Fantasies of Independence and Their Latin American Legacies by Gabriel

Fantasies of Independence and Their Latin American Legacies by Gabriel A Horowitz A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Romance Languages and Literatures - Spanish) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Professor Gareth Williams, Chair Professor Frieda Ekotto Associate Professor Katharine M. Jenckes Associate Professor Daniel Noemi-Voionmaa, Northeastern University So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedern cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover! –Samuel Taylor Coleridge One must surround nature in order to dominate it: if we go blindly ahead, trying to divine instead of observe, it will escape us completely –José Luz y Caballero La ciencia, como la naturaleza se alimenta de ruinas, y mientras los sistemas nacen y crecen y se marchitan y mueren, ella se levanta lozana y florida sobre sus despojos, y mantiene una juventud eternal –Andrés Bello I pursued nature to her hiding places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? –Mary Shelley The enslavement to nature of people today cannot be separated from social progress –Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer © Gabriel A Horowitz 2014 For Cori, Joe, and Lee ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a great debt to my dissertation chair Gareth Williams for his rigor and perseverance in helping me develop as a scholar and as a writer. I also want to thank the members of my dissertation committee Frieda Ekotto, Katharine Jenckes, and Daniel Noemi-Voionmaa for their conversation, feedback, and support over the years. My work has developed in large part through conversation and intellectual exchange with colleagues at the University of Michigan. My discussions with Alejandro Quin about nature and Yo el Supremo were the real starting point for this work, and an ongoing weight-room dialogue with Martin Vega has been crucial in defining the path it took, especially in pointing me toward a serious investigation of romanticism. Elizabeth Barrios and Adam Johnson read chapters, and provided valuable feedback that helped strengthen my scholarship. For fuelling my thinking I also want to thank Erika Almenara, Juanita Bernal, Abigail Celis, David Collinge, Shannon Dowd, Maria Robles, Angelica Serna, Brian Whitener, and Silvina Yi, as well as Christian Kroll, Federico Pous, Marcelino Viera, and Robert Wells. Julie Highfill provided early feedback for my Borges chapter and thoughtful encouragement. Gustavo Verdesio provided unofficial mentorship, and Cristina Moreiras unofficial support. For their friendship I wish to thank Josh Berkow, Kyle Booten, Michael Gorwitz, Patrick McAnany, Shane Meyer, Kevin O’Connor, and Sarah Pappas. I feel tremendous gratitude to Mauricio Gómez Valdovinos for his friendship, hospitality, and intellectual engagement when I was an exchange student at the UPLA in Chile, and after. Also, I iii am indebted to Alberto Moreiras for helping set me on a path in the study of Latin American literature and culture. Finally, I want to thank my family. This work is dedicated to my older cousins, without whose encouragement it might never have emerged. Thank you, Cori, for teaching me about projects, Joe for the overly difficult books and philosophical conversations, Lee for lessons on politics and historical materialism. Thanks also to Mollie, Kenny, Takako, Aaron, Rachel, Skyler, Anton, and Julia. I want to thank Juanita Bernal again for her love and support, and my mother, Gina, for her love and my existence. iv CONTENTS DEDICATION.....................................................................................................................ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................................................................iii INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE – Romantic Nature and the Culture of New Latin American States.....18 CHAPTER TWO – A Critique of the Desire for the End of History in Borges................79 CHAPTER THREE – Expeditions to the Modern Wilderness........................................120 CHAPTER FOUR – Specters of Utopia in Augusto Roa Bastos....................................165 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................214 WORKS CITED..............................................................................................................218 v INTRODUCTION This work investigates the claim of cultural autonomy and its relation to the discursive history of nature in Latin American literary and political thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A question of cultural autonomy arose as an essential part of the thinking by which American territories began to establish themselves as nation-states after attaining political independence from Spain. Ever since then, Latin American discourse has been defined by this problem of identity, a question of what makes its nations different, not just politically, but culturally. I contend that the cultural autonomy of Latin America, and its ongoing proclamation over the past 200 years, can best be understood by examining it in relation to the ideology by which is was originally informed, a European romanticism in vogue during the first wave of independence in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, a romantic concept of nature has been particularly instrumental for justifying both national and pan-national claims of difference and cultural autonomy in Latin America. I argue that a concept of nature introduced by European romanticism was developed by Latin American Creoles in order to help articulate a claim of national cultural autonomy from Spain during the mid-nineteenth century, and that romantic nature constituted the ideological ground in which a belief in the culturally independent nation was cultivated. A vision of the American landscape as nature–the pre-history upon which history is constituted, the tabula rasa upon which it is written—supports a view of independence as a moment of definitive rupture 1 with the past, and the Creoles’ claim of having ceased to be culturally Spanish. Rather than forming a true basis of rupture with the past, however, the vision of America as a land of nature really just concealed the underlying continuities between the new Latin American nations and the Catholic Spanish Empire. Even as romantic nature facilitated a transition to a modern political nomos, as a concept by which Creoles defined their new, ostensibly egalitarian nation- states, it ended up conserving and maintaining the imperial reason that had guided the Spanish Empire for centuries, contributing to an incomplete and paradoxical nationalization. Over time, the claim of cultural autonomy, and the foundational ideological operation facilitated by nature of disavowing a connection to the past, evolved into the “tradición de la ruptura” that would define Latin American modernity (Paz 17). A widely-accepted, progressive view of history understands the rise of positivist discourse in the late nineteenth century– manifested by the development and application of social and human sciences—as a “gradual emerging from […] aberration,” a supersession of the romanticism that had represented “the point of maximum delusion in our recent past” (de Man, Blindness 13).1 Still, even as avowedly modern discourses displaced avowedly romantic ones in Latin America, the proclamation of this displacement as an emergence from the decadent past strongly resembled the original romantic Creole claim of cultural autonomy from Spain. In this manner, discourses promoting Latin American and national modernization appear to perform the deluded gestures that they were supposed to supersede. This, as well as the way in which modern discourses continue to profess 1 In The Latin American Mind (1949) Leopoldo Zea describes a “transition” from romanticism to positivism in Latin American intellectual history, but remains skeptical that it truly represents a definitive break. Nevertheless, this sense of transition, and an acceptance of all the ostensible differences between romanticism and positivism, would define the way in which the history of Latin American thought is understood. In Positivism in Latin America (1971) Ralph Lee Woodward gives voice to a model of history organized around Latin America’s transition from romanticism to positivism. In Hijos del limo (1974) Octavio Paz characterizes the history of Latin American thought as the dialectical swinging from backward-looking romanticism to forward-looking positivism, understanding the relation between literary modernismo, Arielismo, and the avant-gardes of the 1920s according to this model. 2 faith in the autonomous nature that originally facilitated the ideological concealments of romanticism, lead me to read the modern claim of rupture with deep skepticism. Taking into account recent assertions that “we still belong to the era [romanticism] opened up,” nature appears not just to be a random point

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