Download Man on the Market: José Martı and the Poetics of Commerce

Man on the Market: José Martı́
and the Poetics of Commerce
ericka beckman
university of illinois, urbana-champaign
Artes y Sociedad económica van aparejadas.
—José Martı́, Guatemala (1877)
J
osé Martı́ is without a doubt the most prominent figure in the articulation of
an anti-imperialist and anti-commercial Latin Americanist discourse at the
turn of the nineteenth century. Here I understand Latin Americanism to mean
the construction of a unified, continental identity in opposition to AngloAmerica and/or Northern Europe, from the late nineteenth century until
today.1 A key element of this discourse is the assertion that the ‘‘value’’ of Latin
America lies in spiritual—and not material—wealth: if the United States and
Britain were characterized by ‘‘materialism,’’ in this context a codeword for the
money economy, Latin America was governed by a superior order of values.
Today, Martı́’s Latin Americanism is rather consistently associated with antieconomist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist positions (usually posited as interchangeable). He is considered the architect of a spiritual and political economy
based upon a uniquely American aesthetic expression, continental brotherhood,
and national autonomy in opposition to the imperialist designs of the United
States. The 1959 Cuban revolution, especially, has cast Martı́ retroactively as an
enemy of capitalist society; or, as Roberto Fernández Retamar has put it, as anticipating the socialist future ‘‘sin haber sido socialista él mismo’’ (44). Most recently, within the U.S. academy, scholars in postcolonial, Latino/a and ethnic
studies have looked to Martı́ as a cultural bridge between Americas North and
1
One of the most important assumptions of Latin Americanism—or in the case of Martı́,
‘Nuestro americanismo’—is that certain attitudes, beliefs, and practices are appropriate (propios) while others are foreign (ajenos) to Latin America. An excellent description of Martı́’s
literary-humanist articulation of the Latin American ‘‘we’’ in opposition to U.S. market society is elaborated by Julio Ramos. In his excavation of Latin Americanist discourse, Ramos
places Martı́ in dialogue with key forerunners like Francisco Bilbao and Eugenio Marı́a de
Hostos; and later twentieth-century figures such as Pedro Henrı́quez Ureña and Alfonso
Reyes. In a different sense, the term Latin Americanism has been used recently to describe
the discursive practices deployed to create ‘‘Latin America’’ as an object of study within the
U.S. academy (under area studies paradigms within the social sciences, and through the
popularity of ‘‘Boom’’ literature within Spanish literature departments). See Román de la
Campa.
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South, denouncing U.S. racism and imperialism in favor of a more fluid, inclusive utopia of regional identity.2
Yet Martı́’s passionate anti-imperialist stance and defense of national, spiritual
and aesthetic values above and beyond commodity exchange did not mean that
he was entirely opposed to the institutions and practices of bourgeois liberalism;
instead, he often looked to the ‘‘free’’ market as a utopian space of democratization and decolonization, a position that is rarely accorded critical attention.
Martı́ became a key figure in the articulation of an anti-commercial, antiimperialist regional identity, even as he worked to construct an eminently commercial vision of ‘‘Nuestra América.’’ This argument is developed in two parts.
First, I explore how ‘‘nature’’ became the materia prima of an aesthetic economy
existing in willful opposition to the capitalist market in the well-known 1882
prologue to J.A. Pérez Bonalde’s Poema del Niágara. Not coincidentally, Martı́’s
invocation of nature as non-commodifiable value coincided exactly with the consolidation of primary export economies in most of Latin America, as part of an
emerging world-system in which peripheral nations and colonies alike became
locked into providing the raw materials for industrial growth in capitalist centers.
In dialogue with this paradigm, another set of Martı́’s texts from the late 1870s
and early 1880s reveal an economic substrate to ‘‘nature’’ as the backbone of
material progress in Latin America. Martı́, taking on the double role of poet and
developer, thus attempted to make aesthetic production ‘‘useful’’ to commerce
through an emerging discourse of marketing, presenting a rather contradictory
conceptualization of the place of aesthetic production within regimes of capitalist modernization.
Studies by Ángel Rama, Julio Ramos, Susana Rotker, and Gene Bell-Villada,
among others, have productively explored the contradictory consequences of
the professionalization of writing in Latin America during this period. As societies experienced intense processes of modernization and commercialization in
the last decades of the nineteenth century, writing increasingly became a paid
profession—especially as a result of the boom in newspaper publishing—and the
text a commodity. Martı́, along with contemporaries like Rubén Darı́o, has become a model of sorts for examining the effects of this process. In general, critics
have emphasized authors’ grave discomfort with the effects of commercialization, an ideological stance that transformed modern literary discourse into a site
of market resistance. If we turn to a different set of texts, however, resistance
morphs into celebration, and poetry into marketing. On levels of both ideology
and form, then, Martı́’s critiques of the market coexisted with aestheticallydriven celebrations of its potential, opening up alternate conceptualizations of
‘‘the literary’’ at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Scholars have already pointed out an enduring conflict between Martı́’s attraction to and rejection of commerce. Ángel Rama, in a key essay, writes that Martı́
‘‘[no] se apartó un ápice de su filosofı́a librecambista: sólo al final viendo algunas perniciosas formas del liberalismo pidió atemperamiento de sus excesos’’
(141). More recently, Beatriz González Stephan has read Martı́’s essay on the
2
Gayatri Spivak, for example, has recently called upon Martı́ as a representative of postcolonial nationalism (96). See also Belnap and Fernández (eds.), De Sousa Santos, and Saldı́var.
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1889 Universal Exposition in Paris (published in La edad de oro) as demonstrating
‘‘no poca confianza en los logros materiales de la modernización y las posibilidades de su difusión democratizada’’ (237). I will examine Martı́’s simultaneous
critique and embrace of commercial expansion, especially with regard to the
different uses of aesthetic representation vis-à-vis market expansion. Aesthetic
expression could provide a refuge from the destabilizing currents of the market,
yet, in some contexts, it could also transform the market itself into an object of
desire for the modern Latin American subject.
‘‘Natural Poetry’’ and the Critique of the Market
The 1882 prologue to J.A. Pérez Bonalde’s Poema del Niágara, widely considered
a literary manifesto of Spanish American modernism, is one of Martı́’s most compelling defenses of the place of poetry in a world characterized by modern flux
and uncertainty. This text is important in casting the literary object in opposition
to the negative effects of capitalist modernity (what Raymond Williams has
termed in a different context a higher ‘‘Court of Appeal’’ [64]), as well as in its
attempt to grasp linguistically the promise and threat of modern transformation.
A double movement marks the text: modernity is seen to destroy an anterior
order that needs to be restored through poetry, while it is the vast upheaval
unleashed by modernity that provides the images and sensations at the heart of
a new literary aesthetic.
Regarding the prologue, Julio Ramos has written that Martı́ looked to literature as a depository of cultural value in stubborn resistance to U.S. capitalism, a
binary opposition that would come to characterize twentieth-century latinoamericanismo:
Before the form of knowledge privileged by modern rationalization,
Martı́ asserted the superiority of an alternative ‘knowledge’ found in
art, capable of even imagining a future harmony. For Martı́, the authority of modern literature was rooted precisely in its resistance to the
deterritorialized flows rampant in capitalist modernization. (xxxix,
emphasis in original)
Martı́ wrote his prologue in the United States (for a poem written about Niagara
Falls by a Venezuelan author), and I wish to approach it in dialogue with four
specific elements that the author sees at the heart of commercial society in the
U.S.: the rapid march of technological innovation, the hegemony of the money
economy, rampant financial speculation, and feminine luxury consumption.
These characteristics run a line from the most socially productive (the steam
train) and materially tangible (gold), to the most intangible (finance) and deceptive (luxury), infusing an uneven density and intensity into Martı́’s critique
of northern modernity.
In the line that perhaps best summarizes the aesthetic sensibility sketched in
the prologue, Martı́ writes: ‘‘Una tempestad es más bella que una locomotora’’
(OC 7: 234). Calling upon the breakneck speed and thrilling promise of the
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locomotive, a metonym for modernity in Martı́’s time, the natural phenomenon
is chosen as the more beautiful spectacle of the two. But already, his defense of
the ‘‘natural’’ over and against the technology of the steam train is ambiguous,
since it is the radical proliferation of ideas and objects in modern society that
provide the terms and framework for a new aesthetic program in the first place.
Marshall Berman, after Marx, has called modernity a state in which ‘‘everything
solid melts into air.’’ This statement is echoed in the prologue: in the ‘‘nuevo
estado social,’’ ‘‘los ferrocarriles echan abajo la selva; los diarios la selva humana’’ (OC 7: 225). Here Martı́ refers again to the omnipresence of the railway
in late-nineteenth cultural imaginaries, and adds the newspaper, an industrially
produced object that would mark his own life in profound ways. For it was eking
out a meager living as a journalist in New York City in the 1880s that Martı́
was able to disseminate his thoughts to readers across Latin America, especially
through his widely reproduced chronicles of life in the United States.
In the prologue, the confusion and destructive pull of the times have weakened the place of poetry in society. The classical model of the poet-warrior is
gone; today, we see poor, pallid young men, poets with ‘‘broken wings,’’ faced
with ‘‘nostalgia for the great deed.’’ This crisis is brought on by the general upset
of modernity, but it is marked particularly as a result of the decline of ‘‘spiritual’’
values and the predominance of ‘‘material’’ ones. It is thus that poetry—the
reserve of spiritual value par excellence for Martı́—is called upon explicitly to
counteract this fall into commerce:
¡Ruines tiempos, en que no priva más arte que el de llenar bien los
graneros de la casa, y sentarse en silla de oro, y vivir todo dorado; sin
ver que la naturaleza humana no ha de cambiar de como es, y con
sacar el oro afuera, no se hace sino quedarse sin oro alguno adentro!
(OC 7: 223)
The true social function of art—to express human nature—has become subordinated to the spurious ‘‘art’’ of individual gain. If the ‘‘gold without’’ belongs to
the money economy, ‘‘the gold within’’ should be inalienable. But to the extent
that material gold is accumulated, the reserve of ‘‘inner’’ gold—virtue—is depleted. The epic poet, once guard over this fund of virtue, has lost his place in a
world run by the money form: today, Martı́ writes, ‘‘apenas tienen hoy los hombres tiempo para beber el oro de los vasos, y cubrir de él a las mujeres, y sacarlo
de las minas’’ (OC 7: 224), signaling a turn away from civic duty, and toward the
satisfaction of individual material desires.
If for Martı́ the money economy is false when compared with the true ‘‘gold’’
of the poet (a concept that resonates with the ideas of the Victorian philosopher
Thomas Carlyle),3 even more worrisome was the fact that this money economy
3
Martı́ was familiar with Thomas Carlyle by way of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a great admirer
of the Victorian philosopher. In Carlyle’s famous lectures, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the
Heroic in History, delivered in 1840, he lamented the presence of ‘‘counterfeit’’ subjects in
the midst of the ‘‘gold’’ of true heroes: ‘‘They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries,
all representing gold—and several of them, alas, always are forged notes. We can do with
some forged false notes; with a good many even; but not with all, or the most of them
forged!’’ (12).
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was based on the fictitious and duplicitous machinations of financial speculation.
I would like to turn briefly here to a chronicle Martı́ wrote about the dishonest
business practices and ensuing bankruptcy of General Ulysses S. Grant’s firm,
Grant and Ward, in 1884, published in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación.
Here the author provides further insight into what is wrong with modern market
society: it is a system in which value surges and deflates not in accordance with
any natural law, but according to the whims of the market:
Es legı́timo el tráfico en valores, y ha de haber un lugar donde el que
se vea corto de dinero, y sobrado de papeles que lo representan,
venda, y compre el que quiera colocar sus fondos. Pero hinchar las
acciones a precios que no están en relación con sus orı́genes y valor
presente y probable; imponer a papeles nulos un valor ficticio; forzar,
con escaramuzas y asedios de bolsa, que no son en sı́ más que voluntarias suposiciones, ocultaciones culpables y descaradas mentiras, alzas
o bajas que no proceden de los cambios reales del valor representado—es una estafa indigna de que las gentes honradas pongan su
inteligencia en organizarla, o su limpia fortuna en mantenerla en
movimiento y crédito. Ha echado por caminos la existencia moderna,
en que la serenidad del ánimo, la claridad de lo interior y la vida
legı́tima van siendo imposibles. (OC 10: 62)
‘‘Traffic’’ in stocks is legitimate, Martı́ writes; the problem arises when representations exceed true value. Stocks, as paper representations of value, can easily be
inflated, manipulated and forced, resulting in bald-faced lies and outright fraud.
‘‘Fictitious’’ value, a term often applied to credit-based wealth, provokes material
crises; more broadly, however, the machinations of the stock market point to
a larger crisis in representation, by which it becomes increasingly difficult to
distinguish truth from falsehood, and honor from corruption.
To return to the prologue, Martı́’s critique of fictitious value in a financial
system might be read through his stern critique of those poets who have abandoned virtue in favor of artifice and caprice:
¡Son los hombres como ciertas damiselas, que se prendan de las virtudes cuando las ven encomiadas por los demás, o sublimadas en
sonante prosa o en alados versos, mas luego que se han abrazado a la
virtud, que tiene forma de cruz, la echan de sı́ con espanto, como si
fuera mortaja roedora que les comiera las rosas de las mejillas, y el
gozo de los besos, y ese collar de mariposas de colores que gustan de
ceñirse al cuello las mujeres! (OC 7: 223)
Here Martı́ stresses the qualities that should not guide literary production
through the men whose moral values fluctuate like those of the stock market,
embracing and rejecting virtue at whim. And like the caprice of the stock market
(often represented as a fickle woman, as Laura Brown has shown), moral volubility is expressly feminized. The ‘‘damiselas’’ he invokes here are fickle, but they
are also coded as consumers bedazzled with bright objects, metaphorized through
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their non-committal trying on and casting off ‘‘butterfly necklaces.’’ While Martı́
is surely talking about the conditions of literary production, in which the writer’s
work becomes subject to market demands, he is also commenting upon the insatiable desire to consume objects under commodity culture, a desire he associates,
in dialogue with contemporary discourses on fashion and shopping, with women
(see Bowlby, Felski).
A consistent theme in Martı́’s writings is his deep mistrust of ‘‘superfluous’’
consumption, inserting him within a long anti-luxury tradition of Western
thought.4 His most immediate reference was without a doubt Rousseau (a guiding figure for generations of Spanish American letrados), refracted via a Krausist
vision of Republican virtue and austerity.5 In keeping with earlier discourses on
consumption, luxury’s ‘‘name’’ is Woman. As he wrote in a second installment
of ‘‘Impressions of America’’ written in English for The Hour in 1880:
We must ask women for the natural end of their inextinguishable
thirst for pleasure and amusement. We must ask them if being so
exclusively devoted to the possession of silk dresses, dazzling diamonds and all kinds of costly fancies could afterwards carry into their
homes those solid virtues, those sweet feelings, that kind resignation,
that evangelic power of consolation which can only keep up a hearth
shaken by misfortune and inspire children with contempt for regular
pleasures and the love of internal satisfactions that make men happy
and strong, as they did Ishmael, against the days of poverty.’’ (OC 19:
121)6
It is worth noting that Martı́ calls upon present-day Ishmaels as the male subjects
threatened by women’s poisonous attachment to luxury. This Biblical name, of
course, was immortalized in the same year in Ismaelillo (1880), a collection of
verses dedicated to his absent son Pepe, from which women are conspicuously
absent.7
Here it is important to point out that luxury is rejected on both social and
aesthetic levels as a threat to ideals of masculine civic duty and community. In
4
John Sekora provides a thorough discussion of the transhistorical associations between
luxury and foreignness (especially via Asia), and luxury and femininity (by way of Eve in
Christian thought). Of special interest to a discussion of Martı́ is the Roman opposition
between luxus and virtus articulated by Cicero and others, which would resound within later
articulations of manly Republican virtue in nineteenth-century Latin America and elsewhere.
5
For a discussion of the Bolivarian Republican ideal of austerity inherited from Rousseau,
among others, see Castro Leiva. For an analysis of Martı́’s adhesion to the neo-Kantian
thought of Karl Krause, characterized in part by its aversion to luxury and frivolity, see Peter
Turton. Richard Rosa provides an excellent analysis of the Latin American civic tradition in
the writings of Eugenio Marı́a de Hostos.
6
Martı́, of course, was not the only Latin American author to associate the ills of modernity
with feminine luxury consumption. This theme organizes several nineteenth-century novels,
running from the Peruvian Benjamı́n Cisneros’s Julia (1860), to the Uruguayan Lola Larrosa’s El lujo (1880), to better-known texts such as Lucio V. López’s La gran aldea (1884).
7
As Ángel Rama points out, Martı́’s Ismaelillo is predicated upon a father-son relationship
in which any trace of the feminine is erased; instead, the two form a ‘‘férrea y autosuficiente
pareja masculina’’ (150).
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this regard Martı́ should be distinguished from contemporaries such as Rubén
Darı́o, Julián del Casal, and José Asunción Silva, all of whom cultivated their
aesthetic sensibilities in positive relation to luxury (even as they distanced themselves from luxury’s feminine identifications). Instead, more in line with earlier
writer-statesmen ranging from Simón Bolı́var and Andrés Bello to Domingo F.
Sarmiento and Eugenio Marı́a de Hostos, Martı́ was characterized by sobriety
and austerity in his attitudes toward consumption; also like these figures, he
would insist that writing be socially useful, and denounce luxury as a threat to the
Republic.
It is against this array of threats to masculine integrity that Martı́’s prologue
advocates the restoration of a male code of honor through natural poetry, an
artistic form that rejects (feminized) duplicity, artifice, and excess of the urban
marketplace in its turn toward nature:
Lo que el Niágara cuenta; las voces del torrente; los gemidos del alma
humana; la majestad del alma universal; el diálogo titánico entre el
hombre impaciente y la naturaleza desdeñosa; el clamor desesperado
de hijo de gran padre desconocido, que pide a su madre muda el
secreto de su nacimiento. (OC 7: 231)
In contrast with the modern city, there is a soothing element to the forces of
Niagara Falls, designed by a divine hand. Notably, the feminine becomes reassuring again, as the mute mother and ever-faithful wife (‘‘esposa que jamás desama’’
[OC 7: 231]); the father is absent, allowing the new men to direct their own
destinies; ‘‘Urge devolver los hombres a sı́ mismos,’’ Martı́ writes (OC 7:230),
positing the possibility of the reconstitution of virtue in nature. Importantly, this
attempt occurs against the backdrop of unstable, permanently fluctuating and
feminizing urban modernity, marking manliness and ‘‘nature’’—the only real
‘‘gold’’ possible—off limits from capitalist exchange.
Utility and Transcendence: The Natural Poet Goes to Market
The setting of the poem considered by Martı́, Niagara Falls, had become an
icon of sublime nature for generations of Latin American authors, providing a
touchstone for a Latin American poetic community via the cataract on the U.S./
Canada border.8 Ironically, however, as Elizabeth McKinsey has shown, this site
had become a major tourist attraction by the end of the nineteenth century,
replete with the ‘‘artificial’’ and crassly commercial elements most despised by
Martı́ (who, it should be noted, never visited the Falls himself ): alongside the
natural phenomenon stood the commodity spectacle, signaled by a proliferation
of souvenir stands, rubber-suited tour guides, and Irish immigrants dressed as
8
The Cuban José M. Heredia’s 1824 poem ‘‘Niágara’’ served as inspiration for Pérez
Bonalde; other nineteenth-century Latin American writers who wrote about Niagara Falls
include Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Eduardo Mansilla, and Justo
Sierra.
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American Indians. In this sense, Niagara Falls in 1882 might have shared some
characteristics with Coney Island, the urban tourist attraction Martı́ had chronicled for a Bogotá newspaper a year earlier. It was in this later text, Julio Ramos
has argued, that the Cuban author expressed an understanding of a spiritualized, aestheticized Latin American ‘‘we’’ in opposition to the commercial laws
governing U.S. society (206). Standing apart from the reveling urban masses,
Martı́ writes: ‘‘Otros pueblos—y nosotros entre ellos—vivimos devorados por un
sublime demonio interior, que nos empuja a la persecución infatigable de un
ideal de amor o gloria [ . . . ]. No ası́ aquellos espı́ritus tranquilos, turbados sólo
por el ansia de la posesión de una fortuna’’ (OC 9: 126).
In contrast with Coney Island as tourist mecca, the commodification of Niagara Falls is not an issue for Martı́’s discussion of a poem, even though its Venezuelan author had written his verses as a tourist there in 1880. What we might call a
commercial prehistory of the prologue to the Poema del Niágara involves Pérez
Bonalde himself as prototype for the ‘‘natural poet.’’ For this figure, when not
writing about Niagara Falls, was a commercial agent for the New York-based perfume and soap firm Lanman and Kemp. A gifted linguist, he was in charge of
marketing the company’s products in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and penning advertisements for its toiletries.9 It was in this double capacity, as ad-man
and poet, that Martı́ met Pérez Bonalde first in Venezuela and later in Spanishspeaking New York literary circles in the early 1880s.10
What does it mean that the site identified with a non-commodifiable fund of
spiritual value in Martı́’s prologue was well on its way to becoming one of the
most notorious late-nineteenth-century representatives of nature commodified?
Why is the commodification of nature suppressed in the prologue, while it becomes the organizing element of his critique of U.S. culture in texts like ‘‘Coney
Island’’? On the other hand, what does it mean that Martı́’s ‘‘natural poet’’
marketed luxury commodities (most likely to female consumers)? The utopian,
unmediated relationship between ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘nature’’ sought after in the prologue (and in Pérez Bonalde’s poem itself ) is thus undergirded by a set of circumstances that openly contradict the vigorously wrought separation between
the poet and the feminized commodity culture surrounding him. For what could
be more contrary to the values of ‘‘nature’’ than advertising, a genre that selfconsciously deploys representative language to inflate the value of commodities?
Given Martı́’s critique of the duplicity of modern market culture, how can we
interpret the fact that the male poetic subject he showcased was engaged in the
most ‘‘insincere’’ of professions? In posing these questions, I do not wish to
suggest that Martı́ (or Pérez Bonalde for that matter) was naive or ‘‘insincere’’;
rather, I want to point out the extent to which an emerging literary discourse
was deeply embedded within the market conditions it rejected.
9
Pérez Bonalde’s advertisements for Lanman and Kemp were written in seven languages
and appeared in different media over the course of eighteen years (1870–1888; see Paredes).
In 1890, the Colombian poet José Asunción Silva, in a text on the uses of advertising in
Bogotá admired the campaigns launched by Lanman and Kemp in New York City newspapers, and proposed them as a model for Colombian businessmen (Santos Molano 5).
10
Martı́ and Pérez Bonalde became friends as participants in the literary group that met
at the Salón Theiss, on 14th Street in New York City. It seems that in later years this friendship
soured, as Pérez Bonalde became addicted to morphine (see Martı́, OC 20: 123).
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Pérez Bonalde was not the only writer engaged in marketing products in his
day-to-day life. Martı́, as I will show in this section, was also a consummate promoter of Latin American commodities, especially with regard to the region’s
natural resources. Nature as poetic ideal, in some cases, acquires an explicitly
economic dimension as Latin America’s main mode of production during the
last decades of the nineteenth century.
The Practical-Utilitarian Critique of Literary Production
When viewed from the United States, modern market society was the negative
object against which the natural poet could articulate a code of values superior
to those governing the money economy, a recurring element of modern cultural
discourse in Latin America. When discussing the future of the region, however,
Martı́ often reversed this formula by subordinating literature to matters of material progress. In January 1884, more than a year after publishing his prologue to
the Poema del Niágara, he provided a very different evaluation of the place of
literary expression under capitalist modernity. He addressed the Spanishspeaking readers of the New York-based commercial newspaper La América, to
which he recently had been appointed director:
De unas tierras se piden que sea periódico exclusivamente literario.
Hermoso serı́a un periódico de este género; pero los tiempos son
graves, y acaso temibles, y ni un ápice menos que crı́ticos. Se van
levantando en el espacio, como inmensos y lentos fantasmas, los problemas vitales de América:—piden los tiempos algo más que fábricas de
imaginación y urdimbres de belleza. Se puede ver en todos los rostros y
en todos los paı́ses, como sı́mbolos de la época, la vacilación y la
angustia.—El Mundo entero es hoy una inmensa pregunta. (OC 8:
266; emphasis added)
The ‘‘ruinous age’’ of the prologue is here referred to as ‘‘grave times,’’ in which
the problems of modernity arise like immense, looming specters. Taking a sentence almost verbatim from the prologue, in which he notes that in the present
‘‘todo es pregunta’’ (OC 7: 232), Martı́ underscores the utter instability of modern life. But while the first text proposes to deal with flux and uncertainty
through ‘‘natural poetry,’’ the editorial in La América tells us that literature is not
enough, suggesting that the ‘‘factories of the imagination’’ and ‘‘machinations
of beauty’’ are just as fleeting as the ghosts of modernity; they are mere speculations. The contours of a split subjectivity begin to emerge, as Martı́ in different
moments and in different contexts alternately upholds literature as a moral compass for ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ and dismisses it as an impediment to the region’s
material progress.
The ‘‘grave times’’ invoked in this editorial must be situated within the vast
material transformations experienced by Latin American countries in the 1870s
and 1880s. Significantly, the fin-de-siècle discourse of Latin ‘‘spirit’’ in opposition to U.S. ‘‘materialism’’ articulated by Martı́ (and reaching its maximum ex-
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pression with Rodó’s arielismo) emerged at a moment in which the region’s
countries were being incorporated on an unprecedented scale into global networks of commodity exchange, especially as providers of ‘‘raw’’ mineral and agricultural commodities such as coffee, sugar, timber, nitrates, and copper. Martı́’s
Cuba, while ruled by an agonizing Spanish Empire, had a booming sugar economy that fell increasingly into U.S. orbit. For historians such as Tulio Halperı́n
Donghi, the last two decades of the nineteenth century represented ‘‘the maturity of the neocolonial order’’ across Latin America; for Steven C. Topik and
Allen Wells, this period marked a ‘‘Second Conquest’’ of the region, this time by
nothern European and U.S. capital. Precisely during this time Latin American
societies were being made over in the image of global capital—albeit to varying
degrees—through increased export capacity, the construction of railways, influxes of foreign goods, and, in some places, rapid urbanization and European
immigration. The tumultuous, destructive and ‘‘unnatural’’ pull of capital, then,
was not affecting just the United States, but the community Martı́ famously referred to as ‘‘Nuestra América.’’ While living in New York City, Martı́ was understandably most captivated by the transformations wrought by commercialization
in the United States; as many of his writings show, however, he was very concerned with processes of modernization in Latin America. And, importantly for
my argument, Martı́ would never view these parallel stories of market expansion
with the same degree of suspicion. Instead, a whole subset of his writings directed the aesthetic power of literature toward cultivating a sense of the utopian
possibilities promised by commercial expansion in the South.
Contradictorily for Martı́, it was in part because men were too concerned with
‘‘purely literary’’ concerns that Latin America faced such grave dangers. In this
way, he invokes the nineteenth-century trope of Spanish-inherited ‘‘literariness’’
as an obstacle to ‘‘progress’’ in Latin America. This mistrust of the literary has
early roots in Martı́’s writings. During his stay in Mexico in 1875, in an article
published in the Revista Universal, he lamented the fact that América lacked the
ability to channel creative potential into economic productivity. The Latin American subject ‘‘vuela errante por lo improductivo y lo ilı́mite y hace de la vida
oficio de poeta, el que tiene el deber formal de hacerla oficio de hombre’’ (OC
6:81). Here ‘‘oficio de poeta’’ is the negative definition of ‘‘oficio de hombre,’’
setting up the first as that which must be modified in order for the second to
emerge. Manly civic duty is equated with economic production, measured
against a feminizing penchant for the non-productive labor of the poet, reversing
the opposition between manly poetry and feminizing market society. Remaining
stable, however, is Martı́’s privileging of the masculine term in opposition to a
threat coded as feminine. Depending upon the context, then, the threat can be
the ‘‘unnaturalness’’ of market society; at other times it is poetry, a frivolous
activity that impedes manly productive duty.
In his unfavorable diagnosis of the gulf between Latin poetic sentiment and
U.S. practicality, Martı́ echoes Domingo F. Sarmiento, the predecessor with
whom he is most often contrasted. In his Viajes, Sarmiento bid an irritated farewell to his continent by condemning Spanish colonial literary habits for the region’s ineptitude in commerce and industry. The Spaniard, ‘‘inhábil para el
comercio [. . .] negado para la industria [. . .] se encierra en sı́ mismo y hace
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versos’’ (49–50). For both Sarmiento and Martı́—two figures often posed as
polar opposites, especially with regard to the latter’s rejection of the former’s
racist Eurocentrism—the Spanish colonial legacy is marked by a certain kind of
ornamental (and feminized) writing that impedes commercial progress. To
throw off that yoke, then, meant aligning the lettered project with more ‘‘practical’’ endeavors, which in the late nineteenth century necessarily involved commercial enterprise. Martı́, of course, was far more critical than Sarmiento of U.S.
commercial expansion. Yet even for the Cuban, poetic sentiment was at once
fundamental to the Latin American community and a constant threat to its integrity.
Americanist Journalism and the Poetry of Commerce
It is with this utilitarian-practical critique of literature in mind that I would like
to turn to a speech Martı́ delivered in 1881 to inaugurate the Caracas Club de
Comercio. While the speech was delivered in the context of a velada literaria, or
literary evening, it provides a dramatic illustration of the poet in the role of
‘‘spiritual guide’’ to creole businessmen:
Y yo vi entonces, desde estos vastos valles, un espectáculo futuro en
que yo quiero, o caer o tomar parte.—Vi hervir las fuerzas de la tierra;—y cubrirse como de humeantes desfiles de alegres barcos los
bullentes rı́os; y abatirse (tenderse) los bosques por la yerba (tierra),
para dar paso a esa gran conquistadora que gime, vuela y brama;—y
verdear las faldas de los montes, no con el verde oscuro de la selva
sino con el verde claro de la hacienda;—y sobre la meseta vi erguirse
pueblos (el pueblo);—y en los puertos, como bandadas de mariposas,
vi aletear (flamear), en mástiles delgados regocijados, (alegres y) numerosı́simas banderas;—y vi, puestos al servicio de los hombres, el
agua del rı́o, la entraña de la tierra, el fuego del volcán. (OC 7: 282)
From a multiple set of locations (valleys, plateaus, mountains, rivers), the poetseer produces a landscape. An image of the sublime, terrifying movements of
the earth gives way to one of harmonious movement, as ‘‘happy boats’’ glide
along rivers, their flags flapping in the wind. In contrast with his exaltation of
‘‘raw’’ nature in the ‘‘Prólogo al Poema del Niágara,’’ this text seeks beauty in the
domestication of the landscape. It does not bother Martı́ that the forest submits
to the hacienda, because the results are productive. Indeed, the water of the
river, the entrails of the earth, and the fire of the volcano are beautiful insofar
as they are transformed and made economically useful. A rather different aesthetic is at work, one which identifies utility as beautiful and morally good.
Strangely in this passage, the hacienda—epitome of Spanish exploitation—is
exalted as an image of modernity and economic productivity. What is being produced in the hacienda is not mentioned. In 1880s Venezuela, the vast majority
of haciendas were most likely dedicated to the cultivation of coffee (as were
those in Brazil, Colombia, and Guatemala), following this crop’s spectacular rise
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to global prominence in the 1870s. Nor does Martı́ make reference to who owns
the haciendas, and who works them. Instead, he prefers images of harmony, in
which the winds of commerce enrich the nation as a whole.
There are many more instances in Martı́’s oeuvre of an attempt to harness
aesthetic representation to market expansion in Latin America. In a series of
journalistic texts produced in Mexico, Guatemala, and Venezuela between 1877
and 1881, literary language sometimes becomes a marketing tool, infusing aesthetic value into different elements of projects of export-led modernization. Important to note is the fact that, as in his critiques of U.S. modernity, there is an
uneven density to Martı́’s songs to rural progress: he prefers agricultural production to mineral extraction (a kind of ‘‘fictitious’’ or ‘‘accidental’’ wealth, because
it is not grown from the earth), and the cultivation of coffee over sugar, a commodity associated with back-breaking slave labor. In his pamphlet Guatemala,
published as a guide to export crops in that country, Martı́ celebrates coffee as
‘‘el rico grano, que enardece la sangre, anima la pasión, aleja el sueño, inquietı́simo salta en las venas, hace llama y aroma en el cerebro; el que afama a
Uruapan, mantiene a Colima y realza a Java; el haschich [sic] de América’’ (OC 7:
133). While other texts excoriate luxurious consumption, this text and others
encourage people to be literally carried away by the stimulant properties of
coffee.
Throughout the commercial pamphlet Guatemala (whose explicit purpose is
to promote everything that the country produces), literary language becomes
‘‘useful’’ in promoting a commodity. This lyricism is found on the level of content, but also that of form. The syntax and rhythmic patterns of the pamphlet
call a poetic economy to mind, just as the one-sentence paragraphs resemble the
formal organization of a lined poem:
Llaman Retalhuleu a un departamento que rebosa maderas, y
suculento cacao, y el exquisito grano americano.
Esto y caña produce Mazatenango, del mercantil Quezaltenango fiel
tributario.
En Quezaltenango abundan, sobre las fertilidades apuntadas, los
ganados lanares. Inexplotado este ramo, es fuente segura de
riqueza. Mucho tienen que hacer allı́ cardadores, exportadores,
tejedores.
San Marcos crı́a ganado bueno a fe; espiga el trigo de oro, cultiva el
maı́z nutritivo, amén de los productos generales. (OC 7: 132)
Guatemala’s abundance and plenty are stressed with the use of adjectives such
as suculento, exquisito, nutritivo, and verbs such as rebosar and abundar. The image
of a self-contained, harmonious universe is interrupted, however, when in the
middle of the passage Martı́ notes that wool is a ‘‘fuente segura de riqueza,’’
inserting ‘‘practical’’ advice within his aesthetically-driven prose. The beautiful,
the indigenously American, the ‘‘natural’’ (via agriculture) is thus made economically productive. Or is it the other way around? Is it that that which is economically productive is beautiful? This is certainly not the case when Martı́ talks
about urban commodity culture from New York. But when it comes to América,
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31
its inhabitants, and its rural landscapes redolent with the products of nature, a
different kind of aesthetic sensibility asserts itself.
Martı́’s tendency to collapse physical and material variants of ‘‘nature’’ in his
texts on Latin America has led Fina Garcı́a Marruz to remark that the poet ‘‘[v]e,
en lo fı́sico y en lo espiritual, la fuerza virgen, los recursos no explotados’’ (230).
Marruz notes a ‘‘quixotic’’ element in Martı́’s early Latin Americanist prose, but
does not go on to discuss its specific manifestations; indeed, little critical attention has been accorded to the specific ways in which Martı́ shaped his literary
program in positive (and not merely negative) relationship to global commodity
markets. This oversight is important, not only because it gives us a different sense
of Martı́’s understanding of the role of aesthetic production within modernity,
but because it poses a series of questions about how the turn-of-the-century creole letrado could reject the commercial corruption of United States society while
at the same time upholding the free market as a site of utopian possibility for
Latin America.
While in the U.S. commerce leads to excessive individualism and materialism,
texts such as Guatemala show commercial expansion as key to securing the public
good. There is no point in any of Martı́’s pro-market texts in which he asks for
commercial activity to be tempered, lest the men going to market become too
obsessed with money, luxury, or power. These vices, of course, are the main
objects of his critique of U.S. commercial society. Also worthy of note is the fact
that Martı́ assumes that creole men will lead the project of commercialization.
Guatemala, for example, will be ‘‘hospitable’’ to potential investors who wish to
plant coffee on the country’s vast expanses of land: ‘‘Porque es ir, plantar,
esperar y hacerse rico.’’ (OC 7: 133). But Martı́ assumes that these planters, arriving with capital and an interest in exporting coffee, will act according to a code
of republican virtue, working for personal gain at the same time as they improve
the country for the good of all. I do not think he is so naive as to think that
creoles are naturally virtuous; instead, his critiques of the effeminacy and inefficiency of this group recur throughout his writings—we need only remember his
scorn for the fashion-addicted, frivolous ‘‘sietemesinos’’ of the essay ‘‘Nuestra
América.’’ Rather Martı́ seemingly views them as the only class—at least for
now—able to lead América; he therefore wills them to become hard-working,
enterprising, and virtuous leaders. And he does so, not by positioning these figures in resistance to the market, but by inserting them within the new structures
of transnational capitalism spreading throughout Latin America. Another assumption latent in Martı́’s commercial texts is that the market is a just, harmonious and self-regulating force, a liberal fantasy that stretches back to eighteenthcentury thinkers such as Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith. Nowhere is this fantasy
of stability better expressed than in his depictions of agriculture, an activity that
for Martı́ conjures images of stability, simplicity, and communion with the earth.
If we remember that for Martı́ instability and fluctuation were two of the most
dangerous characteristics of modern capitalism in the U.S., he often writes as if
these elements did not mark commercial expansion in Latin America. He instead goes out of his way to present a vision of utter harmony in ‘‘nature,’’ when
it was precisely a reliance on single crops such as coffee that provoked economic
instability across the region.
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‘‘El que no anuncia no vende’’: On the Uses of Advertising
Of course, Martı́ would become a well-known critic of mono-export regimes precisely because of their radical instability, a position he would articulate on the
pages of the Cuban-owned commercial journal La América. It was in this publication that he added a rather ‘‘practical’’ bent to his poetics of export production.
Assuming a sober tone, he warns in April 1884 that global markets are inundated
with ‘‘easy’’ cash crops (‘‘frutos fáciles’’). Latin American producers of sugar
cane, corn, and potatoes were faced with fierce competition from foreign lands:
‘‘el café viene a barcadas de la India’’ (OC 8: 366). Accepting that for the moment there was no way around dependence upon raw material exports as the
motor of economic growth in Latin America, Martı́ advocates for the diversification of crops. What is most interesting about this article is that diversification is
not the only solution he proposes. Instead, he turns to a rationalized use of
marketing techniques as a corrective to market gluts and competition (an indication that for Martı́ the movements of the market were not as ‘‘natural’’ as his
texts from Venezuela and Guatemala made it seem). Men need to find ‘‘nuevas
fuentes de riqueza’’ and, in addition, know how to showcase them: ‘‘nadie compra a vendedor que no se anuncia, como no va a buscar la Fama al hombre de
mérito que no saca de sı́ palabra ni obra’’ (OC 8: 37). ‘‘Fame’’ is used to conjure
a set of classical references to heroic deeds (the values celebrated by epic
poetry); surprisingly, however, this concept is reworked to encourage a representational strategy belonging to the modern era: advertising.
Alluding to Martı́’s collaboration with La América, Susana Rotker writes that
‘‘even Martı́ had to write advertisements,’’ (33, emphasis added) suggesting that
had it not been for economic necessity, the author would not have worked this
overtly commercial genre. Yet the assumption that Martı́ had to write advertisements overlooks the author’s avid interest in the economic benefits of marketing. Martı́’s texts in La América are full of marketing maxims inspired by the
heyday of commercial expositions in the United States. Regarding the Boston
Exposition of 1883, he notes: ‘‘No está todo en producir, sino en saber presentar.
Dama gallarda, parece mejor sin afeites, pero con aseado aliño. En envolver bien
está a las veces el único secreto de vender mucho’’ (OC 8: 351). Let us note here
the guarded defense of feminine decoration (elsewhere decried as deception
and luxury). Running contrary to his attempts to see beyond ornamentation,
and to strip language of deception, we have an instance in which secrets are
unlocked not by the thing itself, but by its outward appearance.
Yet Martı́’s attraction to advertising becomes highly contradictory when we
consider his insistence elsewhere that language avoid artifice and duplicity. In
the prologue to Lucı́a Jerez, for example, the novel he wrote in seven days to earn
badly needed income, Martı́ apologizes to his readers for having produced this
text. The author, he notes, does not approve of the genre because ‘‘hay mucho
que fingir en él,’’ writing scenes he never witnessed, and inventing dialogues he
never heard (xxvii). He notes (only partly in jest, I think) that this is a sin:
‘‘Pequé, Señor, pequé [. . .] Señor, no lo haré más’’ (xxviii); indeed, Martı́ would
never write another novel. Instead, as we have seen, Martı́’s highest ideal is ‘‘natural’’ poetry, a genre defined by its rejection of duplicity and artifice in the realm
beckman, Man on the Market
33
of language. We might also gather that Martı́ hates the novel because it is an
overtly commercial genre, an interpretation upheld by the fact that he wrote it
for money, in contrast with his poems. At the same time, it is worth noting that
in Martı́’s time the novel was a feminine genre; not coincidentally, he wrote under
the pseudonym Adelaida Ral, in a reference to Adelaida Baralt, the female friend
originally commissioned to write the novel.
Let us now compare this rejection of ‘‘duplicitous’’ speech with another text,
‘‘Una indicación de La América,’’ published in November, 1883. In it, Martı́ invents a discussion among men enthusiastic about the possibility of installing a
permanent exhibition of Latin American products in the United States. One
says: ‘‘Artes, productos del cultivo, muestras de las industrias incipientes, que
servirı́an por lo menos para revelar a los capitalistas lo que se puede hacer de
nuestras materias primas’’ (OC 8: 363). Interestingly, Martı́ invokes art here as a
support for commercial exchange; as cultural capital, it is invested in material
profits for the nation. Another participant in this dialogue chimes in: ‘‘—Más,
más serı́a—dijo otro.—Necesitamos inspirar respeto; necesitamos ponernos en
pie de una vez con toda nuestra estatura, necesitamos reivindicar por la fama de
nuestras Exposiciones lo que hemos perdido por la fama de nuestras revoluciones’’ (OC 8: 363). While we are ostensibly listening to a group of men, the voice
belongs unmistakably to Martı́, who does precisely what he says he hates in Lucı́a
Jerez. The proper display of products will help to change Latin America’s reputation for revolution and civil war among trading nations, relying on representation and image—rather than things in themselves—to generate economic
success.
The text from La América displays a keen interest in the techniques of salesmanship through different forms of advertising: the exhibit, to be sure, but the idea
for exhibit is expressed through a ‘‘fiction’’ created to stimulate interest in its
installment. And as in all advertising ventures, this maneuver implies some degree of linguistic duplicity. This chronicle-advertisement, tucked in the pages of
La América, shows little discomfort with the inherently representative nature of
marketing genres (and of commercial society itself ). What the author apologizes
for with regard to Lucı́a Jerez becomes a source of pride when encouraging the
increased circulation of other kinds of commodities such as agricultural products and industrial implements. While Martı́ atones for the ‘‘sin’’ of having written a novel, by nature ‘‘artificial,’’ his text in La América relies upon this
artificiality. And while the embarrassed novelist wishes to distance himself from
the alliance between femininity and commercialism behind the novel, the adman seems quite happy to promote what is coded as a socially and economically
‘‘productive’’ commercial endeavor. Contradictorily, what is deemed unacceptable in literary production becomes the source of effectiveness of advertising. As
in the prologue to the Poema del Niágara, the writer cannot avoid market society;
different here, however, is the extent to which he chooses to immerse himself in
it head-on.
Martı́’s ambivalent and contradictory understandings of the relationship between literature and the market attest to the fact that literature was never to
remain outside of the goals of economic production under an expanding system
of transnational capitalist exchange. Indeed, the only ‘‘good’’ literature for Martı́
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seems to be literature that ‘‘invests’’ in the future of the nation or regional community, an investment that often assumes an explicitly economic character. In
this sense, writing becomes productive when it brings ‘‘spiritual’’ and material
enrichment, or when it transforms material wealth into spiritual plenitude, giving a different inflection to our understandings of the anti-commercial stance
we associate with latinoamericanismo. While Martı́ himself was no capitalist in a
material sense, his writings continue to provide a source of symbolic capital
within regional literary and political imaginaries, much like the inalienable fund
of ‘‘inner gold’’ he envisioned in his 1882 prologue to Pérez Bonalde’s Poema del
Niágara. In this regard, it is clear why Darı́o called Martı́ ‘‘el Vanderbilt de nuestras letras’’ (53), a metaphor for the dazzling and seemingly endless store of
literary riches the Cuban writer offers his readers. More recently, Rafael Rojas
has remarked on the commodification of Martı́ himself within Cuban political
imaginaries, calling him ‘‘el sı́mbolo nacional más mercantilizado de la polı́tica
cubana en el siglo XX, la moneda de cambio más activa en la guerra de los
emblemas’’ (294). This essay has pointed to some of the ways in which Martı́
himself engaged in processes of commodification, and to the complex and contradictory visions of ‘‘Nuestra América’’ as seen from the author’s alternate rejection and embrace of the global market.
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