Hemispheric Imaginations

Front matter

Hemisoneric Imaginations

NORTH AMERICAN FICTIONS

OF LATIN AMERICA

Preface

WHEN | VISITED MACHU PICCHU in the 1980s, I encountered a scene that thousands of tourists in Peru must also have witnessed. While the bus slowly labored down the serpentine road from the ruins to the valley of the Rio Urubamba, a small group of barefoot Indio boys raced downhill on the most direct route, through shrubbery and scree. Whenever they met those on the bus, they gleefully, perhaps insultingly, shouted “jgringo!” or else “jgringa!” according to whoever the primary butt of their taunts might be. The same thing happened when we walked down on foot, which we preferred to do, because we could experience the stunning landscape more directly, including the torrential downpours. The boys’ race with the strangers, the grown-ups, and technology, underlined as it was by shouts, a race they always won, can easily be interpreted as a demonstration of their own strength, their own competences, and a ridiculing of those of the foreigners. And yet the young mockers, when they had reached the bottom, demanded money from those they had mocked, as a reward for their physical prowess. A contradictory behavior, I felt, illogical and decidedly strange. Did it reflect the conflicting attitude many Latin Americans had and have vis-a-vis the visitors, particularly if they come from the United States, a mixture of admiration, envy, contempt, and hatred that is easily understandable from the history of inter-American relations?

However, their shouts might also have reflected something else, something of the—presumably—universal uncertainty we experience when we encounter the alien, the Other. I felt such uncertainty myself during my travels through numerous Latin American countries, as a tourist or a visitor of family or close friends, and always as an ignoramus. I also felt such uncertainty, although to a lesser, and lessening, degree, during my long sojourns in the United States and Canada. All this, while I was fully aware of the enormous differences between the countries, regions, and populations of both South and North. The whole Western Hemisphere was and is part of “the West” and thereby shares not only major developments of its modern history but many attitudes, institutions, and, depending on the social class and the ethnicity you are in contact with, many so-called civilizational advantages. I got more and more interested in this interplay of familiarities

[xii] Preface and strangenesses that characterized not only my own experiences but the relations between those peoples, cultures, and socioeconomic systems. As a European Americanist, I was particularly interested in the traces the complicated hemispheric history had left in the minds of people I met, both south and north of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo del Norte. In particular, I was interested in the literary constructions of self and Other on either side, the northern side of which was to turn into a major research project—to include the southern one would have overextended my competency, although I love to look at critical studies on such issues from the pen, nay, Pc of Latin American colleagues.

I team-taught several classes on the literatures of North and South together with colleagues from the romance departments of the universities I happened to be affiliated with, the first in 1984 with Walter Bruno Berg. Walter and I tried to make the students comprehend some basic structural elements of the literary history of the countries that formed our respective fields of scholarship, Peru in his case, the United States in mine, and the first thing we learned was how little we knew of each other’s textual and cultural worlds. I am grateful for the things I learned then, as I am grateful to my colleagues of later seminars, Wolfgang Matzat and the late Titus Heydenreich, with whom I shared insights at a much later stage of what was to become a central area of research for me: what is now called hemispheric studies. The interdisciplinary research project on inter-American studies that I initiated at Erlangen University, involving Wolfgang Binder, Ute Guthunz, Friedrich W. Horlacher, Titus Heydenreich, Hans-Joachim König, Friedrich von Krosigk, Wolfgang Matzat, Dieter Meindl, Anton P. Miller, Michael Richter, Roland Spiller, Rolf Walter, and Rüdiger Zoller, scholars from the fields of Latin American, us American and Canadian literature, history, political science, geography, economics, and linguistics, bore testimony to the fact that hemispheric studies requires more than the data from just two fields.

I owe much of my knowledge to our discussions then; with the political scientist Friedrich von Krosigk, I team-taught a seminar that combined literary with empire studies, a conjunction that made our students aware of the widely differing approaches of scholars focusing on social and political “facts” and others like myself, who tend to see reality more as a discursive construction and to direct our attention to the symbolic levels of texts. I should also mention that the interdisciplinary discussion groups at Erlangen under the mentorship of a much-esteemed social scientist, the late Joachim Matthes, and particularly the advanced doctoral and research program “Cultural Hermeneutics: Perspectives on Difference and Transdifference” provided me with a wide range of theoretical models transcending those I had started out with. I am immensely grateful to my colleagues and my

Preface [xiii]

doctoral students in this program but also to the students in the classes mentioned earlier and in those I taught alone for their readiness to confront theoretical problems and literary texts not to be found in our ordinary reading lists.

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft/German Research Foundation generously supported my work and that of others in our study group. It financed a sabbatical year I used for extended research in the United States and a number of shorter research stays. A Canadian government grant made my first extended stay at the University of British Columbia—Vancouver possible. I am thankful for such financial support, as I am for the help provided to me at the Library of Congress, where two of my research assistants and I stayed for several months; at Harvard’s Widener Library and, by the generous intercession of Werner Sollors, the Charles Warren Center there, whose hospitality included office space; and finally, at the Library of the University of California—Berkeley.

What I encountered during the first research stays at these university libraries were awe-inspiring, long, and sometimes dark and dusty aisles of books, most of which were not used very often. Hemispheric studies was alive in the fields of history, political science, economics, and anthropology. It was only at its beginning in the fields of American literature, Hispanic literature, and cultural studies in general. When I first tried to find North American literary works dealing with Latin America, thumbing my way through the old card catalog of the Library of Congress, I found very little, for an excruciatingly long period of time. Stanley T. Williams’s The Spanish Background of American Literature was helpful as a start, and then Drewey Wayne Gunn’s Mexico in American and British Letters, Cony Sturgis’s The Spanish World in English Fiction, and A. Curtis Wilgus’s Latin America in Fiction and his other bibliographies provided a great number of titles. My first impression that there existed hardly any literary material vanished, and over time I had to realize that there were not just a few dozen or even a few hundred, but thousands upon thousands of books.

This insight influenced my decision of what to study for the fairly long series of articles and lectures I was to publish or present during the years to follow, and it does so for this book. To include drama and poetry proved to be unfeasible, and thus Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana was left out, as was practically all of Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazilian poetry; only some early American Columbus poems are included, a poem by Jeannette Armstrong, and one by William H. New, which concludes the book. Needless to say, matters of scope also forbade the inclusion of nonliterary production such as film or painting that reflect discursive approaches to the Other just as well as novels or short stories. As far as fiction was concerned, I excluded

[ xiv ] Preface juvenile texts and spy and mystery novels as well as most, but not all, of the myriad novels of adventure dealing with, preferentially, Mexico or the Caribbean. True, such texts reveal stereotypical notions more clearly than more complex works do, and this is why they sometimes furnish me with examples for typical features of the discourse. Yet most texts I deal with are more ambitious—it is especially rewarding to see dominant discourses both presented and deconstructed in works that have at least a modicum of literary complexity. Thus, the degree of sophistication varies enormously among the texts I have selected, between, say, Richard Harding Davis’s popular Soldiers of Fortune and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, one of the chefd'oeuvres of literary modernism. As will be seen, and as was unavoidable in a book dealing with texts that thematize power relations, among other things, aesthetic and ethical aspects intertwine. My preferences for certain literary techniques often converge with those concerning ways of behavior on the individual and on the national or cultural level. However, in modern literature the coming together of ethics and aesthetics does not lead to trivial didacticism but to openness and complexity.

Because my object was to study literary symbolizations of attitudes, discourses, and the cultural imaginary, the decision what to exclude was more difficult with respect to travel literature, of which there exists an at least equally large body as that of fiction. However, as my study—due to the bulk of available material—had to remain selective rather than comprehensive, I decided to analyze only few examples from this corpus of texts. The same applies to historiographic representations, of which there remain only Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus and a few glances at William H. Prescott. Although their discursive construction of the Latin American Other is often quite similar to that in us or Canadian texts, I also excluded European works, with two exceptions that were highly influential in North America: Alexander von Humboldt and D. H. Lawrence. With very few exceptions, I resisted the temptation to present Latin American versions of a reciprocal discursive representation of the United States because such a comparative approach would have threatened the format of my book and would often have been beyond my competency. This exclusion should therefore not be regarded as further evidence of hegemonic thinking. Finally, I have to say that my focus is on twentieth-century literature and that, therefore, the number of nineteenth- or even eighteenth-century texts is rather limited. The reason is simply that I was fascinated by the way century-old approaches have survived into my own lifetime.! Initially I wanted to use the end of the Cold War as a terminus ad quem but finally felt that a few more recent novels might shed light on the discursive world of our present time. Except for Daniel Curley’s Mummy, though, none of the texts I

Preface [xv]

have selected focuses on the drug war as an essential facet of contemporary inter-American relations.

One decision I made early in my work was to see the whole hemisphere as my object of study rather than to restrict myself to the United States on the northern and, as is often done, Mexico on the southern side (because of the dominance of that country as the theme of inter-American fiction). Using the whole of Latin America (including the Caribbean) can help to indicate the way us or Canadian texts homogenize (or do not homogenize) the fantastic variety of the world south of the us-Mexican border. Nonetheless, this study bears witness to the overpowering number of books published on Mexico. To include Canadian literature followed from my impression that this huge country was often neglected in hemispheric studies, although some Canadian texts belong among the best works dealing with Latin America. I was also interested in the question to what extent these texts followed the same discursive patterns as “American” fiction did. Nonetheless, my topic is literature about Latin America, and thus Canadian fiction about the United States or US texts on Canada are excluded even though they belong to the totality of inter-American literature.

Finally, I have to admit that, all these decisions notwithstanding, this study cannot claim to be truly representative. There is an element of haphazardness in my selection of texts, often resulting from the chances of thorough firsthand knowledge but also from those of sheer availability. I had Erlangen University Library acquire a large number of primary and secondary texts as well as background material, which must have made its collection of inter-Americana one of the best in Europe. However, when we set out on this journey, there was no Google and no Amazon to find out-of-print books, and our search through the catalogs of secondhand booksellers often ended in frustration. The major reason for my selectiveness, though, is that the size of my study had to remain manageable. Thus, for instance, Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream and the relevant works of both Jane and Paul Bowles are absent, just like those of Peter Matthiessen and Cormac McCarthy, although they provide excellent examples.

I mention background material—histories, political analyses, geographic descriptions—very sparingly in order not to clutter this study with innumerable notes. I give (and refer to) background information where I find it particularly pertinent. On the whole, however, I rely on the readers’ capacity and willingness to check the readily available and electronically traceable sources of information if they are so minded.

Beyond the persons and institutions already mentioned, over the years this book has profited from the help of numerous people. Ralph Bauer and David F. Krell read the entire manuscript and made numerous cogent sugges-

[ xvi ] Preface tions, the former from the point of view of the hemispheric studies specialist, the latter from that of the philosopher and cultural critic. Pertinent and very helpful comments on the entire book came from the readers of University Press of New England. Susanne Opfermann loyally tolerated my long absorption by this project; she read major portions of the book and made valuable contributions. Klaus Lösch saved the chapter on theory from a number of problems that my eclectic approach had produced. Hans-Herbert Rakel graciously used the library facilities in Montréal to ferret out obscure and, for me, inaccessible texts concerning Lowry, Atwood, and Gibson. Christina Strobel, Klaus Losch, Hanne Breinig, and Susanne Opfermann helped me find relevant titles at the Library of Congress and at Harvard’s Widener Library, the former two at that time in their capacity as research assistants. They and their colleagues at the University of Erlangen-Niirnberg, Tomas Christ, Karin Hépker, Susanne Mayer, Christian Schmidt, and Silvia Weinrich greatly contributed to the influx of relevant primary and secondary material, its bibliographic organization and classification for the large bibliography that turned out to be a side product of my project and is waiting for separate publication. Hannelore Horlacher tirelessly took care of the acquisition and handling for Erlangen University Library of those titles we thought important enough to have in our local holdings. All of them are entitled to my profound gratitude.

I wish to thank Jeannette Armstrong for permission to use her poem “History Lesson” in Chapter ro and William H. New for permitting a portion of his book-length poem Touching Ecuador to be used as the conclusion of Chapter 12.

My thanks to Richard Pult, Sara Evangelos, Mary Garrett, and the entire staff of University Press of New England for help at every stage.

Earlier versions of parts of this book were published in the following publications:

A passage on Asturias’s “;Americanos Todos!” (Chapter x) in Gerald Vizenor, ed., Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

A German version of parts of Chapter 3 in Titus Heydenreich, ed., Columbus zwischen zwei Welten: Historische und literarische Wertungen aus fiinf Jahrhunderten, Vervuert Verlag, 1992.

A shorter version of Chapter 4 in Americastudien/American Studies 53.1 (2008).

An early version of Chapter 5 in ZAA: Zeitschrift fiir Anglistik und Amerikanistik 40.4 (1992).

A shorter German version of Chapter 6 in Konrad Grof et al., eds., Das

Preface

Natur/Kultur-Paradigma in der englischsprachigen Erzablliteratur des 19. und 20. Jabrhunderts, Gunter Narr Verlag, 1994.

Portions of Chapter 7 in Josef Raab and Martin Butler, eds., Hybrid Americas: Contacts, Contrasts, and Confluences in New World Literatures and Cultures, L1T Verlag, 2008.

Parts of Chapter 9 in Roland Hagenbiichle and Josef Raab, eds., Negotiations of America’s National Identity, Stauffenburg Verlag, 2000; and in Armin Paul Frank and Helga ESmann, eds., The Internationality of National Literatures in Either America: Transfer and Transformation, Wallstein Verlag, 1999.

Parts of Chapter ro in Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller, eds., Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, Schéningh Verlag, 1994; and in Simone Pellerin, ed., Gerald Vizenor, Presses

Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2007.

I thank editors and publishers for their permission to use this material.

[xvii]

Introduction

Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home?

— Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel” (The Complete Poems, 94)

THE CONCLUDING STANZAS Of the title poem of Bishop’s volume Questions of Travel (1965), quoting a “traveller[’s] notebook,” indicate the uncertainty of perception, the imaginary nature of both home and the away from home. Questions of Travel, her book about her impressions during her long stay in Brazil, one of the most impressive collections of poetry on a Latin American country by a us author,' holds a central position in Bishop’s work and in the development of her thought about intercultural awareness and communication. And yet her most frequently anthologized poems deal with North American or universal topics, as if the Brazilian themes were less interesting or less accessible for the average us reader. One of the poet’s major achievements, the questioning of the traveler’s point of view,* appears to present uncomfortable reading material.

The vast body of North American fiction on Latin America, which is the subject of this book, bespeaks such feelings of discomfort but also of fascination in view of the exotic Other.’ A complicating factor, also noted by Bishop, is the discursive nature of both self and Other. The “Continent, city, country, society” mentioned in her poem are not only objects of her personal imagination but “imagined places” in the public discourse; “the choice is never wide and never free” (94) because it is pre-shaped by those anonymous societal structures organizing speech and thought that we have come to call (in a vaguely Foucauldian sense of the term) discourses.’ It is also shaped by what has been called the cultural imaginary: the range of feelings and imaginings concerning a given subject that is available to a sociocultural group of people. And of course such discursive and imaginary construction of the Other occurs in either direction. Sometimes, as in Ariel Dorfman’s memoir Heading South, Looking North, a single person is capable of representing both major perspectives. Whether articulated, felt, or thought, such constructions are efforts to make sense of the world, that is to reduce its complexity, as the early Niklas Luhmann has put it. They simplify whatever may be considered as reality, and they tend to structure the world by binary approaches: self and Other, south and north, new and old, and so forth. But cultural constructions, be they literary, filmic, graphic, or belonging to other symbolic subsystems, have a double tendency. Man’s “[b]lessed rage for order,” as Wallace Stevens put it, “[t]he maker’s rage to order words of the sea,” finds its creative complement in “man’s rage for chaos,” the role of the arts to prepare humans for the contingency of the world.° Hence, the imaginative constructions of the Western Hemisphere are caught between order and chaos.°®

Let me insert here a few remarks about the nomenclature used in this book, which has to be taken with a good degree of leniency. I speak of “North America” as excluding both Mexico and all of the Caribbean—a term that is therefore obviously inadequate but common practice. “North American” is the direct translation of the Spanish norteamericano that is used throughout Latin America, including Mexico.’ Occasionally, reluctantly, and mostly for stylistic reasons, I speak of “America” where I refer specifically to the United States; mostly I use “us American” rather than “American.” I speak of “Latin America” as including the Anglophone nations of the Caribbean and formerly British Guyana, formerly Dutch Suriname, and French Guiana, as well as the other French départements d’outre mer, but excluding the United States in spite of its growing Latino population and Canada in spite of Québec. All this is on the basis of today’s boundaries, but we have to bear in mind that these have proved to be highly flexible. One has only to look at Wikipedia’s map video of the “History of Central America from 1700 to the Present” to experience the shifting colonial and postcolonial affiliations within a few seconds and to thus realize the instability of order over time.

We ought to remember, too, that until the Mexican-American War (1846- 48) and Mexico’s loss of half of its territory to the United States in 1848, the longest border separating what was claimed to belong to Latin America (avant la lettre) and the United States was the latter’s western frontier. And we should finally remember that the very terminological construct Latin America was first used (by Francisco Bilbao, in 1856) in the context of French plans to establish a special sphere of influence in the Americas as a counterweight to (British and us American) Anglo-America, although it was later used to invoke a coherence and uniformity that did and does not exist (cf. Mignolo, Idea).* I use the terms Old World and New World in a metaphorical, common-language sense, Edmundo O’Gorman’s impressive refutation of the acceptability of such usage notwithstanding. It should be remembered, though, that this terminology also has its history: “From the Old World came a conception of the New, from the New a conception of the Old by means of which Americans could announce what they were not and thereby proclaim their superiority” (Martin 18). The same procedure informed the mutual conceptions of Anglo-America and Latin America.

MANY NORTH AMERICAN WORKS of fiction on Latin America follow rather simple discursive patterns in making sense of the Other. In Michael Rumaker’s short story “Gringos” (1966), a young American man crosses the bridge into a Mexican border town. What he experiences there is heat, dirt, poverty, inefficiency, primitiveness, brown-skinned people with “flat black eyes” (Gringos, 57). He drives off a small boy who tries to sell him chewing gum, but relents when the boy’s little sister joins them because, to all appearances, she has a crippled leg. After the American has given her some pesos, she runs off—her lameness was just a trick. The boy runs after her and forces her to give up the money. Things get worse after that. Virtually all adult women the American sees are prostitutes. Older women attending church service and piously kneeling on the paving stones seem to be the only exception. The young gringo is befriended by an American sailor with whom he has some drinks, and tours the town. Finally the two Americans have sex with a prostitute in one of the cabins on the outskirts of the town. When they walk back through the night, they are attacked from behind by three Mexican men armed with knives, who try to rob them, but the Americans easily win the fight and return to their hotel.

On the surface, what we have here is one of the most stereotypically clear specimens of a discourse-governed perception of the Latin American Other based on examples from the sphere of gender relations. Mexican society is presented as consisting of pimps, prostitutes, and desexualized older people. From childhood on, there is an asymmetrical power relation between exploitative, primitive machos who are sexually aggressive, brutal, and treacherous on the one hand, and, on the other, exploited but equally treacherous women, whose sole power lies in their physical properties. Both are victimized by the Catholic church; the golden cupola of the church building symbolizes a pseudo-maternal bosom whose true function is not nourishment but self-enrichment at the expense of a poor but brainwashed population. Between this society and that of the United States, there is no Anzaldúan “borderland,” no zone of transitions and hybrid fluctuations, of psychological, spiritual, and sexual third spaces, but only the border, period.’

While this perception of Mexico epitomizes crucial, but also superficial, cliché aspects of the us American discourse on Mexico and on Latin America in general, it also reveals more fundamental discursive structures. For the basic pattern alluded to in this story is the dominant one of an invasion, an intrusion, a taking possession. That it is Latin America’s manifest destiny to be controlled and exploited by us power is supported by specifically racist assumptions: Mexicans, Guatemalans, and so forth are collectively regarded as brown-skinned people, as racially inferior, as “Indians.” In Rumaker’s story, brown skin is one of the leitmotif observations made by the American protagonist. As we shall see later in this book, the story has complexities concerning the interaction of the discourses of ethnicity and gender that deserve closer scrutiny.'° In any case, it is a good example of the discursive complex of cognition and power I shall call Latinamericanism and which forms a central topic of this book. The term was first used by Enrico M. Santi in “Latinamericanism and Restitution.” I employed it the same year and independently in its German version, Lateinamerikanismus, in “Altertatsdiskurs und Literatur.” Alberto Moreiras uses the term more strictly as denoting a scholarly or intellectual approach, “the sum total of engaged representations providing a viable knowledge of the Latin American object of enunciation,” and makes an argument for a new, subversive Latinamericanism that will counteract the homogenization of the traditional discourse in the process of globalization that entails the tendency toward “some totality of allegedly neutral, universal knowledge of the world in all its differences and identities” (“Global Fragments,” 86).'! For my present purpose, I shall use Latinamericanism in its initial sense as demarcating the construction of Latin American otherness and its circulation in the public mind. The term and its theoretical and practical implications will be defined in detail in Chapter 2.

When we look at the other side, that of the invaded, the pattern can be equally simple. Take a text by Nobel prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias, a Guatemalan with, possibly, some Maya ancestors. In his story “;Americanos Todos!” (“We Are All Americans!”), the Guatemalan tourist guide Emilio Croner Jaramillo, called Milocho, is immensely popular among American tourists. He has acquired us citizenship, and after a stormy affair with the blonde Californian beauty Alarica Powell, he is dreaming of a future life with her in the United States, when the c1a-sponsored invasion of Guatemala by foreign mercenaries in the 1954 coup that was to topple the democratically elected Arbenz government prevents his return from the coast to Guatemala City.’ He witnesses the bombing of the indio and mestizo villages near the coast by American airplanes whose national identification symbols had been removed, and the massacre of the Indian population of whole villages suspected of sympathizing with “the Communists.” Although no Maya himself but a light-skinned mestizo, he identifies with the poor population of his native country and particularly the indios, who are once again being robbed of life or property and cultural identity. Sometime later, Milocho is again guiding American tourists through the Guatemalan highland. Alarica has joined him, and their plans for a touring business connecting the American East and West Coasts have matured. But when she teases him about the passivity of his country, of even the majestic volcanoes, which, in the colonial past, destroyed the cities of the conquistadors, his memories of the massacred Indians and his guilt feelings for having done nothing to defend his country, nay, for being “an American” himself, rise up again, and he drives the bus full of gringos into a deep gorge, killing all aboard. In his death plunge, he shouts the ironic leitmotif phrase of the story, “We are all Americans!” a slogan that before had been uttered even by the Guatemalan military officers, who, in the service of the United Fruit Company and the CIA, had led the coup against their own government.”

Again, at first glance, the discursive construction of the North American invaders looks simple enough. Yet Milocho is more than an anti-American suicide killer. His increasing awareness of the ironies of his own situation, his growing engagement with the political and social conditions of his country, past and present, make him part of a resistance that is not limited to acts of physical revenge but entails a mental and emotional identification with those who have been victimized for centuries and, what is more, an imaginary transcending of the state of helplessness. He turns into a representative of what Gerald Vizenor has called survivance.'* The series of surreal images rushing through Milocho’s mind reveals him as capable of transforming reality in line with traditional Maya beliefs concerning the creative power of the word without literally following Maya symbology. He thus becomes a representative of the author who, in his rage and frustration, fictionalized the events of the coup in his collection of eight stories, Week-end en Guatemala (1956), a series containing “;Americanos Todos!” and culminating in an imaginary overthrow of the new rulers by the masked masses during the native feast of Torotumbo. That this event was never to take place in reality, that, indeed, it took decades of guerilla resistance against a brutal military dictatorship until some kind of political compromise could be reached, a first level of national reconciliation including elements of a recognition of indigenous rights, does not diminish the function of these texts to demonstrate how the imagination can overcome victimization. At the same time, the story questions the discourse on nationality and national culture, the very nature of the term American.'°