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Cosmopolitan Desires

The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyonnd strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically winthout falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emnergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and histnory and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/?ashpoints series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz)

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Cosmopolitan Desires

Global Modernity and World Literature

in Latin America

Mariano Siskind

northwestern university press evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press

www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Copyright ©

2014
by Northwestern University Press. Published 2014

All rights reserved.

Digital Printing

ISBN 978
-0-8101-2990-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Siskind, Mariano, 1972- author.

Cosmopolitan desires : global modernity and world literature in Latin America /

Mariano Siskind.

pages cm. - (FlashPoints) ISBN

978-0-8101-2990-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Latin American literature - 20th century - History and criticism. 2. Modernism

(Literature) - Latin America. 3. Cosmopolitanism in literature. I. Title. II. Series:

FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.)

PQ7081.S58 2014

860.998 - dc23

n

2014001057

??16 16 661 ?1 ?1

Para Analía Ivanier

son tantos tus sueños que ves el cielo

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 3

Part I: World Literature as a Global Relation, or

The Material Production of Literary Worlds

1 . The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global 25 2 . The Global Life of Genres and the Material Travels of Magical Realism 59

Part II: Marginal Cosmopolitanism, Modernismo,

and the Desire for the World 3 . The Rise of Latin American World Literary

Discourses (

1882
1925
) 103 4 . Darío's French Universal and the World Mappings of

Modernismo

184
5 . Gómez Carrillo Eastbound: Travel, Orientalism, and the Jewish Question 223

Notes 261

Works Cited 317

Index 343

Acknowledgments

I wrote this book between 2007 and 2012, and during those ?ve eventful years I incurred many debts of gratitude. Sylvia Molloy is my favorite cosmopolitan intellectual. Learning from her at New York University was a privilege that has shaped my work profoundly, and I continue to consider myself her student. I am deeply grateful to Diana Sorensen and Doris Sommer for going above and beyond the call of duty to support my research and teaching at Harvard. I bene?ted enor- mously from Diana's insightful comments on the ?rst draft of chap- ter 1, particularly regarding the materiality of literary networks, and I have learned a great deal from Doris's incisive questions on the role of Caribbean and Jewish dislocations in chapters 2 and 5. From the moment I met him, David Damrosch has treated me with unparalleled kindness, encouraging my research on cosmopolitanism, inviting me to take part in American Comparative Literature Association panels, and including my work in anthologies. Michelle Clayton, who is one of the most generous scholars of the North Atlantic rim, took an interest in this book even before it was ?nished; in addition to her thought- ful comments on several chapters, I want to thank her for making my Cosmopolitan Desires part of the Flashpoints series of the Modern Languages Initiative and for taking care of the manuscript as if it were her own. Graciela Montaldo and Chris Bush read the entire manu- script and made extremely useful comments on its general structure and on global modernisms at the exact moment when I was beginning ix x Acknowledgments to rewrite numerous sections. Luis Fernández Cifuentes took me under his wing from my ?rst days at Harvard, providing priceless advice when I most needed it. I am incredibly fortunate to work with colleagues who have always made me feel at home at the Department of Romance Lan- guages and Literatures. Thanks to Mary Gaylord, Luis Girón Negrón, Virginie Greene, Christie McDonald, Susan Suleiman, Francesco Ers- pamer, Jeffrey Schnapp, Brad Epps, José Rabasa, Tom Conley, Janet Beizer, Nicolau Sevcenko, Joaquim Coelho, Alice Jardine, and Verena Andermatt Conley, and also to Mike Holmes, Kathy Coviello, Kather- ine Killough, Susan Fuerst, Frannie Lindsay, and Walter Hryshko. I am particularly grateful to my junior colleagues with whom I have shared the trenches during all these years, Mylène Priam, Sylvaine Guyot, Ser- gio Delgado, Daniel Aguirre, and Giuliana Minghelli, and to Johanna Liander, Adriana Gutiérrez, María Luisa Parra, Clemence Jouët-Pas- tré, and Stacy Katz for their warmth and collegiality. Among the many friends who have contributed to this book, I espe- cially want to thank Alejandra Uslenghi, Gonzalo Aguilar, and Ale- jandra Laera for their lucidity as readers and for being ever-present for almost two decades. Writing books, organizing panels, presenting papers, and imagining future collaborations are all the more enjoy- able when done in the company of friends and colleagues like Erin Graff Zivin, Héctor Hoyos, Guillermina de Ferrari, César Domínguez, Víctor Goldgel, Martín Gaspar, Ximena Briceño, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Heather Cleary, Rebecca Walkowitz, Jing Tsu, Javier Uriarte, Florencia Garramuño, Ernesto Livon-Grossman, Emily Maguire, Nina Gerassi- Navarro, Nathalie Bouzaglo, Víctor Vich, Javier Guerrero, Fernando Degiovanni, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Lena Burgos-Lafuente, Martín Ber- gel, and Gabriel Giorgi. I am also extremely grateful to María Teresa Gramuglio, Beatriz Sarlo, Carlos Altamirano, and Nancy Ruttenburg for supporting this project in its preliminary and later stages, but also for their unwavering friendship. I was able to conduct archival research in the United States and Latin America thanks to two travel fellowships from the David Rockefeller Cen- ter for Latin American Studies at Harvard and a Faculty of Arts and Sci- ences Research Enabling Grant. I have learned a great deal about this book from my co-panelists and audiences at numerous conferences and invited lectures where I have presented draft portions of this project. I would like to express particular appreciation to Homi Bhabha for inviting me to speak at Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center; to Franco Moretti, Margaret Cohen, and Nancy Ruttenburg for welcoming me at Stanford's

Acknowledgments xi

Center for the Study of the Novel; to Hernán Feldman for his intellectual hospitality at Emory University; to Florencia Garramuño for fruitful dis- cussions of the ideas underlying this book at the Foro de Crítica Cultural at Universidad de San Andrés; and, ?nally, to Martín Bergel, Alejandra Laera, Adrián Gorelik, Lila Caimari, and Hugo Vezzetti for a heated and interesting debate at the Instituto Dr. Emilio Ravignani at the Universi- dad de Buenos Aires. Early versions of chapter 1 and chapter 2 appeared in Comparative Literature (Fall 2010, 62.4) and The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2012), respectively. I thank Duke University Press and Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint them in revised form. I would like to express deep gratitude to George Rowe and Ato Quayson, editors of those publications, for their help and encourage- ment with these two chapters. The anonymous referees at Northwestern University Press provided invaluable criticism and helpful suggestions. I have tried out many of the hypotheses of this book in undergraduate and graduate seminars at Harvard, and I want to thank my students for many precious conversations. Among the participants in these seminars, I would like to acknowledge Rosario Hubert, Lotte Buiting, Carlos Varón González, Anna White-Nockleby, and Ernest Hartwell. I am deeply grateful to my loving friends in Buenos Aires, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Paris, and Australia, whose faces and voices are constantly with me over e-mail, Skype, and cell phones, and occasion- ally even face to face: Gabriel Schvarstein, Martín Moya, Juan Saadia, Mariano Polack, Mariano Kulish, Carmen Güiraldes, Martín Kohan, Carolina Lutenberg, Ernesto Semán, Claudio Benzecry, Lorelei El Jaber, and Sergio Chejfec. I thank each of them. But above all, I want to thank my family for their unconditional affec- tion and support. Raquel and Hugo, in-laws extraordinaire, my dear sis- ter Luli and her family in Santiago de Chile, my adoring parents, Rosalba and Horacio, and my grandfather, Bernardo Smulevici, who passed on to me his love of literature and storytelling (directly and through my mother): I could never adequately thank them for oh so many ways of loving and caring for me. Finally, I thank my beloved, beautiful sons, Valentín and Bruno, who every day rescue me from myself and take me to our shared universe of Beatles songs, movies, soccer rituals, and picture books (from Gorilita to Gruffalo!). This book is dedicated to the love of my life, Analía Ivanier, not because I could not have written this book without her, but for everything, everything else.

Cosmopolitan Desires

Introduction

In Latin America (as in other global peripheries), critical and aesthetic cosmopolitan discourses shared a common epistemological structure that I call deseo de mundo, desire for the world. Cosmopolitan intellec- tuals invoked the world alternately as a signi?er of abstract universality or a concrete and ?nite set of global trajectories traveled by writers and books. In either case, opening to the world permitted an escape from nationalist cultural formations and established a symbolic horizon for the realization of the translocal aesthetic potential of literature and cosmopolitan forms of subjectivation. I want to begin by reading the constitutive nature of these desejos do mundo and deseos de mundo in two particular and meaningful cosmopolitan imaginings of Latin

American culture.

In 1900, the Brazilian politician, diplomat, and writer Joaquim

Nabuco published a memoir,

Minha formação (My Formative Years),

describing his sentimental education as one of the most in?uential pub- lic intellectuals of the late Empire and early Republic. The historical importance of Nabuco's autobiography lies in his ?rsthand accounts of the abolition of slavery, the revolts and political maneuverings that led to the Empire's collapse, and his travels and encounters with notable literary and political ?gures. What interests me, however, is a remark- able section of the book titled "Atração do mundo" ("The Attraction of the World"), where Nabuco grounds his intellectual self-representation in a cosmopolitan discourse: "Minha curiosidade, o meu interesse, vae

4 Introduction

sempre para o ponto onde a acção do drama contemporâneo universal é mais complicada ou mais intensa. Sou antes um espectador do meu seculo do que do meu país; a peça é para mim a civilização, e se está representando em todos os theatros da humanidade, ligados hoje pelo telegrapho" (33-34) ("My curiosity or my interest always focuses on the most complicated or intense part of the action in the contemporary universal drama. I am more a spectator of my century than of my coun- try. For me, the play is civilization, and it is staged in all great theaters of humanity, now connected by the telegraph"; 24). Silviano Santiago reads Nabuco's cosmopolitan declaration as a crucial milestone in a tradition that Antonio Candido has described as a "síntese de tenden cias particularistas e universalistas" (12) ("synthesis of particularis- tic and universalist trends"). 1

But instead of a dialectical synthesis of

opposites, Santiago characterizes Nabuco's self-representation as that of a marginal witness to world affairs (thus his reliance on modern technologies of communication, like the telegraph), the sort of global mediation that shapes the peripheral position of Brazil and Latin Amer- ica at the beginning of the twentieth century: "Morando em um país provinciano, [Nabuco] está distante do palco onde a grande peça se desenrola, mas dela pode ser espectador no conforto do lar em virtude dos meios de comunicação de massa modernos, no caso o telégrafo. A oposição entre país de origem e século, e a preferencia pela crise da representação [do Imperio] e não pela busca de identidade nacional da joven nação" (12-13) ("Living in a provincial country, [Nabuco] is far from the stage where the great play is being performed, but he can be a spectator from his comfortable location thanks to modern media like the telegraph. The opposition between country of origin and his times signi?es his preference for the [Empire's] crisis of representation, to the detriment of his young country's search for national identity"). Nabuco admits that, despite their national signi?cance, local politics bore him (33). He conceives of himself as a spectator, a world-historical witness, only to "a acção do drama contemporaneo universal" ("the action of contemporary universal drama") that takes place beyond the national stage, out there in the undetermined, universal realm of civi- lization - the discursive ?eld where Nabuco grounds a cosmopolitan self-representation that relies on the radical opposition between the nation ("meu país") and humanity at large ("meu século," "drama con- temporâneo universal," "os theatros da humanidade"). Half a century later in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a pro- grammatic and polemical essay, "El escritor argentino y la tradición"

Introduction 5

("The Argentine Writer and Tradition"). In that piece, written as a lec- ture in

1951 and revised and published in 1953, he examines the con-

tingency and boundaries of the aesthetic tradition that should structure the Argentine literary imagination. He asks, "¿Cuál es la tradición argentina?" (272) ("What is Argentine tradition?"; 425), not because he seeks descriptive satisfaction, but rather in order to introduce his normative, radically universalist answer. However, before he articu- lates his cosmopolitan theory of the sources, institutions, and struc- tures of signi?cation of Argentine literature, he devotes his polemical energies to discrediting the prevailing responses to his question. His targets include predominant forms of particularistic localism (includ- ing the criollista avant-garde to which he had subscribed three decades earlier), the national populism of

Peronismo's cultural dicta, a meager

proposal to rekindle a close relation with peninsular cultural tradi- tions, and more generally, any foundationalist and essentialist concep- tion of cultural identity. Beyond the essay's polemical pulse, Borges is concerned with providing an interpretative framework for the nar- rative universe he had been assembling since the mid-1930s, one that was frequently characterized as too abstract, lacking clear referents, and, most problematically, disregarding and radically reshaping the traditional motifs of national literature. By the end of the essay, this framework doubles as a forceful call on Argentine writers to disregard national determinations and produce a cosmopolitan literature: "Creo que nuestra tradición es toda la cultura occidental, y creo también que tenemos derecho a esa tradición, mayor que el que pueden tener los habitantes de una u otra nación occidental" (272) ("I believe that our tradition is the whole of Western culture, and I also believe that we have a right to this tradition, a greater right than that which the inhab- itants of one Western nation or another may have"; 184), concluding, "Debemos pensar que nuestro patrimonio es el universo" (274) ("Wequotesdbs_dbs26.pdfusesText_32

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