LATINO INTERPRETATION FROM A SPACE IN BETWEEN

Between José Martí's now canonical “Our America” (1891), and the hundreds of pages of Martí's untranslated prose, resides an inconclusive body of less visible works. Works like the neglected manuscript fragment on Ralph Waldo Emerson from which I take my second epigraph transform our understanding of Martí's relationship with Emerson – and by extension, with what I am calling the “United Statesian” literary tradition. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges defined such muted or neglected writings as “possibly the most significant of our time.”Footnote ⁴ In Borges's story about the “old Turk” Pierre Menard, such works are difficult to enumerate, parasitic and transformative. Unlike the sometimes humorless or hasty readings that create a record of “visible works” and that attribute opinions that are the strict reverse of those the writers preferred, this subterranean, inconclusive work has the potential to revise literary history. In Martí's case, such work might transform commonplace conceptions of him as Cuba's altruistic founding father or as a disgruntled exile who would applaud ongoing policies of US-led Pan-American regionalization.Footnote ⁵ Martí's neglected works illuminate his claim to define another America from a Latino migrant perspective.Footnote ⁶

The interpretation of Martí's relationship with Emerson as one of near total identification has recently entered the mainstream of American literary history along with a transnational turn in American studies. Echoing Cuban literary historian Félix Lizaso – who defined Martí's affinity with Emerson as “one of the most significant cases of spiritual approximation between two minds” – Oscar Montero claims that the parallel between the two writers is so complete that “it becomes difficult to establish [in Martí's texts] where Emerson ends and Martí begins.”Footnote ⁷ In his recent reappraisal of Emerson's lasting critical value for American studies, Lawrence Buell wonders perspicaciously if perhaps Martí scholar José C. Ballón Aguirre “may exaggerate in claiming that Emerson was the single greatest influence on Martí's style of writing and thought.”Footnote ⁸

While Buell's book makes a strong case for Emerson's continuing relevance, it caricatures Martí's response to Emerson as “fervent” and “hyperinflated.”Footnote ⁹ Buell draws on several influential studies by José Ballón – who offers perhaps the most meticulous reading of the Martí–Emerson relationship to date – in which Ballón provides evidence of and applauds Martí's identification with Emerson. Although Ballón does not make the claim in such hyperbolic terms, his studies of Martí and Emerson draw on celebratory Cold War-era interpretations of Emerson to establish some of the qualities to which Martí may in fact have been initially attracted: originality, political and cultural autonomy, and the fantasy of exclusively male, metaphysical regeneration.Footnote ¹⁰ Ballón's and Anne Foutain's arguments about Emerson and Martí as kindred authors locate textual citations of Emerson in Martí's poetry and prose in order to demonstrate the North American's “enormous influence” upon the Cuban.Footnote ¹¹ However, the traditional comparative-literature search for influences of European origin – or in this case United Statesian writers – in literature from a peripheral perspective tends to reinforce a north–south hierarchy that like US empire itself has, historically, not been fully acknowledged. The search for such influences has the effect of occluding the Latino migrant's critical ambivalence.

The traditional inquiry into sources and influences, according to Brazilian theorist Silviano Santiago, obscures the “space in-between,” in which a peripheral or postcolonial reading cannibalizes and thus aggressively remakes the center's literary tradition, and necessarily does so in clandestinity.Footnote ¹² To elucidate this in-between space counters common constructions of the formerly or still colonized as incapable of or uninterested in defining an alternative trajectory in the hemisphere. By contrast, to read for the reactions of the dominated confounds a moral narrative of progress from backwardness to modernity, from imitation to originality, from dependence to autonomy. Martí's camouflaged reactions interrogate the moral narrative that shores up the imperial dominant's innocence and blames the peripheral and (post)colonial culture for its oppressed condition. Emerson, in assuming an inevitable process of incorporation of the hemisphere to New England's youthful leadership, and in his suspicion of the capacity for self-government among the swarthy, non-Anglo groups in the Americas, came to represent the uncharitable and predominant viewpoint of the United States.

In the case of Martí's study of Emerson, previous interpretation of the Cuban as extending the North American's legacy grafts Latin American letters onto a “universal” or “classical” Emersonian trunk. Emerson becomes the mediating root through which Latin American literature “continues and brings up to date, through Emerson, a classical literary tradition.”Footnote ¹³ Martí does indicate in an 1881 notebook fragment that the American who can put into writing “the multiple, confused conditions of this epoch” would join a pantheon of European thinkers of the caliber of Dante, Luther, Cervantes, and Shakespeare.Footnote ¹⁴ However, by 1883 Martí envisioned a ground swell of another modernity arising from respecting America's millennial autochthonous and mestizo civilizations. To Martí, the emerging canon of North American writing lacked the perspective that would permit understanding of postcolonial conditions in his America. Martí's reading of Emerson provincializes a far from universal, United Statesian tradition.

EMERSON'S NEW ANGLOCENTRISM

Recent scholarship calls attention to Emerson's limitations as the spokesperson of America's cultural independence from Europe. This work critically examines the American Renaissance writer's investment in the racial system that afforded a youthful Anglo culture a privileged status in the US and in the New World, notwithstanding Emerson's courageous support for John Brown and his outspoken abolitionism. Whereas a previous generation of critics celebrated a self-revising, Nietzschean, and deconstructive Emerson, this new critical angle finds the inward movement of his thinking unresistant to imperial expansionism and Anglocentrism.Footnote ¹⁵ This work invites us to reconsider the assumption that the Cuban revolutionary totally identified with the Concord bard.

The current reinterpretation of Emerson takes issue with his endorsement of the nineteenth-century notion of the “arrested development” of allegedly inferior races, and with his use of this racial idea to displace responsibility for acts of colonial occupation onto the colonized. For example, Emerson observed that “an imperial Saxon race” would be “given” hundreds of Mexicos, and would absorb Mexican, Irish, and German immigrants and African Americans, who after a life of drudgery were destined to become so much fertilizer for Anglo pastures.Footnote ¹⁶ Susan Castillo shows that racial assumptions buttress Emerson's understanding of English cultural power: “It is race – is it not – that puts the hundred millions of India under the domination of a remote island in the north of Europe?”Footnote ¹⁷ Brady Harrison's Agent of Empire locates in Emerson's essays a poetic subject that imagines the world as a “ball” to be tossed in the poet's hands.Footnote ¹⁸ In the 1844 speech to the Mercantile Library Association in Boston, “The Young American,” Emerson nominates youthful New Englanders to act as leaders of a nation destined to accumulate “cheap land” in order to balance the New and Old Worlds.Footnote ¹⁹ Notably, the Young America movement inspired by Emerson's essay provided popular support to the Pierce Administration's bid to purchase Cuba.Footnote ²⁰

Incontrovertibly individual, the Emersonian subject considers conformity to a collective a sign of weakness, whereas for Martí unity through coalition helps ensure the anticolonial nation's futurity.Footnote ²¹ Emerson's individual subject is infinite, sovereign, and self-engendering.Footnote ²² It achieves self-reliance by heeding and acting on a solitary will. To the poet, in particular, Emerson attributes an “invulnerable essence” and eternal oneness: “The poet is a sovereign, and stands on the center”.Footnote ²³ The poet's mind or soul, not his body, “is the only reality”: “I – this thought which is called I – is the mold into which the world is poured like melted wax”.Footnote ²⁴ This thought defines a world according to the hard shape of an individual will. To Emerson, the mocking performance of an imposed cultural script and “the gentlest, asinine expressions” suggest the conformity befitting minors, invalids, cowards, charity cases, bastards, interlopers, or members of a mass or herd, against which the North American normative person should distinguish himself.Footnote ²⁵ By contrast, for the Latino migrant, this imposed condition must perforce become an opportunity for transgressive irony and creative evasion of constraints and pressures from the powerful host culture. The effects of imposed receptivity, colonial economics, or racial stereotype do not seem to touch Emerson, whereas they indelibly mark Martí.

If Emerson imagines himself as homogeneous and invulnerable – a standing house and not a storm-tossed ship – Martí defines subjectivity through figures so internally heterogeneous and contradictory that they threaten to split open. Such figures appear in the published essay on “Emerson,” in Martí's journals, and in other New York chronicles: “Ah, to read when you are feeling the pressure of flames buffeting within your brain – it is like holding down a live eagle! If only our hands were bolts of lightning and could vaporize our skulls without committing murder!” (OC 13, 24, SW 124).Footnote ²⁶ Subjection for Martí figures as a violent struggle to pin down a powerful eagle, as the removal of barriers to the fire of thought, or as angry eyes staring into the blinding light of the sun. In his notebooks, this eagle takes on the characteristics of a demanding muse: “it takes a lot of work to receive an eagle: many are terrified by the visit [a muchos aterra la visita]” (OC 22, 324). This figure of a mind on fire or splitting open suggests the way historical, material, linguistic and political circumstances condition the thinkable and stoke the fire of invention to permit the dodging of historical determinations. This material limit and the mind's opening generate a sense of the stakes of thinking. The eagle in the brain knocks the thinker to the ground in a gesture that prefigures death. Receiving the eagle's visit demands the daunting combination of theory and practice. To miss this opportunity causes the greatest terror.

The striking metaphor of a mind in the process of opening recurs and references the peculiar difficulty of Latino alterity inside the space of New York's mass culture of entertainment and consumption. This condition anticipates W. E. B. Du Bois's description of two contradictory strivings that threaten to tear asunder black souls in a land of dollars. While writing about New York's seaside resort, Coney Island, Martí again conjures the incalculable struggle of the eagle in pursuit of a vehement desire:

As in the published essay on “Emerson,” here “other” peoples simultaneously attempt and do not manage to grasp the eagle, which releases a remainder: a rebellious butterfly. Cross-pollinating as it moves, the tiny winged insect flits a zigzagging course in the wake of the escaping eagle, in a figure that evokes the above-cited manuscript fragment entitled “Emerson,” in which previously hidden “smaller ideas” arrive in the wake of a large idea. These four pages of typed and handwritten notes that appear in Volume 19 of the Obras Completas amongst Martí's philosophical writings begin by describing how Emerson related to ideas. It ends with a self-description of ideas that burble up like a “wounded spring” beside the feet of someone treading upon a path.Footnote ²⁷ The mobile migratory subject may envy the ease and stability of Emerson's erect sovereignty, but it ultimately values more its own agon of a “sublime inner demon” and of disquieting winged ideas “of steam” that do not pertain to a single mind or a single person.

If “the world is mind precipitated” – a phrase that appears in English in Martí's notebooks repeatedly – then no condition is fixed, immutable, or natural.Footnote ²⁸ The premises of historical mutability and of human construction of social forms are necessary and useful to a revolutionary seeking to turn the tables on colonization. However, while Emerson drifted inward in his latter decades, Martí increasingly observed the limitations of Emerson's vision of Man Thinking. Although my reading of Martí and Emerson is sympathetic with Paul Giles's impression of Martí's spectral difference from the US literary culture in which the Cuban puts into practice his revolutionary commitment, I see Martí's distinct position as marked by the historical context of a new and aggressive phase of US imperialism.Footnote ²⁹ Whereas Giles suggests that Martí's position reflects a cosmopolitan response to “globalization and displacement,” I believe that to privilege such universalizing terminology over imperialism places Martí in limbo with respect to the United States.Footnote ³⁰ In the process of Martí's interpretation of Emerson, he convenes an anticolonial grassroots movement and confronts US anti-immigrant violence with his untimely vision of a multiracial postcolonial nation. This historical coincidence convinces Martí of the final insufficiency of Emerson's thinking, as I shall show in the remaining sections of this essay. On balance, if we must choose a life and work that proves ultimately “hopeless” and “impossible,” it is not so much Martí's – as Giles implies – as Emerson's.Footnote ³¹

“THE EVENING OF EMERSON”

What are the reasons for Martí's increasing antagonism toward Emerson? In the course of an intense study of the Concord bard and while living in New York, Martí perceived the New Englander's inability to recognize Cuba, Latin America, and other non-Anglo, “swarthy,” or culturally different groups' equally legitimate claim to self-government in America. In the Cuban's changing responses to Emerson's texts, the dramatic turning point is “the evening of Emerson [la tarde de Emerson].”Footnote ³² Alluding to the chiaroscuro of eventide, Martí calls for a new American literary history that might critically translate the US tradition and attend to secondary, belated, or minor American texts such as Martí's own book of poems, Ismaelillo (1882). The “evening of Emerson,” a night on or around Martí's thirtieth birthday in January 1883, marks an awakening of consciousness after long hours of laboring over Emerson's texts.

Others have read this event as the “‘hour’ of the Cuban's identification with his mentor,” a confirmation of Emerson's role as “an inspiration for Martí's own life,” or as Martí's self-portrait of the artist.Footnote ³³ To me, this epiphany records a rupture and redefinition of Martí's sense of himself as a critic, artist, and revolutionary. After Martí's initial identification with Emerson, discrepancies became more acute as Martí grew intimately acquainted with the culture that Emerson's writing helped to engender and, on occasions that critics have noted, that Emerson explicitly endorsed. The Cuban migrant's divergence from the now spectral Emerson transformed the inextricably interrelated spheres of Martí's aesthetics and politics.

Martí's interpretation of Emerson leads him to question both Caribbean culture's peripheral status and the new phase of late nineteenth-century US expansionism in the hemisphere. The ethical and literary culture of the Northeastern cities of the United States becomes in this reinterpretation heterogeneous and, finally, secondary. The pure pleasure to which Martí refers in his descriptions of the “evening of Emerson” follows from a sense that he will engage in revolutionary change rather than remain aloof or fearful of its impossibility:

Entitling this starlit memory the “evening of Emerson” underscores the evanescence of the New Englander's explanatory power. Martí defines a post-Emersonian pivot from which he “glimpses” the future in evening shadows and studies the “prostrate city.” The verb entrever signifies a confused suspicion, a guess or a conjecture: literally, it suggests “to see between.” With this verb that points to future thinking “in between,” Martí distinguishes himself from an Adamic Americanism or a Columbian New Worldism that takes possession by renaming the world without acknowledging historic and continuing civilizations in the Americas.

Evoking a chaotic, built environment, the urban setting of this “evening” memory differs markedly from Emerson's transcendental eyeball, which observed in the present tense New England's open, harmonious, semi-rural landscapes: “I am nothing; I see all ... to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.”Footnote ³⁴ The shirtless, thirty-year old Martí in his apartment looked out upon a cacophonous city of migrants and workers, doubled over before the forces of the North's capitalist industrialization, party machines, and expansionism. The noise of the hawkers' market cries and of the belching factories bombarded the Cuban. This encounter with and commitment to “the tumultuous and resplendent city” (OC 13, 17; SW 116) contrasts with Emerson's disembodied thinking upon a silent mountain summit. According to Martí, Emerson “walks above the living” (OC 9, 335), whereas Martí in his New York City boarding house, dwells amongst the marginalized workers of the city.

MARTÍ'S DIVERGENCE FROM EMERSON

The sense of Emersonian twilight catalyzes Latino self-definition through the development of criteria or judgment. Six years later, in February 1889, Martí's textual references to Emerson appear with a dramatically different tone. In the midst of reporting misconceptions of the United States by Europeans, Martí mentions Emerson. Although couched as a review of Paul Blouët's light burlesque travel essay that pokes fun at the prudish and materialistic US Gilded Age, Jonathan and His Continent (1889), Martí's argument rejects Emersonian transcendentalism.Footnote ³⁵ Martí complains of Blouët's superficiality, as evidenced by the failure to mention Emerson at all in his four-page chapter on “Literature in the United States.” This passage claims that the New Englander's ideas prove inadequate to the political and cultural complexities of Martí's America:

More than an attribution of Emerson's limitations to a period some fifty years earlier, this passage questions the privileged status of a single mind and of a representative man, adumbrated by Thomas Carlyle. Referencing Martí's own manifesto on modern poetry – a prologue to Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde's “Poema del Niágara” that he wrote the same year as his essay on Emerson (1882) – Martí describes here a process akin to the “decentralization of intelligence,” and dissents from Emerson's notion that one or two great individuals should or could speak on behalf of several hundred years of literary culture. Martí's translation of little-known popular performances, his reports on social movements, his observation of urban scenes, and his recording of forms of speech in the US shaped his distinct understanding of text and culture as phenomena belonging to a wide cross-section of working people who are society's primary producers. When Martí claims that “today, there is no space for this,” the pronoun “this” refers to the accumulation of a wealth of knowledge in a single mind through years and years of isolated study in privileged conditions, the glorification of which depends, significantly, upon a sufficient level of “ignorance” among the largest class. The intellectual “mountains” no longer appear great if the valleys rise up.

While this passage reproaches Blouët's account of the poetry of the United States that focuses on Whitman to the exclusion of Emerson – and thus reveals Martí's own preference with regard to these two poets – it more pointedly faults the Europeanist assumption that no genius had emerged, or could emerge, from America. Martí's comment also defines the limits of what the United States could produce, given its ignorance as a republic that perpetuated post-slavery racism and wars of aggression. The quiet mountaintop genius of Emerson, out of touch with the valleys, exemplifies these limits.

As an example of these rising valleys, Martí's little-known chronicle on the “Problems and Pleasures of September” (1885) juxtaposes the difficult conditions of workers with the extravagant consumption of a spectacular America's Cup sailboat race and armaments display. By hanging a textual portrait of Emerson in the paragraph preceding this description of “Anglomaniacs” observing a regatta, the chronicle conveys with wry bitterness Emerson's inability to perceive or counteract the effects of an increasingly imperial system that thrives off competition between Europe and the United States for control of Latin America's material resources:

This postmortem reference to the victorious Union army and to Emerson's faint echo in the midst of a militarily aggressive Gilded Age calls attention to persistent Anglophilia in the United States, especially among the wealthy and upwardly mobile classes, despite Emerson's repeated exhortations to cast off the Old World mantle. The life's work of the preeminent US philosopher and declarer of cultural independence did not transform the elite citizenry's exploitation of a class of disenfranchised workers, nor did it end this influential group's imitation of a British imperial prerogative over other nations. Britain and North American boaters compete for the trophy of Latin American resources, as anti-Asian racism and the exploitation of workers makes possible this sumptuous pageantry at home.

Martí's 1882 study of Emerson appears sandwiched between his exposé of the US's intent to access Latin American material resources through new tactics of military–diplomatic intervention and an eyewitness-style account of violence against terrified Chinese migrants in San Francisco in 1882. References to the US State Department's problematic diplomatic role in Peru during the War of the Pacific appear in the midst of descriptions of New York's end-of-the-year festivities:

This excerpt from Martí's description of the rituals of Christmas and Hanukah (“La Chanucka”) appeared in La Opinion Nacional in January 1882, just months before he published his essay on Emerson. It suggests Martí's shift in consciousness over the course of these years. Observing the empty rituals of the multitudinous city giving itself over to the “unlimited pleasure of shopping” (OC 9, 201), the narrative geographically straddles the richly decorated metropolis and the South American spaces that were increasingly becoming subject to North American economic exploitation. Martí uses the awkward phrase “monstrous conceptions” to allude to the antithetical idea of a so-called Peruvian company establishing claims on behalf of North American interests in transportation and mining concessions. These inter-American business proposals appear distant and unrelated to the joys of the holidays, yet the figures of accumulation in the text – as, for example, of shoppers bowing down before jewelry display cases in Tiffany's and the reference to the “crowning jewel of the contract, its ports and railroads” – forge powerful connections among these spaces and economies.

Just months after “Emerson,” Martí informs his readers of the May 1882 ratification of the amendment to US immigration law that prohibited any state in the Union from granting citizenship to any person of Chinese origin (OC 9, 312). A month earlier, under the subheading “Social Warfare,” Martí described the assassinations of African American leaders, the strikes of white miners and railway workers, and Anglo demonstrations against the Chinese in San Francisco. The following gripping passage employs the cinematographic, minimalist style of a screenplay in order to place the Latin American reader on the scene and alongside the Chinese. It depicts aggressive, “native” vigilantes and creates readerly sympathy for vulnerable and unjustly demonized migrant workers. The “loyal citizens” of the US appear here as armed perpetrators of violence and not as the vanquished victims of a foreign invasion, as the demonstrators in favor of Chinese Exclusion claimed:

Backed into alleys, the trembling Chinese occupy the space left to them by the Anglos, who shout demands and decrees from spontaneous tribunals in the city's centers. The unusually short sentences capture the tension created by the bullets of the Anglo “crusaders.” Martí repeats almost verbatim the rhetoric of then Senator James G. Blaine's racially motivated argument for Chinese exclusion before the US Congress, and thus exposes the hollow stereotypes of disenfranchised workers as “an insurmountable Chinese invasion.”Footnote ³⁶ By representing the Anglo abuses of Chinese migrant workers, Martí reveals to his readers the rhetorical and physical excesses of panicked white supremacy. The heterogeneity his perspective represents within the North American scene calls into question the US government's claims that aliens threatened to imperil North American civilization in general. The account shows that in the chronicler's view the United States engaged in exclusionary wall-building by defending the use of anti-immigrant force with demonizing racial rhetoric. Similarly, Secretary of State Blaine's meddling in the War of the Pacific and his avid pursuit of Cuba's annexation depended upon a white nativist, anti-immigrant discourse at home. By studying these historical events in relation to each other, Martí discovers the role of racial discourse in constructing a domestic imperial subject that, in keeping with Emerson's rhetoric, calls upon North America's youth to transform the New World into the US's private garden.