernismo may be likened to its textual kin and offspring of capitalism, print journalism. Print journalism demands to be read, it demands a public, and stretches to meet a desire for novelty and scandal, for salaciousness and the obscene. Newspapers are ruled by the same energies that fueled the modernist aesthetic: shock value, the odd, the queer, the eye-catchingly perverse, and endless novelty. By writing for the mass readerships of newspapers and journals, the modernistas created a market for modernista-inspired fare beyond the skewed demographic of the elite and educated. The modernista poets entered the mainstream primarily through a hybrid form of journalism and expressionistic essay known as the chronicle, which included social chronicles, criticism of theatrical pieces, book reviews, profiles of artists and celebrities, and travel writing (Rama, Los poetas modernistas 35–36). Writers like Enrique Gómez Carrillo, José María Vargas Vila, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Julian del Casal, José Martí, and Rubén Darío found sustaining employment as journalists while they pursued their vocation as poets: These stylistic epochal tendencies are novelty, attraction, speed, shock, peculiarity, intensity, and sensation; the same things that we will encounter in modernista art. The search for the unusual, the collision of dissimilar elements, permanent renovation, audacious themes, the recording of hues, the mixture of sensations, the interpenetration of different disciplines, the constant, desperate desire for originality, are also features that pertain to the new market and are simultaneously ways of penetrating and dominating it. Esas tendencias estilísticas epocales son: novedad, atracción, velocidad, shock, rareza, intensidad, sensación. Las mismas que reencontraremos en el arte modernista. La búsqueda de lo insólito, los acercamientos bruscos de elementos disímiles, la renovación permanente, las audacias temáticas, el registro de los matices, la mezcla de las sensaciones, la interpenetración de distintas disciplinas, el constante, desesperado afán de lo original, son a su vez rasgos que pertenecen al nuevo mercado, y, simultáneamente, formas de penetrarlo y dominarlo. (Los poetas modernistas 52)

The massification of the audience through journalism was an effect of the consolidation of capitalism, yet these same forces created enabling conditions for the transmission of texts necessary for the expansion of a community of readers and the democratization of the modernista ethos. The drive to the new, the spectacular, and the shocking, so much a part of all mass media, has a less explicit after-effect. An urban lifestyle is sent out over long distances to reach the most obscure corners of the provinces. This returns us to Jrade’s characterization of modernista cosmopol-

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itanism as well as Rama’s depiction of modernist marketing: modernismo used the city to broker Latin American autonomy and Pan-American cohesion.

Dream City The preoccupation with cosmopolitanism in the Americas at the turn of the nineteenth century was a search for new forms of justice. Cities were places where the possibilities of justice could be imagined and even planned as integral to the form of the city. The organic growth of capital might be regulated, civic concern cultivated, and liberty established as a fundamental principle of social interaction. The city offered a practical arena for cosmopolitanism at work, for the coexistence of the strange and the outcast, for the cultivation of the innovative and scandalous ideas of modernity. Metropolitan cities were high-speed massive entities that redefined social life with new patterns of movement and settlement rendered in part by immigration from all over the world. Cities became symbolic paradigms of radical inclusion, acceptance, and the coexistence and integration of difference. Cities might be more imagined than real, a repository for fantasies of liberation and new kinds of freedom; they might be places never visited or experienced by writers who thematize them. For Julio Ramos, the city was the “emblem of [a] desired modernity . . . as the virtual site of the future” (41). Ricardo Rojas’s “cosmopolis” expresses the fantasmatic nature of the city: “the word Cosmopolis nicely designates the idea of a city half real and half imaginary” (“La palabra Cosmópolis, además, designa bien la idea de una ciudad á medias real é imaginaria”) (1). Large cosmo-metropolitan cities were integral to the late-nineteenth-century psyche, eliciting a range of fantasies about their interiors. Walter Benjamin often linked the subconscious workings of dreams to the life of the city and modernity. For instance, in “A Berlin Chronicle,” he likens the language of Paris to that of a dream: “I tell myself that I had to be in Paris, where the walls and the quays, the places to pause, the collections and the rubbish, the railings and the squares, the arcades and the kiosks, teach a language so singular that our relations to people attain, in the solitude encompassing us in our immersion in that world of things, the depths of a sleep in which the dream image waits to show the people their true faces” (30). Likewise, for Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Paris is where liberatory fantasies are realized, and for Cuban Aurelia Castillo de González, European cities, particularly Paris, are places of art but North American cities like Chicago are sites of the crafts of modernity. Martí’s New York City is a practical source of his analysis of Euro-American modernity around which he consolidates his exile activism. Others use cities to critique the limitations of tradition at home in the provinces. Cities are more of a state of mind than a place. According to Oscar Montero’s meticulous and careful decoding, Julián del Casal found expression for his sexual desires in the gay subcultures of Havana. Manuel Gutiérrez

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Introduction

Nájera describes his native Mexico City as exemplary cosmopolitan space for the syncretic mix of local and global culture. José Fernández, the protagonist of José Asunción Silva’s iconic modernista manifesto, De sobremesa, signs off from various world cities in his critique of Latin American traditionalism. Perhaps there is no greater sign of the late-nineteenth-century fantasy life about the city than in the exemplary and symptomatic dream-life of Freud. His extended fantasies about the original cosmopolis delineate a cosmopolitan unconscious. In his Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams 1899/1900), Freud explores his own dreams as much as those of his patients; moreover, he devotes an entire section to a mystifying obsession and dream-life around Rome that emanates from a “longing to visit Rome” (226). A series of embedded footnotes from the 1965 English edition follows the course of this longing from fantasy to frequent flyer, or, as it were, train traveler: “(footnote added 1909:) I discovered long since that it only needs a little courage to fulfill wishes which till then have been regarded as unattainable; [added 1925:] and thereafter became a constant pilgrim to Rome [The correspondence with Fleiss (Freud, 1950a) gives repeated evidence of the emotional importance to Freud of the idea of visiting Rome. He first fulfilled this wish in the summer of 1901 (Letter 146)” (The Interpretation of Dreams footnote 226). In the above passage, Freud’s voice mingles with that of the editor, James Strachey, to a better explanation of the Roman dreams as wish fulfillment seeking actualization. Freud joins these dreams around a single aim symbolized by the city: I dreamt once that I was looking out of a railway-carriage window at the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. The train began to move off, and it occurred to me that I had not so much as set foot in the city. The view that I had seen in my dream was taken from a well-known engraving which I had caught sight of for a moment the day before in the sitting-room of one of my patients. Another time someone led me to the top of a hill and showed me Rome half-shrouded in mist; it was so far away that I was surprised at my view of it being so clear. There was more in the content of this dream than I feel prepared to detail; but the theme of “the promised land seen from afar” was obvious in it. (The Interpretation of Dreams 227)

The seriality of the Rome dreams, the conditions of longing, its subsequent emplotment and materialization in the Roman holiday, suggests powerful associations of which Freud was aware: “Thus, the wish to go to Rome had become in my dream-life a cloak and symbol for a number of other passionate wishes” (229). Rome colonizes all meaning; even Paris stands in for Rome. In a dream about Paris, another object of Freud’s longing, he asks for directions, which is interpreted as a sign leading to Rome: “‘Asking the way,’ moreover, was a direct allusion to Rome, since it is well known that all roads lead there” (228). All interpretation seems to flow towards and back from Rome. It is a place seen from afar, yet

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inaccessible, unavailable, an ideal: “the theme of ‘the promised land seen from afar’ was obvious in it.” Rome represents a “promised land” that would welcome the outcast as well as a powerful symbol that unites a complex of outcast or repressed wishes: “there was more in the content of this dream than I feel prepared to detail” (227). This is the original organization of the mythical Rome of Romulus who invited exiles, refugees, criminals, and runaway slaves to populate the new city. Rome is the original cosmopolis, and the meaning of cosmopolitanism as hospitality no doubt shares in this mythological origin. Cosmopolitan rootlessness and freedom from national determination is also homelessness, a traumatic rupture from the privilege of belonging and being welcome. For Freud, being outside Rome and unable to enter its territory recalls the permanent exile of being Jewish. Rome signifies the abstract longing for home and hospitality. Yet, the dream-plot thickens when the meaning of Rome is complicated by a duplex connotation and deep ambivalence. As promised land outthere, its literal geographic distance in the dream is a temporal distance, a future yet-to-be-achieved, a cosmotopia, while it is also identified with hostility, as the aggressive object of the Punic wars between the Romans and Carthaginians in the second and third centuries of the Common Era (see Gay). Freud identifies his longing for Rome with a similar longing on the part of the Semitic Carthaginian general Hannibal to enter (and conquer) Rome, the linchpin of the Roman empire. Freud follows Hannibal’s elusive itinerary around the lake, evading the Romans and bypassing Rome, and figuring out his ambivalent attraction to the city. It was on my last journey to Italy, which, among other places, took me past Lake Trasimene, that finally—after having seen the Tiber and sadly turned back when I was only fifty miles from Rome—I discovered the way in which my longing for the eternal city had been reinforced by impressions from my youth. I was in the act of making a plan to by-pass Rome next year and travel to Naples, when a sentence occurred to me which I must have read in one of our classical authors. “Which of the two, it may be debated, walked up and down his study with the greater impatience after he had formed his plan of going to Rome—Winkelmann, the Vice-Principal, or Hannibal, the Commander-in-Chief?” I had actually been following in Hannibal’s footsteps. Like him, I had been fated not to see Rome; and he too had moved into the Campagna when everyone expected him in Rome. But Hannibal, whom I had come to resemble in these respects, had been the favourite hero of my later school days. Like so many boys of that age, I had sympathized in the Punic Wars not with the Romans but with the Carthaginians. And when in the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race, and anti-Semitic feelings among the boys warned me that I must take up a definite position, the figure of the Semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic church. And the increasing importance of

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Introduction

the effects of the anti-Semitic movement upon our emotional life helped to fix the thoughts and feelings of those early days. (229)

Ancient Rome is a placeholder for Freud’s own ancient history as he maps the battle of the Carthaginians with the Romans across his own battles with antiSemitic boys. The longing for Rome is also the longing for some future moment when anti-Semitism is no more. Freud ends the dream series by painfully recounting an anti-Semitic attack suffered passively by his father. Freud, not pleased with his father’s reaction, comforts himself with an activist story: “I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans” (230). Freud adds in a footnote to the first edition of Interpretation of Dreams that he initially wrote the name Hadrusbal instead of Hamilcar Barca (footnote 230); which he claims, in Psychopathology of Everyday Life points to disappointment at his father’s un-heroic attitude. Hasdrubal was the rather uncourageous son-in-law of Hamilcar, whose successes were an effect of diplomacy and whose rule was short-circuited by his assassination (Gay). In the last of these Roman dreams, the name Hasdrubal, instead of Hamilcar, indicates Freud’s unconscious wish to exchange his father for another more valiant one (Psychopathology 118–20). Freud’s Rome, varied and various, hardly indexes the place, yet his powerful fantasies about the city shape his political ideas, name and give rise to an activist political ideal. Rome, the sign of possibility, virtualizes a political space of action. For the cosmopolitan modernists, the metropolis was a repository of vital fantasies that enabled the creation of a new politic. As a space of fantasy, it was a symbolic region that enabled the difficult thought of hospitality. The metropolis was more text than place, a symbolic realm that served as a point of many different kinds of departures and that played a major role in the formulation of ideas about American cultural identity. Unlike Angel Rama’s lettered city or a city of writing where the powers of social ordering derive from written texts, the cosmopolis was an abstraction, a written city used to disrupt social orders and agitate readers towards modernity.

Cosmopolitics While the Latin American cosmopolitans were reviled at home for elitism and a snobbish Francophilia, they faced a contemptuous racism abroad. Latin American cosmopolitanism was an affront to Euro-nationalism and European cultural chauvinism and threatened to redefine the trans-national Euro-culture signified by the city. In Paul Bourget’s novel Cosmopolis (1892), cosmopolitanism is threatened by incursions from beyond the centers of Euro-modernity. In the preface, he writes of the underlying principle of this narrative about various cosmopolitans in Rome: “the writer is compelled to take from it (the ever-changing society of the

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cosmopolites) a series of leading facts, as I have done, essaying to deduce a law which governs them. That law in the present instance is the permanence of race” (2–3). For Bourget, each “race” has its own basic and unique characteristics that are perverted when combined with another “race”; race signifies the unstable conjunction of biological phenotype, national origin, and ethnicity. Bourget draws on racial and eugenic discourses of the late nineteenth century that promote racial purity as the key to social development and the progress of the Enlightenment. The law of race also partakes in anti-decadent rhetoric against the superficial in favor of the rigorous and deep; there are deep racial categories, habitus-like and essential, and there are superficial racial masquerades used to conceal the original biological type. The racialized and ethnic traveler might attempt to pass for cosmopolite, but the deep structure of racial determinism will eventually reveal itself and expose the cosmopolitan posturing. Each character of Cosmopolis either constitutes a miscegenic conjugation or represents one; thus all have broken the cosmopolitan law of race. There are Italians in love with the French, Polish with the English, a Jewish-German Baron, and mulatto Americans among the many cross-ethnic matches. Each exhibits some ethnic/racial characteristic that becomes a fatal flaw: American materialism, Slavic intemperance, English Puritanism, and Black rage and violence. These negative racial traits are not mitigated by racial mixing, but rendered ever more pronounced and chaotic. The mixed race character is the worst sort of cosmopolitan impostor attempting to pass for the “real thing.” The wrong cosmopolitanism is a source of a dangerous and ill-fated mixing and merging evident in the many duels, betrayals, rivalries, and jealousies that plague the narrative. In the end, the true cosmopolitan shines through and leads the way; the racially pure French protagonist proves that cosmopolitanism is a prerogative of Western European culture. Transplanted to non-Western European contexts, cosmopolitanism is considered an invalid and inorganic form stolen from its rightful owners, implying that culture is inherited as a right of birth and cannot be popularized as an object of learning. Bourget is anti-cosmopolitan for all but the French. Emily Apter notes that Bourget’s contemporary, Maurice Barrès, performs a similar anti-cosmopolitanism to equally nationalistic ends (also code for anti-Semitism) (25–37). Barrès propounds the importance of rootedness and the deep values of the province against the cosmopolite who is immoral and “uprooted.” The immigration of different races into France spoils the native landscape, echoing Darwin’s language on transplantation in The Origin of Species: “If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this would likewise seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants. Let it be remembered how powerful the influence of a single introduced tree or mammal has been shown to be” (55). This bio-logic motivates an allegorical caution against permissiveness to immigration, since trees and plants hardly thrive and often perish in non-native soil. This sense

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Introduction

of racination is what Apter calls Barrès’s “bulbous master-trope,” germinating various French theories that take place and race as inextricable forms (27). The Latin American cosmopolitans would take issue with this phobic definition of “race” and transplant cosmopolitanism to American soil.

American Europe Though the cities of the Americas were undergoing various states of transformation towards modernity, Europe was viewed as the original source of and shorthand for modernity. The turn-of-the-century Pan-American fantasy about Europe is conveyed dramatically in Henry James’s short story, “Europe,” which tells of the Rimmle family’s mania for the place and idea. James regarded these fantasies with ambivalence, asserting that “one of the responsibilities” of being American is “fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe” (qtd. in Wegelin 3). The Rimmles are particularly susceptible to this invidious overvaluation; but this is not all bad, they make use of “Europe” to express distaste for provincial attitudes at home. The eponymous Europe of the tale is less an actual place than an obsessional idea, a ghost that inhabits the home and uproots the family, providing the fantasy of escape for the Rimmle sisters, tormented by provincial and domestic banality and sexual repression. Europe does not exist except as a sort of text and image—literary, pictoral, and epistolary—and it is a site best encountered and known through its representations. The Rimmle sisters know everything that may be known about Europe through study: “She knew already, through this and other illumination, so much about Europe that it was hard to believe, for her, in that limit of adventure which consisted only of her having been twice to Philadelphia” (64). The entire family lives in the past of the missed opportunity of Europe—a name that evokes the rim from which Europe is the center and site of fixation: “She had not gone, and Becky, Maria, and Jane had not gone, and this was long ago. They still merely floated in the air of the visit achieved, with such introductions and such acclamations, in the early part of the century; they still, with fond glances at the sunny parlour-walls, only referred, in conversation, to divers pictorial and other reminders of it. The Miss Rimmles had quite been brought up on it, but Becky, as the most literary, had most mastered the subject” (63). Letters from and literature about Europe set off an internal fugue and a relentless wandering of all thought towards this destination. Home is tedious and unchanging, the sisters are trapped in a stasis of locality, they seek the dynamism of a Europe that is both romantic, the backdrop of idyllic literary portraits, and modern, offering ideas of progress and liberation. Enrique Dussel analyzes this identification of modernity and Europe. He describes modernity as a philosophical concept and a mode of industrialization, both of which have origins in Europe and are, paradoxically, cause and effect of the centrality of Europe in the world system. Europe achieved this centrality

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through Spain in the founding event of the discovery of “Amerindia” (America). By the turn of the nineteenth century, especially for Latin America, Spain was no longer considered a source of modernity. Modernity continued its life span in Europe but shifted its center to “Anglo-Germanic Europe,” and this version of modernity became the paradigm of the modern, organizing the world around a European center to which Asia, Africa, and Latin America are peripheral. The crises of modernity (the destabilization of its grand narratives: subjectivity, knowledge, power, and science) have implications for Euro-America, but not for the periphery, whose inhabitants remain passive observers to the dissolution of stable orders of meaning and political system (Dussel 3–31). In short, mimicking Europe is the destiny of the periphery within the global evolutionary narrative of modernity. The system is rigged for failure in the periphery. Nationalism or the creation of a stronger national system fails to address the larger systemic inequities that predetermine the limits of power and development in the periphery. Yet, might there be a way of circumventing the impasses of the hegemonic modern from the periphery? Julio Ramos offers a different project of modernity through the work of José Martí: a resistant and subversive modernity. Martí believed in the potential autonomy and cultural greatness of Latin America, which could be achieved by recognizing and cultivating the alternate vision and course of Latin American history. Literary modernismo challenged questions of literary value during an era of social, cultural, and political instability rendered by modernization; literature was no longer the unquestioned site of the reproduction of the nation, which liberated it from the ideology of state scripture. For Ramos, Martí exemplified the privatization of literature through his exile from the centers of literary production, a position from which he “asserted the superiority of an alternative ‘knowledge’ found in art, capable of imagining a future harmony” (xxxix). In The Dialectics of Our America, Saldívar also raises Martí to the status of nationalist hero able to create a different version of history. Saldívar illustrates this different version of history with Martí’s formulation of “Our America” as a critical point of departure toward a new Pan-American genealogy. He mobilizes “Our America” as an instance of the resistance of empire in the Americas and an originary moment in the creation of a Pan-American continuity as a “critical cosmopolitanism”: “The Dialectics of Our America proposes a new American literary, cultural, and critical cosmopolitanism that fully questions as much as it acknowledges the Other, thereby serving as a more adequate and chastening form of self-knowledge. This new critical cosmopolitanism neither reduces the Americas to some homogeneous Other of the West, nor does it fashionably celebrate the rich pluralism of the hemisphere. Rather, by mapping out the common situation shared by different cultures, it allows their differences to be measured against each other as well as against the (North) American grain” (4). Saldívar cautions against the uncritical sublation of the two Americas, while arguing that American cultural

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Introduction

and literary studies are incomplete without recognition of the dialectical relation between north and south. For Saldívar, Martí’s oppositional rhetoric is the foundation for a Pan-American genealogy that aims to right the structural difference between north and south. Cosmopolitanism reroutes nationalism from its provisional insularity by creating what might be called a pan-nationalism across South America and parts of the Caribbean. Yet, no matter how expansive and critically reconstructed, revisions always contain some piece—a glitch, an error—of the revised. Nationalism was beset by its own homogeneity, its refusal to negotiate unincorporable oddities, outcasts, and strangers. Martí’s politically triumphant narratives are profoundly, like most nationalisms, masculinist and tinged with a phobic edge. Molloy in “Too Wilde for Comfort” underscores this unseen aspect of the Martían canon in what was considered, hitherto, an unremarkable passage in Martí’s correspondence to La Nación. Molloy describes how he consolidates a panicked Pan-American public consensus around the disdain for Wilde, who “does not dress as we all do but in a singular manner” (qtd. in Molloy 187). His difference of style, his queerness, is a source of discomfort that is incomprehensibly opaque to the clear moral vision of nationalist modernism.

Cosmopolitan Queer While there was a marked tendency in cosmopolitan modernismo to make nationalist assertions in no uncertain terms, there was also a preoccupation with the effete, the hyperstylized use of language, the decadents, and the aesthetes; yet individual writers differed in the way they framed this fascination. Martí might use Wilde as a captivating figure for dis-identification, but he uses him nonetheless; he is fascinated and in his writing flirts with the idea of the English dandy with the bad reputation. Readers might do what they please with the portrait of queerness; they may read more for pleasure than for scientific or professional purpose, a well known phenomena at the turn of the century when the most salaciously pleasurable texts were also scientific treatises: for instance, Krafft-Ebings’s Psychopathia Sexualis, Freud’s Case Histories, or Nordau’s Degeneration. In fact, the medical texts told the forthright and unsparing truth about that to which literary texts might simply allude. Modernismo was caught up in this current of potential sexual disinhibition and proliferation of sexual and gender variation. Those writers who did not use the beard of nationalism to shield themselves from ridicule were charged with literary transvestism and other forms of transgression. They became known as odd, queer, or strange. Through distaste or defense, many withdrew from their local circumstances and left for the major cities of the world or isolated themselves from mainstream social life. Lily Litvak notes that the obsession with sex at the turn of the century is unique for its peculiar manner of encountering and expressing eroticism (“su

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manera peculiar de enfrentarse y de expresar el eros”) (2). Litvak analyzes this preoccupation of the moderns during a time of intense social and sexual repression and hypocrisy. The division of sexuality into mutually exclusive occupations of pleasure and reproduction, of marriage and eroticism, of conjugal relations and perversity, defined all pleasure seeking as non-normative and outlaw. When pleasure left the boudoir, it found refuge in art. Art and literature became obsessed with depicting, expressing, and eliciting pleasure. The modernistas infused their texts with these illicit desires and pleasures, and critics attacked them for bringing strange things to the light of literary cultures. For instance, Oscar Montero notes that the homophobic language of the critics encodes the open secret of Cuban modernista Julián del Casal’s sexuality: Emilio de Armas describes him as harboring “[the] secret of initiates” (“un secreto de iniciados”), Mario Cabrera Saqui describes Casal as “a supertimid” (“un supertímido”), and in perhaps the most obvious account, Carmen Poncet describes Casal as “a psychologically intersexual type” (“un tipo sicológicamente intersexual”) who has “a perfect sexual mechanism, but who are inhibited by the false awareness they have of their abilities” (“un mecanismo sexual perfecto; pero que frecuentemente se inhiben por la falsa conciencia que experimentan de su capacidad”), that is, he was completely withdrawn from and even afraid of the heterosexual norm (Montero 97). Though there are no substantiated assertions by Casal himself or testimonies from possible lovers, the language used to describe him continually invokes his queerness and oddity. The scientific medico-legal texts serving the larger interests of public health provide the only substantial ground for decoding the Casal mystery. Montero consults two works, Benjamín Céspedes’s La prostitución en La Habana and Pedro Giralt’s El amor y la prostitución, both of which deal with male homosexuality and male prostitution. Each text locates exactly where male-male sex trade took place, locations then infamous, but to the uninitiated, merely innocuous. The mention of these sites, however oblique, in Casal’s work seems to indicate an intimate knowledge of queer erogenous zones. In an essay about a mysteriously unnamed figure, Julián del Casal proleptically colludes with his critics in a portraiture linking oddity with isolation from the social norm. Most likely, he is describing his good friend, travel writer and translator of D’Annunzio (fascination with the decadent D’Annunzio is itself a sign of deviance), Castillo de González: “She lived hidden, like an exotic plant in an exquisite greenhouse, surrounded by a coterie of admirers” (“Vivía oculta, como planta exótica, en regio invernadero, rodeada de una corte pequeña de admiradores”) (139). Such a figure is typically cosmopolitan, at home in all the global cities of the world, yet a stranger at home: “After having spent her life in great European capitals, she returned to Havana as a foreigner in her own country” (“Después de haber pasado su vida en las grandes capitales europeas, volvió a la Habana, siendo una extranjera en su propio país”) (139). Isolation, foreignness, oddity, the peculiar, and the queer all describe a figure in excess of a social whole,

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Introduction

an outcast whose peculiarities cast her/him out of the nation in search of refuge elsewhere. The desire to leave, to flee home in search of a hospitable place, registers as a discontent and a dissention. Leaving is a critique of everything left behind. These modernistas sought modernity as something radical, something capable of changing the national state of normative affairs, as a momentary forgetting of history to make a leap for some new condition, a kind of Nietzschean search for a living text to replace the dead objects of history. Modernity seemed to be the answer to the problems inherited by contemporary culture, which history was ill-prepared to address. Paul de Man finds that the juxtaposition of history and modernity may never be absolute, since history is always present even in its negation. He suggests that there is nothing modern about modernity, rather it names the symptom of an era attempting to efface a past designated as un-modern. The term “modernity” reappears with increasing frequency and seems again to have become an issue not only as an ideological weapon, but as a theoretical problem as well. It may even be one of the ways by means of which the link between literary theory and literary praxis is being partly restored. At other moments in history, the topic “modernity” might be used just as an attempt at self-definition, as a way of diagnosing one’s own present. This may happen during periods of considerable inventiveness, periods that seem, looking back, to have been unusually productive. At such actual or imaginary times, modernity would not be a value in itself, but would designate a set of values that exist independently of their modernity. (142–43)

Modernity is then not a discoverable set of conditions, but a temporal notion and a movement of negation that initiates a rupture with the past to posit new origins. When modernity attempts a break from the past it also breaks itself off from the present, striving to achieve an “unmediated, free act that knows no past.” This momentary break, this ex-stasis, is a necessary condition for achieving the pure possibilities of the creative act. In Celebration of Modernismo (Celebración del Modernismo), Saúl Yurkievich returns to the modernistas to rehabilitate the pleasures of fiction and the literary, and revalidate “hedonism, sensuality, humor, [and] play” (“el hedonismo, la sensualidad, el humor, el juego”) (9). The celebration of modernismo is a return to style, impossible ideals, utopias, the free play of desire, and the search for pleasure: “Returning to the modernistas means rescuing the aptitude for imaginative fantasy and its executor, verbal fantasy. It means liberating the means from the servitude of the message. It means overcoming the limitations of the reproductive imagination, the deficiencies of the verifiable real. It means breaking the circle of factual experience, to say the possible and the impossible, to say all the sayable” (“Volver a los modernistas significa rescatar las aptitudes de la fantasía imaginativa y de su ejecutora, la fantasía verbal. Significa libertar al medio

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de la servidumbre mensajera. Significa superar las limitaciones de la imaginación reproductora, las deficiencias de lo real verificable. Significa romper el cerco de la experiencia fáctica, decir lo posible y lo imposible, decir todo lo decible”) (8–9). There is something revolutionary in the presentist recasting of the modernista line; imagination promises more than reality may deliver, but retains a subversive edge that shores up deficiencies of reason against the plenitude of fantasy. Yurkievich celebrates the cosmopolitan mix of aesthetic cultures of Latin America with those of major world metropolises as a “virulent and omnivorous internationalization” born out of “prolonged isolation” and “backwardness” (“Por el prolongado aisla– miento, por el atraso acumulado, la internacionalización es virulenta, omnívora”) (11). These conditions gave rise to a Latin American mastery of parody and pastiche in the creation of a “patchwork” of styles [English in the original]: “Their accumulated works were not only transhistorical and transgeographical, but also translinguistic, as is the art of the traveler and polyglot” (“Sus acumulaciones no son sólo transhistóricas y transgeográficas, son también translingüísticas, como corresponde a un arte de viajeros y poliglotos”) (12). Literature creates the conditions of movement and change. In James’s story, one of the sisters, Jane, finally arrives in the long-awaited “Europe” and subsequently refuses to “budge from Florence” (74) with a stubbornness that lets in an air of mystery and becomes the stuff of gossip: “You don’t know the queerest part. I mean the way it has most brought her out” (75). The “queerest part” is that she is outed as a “flirt,” yet just as scandalously, “Europe” has also brought “out” Jane’s sister, Rebecca, who, in reading Jane’s letters, developed sympathy with her sister. The desire to experience the world, away from the family and all that it signifies, is projected onto the desire to travel to Europe, to be “out” in and to the world and experience all manner of freedom. Literature, like Jane’s letters, contains the possibility of creating the transformations of cosmopolitanism by luring the reader over the threshold into the strange and igniting the imagination with different cultural ways and practices. Rebecca never leaves home. She changes in place, experiencing an internal shift without ever traveling. Enrique Gómez Carrillo, writing at the same time as James, wrote a series of prefaces and synopsized fictions that would alter the dispositions of his readership. His preface work elicits a cosmopolitan sympathy with the text that renders the strange familiar, effecting a transformation-in-place without the expense of travel. Deleuze and Guattari describe this movement within stasis as nomadism: “The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. Toynbee is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is on the contrary he who does not move” (37). The “smooth space” of nomadic thinking is an open-ended, unbounded, borderless, and dehierarchical plane in which movement or travel is infinite and multiply signified. Travel might be motionless, the travel of thought, time travel, regression, retrogression, projection, escape, or sur-

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vival; it is flight from institutions, systems, the state, and the Oedipal machine. The nomad, like the cosmopolitan, is an idiosyncratic figure, an outsider, a subject and agent of minor discourse. Deleuze and Guattari evoke travel as a mode of the upsetting and disruptive, causing disquiet to Oedipal conformities, stable subjectivities, common sense, truth, universals, dominant significations, and established orders. Nomadic movements have little to do with actual travel; rather, they are the movements that upset from within through a radical alienation that dissolves the bondage of and to institutions. In these turn-of-the-century American narratives, the yearning to travel to European metropolises registers as a rebellious desire to throw off the restrictions of normative institutions at home and set out for something new and perhaps illicit. The cosmopolitan writer moves the reader, elicits a sympathy or identification with the reader. Cosmopolitan writing expands the horizons of home by introducing the reader to something strange, bizarre, unfamiliar, and unexpected. In each chapter, I look to the various strategies of temporary leaning, transformation, and acts of learning within a basic cosmopolitan principle. Learning includes several modes: tutorials, apprenticeship, Socratic dialogue and dialectic, prescribed reading lists, and learning by example and by lecture. Each lesson engages the same objective and is driven by the same principle: learning implies a subjective transformation, a change wrought by forces and ideas rendered from outside the subject. The idea was to act on readerships by upsetting cultural expectations and by introducing different perspectives to acclimate the readership to new ideas, to the queer, and the strange. These texts teach the most difficult lesson of how to accept what is deemed unacceptable culturally. Euro-modernity was a desired object in the new lessons. It was craved for what it represented in its large cities: hospitality and justice for the outcast. The uses of modernity were uneven. They sometimes endorsed illusions of progress and sometimes criticized the linear narratives that exclude turns and returns and narratives that refuse to bend. The stories of this modernista moment often swerve and veer off track, taking alternate routes and ex-centric courses. Cosmopolitanism would offer a different approach to combating phobias about difference; indeed, it is best practiced and theorized from outside and from below; from the vantage of disadvantage, that is, from a perspective wide enough to contain less visible minorities. The work of Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo, the travel writings from the Chicago World’s Fair of Cuban Aurelia Castillo de González, the Venezuelan journal Cosmópolis, and Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó’s infamous Ariel all share a common principle of the practical application of cosmopolitanism. These texts teach lessons of cosmopolitanism, of how to become worldly and modern. In a phobic account of a similar cosmopolitan literary dissemination, state bureaucrat Víctor Mercante claims that female uranists in Argentina were like decadent modernista writers who spread their “perversion” with persuasive and literary letters.

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As international writers were debating what it meant to be cosmopolitan, from Bourget’s typology of the authentic versus the poser to James’s elite BritishAmerican adventurer, the modernistas had already renovated the term, turning it into a practice with nationalist implications. They explore the spaces of cosmopolitanism, the cosmopolises or metropolitan cities, and theorize ideal communities of cosmopolitanism, the utopias of the cosmopolis. They revisit the failures of Eurocentric cosmopolitanism by rewriting them, recasting them for a new audience and generally making use of them for their own purposes. But, above all, they grapple with cosmopolitanism, sometimes conceptualizing new models of hospitality and sometimes failing, while nonetheless keeping the broken promise of utopic spaces and their imagined cities. These texts activate a cosmopolitan attitude by persuading the reader to be a bit more open, more modern, and more amenable to difference.

CHAPTER ONE Thresholds of Cosmopolitanism: Prefaces to Modernity and Other-Worldly Readings In the late nineteenth century, cosmopolitanism was associated with the large metropolises of Europe, ancient capitals and centers of cultural life where immigrants from all over the world gathered. For Latin Americans and others located beyond the centers of Euro-modernity, these cities held the promise of a cosmopolitan way of being, and exemplified an elusive complex of ideas about modernity: progress, cultural diversity, hospitality, acceptance of difference, and sexual license. The city provided the raw materials for cosmopolitans who sought liberation from the restrictions of provincial forms of nationalism. The Euro-cosmopolis posed a challenge to nationalism that was an organic outgrowth of the conditions of a globalizing modernity, of urban growth, immigration, and new flows of capital. Latin American cosmopolitans took their lead from the city; they too sought to redefine national culture, ridding it of prejudice and exclusiveness to make it open to the migration of new and different values, people, and ideas. In the literary circles of modernismo, cosmopolitanism meant making use of international culture to set a national cultural agenda. Though the internationalization of local culture was considered important, there was little discussion of how this transformation might be accomplished, that is, beyond incurring the prohibitive expense of international travel and acquiring the leisure and language skills required to read literatures from elsewhere. In this chapter, I focus on the works of one cosmopolitan writer actively concerned with disseminating methods to achieve a cosmopolitan state of mind. Enrique Gómez Carrillo spent much of his literary career propagandizing European letters and metropolitan culture to the Americas in the service of a cosmopolitan ideal. Yet his was not simply a political endeavor, but part of a desire to conquer the international literary market. From his vantage point he would accomplish two related aims: he would democratize a cosmopolitan ethos by making European literature more accessible and he would create and expand a literary market for his own fare. Like Sarmiento’s project of introducing foreign ideas to his native Argentina, Gómez Carrillo’s project was

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inextricable from processes of modernization, from the not unproblematic association of modernity and European culture. Gómez Carrillo was not alone in his desire to create a new readership and rise to the top of local and international markets; he was joined by many others, including Rubén Darío and Rufino Blanco Fambona. These writers were unique in their real understanding of how to make use of literary currents to accelerate the growth of their own cultural capital. Gómez Carrillo’s task was formidable, he had to first acclimate readerships to the seemingly bizarre ideas and practices emanating from the other side of the world, then create desires for more of the same. Like other modernistas, his stock and trade was his voyeuristic prose in which he expressed and engaged a fascination with scandal, excess, luxury, and refinement. Julio Ramos finds that the turn to luxury and excess in Gómez Carrillo or early works of Darío had an implicitly political valence as signs of insurrection against the “utilitarian principle of efficiency and productivity distinctly featured in capitalism” (116). At the same time, excess is a sign of literature’s autonomy from other fields of discourse. For Ramos this isolation is “what guarantees literature’s authority as a new place for a moral judgment, which has been displaced from education, now oriented toward the realization of ‘practical ends’” (51). The only pitfall is that this strategy becomes reabsorbed by the capital flows it disrupts and even becomes the trademark of an elite class (Bastos qtd. in Ramos 116). This withdrawal turned interruption of, then collusion with, the forces of capitalism was a defining mark of modernismo. The contrary forces of art and commerce worked well together, capital flows were not just useful but necessary to expand the scope of influence for the modernistas. Detachment was little more than an aesthetic posture, but like any pose it was not without its critical implications. Gerard Aching links modernista detachment with what is currently favored as critical objectivity: “To claim that the modernistas refused to involve themselves in the cultural politics of their times is a way of avoiding areas of inquiry that are crucial for the way we speak not only about the modernista canon but also about our positions as literary critics who continue the cultural criticism that the modernistas began over a hundred years ago” (15–16). Thusly, he proposes analyzing not just the origins of modernismo, but the origins of criticism of it and the overall function of criticism to assess and determine “literacies” (18). Modernistas would set up an “exclusive dialogue among their ranks . . . with specific readers by exquisite design,” marking the rise of a new professional class of writers and the creation of a new standard of culture (18). Readerships became divided between “competent or at least appreciative readers and ‘less privileged’—that is, the unenlightened and/or dissenting ones” (19). The “exquisiteness” of design, the wasteful excess, the deviance from the crowd and the masses, and the isolation of the wayward writer and thinker are all signs attached to a ruling cultural class, the tastemakers and their bourgeois consumers. Social antagonism was a by-product

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of the cosmopolitan attempt to create cultural parity between centers and peripheries. Yet, this was perhaps one stage in a longer process of a desired wholesale cultural transformation. As Ramos argues, poetry and the newspaper chronicle were completely distinct genres and approached completely divergent class-based audiences. The collapse of the two realms opens some possibilities for cross-class contact and perhaps cross-class understanding. Gómez Carrillo was part of that generation of modernistas who worked as journalists and lived as poets. Beyond this generic cross-over, he deployed a unique strategy for reaching wide audiences. He drew up persuasive prefaces that lured a Pan-Hispanic readership, mostly by farming out his preface and prologue work to celebrated Peninsular Spanish writers like Leopoldo Alas and Jacinto Octavio Picón, which induced a Spanish readership to read the text while signaling a Latin American readership to look to Spain and its writers. Most of his work is composed of catalogues of literary texts that had captivated a Parisian readership; these texts were broken down into palatable pieces and gathered together in collections of reviews, chronicles, criticism, and short interviews of Euro-American literary figures. These synopses and previews would acclimate the Latin American reader to European ideas in small doses and enable contact with the foreign, the strange, and particularly, the queer. The prefaces organize a complex geometry of induction into cosmopolitanism. They not only introduce the larger text, offering a sense of what is to come, but they set up an exemplary relationship that guides the reader in the journey of reading, they explore the relationships and identifications shaped in the preface, and they teach how to assimilate difference and how to be cosmopolitan. Gómez Carrillo’s scholarship is an itinerary of cosmopolitan ventures. Among his works are Literatura extranjera: Estudios cosmopolitas (Foreign Literature: Cosmopolitan Studies) (1895), La vida parisiense (The Parisian Life) (1895), Almas y cerebros: Historias sentimentales, intimidades parisienses, etc (Mind and Soul: Sentimental Stories, Parisian Intimacies, etc.) (1898), El alma encantadora de París (The Enchanting Spirit of Paris) (1902), El modernismo (Modernism) (1905), Vistas de Europa (Vistas of Europe) (1919), Literaturas exóticas (Exotic Literatures) (1920), Las cien obras maestras de la literatura universal (One Hundred Masterpieces of World Literature) (1925), and La nueva literatura francesa (New French Literature) (1927). Born in Guatemala to a Spanish father and Belgian mother, he was raised speaking both French and Spanish; an intercultural reality he brought to his literary aspirations. He began his career by writing for the newspaper El Correo de la Tarde in Guatemala, launched by Rubén Darío in 1889. Later, perhaps because of his work El modernismo (1905), he directed and organized a survey of modernismo in the Argentine Paris-based periodical El Nuevo Mercurio in 1907 (see Schulman). He was a correspondent for the Argentine journal La Nación and became the director of El Liberal in 1916. In 1919, he founded and directed the monthly journal Cosmópolis, which

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would link a Spanish American with a Peninsular Spanish readership of PanAmerican, Spanish, and European writers of cosmopolitan persuasions. In 1895 and 1898, he published two volumes of cosmopolitan criticism and impressions, Literatura extranjera (Foreign Literature) and Almas y cerebros (Mind and Soul); in 1920, an edited selection from both volumes was republished as Primeros estudios cosmopolitas (First Cosmopolitan Studies). Literatura extranjera provides the reader with a quick-fix of European literature in an intensive course in cosmopolitanism. The syllabus of Literatura extranjera is carefully organized to advance the lessons of cosmopolitanism. The text is composed entirely of reviews of the notables of modern literary culture, for instance: “Walt Whitman,” “María Bashkirtseff,” “Alejandro Pouchkine,” “Del exoticismo,” “Los poetas jóvenes de Francia,” and “Los maestros nuevos.” Each synopsis acts as a preview urging the reader to seek more of the same. Almas y cerebros gives intimate impressions of notable literary figures associated with scandal and intrigue; figures such as Wilde, Huysmans, Verlaine, and Nordau. Gómez Carrillo’s syllabus of texts contains a series of rewritings and commentaries of excerpted and synopsized texts from Europe and the United States; likewise, the syllabus of figures introduces the personages that constituted the literary culture of late-nineteenth-century Paris.

Preface and Protégé The preface, as a mode of orientation, is a text of cosmopolitanism. The mission of the preface or the preview is to create proximity, to draw the reader into the space of the text, establish intimacy, and tune the audience to the text’s frequency, to the tempo and pace of the text. This involves the hermeneutic problem of rendering the strange familiar and introducing or being introduced to a foreign context, situation, person, or thing. The preface suggests connections that may not have been apparent; i.e., different cultures, sexualities, ethnicities, races, and languages coexist under the same sign and in the same space. It provides the way for one place or text to link across to elsewhere to create new and different territories of meaning; it offers a new translation to a foreign readership. Introductions have a special task; they orient the reader on the dizzying landscape of foreign literature, they tell you where you are, how you got there, and where you are going. It is no coincidence that the preface is most needed and indeed most welcome when we are outside the comfort zone of our own texts, pretexts, and home-spaces. It is the pause before the text that destines and emplots its history. The preface is in a position to do more ideological work than the text itself. For Aristotle, it signals the insufficiency of the text: “Why all this preface? Introductions are popular with those whose case is weak; it pays them to dwell on anything rather than the actual facts of it. That is why slaves, instead of answering the questions put to them, make indirect replies with long preambles” (Book 3, Rhetoric).

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Prefaces orient the reader, but they also program us by instructing us on how to incorporate the text. From the Latin praefatio, meaning “saying beforehand,” the preface establishes beforehand the logic and economy of the text (for a theory of the preface, see Tötösy de Zepetnek, “A Hypothesis”). In Literatura extranjera, Gómez Carrillo sets up a reading practice in which we learn by his example. The ideology of the preface is spun out in the complicated relation of dedication-preface-prologue and text; these modes establish an exemplary hierarchy that sets up a model system of textual apprenticeship, of which the main text is the curriculum. The reader will learn how to choose literary masters and undergo a carefully aimed course into self-mastery. She/he is oriented in the daunting possibilities of reading—of what and how to read—and directed to well-selected texts framed for their literary and cultural value for conversion to American currency. Gómez Carrillo establishes a relation of submission and indebtedness to literary forefathers, dedicating his work to Leopoldo Alas and borrowing against this name to manifest the destiny of the text in the tradition of masculine reproduction and homosocial mentoring. By the turn of the century, Alas, known in the literary world under the pseudonym Clarín, was at the end of a spectacular and well-respected literary career and a critical stamp of approval from him was akin to literary canonization. By submitting to this name, Gómez Carrillo incurs no small debt. He turns himself over to a master, abdicating his writerly authority and becoming a student permanently subjected to the critical scrutiny of the teacher. He assumes the tutelary pose of acolyte: “Here are, my dear teacher, some works of cosmopolitan criticism, in which I have tried to record all that my soul has seen and felt during these last literary voyages” (“He aquí, querido maestro, algunos estudios de crítica cosmopolita, en los cuales he tratado de referir lo que mi alma ha visto y sentido durante sus últimos viajes literarios”) (Literatura 1). This submission in the form of an offering (“He aquí, querido maestro”) signals the unfinished project of education. There is no work fully presented in and of itself but “algunos estudios” and preliminary impressions rather than systematized interpretations (“he tratado de referir lo que mi alma ha visto y sentido”). “I have tried” is the unmistakable idiom of failure or of falling short of a plan, of a project that has yet to reach completion. The preface poses its failure by way of a repetition of fault or error that hinders his advancement: “I had not wanted to repeat yesterday’s failures, but unfortunately it has been impossible to realize my desire” (“Habría querido no incurrir hoy en los defectos de ayer, pero desgraciadamente me ha sido imposible realizar mi deseo”) (1). These incompletions and shortcomings recall the unfinished project of any ideal formation—i.e., nationalism, cosmopolitanism, or modernity—the ostensible reason for continuing one’s studies under the direction of another. The failure of the preface is merely a conceit that sets the cosmopolitan education in motion. Each of the three figures of the preface/prologue represents a different stage of cosmopolitanization. The prologuist, Jacinto Octavio Picón,

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well-known naturalist Spanish writer, is figured as Gómez Carrillo’s own protégé and is, in this manner, an exemplary stand-in for the reader, who in turn must also learn to pass down the work of dissemination. The prologuist is subordinate to Gómez Carrillo and Leopoldo Alas, whom he adjoins as the couple into whose union he is welcome but not worthy by virtue of his position of lesser prestige, that is, as student: “By dedicating, my friend Gómez Carrillo, Literatura extranjera to Leopoldo Alas, Alas thought that he should not write the prologue, according to both of us it was determined that I should write it; it gives me pleasure to see my name honored in the company of theirs” (“Al dedicar V., amigo Gómez Carrillo, Literatura Extranjera á Leopoldo Alas, creyó éste que no debía escribir el prólogo, acordando ambos que yo lo hiciera; á lo cual me presté gustoso por ver mi nombre honrado en compañía de los suyos”) (iii). The decision to relegate all prologuing to an outside party is not only a matter of propriety, but a division of labor that sets up an exemplary hierarchy, one necessary for the kind of teacherly ideology treated by Literatura extranjera. The prologue cautions the reader to choose one’s masters carefully with the revelation that Gómez Carrillo has done just that: “the writer who depends on another ought to secure someone who has great prestige and that of Leopoldo is indisputable” (“el literato que se ampara de otro, debe procurar que tenga gran prestigio, y el de Leopoldo es indiscutible”) (iii). Knowing how to choose the right master is a prerequisite for the cosmopolitan course, a selective process that requires recognition of “prestige.” After hundreds of years of living under colonial tutelage, colonial writers, well-versed in the politics of mentoring, have little trouble fulfilling the prerequisites. Gómez Carrillo’s choice is complicit with social conditions and conditioning; he chooses a colonial master who exemplifies literary prestige. This is meant to enlist the reader’s trust, who might more readily abdicate his/her will to the “good taste” of the author. The prologuist has the difficult task of gaining the faith of an undoubtedly skeptical readership. Yet Jacinto Octavio Picón invites the confidence of the reader by offering himself as a guide and exemplary stand-in who shares in the resistances of identification. The prologue begins this process through a rhetorical ploy that leads sameness into difference. For me—and like me there are others—for me, Latin down to my bones and of a southern race, by temperament, by education, and even taste, this heterogeneous parade is of great interest; this list of the bizarre and even fantastic, of novelists and poets whose artistic attitudes and faculties are in a terrible contradiction with the spirit and character around me, with that which I am accustomed to understand, with that which I may feel, and with all that exists around me.

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Para mí—y como yo habrá muchos—para mí, latino hasta la médula de los huesos, meridional de raza, por temperamento, por educación y hasta por gusto, tiene interés grandísimo ese desfile heterogéneo, abigarrado y algo fantástico, de novelistas y poetas cuyas aptitudes y facultades artísticas se hallan en terrible contradicción con el espíritu y el carácter de lo que me rodea, de lo que estoy acostumbrado á comprender, de lo que puedo sentir y de cuanto vive en torno mío. (vi)

This confession prepares the reader for unexpected narratives and initiates a conversion that will turn the strange into the familiar. The prologuist allows a disquieted reaction to the “bizarre and fantastic,” while encouraging the readership to form a scholarly rapport with the “heterogeneous list.” He goes on to illustrate how singular and obscure ideas are not just signs of peculiarity, but have the potential to become part of the forces of social change. Don’t think, by this, that I am one of those who sustain the archaic and false notion that social struggles are of little importance to the writer: I think, on the contrary, that our work ought to reflect all of the phases and pulses of this era, an era that is a battle against ideals, institutions, and customs condemned to disappearance. I think, for example, that the life of a railway switchman lost in the solitude of the mountains has as much greatness as the choleric Achilles and that there is more poetry in the process of water turning into vapor than in all the rhetoric of the world. Finally, novelists like Balzac or Zola contribute more to moral progress in painting our faults than those Northern dreamers whose works emanate a disillusionment that diminishes the most powerful vigor and purest energy. No imagine V. por esto que soy de los que sostienen la vieja y falsa doctrina según la cual deben importar poco al literato las luchas de su tiempo: pienso, por el contrario, que nuestras obras deben reflejar y sentir todas las fases, todos los latidos de esta época que es una batalla contra ideales, instituciones y costumbres condenadas á desaparecer; pienso, por ejemplo, que la vida de un guarda-aguja olvidado en la soledad de las montañas, puede tener tanta grandeza como la cólera de Aquiles; que en el trabajo que supone una gota de agua transformada en vapor, hay más poesía que en todas las retóricas del mundo, y finalmente, que un novelista como Balzac ó Zola contribuye mejor al progreso moral, pintando nuestros males, que esos soñadores del Norte de cuyas obras se desprende un desaliento que amengua el vigor más poderoso y la energía más sana. (vii–viii)

Picón anticipates a reader who is put off by the modernista attraction to singularity and peculiarity and so frames the anomalous or bizarre idea as part of a larger process. He performs his own diminished resistance to coax the reader into the textual fold. Like the cosmopolitics of the text, he suggests that literature should be inclusive and hospitable to the strange and the queer, since it is necessary for

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social progress to reveal our “faults” in a Balzacian manner. The embrace of the world means not only a consideration of unseen or hitherto unconsidered details (e.g., water turning into vapor), but an inevitable embrace of other hitherto unseen things, like the unexpected characters and characteristics of modernity.

Cosmopolitan Identifications Picón uses the preface to derail racial and cultural determinism, partly through the idea that we may identify with and provisionally become what we are not as key to becoming cosmopolitan. One of the previewed texts performs this work by acting as an exemplary preface and analog to the entire project of Literatura extranjera: Gerhart Hauptmann’s realist drama Einsame Menschen (Lonely Lives). Gómez Carrillo describes this text as incompatible with a Latin American context: “Its literary form would disconcert those who are more or less accustomed to a Latin education and who share a love for traditional rituals” (“Su forma literaria desconcierta á todos los que, más o menos, conservan la huella de la educación latina y el amor de los ritos tradicionales”) (21–22). It is a text with an unexpected ethos, upsetting and disappointing Latin American cultural expectations. its fundamental idea does not have the charming frivolity that our public generally admires in the tendentious works of Echegaray and Sellés. To enjoy it, one must have a German soul; to understand it, one should have a basic idea of the great ideological problems that, today, agitate men of the North; and in order to feel it, one must have lived for some time in the penetrating fog of the septentrional countries. Those who have a Calderonian psyche ought not read it if they want to avoid the distress caused by disillusionment. su idea fundamental no tiene esa encantadora frivolidad que nuestro público admira generalmente en las obras tendenciosas de Echegaray y Sellés. Para saborearlo, es preciso, “hacerse una alma alemana”; para comprenderlo, es necesario tener una idea neta de los grandes problemas ideológicos que agitan hoy á los hombres del Norte; para sentirlo, es indispensable haber vivido algún tiempo entre la bruma penetrante de los países septentrionales. Los que tienen un cerebro “calderoniano” harán bien en no leerlo si desean evitarse la pena que siempre causan las desilusiones. (22)

The Pan-Hispanic reader must literally and literarily shift his/her racial positioning in order to read, so different is this work from anything familiar to a Spanish or Latin American psyche. Rather than simply putting off the Spanish readership, the warning “not to read” registers as a challenge; especially since the purpose of introducing the text is to elicit the interest of the reader. Hauptmann’s drama becomes theater for the rehearsal of the transmutation of identification from being “calderoniano” to being a reader able to withstand “the distress caused by dis-

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illusionment” (“la pena que siempre causan las desilusiones”). This allegory of reading marks the beginning of the transformation to cosmopolitanism through the access of literary identification. Through a concatenation of becomings wrought in each introductory allegory (becoming-German, becoming-French, becoming-Spanish, becoming-North American), the reader eventually becomes cosmopolitan. Gómez Carrillo posits a German-ness that may be apprehended and inhabited while it liberates race from its status as the essential mode of being. In order to read, enjoy, and understand, one must “inhabit the German soul,” an appropriation that requires having a clear understanding of the great ideological questions of the North. Each mode of apprehension requires a different emotional background of experience; to enjoy one must inhabit the German soul; to understand requires Germanic philosophical depth; and to feel truly and experience one needs to have lived in the northern climates of Germany. Understanding requires a long process and series of steps, some accomplished through study, others through experience. Nonetheless, the approach to empathic understanding is a synaesthetic course that begins literarily and requires a deep contextual rendering to capture mood, mode, tone, tenor, sensibility, feeling, and atmosphere. Cosmopolitanism does not promote an easy access to other cultural ways and modes, as this series of prerequisites suggests; rather, becoming cosmopolitan means expanding the means of understanding others and elsewhere.

Colonial Tutelage The relationship created in the preface (teacher-student) can be likened to that of colonial tutelage, which is counterintuitive in Enlightened modernity, since it is the inverse of the Kantian motto: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity/minority/tutelage” (“Unmündigkeit”) (“An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” 54). For Kant, cosmopolitanism is the transformation of the polis beyond its self-imposed limits into the world-oriented cosmopolis; it is a sign of national maturation. Unmündigkeit (immaturity) is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. It marks a deficiency of self-reason for which each person is held responsible: “This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another” (54). Enlightenment signals the end of the tutelary ethos that binds subjects to their headmaster, the state, by re-establishing a relation to the world as necessary, though abstract, to the achievement of freedom and justice. The abandonment of tutelage is a sign of self-mastery and successful self-completion. Yet this is where the Kantian model fails, since self-mastery implies equal access to the means of self-actualization. Foucault notes this contradiction in the Kantian definition of mastery: enlightenment is described as a collective process and as an individual act, in which case,

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humans are both passive and active agents of the process; “they may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors” (“What Is Enlightenment?” 35). Moreover, all of mankind, the entire world, is implicated in the Enlightenment process, implying that the characteristic of “immaturity” is the same everywhere or can be defined by the same conditions. The Enlightenment process fails to account for deep political and social inequalities and uneven development in the world system. Gómez Carrillo refuses the Enlightenment demand of self-mastery. He expresses his authorial vulnerability and relinquishes the control and absolute priority accorded him in order to redesign the master-tutor relation for very particular cosmopolitical purposes. He proposes intensive tutelage as a provisional and transitional stage prior to sovereignty. His subjugation to Alas exposes a relationship that metonymizes the colonial dynamic of Latin America with Spain, yet like all repetitions it was the same thing done differently, designed to revise an earlier relationship of forced submission. For Freud, repetition is also a compulsion to repeat a traumatic history in an effort, with some interpretive mediation, to overcome it (“Recollection, Repetition” 366–376). This might be regarded as a provisional step, one moment in a long process of acting out, repeating, working through, and eventually of remembering. Deference to Alas allegorizes the submission of the entire text towards Europe as a temporary anaclisis designed to empower toward independence; through education, asymmetry is transformed into complementarity. Though the cosmopolitans were accused of short memories, they repeated a past relationship with the aim of reworking it and remembering the nation, making it stronger and more flexible. Just as the preface is a pause before the text, tutelage is a provisional moment before self-mastery; in a modernist narrative, one leads into the other. These transitional steps are necessary stops on the way to full subjective integrity, just as the integration of national identity is a necessary step to a cosmopolitical mode of being.

The Ends of the Lesson Gómez Carrillo, unable to attain the approval of Alas, seems instead to only court failure in his eyes. The ghostly presence of Alas in Literatura extranjera as the recipient of the dedication, is realized in Almas y cerebros when the literary forefather returns to admonish his charge. A year after the publication of Literatura extranjera, in a prologue to Almas y cerebros, Alas, writing under his critical pseudonym Clarín, will air his disdain for the double volume of cosmopolitan criticism. This second volume is crucial to the tutelary project; the entire text stages a minor insurrection against the old guard represented by the Spanish critic, marking a critical break from the master. From Literatura extranjera to Almas y cerebros, we move quickly from dependence to independence, from reading un-

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der the direction of another to rereading and revising the works of the master. The rupture with literary forefathers initiates a break from the deep genealogies of cultural, sexual, gender, and aesthetic determinism. Clarín agrees to write the prologue of Almas y cerebros under less than enthusiastic terms: “I write this prologue at the request of the author and to keep an old promise” (“Escribo este prólogo á instancias del autor del libro, y por cumplir una promesa antigua”) (vii). Gómez Carrillo is his “good friend” even though, he admits, they differ in opinion. His prologue is full of warnings to Gómez Carrillo and the reader. He wagers his position as teacher and master by offering endorsement of the author’s “talent” and his larger project of “literary propaganda.” But all this is florid preface to the critical admonishment that will follow. Gómez Carrillo is treated like an upstart colonial subject staking unwarranted claims on the master’s turf. The prologue captures the critical drama played out over the text, revealing the coveted territory that will not be ceded without resentment. For the prologuist, that territory is European literature as he knew it. With curmudgeonly impatience, Clarín begins by admitting that he has stopped following the current literary trends for their lack of substance, in fact, he would like to chuck literature out in favor of the more substantial efforts of philosophy and science—sounding not unlike the positivists of his day. This is odd considering that literature and criticism were Clarín’s lifelong professions and that he has been put to the task of prologuist of literary criticism. But, in his diagnosis, something has befallen literature of late, making it an object he can no longer incorporate. He expresses this disillusionment by way of example, setting up Gómez Carrillo as the straw man in the defense of his domain. Clarín admonishes Gómez Carrillo for his uncritical obeisance to literary notables and for hyper-identification with the French. He begins his attack by taking the author to task for being dazzled by fame in his fascination with Max Nordau, the infamous German anti-decadent moralizer and dilettante who scandalized readers with accounts of the most salacious aspects of decadence. In Clarín’s opinion Nordau is “not a learned man, a philosopher, nor artist” (“no es un sabio, no es un filósofo, no es un artista”), but someone who “understands little about a lot of things” (“entienden un poco de muchas cosas”) and uses this studied incompetence to gain “notoriety” (“notoriedad”) (ix–x). He finds that the author of Almas y cerebros exhibits the immature generosity of the critic, who, lacking discretion, finds everything to be of value, excluding little. The book’s archive is ever expanding in its inclusiveness, sheltering even the least likely addition of those deemed unworthy by the gatekeepers of culture. Clarín, in his assertion of the deep values of classical literature, misses the point. For instance, Nordau’s rancorous litany against decadence, Degeneration, had become a bible on the subject that was perversely taken up in popular cultural circles in Paris with Nordau himself considered a kind of anti-hero of decadence (Clarín intones that the book was virtually unknown as Entartung, but popular as Dégénérescence). The case of

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Nordau is a major point of contention between Clarín and Gómez Carrillo and a sign of their distinct modes of reading.

Reading against the Grain Gómez Carrillo draws his portrait of Nordau from an interview that was intended diagnostically to understand the cause of his rancor. He ends up demystifying the mysterious and intimidating critic, who is agreeable and speaks “more ironically and persuasively than dogmatically” (“Su manera de hablar es más bien irónica y persuasiva que dogmática”) (247). In fact, during the interview, Nordau is quite chatty and open, except for one tightly bound (k)not: “the only thing that he will not assent to, joke about or tolerate is moral and philosophical degeneration” (“Lo único que para él no admite ni bromas ni tolerancias, es la degeneración filosófica y moral”) (247). Nordau is himself a text. He is of great interest as a cosmopolitan figure, a descendant of Spanish Jews who were expelled in the sixteenth century during an anti-Semitic assertion of Spanish nationalism. He maintains identification with the Spanish although born into a rabbinical Jewish-Hungarian family and, at the time of the interview, having lived in Paris for some fifteen years (Mosse xii). George L. Mosse notes in the English introduction to Degeneration that “he escaped the narrowness of this Orthodox Jewish milieu by becoming a journalist . . . to symbolize his break with the past he changed his name from Südfeld (southern field) to Nordau (northern meadow)” (xiii). Gómez Carrillo finds much of interest in Nordau, enough that he chooses him as representative of the cosmopolitan milieu of Paris. His investigation of Nordau reveals a talent for rereading, for reading against the grain and changing the ideological context to suit his own purposes. We gain better understanding of the possible cause of Clarín’s distaste of Nordau upon reading the text about him. Nordau proclaims that “Spanish letters and science . . . are in complete decadence and in complete degeneration” (“Las letras y las ciencias españolas . . . están en completa decadencia y en completa degeneración”) (247). When asked if he had heard of Pereda, de Valera, and Clarín, he affirms their talent, but remarks that a handful of writers do not make a brilliant generation. This opinion is a brutal affront to Spanish national spirit. Perhaps it is in recording and conveying this conversation, that Clarín finds Gómez Carrillo to be amiss in his cosmopolitanism. If we swing for a moment back to the prologue, the foray into Nordau is directly followed by a recursion to nationalism, a nationalism that encompasses Spain and its former colonies: “I know only one thing more harmful than the isolation of national spirit: the dissolution of the national spirit” (“Sólo conozco una cosa más nociva que el aislamiento del espíritu nacional: la disolución del espíritu nacional”) (xi). Clarín’s reconstructed nationalism reunites motherland to colony: “Let me say, before continuing, that for me, radical in this idea, Spain and Latin

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America are one single nation, even though they do not want to be and have different States. We have been one and will be so again soon” (“Conste, antes de seguir, que para mí, radical en esto, España y América española son una sola nación, aunque ellas no quieran y aunque tengan diferentes Estados. Hemos sido unos y volveremos á serlo, acaso pronto”) (xi). From this proprietary identification, he feels entitled to make judgments about the cultural movements of Latin America that look to Paris instead of Madrid. And it is from this position that he issues the following warning: Every time I have preached the necessity of assimilating the foreign, I add the warning that assimilate means making something your own, converting it into your own substance, adding something to your organism to conserve it, so that it might continue being what it is. How can I not censure that American literature that does not assimilate the foreign, but that dissolves itself into the foreign, that in a kind of ecstasy, badly employed, is lost in the loved object, passing into it in a sad imitation of precious French literature . . . ? Siempre que he predicado la necesidad de asimilarse lo extranjero he añadido la advertencia de que asimilar significa hacer propio, convertir en propia substancia, agregar algo á nuestro organismo para conservarlo, para que siga siendo lo que es. ¿Cómo no he de censurar á esa literatura Americana que no asimila lo extraño, sino que se disuelve en lo extraño; que, con una especie de éxtasis, muy mal empleado, se pierde en el objecto amado, pasa á él, y viene á convertirse en un triste remedo de los tiquis miquis de las letras francesas . . . ? (xii)

This warning against Francomania is issued partly to the author, who “does not seem entirely free of the vice that he used to talk about” (“no se ve libre por completo del vicio de que hablaba”) (xiii), and to the modernistas who share this adoration of the French. The cosmopolitans, he complains, only read the French or those works that passed through “French customs.” Perhaps this turn from Spanish to French is a defensive gesture against recolonization. This literary cosmopolitanism, Clarín asserts, “needs corrective from the other side” (“necesita correctivo por otro lado”) (xiii), a corrective that would send it back to Spain. Clarín interprets the cosmopolitan rapport to elsewhere as infidelity to Spain and he uses the prologue to draw the Latin American readership and the author back into Spain’s fold. Gómez Carrillo writes for a Pan-Hispanic audience and certainly shares in Clarín’s desire for political alliance, yet he seeks these things without restrictions or conditions. His wayward readings in this second volume of criticism are a break from the proprietary grip of the master’s demanding monogamy.

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American Flirt Almas y cerebros is a departure from the gravity of Peninsular aesthetics with the levity of flirtatious encounters with foreign writers and writings. Gómez Carrillo did seek becoming-other at the loss of self; a loss that was always provisional and temporary, but necessary for understanding the position of the other. He would hardly challenge Clarín’s definition of assimilation as “making something your own, converting it into your own substance,” yet for him there is a difference in the manner and temporality of assimilation. The logic of textual encounter is that of flirtation; light and brief, tempting but not total. There is no full affair with the other text, but a series of flirtatious encounters. In On Flirtation, Adam Phillips explores the complex dynamics and logic of flirtation. He notes that the topic of flirtation is worthy of consideration, since we really only flirt with serious things; we flirt with disaster or madness. Yet, the flirt makes no serious commitment to the encountered object, is neither beholden nor obligated; likewise, one does not become the thing flirted with, that is, to flirt with madness is not to become mad. Flirtation eschews the progress narrative, like the stray routes of perversion, flirtation refuses predictable ends. For Phillips “Flirts are dangerous because they have a different way of believing in the Real Thing” and flirtation is “the calculated (consciously or unconsciously) production of uncertainty” (xvii). Like cosmopolitan departures, perversions, the bizarre and the strange, flirtation refuses the consolidation of normativity and opens up a wide repertoire of possible relationships. The idea of the flirtation of one text with another is perhaps a key to understanding the cosmopolitan’s noncommittal endorsement of other cultural ways. Flirting does not lead to serious affairs, but rather ensures against such a promise. Freud notes that the flirt may elicit a jealous reaction if the beloved does not understand the logic of flirtation and its failure to make promises: “Convention has laid down that neither partner is to hold the other accountable for these little excursions in the direction of unfaithfulness, and it achieves the result on the whole that the desire awakened by the new love-object is gratified by a turning-back to the object already possessed. The jealous person, however, does not recognize this convention of tolerance, he does not believe in any such thing as a halt or a turning-back once the path has been trod, nor that a social ‘flirtation’ may be a safeguard against actual infidelity” (“Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy” 234). The metaphors of travel, of “turning-back” and “excursions” recall a cosmopolitan logic of travel. The “little excursions” in the direction of cultural unfaithfulness are simply a deviation or digression of an impermanent and transitory state. Cosmopolitanism operates in this mode of the flirt whose forays into other cultures are vagrant and promiscuous, but who eventually returns home with renewed intensity and commitment. Although Gómez Carrillo suffers a momentary Francomania, in the end his commitment remains with his Pan-Hispanic readership, to whom he dedicates his work and whom his work addresses. Travel to Paris on the

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passport of Almas y cerebros or Literatura extranjera requires that the point of departure remain a point of reference. Cosmopolitanism ensures the protection and advancement of nationalism, but it is a renovated nationalism that is more hospitable, more open to difference, more empathetic to others and elsewhere. Gómez Carrillo dramatizes the cosmopolitical attitude with his abbreviated accounts of various textual flings. One particular encounter lends insight into the text’s larger cosmopolitan purpose. In “A Visit with Oscar Wilde” (“Una visita a Oscar Wilde”), the unnamed narrator suddenly encounters Wilde in Paris. This encounter begins a fascination bordering on flirtation: “His singular and insinuating way of speaking French, changing, like the Sterner drawing, the intonation of the vowels, caught my attention; and his enormous face full of adolescent sadness and dreaminess, filled me with interest” (“Su manera singular é insinuante de hablar francés, cambiando, como el dibujante Sterner, el valor de las vocales, me llamó desde luego la atención; y su enorme rostro de adolescente triste y soñador, me llenó de interés”) (149). Wilde’s singularity and insinuations encode something else, while the interest of the narrator hints at a peculiar kind of investment. The visit with Wilde is not just a single and singular meeting, but an intense and reverberating encounter with the literary figure and his fictions. Gómez Carrillo chronicles his experience of Wilde along with a brief synopsis of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The text is trailed by the following post-dictum: “This article was written in 1890. It has no merit in itself, but I think that by publishing it now, at a time when Oscar Wilde has been incarcerated for immorality, it is an homage of unwavering sympathy that will be pleasing to the great writer in his disgrace” (“Este artículo fué escrito en el año 1890. No tiene mérito ninguno, pero creo que reproducirlo ahora, en los momentos en que Oscar Wilde se encuentra en la cárcel por crimen de inmoralidad, es un homenaje de simpatía invariable que será grato al gran escritor en desgracia”) (156). This fragment is deceptively positioned, not as a key or preface, but as an afternote and afterthought; however, it is the thought of the short text, its basis and foundation. It orients the text and reveals its orientation in the sympathetic rapport, simpatía, of Gómez Carrillo with Wilde, a likeness hidden in the parenthesis as an off-scene secret. This flirtation begins on turf foreign to both in its most likely site, Paris. Wilde’s persona is prepared by Gómez Carrillo as the cosmopolitan accumulation of different cultural markers and signifiers: “dressed with that careful English ‘style,’ I come upon him in a literary café in the Latin district, his tall stature reminded me of an old portrait of Tourguénief . . . his eyes . . . are pale eyes, as pale as the smile of that heroine of Catulle Mendés” (“trajeado ya con esa cuidadosa ‘tenue’ de los ingleses, le encuentro en cualquier café literario del barrio Latino, su talle gigantesco me trae á la memoria un viejo retrato de Tourguénief . . . sus ojos . . . son ojos pálidos, como era pálida la sonrisa de aquella heroína de Catulle Mendés”) (150). The narrator of “Una visita a Oscar Wilde,” perhaps Gómez Carrillo or his like, inserts himself into the cosmopolitan flow surrounding Wilde:

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“During the entire time in which an almost fraternal affection linked me to him, I think I never heard him shout” (“Durante todo el tiempo en que un cariño casi fraternal me ligó á él, creo que nunca le oí dar un grito”) (150). This identification with Wilde and the continuity between them, the simpatía turned fraternal bond is the empathic connection at the basis of cosmopolitan hospitality. This couple, Wilde and Gómez Carrillo, forms a fitting counterpoint to another literary couple joined by Molloy in “Too Wilde for Comfort.” Molloy joins Martí and Wilde as that odd couple whose encounter lends insight into larger cultural relations. Martí’s impression of Wilde, decidedly not fraternal or convivial, advances the phobic bond of Pan-American nationalism premised on disidentification with the foreign. The scene and setup of Martí’s encounter with Wilde is patently modernist; Molloy renders Martí a voyeuristic flaneur spying on an urban oddity: “Lost in a New York crowd, Martí, the foreign correspondent, gazes upon, better still, spies on Wilde, carefully taking in the man and his words, the better to report his experience to the Spanish readers of La Nación” (187–88). Martí and Gómez Carrillo coincide as disseminators and popularizers of texts to a Latin American public, though with vastly different schemes; both use Wilde as an indispensable foundation for radically diverse plots. Martí sacrifices Wilde to an identification with his reader, one that clearly marks its nationalist exclusions. Molloy writes: “Wilde does not dress, writes Martí, the way we all dress. But who is this we? The usual first-person plural, so frequent in Martí as a means to separate the Latin American we from an antagonistic North American they, gives place here to an atypical, panicked we—that of all ‘normally dressed’ men, whatever their national origin—before the ‘strange,’ the ‘childish,’ the ‘extravagant’” (188). Wilde is a marked signifier, the presence of which, as Molloy has noted, activates scandal. The scandal surrounding Wilde conveys the ethos of Almas y cerebros and sets up our reading of its other tales and essays. Gómez Carrillo reads not with a sense of disdain for this odd figure, but with the affinity of identification. In fact, “Una visita a Oscar Wilde” is the point of departure for the larger text: Gómez Carrillo sums up his own literary project by citing Wilde: “‘Modern novelists think that art should imitate nature but, on the contrary, it is nature that should imitate art’” (“‘Los novelistas modernos pretenden que el arte debe imitar á la naturaleza, cuando, al contrario, es la naturaleza la que debe imitar el arte’”) (152). Cosmopolitanism works against the consolidation of a literary and social norm by carefully rewriting traditions and with forays into other cultural texts. To attain a cosmopolitan way of being, one should seek to understand the position occupied by the other, a position that includes a set of complex conditions from environment to personal and national history. Becoming-other involves listening to the other and shaping understanding and empathy where once there was none. It involves the mechanics of reading, the processes of identification and incorporation. The cosmopolitanism of promiscuous reading, emanating from the work of

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Gómez Carrillo and his like, decisively changed the course of modern cosmopolitanism by working against national identity on a micro-political plane, targeting reader identification. Gómez Carrillo created a series of prefaces that not only introduce and orient, but create provisional continuities across place and initiate the uninitiated to a range of “peculiarities” drawn from various European cultural texts. His narrative voice is consistently that of the cautious tour guide who is aware of the cultural proprieties of the group, making scandalous material palatable by mitigating its foreign peculiarities. He offers micro-summaries of unwieldy texts, breaking them down into consumable portions. A synopsis is hardly innocent; it gives a summary, a map for reading, while it forges an ideology in the manner of abbreviation. It disturbs the integrity of the work, summing it up and delivering it in a part that stands in for the whole and undermining the authority of the author as producer of narrative meaning. The synopsis reduces the autonomy and power of the text. It makes the text into a different object, one that might be annexed to different projects to serve different aims. Although writing in a different era, Gertrude Stein captured the critical sentiment in this kind of reprocessing of the “greats.” Stein was the kind of reader that Gómez Carrillo would have hoped to create. She writes, of her difference from other European high modernists, “They read the master-pieces, I read what are not master-pieces but which quote pieces of masterpieces in them” (qtd. in Perelman 22). It is the parceling of the masterpiece that turns a formidable greatness into consumable pieces, their inaccessibility punctured and even dissolved. Gómez Carrillo teaches the reader how to incorporate these fragments of “great” literary texts and figures and metabolize them for distinctly American purposes.

CHAPTER TWO Cosmopolitan Topographies of Paris: Citing Balzac

Paris and Immigration Although Paris had become shorthand for cosmopolitan hospitality, this was more an effect of a literary imagination than the actual experience of the city. Paris was more imagined than real, its mythology disseminated by a number of writers associated with its cultural landscape. Charles Baudelaire scandalized his reading public with seductive itineraries of the synesthetic experience of walking the city streets, traversing territories marked out and split open by various kinds of traffic and trafficking. Baudelaire returned the experience of walking the streets to some primal trauma, full of ruptures and liminal zones where the promenader experiences rapid population changes, the threat of becoming lost or cut off, and surprising and chaotic conjunctures. What Baudelaire discovered or recovered, is the idea that there is a world of otherness and difference in the city, one that is exstatic and de-localizing. Paris became, in this way, understood as a global or world city, a crossroads of international travelers, ideas, and commerce. The idea of the global city replaced the world tour, which had become a tedious and laborious gathering of cultural capital and place. The new way of knowing place and self was by experiencing a displacement from self and the familiar at home rather than sending oneself into some faraway out-there. Paris, for Baudelaire, had become the world that one traversed to gain culture and knowledge. It had become for this reason the capital of the world and of the nineteenth century. Baudelaire did for Paris after the turn of the century what Balzac struggled with, and indeed had cornered the market on prior to the great sea-change characterized as later modernity. Paris was the place where the world gathered and convened, the scene of modernity; yet many stories about the city reveal that its borders were not so permeable and the city not so hospitable to strangers. Visiting virtualized Paris means returning to its most prolific signifying name, Balzac, whose work on Paris is nothing less than iconic. This chapter follows one strain of 43

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the infinite strands of review and influence generated by the Balzacian corpus, a strand that emerges during the turn-of-the-century migration to Paris from all over the world. More specifically, Balzac’s La fille aux yeux d’or (1835) (The Girl with the Golden Eyes) exposes a complex of issues surrounding the migrations of Latin Americans into Paris that stands in for a larger idiom of immigration and the symbolic practices that it generates. The Girl with the Golden Eyes is frank in its depiction of various interethnic, interracial, and same-sex encounters. Balzac critiques this licentious cosmopolitanism indirectly through a long prefatory discourse on the pernicious culture of commodity fetishism (the fetish for gold) in which the desire for gold and pleasure trump all other concerns. He then weaves the main themes of this socioeconomic critique, gold and pleasure, into a scandalous tale that associates them with the dangerously alluring and sexually “perverse” Cuban-Georgian girl with the golden eyes. The story combines racial and commodity fetishism to fill various slots and gaps in a national discourse about the deleterious effects of immigration and capitalism. Balzac’s constitution of the Latin American in Paris does not remain uncontested. At the height of the cosmopolitan vogue in turn-of-the-century Paris, Enrique Gómez Carrillo rewrites Balzac’s La fille aux yeux d’or in his Almas y cerebros; historias sentimentales, intimidades parisienses, etc. (Mind and Soul, Sentimental Stories, Parisian Intimacies, etc.) (1898). Almas y cerebros, part of his double set of cosmopolitan works, is already a nod to Balzac’s Scènes de la vie parisienne (Scenes from Parisian Life) in its appropriation of work associated with Parisian literary culture. Almas y cerebros makes its case in an explicit rewriting of The Girl with the Golden Eyes with the short story “Marta y Hortensia.” This story offers an example of how postcolonial cosmopolitan readings reshape colonial texts, offering the different vantage of disadvantage and reconstruing the vision of Paris as an open cosmotopia. Gómez Carrillo appropriates the story of the girl with the golden eyes, refurbishes it, and, by removing its xenophobic discourse, turns it into quite another thing. For Gómez Carrillo, “perversion” resides not with the Latin American “other,” but is closely associated with Paris. It is the Parisian in “Marta y Hortensia” who, like Balzac, fails to identify the figure of the perverse as the modern subject of cosmopolitanism. Gómez Carrillo’s critical rereading offers a surprising reversal of the relation of cosmopolis to colony.

The Fetish and the Cosmopolitan The Girl with the Golden Eyes is based loosely on some literary gossip concerning a purported affair between George Sand and Marie Dorval. The text itself was so scandalous in its treatment of homosexuality that it was left out of the 1899 English translation of the Histoire de Treize (The Thirteen)—which includes The Girl with the Golden Eyes—since, George Saintsbury claims, it “contains things that are inconvenient” (ix). It is an iconically cosmopolitan tale of national, racial, and

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ethnic mixing and sexual diversity; Henri de Marsay, a half-English and halfFrench Parisian, becomes obsessed with a beautiful and mysterious GeorgianCuban relocated to his native Paris. Henri, the most beautiful and prized youth of Paris, pursues the girl with the golden eyes; yet, unable to secure her love to his liking, he suspects the existence of a rival. The tale ends dramatically with a double scandal when Henri discovers that he has a half-sister, a Spanish-English Cuban Creole, the Marquise Margarita Euphemia Porraberil, and that this sister is his lesbian rival and the murderer of the girl with the golden eyes. Balzac intensifies the homosexual scandal of the original source by adding a racial dimension to the story, aligning sexual “perversity” with race. The queer scandal is resolved by neutralizing the racial threat, initially through fetishizing racial difference, then by eliminating it completely. Balzac’s fetish-centered Girl with the Golden Eyes recalls a history of the fetish as a French phenomenon. Robert Nye gives an account of the medical origins of fetishism in France and alludes to the curious nature of this patently French preoccupation as colonial occupation: There is one interesting, albeit speculative, reason why sexual fetishism may have appeared first in France, and developed such deep roots there. Many of the decadent writers were social and political conservatives and nationalist and “revanchist” in foreign policy. The medical community, in its public hygiene function as “first servant of the state,” was equally disposed to a conservative, nationalist outlook. Could it be that the concept of fetishism sprang to mind because both doctors and writers viewed French expansion in the colonies as a (fetishistic) compensation or displacement for the proper aim of regaining Alsace-Lorraine? Might fetishistic love, in other words, be to real love what colonialism is to revanche? (26–27)

The French aggregation of power through annexation of colonies is analogous to the operations of the fetish, where the colonial appropriation of foreign land is compensation for a lost piece of the French corpus. Fetishizing the foreign is a means of regaining the lost potency of an earlier era. In turn, for Balzac the fetish recalls its history as a colonial practice as a sign and symptom of the unequal exchanges between Europe and its colonial Others. It is not coincidental that The Girl with the Golden Eyes operates in a French context with regard to a CubanGeorgian woman, Paquita, since this relation, European-Cuban, is exactly that of the earliest example of the term coined by Charles de Brosses in 1757: “The savages of Cuba considered gold to be the fetish of the Spaniards so they celebrated it with a feast, danced and sang around it, and threw it into the sea in order to be rid of it” (qtd. in Pietz 134). De Brosse’s work on the fetish is the basis of Marxian insight about commodity fetishism. Marx names the problem of the fetish in his critique of the commodity, its mysteriousness, and its inherently perverse, queer character: “A commodity appears at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily un-

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derstood. Its analysis shows that it is in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (319). The very same language will be used to describe Paquita as a colonial subject in Paris: she is both abject corporeality, a body to-be-looked-at, and a metaphysical abstraction, the “ideal woman.” Paquita is experienced by the men of Paris as “a very queer thing.” The economy of the commodity permeates all things. It makes the values of the exchanger and the exchanged interchangeable through the mediation of money. Money transforms the object and its consumer into values and emplots them into the same system, upsetting stable orders of meaning and value: “Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges all things, it is the general confounding and compounding of all things—the world upside down—the confounding and compounding of all natural and human qualities” (Marx and Engels, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” 105). In The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Paquita is a sign of the economy of Paris, a chimera and object of fantasy and fascination who threatens to turn Parisian social life upside down. Henri de Marsay, exemplary of the social scene captivated by the girl with the golden eyes, describes Paquita as the “original of that captivating painting which goes by the name of ‘A Woman Fondling Her Chimaera’” (339). De Marsay’s preoccupation with the image of Paquita inverts their relation, causing him to lament that he is reduced to waiting for “the girl whose chimaera I have become” (339–40). This unexpected reversal is exactly that of the Marxian critique of the trick of capital: [Money] being the external, common medium and faculty for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image (a faculty not springing from man as man or from human society as society), money transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract conceits and therefore imperfections—into tormenting chimeras—just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras—essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual—into real powers and faculties. (Marx and Engels, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” 105)

In the sleight of hand of capital, fantasy not only becomes reality, but acts on reality by changing it into fantasy. Likewise, the foreign body in Paris upsets the stable order of things by causing the becoming-chimera of the Parisians. This attitude, beginning to gather force in 1835 had considerable currency in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In The Origin of Species Charles Darwin, Marx’s contemporary and Balzac’s future cousin, will use the “problem” of immigration as a point of reference to explain the idea of natural selection: “If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this would likewise seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants. Let it be remembered how powerful the influence of a single introduced tree or mammal has

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been shown to be” (55). Darwin’s account crystallizes the anxiety about immigration into scientific fact, proleptically foreboding with the idea that we ought “let it be remembered how powerful the influence of a single introduced tree or mammal has been shown to be” (55). Scientific discourse is not only a symptom of culture, it authorizes the social discourse about immigration by participating in it. The foreign woman, as a spectacle in Paris and a new and fascinating object to be looked at and pursued, transforms Paris into a visual landscape of tantalizing differences. This scenario indicates a new visual economy of the city. Balzac is explicit on this point, the place of the image in the visual landscape of Paris is emphasized as the main aim and locus of the story: “If this rapid glance at the population of Paris has helped the reader to realize how rarely the eye perceives a Raphaelesque figure and what passionate admiration it inspires so soon as it is seen, the main purpose of our story will have been achieved” (327). Indeed, the story is about the visual, eyes, and seeing. It even opens on site with a panorama of its city-specific sights: “one of the most fearful spectacles in Paris is the general aspect of the Parisian population: a population revolting to look on—gaunt, yellow, sallow” (309). For Balzac, all Parisians are driven toward the same aim and are both over-worked and over-indulged: “What then are the dominant forces in this community devoid of morals, principles and genuine feeling, which yet are forces in which all feeling, principles and morals have their beginning and their end? They are gold and pleasure” (310–11). No one in Paris rests or sleeps in the active pursuit of their livelihood and leisure. Balzac gives the example of a man who, freed from his official servitude at four o’clock, roams the city in search of pleasurable sights, encountering the working girls, roaming the streets and visiting the opera, and arriving home at midnight to transform the city sights and the images and illusions of the opera to the “profit of conjugal love” (315). Balzac describes the typical Parisian as like the city itself: “He is the epitome of all things: history, literature, politics, government, religion, the military art. He is in fact a living encyclopedia, a grotesque Atlas; endlessly on the march and never taking rest, like Paris itself” (315). Paris, against the other readings of Paris as a woman, is the roaming husband in active pursuit of images, sights and scenes under the twin rubrics of gold and pleasure, a double aim merged and symbolized by the Latin American woman. Paris is the fetishizing and imperious Western European figure whose power is affirmed by a colonial gaze, yet who, at the same time, is upset and disturbed by an overdetermined visual object of fixation. Gold, as the organizing principle of the narrative, is framed as the most pernicious element of the plot. The value of gold may be rendered on several different signifying levels. For Jean-Joseph Goux, gold is the primary “arbiter of evaluations,” the defining object in the world of commodities, where money becomes a commodity in the everything-becomes-commodity of Marxian analyses. Yet, everything gains its value in relation to gold, while gold itself is excluded

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from this system of valuation: “And here again, if the commodity in the position of the equivalent is excluded from the world of commodities, the object that functions as equivalent, the sexual organ, is necessarily excluded from the imagined body and from the world of objects of drive in a logical ‘operation,’ a castration that dramatizes the phantasmatic element” (Goux 23). This relation of internal externality, the paradox of inclusion and exclusion at the same time, is part of the contradictory logic of the fetish, while it marks the double position of the cosmopolitan as stranger. Indeed, gold is the perfect sign to attach to the golden-eyed girl, since it conveys the trouble of the paradoxical move associated with the outsider figure, the immigrant and the cosmopolitan. The trouble here is exactly that alluded to by Marx as the doubleness or paradox of the fetish as both abject materiality and metaphysical abstraction. Analogously, it is the paradox of the cosmopolitan as citizen of a particular place while simultaneously international or abstracted from any particular or defining context. Gold is the staple of the narrative, the obsessional center, object of pursuit and fascination, and as such it maintains a position of relative autonomy and sovereignty. Gold is extraordinary. Goux claims that “it is the commodity whose exclusion settles the question, and the contradictions, of multiple equivalences” (31). Just as the value of the men and women of Paris is determined by their proximity to, or more likely distance from, Paquita, so is the commodity determined by its proximity to more gold. The analogies to gold that shape Paquita define her as powerful and elicit fear of her as well as a desire to appropriate and exchange her. Paquita is the gold standard of the immigrant, the exemplary stranger standing in for all those foreign to Paris, the fullest measure of potential disruption. She is a critical figure that confronts the citizens of Paris, calling into question the status not only of the outsider, but of those who, ostensibly, belong. The visual element, of image and fantasy, crucial to the Marxian framing of the gold-hued fetish, is not lost in Balzac’s tale. The girl with the golden eyes is reduced ontologically to and constituted by the most iconic of phallic substitutions, her eyes. The history of this displacement emerges in Freud’s “The Uncanny” in which the fear of castration is associated with the fear of injury to the eyes; the eyes are imagined as vulnerable to injury because they are a potent signifier of the mastery suggested by seeing. Paquita’s eyes are the site of competing discourses; on the one hand she is fetishistically reduced to her eyes, yet she is also fully defined by the visual register and assumes the active role of the looking subject in a visual schema in which, according to Mulvey, the gaze is defined as male. The logic of the fetish accords her moments of agency, yet her fixity as a figure of perversion supersedes this temporary vision. She is ultimately permanently subjected to the gaze of her many Parisian suitors. The force of the racial fetish works around the girl with the golden eyes as a force field of attraction that draws the men of Paris into the streets awaiting her arrival. She is scoped and trailed by some fifty men of Paris: “She comes along here

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sometimes. She’s the Girl with the Golden Eyes. That’s the name we give her” (338). When she finally arrives all the men turn and stare: “There she is. . . . Everybody’s looking round at her . . .” (340). She organizes the social relations of Paris through her magical properties of attraction and yet she is a fantasy generated in and by these social relations. She works like money as the force of a social economy and principle of exchange. When she arrives, her presence is never enough; she is always surrounded by an absence and insufficiency that is expressed as an appreciation of her mystery: “He began to look upon this girl as a mystery, but while he studied her with the expert attention of a man who was surfeited and athirst for new delights, like a potentate of Orient forever demanding that a new pleasure should be created for him—a terrible craving which takes hold of overweening souls—Henry recognized in Paquita the richest organization that Nature had ever been pleased to create for love” (359). Paquita casts a spell that draws the men of Paris away from the normal course and zones of daily work while she puts the narrative on its course as its aim and object of fixation. Paquita causes an undifferentiation of the men of Paris that heightens her unique status. She delivers well on her role as fetish, since the fetish is a machine of indifference operating on the denial and disavowal of an imagined castration. In the Freudian lexicon, the fetish is a symptom of masculine anxieties about castration. The story goes something like this: when the young boy sees his mother’s genitals he disavows what he perceives to be her castration through the fantasy of indifference—this way, the boy may deny to himself that such a fate might befall him. The ego is split by this dissonance and organized on a double logic that enables the suspension of disbelief, expressed in the articulation: “I know very well but all the same.” The fetish emerges to fill the gap of maternal or feminine lack, materializing as various kinds of metonymic replacements, a shoe, a foot, a hand, etc. The fetish sustains the fantasy of gender indifference to allay the fear and anxiety of a violent excision. Following on the logic of the fetish, Paquita reduces or homogenizes all the men of Paris, and some women, through her indifferentiating value. As a commodity fetish, she is literally “owned” by her lesbian lover, the Marquise, and is bought and sold accordingly. She is an object of exchange and its arbiter, circulating between these men as an elusive and mysterious figure as the narrative gold standard: “My dear fellow, from a physical standpoint, this incognita is the most adorably feminine woman I have ever met. She belongs to that variety of women whom the Romans classified as fulva, flava, the woman of fire. And what most struck me straightaway, what I still find most fascinating is her two eyes, yellow as a tiger’s, a golden gleaming yellow; living gold, brooding gold, amorous gold! The gold of your watch is nothing to it!” (Balzac 338). The opening critical sequence is a long socio-economic critique of the devaluation of the people of Paris through an obsessive pursuit of gold and pleasure and a subsequent indifference to all else.

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The Parisian is so interested in everything that he ends up by being interested in nothing. No dominant emotion has left its mark on his countenance over which so many emotions have skimmed, and therefore it turns grey, like the plaster of the house-fronts, overlaid with all the shades of dust and smoke. Truth to tell, the Parisian, caring nothing one day for what will delight him the day after, lives like a child whatever his age may be. He grumbles at everything and puts up with everything, mocks at everything, forgets and longs for everything, likes to sample everything; he passionately takes up a cause and drops it without a further thought—royalism, foreign conquest, national glory, any idol be it of bronze or tinsel. He sheds them as he sheds his hose, hats or dreams of fortune. In Paris no sentiment can stand against the swirling torrent of events; their onrush and the effort to swim against the current lessens the intensity of passion. Love is reduced to desire, hate to a whimsy. The only family link is with the thousand franc note, one’s only friend is the pawnbroker. This general attitude of devil-may-care bears its fruit: in the salon as in the street no one is de trop, no one is absolutely indispensable or absolutely noxious, be he knave or blockhead, intelligent man or honest citizen. In Paris there is toleration for everything: the government, the guillotine, the Church, cholera. You will always be welcome in Parisian society, but if you are not there no one will miss you. What then are the dominant forces in this community devoid of morals, principles and genuine feeling, which yet are forces in which all feeling, principles and morals have their beginning and their end? They are gold and pleasure. (310–11)

The girl with the golden eyes embodies these dominating principles of gold and pleasure. The indifference caused by the presence of the girl with the golden eyes reflects the indifference in her narrative characterization. The figure of the girl with the golden eyes ambitiously contains every element of Balzac’s scheme; in the language of Marxian commodity fetishism, she is the singularity that contains the generality of all. She is the accretion of all that is foreign and the cipher for the rest of the non-Western European world, for the “non-civilized” foreign conveyed in the accretion of multicultural props in her secret crypt; from the mulatto servant, a “genuine Turkish divan,” a “Corinthian column,” “Indian muslin,” and designs that recall “the poetry of Persia” (365–66). More than simply having the markers of elsewhere around and attached to her, she is the conjunction of ethnic and racial difference; she is a “lovely creature—linked through her mother with the houris of Asia, belonging to Europe by virtue of her upbringing and to the tropics by the incident of birth. . . . She is from Havana, the most Spanish country there is in the New World” (Balzac 372). She is a paradox as the container of all that is strange and foreign about elsewhere and about women, the perfect instantiation of the both/and of contradiction who presents “the singular combination of mystery and reality, light and shade, hideousness and beauty, pleasure and peril, Eden and Hades” (370). She is “a poem of Orient, radiant with the sunlight which

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Saadi and Hafiz instilled into their impassioned stanzas” (370). Paquita is at once a cipher and transparently readable. As a racial subject she remains strange and unknowable; both too much, all things foreign, and too little, an empty container, Paquita is the perfect sign of Parisian ambivalence about the immigration of goods and people into the city. Although all men pursue Paquita, none succeed in eliciting her desire in return. Yet, she fixes on Henri, pursues him and arranges secret meetings with him to his amazement and surprise. However, Henri suspects that he is being reduced to a placeholder for some other amorous history. Her desires for Henri are both too intense and too distracted: “It seemed to him that Paquita was preoccupied with something other than himself, like a woman under equal constraint from both passion and remorse; perhaps because she had in her heart another love which she was forgetting and remembering turn by turn” (Balzac 359). The mystery begins to unravel as Paquita cannot contain the secret of her undifferentiated love objects: “Then he poured out a thousand insensate phrases with the impetuosity of a mountain torrent tumbling over rocks and repeating the same sound in a thousand different ways. ‘It’s the same voice,’ said Paquita in a melancholy tone—de Marsay did not hear this—‘and,’ she added, ‘the same ardent passion’” (361). Henri suspects deception and his suspicions are confirmed when Paquita cries out the wrong name to him in the midst of ecstasy: “‘Oh Mariquita!’ ‘Mariquita!’ the young man roared out. ‘Now I know all that I didn’t want to believe’” (384). Her colonial upbringing is the source of her terrifying treachery; “She is from Havana, from the most Spanish country there is in the New World, and so she has preferred to blackmail me with terror rather than spin me tales of suffering, or beguile me with talk of incompatibility or family obligations as Parisian women do” (372). While the onus of racial fetishism is on the Parisian, “all the elegant youth of Paris,” the punishable perversion is that of Paquita, whose sexual indifference is the source of great upset. For Henri, the main crime is the dedifferentiation that he suffers at the hands of the deceptive Paquita and not her bisexuality: “At that moment then, de Marsay perceived that he had been deceived by the girl with the golden eyes, for now he could see the past night in perspective, beginning as it had done with a trickle of pleasures which in the end had swollen into a torrent of voluptuousness. By now he was able to read that page, so brilliant in its effects, and divine in its hidden meaning. Paquita’s purely physical innocence, the amazing quality of her joy, the few words, at first obscure but now clear, which had escaped her in the midst of that joy, everything showed him that he had posed for another person. Since no form of social corruption was a closed book to him, since he professed perfect indifference with regard to all kinds of moral deviation and believed them to be justified by the mere fact that they were capable of being satisfied, he took no umbrage at vice, being as familiar with it as one is with a friend; but he smarted at the thought of having provided it with sustenance” (376–77). The final

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scene promises the dissolution of the problem of indifference by eliminating its source. Henri, bent on murdering Paquita for her treachery, for saying the name of another while making love with him, spies on her for a week before moving in on his kill. When he rushes into her room, he opens the door to find that someone has beaten him to it. The strange and mysterious outsider, whose crime was the assertion of no difference between her rival lovers, has been murdered by one of them, Margarita-Euphemie-Porraberil. The revelation of Paquita’s double infidelity, to Henri and to her lesbian lover, is only exposed upon her death. When the siblings face each other over the dead body of Paquita, “In very truth, the two Menaechmi could not have been more alike. In one breath they asked the same question: ‘Is not Lord Dudley your father?’” (390). The final justice has nothing to do with the law: “‘But what are you going to do to get help,’ asked Henri, pointing to the girl with the golden eyes, ‘in order to destroy evidence relevant to this little caprice? Is the law likely to overlook it?’” (Balzac 391). The Marquise will not be tried for her crime, but repatriated to Spain and confined to a convent. The story accomplishes its critical aim of eliminating the major social problem of immigration. The immigrant to Paris was demonized as a source of the chaos of an expanding city, a city in need of a new form of control. David Harvey notes that Balzac’s cartographic imagination of Paris projects an imperial totality onto the city, either through description, panoramic and cartographic depictions of the city, or diagnostic generalizations—as in the idea that all inhabitants of Paris are ruled by gold and pleasure (“Cartographic Imagination”). This novelistic description of the city gave impetus to the principles of design deployed by Hausmann. The urban design was based on conquering the city, containing the chaos through the imposition of strict and restricting order. The tale of the girl with the golden eyes takes charge of this chaos and exposes the threats that energized the urban reform movements, providing a sinister solution to the “problem” of immigration. French realist novels described a social world dominated by large-scale systems operating on the logic of causality, which is most evident in the consolidation of the processes of capitalism. David F. Bell reads these novels through depictions of the unexpected, the surprising or chance encounter that disrupts expectations of the fatedness of logical causality. He cites Balzac, who, in the prologue to his La Comédie humaine, describes his work as the search for “the reasons or reason behind . . . social effects” (3); Bell reminds us that Balzac was a contemporary of Hegel and suggests that this language resounds intimately with the Hegelian “Reason” of history in which all things are causally linked and drawn together in an exhaustive explanatory system that does not allow for the sovereignty of chance. Hegel interprets chance occurrences, accidents and randomness as necessary events accounted for within the teleological system of history; Balzac, inventor of the nineteenth-century French novel and literary mappings of Paris, is running the same game. Novels, by their very name, are charged by the novel encounter, the fortuitous and chance meetings that set up the sala-

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cious plot twists and leave readers wanting more. The chance meeting is the source of all narrative emplotment. It sets off a series of events that might seem like chance and end up as fate, and, of course, Paris is the perfect setting for the unexpected. The Girl with the Golden Eyes begins, like many Balzac tales, with a long preface, which David F. Bell describes fortuitously as dawdling “at the threshold, at times seemingly unable to begin” and perhaps also unable to end (118).

Revisiting Balzac’s Paris The relation of Balzac to Gómez Carrillo is not entirely unhappy, yet it poses a crucial problem for those modernistas who “miran a Europa” (“look to Europe”) or who look to European literary traditions that often pose the fundamental exclusion or disdain of former colonies. The Girl with the Golden Eyes begins with some fun, offering the enjoyment of scandal and intrigue and the fun of the possible upset of social order. The story, while it is a salacious and scandalous text to its contemporaneous readers, is both drawn to and phobic of the foreigner; in the end it legislates anxiously its own anti-immigration policy through expulsion and death. The ideological atmosphere in and around The Girl with the Golden Eyes is wholly ambivalent. The gratuitous indulgence of a salacious narrative is mismatched with a conservative disdain of free enjoyment, a free enjoyment or pleasure associated with sexual decadence. Balzac’s text is profoundly anti-cosmopolitan: its ambivalence is resolved on the side of a conservative restoration of order in eschewing all manner of revolution or of structural change. Gómez Carrillo preserves the instabilities of disorder and unrest of the cited text by rewiring its narrative system toward more, not less, upset. Within the larger project of capturing and experiencing actual and literary Paris, the literary citation of Balzac might be considered a rite of passage, just as Joyce evokes Dublin and Dickens London. Balzac’s Paris is one in which all things are known, exposed, and revealed and where shocking secrets are not so shocking. “Marta y Hortensia” cites The Girl with the Golden Eyes as a point of departure for the kind of Paris that Gómez Carrillo will return to again and again. The city had become a literary trope drawn from classical mythology where Paris, the youngest son of Priam and Hecuba, evokes a new generation, youth, and innovation. He is the wayward son, a philandering playboy preoccupied with beauty, pleasure, and women, connotations that persist in the ethos of the eponymous city. In Paris desire is modern, non-normative, unrestricted by the conventions of family and state and the exclusive rhetoric of nation-building ideologues. Paris is a city of redemption from tradition and conservativism and of rapid aesthetic, cultural, and political transformation. From beyond the centers of Euro-modernity, it represents the possibility of other kinds of transformations, that

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is, the movement away from deep genealogies of cultural, racial, and aesthetic determinism. We need only read the entirety of Almas y cerebros; historias sentimentales, intimidades parisienses, etc. to understand the atmosphere of the narrating subject’s Paris, a secret encoded in the title’s “etc.” Each chapter deals in some way with the subject of the sexually “perverse,” with decadence and degeneration, in short with matters of sexual difference and a positively charged sexual indifference. Some of the titles include “Dame Cleopatra” (“La Caballera de Cleopatra”), “Psychopathology” (“Psicopatía”), “Ideal Love” (“Amor ideal”) “Nostalgia for Pain” (“La nostalgia del dolor”), “Unquiet Soul” (“Alma inquieta”) and including sections on Jean Lorrain, J.-K. Huysmans, Paul Verlaine, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde. It is a Paris of sexual freedom, one that offered pleasant refuge to the perverse ideas of Huysmans and the socially outcast Wilde. In Almas y cerebros, each scandal is a small insurrection accruing toward a greater shift to a cosmopolitan attitude. Cosmopolitanism works in a series of disruptions that, rather than promoting a single and singular ideological aim or political end, seek to unsettle all manner of normative construction. Gómez Carrillo transforms Balzac’s narrative by changing the course of its discourse on racial difference and sexual deviance, making it an entirely new story. “Marta y Hortensia” is an encrypted version of its antecedent, citing Balzac quietly and obliquely. Gómez Carrillo returns the story to its originating instance, a piece of gossip passed between men. As the gossip goes, The Girl with the Golden Eyes was conceived when Balzac was hosting George Sand’s jilted exlover, Jules Sandeau. Balzac lent a “willing ear” to Sandeau’s version of Sand’s affair with Marie Dorval and, to some accounts, promptly turned it into one of the tales of the Histoire de treize. The scene of two men gossiping about Sand and Dorval is exactly that of the opening scene of “Marta y Hortensia,” and it is to this scene that Gómez Carrillo returns the tale. Yet, he turns away from the other implications of Balzac’s narrative, that of the obvious citation of the social figure of Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Comtesse de Jaruco or the Comtesse Merlin, a Cuban émigré who traveled in the elite circles of Paris (see Castex 126–34). Balzac conflates these two figures to merge the lesbian with the Cuban. It is this inseparability of race and homosexuality—as a sign of decadence—that Gómez Carrillo works against and refuses, retaining only the obscene situation of two men, Balzac and Sandeau, sharing a private moment of gossip. The initial and initiating revision to the phobic Balzacian narrative is that of the racial and ethnic makeup of the cast. It is no coincidence that Balzac’s girl with the golden eyes is Cuban-Georgian and that her lesbian lover, the Marquise, is a Cuban creole. The racial and colonial ideology of Balzac’s text is charged unmistakably by a fantasy of Cuban decadence. The Marquise, a Cuban creole, is described as “daughter of a Spanish lady, brought up in Havana, conveyed back to Madrid . . . burdened with the ruinous tastes customary in the colonies” (Balzac 331).

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Gómez Carrillo acknowledges Balzac’s racial ideology by dismissing it, that is, by refusing to engage the terms of its racial positioning and returning the story to a Parisian racial indifference. Decadence does not emanate from the colonies, but is an effect of a refusal of modernity from within, of the backwardness of old world ways. It is no longer a cast with racially and culturally mixed origins, an alien plot to take over the city; rather, the main characters are from or represent Paris. The unnamed narrator, perhaps an outsider to Paris, remains on the threshold of the narrative, observing and judging the goings on of the Parisians. The dialogue and friendship between the interlocutors mirrors that between Henri and Ferragus, who in Balzac’s story often discuss the mystery of the girl with the golden eyes. The mystery of the “exotic” Latin American cosmopolitan is unresolvable and impenetrable, signaled and sealed by the fetishistic reduction of Paquita to her eye color. Yet for Gómez Carrillo, it is the French friend who endures this reduction and remains the unnamed man with the green eyes (“hombre de los ojos verdes”). The man with the green eyes tells his story from an enlightened position, after his full realization of his wife’s numerous infidelities, of her modern love as opposed to his courtly love. He tells of his thorough self-deception about his lesbian wife, in which he interprets her passive acceptance of his relentless courtship to be a sign of her desire for him. He describes her affection in terms of decadence, telling of her ennui, indolence, and the enervation of physical desire: “Living at my side, letting me adore her, indolently obeying my whims, dominating me in a crafty way, lazily falling asleep in my arms, vegetating like a clorotic plant in a luxurious greenhouse, making me believe that God had heard my delirious prayers and that her love was equal to mine” (“Viviendo á mi lado, dejándose adorar, obedeciendo indolentemente á mis caprichos, dominándome de un modo hábil, adormeciéndose por pereza entre mis brazos, vegetando, en fin, como una planta clorótica en un invernadero de lujo, hacíame creer que Dios había oído mis votos delirantes y que su amor era igual al mío”) (74). This misconception is enabled by his archaic and ancient Parisian beliefs about love: “I am weak, backwards, a survivor of ancient generations” (“Yo soy un débil, un atrasado, un superviviente de generaciones antiguas”) (73) and his refusal to imagine modern emancipated female desire. Like psychological portraits and case studies from the turn of the century, the dialogue becomes a litany of “perversions” that seem drawn from another chapter in the same book: “Notes about Sensory Disorders from the Point of View of Literature” (“Notas sobre las enfermedades de la sensación desde el punto de vista de la literatura”) that details various sexual disorders of modernity voyeuristically. In “Marta y Hortensia” we hear the echoes of those turn-of-the-century critics of degeneration and literary figures of decadence, including writers of salacious and novelistic case histories from Krafft-Ebbing, Nordau, Lombroso, Moll, Baudelaire, Larcher, and de Sade. In the section “Literary Cases” (“Casos lite-

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rarios”), Gómez Carrillo remarks that Nordau thinks of Balzac often thematizing masochism (362). If this were not already apparent in The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Gómez Carrillo intensifies the masochism in the rewriting, but changes it by mapping it across masculinity, from the girl with the golden eyes to the man with the green eyes. Masochism in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is presented as a patently feminine expression of sexuality, a cultural commonplace that identifies desire as masculine, active, and subject to brutal excesses: “As regards active algolagnia, sadism, the roots are easy to detect in the normal. The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness—a desire to subjugate; the biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position” (24). Masochism, for Freud, is a cultural condition for female subjectivities: “the term masochism comprises any passive attitude towards sexual life and the sexual object, the extreme instance of which appears to be that in which satisfaction is conditional upon suffering physical or mental pain at the hands of the sexual object” (Freud, Three Essays 24). By this definition masochism is rendered perverse when, in its extreme form, it is associated with masculinity. The narrator displays his masochism in his relentless pursuit of “mental pain at the hands of the sexual object.” He fails to recognize his own role in their affair because, for him, masochism is a female disposition: Have you read the secret chronicles of the French court? In one, there is a very interesting story, an anecdote worthy of Brantome. It is a story about a gentleman, the lover of the infanta, who would take a whip to their encounters to provide his royal sweetheart with the pleasure of brutality, a pleasure, it seems, that women enjoy the most. Sometimes I think that if I had bought her a whip instead of a bouquet of violets . . . ¿Ha leído usted las crónicas secretas de la corte de Francia? En una de ellas hay un cuento curiosísimo, una anécdota digna de Brantome. Es la historia de un caballero que dormía con la infanta y que iba á las citas amorosas llevando un látigo para proporcionar á su dulce y real querida el placer de la brutalidad, que, según parece, es uno de los placeres que mejor saben saborear las damas. Á veces se me figura que si en vez de comprarla ramos de violetas hubiese comprado un azote . . . (Gómez Carrillo, Almas y cerebros 75–76)

The man with the green eyes is the actual masochist of the narrative insofar as he persists in his desire for Marta, his wife, against her indifference. He is met with indifference at every possible attempt to capture her attention and admits to a failure: “Sometimes I think that if I had bought a whip instead of a bouquet of violets.

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. . . But no . . . This also would have been useless. Marta had, in her blood and her nerves—especially in her nerves—the same illness shared by almost all Parisian women of her era. Marta was not born for men” (“Á veces se me figura que si en vez de comprarla ramos de violetas hubiese comprado un azote. . . . Pero no . . . Eso también hubiera sido inútil. Marta tenía, en la sangre y en los nervios—en los nervios especialmente—la misma enfermedad de casi todas las parisienses de su época. Marta no había nacido para el hombre”) (Gómez Carrillo, Almas y cerebros 76). Marta’s indifference is double; it is the indifference of a gendered modernism, of being like all other women in the street, being part of an undifferentiated female mass, and it is an indifference to gender and of gender, or sexual indifference. For Luce Irigaray, indifference recalls the indifference of this sex which is not one in all the variety of meanings captured by “Marta y Hortensia.” In one instance, indifference refers to the indifferentiation of gender within a symbolic ordered on and around masculinity, that is, woman is indifferent in the sense of the non-difference of accepting masculine definitions of gender. This causes an indifference of attitude, an indifference of detachment. Marta’s indifference to gender difference leads to another kind of difference: “I think that never, not in the streets or in the dances, did she ever turn her head to look at a man; no never! Women, on the other hand, fascinated her, seduced her, and drove her crazy” (“Creo que nunca, ni en los paseos, ni en los bailes, volvió la cabeza para fijarse en un hombre; no, nunca! Las mujeres, en cambio, la atraían, la seducían, la enloquecían”) (76). Yet, the man with the green eyes is trapped in his misunderstanding; he cannot interpret this difference and so reduces all of these encounters to the same, to Marta’s feminine narcissism and her desire for a visual mirroring: “Did I say her friends? I meant her friend. Marta would only ever have but one friend, one alone, a friendship that would last one month, one week, one hour and that later would disappear from our life only to be replaced by another. Thus, during the two years of our common existence she had more than thirty or forty women, all young, all beautiful, and all looked like they could be Marta’s sister” (“Sus amigas, he dicho? No, su amiga; porque Marta no tenía nunca sino una amiga, una sola, que duraba un mes, ó una semana, ó una hora, y que luego desaparecía de nuestra vida para dejar el puesto á otra. Así, durante los dos años de nuestra existencia común, pasaron por casa más de treinta, más de cuarenta mujeres, todas jóvenes, todas bonitas, que parecían siempre las hermanas de Marta” (Gómez Carrillo, Almas y cerebros 76–77). The scandal of Gómez Carrillo’s story erupts over this disorienting and indifferent flow of women. Perhaps more shocking than this undisrupted flow of forty women is the sustained and masochistic misrecognition of the husband, who, although “intranquilo,” upset, and disturbed, seems to withhold perversely all realization from himself while knowing all the same. He maintains the contradictory belief system of fetishistic disavowal, of knowing but nonetheless acting as if he

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did not. This attitude is part of a larger refusal to recognize the changes wrought by modernity: “And I remained troubled by this perpetual movement of light dresses, of delicate bodies, and of long hair; thinking that my love was looking for a dear sister everywhere and that her feminine inconstancy was the result of what we all go through when looking for a true friend” (“Y yo vivía intranquilo en ese movimiento perpetuo de trajes claros, de cuerpos delicados y de grandes cabelleras, figurándome que mi querida buscaba una hermana del alma á través del mundo, y que su inconstancia femenina no era sino el resultado natural de la selección que todos hacemos al tratar de encontrar un amigo verdadero”) (77). The failure to recognize the full extent of Marta’s desire is an indifference to feminine desire and a disavowal of its force. It is also part of a warning about the disastrous effect of not being part of and thus recognizing and understanding the social changes that incubated this new turn of events in Paris. The narrating figure, although not part of the narration, moves and guides our reading by characterizing the narrator’s posture: “he called me aside . . . he leaned against the marble of the chimney . . . he roared with laughter moving his lips feverishly” (“me llamó aparte” [73] “apoyó las manos sobre el mármol de la chimenea” [75] “se echó a reír á carcajadas, moviendo los labios febrilmente” [79]). These remarks are almost the full extent of our interlocutor’s interventions; there is, however, a final remark by the outside narrator that decisively marks the eerily arcane atmosphere of an era long passed evoked by green eyes’ tale: “I thought that this story would end in a grotesque manner and that the epilogue would be one of those comic scenes of two close friends gouging each other’s eyes out over a hat pin or over a rivalry of elegancies” (“Yo creí que su historia iba á terminar de un modo grotesco, y que el epílogo iba á ser una de esas escenas cómicas que representan á dos camaradas íntimas sacándose los ojos por un adorno de sombrero ó por una rivalidad de elegancias”) (79).

Crossing the Threshold into Modernity Finally, Marta expresses her disillusionment with women, remarking that, fortuitously, “¡Todas son iguales!” (“They’re all the same!”) (78) when suddenly the man with the green eyes’ sister, Hortensia, walks through the door after having just left the convent. After this day, no other woman ever visits the house except for Hortensia; they become so inseparable that Green Eyes’ friends refer to them ironically (“irónicamente”) as the two sisters (“las dos hermanas”) (79). It seems the whole world knew except for our hapless narrator. Happy that his wife is finally pleased and consistently occupied by a member of the family, he returns home one day earlier than usual, thinking that Marta would be alone. When he approaches the door to the bedroom he hears “the murmuring of hushed voices [that] froze the blood in my veins” (“un murmullo de voces apagadas me heló la sangre entre las venas”) (79). He hears the voice of his wife saying a million im-

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passioned things to someone and wonders feverishly to whom, until he hears a voice even more familiar to his ears. Only then does he fully realize that his wife and his sister are having an affair. As in The Girl with the Golden Eyes, the narrator approaches the door beyond which lies the source of uncontainable disquiet, trouble, and unrest; but he cannot open it. “After all, why should I open the door if I have never been capable of killing two women?” (“Después de todo, ¿para qué abrirla puesto que yo no he sido nunca capaz de matar á dos mujeres?”) (80). All of the action of the narrative, happens on this threshold, between two diverse states, between an earlier era and its negating force, modernity. The narrator, backwards and “an atavism,” is caught in history unable to enter that thoroughly modern zone in which homosexuality is an unscandalous norm. The narrator looks in and on as this story is told and offers his own prescient forecast in an ironic and disdaining smirk: “I thought that this story would end in a grotesque manner” (“Yo creí que su historia iba á terminar de un modo grotesco”) (79). The revelation is double: it is a revelation of rereading where the joke is no longer on the girl with the golden eyes, who is killed, but rather on the unsuspecting narrator, who is from Paris but seems unacculturated to this metropolitan and cosmopolitan zone. Balzac’s text does not have the last word or the final gesture in the mapping of Paris; instead, cultural indifference is not the effect of immigration into Paris, but is an effect of modernity, not just of Paris but of “todas las grandes ciudades del mundo” (“all the great cities of the world”) (73). The hesitation at the threshold, when the narrator stops before opening the door, allegorizes the difficult encounter of the foreign and the familiar, in which to enter the room is to face something new and perhaps strange and unfamiliar. Likewise, the citation marks the encounter and assimilation of diverse texts and contexts; the textual precedent is renovated to create a new story. Although the encounter may be as uneven as the cultural relations that it expresses, Gómez Carrillo encourages travel beyond home and the familiar as a movement towards cosmopolitanism and towards modernity, thus removing cosmopolitanism from its strictly Western European entitlement. Cosmopolitanism from the margins requires the work of rewriting and reenvisioning global culture as an inclusive and hospitable domain, one that is both local and global at the same time.

CHAPTER THREE Cosmopolitan Decadence: Writing Inversions Decadence was a symptom of modernity and its cardinal pose. In Latin America, decadence was considered a direct consequence of cosmopolitanism because of its openness to foreign influence. The attribution of decadence was as arbitrary as it was culturally based and biased; in the case of Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes, the threat emanated from the colonial other, yet for much of Latin American state discourses, decadence was a patently European phenomenon represented by figures like Barbey d’Aurevilly and Oscar Wilde. By the turn of the century, antidecadence in Latin America was a catch-all for past and present social ill, of the decadent Spanish past and the contemporaneous immigration of foreign cultural forms. Decadence is a celebration of artifice, of the potential for substituting the “natural” or “real” body and its practices with a set of performances, typically of deviant sexualities and gender identifications. In an iconic definition, Arthur Symons describes decadence as “an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an oversubtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity” (135). For Barbara Spackman, the master trope of decadence is inversion, particularly sexual inversion (“Interversions”). Havelock Ellis, the master of this discourse, defines inversion as “sexual instinct turned by inborn constitutional abnormality toward persons of the same sex” (1); this constitutional deficiency puts inversion squarely in the domain of that close kin of decadence, degeneration. Decadence was often described as degeneration and though they often appear in tandem, David Weir distinguishes them in a concise manner: “Decadence and degeneration have little in common: one refines corruption and the other corrupts refinement” (ix). Decadence is a literary and cultural movement, whereas degeneration described biological forms of decay or devolution; though literary decadence was often interpreted as an expression of “biological degeneracy” (Constable, Denisoff, and Potolsky 7). The terms were used together to amplify and synergize their connotations; for instance, when Nordau contends in his interview with Gómez Carrillo that “Spanish letters and science . . . are in complete decadence and in complete degeneration” (“Las letras y las ciencias españolas . . . 60

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están en completa decadencia y en completa degeneración”) (Almas y cerebros 247). Across the Americas, decadence, conflated with degeneration, was virtually synonymous with sexual, gender, and racial deviance as cause of the decline of “civilization,” as an unfortunate condition leading to the weakening of the state, conveniently attributed to alien immigration to a purely heteronormative native soil. Internationally, there were many texts and discourses dedicated to the elimination of the threat of decadence, often the primary target of the state sanitizing discourses. But like most turn-of-the-century scientific discourses about sex, they served only to publicize the acts they describe and sold out faster than the steamiest novel. Nordau’s Degeneration scandalized and intrigued more readers than the most boosterish prose about the new generation of writers of decadent and symbolist proclivities. There was a whole slate of scientific and medical discourses similar in kind to Degeneration that cast an often moralizing and taxonomizing gaze upon aberrant social and sexual practices. The case histories, reports, and studies were symptoms of an Enlightenment-inspired ordering and categorizing discourse of modern state control. Yet, as Foucault notes in his History of Sexuality, the proliferation of scientific discourses about sexual practices gave rise, actually, to categories and species of being and behavior hitherto nonexistent, invisible, or unnamed. As a result of the new publicity attributable to literary and scientific advertising, gay cultures and identities were beginning to emerge in many of the major world cities at the turn of the nineteenth century. Visibility coincided more or less with scandal, when the most socially visible populations were caught acting up and out, when sex crossed with gender and men acted or “posed” in a feminine manner. Sylvia Molloy notes that, in turn-of-the-century Latin American literary cultures, the idea of the “pose” is unequivocally associated with deviance in its reference to Wilde, caught famously “posing as a somdomite” [sic] by his lover’s father—who perhaps misspells the word to seem naïve of its intricacies. Molloy locates a clear association of posing with homosexuality: “Not all turn-of-thecentury posing refers unequivocally to the homosexual, a subject yet to be defined and in whose formulation, both cultural and legal, Wilde’s trials played such a large part. But I would argue that all turn-of-the-century posing does refer equivocally to the homosexual, for it refers to a theatricality, a dissipation, and a manner (the uncontrollable gesturing of excess) traditionally associated with the nonmasculine or, at the very least, with an increasingly problematic masculinity” (“The Politics of Posing” 187). The threat embodied by the body in full pose was attributable to the heightened visibility of the body. As Molloy suggests, the pose was an “oppositional practice,” scandalous for advertising troubling gender designations and sexual deviation most often mapped across the public male body (184). José Quiroga, writing about the archive of homosexuality in Latin America, also describes masculine forms of homosexuality as those most visible, and al-

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though lesbians were invisible, they were nonetheless phantom objects of the “voyeuristic and repressive actions of the state” (13): “Visible homosexuality was meant to be expelled from a national fabric that could only see itself as tenuously constructed, in view of its immense social, racial, and ethnic inequalities. Power operated in this specific regard in a dual fashion: it articulated the visibility and named it as something that it believed to be Other. The system created highly coded visibilities—once again as these related to men, although the fact that women were always already ‘invisible’ did not mean that they were ‘outside’ the taxonomical circuits” (13). Lesbians might be apparitional, but the very idea of female homosexuality undermined the heterosexual “foundational fiction” of the nation in which women, particularly as wives and mothers, form the basis of a stable society while ensuring its healthy reproduction (Sommer, Foundational Fictions). Lesbians were written objects of state control, symbols of improper comportment, desire out of bounds, murderous and deranged sexual “perversion,” “inversion,” and “uranism.” Lesbians represented the decadent collapse of the state, though their material presence was rare. Elsewhere, the lesbian was more often maligned through the modern figure of the New Woman, the autonomous masculine type often derided as a member of the “third sex” for her threatening entry into typically male domains. The charges of “lesbian,” “third sex,” or “invert” were punishing terms for any girl or woman exhibiting an upstart desire for social visibility beyond the bounds of what was deemed socially acceptable.

Lesbian Apocalypse Although barely visible in Latin American literary discourse, the lesbian was the cautionary emblem and limit case for the proper acculturation of the female population. In turn-of-the-century Argentina, one state figure, Víctor Mercante, viewed adolescent girls as particularly susceptible to the vagaries of decadence, cosmopolitan literary influence, and its kin, homosexuality—encoded in the term “uranism,” taken from Plato’s Symposium and coined by German gay rights activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the 1870s—although the term was later pathologized by various sexologists (see Blasius and Phelan). Adults were inculpated by the medical and juridical gaze as willful and responsible subjects of their sexuality, whereas adolescent subjects were passive victims of their bodies and environment, seen as lacking both legitimacy and agency. Within turn-of-the-century Latin American state discourse, the adolescent girl is a dangerous threat, one that represents the feminized and infantalized masses and one at the critical juncture of a number of state discourses regulating aberration. Mercante shares in a turn-ofthe-century cultural preoccupation with adolescence as a crucial age group for state formation. In his study of the fin-de-siècle culture of adolescence, John Neubauer notes that the term did not appear with any frequency until the nineteenth century and the very designation and age-categorization is a consequence

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of modernity. The adolescent suddenly became an important demographic whose identity was shaped as much by literary thematizations as by artistic and cultural self-expressions (see Neubauer). Mercante’s study clearly locates the adolescent as a revolutionary cultural force whose experience of crisis reflects the larger social experience of the crises of modernity. Mercante encompassed and represented each of the major institutions that were targets of a positivist overhaul to rid the state of all vestiges of degeneration and decadence: education, science, and psychology. He was a major proponent of the mathematical education of the primary school student and author of, among other things: Comptian Positivism (El Positivismo Comptiano), History from the Positivist Point of View (La historia del punto de vista positivo) (1891), Lay and Religious Education (La educación laica y la religiosa), and The Psychology of the Mathematical Aptitude of the Child (Psicología de la aptitud matemática del niño) (1904). He was also the director of the Mercedes Normal School in Buenos Aires and professor of psychology. Mercante was among a positivist group who were disciples of José Ingenieros and contributed many articles on this topic in the periodicals Revista de Filosofía and El Positivismo. He was one of the leading figures in the field who set the positivist agenda from the turn of the century far into the next (see Romero 103). Mercante wrote two fascinating texts presented in the service of educational reform and the healthy comportment of those most vulnerable to homosexuality, adolescent girls. “Fetishism and Feminine Uranism in Boarding Schools” (“Fetiquismo y uranismo femenino en los internados educativos”) (1905) focuses on the link between fetishism and female uranism, while the other text, The Crisis of Puberty (La crisis de la pubertad) (1918), makes a case for a need to control the body during puberty. The link between these texts is a piece of evidence that substantiates the claims of each: a lesbian love letter. The letter is purportedly written by a “female uranist” who writes of her literary ambitions, her fetishes, her desire for women, and her tendency to fantasy and hypersensitivity. The desire to be a writer and the desire for other women were woven together as exemplary deviance from Argentine sexual, cultural, and social norms. She is the iconic decadent writer reviled by antidecadent critics; her double billing underscores her important status as enemy of the state. Jorge Salessi has examined Mercante as a key figure of the “Argentine state technocracy,” which would designate and categorize aberration in the effort to recreate national identity (“The Argentine Dissemination of Homosexuality” 49). Women were central to Argentine nationalist phobias for their growing sexual and social autonomy; for their entry into the masculine labor force and labor movement, they were targeted as “inverts” and the “third sex” (Salessi). Mercante’s work is a response to the decadent threat of the female uranist as fetishist and writer, as a specter of foreign literature and sign of its potential to upset gender and sexual norms; she is third-sexed for assuming the position of the writer or author, an inherently masculine designation and privilege of men. Mercante frames

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the accused by planting the incriminating evidence—the love letter—the writer of which stands guilty of trafficking in decadent modernista rhetoric and passively spreading sexual degeneration throughout the boarding school; that is, she is one of the victims claimed by sexual degeneration. The female uranist and letter writer was modernista not by affiliation, but by attitude. Lily Litvak draws on Juan Ramón Jiménez’s description of modernismo as not just a literary but a general tendency, not a school or form, but an “actitud,” an attitude; one that, though diverse and often contradictory, shares a rejection of positivism and an enthusiasm for “la Belleza” for “Beauty” (1975). Moreover, in the traversal of the city of Buenos Aires, the uranists were bound to encounter some aspect of the fashionable modernista trends. Modern urban influences and temptations were part of the problem besetting state antidecadence. Buenos Aires was a major cosmopolis and one of the main crossroads of international literary culture and modernity. For Rafael Arrieta, modernismo originates in Buenos Aires, where the forces of renovation gathered (8); a claim corroborated by Rubén Darío. For Darío, Buenos Aires was the American cosmopolis whose atmosphere and intellectual traditions were the proper home for his own aesthetic disposition. It was a city full of polyglot high culture—the finest of private galleries, theaters, presses, and libraries unrivalled in all of Latin America. Most importantly, it was closer to Europe than to the rest of the Americas; it was where Parisian culture traveled first and where French decadence likely found hospitable refuge. The girls undoubtedly were affected by the cultural currents coursing through the city. Moreover, the big city was the site of the distractions and fetishes of consumer culture, at least according to a director interviewed by Mercante: “Buenos Aires has this for the girls: they become accustomed to frivolity. Each shop window is a temptation. You cannot imagine how we have combated the use of these trinkets!” (“Buenos Aires tiene esto de malo para las niñas: que las acostumbra á la frivolidad. Cada vidriera es una tentación. ¡Ud. no se imagina cuánto hemos combatido el uso de esas cucherías!” (“El fetiquismo” 24). Mercante’s work reflected cosmopolitan currents, while it was also was part of these same trends; he was an avid reader of the international sexologists, and they were readers of his work. Havelock Ellis cites Mercante as the “South American” example in “The School-Friendships of Girls,” which forms an appendix to his infamous work Sexual Inversion. Ellis makes use of Mercante’s work to illustrate the culturally relative phenomena of the adolescent stage of intense proto-sexual friendships between girls; Mercante’s study is one example among those from Italian, English, and North American school girl populations. Ellis begins his study by citing liberally from Giulio Obici and Giovanni Marchesini’s work on Italian schoolgirls: School Friendships: The First Manifestation of Erotic Love (Le “amicizie” di collegio; richerche sulle prime manifestazioni dell’amore sessuale) (1898). Obici and Marchesini describe at length their findings of these

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“love-relationships” in which the girls describe each other, in Italian school girl slang, as a “flame” (“flamma”). The relationships are characterized by a complex system of gazes and a silent exchange of gifts and letters. It is not by being always together, talking and studying together, that two become “flames”; no, generally they do not even know each other; one sees the other on the stairs, in the garden, in the corridors, and the emotion that arises is nearly always called forth by beauty and physical grace. Then the one who is first struck begins a regular courtship: frequent walks in the garden when the other is likely to be at the window of her class-room, pauses on the stairs to see her pass; in short, a mute adoration made up of glances and sighs. Later come presents of beautiful flowers, and little messages conveyed by complacent companions. Finally, if the “flame” shows signs of appreciating all these proofs of affection, comes the letter of declaration. Letters of declaration are long and ardent, to such a degree that they equal or surpass real love-declarations. The courted one nearly always accepts, sometimes with enthusiasm, oftenest with many objections and doubts as to the affection declared. It is only after many entreaties that she yields and the relationship begins. (qtd. in Ellis 368–69)

Curiously, the description sounds uncannily like what Mercante finds in the boarding schools in Buenos Aires. It would be easy to claim that Mercante, as a reader of the sexologists, read this account and used it as a blueprint for his own description of the same exact circumstances—the exchange of gazes that precedes a unilateral exchange of gifts followed by a declarative love letter. Yet, regardless of the similarity of themes, the different deployment of the findings of Obici and Marchesini—as described and elaborated by Ellis—and those of Mercante makes any similarity of formula inconsequential. The only similarity between the studies of Mercante and Obici and Marchesini is the use of love letters as the primary source for their investigations. In fact, Obici and Marchesini substantiate their scientific analysis of this phenomena with over three hundred love letters, “which had been carefully preserved by the receivers and which, indeed, formed the chief material of their study” (370). The letters are also the centerpiece of Mercante’s argument, for which he gives a particularly long example together with some short excerpts. He cites such a long example that Ellis is able to assess fully the writers’ literary competence: “Opportunity was offered to Mercante to observe some of the correspondence between the girls. Though of indifferent training and ability in other respects, the girls speak and write regarding their affairs with the most admirable diction and style” (384). Mercante does not find this grasp of diction and style admirable; rather, he finds the girls’ literary persuasiveness dangerous, infectious, and a sign of blatant disregard for their scientific education. Obici and Marchesini describe the love letters as “a form of intellectual onanism” that obviates the need for any actual manifestation of sexuality (370).

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They define these relationships as “platonic,” the “flames” are content to indulge “mutual admiration,” to “being as near as possible to the beloved,” and “to press each other’s hands, to embrace and kiss” (370–71). Ellis uses the term “flame” to emphasize the inchoate sexuality of the girls’ relationships and avoid provocative associations with homosexuality, uranism, or inversion. He maintains that these relationships are not signs of organic perversion, but perversion of an idea, the fetishism of friendship. In fact, the study presents these relationships as transitional and contingencies of the short-term experience of homosocial spaces. In short, these relationships are part of a passing stage of development that, the same the world over, does not lead to a sexual revolution: “The girls here studied have lost an exact conception of the simple manifestations of friendship, and think they are giving evidence of exquisite sensibility and true friendship by loving a companion to madness, friendship in them has become a passion. . . . While there is an unquestionable sexual element in the ‘flame’ relationship, this cannot be regarded as an absolute expression of real congenital perversion of the sex-instinct” (374). While Ellis endorses readings of the girl’s school as spaces of transitional protohomoeroticism, a stage of development on the way to heterosexuality; Mercante interprets the same or similar phenomena as an extremely contagious “epidemic” of homosexuality, an implied threat to the very order of Argentine society, and a symptom of decadent Spanish Catholicism—“no illness is more contagious” (“ninguna enfermedad es más contagiosa”) (“El fetiquismo” 24). In fact, he calls the uranism “ecstatic uranism” for its basis in mysticism and for the manner in which it flourishes in convents, enabled by every aspect of the conventual experience: “My notes, furthermore, cover particular establishments and those of the state, where the religious practices seem a bad antidote for the psychopathy that I am going to treat here, ecstatic uranism, a sexual perversion that produces this annihilating period of obsession, such a sad mental development” (“Mis anotaciones comprenden, además, establecimientos particulares y del estado, donde las prácticas religiosas parecen mal antídoto para la psicopatía que voy á tratar, el uranismo extático, una perversión sexual [Krafft-Ebing] que produce ese hebetismo aniquilante de la obsesión, tan funesta al desarrollo mental” (“El fetiquismo” 25). In Latin America, the Catholic girls’ school was targeted as the site par excellence of postcolonial social reform, since, as Ariel emphasized and dramatized in the space of the classroom, the youth, upon whom the hope of the future rests, were to lead the way for the older generation into sovereign modernity. Moreover, these schools were places where the girls learned their uranism, where uranism was not only a consequence of mystic and religious teaching, but tolerated as a common social practice. Religiosity itself is the condition of inversion; so that the only way to rid the nation of the epidemic is to get rid of this type of institution: “The phenomenon, curiously, is evident in those most claustral schools and where the teachers deliver frequent lectures on the cult of the female saints, with allusive signs on the chalkboard” (“El fenómeno se manifiesta, es curioso, en aquellas es-

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cuelas más claustrales y donde las maestras se entregan á frecuentes disertaciones acerca del culto á las santas mujeres, con letreros alusivos en los pizarrones”) (“El fetiquismo” 25). The girls are unable to escape their transformation to passive uranism; they are not themselves responsible for their passive transformation, but are victims of a plague brought by the Spanish. There are few “impulsive” (“impulsiva”) uranists: “female homosexuality is not usually impulsive” (“la homosexualidad femenina no es por lo común impulsiva”) (“El fetiquismo” 26). The impulsive uranist is not the problem, since she is but an aberration, whereas passive uranism is sewn into the fabric of the girls’ school and characterizes its entire population. Mercante describes the uranist as a poseur; she poses as well-mannered, docile, and requiring no vigilance. Unlike the male dandy whose pose intensifies his visibility, the uranist poses to conceal her deviance, the performance is a masquerade. The school recesses that I experienced were tranquil and enervating. Obeying the purpose of cultivating manners, the directors had prohibited running, shouting, boisterousness, arguments, brusque movements; all that inexpert eyes could view with displeasure in a child. It was such that the patio was a living room, the girls were guests and the uniforms etiquette. The impression was very good and enviable, so much so that it looked spontaneous, to the point that the vigilance of the professors was unnecessary; in effect, they abandoned the patios to undertake their pressing chores. They did not notice that the quietude of those beings without work could be nothing but fiction. Los recreos de la escuela que me ocupa eran tranquilos y enervantes. Obedeciendo al propósito de cultivar maneras, la dirección había prohibido el correr, el gritar, la bullangería, la discusión, los movimientos bruscos, todo cuanto ojos poco expertos podían ver con desagrado en una niña. De modo que el patio era una sala, las niñas visitas, el conjunto etiqueta. La impresión era buenísima y envidiable, tanto más cuanto que el fenómeno se producía espontáneo, á punto de ser innecesaria la vigilancia de las profesoras; en efecto, abandonaban los patios para entregarse á quehaceres de momento. No advertían que la quietud de aquellos seres sin trabajo no podía ser sino ficticia. (“El fetiquismo” 25)

Lombroso, in his discussion of the female criminal, describes dissimulation as a function of female deviance, most notably observed in the prostitute. He credits prostitutes with the “art of making up,” which “disguises or hides many characteristic features which criminals may exhibit openly” (101). The art of making up, which is part of the decadent pose, is not seen as a normative feminine occupation, but a strategy of the criminal mind given to dissimulation and deception. The female criminal is most likely to fake and feign a normalcy that enables her to circulate freely in society.

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The schoolteachers are complicit with their charges to the extent that they do not suspect nor do they find reason to suspect the girls of posturing to conceal their sexual misconduct. Conveniently, Mercante is able to confirm his suspicions with gossip: “Their secrets, by indirect paths, came to me. They were a couple talking about their affair. Notwithstanding the spiritual degradation and feminine nature of this relationship, there was one active and passive partner, as the authorities on the matter assert” (“Las confidencias, por caminos indirectos, llegaron á mi. Eran novios que conversaban de sus asuntos. No obstante el carácter espiritual y femenino de aquel connubio, un elemento era el activo, otro el pasivo, lo que confirma el principio de las autoridades en la materia”) (“El fetiquismo” 26). The courtyard is not only the place where they simply assemble, but the one where various posturings conceal the amorous activity that escapes the eyes of authority in a silent agglomeration of the forces of homosexuality. Uranism is an epidemic in the microsocial of the institution in which Mercante sees the reflection of the entire society: “The school is the whole and every psychosis spreads epidemically with extraordinary swiftness, evident in a multitude of cases: the individual passes into the collective” (“La escuela es un conjunto y toda psicosis se epidemiza con extraordinaria rapidéz, constado por multitud de casos: la forma individual pasa á la colectiva”) (“El fetiquismo” 24). Mercante’s audience, the school mistresses of Buenos Aires, and farther afield, are suspect for their own passivity, their lack of interest, about the “epidemic,” for their failure to heed the signs of this growing “morbid condition”; this disinterest could also be read, as it is insinuated, as collusion. The effects of this epidemic are considered wide-ranging, affecting the innocent populations that are subject to it and generally dissolving the efforts of education as an arena in which the model citizen could be produced: “There is a spontaneous predisposition in some people to be victims of appearances, lies or hypocrisy; teachers, parents, and authorities deceived themselves against all natural manifestations of the young because of a grotesque and atavistic neglect: but look there at one of the most precious fruits of conventionalism” (“Hay en las personas predisposición espontánea á ser víctimas de las apariencias, mentiras é hipocresías; maestros, padres y autoridades se confabulan contra toda manifestación natural de la joven, por un dejo atávico y grotesco: pues ved allí uno de los más preciados frutos del convencionalismo”) (“El fetiquismo” 30). Everyone, from administrators to parents, is deceived by what seems like a natural and salubrious disposition in the girls, a pose that conceals a pernicious erotic undercurrent. Mercante’s aim is to rouse the complacent authorities about the public menace of homosexuality. In fact, the tranquil and practically silent patio where the girls take their recess is revealed by Mercante to be a sexually charged arena of illicit desires: “The atmosphere of that conventual patio, almost mute, was charged with desires, jealousies, charged gazes, illusions, dreams, and laments. Place of dissatisfaction, place of sadness, because those who live in the empire of anomaly only experience sadness” (“El

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ambiente de aquel patio conventual, mudo casi, estaba cargada de deseos, de celos, de regañeos, de ilusiones, de ensueños y de lamentos. Mansión de insatisfechas, mansión de tristezas, porque visten de tristeza los que aman en el imperio de la Anomalia”) (“El fetiquismo” 26). In a typically decadent fashion, the girls “pose” as docile and law-abiding students during their recesses; but upon closer examination, Mercante finds torrid love affairs hidden in the silent exchange of letters and other fetish objects.

Catholic Fetishist According to Mercante, the female uranists are not acting up; they are caught up in a proto-religious craze that is merely an extension of their Catholic scholastic indoctrination. They live in a space of rampant fetishism in which fetishes occupy the absence of the salubrious influences of men and the principles of masculinity. The religious iconography and the mystical discourses of religious teachings provide the conditions for the supremacy of the fetish as a defining value. In Mercante’s analysis, the fetish joins several social discourses—ethnological, posivitivist, sexological, and psychoanalytic; it is an object with “intrinsic value” (“valor intrínsico”), the fetish of ethnological discourse; an object that inspires obsessive fixation (“la idea obsesiva”), the fetish of religions; an object that evokes an absent situation (“una situación ausente”), the fetish of sexology and psychoanalysis. For Foucault, the fetish is the “master perversion” because it is the central organizing principle of classificatory discourses. The fetish gains extra-symbolic power as the sign of all deviations and as a sign of deviation: “sex was defined by the interlacing of function and instinct, finality and signification; moreover, this was the form in which it was manifested, more clearly than anywhere else, in the model perversion in that ‘fetishism’ which, from at least as early as 1877, served as the guiding thread for analyzing all other deviations” (History of Sexuality 1: 153–54). In Freud, we find this course and discourse in his work on sexual aberrations consolidated. His analysis of the fetish emerges early on in the discussion of perversion when he describes the fetish as an evasion of the normative path of sexuality. The fetish is not just the “master perversion” and point of reference for all others; it is the master trope of decadence (see Birkett 269). It is the source of all evil, all upset, it is the reason that the girls in the school are not doing their work and the first step and stage towards uranism or a placeholder for homosexuality: “Fetishism of objects offers, in the woman, singular varieties; because of her isolation, her unbridled imagination, it occurs more frequently than in men” (“El fetiquismo de los objetos ofrece, en la mujer, variedades singulares; es por efecto de su vida retraida y su imaginación desbridada, más frequente que en el hombre”) (23). The fetish connotes a distractingly obsessive fixation. The immediate result of the fetish, that evokes the absent situation, is the obsessive idea that orients the psychic activity in a single direction and in-

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capacitates the brain for study. Ideas don’t take root; there is a lack of attention, a lack of memory, a lack of language. They spend hours on a page read until sated, and a few minutes interval suffice to reproduce, when not jumbled, incoherent and ill-considered ideas of a meaning that demands the unity of fragments. A systematic aversion to work, school, duty. Solitude is a desire, the fetish, an anxiety. El resultado inmediato del fetiche, que evoca una situación ausente, es la idea obsesiva que orienta la actividad psíquica en una sola dirección é incapacita el cerebro para el estudio. Las ideas no se arraigan; falla la atención, falla la memoria, falla el lenguaje. Se pasan horas sobre una página leída hasta la saciedad, y bastan pocos minutos de intervalo para reproducir cuando no desatinos, ideas incoherentes y desprovistas del significado que exige la unidad del trozo. Una adversión sistemada contra el trabajo, la escuela, el deber. La soledad es un deseo, el fetiche un ansia. (“El fetiquismo” 24)

The letters, relics, and jewelry act as fetish objects that stand in for the absent beloved; in fact, the object is loved in absence through the fetish, in kissing and caressing it or, in the case of the letter, in descriptions of these acts. Mercante gives the following examples: “One girl, on the way to become a hysteric, had, for an hour, at her lips, a relic containing her precious memories; I saw another during an impressive physics experiment, stupefied by a ring, kissing it, from time to time, in ecstasy” (“Una niña, en camino de la histeria, tuvo durante una hora, junto al labio, un relicario con sus preciosos recuerdos; otra vi durante un experimento de física impresionante, alelada sobre un anillo, besándole con éxtasis de vez en cuando”) (“El fetiquismo” 24). And this fixation is the basis of the illness: “no other illness is more contagious” (“ninguna enfermedad es más contagiosa”) (“El fetiquismo” 24). The fetish engages the structure of religious faith: “without the purpose of reducing that which is redeemed, they lose their aesthetic prestige to acquire that of idolatry” (“Sin propósito de reducir lo que está redimido, pierden su prestigio estético para adquirir el idolátrico”) (“El fetiquismo” 23). He uses religious language to describe it: redimido, from redimir, “to redeem”; and idolátrico, as in religious idol, marking the vestigial presence of a Catholic scholasticism. Within the positivist discourses in which Mercante is immersed, fetishism is a primitive stage in philosophical theology, in which the believing subject confuses multiple object cathexis with representations of many deities. This state is characterized by a propensity to project an inner sense of existence onto inanimate external objects in order to understand oneself in relation to other objects in the world. The result is that the self becomes likened to an object in the world by virtue of a decreasing rather than increasing intellectual understanding of its phenomena. The idol or fetish is associated with falsity and a willful induction into a false universe in which real and imaginary are confounded. The positivist analysis leads directly into a discussion of the fetish by sexology and psychoanalysis in which the fetish stands

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in for an absence. For Havelock Ellis, it establishes an entirely different order of reality in which shadow play is willfully substituted for real events. The girls’ school fetishist willfully resists her studies and instead induces in herself a state of sublime contemplation and as a mystic, she loses her sense of the immediate present and social reality. For Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, published in the same year as Mercante’s article, the fetish object causes a deviation in the normative aim. He also notes that there is a constitutional weakness in the subject’s urge to a normative aim that enables deviation: “Some degree of diminution in the urge towards the normal sexual aim (an executive weakness of the sexual apparatus) seems to be a necessary precondition in every case” (Freud 19). The passive uranist’s fetish-based illness is caused by her congenital weakness. The diagnosis of sexual and social “perversions” was a consequence of the large number of competing discourses around social and state reform. In Argentina these discourses were related to the social problems generated by the processes of modernization, industrialization, and urbanization; problems relating to the integration of women into the workforce, the rise of the labor movement, public health concerns, criminology, immigration reform and control, and anarchism (Zimmerman 23). Eduardo Zimmerman locates race as the primary term linking these various discourses and the key to solving social problems. Race was difficult to define and locate, sometimes an effect of biological phenotype, sometimes attributable to geographic or cultural factors, sometimes equated with nationality; it was an inchoate term strategically deployed to describe and manage difference. Race often combined with sex and gender to characterize bodies out of control, dark continents inaccessible to reason. In these pseudo-scientific discourses, race was the cardinal sign of biological degeneracy that organized all other types of degeneracy. In Mercante’s study, the population of the girl’s school is racially unmarked, which means that by default they are not part of the “race” problem. Yet, as girls, they are examined through the devolutionary scale of gendered sexuality and are shown to exhibit a biological degeneracy akin to that of race. There were several methods deployed to stem the growing tide of social decadence and biological degeneration: to address the biological arguments, there were efforts to “purify” the racial composition of the nation by inviting European immigration, while the cultural arguments were addressed to the “estado docente,” to the state mechanism for ensuring homogeneous acculturation and uniformity. Víctor Mercante’s work was integral to the educational policies that bolstered the expansion of the “estado docente” at the turn of the century. The school system was the target of reform for its perceived role in the expansion of industry and growth of the secular state. By the end of the nineteenth century, the principles of positivism were used to refashion education to meet the imperatives of increasing urbanization and the liberal struggle to consolidate the secular state as part of a larger nation-building project to achieve cultural homogeneity. By the early twen-

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tieth century, well-known critics of the “estado docente” like the schoolteacher of the Americas, Gabriela Mistral or José Vasconcelos—proponents of racial mixing or “mestizaje”—had decried the insidiousness of state-impeded diversity (Newland, “The Estado Docente and Its Expansion”). In Chats on Pedagogy 1890–1920 (Charlas pedagógicas 1890–1920), Mercante endorses Sarmiento’s expositions on the purpose of education to impose order on the “disorder” of racial diversity: The amorality and instability of character have causes in history, ethnicity, society, economics, politics and even biology; and it would be absurd to attribute such morbidity of the intimate sense of acts to the inefficacy of education. . . . It is, in these conditions, that the powerful action of the school is undeniable, as Sarmiento suggested, for which reason the schools occupied the most advanced in the great combat that suppressed the ethnic incompatibilities, sown with the same beliefs and disseminated by the same language. El amoralismo y la instabilidad del carácter, tienen causas de orden histórico, étnico, social, económico, político y aún biológico; y sería absurdo atribuir tal morbosidad del sentido íntimo de los actos, a ineficacia de la acción escolar. . . . Es, en estas condiciones, innegable la acción poderosísima de la escuela como lo suponía Sarmiento, en razón de lo cual ella ocupó las avanzadas en el gran combate que suprimió incompatibilidades étnicas, sembrando las mismas creencias y difundiendo una misma lengua. (Charlas 16)

Mercante argues for the necessity to masculinize education according to the values associated with “moral conscience, good character, self-esteem, self-dignity, heightened sentiments, virtue, faith, and work” (“consciencia moral, carácter, aprecio de sí mismo, respeto de la propia dignidad, elevación de sentimientos, virtud, fé, y trabajo”) (Charlas 17). He insists that “we need to masculinize education and not continue in the dangerous downward slope of feminization” (“necesitamos masculinizar la enseñanza y no seguir la pendiente peligrosa de la feminización”) (Charlas 17). Femininity is a sign of organic inferiority and the constitutional susceptibility to the dangerous distractions and liberties of modern life: “Never has the youth been so lacking in ideals, seriousness, convictions, of the desire to work” (“Nunca la juventud se ha sentido tan desprovista de ideales, de seriedad, de convicciones, de deseos de trabajo”) (Charlas 17). The feminization of the social character is enacted through the weakest constituents, those who are more readily ruled by “insecurity, lack of foresight, adaptation to all the pleasures and all the easy successes of egoism and improbity” (“inseguridad, imprevisión, adaptación a todas las dulzuras y a todos los éxitos fáciles del egoísmo y de la improbidad”) (17). The girls’ school in Buenos Aires was the perfect site for the management of these cultural maladies; it could be isolated as a feminine and

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feminized institution of social decadence where the problems of modernity and colonialism converged.

The Love Letter The letter that forms a continuity between “Fetishism and Feminine Uranism in Boarding Schools” (“Fetiquismo y uranismo femenino en los internados educativos”) and The Crisis of Puberty (La crisis de la pubertad) meets a scientific standard for hard evidence against the hearsay of personal testimony. It exemplifies standards of scientific rigor; yet it is also a cautionary text about the deleterious authorial and erotic fantasies of its writer. It is no surprise then that the letter appears to be a sham, a literary text fabricated to serve diverse diagnoses; Mercante, taking little care to maintain continuity of each citation of the same letter, cites different dates for each—one is dated 1901, the other 1904, a slip that reveals the corruption of the evidence. However, this apparent sleight of hand by Mercante is less interesting than the function and defining role of this autobiographical and confessional literary object in the constitution of the female uranist. The letter Mercante cites/writes is long, but to get the full sense of his project and the text that supports it, it bears full evaluation. He gives a similar preface to each letter on each occasion of citation; in each, the letter is proof that the girls ignore their studies and cannot focus their attentions on anything but their desires for each other. The letter is of crucial importance for its multivalency as a linguistic act and as an apparent or actual instrument of communication. It leaves perhaps the only verifiable trace of a relationship that would otherwise bear no name, while it functions as a substitute for sexual or amorous acts, for speaking, and, in some cases, for the exchange of a meaningful gaze. For Mercante, writing about an act is tantamount to committing the same act, and thus the letter offers proof of the actuality of the epidemic of uranism; discovering the letter, to Mercante’s voyeuristic thrill, means catching the girls in the act: “The proof of my assertions is this letter that I consider typical of feminine uranism and which is a symptomatological picture of the illness; this self-exam excludes nothing” (“Prueba acabada de mis afirmaciones es esta carta que considero típica del uranismo femenino y que es un cuadro sintomatológico de la enfermedad, sin que el autoexamen excluya un detalle”) (“El fetiquismo” 26). He concludes along the same lines: “I’ve only tried, with documents, to make evident the existence of this morbid condition” (“Sólo he pretendido, con hechos documentos, constatar la existencia de un estado morboso”) (“El fetiquismo” 30). The letter in question is sent by a love-weary uranist after a fruitless year of trying to gain the affections of her beloved. In the long dolorous span of this letter, the florid description of the heavy sentiment and undying passion far exceed any actual experience between the girls. In fact, the passion is literary; it has a longer duration in the letter than it seems to have in the life of the writer:

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For D.N. Cross over Cross. Brief story of a love that lasted as long as pleasure lasts, by a hateful person who does not know how to hate. August 1901. Bs. As. I’ve gone through many different phases in the short period of my existence. I have pleasant memories of adventurous hours, of illusions and pleasures, as well as terrible moments of mad ambition, cruel doubt, and bitter desperation. A soul is a world unto itself: in it there is good fortune and disgrace as well as insanity, deceit, prudence, and truth, just as these things exist in me. But of all these periods, that which has left me sadly remembering, that which has wounded my heart so profoundly as to imprint itself indelibly there, is without doubt, one that has imprinted on my sick spirit a new air of illusion and hope to offer me, after all, the final martyrdom that is precisely that which would precede the grave. I had been sick for a long time and I devoted myself to my studies to forget my fate. I knew that I would not become well again, that each hour that passed brought me rapidly closer to eternal repose and despite all the care taken by my parents so that I would be continually distracted and happy, I remained sad and silent most of the time; and when, by an infinite effort, pretending to be tranquil and happy to instill in them confidence in my well being, I would discover on her lips a bitter smile that destroyed my heart. So . . . terrible fantasies plagued my mind! I saw a cross . . . a cross over a damp tombstone . . . and I escaped so that my tears would not respond, that they would not suspend from my black eyelashes like my luck. I went to school and in that nucleus of friends I seemed to forget a little of my sad future. I spoke of my happy past, of my dreams, of my disquieted mind, of my literary aspirations, of all that in other times constituted the face of my most beautiful illusion, now unrealizable, and I professed to all those girls a loyal and sincere affection, even if I well understood that many of them did not deserve it! Every day I obtained satisfactory grades and, in my constant longing for a glorious future, contemplated in the midst of black shadows the sweet clarity that illuminated my being with each of these successes. A few times I would go to the patio during our break, but in one of those few times something happened that I could not have foreseen. A young girl of my age, with black eyes and a burning gaze, felt herself penetrated by the passion wrapped in my gaze, a gaze full of all the passion that could fit in a young person’s heart that awakes to the heat of the fire ignited for the first time. Many days passed . . . I ignored her passion and strange thing! Peaceful dreams stirred my imagination; my heart beat violently. It seemed that something contracted and later enlarged the sublime component of my being. I was starting to worry about such a change, when suddenly, I had to know the cause, and began thinking that I was loving unconsciously for these past few days. How could I deny the last affect that had taken hold of me? . . . I didn’t know what was happening to me! A feeling of ineffable happiness inundated my soul when Delia, upon shaking my hand, fixed her

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eyes on mine, which I contemplated for the first time. Ah! If in them I could have read the depth of her treacherous heart, of cruel and terrible feelings. Today I curse the moment in which I gave myself blindly and surrendered to the intensity of her criminal gaze. In this way two months passed. Strong and repeated attacks produced in my illness obliged me to a long and painful absence. Since I could not write, I made my little sister do so, two times. But I just received one letter from her! Just one! From then on, I was dominated by an extraordinary agitation. What did this silence mean? Was it because her friends and her studies didn’t allow her a minute to devote to me or that the love inspired by my presence had died in her heart and been replaced by another, how could she replace something not worth an emotion so secret and continual as it was huge and beautiful? Ah! I wanted to go, I wanted to see her immediately. . . . In any case I would tell her, I would demand that she tell me what my presentiments told me! That which in my anxious hope I heard endlessly, as if the timber of her voice, that resonated in the depth of my spirit and that made me tremble and look around me more than once, would murmur: “She is dead to me: I don’t know her.” I would have sacrificed half of my existence to see her in those moments of my terrible doubt! The days passed and I could, finally, return to the temple of my cult. But it had changed. I lacked courage to ask her for a precise explanation; I tilted my head and remained silently at her side during recess. But, instead of feeling as I did before, indescribable pleasure, I felt devalued and my heart descended into a disquiet full of pain and spite. From the point when that idea was born in me, the dread took mad proportions because nothing and nobody was sufficient to combat it. A few times, I suddenly blanched, seeing emerge before my eyes her indifferent image. How if she had not stolen the calm that I had remaining! My angst intensified and my martyrdom started the morning that I found out she had said: “Don’t talk to me about her, I hate her!” Upon hearing this, I could not contain myself anymore: my eyes shone; an inexplicable emotion agitated my nerves for an instant, after . . . the tears flooded my eyes without being able to contain my already impotent will. I blessed the night that offered its solitude for my thoughts to widen its black horizons. How agitated was my dream! I dreamed one hundred times that she denied her errors and made it up to me with caresses. But I woke up and I reproached myself for all that I had done to save my life during the last time that God appeared to want to dispose of it. If I had lost my life then, I would have at least, in my final moments, thought of her as someone sacred and sublime to whom I owed the final happiness of my existence! But now, I see that I’m obliged to return the hate that she professed to have for me, to sacrifice all the passion that had animated me and that I had experienced! But this despicable feeling has not manifested nor will it manifest ever again in the space of my soul. I could not hate her, but I had to stop loving her! These reflections, these reproaches of my conscience, regardless of how I

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Chapter Three

tried to escape them, little by little weighed heavily on my spirit, so that I felt annihilated under this painful but evident truth. I was capable of committing a humiliating act, and I was trembling at the single idea of seeming, much later, disagreeable, because in my soul there still existed an unceasingly reborn hope that I should have quenched. But the image of duty rose before me to demand more than passive resignation. I told myself that it was not enough to tear the last piece of my love from my heart, it was necessary that my own hands break my hope, my faith, all my being. I had to extinguish the only light of my life and to accept the short but terrifying, obscure and gloomy fate like an abyss. I made, then, the determination to show her indifference and promise hatred, and conserve in my heart the pure passion that she never deserved, forgetting her indig