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Paradoxical Republics: Tropes of Civic Longing in Postcolonial Caribbean Writing

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Paradoxical Republics: Tropes of Civic Longing in Postcolonial Caribbean Writing Paradoxical Republics: Tropes of Civic Longing in Postcolonial Caribbean Writing By Luis Ramos A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Francine Masiello, Chair Professor Karl Britto Professor Dorothy Hale Professor Richard Rosa Fall 2010 Abstract Paradoxical Republics: Tropes of Civic Longing in Postcolonial Caribbean Writing by Luis Ramos Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Francine Masiello, Chair What can a poetics of longing suggest about unrequited political promises? In my dissertation I demonstrate how postcolonial fiction strategically recovers founding moments of civic awakening and revolutionary consciousness in order to transmit a greater understanding of anti-colonial resistance in the Americas. Focusing on four authors who retrace the transition from colony to nationhood and from royalist to republican rule in the Hispanic new world, I uncover a literary strategy that Spanish American (Martí and Carpentier) and Anglophone writers (Conrad and Naipaul) share in common. I argue that a structure of longing that yearns for a sense of the greater good, which it also mourns as unreachable, informs this subset of new world writing. Offering an image of a republican ideal under siege, this paradoxical mode of longing is also marked by a homosocial desire for male friendship and companionship, a desire increasingly at odds with modern commercial society and its overt reliance on a heterosexual private sphere. This homosocial desire for male friendship and companionship serves as a common structuring device, transforming Hispanic and Anglophone literary traditions into a cohesive body of writing. At the heart of each work—from Martí’s Versos sencillos to Na ip a ul’ s A Way in the World—lies an abiding preoccupation with the meaning of civic virtue and its o ft-described opposite: corruption. Faced with realities that exceed North Atlantic republican models, each author reconsiders the relation between virtue and corruption under precarious political conditions. Moving beyond dualist definitions (duty versus self-interest, austerity versus greed, community versus individuality), I argue that postcolonial new world writing offers a more fluid and wide-ranging means of conceiving this relation than political theory has traditionally acknowledged. In its paradoxical formulation, each author reflects a poetics of longing that yearns for correspondence between Caribbean realities and a European civic vocabulary. In striving toward such an aim, however, each author inevitably confronts the painful knowledge of the impossible nature of his task. It is this moment of mournful self-awareness, I argue, that enables all four authors to abandon a project of mimetic correspondence and gesture toward an understanding of the Caribbean as a geography defined less by linguistic and insular categories, and more by a shared paradoxical experience of revolutionary modernity. 1 TABLE OF CONTEN TS I. Total Recall: Republicanism and the Aesthetics of Mourning from Simón Bolívar to José Martí 1 II. Finding Virtue in an Uncertain State: Republicanism and the Rhetoric of Corruption in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo 25 III. Paradoxical Republics: Metaphors of Caribbean Revolutionary Origins in Alejo Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces 50 IV. Forging Bonds Out of Water: Melancholic Kinship and Belonging in V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World 71 Conclusion 93 Bibliography 94 i Total Recall: Republicanism and the Aesthetics of Mourning from Simón Bolívar to José Martí This chapter examines how the anti-colonial past informs the republican fictions of Bolívar and Martí. Its aim is two-fold: O n the one hand, to demonstrate how Simón Bolívar’s “Jamaica Letter”–a text likened to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in terms of its symbolic status as a corresponding statement of Latin American revolution— may be usefully read as a primal scene over which twentieth-century Caribbean fiction about the anti-colonial past unfolds. On the other, to probe how such a primal scene is later mediated by José Martí’s political and poetic labor. It is this link between Bolívar’s originary declaration and Martí’s literary imagination that this chapter will aim to uncover. This chapter (and dissertation as a whole), then, is concerned not only with republican thought, but moreover, with its aesthetic dimension. In Martí’s case, as well as in the authors subsequently examined (Conrad, Carpentier and Naipaul), republican political thought in its literary rendition corresponds with an aesthetics of mourning—that is, with an aesthetics that mourns for a politics feared as lost or forgotten. Although this sense of mourning is already present in Bolívar’s Jamaica Letter, I argue that it is expanded in Martí’s writing, taking a heightened gendered dimension. His is a republican vision most fruitfully understood not simply as a theory about the possibilities of political representation, 1 but perhaps just as crucially, as a window into larger cultural anxieties around gender roles and the status of women under shifting political conditions. This anxiety gives way to a poetics of male bonding in Martí’s literary writings. 2 The first half of this chapter identifies the dominant narrative modes that typify the Jamaica Letter. By examining the letter’s temporal structure, I demonstrate how 1 My aim, then, is to move beyond commonplace or formal definitions of republicanism (i.e., as a form of government distinct from a monarchy in terms of its emphasis on checks and balances, rule of law, civic participation, etc.). In so doing, this chapter joins a widening body of scholarship that, over the last two decades, has examined its legacies within a transatlantic and comparative frame. Until very recently debates have centered around a North Atlantic conceptualization of its legacies. Needless to say, my object is its South Atlantic variant, and in particular, its possibilities for a broader understanding of postcolonial politics. Until fairly recently, the Latin American variant of republicanism has received little scholarly attention. For an excellent introduction to the debates about republicanism’s Latin American incarnation, see El republicanismo en Hispanoamérica: Ensayos de historia intelectual y política. Eds. José Antonio Aguilar and Rafael Rojas. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002. For a landmark text that examines republicanism within a North Atlantic frame see J.G.A. Pocock’s classic, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. 2 My own definition, then, draws inspiration from feminist engagements with political theory. In particular, Elizabeth Rose Wingrove’s Rousseau’s Republican Romance provides a model of a feminist engagement with politica l theory that demonstrates how republicanism “engenders political subjects as it engenders men and women.” In other words, central to her claim (and mine) is the centrality of sexual difference in the production of political subjectivity. Her examination of Rousseau’s sexual politics, moreover, as an elaboration of a mode of political analysis “that attends to the principles and relations of governance inhering in textual, material, and bodily representations” strongly resonate with my own aims here. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 16-17. 1 Bolívar’s conception of the revolutionary present relies, on the one hand, on a suppression of the pre-colonial past and on the other, on an unfolding of the postcolonial future. The Letter’s temporal logic of suppression and release, containment and discharge, I argue, characterizes its particular strain of republicanism; one that appears to acknowledge new world racial inequalities, but in fact cloaks them in an ambiguous and ill-defined notion of post-independence freedom. The Jamaica Letter, in that it stages an originary fantasy of resistance and domination, liberation and coercion, thus constitutes the primal scene for subsequent twentieth-century Caribbean fiction about the revolutionary past. Republicanism’s repeated failures to unravel the exclusionary legacies that lay at its conceptual core, I argue in subsequent chapters, becomes an underlying object of reflection in twentieth-century Caribbean fiction. In the second half of Chapter O ne, I demonstrate how Cuban poet and Independence hero José Martí inaugurates the strain of republican imagination examined in this dissertation. Martí’s republicanism, I argue, puts forth a distinct notion of civic virtue 3 centered around a cult of foundational figures of the Spanish American Revolutions—a cult wherein Simón Bolívar occupies a central role. Martí’s republicanism, however, does not simply inherit Bolívar’s unitary vision, but moreover, imbues it with an added dimension. By mourning Bolívar’s political vision of a united Spanish America as a loss he wishes to recover in homosocial terms, Martí sets the terms for his own aspirations for Cuban independence. Thus by imagining the Cuban nation as a homosocial pact between founding fathers and patriot sons, he creates a space within his own writing that both mourns and strives to recover a political vision viewed as lost or forgotten. Resembling what Marc Redfield calls “an impossible, ineradicable mourning, 4” Martí’s own cry of lament
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