Writing Civilisation: the Historical Novel in the Colombian National Project
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Writing Civilisation: the Historical Novel in the Colombian National Project A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree Doctor of Philosophy from UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG by Marta Jimena Cabrera, MA (Hons), BA Faculty of Arts, Communication and Cultural Studies 2004 CERTIFICATION I, Marta Jimena Cabrera, declare that this thesis, submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for the award of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Faculty of Arts, Communication and Cultural Studies, University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. The document has not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institution. Marta J. Cabrera Date: January 15, 2004 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my thesis supervisors, Paul Sharrad and Jeff Browitt, for their patience and help in the writing of this thesis and the people at the Office of Research, particularly Tim McDonald, for their help. I would also like to thank the friends that have made my time in Australia a lot easier and this experience enjoyable. Finally, I would like to thank Luz for the endless support and patient readings of my stuff and my family for their loving support. This thesis is dedicated to all those who believe that Colombia deserves better and are trying to do something to make it happen. iii Abstract This analysis of four selected Colombian historical novels of the nineteenth- century explores textual modes of self-fashioning in the process of nation building (individual and collective fashioning). To do this a methodology has been employed which entwines literary, political history and cultural studies. Based mainly on textual discourse analysis, it includes applications of literary theory (the role of the historical novel, Angel Rama’s notion of the ‘lettered city, the New Historicist notion of ‘self-fashioning’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘classical’ and ‘grotesque’ bodies). It also works with sociology of culture (Norbert Elias’ notion of ‘civilisation process’ and Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘distinction’), history of ideas (Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ and ‘technologies of the self’), and historiography specific to the Colombian nineteenth century. The chosen texts for study are Yngermina o la hija de Calamar (1844) by Juan José Nieto; El último rei de los muiscas (1864) by Jesús Silvestre Rozo; Los jigantes (1875) by Felipe Pérez and Los piratas en Cartagena (1886) by Soledad Acosta de Samper. They were selected for having being published in different phases of the period of liberal hegemony in Colombia until the onset of conservatism and because their fictional settings cover different periods of Colombian history (the pre-Hispanic past, conquest, colony and independence). The analysis focuses on the way the writer constructs simultaneously a textual self-identity in consonance with collective identity emphasising issues of subjectivity, governmentality, space and the body and identifying the strategies iv employed in the construction of these identities. Thus, a reading of Yngermina o la hija de Calamar shows how Juan José Nieto simultaneously constructed himself as a liberal Romantic denouncing the abuse of power and possessed of a romantic history as site of civilisation. Similarly, Jesús Silvestre Rozo fashioned himself as a liberal Romantic in El último rei de los muiscas (1864) while relying on nostalgia to recreate a heroic past for the nation. In the case of Felipe Pérez, his radical liberal ideology and his experience as geographer produces in Los jigantes (1875) a nation conceived as an ensemble of regions and peoples destined for freedom and equality. Finally, Soledad Acosta de Samper is able to construct herself as a learned female historian in Los piratas en Cartagena (1886) in a time of constraints on the production and reception of women’s writing while also producing a conservative image of the nation as a Catholic, Hispanophile social body. v Table of contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1- Letrado self-fashioning and the production of the body politic 18 The agency of writing 24 Literature and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion 32 Time and the nation: towards the historical novel 38 Performing shame in the historical novel 50 Dialogues: memory, rupture and continuity 54 Chapter 2 - The construction of identities: science, space, aesthetics 59 Difference and the construction of Creole identities 61 The production of internal others 64 Producing the body of the nation 75 A new beginning: the symbolic economy of the independent nation 83 Shaping the (classic) elite and the (grotesque) masses 90 Chapter 3 - Yngermina, tale of a white Caribbean (The civilising project) 100 Juan José Nieto and the project of an-other history 101 The delights of ‘Civilisation’ 112 New orders: governmentality as time/space reconversion 117 The (bio)politics of love 123 Cartagena is afraid of the darkness 131 Modern/colonial spatial narratives: capitalist progress and white heroism 134 vi Summary 138 Chapter 4 - Memorable antiquities: El ultimo rei de los muiscas (The nostalgic project) 140 Heroes, gods and mortals: from mythical to historical time 145 Genius loci: Nature, the sublime 148 Nostalgia for civilisation 153 Dynamics of representation: the Indian as westerner 161 The Indian male/female grotesque 165 The Spaniard as executor 169 Summary 173 Chapter 5 - The awakening of the nation: Los Jigantes (The educational project) 176 ‘La España trataba a la América como a una mujer tártara’ 183 Enlightenment for all (who can read) 192 From the grotesque to the sublime (and back) 196 The Gender politics of modernity 202 Space and the other 205 Moral geographies 211 Summary 218 Chapter 6 - The virtuous body public/private: Los piratas en Cartagena (The didactic-conservative project) 220 Soledad Acosta de Samper: performing the female intellectual 222 vii ‘Orden, Progreso y Tradición’ : the cultural universe of Regeneración 229 Soledad Acosta de Samper’s pan-Hispanic world 235 Material culture as civilisation 243 The location of culture: race and place 246 American beauty 251 Summary 258 Conclusion 261 Bibliography 272 viii Introduction El presente en Hispanoamérica no es prisionero del pasado sino más bien de las imágenes construidas del pasado (Colmenares 1987, p. 23). [The present in Hispanic America is not a prisoner of the past, but rather of constructed images of the past]. The “nation” as conceived by nationalism can be recognized prospectively; the real “nation” can only be recognized a posteriori (Hobsbawm 1990, p.9). I This dissertation springs from the confluence of many interests. The most general and perhaps the main one is the recent perceived need to re-examine Colombia’s situation of ongoing unrest from diverse perspectives. Violence appears since the nineteenth-century in the form of eight civil wars and resurfaces in the twentieth more notably in the period known as La Violencia (1948-1957) as well as in the 1980s-1990s. This phenomenon has attracted much attention from a range of social scientists and a number of interpretations have been articulated. In the case of the nineteenth-century, the endemic weakness of the newborn state, Colombia’s rough topography (which caused regional fragmentation and therefore national disarray), ideological confrontation, along with the difficulties of integrating the nation into the world economy are some of the main causes that 1 have been proposed. 1 On factors involving political party animosity, see Delpar (1981), Tirado (1995; 1984); on geographical and economic factors, see Bergquist (1987), Palacios (1986), Ocampo (1984), and Safford (1976), among others. 1 More recently, however, culture has emerged as another key to the comprehension of the shortcomings of the nation-state in the production of the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983). From the cultural view, one of the central causes for unrest is the absence of an encompassing national narrative in which diverse voices can be incorporated.2 The construction of such a narrative was problematic for the nineteenth-century letrado (an ideal type of the writer/statesman), caught between the need to legitimise the autochthonous and the need to ‘civilise’ it according to modern standards. For this reason, the representation of the autochthonous required the use of complex narrative strategies seeking to inscribe in memory and history those segments deemed suitable while simultaneously concealing others. Consequently, nineteenth-century ‘national’ narratives simultaneously recognise and conceal, include and exclude subjects, spaces and bodies from the national project, which was constructed mainly via the written sign. In this view, artefacts such as constitutions, grammars, historiographies and novels were perceived as determinant forces in fashioning the modern nation. The ambivalent sign of the formation of the modern Colombian nation is explored here in connection to literary culture, not resorting to its ‘foundational fictions’ or canonical works, but rather to the less studied genre of the historical novel, as it has historically accompanied the rise of the nation throughout the nineteenth- century. The historical novel has been neglected because of the preponderance 2 Carlos Mario Perea’s Porque la sangre es espíritu (1996), which looks at the expression of animosity between parties via newspapers in the first decade of La Violencia, is an example of an attempt to analyse the connections between culture and violence. In the same vein are the works of