Recovering Adrian Del Valle's Por El Camino and Building
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RECOVERING ADRIAN DEL VALLE’S POR EL CAMINO AND BUILDING TRANSNATIONAL MUTLITUDINOUS COMMUNITIES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH BY SHANE L. THOMSON DISSERTATION ADVISOR: DR. DEBORAH MIX BALL STATE UNIVERSITY MUNCIE, INDIANA JULY 2013 DEDICATION They say it takes a village to raise a child. It is equally true that it takes a village to complete a dissertation. To my village, then, I dedicate this project and hope to someday justify the faith and prayers, sacrifice and patience, and constant encouragement they have offered in supporting my family and me these many years. Bless you, all. ABSTRACT DISSERTATION: Recovering Adrián del Valle’s Por el camino and Building Transnational Multitudinous Communities STUDENT: Shane L. Thomson DEGREE: Doctor of Philosophy in English COLLEGE: Sciences and Humanities DATE: July, 2013 PAGES: 275 This dissertation is a recovery project, and as such it introduces Adrián del Valle, a prolific Spanish-born literary modernista and anarchist activist who dedicated his life to social reform in in turn-of-the-century Cuba and beyond. In addition to a critical introduction, this project includes my translation of his 1907 collection of integrated short stories Por el camino [Along the Way], which, as all of his works, is long out of print. Por el camino complicates critical models grounded in nationality and therefore invites us to construct and apply an alternative model better suited to handling a transnational epistemology of space, which allows for the constant flow of people, ideas, and texts, as well as commercial and political influences, across borders. In developing this epistemological framework, I blend two theoretical concepts— “multitude” and “imagined communities”—to situate del Valle in his dynamic historical moment. Del Valle wrote Por el camino in the throes of the Second Industrial Revolution, the Age of Synergy, which I argue can be understood as an early age of globalization. Por el camino also stands at the crossroads of Latin American modernista short fiction and the international anarchist movement, thus challenging critical positions that treat modernismo as an apolitical and socially apathetic literary movement obsessed with elitist aesthetics and escapism and anarchism 4 as a mutually exclusive movement wholly concerned with achieving practical social and political reforms. Through my reading of del Valle’s work, I demonstrate that modernismo and anarchism are two manifold and simultaneous responses to the complex socio-political, economic, cultural, and spiritual crises that grew out of Latin America’s transition into modernity. TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication 2 Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 6 Preface 7 List of Publications 18 Part I Chapter 1: Introduction 20 Chapter 2: Globalization 34 Chapter 3: Anarchism 61 Chapter 4: Modernismo 89 Part II On the Translation 119 Along the Way 122 Bibliography 245 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My advisor, Dr. Debbie Mix, told me that if my dissertation ended up like my proposal, I would know I had done something wrong. You were right, and I thank you for saying so because that gave me permission to follow wherever my thoughts led me. At the same time, you disciplined my tendency to plop down and admire every little, shiny fish that my nets drew in. Thank you. Dr. Rai Peterson reshaped the way I look at the world. I question everything, I challenge everything, and as a consequence have made myself an inconvenience in certain circles. Yet, I have learned to see beauty in places I hadn’t expected to find it. You’re smiling right now because you already knew it. Thank you for putting so much of yourself into me, and thank you for pulling so much of me back out. Dr. Amit Baishya overwhelmed me with new and fascinating possibilities every time he opened his mouth, and I often felt unequal to our task. But your sharp intellect, sensitivity, genuine enthusiasm, and kind encouragement kept me fascinated and engaged. I only regret that I hadn’t the chance to work with you under less strenuous circumstances. My other regret is that I was not able to spend more time working with Dr. Marina Guntsche. Su apoyo entusiasmado para mí y para nuestro proyecto me recordaba que debía de disfrutarme por el camino. Le agradezco por su ánimo estimulante. PREFACE Recovering del Valle Recovery work is not an infectious trend among today’s literary scholars. That said, it has continued to be the topic of some critical discussion. Corinna K. Lee and Jacob Brogan proposed a special session for MLA 2013 titled “The Poetics of Literary Recovery.” “Recent scholarship has all but consigned recovery projects to the dusty sections of the literary historical past,” they write in their CFP. “The very idea of recovery, it would seem, has become an embarrassment” (Lee). Yet they issue a panel proposal soliciting a discussion treating the very subject. It is, they argue, because there are still questions of methods, models, and social and political implications related to recovery work that need to be addressed. University of Waterloo’s Professor Victoria Lamont offered a graduate course in literary recovery last year (2011-2012). She claims it has been a serious trend in American literary scholarship since the 1980s, citing Henry Louis Gates’s recovery of black writers and critiques of the American canon by scholars like Jane Tompkins and Paul Lauter. This dissertation is a recovery project, and as such my intent is to introduce the modern reader to Adrián del Valle, a Spanish-born writer, publisher, and activist who spent the better part of his life striving to improve the quality of life of people across a world caught in the throes of globalization. I hope to accomplish this recovery by offering a translation of his 1907 collection of integrated short stories Por el camino [Along the Way], which, as all of his works, is out of print and has therefore been inaccessible. I also offer a critical discussion of the historical and cultural context in which del Valle lived and worked. Historian Kirwin R. Shaffer has participated in recovering del Valle, particularly to the extent he has drawn on del Valle’s fiction to construct a fuller image of anarchism in Cuba’s 8 cultural history. “Fiction helps us to understand what the anarchists were seeing, interpreting, and imagining,” writes Shaffer. “By the same notion, it helps us understand how anarchists tried to get their readers and viewers to imagine Cuba’s past, present, and potential future” (Countercultural 19). Yet while del Valle was concerned with Cuba and Cuban anarchism, he was also concerned with the Americas, Europe, and beyond. To follow his gaze, therefore, I will practice a critical approach that allows for the perpetual motion of agents in and between those spaces. In keeping with this multinational bearing, del Valle is in the company of revered Latin American national heroes like Simón Bolívar, who led Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia to independence; José Carlos Mariátegui, political philosopher and journalist who agitated for indigenous enfranchisement throughout Latin America; and José Martí, the “father” of the Cuban independence. Each exhibited the most exalted patriotic dedication. Each strove to implement visions of pan-American cooperation, even unification. Each believed in the tremendous potential of political and social institutions that evolved organically from local soil. Still, del Valle never made it into the writings or speeches of Cuban nationalist iconic figures like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, or Roberto Fernádez Retamar. One reason may be that del Valle placed Cuba, the Americas, and other peoples in comparable standing, elevating humanism over “Cubanism.”1 1 I will use Martí as a touchstone in the following chapters but will not consider his influence to any significant depth. For more detailed discussions of his politics and aesthetics in relation to this project, see Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Martí and His (Third) World,” (1965) 2009; Ivan Schulman’s Martí, Darío, y el modernismo, 1969; José David Saldívar’s “Nuestra América’s Borders: Remapping American Cultural Studies,” 1998; Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández’s collection of essays José Martí’s Our America: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, 1998; and Laura Lomas’s Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities, 2008. 9 Another contributing factor to del Valle’s being left behind may have its origin in the definitive break that occurred between the socialists, anarchists, and anarcho-syndicalists before the first congress of the Second International in 1889. The anarchist groups were not invited, and their absence set international socialism on a clearly distinct path. Following Cuba’s independence from Spain in 1898, the United States governed Cuban politics directly and indirectly until 1909. Legally elected presidencies and short-lived revolutions passed through the political landscape until 1959, when socialist Fidel Castro succeeded in overthrowing the Batista regime and establishing himself as supreme leader. To consolidate a Cuban nationalist spirit under socialism, Castro invoked the memory of José Martí as the forerunner of their contemporary political and economic ideology. By this point del Valle’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anarchism had become altogether incompatible with mid-twentieth-century socialism and later full-blown communism because both required hierarchical