The Possible Nation: Romanticism in Brazil and Argentina By Marcelo Freddi Lotufo B.A., State University of Campinas, December 2009 M.A., Brown University, May 2014 Dissertation A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2017 © Copyright 2017 by Marcelo Freddi Lotufo The dissertation by Marcelo Freddi Lotufo is accepted in its present form by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date ____________ _____________________________________________________ Professor Luiz Fernando Valente, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date ____________ _____________________________________________________ Professor Michelle Clayton, Reader Date ____________ _____________________________________________________ Professor Esther Whitfield, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date ____________ _____________________________________________________ Professor Andrew G Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School CURRICULUM VITAE Marcelo has received his M.A. also from Brown and a B.A. from the State University of Campinas, Brazil. Marcelo has published articles in several peer reviewed academic journals such as Hispania, Elipsis, Itinerários, Remate de Males, and Latin American Literary Review. He has published reviews of poetry and literary criticism at the journal Brasil/Brazil. He has also published a selection of poems by the New York based poet John Yau and has a forthcoming translation of Rosmarie Waldrop’s Driven to Abstraction to be published in Brazil in August 2017. He has also published fiction at the literary journal Rascunho. iii AKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank the committee for walking me through this process. And specially Prof. Valente for serving as the committee’s director. I also thank the department of Comparative Literature, the Graduate School and the Center for Latin American Studies at Brown University for the support they offered me throughout this project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction: 1 Chapter 1. Literary Criticism and Nation Building: Norberto de Sousa Silva and Juan Maria Gutierrez 11 Chapter 2. Between Salón and Institute: Juan Bautista Alberdi and Gonçalves de Magalhães 56 Chapter 3. Novel and Equality: José Mármol and Joaquim Manuel Macedo 108 Chapter 4. Nature Tableaux, Politics and Poetry: Gonçalves Dias and Esteban Echeverría 162 Chapter 5. Myth and Nation: National Symbols in Sarmiento, Hernandez and Alencar 213 Conclusion 248 Bibliography 254 v LIST OF IMAGES Page Image 1 Floresta Brasileira (1853), Manuel Araujo de Porto ALegre 211 Image 2 Intérieur d’une Forêt du Brésil (c.1819), Jean Baptiste de Clarac 211 Image 3 Valée de La Serra do Mar (1834), Jean Baptiste Debret 212 vi INTRODUCTION Romanticism in Latin America has been closely related to debates on nation building: Antonio Candido, Afrânio Coutinho, David Viñas, Beatriz Sarlo, Carlos Altamirano, and Doris Sommer, to stay with a few known names, all paid attention to the role of the romantic generations for nation building after the victory of the continent’s independence movements; and how the development of romantic aesthetics after colonialism was central for creating each country’s national identity and unity. This study follows on their footsteps, but proposing both a reconsideration of nation building under contemporary discussions of the relationship between aesthetics and politics – particularly those done by Jacques Rancière – and a comparative framework that pays attention in an equal measure to Brazil and Argentina. As posited by Antonio Candido, the nineteenth century was both the moment when Latin America gained political independence from the Iberian metropolises, but also the moment when a local literary tradition began to be structured in systematic terms in the continent. That is, for the first time, literature found in Latin America an environment conducive to its development, with writers, readers, and the circulation of books. It was also around this time that a sense of local continuity and influence started to be felt in Latin America’s literature, with authors referencing those that had come before them in their now independent countries, and thus forming the basis for their national literary traditions. A national literary system and the nation, that is, came into being around the same time. 1 It is not by chance, then, that both Eric Hobsbawm’s and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition, and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, consider the relationship between literature and nation building a central aspect for the rise of the modern nation state and, most specifically, of nationalism. For Hobsbawn and Ranger, literature and the arts in general were central for the creation of national symbols and myths that could transcend particular conflicts in name of national unity, safeguarding the hegemony of the particular elites that lead the process. For Anderson, literature, together with the press, was central in forming what he defined as “imagined communities;” that is, novels and newspapers were central in creating a sense of community between people that were not in direct relation to one another, helping form particular nations in opposition to others. Following their now canonical works, the main focuses for literary critics studying the period became to understand how literature helped form the social and ideological cohesion necessary for the development of nation states. In other words, literary critics and historians largely focused on the same question of nationalism. Doris Sommer’s Foundational fictions (1991) further specified how Latin American romantic fictions participated in nation building. For Sommer, national narratives were important in so far as they developed “strategies to contain the racial, regional, economic, and gender conflicts that threatened the development of new Latin American nations. After all, these novels were part of a general bourgeois project to hegemonize a culture in formation” (29). For the critic, allegorical texts like Iracema and Amália helped nineteenth-century Latin American creole elites create narratives of unity after their national independence, which allowed for the overcoming of local differences in the name of particular national projects. The encounter between Iracema and Martim, 2 or Amalia and Eduardo, that is, sutured the fragmented social and political fabric of Brazil and Argentina, opening the space for the future political and literary developments of each country and the establishment of liberal nation states after colonization; or, at least, this is the narrative the creole elites of the continent seem to write in these texts. In recent years, however, the work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has opened new ways of articulating the relation between literature and nation building. Though the critic has not used the vocabulary that sprung from Hobsbawn’s, Anderson’s, and Sommer’s works, he has largely focused on a similar problem: how communities are formed and the role of the arts in this process. For the nineteenth century, community building largely meant nation building. The French critic, however, does not focus on nationalism per se, or on the actual communities (or nations) projected by certain literary works, but on their limits, on how their borders were defined, and the role literature had in establishing them. For him, the question we should ask was not how the center of these communities remained united, but how they defined who belonged and who did not in them: “la politique est la constitution d’une sphère d’expérience spécifique où certains objets sont posés comme communs et certains sujets regardés comme capables de designer ces objets et d’argumenter à leur sujets” (Politique de La Literature 11). In other words, the central question for Rancière is one of equality; of understanding how we determine who is and who is not an equal. In suggesting we look at how the limits of communities are being defined, he shifts the focus from the group itself, and its discourse of cohesion, to its margins, for they define the symbolic conditions of possibility of our communities; of how egalitarian they can be imagined and built. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that the debate on aesthetics and politics, for Ranciére, needs not to be 3 understood by the subservience of the aesthetic realm to that of the political; the arts are not seen as instruments of hegemony, but as defining elements on the division – and sharing1 – of the world we inhabit. For the critic, artistic language is central on pushing and redefining the assumed limits of our communities, for it constantly looks for new forms of seeing and understanding the world, of organizing how things and peoples relate to one another: “les pratiques artistiques sont des ‘manières de faire’ qui interviennent dans la distribution générale des manières de faire et dans leurs rapports avec des manières d’être et des formes de visibilité” (Le partage du sensible 14). Writers, that is, “utilisent les mots comme des instruments de communication et se trouvent par là engagés, qu’ils veuillent ou non, dans les tâches de la construction d’un monde commun” (13). In his reading of nineteenth-century European literature, Rancière sees a new paradigm of equality – born hand in hand with the French Revolution – spread around Europe, redefining the ways people imagined and