Nation and Narration (1)

 

 

Some Tripos questions to consider for this topic:

 

1.     “Words shape nations as much as guns do.” Discuss with reference to AT LEAST TWO writers or essayists.

2.     “The first authors of the new Republics were also among the Fathers of their countries, preparing national projects through prose fiction.” Discuss with reference to AT LEAST TWO authors.

3.     Discuss the relative influence of Europe and the United States of America on the concepts of national AND/OR Latin American identity as expressed in the work of TWO OR MORE essayists.

4.     “Nationalist or even regionalist thinking depends upon the creation of a false set of oppositions: between self and other, between civilized and barbarian.” Discuss with reference to AT LEAST TWO texts.

5.     “Latin American writers and statesmen saw their nations as blank pages upon which to ‘inscribe’ European civilization.” Discuss with reference to AT LEAST TWO writers and/or statesmen.

6.     Discuss the extent to which the opposition ‘civilización/barbarie’ is upheld AND/OR undermined by Latin American thinkers. You answer should refer to TWO OR MORE writers or essayists.

7.     “Behind the work of Latin American essayists lies the notion that art might somehow redeem society.” Discuss with reference to the work of TWO OR MORE essayists.

8.     “En suma, la cuestión del origen es el centro secreto de nuestra ansiedad y angustia” (OCTAVIO PAZ). Discuss with reference to the search for national/personal identity in TWO OR MORE texts.

9.     “It is curious that Latin American works influenced by the Romantic association between Literature and the Spirit of the Nation, usually end up portraying the forces of barbarism triumphing over those of civilization.”  Discuss with reference to TWO OR MORE texts.

 

 

Primary and Secondary Bibliography for Nation and Narration 1

 

 

 

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990; rpt 1993. [Collection of theoretical Essays, including one by Doris Sommer on Latin America.]

Echeverría, Esteban. El matadero. Ed. Leonor Fleming. Letras Hispánicas #251. Madrid: Cátedra, 1986 (written 1841).

Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Calibán: apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra América. México: Diógenes, 1971.

González Echevarría, Roberto. ‘A Lost World Rediscovered: Sarmiento’s Facundo’. In Halperín Donghi, et al. 220-56. Also in González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 93-141.

———. ‘The Case of the Speaking Statue: Ariel and the Magesterial Rhetoric of the Latin American Essay”. The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. 8-32.

Halperín Donghi, et al., eds. Sarmiento: Author of a Nation. Berkley and Los Ángeles: University of California Press, 1994.

Jones, C.A. Sarmiento: Facundo. Critical Guides to Spanish Texts #10. London: Grant and Cutler, 1974.

Rock, David. Argentina 1516-1982: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands War. London: Tauris, 1986. [For historical background.]

Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel. Ed. Belén Castro Morales. «Escritores de América». Madrid: Anaya, 1995 (1900).

Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo. Civilización y barbarie. Eds María Teresa Bella and Jordi Estrada. Barcelona: Planeta, 1986 (1845).

Shumway, Nicolas. The Invention of Argentina. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. [For information about the Generation of 1837.]

Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Los Ángeles: University of California Press, 1991; rpt 1993.

Sorensen Goodrich, Diana. Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Tiffin and Lawson: Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, eds. De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality. London: Routledge, 1994.

Some Quotations from El matadero(1841)

 

91: A pesar de que la mía es historia, no la empezaré por el arca de Noé y la genealogía de sus ascendien­tes como acostumbraban hacerlo los antiguos historiadores españoles de América, que deben ser nuestros prototipos.

 

91: la iglesia, adoptando el precepto de Epicteto, sustine, abstine (sufre, abstente), ordena vigilia y absti­nen­cia a los estómagos de los fieles, a causa de que la carne es pecaminosa, y, como dice el proverbio, busca a la carne.

 

92: Sucedió, pues, en aquel tiempo, una lluvia muy copiosa. Los caminos se anegaron; los pantanos se pusieron a nado […]

 

93: Las pobres mujeres salían sin aliento, anonadadas del templo, echando, como era natural, la culpa de aquella calamidad a los unitarios.

            Continuaba, sin embargo, lloviendo a cántaros […] Las campanas comenzaron a tocar rogativas por orden del muy católico Restaurador […]

 

93: Los libertinos, los incrédulos, es decir, los unitarios […]

 

94: Los pobres niños y enfermos se alimentaban con huevos y gallinas, y los gringos y herejotes bramaban por el beef-steak y el asado.

 

94: Multitud de negras rebusconas de achuras, como los caranchos de presa, se desbandaron por la ciudad como otras tantas harpías prontas a devorar cuanto hallaran comible.

 

95: Se originó de aquí una especie de guerra intestina entre los estómagos y las conciencias, atizada por el inexorable apetito y las no menos inexorables vociferaciones de los ministros de la iglesia

 

96: ¡Cosa extraña que haya estómagos privilegiados y estómagos sujetos a leyes inviolables y que la iglesia tenga la llave de los estómagos! [… E]l caso es reducir al hombre a una máquina cuyo móvil principal no sea su voluntad sino la de la iglesia y el gobierno. Quizá llegue el día en que sea prohibido respirar aire libre, pasearse y hasta conversar con un amigo, sin permiso de autoridad competente. Así era, poco más o menos, en los felices tiempos de nuestros beatos abuelos que por desgracia vino a turbar la revolución de Mayo.

 

98: Es de creer que el Restaurador tuviese permiso especial de su Ilustrísima para no abstenerse de carne

 

98: El espectáculo que ofrecía entonces [el matadero] era animado y pintoresco aunque reunía todo lo horriblemente feo, inmundo y deforme de una pequeña clase proletaria peculiar del Río de la Plata.

 

99: En la casilla […] se sienta el juez del matadero, personaje importante, caudillo de los carniceros y que ejerce la suma del poder en aquella pequeña república por delegación del Restaurador. [… Resalta] sobre su blanca cintura los siguientes letreros rojos: «Viva la Federación», «Viva el Restaurador y la heroína doña Encarnación Ezcurra», «Mueran los salvajes unitarios». Letreros muy significativos, símbolo de la fe política y religiosa de la gente del matadero.

 

100: La perspectiva del matadero a la distancia era grotesca, llena de animación. […] En torno de cada res resaltaba un grupo de figuras humanas de tez y raza distintas.

 

103: cuatro […] adolescentes, ventilaban a cuchilladas el derecho a una tripa gorda y un mondongo […]. Simulacro en pequeño era éste del modo bárbaro con que se ventilan en nuestro país las cuestiones y los derechos individuales y sociales. En fin, la escena que se representaba en el matadero era para vista, no para escrita.

 

104: —Es emperrado y arisco como un unitario —y al oír esta mágica palabra todos a una voz exclamaron:

            —¡Mueran los salvajes unitarios!

 

105: Diole [al toro] el tirón el enlazador sentando su caballo, desprendió el lazo de la asta, crujió por el aire un áspero zumbido y al mismo tiempo se vio rodar desde lo alto de una horqueta del corral, como si de golpe de hacha la hubiese dividido a cercén, una cabeza de niño cuyo tronco permaneció inmóvil sobre su caballo de palo, lanzando por cada arteria un largo chorro de sangre.

 

106: Cierto inglés, de vuelta de su saladero, vadeaba este pantano a la sazón, paso a paso, en un caballo algo arisco, y sin duda iba tan absorto en sus cálculos que no oyó el tropel de jinetes ni la gritería sino cuando el toro arremetía al pantano. Azoróse de repente su caballo dando un brinco al sesgo y echó a correr dejando al pobre hombre hundido media vara en el fango.

 

107: Brotó un torrente de la herida [del toro], exhaló algunos bramidos roncos, vaciló y cayó el soberbio animal entre los gritos de la chusma

 

107: Faltaba que resolver la duda sobre los órganos genitales del muerto […] mostrando a los especta­dores, dos enormes testículos, signo inequívoco de su dignidad de toro.

 

108: Mas de repente la ronca voz de un carnicero gritó: —¡Allí viene un unitario! —y al oír tan significativa palabra toda aquella chusma se detuvo como herida de una impresión subitánea.

            —¿No le ven la patilla en forma de U? No trae divisa en el fraque ni luto en el sombrero.

            —Perro unitario.

            —Es una cajetilla.

            —Monta en silla como los gringos.

            —La Mazorca con él.

            —¡La tijera!

 

110: ¡Qué nobleza de alma! ¡Qué bravura en los federales! Siempre en pandilla cayendo como buitres sobre la víctima inerte.

            —Degüéllalo, Matasiete […]

            —A la casilla con él, a la casilla. Preparen la mashorca y las tijeras. ¡Mueran los salvajes unitarios! ¡Viva el Restaurador de las leyes! […]

            [A]rrastraron al infeliz joven al banco del tormento como los sayones al Cristo.

 

112: —¿Por qué no llevas luto en el sombrero por la heroína?

            —¡Porque lo llevo en el corazón por la Patria, por la Patria que vosotros habéis asesinado, infames!

            —¿No sabes que así lo dispuso el Restaurador?

            —Lo dispusisteis vosotros, esclavos, para lisonjear el orgullo de vuestro señor y tributarle vasallaje infame.

            —¡Insolente! […] Abajo los calzones a ese mentecato cajetilla y a nalga pelada denle verga, bien atado sobre la mesa.

 

113: —Está rugiendo de rabia —articuló un sayón.

 

113: Entonces un torrente de sangre brotó borbolloneando de la boca y las narices del joven, y extendiéndose empezó a caer a chorros por entrambos lados de la mesa. Los sayones quedaron inmóviles y los espectadores estupefactos.

            —Reventó de rabia el salvaje unitario —dijo uno.

            —Tenía un río de sangre en las venas —articuló otro.

            —Pobre diablo: queríamos únicamente divertirnos con él y tomó la cosa demasiado a lo serio —exclamó el juez […]

            Los federales habían dado fin a una de sus innumerables proezas.

 

114: En aquel tiempo los carniceros degolladores del matadero eran los apóstoles que propagaban a verga y puñal la federación rosina […]. Llamaban ellos salvaje unitario, conforme a la jerga inventada por el Restaurador, patrón de la cofradía, a todo […] hombre decente y de corazón bien puesto, a todo patriota ilustrado amigo de las luces y de la libertad; y por el suceso anterior puede verse a las claras que el foco de la federación estaba en el matadero.

Some Quotations from Nation and Narration (1990)

 

1. Introduction: narrating the nation (Homi K. Bhabha)

 

1: Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation — or narration — might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. An idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force.

 

1: [Quote from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:] Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which — as well as against which — it came into being.

 

2: If the ambivalent figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between vocabularies, then what effect does this have on narratives and discourses that signify a sense of ‘nationness’: the heimlich pleasures of the hearth, the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other

 

2: To encounter the nation as it is written displays a temporality of culture and social consciousness more in tune with the partial, overdetermined process by which textual meaning is produced through the articulation of difference in language; more in keeping with the problem of closure which plays enigmatically in the discourse of the sign.

 

3: To study the nation through its narrative address does not merely draw attention to its language and rhetoric; it also attempts to alter the conceptual object itself. If the problematic ‘closure’ of textuality questions the ‘totalization’ of national culture, then its positive value lies in displaying the wide dissemination through which we construct the field of meanings and symbols associated with national life.

 

3: It is the project of Nation and Narration to explore the Janus-faced ambivalence of language itself in the construction of the Janus-faced discourse of the nation. This turns the familiar two-faced god into a figure of prodigious doubling that investigates the nation-space in the process of the articulation of elements: where meanings may be partial because they are in media res; and history may be half-made because it is in the process of being made; and the image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of ‘composing’ its powerful image. […] For the nation, as a form of cultural elaboration (in the Gramscian sense), is an agency of ambivalent narration that holds culture at its most productive position, as a force for ‘subordination, fracturing, diffusing, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding’ (Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic).

 

4: [T]he ambivalent, antagonistic perspective of nation as narration will establish the cultural boundaries of the nation so that they may be acknowledged as ‘containing’ thresholds of meaning that must be crossed, erased, and translated in the process of cultural production.

            The ‘locality’ of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself, nor must it be seen simply as ‘other’ in relation to what is outside or beyond it. The boundary is Janus-faced and the problem of outside/inside must always itself be a process of hybridity, incorporating new ‘people’ in relation to the body politic, generating other sites of meaning and, inevitably, in the political process, producing unmanned sites of political antagonism and unpredictable forces for political representation. The address to nation as narration stresses the insistence of political power and cultural authority in what Derrida describes as the ‘irreducible excess of the syntactic over the semantic’ (Dissemination). What emerges as an effect of such ‘incomplete signification’ is a turning of boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated.

5. Irresistible romance: the foundational fictions of Latin America (Doris Sommer)

 

71: The ‘unacknowledged’ ties between writing and legislating that Shelley wanted to reveal are no secret in Latin America. Arguments can […] be offered […] for the coincidence between establishing modern nations and projecting their ideal histories through the novel. But perhaps the most stunning connection is the fact that authors of romance were also among the fathers of their countries, preparing national projects through prose fiction, and implementing foundational fictions through legislative or military campaigns. At the turn of the nineteenth century, there was already a page-long list of Hispano-American writers who were also presidents of their countries.

 

75: Latin American romances are inevitably stories of star-crossed lovers who represent particular regions, races, parties, or economic interests which should naturally come together. Their passion for conjugal and sexual union spills over to a sentimental readership in a move that apparently hopes to win partisan minds along with hearts.

 

75: Benedict Anderson has indicated the ties between nation-building and print communities formed around newspapers and novels. The novels, he says, helped to create ‘imagined communities’ through their ‘empty, calendrical, time’, that accommodates an entire citizenry.

 

76: In the epistemological gaps that the non-science of history leaves open, narrators could project an ideal future. This is precisely what many narrators did, producing books that can be considered the classic novels of their respective countries: Argentina’s Amalia, Cuba’s Sab, Colombia’s María, Chile’s Martín Rivas, Brazil’s Iracema, Perú’s Aves sin nido, the Dominican Republic’s Ernriquillo, among many others.

 

79: Empty spaces were part of America’s demographic and discursive nature. She seemed to invite writing.

 

79: In Amalia (1851), the Argentine José Mármol opposes ‘civilization’, associated with the free-trading and Europeanizing Unitarian Party based in Buenos Aires, to the ‘barbarism’ of gaucho-like Federalists who dominated the interior. At the same time he was opposing white to dark skin, a privileged intelligentsia to the untutored masses who supported the Federalist dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas.

 

80: Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido (1889) will use the traditionally elitist opposition between civilization and barbarism to insist that Perú’s only hope for future justice is to bring enlightenment to the provinces in order to liberate not to exterminate the Indians.

 

91: The great Boom novels rewrite, or unwrite, the foundational fictions to show that in Latin America there was no romance, no political erotics that could bind national fathers to mothers. And no novel does this more programmatically than La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1964) by Carlos Fuentes.