Transoceanic Studies Ileana Rodríguez, Series Editor

Transatlantic Correspondence

Modernity, Epistolarity, and Literature in Spain and Spanish America, 1898–1992

José Luis Venegas

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number 2013037461 ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1256-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1256-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9359-1 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9359-X (cd-rom)

Cover design by Thao Thai Type set in Adobe Sabon Typeset by Juliet Williams Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction Engaging Correspondence 1

Chapter 1 Epistolarity and the Rhetoric of Hispanism 49

Chapter 2 Quixotic Correspondence 70

Chapter 3 Postal Insurgency 103

Chapter 4 Transatlantic Transitions 123

Chapter 5 Failed Deliveries 181

Conclusion Crossing Letters 215

Works Cited 223

Index 238

Acknowledgments

uring the years that it took me to complete this project, I have D incurred many debts that I must acknowledge now. I would like to thank, first of all, Wake Forest University for providing a grant from the Archie Fund for the Arts and the Humanities that allowed me to travel to Madrid, where I spent two intense weeks at the Biblioteca Nacional in the summer of 2010. I would also like to express my gratitude to Mar- garet Ewalt, José María Rodríguez García, and Brian Price, who have remained outstanding interlocutors, firm supporters, and tough critics throughout the whole process. Alejandro Mejías-López and Sebastiaan Faber shared their valuable insights on the project at a crucial moment, for which I am extremely grateful. I am also indebted to several col- leagues at Wake Forest, who read early drafts of some of the chapters and generously provided useful feedback. Many thanks to Dean Franco, Mary Friedman, Candelas Gala, and Kathryn Mayers. My appreciation also goes to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their thoughtful recommendations and strong endorsement as well as to Sandy Crooms and the rest of the editorial team at The Ohio State University Press for the professionalism with which they handled the evaluation and production of my book. My largest debt of gratitude is owed, as always, to my family, espe- cially my father, José Luis, and my sisters, Ana and Inmaculada, who have shown enthusiastic interest in the book’s central ideas from its

ix x Acknowledgments very inception. John and Lynn have continued to support me selflessly and unconditionally. Eva Isabel, my darling daughter, brings brightness, love, and hope to my life on a daily basis. My wonderful wife, Jessica, to whom this book is dedicated and who read every word of it, is not only my most incisive and perceptive critic in academic matters, but also my rock and the person who makes me who I am. Her rare intelligence is only matched by her incredible kindness. And, last but not least, some recognition is due to lovely Sugar Bear, who has been a loyal companion and quiet supporter for over a decade now. Earlier versions of some parts of this book were previously published in Modern Language Notes, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and Hispanic Review. I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to reprint material. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Introduction Engaging Correspondence

Correspondence: . . . 1. The action or fact of corresponding, or answer- ing to each other in fitness or mutual adaptation; congruity, harmony, agreement. Also said of the relation of one of the corresponding things. 2. Relation of agreement, similarity, or analogy. 3. Concordant or sym- pathetic response. 4. Relation between persons or communities; usually qualified as good, friendly, fair, ill, etc. 5. Intercourse, communication (between persons). 6. Intercourse or communication by letters. (Oxford English Dictionary)

n February 2, 1894, Senator Santiago de Liniers, newly Oinducted into the Spanish Royal Academy, gave a speech in front of his fellows on the utility of epistolary writing for the revitalization of Spain’s social life and historical reputation. At a time when Spanish intellectuals were looking for solutions to the country’s social deterioration and international decline, Liniers suggests that writing personal letters may renew an authentic national identity that he traces back to the med- ieval origins of the Castilian language. This authenticity survives, in his opinion, in the unpretentious epistolary prose of the popular classes, who have remained impervious to foreign “invasions” into the native culture (78). Just as writing letters can regenerate the lost vitality of Spain’s traditional society, so the nation’s epistolary archive can provide the necessary evidence to refute the international vilification of Spain and its imperial past. Liniers discusses private letters by Queen Isabella (which reveal her exemplarity as a wife and ruler), Phillip II (which portray the king as a caring father, a dedicated monarch, and a lover of Castile’s landscape),

1 2 Introduction and other prominent figures, such as Cardinal Cisneros and the Duke of Alba, all of whom participated actively in Spain’s imperial mission during the sixteenth century. The agents of Empire, Liniers suggests, were first and foremost admirable people brimming with humane qualities. The national epistolary archive is therefore a repository of documen- tary proof, unparalleled in its testimonial authenticity, against those who demonize imperial Spain as a backward, brutal, and benighted nation led by a host of cruel and sadistic rulers. In his response to Liniers’s address, fellow academician Francisco Silvela, soon to become Spain’s Prime Minister, goes on to urge Spanish historians to compile and edit epistolary collections of illustrious peninsular rulers and artists in order to “rebuild our history, without a doubt one of the most castigated ones by the preoccupation of the legends and the prejudices of men, the insti- tutions, and the customs passed along from one age to the next because of the lack of documentation, original studies, and criticism” (104).1 Only a few years after Liniers and Silvela embraced letter writing as a fundamental building block for the regeneration of decadent Spain, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz discussed in his conten- tious La reconquista de América: reflexiones sobre el panhispanismo [The Reconquest of America: Reflections on Pan-Hispanism] (1910) the importance of postal communication for the construction of modern national identities in Spanish America. Offering a counterpoint to the Spaniards’ imperial nostalgia, Ortiz rejects the neocolonial implica- tions of what he calls “postal Hispanism,” that is, the postal agreements proposed by influential peninsular scholars such as Rafael Altamira and Adolfo González Posada in order to stimulate the “mutual correspondence of ideas” across the Atlantic (Altamira, España en América 367).2

1. See Hazel Gold (“Postdata”) for a discussion of the literary and historiographical uses of letter writing in Spain during the nineteenth century. 2. In La reconquista de América, Ortiz sets out to dismantle the pan-Hispanic pro- posals that Altamira and other fellow University of Oviedo professors presented at the Hispano-American Conference celebrated in Oviedo in October 1900. Besides establishing postal agreements between the Peninsula and Spanish America, these scholars promoted the transatlantic exchange between college professors and students, the creation of an exclusively Hispanic cable for the relay of news without foreign interference, and the reduc- tion of tariffs to stimulate Ibero-American commerce, among other measures. What these professors saw as means to encourage the intellectual and financial traffic between Spain and the Spanish American republics, Ortiz interpreted as a Spanish crusade, a “spiritual reconquest of America that covers up a campaign of mercantile expansion” (Reconquista 105). Altamira further discussed the philosophical and material foundations of this pan- Hispanism in publications such as Mi viaje a América (1911), España en América (1910), and España y el programa americanista (1917). Engaging Correspondence 3

This pan-Hispanic “postal union,” Ortiz contends, is all but an innocent proposal. By promoting “the exclusive exchange of thoughts between nations of the same raza” (160), he claims, this bureaucratic measure seeks to strengthen Spain’s “imperialistic tendency,” restore its spiritual influence over the New World, and compensate for the country’s recent loss of its last colonies in America and Asia. Ortiz suggests that Span- ish Americans should clamp this bidirectional postal cord and open up their region’s epistolary communications and, by extension, cultural and economic commerce to nations beyond the pale of the former Spanish Empire. Far from the basis for national purity, postal exchange for Ortiz is a social practice that helps articulate a collective identity that is never given or straightforward, but rather a matter of exchange and dialogue. When compared to the discourse of the peninsular academicians, Ortiz’s reflections manifest the rifts between Spanish and Spanish American defi- nitions of modern national identities. For Liniers and Silvela, national regeneration involves the restoration of imperial prestige and a lost ancestral identity. For Ortiz, to be modern means to reject all forms of metropolitan control and to embrace a cosmopolitan, transcultural out- look. This brief comparison also reveals the productive ambivalence of postal communication and epistolarity—“the use of the letter’s formal properties to create meaning” (Altman 4)—in nineteenth- and twentieth- century Hispanic society and culture, specifically its capacity to gener- ate a given cultural position and its opposite, thus becoming a common ground where the conflicts among imperial, postcolonial, and national cultural projects play out. The interplay between imperial memories and modern designs that Liniers, Silvela, and Ortiz connect with real letters continues to be addressed in fictional letters in the metropolis and its former American dominions well into the twentieth century. Spanish and Spanish Amer- ican authors from Miguel de Unamuno to Ricardo Piglia and Gabriel García Márquez use the epistolary form in their literary works to express the multifaceted challenges and enduring consequences of building modern national cultures on the ruins of a transatlantic empire that was considered by many to be the antithesis of everything modern. Fol- lowing their cue, I aim to offer a new reading of modernity from the Hispanic periphery by analyzing essays, journalistic chronicles, and novels that intercalate letters or, while never quoting them directly, use them as central metaphors and motifs. In emplotting the post-imperial/postcolonial nation through letters, these texts connect nation building with other expressions of resistance to and assimilation of global discourses 4 Introduction that ultimately transcend the boundaries of both the nation and empire. A frame of analysis that buys into national and postcolonial paradigms cannot fully account for cultural phenomena such as the mobilization of Spanish civilization made by Spanish American intellectuals such as Rubén Darío to articulate cultural independence from both the Iberian metropolis and the United States around 1898; the use of Spain’s Amer- ican dimension by Spanish Civil War exiles to undermine and reject Franco’s conservative versions of Spanish identity from the 1940s to the 1960s; the transatlantic defense of Ibero-American ties as an alter- native to Cold War polarities during the 1980s; and the proliferation of avant-garde experimentation as a form of post-dictatorial critique of neoliberalism in Spain and Spanish America’s Southern Cone from the late 1970s on. A transoceanic perspective that holds these narratives together certainly demands attention to the uneven circulation across the Atlantic of the ideological and literary capital inextricably associated with the nation, modernity, and empire. Simultaneously, however, it also demands attention to the plurality of ways in which such cultural traffic cannot be contained and explained by these categories. Epistolar- ity, a largely overlooked rhetorical aspect in modern and contemporary Spanish and Spanish American literature, provides a textual thread that reveals the contradictory and multifarious contours of this transatlantic circulation. Although the differences between authentic correspondence and fictional epistolarity are obvious, the boundaries between real and literary letters often blur. Actual correspondents tend to adopt a literary style when putting pen to paper, while the missives we find in novels and other works of fiction usually create the illusion of being real-life documents. As Thomas Beebe puts it, “fictional uses of the letter appropriated the status and power the letter had already acquired from its established func- tions within other discursive practices” (3–4). But what is relevant for our concerns here is that authentic and fictional letters share a common set of formal features (what Janet Altman calls “epistolarity”) that Spanish and Spanish American historians, politicians, and writers use to describe and negotiate the cultural and social challenges associated with the for- mulation and performance of modernity in a Hispanic setting. Take, for instance, Eugenio de Ochoa, who states in the introduction to Epistolario español (1850), a collection of personal letters by classical and modern Spanish authors, that his goal in compiling and publishing these letters is, as Liniers and Silvela would later recommend, to tap into the essential Engaging Correspondence 5 source of the country’s character as expressed in the “natural” and “sim- ple” style of private letters (v). Due to their frequent use of the first-person narration and the present tense, private letters are often considered to be sincere and direct reflections of the writer’s thoughts and experi- ences. By ignoring the artificial, rhetorical nature of the letter’s naturali- dad (v), Ochoa finds in private correspondence an unparalleled resource to dissipate the “doubts” and “shadows” that occlude Spain’s past and international image (vii). He contends that public documents and “dip- lomatic correspondence” (xviii), often tainted by political interests, are not as valuable to reconstruct the nation’s past and imagine its future as the personal correspondence of illustrious men of letters. In these missives they can spill “the content of their hearts’ depths convinced of the inviolability of their secrets and with even more freedom than in a private conversation” (v). Therefore, it is in private correspondence, and not in royal decrees, imperial laws, or bills of lading for African slaves shipped to Cuba, that, according to Ochoa, one should look for the true face of the Spain’s imperial past, the cornerstone of the nation’s modern identity. A wide range of similar and conflicting rhetorical negotiations can also be found in more recent literary texts that use letters to inquire, directly or indirectly, into the legacies of colonialism in the modern nation and how these legacies are reshaped, contradicted, and transcended by the contours of shifting world-orders after the collapse of Spain’s empire in the Americas. Consider, for example, two texts that roughly bookend the historical period covered in this book: Miguel de Unamuno’s essay, “Don Quijote-Bolívar” (1914), and Gabriel García Márquez’s Bolívar novel, El general en su laberinto (1989). As distant chronologically and ideologically as they are, they coincide not only in their thematic focus on the icon of Spanish American independence, but also in how they establish symbolic connections between letter writing and the cultural and political afterlives of the imperial/colonial past in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As will become apparent in the following chapters, such reincarnations include Spain’s cultural imperialism after 1898 and its resistance to the rise of the United States as an empire; Francisco Franco’s revival of empire and its influence on twentieth-century Span- ish American dictatorships; and the return of Spain’s manifest destiny in Spanish America in the age of globalization and neoliberal politics. Epis- tolary writing serves writers from both sides of the Atlantic and from different historical periods to address these cultural issues from remark- ably different—and often contradictory—historical and ideological per- 6 Introduction spectives. Those who, like Unamuno, advocate Spain’s ascendancy in a cultural empire of transatlantic proportions and those who, like Gar- cía Márquez, call into question all forms of cultural imperialism, often turn to letters to prove their points. And so do authors who, like Carmen Martín Gaite and Diamela Eltit, seek to expose and criticize the shadow of empire in twentieth-century dictatorial and post-dictatorial regimes. Through letters literature engages with the shaping influence of empire in the Hispanic Atlantic world after 1898, while at the same time opening up to the multiple ways in which that transoceanic space is crossed by cultural and economic capital that ultimately escapes the purview of postcolonial approaches to history and culture. An important part of my argument is to show that letters register not just how modernity is always already traversed with the specter of coloniality, but also how they chart transatlantic confluences, intersections, and discrepancies that cannot be assimilated to a rigid interpretative paradigm that reduces all forms of cultural exchange to the dynamics of power between the metropolis and the (former) colonies. Global structures of power and dominant conceptions of modernity change over time, and so does the place that Spain and Spanish America occupy within those structures and in relation to each other. For example, in order to understand late twentieth-century post-dictatorial literary production in Spain and Spanish America’s Southern Cone and their transatlantic connections, it is necessary to take into account the political and ideological role of pan-Hispanic ideologies during and after dictatorial rule in these countries. But such an examination remains incomplete if one does not perceive the crossings and intersections between those enduring imperialistic ideologies and the neoliberal pacts whose political and cultural effects cannot be reduced to the confines of the imperial/ colonial logic. “Mixture,” writes Jacques Derrida in The Post Card, “is the letter, the epistle, which is not a genre, but all genres, literature itself” (48). The ever-shifting formal and ideological valences of letter writing make it a fitting medium to explore how a broad number of literary texts published between 1890s and the 1990s supplement, complicate, and con- tradict postcolonial understandings of the Hispanic Atlantic. And yet, despite the rhetorical possibilities of epistolary writing, focusing on the literary use of letters to explore these cultural phenomena may still seem like an odd choice, since neither Spain nor Spanish America have been traditionally thought to boast a rich epistolary tradition. Spaniards, as Miguel de Unamuno once said, have traditionally suffered from episto- Engaging Correspondence 7 lofobia (Obras completas 7: 987–88). Certainly, in Spain and its empire, the eighteenth century was not “the century of the letter” as it was in England, France, and Germany (Habermas, The Structural 48). As Jür- gen Habermas suggests, the birth of European modernity was an epistolary affair. During the eighteenth century, letter writing abandoned the rhetorical rules that had regulated it since classical antiquity and became the original expression of intimate thoughts. No longer the product of rigid formalistic conventions (the ars dictaminis) or instru- ments of imperial command and government (e.g., the relaciones sent by Spanish conquistadors to the King), epistolary writing contributed deci- sively to the creation and expansion of a public sphere where individual subjects could communicate freely with each other. During a historical time when “the post office window progressively replaced the ears of the priest” (Siegert 38), modern subjectivity and the new models of behav- ior associated with it found expression in epistolary sentimental novels, letter-writing manuals, and philosophical treatises. This is the age that witnessed the publication of classics such as Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), and Goethe’s Werther (1787). With the rise of the sentimental novel, notes Habermas, “the relations between author, work, and public changed. They became intimate mutual relationships between privatized individuals who were psychologically interested in what was ‘human,’ in self-knowledge, and in empathy” (The Structural 50). The epistolary sentimental novel, Habermas adds, was the literary expression of a nascent “public sphere of a rational-critical debate in the world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interior- ity of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself” (Habermas, The Structural 51). Widespread across Europe, epistolary fiction was an exotic plant on Spanish soil. Most of the epistolary novels published in the Peninsula during the eighteenth century were translations and adaptations of foreign models. It is indicative, as Beebe points out, “that Spanish translations of the epistolary fictions of Goethe and Rousseau came only in the early nineteenth century (1803 and 1814, respectively), and were published in France” (188). Furthermore, while we normally associate the European epistolary tradition in literature with swooning heroines, crafty seducers, and sentimental passions, epistolary novels, handbooks, and manuals published in Spain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were largely devoted to the education of women, who were encour- aged to remain within the domestic sphere and uphold their traditional 8 Introduction

(Catholic) roles of devoted wife and caring mother.3 These discrepancies suggest that epistolary writing should be understood as a culturally and historically specific stylistic choice, for it is always refashioned according to changing contexts and conditions. As Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Ver- hoeven correctly point out, the letter, which in traditional literary history has been read as “the paradigmatic form” to express female sentimental- ity in eighteenth-century novels written in French, English, and German, is in fact “a cultural institution with multiple histories” (4). I intend to reconstruct one such history by offering new readings of a broad range of Spanish and Spanish American texts—from Juan Valera’s Cartas America- nas (1889) and Rubén Darío’s España contemporánea (1907) to Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial (1980) and Diamela Eltit’s Los vigilantes (1994)—where the letter form features prominently. This selection of texts does not seek to constitute a coherent corpus around the notion of epistolary genre. In this study, epistolarity is not understood exclusively as a genre, but rather as a multifaceted trope, a device, and a theme. In other words, my intention is not to make these texts fit neatly into a genre category and then go on to draw genre-based inferences and conclusions. Instead, I use the texts to explore new pat- terns of analysis and routes of comparison that illuminate previously unexplored connections between a single formal and thematic feature and the contradictory and plural nature of Hispanic modernity. Specifically, these readings propose that in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Span- ish and Spanish American literature, epistolarity is not simply a medium through which the modern individual “unfolded himself in his subjectivity” (Habermas, The Structural 48). Rather, it is a form that registers the complex difficulties and intricacies that such process of unfolding involves in the Spanish-speaking world. This is not to say that letter writing has utterly antithetical uses in the context of European modernity, on the one hand, and in Spain and Spanish America, on the other hand. This rather simplistic distinction and the clear-cut Hispanic specificity that it entails are deeply complicated by the multiple borrowings made from European literary, philosophical, political, and anthropological sources by writers as diverse and chronologically and geographically distant from each

3. On epistolary writing as an instrument of discipline and indoctrination during the Spanish Enlightenment, see Rueda 159–88. For a discussion of the historical motivations for the scarcity of epistolary fiction in Spain, see Gold, “From Sensibility.” Garlinger’s important book, which studies the fictional use of letters to express homoerotic and homo- sexual desire in twentieth-century Spain, includes a discussion of the disciplinary function of epistolary handbooks in nineteenth-century Spain (xix–xxi). Engaging Correspondence 9 other as José Cadalso, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Juan Valera, Pedro Salinas, and Ricardo Piglia. However, in spite of these borrowings, the variety of authors examined in this book, and their widely diverse historical contexts, there is a remarkable consistency in how they use letter writing to express, contest, and reformulate dominant versions of what it means to be modern. Despite its close ties with the Enlightenment, letter writing is particularly well suited to complicate universalistic notions of modernity. As Janet Altman indicates, epistolary language is “marked by hiatuses of all types: spatial separation between writer and addressee, time lags between event and recording, between message transmission and message reception; blank spaces and lacunae in the manuscript. The letter is a both- and, either-or phenomenon, signifying either bridge or bar- rier, both presence and absence” (189). Besides thriving on non-syn- chronicity and non-simultaneity, which complicate the modern idea of linear historical progress, the letter’s transparency (i.e., its supposedly unmediated and natural manifestation of the writer’s psyche) infers pre- modern collective identities with the potential to pave over the historical, political, and cultural rifts caused by centuries of Spanish colonial presence in the Americas. Indeed, letters are particularly efficient to for- mulate organic conceptions of a transatlantic Hispanic identity, includ- ing what Unamuno famously termed intrahistoria, since they entwine everyday experience, language use, and the unchanging stylistic model provided by Spain’s literary classics. Of course, the letter’s rhetorical possibilities can also function—as happens in the fiction of Mexican novel- ist Gustavo Sainz—as a corrective to these forms of cultural nationalism and imperialism by contesting the temporal homogeneity demanded by organic conceptions of collectivity and the kind of historical continuity that unproblematically links colonial and postcolonial times. In sum, the writers analyzed here often attach contradictory values and meanings to the epistolary features shared by authentic and fictional letters, but they all capitalize on such features to represent and negotiate both their mar- ginal status within global narratives of modernity and the asymmetri- cal relations of domination, transformation, confluence, and resistance that continue to define the cultural interaction between Spain and Span- ish America after the empire’s final demise i