Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolivar: Simon Rodriguez and the American Essay at Revolution

Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar 6[ ^ Simón Rodríguez and the American Essay at Revolution By Ronald Brig...

Author: Ronald Briggs

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Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar 6[ ^

Simón Rodríguez and the American Essay at Revolution

By Ronald Briggs

Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar

Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar 

Simón Rodríguez and the American Essay at Revolution

Ronald Briggs

vanderbilt university press nashville

© 2010 by Vanderbilt University Press Nashville, Tennessee 37235 All rights reserved First Edition 2010 This book is printed on acid-free paper made from 30% post-consumer recycled content. Manufactured in the United States of America Frontispiece and cover illustration: Portrait of Simón Rodríguez attributed to Juan Agustín Guerrero. Museo y Templete de los Héroes Nacionales, Colegio Militar Eloy Alfaro (Quito, Ecuador). Design: Dariel Mayer Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Briggs, Ronald, 1975– Tropes of enlightenment in the age of Bolívar : Simón Rodríguez and the American essay at Revolution / Ronald Briggs. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8265-1693-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Rodríguez, Simón, 1769–1854—Philosophy. 2. Rodríguez, Simón, 1769–1854—Literary style. 3. Latin America—History—Philosophy. I. Title. F2235.5.R6B75 2010 987’.04092—dc22 2009024881

For Liz

Contents

acknowledgmentsâ•… â•‡ix

introduction

A Hemispheric Insider Takes the Essayâ•… 1

1

American Asylum and the Rhetoric of Escapeâ•… 21

2

Harmony in New World Nature and Old World Eyesâ•… 58

3

Education, Republican Values, and Intellectual Independenceâ•… 99

4

The Quest for a New World Languageâ•… 138

5

The Political and Artistic Avant-Gardeâ•… 161

conclusion

A Hemisphere Created for the Pageâ•… 185

notesâ•… 195

bibliographyâ•… 213

indexâ•… 229

Acknowledgments

T

his project began at New York University, and I am grateful to the following for their help: Eduardo Subirats, Gerard Aching, James Fernández, Sibylla Fischer, and Mary Louise Pratt. Any critical recovery of Simón Rodríguez would be impossible without the pioneering work of Susana Rotker, who died in an accident in 2000. Rotker’s articles on Rodríguez placed his writing in a critical spotlight they had never enjoyed in the U.S. academy and established the first set of parameters for their aesthetic and political reconsideration. The literary lens her work places on Rodríguez and on the Spanish American essay has been an inspiration throughout this project. At Vanderbilt University Press I would like to thank my editor, Eli Bortz, as well as Michael Ames, Jessie Hunnicutt, Jenna Phillips, Sue Havlish, Dariel Mayer, Bobbe Needham, and two anonymous readers. A version of Chapter 5 appeared in Decimonónica in 2008, and I thank the editors for permission to print it here in a modified form. I’d also like to thank Nathalie Bouzaglo, Javier Lasarte Valcárcel, Javier and Rodrigo Lasarte Protzel, Cristina Soriano, Alicia Ríos, Nydia Ruiz, Tomás Straka, Paulette Silva Beauregard, Mirla Alcibiades, the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, the Biblioteca Nacional de Venezuela, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library of New York University, the John P. Stevenson Jr. Library of Bard College, the Butler Library of Columbia University, the Wollman Library of Barnard College, the New York Public Library, the Vanderbilt University Library, the Widener and Houghton Libraries of Harvard University (special thanks to Lynn Shirey), and the Library of Congress (special thanks to Travis Westly). Daniel Loarte and María Antonio Masana provided invaluable help with

ix

x


the cover image, and I would also like to thank the Colegio Militar Eloy Alfaro in Quito, Ecuador. During the past seven years I have had the honor of serving on the faculties of Bard College, New York University, and Barnard College, and I am grateful to all three institutions for their financial support. I also want to thank Bonnie Hanks, Christine Gever, Peg Duthie, Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson, Melanie Nicolson, Nicole Caso, Joseph Luzzi, Marina van Zuylen, Ralph Bauer, Nicolás Wey-Gómez, Ysette Guevara, Amy Wright, Maja Horn, Orlando Bentancor, Wadda Ríos-Font, Alfred Â�MacAdam, Carlos Alonso, Graciela Montaldo, Tynisha Rue, Jeannette Greven, Lauren and Justin Niles, Lizzy and Dan Pond, and Ronald and Bobbie Briggs.

Introduction

A Hemispheric Insider Takes the Essay

I

t would be misleading to call Simón Rodríguez (1769–1854) â•‡ a forgotten figure in the history of Venezuela, especially since the 2000 Constitución Bolivariana established the era of independence as an ideological and spiritual source of national identity. Forever remembered as “the Liberator’s teacher” (el Maestro del Libertador), Rodríguez is a recognizable face and a common source of pithy quotes on murals from Caracas to the shores of the Orinoco. EBR-200, the revolutionary movement through which Hugo Chávez set out on his long road to gaining power in the 1998 elections, began on the two-hundredth anniversary of Bolívar’s 1783 birth and took on the letters EBR to mark its intellectual patrimony: Simón Bolívar, Ezekiel Zamora, and Simón Rodríguez (B. Jones 75–81). One of the Chávez government’s best-known missions—Misión Robinson—named for Rodríguez’s pseudonym, Simon Robinson, provides adult education to cities throughout Venezuela and produces a mountain of public relations materials, many bearing the portrait of el Maestro. Rodríguez is, however, a forgotten figure in the field of Latin American studies, particularly in the United States. His writings are difficult to find, they have never been translated into English, and he seems to fall between canonical categories. As an innovative writer who worked in the essay, a genre that did not even officially exist during his lifetime, Rodríguez eludes the traditional literary categories used to organize the canon. Despite Venezuela’s eagerness to claim him in the twenty-first century, he spent most of his life in exile from his native country and never established lasting ties with any single nation-state, as Andrés Bello and Benito Faustino Sarmiento managed to do. While he always claimed to be carting around 1

2


a magnum opus, the box that allegedly contained it was destroyed by fire in Guayaquil decades after his death, leaving for posterity only a handful of relatively short texts and letters. In the poetic phrase of early biographer Fabio Lozano y Lozano, the blaze “reduced to cinders that trunk that contained—according to Don Simón—the New World’s happy future” (redujo á pavesas el baúl que contenía—según don Simón—el porvenir venturoso del Nuevo Mundo) (190). Thus there is no single magnum opus and no Simón Rodríguez papers awaiting examination in an archive. Finally, Rodríguez’s eccentric typographical layouts, which resemble avantgarde poetry, proved wholly unappetizing to readers of his time. He did not exercise a palpable influence on any generation of writers and is most likely better known in Venezuela now than he ever was in life. The writings that did survive, however, are shocking in their formal innovation, and chilling in the prescience of their critique of independence. A widely read polyglot, Rodríguez demonstrated the fruits of his European and U.S. travels by constructing a plan for the newly independent republic whose conception was considerably more radical in intent and broader in scope than anything his more famous contemporaries were writing. Freed from the role of the public intellectual, Rodríguez conceived of a free-flowing Spanish American social revolution in which the education of a generation of students would create a democratic society from the ground up in defiance of a postindependence in which topdown, nominally democratic forms proved to be little more than a reprise of the colonial order. This book proposes to introduce this marginal figure, called everything from an “archetypal American crank” (Frank 396) to “an American luxury” (un lujo americano) (Lezama Lima 119–20), and to consider the place of his innovative writings within the hemispheric scope of the independence-era essay, a lens whose conceptual breadth is an absolute necessity if we wish to give fair consideration to an intellect as strange and wide-ranging as that of Simón Rodríguez.

The Life and Work of an Unmoored Intellectual Simón Rodríguez was born in Caracas on either the evening of October 28 or the morning of October 29, 1769, and he died in Amotape, Peru, on February 28, 1854. His eighty-four years began in a uniformly colonial Western Hemisphere where a scholastic educational idea still reigned, but by the year of his death the hemisphere was largely independent and a

Introduction

3

wave of political and social revolutions had moved through Western Europe. By 1854 Simón Bolívar’s dream of a united Gran Colombia had collapsed, and internal struggles wracked the still struggling South American republics. Having entered the world as an abandoned child, or hijo expósito, Rodríguez was raised, along with his brother, José Cayetano del Carmen Carreño, in the household of the parish priest, Alejandro Carreño.1 Rodríguez was most likely educated in one of the three schools then in operation in Caracas before accepting the position of primary school instructor in 1791. He was married to María de los Santos Roca in 1793, and a year later he presented his first known surviving writing, Reflections on the Current State of the School, to the municipal government of Caracas. Arguing for an increase in the funding of primary schools and a more rigorous professionalization of their staff, the essay attacked the city’s social penchant for undervaluing primary education and in most cases leaving children to their own and their parents’ devices. An avid follower of the educational reforms under way in Spain and chronicled in La Gaceta, Rodríguez made a call for regularization very much in the spirit of the reforms of Carlos III and IV. For all its conventionality, the essay did show some of the sparks of his later style: the relaxed, conversational tone in which Rodríguez the narrator responded to his own rhetorical questions, and the insistence that philosophy on a macro scale be backed up by specific plans on a micro scale. While the first part of the essay argued for the general importance of primary education in tones reminiscent of Rousseau and Pestalozzi, the second half provided a detailed plan for the organization and funding of a model primary school system intended for Caracas. The Caracas municipal government (Cabildo) gave the document provisional approval, but noted that it would have to be approved by the royal governing body (Audiencia) before it could be implemented. In 1793 Rodríguez also took on the young Simón Bolívar as a student in the Caracas school.2 A wealthy orphan, Bolívar was then under the care of his uncle, Carlos Palacios. When he rebelled and ran away to his sister’s house, his uncle decided, in desperation, to place him under Rodríguez’s care, an arrangement that lasted several months and forged a bond between the two that would become Rodríguez’s claim to fame.3 This experience would become the kernel of the anecdotal construction of Rodríguez as a Rousseauian tutor in the manner of Emile and the vision of that five-month experience as a full-fledged experiential education for

4


Bolívar—a vision that Lynch and others have noted is quite at odds with Rodríguez’s role as a municipal school teacher and therefore cosmically unlikely (Lynch 17; Lasheras 83). Soon after Bolívar’s departure Rodríguez resigned from his position, and two years later, in November 1797, he departed by boat from La Guaira to begin a lifelong exile from Venezuela and a quarter century away from Spanish America that would include visits to Jamaica, Baltimore, and London, as well as extensive European travels. Something, of course, must have been going on behind the bare documented facts of Rodríguez’s resignation and departure. Alfonso Rumazo González suggests that Rodríguez became involved with the pro-independence conspiracy led by José María España and Manuel Gaul, and involving the republican essayist Juan Bautista Picornell (45–46). By this argument the departure could best be characterized as an escape, since the conspirators were severely punished.4 Morales’s chronology cites Gustavo Adolfo Ruiz’s well-documented study of Rodríguez’s teaching career, and notes that the four-month lapse between the discovery of the conspiracy and Rodríguez’s departure makes it unlikely that he was an active, fleeing participant.5 Of course, it could be that Rodríguez feared being denounced—Lynch cites Humboldt’s recounting of the climate of fear and self-censorship during his visit two years later as proof of the conspiracy’s lingering effect (13–14)—or that the conspiracy’s failure served to shatter his confidence in the colonial government. While there is no documentation for Rodríguez’s whereabouts between his 1797 departure from Venezuela and his arrival and registration in Bayonne, France, under the name “Samuel Robinson” in 1800 (the name itself a nod to Rousseau’s influence, as Robinson Crusoe is the book the Genevan recommends as best suited to teach the young Emile self-reliance), biographers conclude, based on interviews Rodríguez gave decades later, that he traveled first to Jamaica and then to Baltimore, where he worked as a typesetter, an experience that would prove particularly important to his development as a writer keenly attuned to the effective use of graphic design. In Paris in 1801 Rodríguez founded a Spanish school together with Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, the fiery Mexican priest who had fled his country after proposing in a sermon that the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe predated the Conquest and was linked to the legend of St. Thomas’s pre-Columbian trip to evangelize the Aztecs. Domingo Miliani exclaims that “these marginals of heroism, military or civil, did not by chance coincide in their Americanist visions” (estos marginales

Introduction

5

del heroísmo, militar o civil, no por azar coinciden en sus visiones ameriÂ� canistas), and certainly the radical priest makes a fitting companion for the marginalized essayist-to-be (“Simon” 12). In Paris, Rodríguez published a Spanish translation of Chateaubriand’s Atala, which he dedicated to his students. Germán Arciniegas has noted that this choice of works “was not by sheer coincidence,” since the book’s New World setting “was bound to arouse the sympathetic interest of the Americans” (Latin 316). In his memoirs Fray Servando would claim that it was he who did the translation—which he remembered as being particularly difficult because he lacked a Spanish botanical dictionary—and that the work was published in Rodríguez’s name “because this is a sacrifice that is exacted upon poor authors by those who pay for the printing of their works” (porque éste es un sacrificio que exigen de los autores pobres los que costean la impresión de sus obras) (28). Morales cites Pedro Grases’s more recent study attesting to Rodríguez’s authorship, while the chronology of Susana Rotker’s 1998 edition of The Memoirs of Fray Servando lists the translation as a joint effort (Grases, La peripicia 24, 40; Mier, Memoirs xiv). Rodríguez was still in Paris when Bolívar arrived in 1804, heartbroken over the death of his wife, and in the spring of 1805 Rodríguez accompanied Bolívar and a friend, Fernando del Toro, on a walking tour through the Alps to Italy. This trip would itself be mythologized as an epic journey and the restorative to Bolívar’s grief, although, as Bolívar biographer John Lynch points out, “how much actual walking the trio did is a matter of conjecture, as is the notion that this was a health cure after months of dissipation” (25). The three travelers passed through Milan, where they glimpsed Napoleon’s dramatic entry, and then visited Venice and Florence en route to Rome. There, in August, they climbed the hill outside Rome where Bolívar made his famous “oath” to fight for Spanish American independence. When Bolívar returned to Venezuela in 1806, Rodríguez remained in Paris. That same year, the Precursor of Spanish American independence, Francisco de Miranda, whose London apartment served as a gathering place for independence-minded exiles (see Grases, Escritos selectos), led a failed attempt to establish an independent Venezuelan republic. Two years later the Napoleonic invasion of Spain toppled the Bourbon government and set in motion a complicated series of independence movements throughout Spanish America. When Bolívar left to return to Venezuela, his political consciousness awakened by both his contact with Rodríguez and the dramatic bits of living and ancient history he had witnessed, Rodríguez stayed on in Eu-

6


rope. While the record of his exact whereabouts grows sketchy, his own later accounts claim that he traveled as far east as the Ukraine, and as far west as London—a hotbed of political activity among Spanish and Spanish American exiles. He would later cite this time as proof of his own authority as a proponent of American originality; he had seen the fruits of European enlightenment and found them wanting. Morales cites interviews recorded by Bolívar’s aide-de-camp, Daniel O’Leary, and the French travel writer Paul Marcoy as evidence of these trips. In 1823, as the struggle for independence that had transformed his old student into “the LibÂ�eraÂ� tor” was winding down, Rodríguez returned to South America, determined to participate in its political and intellectual revitalization. Hailed by Bolívar as the illustrious educator responsible for his success, Rodríguez was named education minister of a Bolivian government led by Antonio José de Sucre, another Venezuelan, who had become Bolívar’s most faithful subordinate and who commanded the victorious American forces in Ayacucho, the last great battle of the Wars of Independence. Charged with establishing a workable educational system in the fledgling republic, Rodríguez soon ran afoul of the country’s criollo elites and its youthful president. While there is still a great deal of uncertainty about the details, the general interpretation presents, on the one hand, a radical Rodríguez whose daring reforms proved too much for the conservative criollo elites that were Bolivia’s ruling class (Chasteen, Americanos 178), and on the other, a disorganized Rodríguez whose chaotic approach finally provoked the ire of the youthful but intensely disciplined executive who had been such an effective commander and military engineer (Lynch 208). Rodríguez’s and Sucre’s letters to Bolívar provide ample support for both perspectives. On July 4, 1826, Sucre noted that Rodríguez had resigned and requested a passport. Rodríguez, he noted, had lost the confidence of school administrators by issuing decrees and then contradicting them with his actions and, at the same time, had been audacious enough to upbraid the government for making improvements to the capital’s homeless shelter without informing him first. This second frustration, Sucre noted, “has not ceased to give me something to laugh about” (no ha dejado de darme que reir) (Cartas 47). Six days later the president would add that Rodríguez had poisoned public relations in Cochabamba—“he has fought with and insulted everyone, calling them brutes and ignoramuses” (ha peleado é insultado a todos tratándolos de ignorantes y brutos)—and that he had claimed that “within six years he would destroy in Bolivia the Religion of Jesus Christ” (antes de seis años, él destruiria en Bolivia la Religión de Jesu-

Introduction

7

cristo), a sure method of endangering whatever good faith the government might still have enjoyed. Forever convinced, at least when writing to Bolívar, of Rodríguez’s merit, Sucre concludes, “It seems incredible that a man of the talent of don Samuel should speak such nonsense” (Parece increíble que un hombre del talento de don Samuel hable tales necedades) (49). Beset with his own frustrations about the viability of republican government for a public so long accustomed to colonial rule, Sucre finds Rodríguez to be the last sort of trouble he needs, an education minister who only aggravates the public distrust.6 Rodríguez’s own letters to Bolívar, which O’Leary included in his edition of Sucre’s correspondence with the Liberator, contradict Sucre in tone, while being much less specific in terms of fact. Where the military prodigy saw disorder and deliberately bungled public relations, Rodríguez casts himself as a misunderstood reformer who marvels at the public’s misperception of his intentions just as Sucre had marveled at the “foolishness” he saw provoking those misperceptions. Clearly in bad financial straits—Rodríguez lists a number of creditors, Sucre among them, for debts incurred in his department—Rodríguez sees this failure as the result of a grand misreading: “I have made two attempts here in America, and no one has managed to uncover the spirit of my plan” (Dos ensayos llevo hechos en América, y nadie ha traslucido el espíritu de mi plan). The people of Spanish America, he argues, have no idea how to categorize him, a reformer who takes into account the plight of the poor and orphaned, and their lack of imagination leads them to jump to the worst possible conclusions—“some think that my intention is to have myself carried to heaven by the orphans .â•¯.â•¯. , and others that I am conspiring to demoralize them so that they will accompany me to hell” (unos piensan que mi intención es hacerme llevar al cielo por los huérfanos .â•¯.â•¯. , y otros que conspiro á demoralizarlos para que me acompañen al infierno) (2:511).7 Having suffered public reprimand by Sucre himself (2:512), Rodríguez claims he has no choice but to attempt to salvage his self-respect by absenting a situation that had clearly become unsustainable. With chilling foresight he asks Bolívar to imagine how it will be for him—“a man of my ideas and of my intentions” (un hombre de mis ideas y de mis intenciones)—in the wilderness of America with no support from any official source, asking him bitterly to “bless, if you wish, the fate of good men” (bendiga U., si quiere, la suerte de los hombres de bien) (2:513). Rodríguez in fact received no reply from Bolívar, and he spent the rest of his life in Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. He would never again

8


wield the sort of official power he had exercised in Bolivia, and he would often struggle to support himself as a small-time shopkeeper, candlemaker, and tutor, but he did manage to make a meager living, sufficient to support his writing habit. Excerpts of his larger works appeared in widely circulated newspapers—El Mercurio Peruano, El Mercurio de Valparaíso, El Neo-Â�Granadino—and he wrote a scientific proposal for a canal on the Vincocaya River and coauthored a report on the Concepción earthquake of 1835 that may have brought him into contact with the British naturalist Charles Darwin. The humiliating failure of his administrative career triggered the beginning of his literary one. Rodríguez’s choice of the word “ensayo” in the letter to Bolívar to describe the educational projects he had attempted in Spanish America would take on an irony of its own, as his thwarted desires to lead an educational ministry blossomed into prose texts. In short order he published American Societies in 1828 (Sociedades Americanas en 1828) (Chuquisaca, Bolivia, 1828; Lima, 1834); The Liberator of South America and His Brothers in Arms Defended by a Friend of the Social Cause (El Libertador del mediodía de América y sus compañeros en armas defendidos por un amigo de la causa social), commonly called Defense of Bolívar (Defensa de Bolívar) (Arequipa, Peru, 1830); and Enlightenment and Social Virtues (Luces y virtudes sociales) (Concepción, 1834; Valparaiso, 1840).8 Beginning with a critique of independence as an incomplete substitute for real revolution, American Societies established the blend of idealism and skepticism that would come to characterize Rodríguez’s writings on politics and education. Separating its arguments into chunks of text arranged like poetry, American Societies also premiered the typographical innovation that would distinguish much of Rodríguez’s prose. In a long, visual comparison between linguistic and governmental reform that might be interpreted as an answer to Rousseau’s call for an investigation into the link between the two, the essay quite literally incorporates its style and themes—making an explicit argument about the very techniques of expression it practices.9 The Defense of Bolívar attempted above all to place in historical perspective the Liberator’s success on the battlefield and burgeoning failure in the court of public opinion. Placing him alongside George Washington and Napoleon as one of the great leaders of the age, Rodríguez argued that an ingrained inferiority complex led the Spanish American public to judge Bolívar more harshly than it would the French or American general. And if Enlightenment and Social Virtues in some ways repeated the message of American Societies, it presented argumentative wrinkles of its own, in par-

Introduction

9

ticular a detailed explanation of Rodríguez’s typographical innovations as deliberate attempts to circumvent the divisions between lettered and oral culture that still mirrored the class divisions throughout the former colonies. These last decades of Rodríguez’s life are probably the most Â�scantily documented of all. He met with Andrés Bello for an amiable chat in 1839, a meeting recorded by Bello disciple José Victorino Lastarria (48–49). Soon afterward he visited Bolívar’s surviving mistress, Manuela Sáenz, in Paita, Peru (Chasteen, Americanos 179), and in 1841 the French travel writer Laurent de Saint Cric came across Rodríguez’s tavern and store in the tiny town of Azángaro, near Lake Titicaca. Saint Cric, who wrote under the name Paul Marcoy, found a learned polyglot who spoke French fluently, claimed to hail from a town near Cádiz, and confessed that with respect to Bolívar he “was never anything more than his friend and counselor” (nunca fui más que su amigo y consejero) (392–93). As Marcoy departed, Rodríguez gave him a compass he said was Bolívar’s in the hope that it would not perish (as Rodríguez would) forgotten in the wilds of America (395; see also Briggs, “El misterioso”). His last newspaper publication appeared in Bogotá in 1849, and he died of natural causes on the evening of February 28, 1854, in Amotape, Ecuador. Somewhere along the way, most likely in 1845, he had written Friendly Advice Given to the School at Latacunga (Consejos de amigo dados al Colejio de Latacunga), which would not be published until 1955 (Pérez Vila xii).

The American Centaur: Genre and New World Writing Rodríguez’s own use of the word “ensayo” to describe his educational experiments rather than his experimental writings underscores the term’s ambivalence in the context of nineteenth-century prose. Derived, according to the 2001 edition of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE), from the Latin exagium, meaning “weight” (peso), the word’s original meanings in English and Spanish, as the leading dictionaries have them, all relate to the act of weighing or assessing something—“Attempt; endeavor” ( Johnson 170); “The action or process of trying or testing” (Oxford English Dictionary [OED]); “Exam, recognition, test” (Exámen, reconocimiento, prueba) (DRAE, 1803). In both languages the meanings of the noun are derived from the verb; the OED thus records a verb use as

10


early as 1483 and the first noun use in 1600, while the DRAE first records the verb “ensayar” in 1732 and the noun “ensayo” in 1803. While the OED reports an almost simultaneous adoption of the literary definition of the noun—“A composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of a subject; .â•¯.â•¯. more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range”—showing its first appearance in Francis Bacon’s 1597 Essays, the DRAE first records a literary definition in 1869, more than a decade after Rodríguez’s death. The likely source of the literary definition of the essay, the OED concludes, is not a direct derivation from the Latin, but the influence of Montaigne’s 1580 publication of Essais. Twice borrowed, from the verb and from the French, the word’s literary application is from the beginning fraught with ambiguity, as evinced by definitions such as Samuel Johnson’s: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular and undigested piece” (170); or the 1869 DRAE: “A writing, generally brief, without the apparatus or the extension necessary for a complete treatise on the same subject” (Escrito, generalmente breve, sin el aparato ni la extensión que requiere un tratado completo sobre la misma materia). It is therefore no surprise that the Spanish writers preceding Rodríguez, that group of Enlightenmentinfluenced thinkers that included Juan Pablo Forner, Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, did not identify themselves as “essayists” despite their production of numerous short pieces of informal, expository prose. To define Rodríguez or any other nineteenth-century Spanish or Spanish American writer as an essayist is, in a sense, to commit an anachronism. Yet as numerous twentieth-century writers have noted, the form as it is understood now—a “composition of moderate length” in an informal style and on any subject—is very much part of the DNA of Spanish American literature, and not only because so many of the region’s poets have made their living publishing short prose pieces in newspapers. In his provocatively titled essay “Our America Is an Essay” (Nuestra América es un ensayo), the Colombian historian German Arciniegas claims a particularly New World–centered patrimony for the genre, invoking the essay as the preferred mode of writing for an American “we,” Montaigne notwithstanding: “Essays have been written among us since the first encounters between the white and the Indian, in the middle of the 16th century, some years before Montaigne would be born” (Ensayos se han escrito entre nosotros desde los primeros encuentros del blanco con el indio, en pleno siglo XVI, unos cuantos años antes de que naciera Montaigne) (356). Dis-

Introduction

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covery, Arciniegas argues, provoked the sort of writings that would come to be called essays from explorers such as Columbus and Vespucci, whose dispatches from the New World function as “true essays that produce controversies in Europe” (verdaderos ensayos que producen polémicas en Europa). Reaching back to the old definition of the word, Arciniegas traces a link between the essay as a test and the essay as a document bringing news of the New World back to the Old: “America is already, in and of itself, a problem, a New World essay, something that tempts, provokes, challenges the intelligence” (América es ya, en sí, un problema, un ensayo de nuevo mundo, algo que tienta, provoca, desafía a la inteligencia) (357). Between Columbus, Vespucci, El Inca Garcilaso, and countless other prose chroniclers of discovery and conquest, the Western Hemisphere had become, in Arciniegas’s estimation, a hotbed for the composition of essays centuries before the word came into use in the Spanish language. Arciniegas is not, of course, the only twentieth-century critic to emphasize the importance of the unclassifiable prose nonfiction text in the history of Spanish American letters. The sort of texts he labels essays form the essential material on which Roberto González Echevarría bases the big idea of his groundbreaking study Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Mito y archivo: Una teoría de la narrativa latinoamericana), which traces the development of the Latin American novel by taking into consideration the region’s long experience with non-novelistic prose (37). For the Mexican poet and essayist Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), who coined the term “centaur of the genres” (centauro de los géneros) to describe the essay, the ambiguous demarcations of the form provided the perfect arena in which the variegated spirit of modernity might be embodied on the page: “The essay, mixed genre, centaur of the genres, responds to the variety of modern culture, more multiple than harmonic” (El ensayo, género mixto, centauro de los géneros, responde a la variedad de la cultura moderna, más multiple que armónica) (El deslinde 51). Robert Conn has characterized this particular definition as Reyes’s attempt to “elevate the ‘essay’ above the politicized, journalistic world” of its most famous Latin American practitioners and thus to consider his own prose pieces within “the rationality of an all-embracing concept” rather than as the fruits of “diverse philological traditions.” As Conn points out, this attempt to bring the genre from the margins to the center of literary production is also an act of subterfuge, since the essays themselves militate against any such “allembracing concept” (37). This tension between the essay’s marginal position with regard to tra-

12


ditional literary genres, and its centrality as the genre for much of Spanish America’s colonial and postcolonial literary history, raises the question of to what degree the problematic nature of the genre has rubbed off on the study of Spanish American literature and, in particular, on unclassified prose stylists such as Simón Rodríguez. If dictionaries make the lack of rigor the genre’s defining characteristic, its relationship to the historical Enlightenment complicates that construction—Montaigne might muse on the New World with little in the way of empirical sources, but Columbus and—Reyes’s example—Einstein were clearly struggling to corral the experience of discovery onto the written page. Michael Hall includes Montaigne with the discoverers who would come later, arguing that throughout its development the essay demonstrates “a common attitude, a spirit of exploration,” and “that in certain important respects the essay emerged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as a product of the Renaissance ‘idea’ of discovery and in response to it” (73). With a lack of scholastic constraint that fitted it perfectly to an age that was beginning to privilege empirical knowledge over received wisdom, the essay became, Hall argues, a laboratory “suited to the examination of conventional wisdom, the exploration of received opinion, and the discovery of new ideas and insights” (78). Furthermore, if the essay’s lack of finish might be seen as a disadvantage in light of the formal perfection expected in plays and poems, its very improvisational nature made it a vehicle in which the experience of discovery might be transmitted in something approximating real time. The essayist, by this measure, convinces not through an overall preponderance of evidence or fact, but by inducing the reader to mimic an experience of discovery analogous to that of the narrator (Hall 82). In this sense the essay is theater, but theater in which the reader takes center stage. The essay, properly designed, demands that the reader imitate the narrator’s thinking and then challenges the reader to accept the veracity not of someone else’s thoughts, but of a process that has become the reader’s own. This is the ingratiating quality that prompted one commentator to say of the essay something very close to what Sir Philip Sidney had famously said of the poem: “The essay, then, does not propose to prove anything, and therefore does not present results, but rather developments that reveal themselves in a process of dialogue in which the reader is an integral part” (El ensayo, pues, no pretende probar nada, y por ello no presenta resultados, sino desarrollos que se exponen en un proceso dialogal en el que el lector es una parte integral) (Gómez-Martínez 75). By this defini-

Introduction

13

tion, Rodríguez, who characterized his writings as attempts to allow a not necessarily learned reader a clearer approach to his own lines of argument, could be called a master essayist. In the readings of his works that follow, I consider him alongside a number of North American and Spanish American contemporaries, all of whom are united by their view of the prose text as a communicative tool specifically adapted to convey their habits of thought to a readership they hope will adopt them.

Constructing an American Rhetoric: The Case for Comparison Any attempt to bring a Spanish American author, particularly an obscure one, into dialogue with well-known U.S. writers such as Thomas Paine and Ralph Waldo Emerson runs a number of risks. While the wide circulation of texts and Rodríguez’s far-ranging travels make his exposure to a variety of authors a near certainty, the lack of concrete bibliographic sources and Rodríguez’s unwillingness to cite other writers makes it difficult to prove many particular readings. He demonstrates a convincing familiarity with George Washington, Napoleon, and the historical details of the French and American Revolutions. He mentions Voltaire, Rousseau, whom he has clearly read deeply, and Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, and he makes a disapproving allusion to one of Thomas Jefferson’s more radical phrases (“the tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants”), but these details must work against a deep-set, and in many respects justified, skepticism provoked by the Pan-American undertones of a NorthSouth comparison.10 Lewis Hanke’s Do the Americas Have a Common History? A Critique of the Bolton Theory posed, in the middle of the twentieth century, the question that remains a third rail for Latin Americanists at the beginning of the twenty-first. The answer, from the Bolton theory to the present, has varied among interlocutors determined to either reinforce or react against the conception of Latin American difference that has always complicated the region’s position vis-à-vis the rest of Western culture.11 This separation, which Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has characterized as “the unspoken assumption” according to which “Latin Americanists should not be writing the intellectual history of the West, on the one hand, and Europeanists should not be meddling with the ‘Third World’ on the other,” easily glides from the East-West, transatlantic axis to the North-South hemispheric one (How 10). Nicolas Shumway sketches the process in which a

14


Latin American reaction against the brutality of industrial capitalism in North America and the concrete actions of the U.S. military in 1898 created a dynamic in which “increasing numbers saw the United States and U.S. culture as an enemy against whom Hispanics from both sides of the ocean and of varying political stripes could rally” (293). If independenceera Spanish Americans such as Simón Bolívar and Fray Servando Teresa de Mier had tended to emphasize the brutality of Spanish rule in a tone that more or less mimicked English and later U.S. constructions of the Leyenda Negra (Black Legend), the Hispanism to which Shumway refers made Spanish American and Spanish difference with regard to Europe and the United States a point of identity and pride. Despite its Manichean history, this oppositional construction in which a historical sense of rivalry between Spain and the other European powers leads to the contrasting of Spanish America with the largely (though by no means completely) Anglo-influenced culture of the United States creates its own opportunities for unexpected readings. Shumway notes that in his own experience North American students often embrace the works of a fiery anti-U.S. Hispanist such as the Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó (1872–1917), though he attributes this effect to the resemblance of Rodó’s style to “the tradition of the Jeremiad, a Puritan preaching tradition in which listeners perversely enjoyed being upbraided for their manifold imperfections” (296). We could argue that the students to whom Shumway refers are performing a hemispheric reading of Rodó, bringing to bear their own frustrations with the Colossus of the North of which they are in fact citizens and, if Shumway’s interpretation is to be believed, unlocking with Protestant-inflected sensibilities yet another (however perverse) means of approaching the Uruguayan’s text. Aesthetically, at least, the perspective of these North American readers provides them access to at least one pleasurable interpretation of Ariel that might be impossible for nonU.S. readers or for U.S. readers reading the work of a fellow citizen. The notion of pleasure as a goal is deeply inscribed in the tradition of the essay. Where Bacon comforted himself that erroneous interpretations were useful because they would lead to corrections, Feijoo would imagine the act of reading as akin to that of entering a first-class literary salon and thus having access to the best and wittiest thoughts of the most intelligent interlocutors: “What could be sweeter than to be dealing every day with the most rational and wisest men, that all the centuries contained, as one manages through the handling of books?” (¿Qué cosa más dulce hay, que estar tratando todos los días con los hombres más racionales, y sabios,

Introduction

15

que tuvieron los siglos todos, como se logra con el manejo de los libros?). And if the pleasurable interpersonal communication provided by wellwritten prose does not in fact provide scientific truth, something is still accomplished in Feijoo’s eyes, as “one entertains the understanding with the sweet delicacy of seeing the subtle discourses with which so many sublime minds have looked for it” (se entretiene el entendimiento con la dulce golosina de ver los sutiles discursos con que la han buscado tantas mentes sublimes) (209). Such a passive approach to the concept of truth would be unthinkable to a politically committed writer such as Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Simón Rodríguez, but even at their most inflammatory, what these texts offer is a shared didactic experience in which the reader, guided by the narrator’s steady hand, rehearses the thought process behind the text itself in a preliminary step (the narrator hopes) to coming to share his or her point of view. The recently burgeoning field of hemispheric studies provides further impetus for a consideration of revolutionary rhetoric that goes beyond the bounds of the nation-state. If one can still complain, as Shumway does, that the paradigmatic view of “Spanish America” tends to elide national and regional boundaries in search of a fictional “Spanish American” reality (296), it’s equally true that for Rodríguez and many writers from the territory that would become the Bolivarian nations of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, the notion of an independent “America” was an idea with a surer history than the boundaries of their individual states. Rodríguez, who left his native Venezuela for good well before the Wars of Independence, is an extreme example, but Francisco de Miranda, Simón Bolívar, Andrés Bello, Fray Servando, and many others spent significant time in Europe and were engaged with a multinational Spanish-language dialogue on Enlightenment and independence that centered around the publishing centers of London, Paris, and Philadelphia, the “hemispheric American city” (Lazo).12 Employing the notion of hemispheric studies that Caroline Levander and Robert S. Levine have called “a heuristic rather than a content- or theory-driven method” (9), this study proposes reading Simón Rodríguez into a larger corpus of revolutionary writing united less by shared political and economic circumstances than by an aspiration to originality and a commitment to bringing it about through the influence of prose in all the forms the “centaur of genres” allows. Rodríguez and his contemporaries created nineteenth-century versions of what Vera Kutzinski, speaking of the twentieth century, has identified as the New World penchant for producing “elaborate literary experiments in

16


disorder” (17–18) as a result of a conscious process of choosing rather than accepting “literary ancestry” (x–xi). Ever sensitive to the notion of writing as communication—and thus to their relationship with the reading public they imagined—the American essayists attempted always to posit a more transcendental idea of a national project, connected or not with a particular nation-state. Here, it is worth pointing out the problematic nature of the term “America.” Ricaurte Soler has shown that the term was always employed in Spanish, from Miranda to Martí, to mark a North-South distinction rather than a transatlantic one (43). This means that the “Nuestra América” proclaimed by nineteenth-century Spanish Americans was transnational but not hemispheric, since “Nuestra América” owed its very resistance to the anxiety associated with the other America, the United States. The term “America” must also contend with the U.S. tendency to treat it as a pure signifier for the United States, thus eliminating or subsuming the majority of the hemisphere into a single national identity. My use of the term to refer to an “American” essay is at once newer and older than that catalogued by Soler. When the Venezuelan intellectual Arturo Uslar Pietri wrote, for example, that utopia was an “American” ideal, he used the term as a synonym for the New World, an identity marker born of the painful process of discovery and conquest (“El mito” 7). Bolívar’s and Thomas Paine’s respective use of the terms “New World” and “America” to refer to the Western Hemisphere as an asylum from European history invokes a contrast between West and East that each posits as a broader philosophical and historical divide—a divide for which their individual revolutions are mere expressions. Recent books by Anna Brickhouse and Ralph Bauer have demonstrated the usefulness of a hemispheric perspective despite the varying political and historical circumstances of Soler’s two Americas. In TransÂ� ameriÂ�can Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004), Brickhouse takes as a point of departure the conflicting emotions released by the Monroe Doctrine: “the hard-nosed economic policy engineered by the nation’s political class and the hemispheric idealism registered in the U.S. public sphere” (3). The “literary imaginary” of the American (which is to say U.S.) Renaissance of the nineteenth-century was thoroughly “transamerican,” she argues, fueled by a multilingual press and multilingual reading habits that defied national or locally focused historical approaches (6–7, 28). If Brickhouse includes Spanish America in order to form a clearer picture of the U.S. literary imaginary of the nineteenth century, Ralph Bauer takes a thoroughly comparative approach, finding in

Introduction

17

the process of discovery and conquest a conceptual link between North and South. Beginning with an explanation of Francis Bacon’s use of instrumental reason as one that created a division of labor in which “the colonials in the ‘bowels’ of nature would provide the epistemic raw material and the metropolitan natural philosopher would refine it into ‘truth’â•ƒ” (Cultural Geography 17), Bauer traces an American literary imaginary in which the narrative mimics this movement from “material” to “truth,” a narrative in which intellectual independence comes to be associated with the ability to do one’s own refining (217). In both cases the hemispheric approach is transformative and heuristic—it allows new readings without necessarily determining them. In the case of Simón Rodríguez, the hemispheric approach serves to place in perspective a body of writings whose very strangeness has relegated them to the margins of the canonical notions of Spanish American literature. While a handful of critics have lauded Rodríguez’s eccentric text design as a conceptual advance rather than a mark of dangerous eccentricity (see A. Rama; Rotker; Lezama Lima), the legendary vision of the man as a half-crazy vagabond redeemed only by his contact with Bolívar persists. John Lynch’s excellent biography of Bolívar counts its subject’s devotion to his old teacher a weakness of judgment (282) and emphasizes Rodríguez’s marginality as a thinker. John Charles Chasteen, on the contrary, makes the case for Rodríguez’s importance as an educational innovator and critical mind in his groundbreaking historical synthesis of the era of independence. But his study devotes less attention to Rodríguez’s writings, classifying them as “almost unreadable tracts” (Americanos 179). I will be arguing that these texts were in fact written with a particular sort of readability in mind, and that Rodríguez, while not an Enlightenment philosopher in the strict historical sense of the term, was indeed a participant in a nineteenth-century effort to remake the tropes of Enlightenment discourse into the building blocks of a transcendent Americanism. I thus propose to read Rodríguez alongside a sequence of philosophically and formally radical contemporaries who share this approach. The first chapter traces the trope of America as an asylum for European history, a construction employed by Bolívar, Thomas Paine, and Rodríguez to justify armed rebellion in the case of the first two, and a social revolution based on public education in the case of Rodríguez. This narrative of arrival, expansion, and emancipation introduces the paradox of the criollo revolutionary, who uses a largely European slate of goals and principles to articulate a vision for American space presented in contrast to Europe.

18


Rodríguez and Paine attempt to bridge this paradox by positing a new conceptualization of America as a privileged space in which the lessons of European history might be used to plot an original course. As transatlantic travelers they make the criollo paradox a virtue, suggesting that readers need to expand their own perspectives in order to understand the transatlantic significance of American political destiny. In Chapter 2, the escape promised by the asylum trope introduces its counterpart—the unavoidable confrontation with New World nature and the challenge that nature represented to any attempt to construct a harmonic vision of transatlantic society. This chapter explores the political treatment of independence by the liberal Spanish exile José María Blanco White and the Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Both approach the question of independence from a deliberately constructed perspective of detached moderation. While willing to criticize the vicissitudes of Spanish rule, they do so not in the white heat of the criollo revolutionaries, but with an ecological perspective that attempts to balance the need for economic success (a prime motivator for Paine and Bolívar) with the coexistence of human communities and the natural world. While this notion of ecology surfaces continually in Rodríguez’s writings, it is most pronounced in his little-known scientific texts—his 1830 proposal for a canal on the Vincocaya River and his 1835 description of the Concepción earthquake. All three writers, I will argue, evince a clear will to modify the Baconian construction explained by Bauer in which European “speculation” dominates the material of New World nature. However much Rodríguez may prize the notion of harmony, his radiÂ� cal view of the need for social change shines forth most clearly in his obsessively reiterated belief in the primacy of educational reform as an engine for social change. Bridging a gap between those critics who view Rodríguez as a simple disciple of Rousseau and those who downplay the Genevan’s importance in his imaginary, Chapter 3 traces the way a Lockean notion of experiential knowledge articulated in Rousseau’s Emile becomes the centerpiece for Rodríguez’s thoughts on education. Bringing to bear Andrés Bello’s and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s constructions of the ideal American education, this chapter argues that the narrative of a single exemplary education becomes a metaphor for the notion of national and regional progress in which America serves at once as “student” and “school” for a new morality characterized by tolerance, intellectual courage, and a deeper social conscience. The fourth chapter takes issue with Benedict Anderson’s supposition

Introduction

19

that the North American and Spanish American revolutions lacked a meaningful linguistic component, by examining the extraordinary efforts of Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, and Andrés Bello to make America the school for a new version of the language shared with the mother country. Rodríguez’s elaborate comparison between governmental and educational reform is meaningful only in reference to these movements, which sought to create a more perfectly phonetic American language in line with the political notion of a more empirical and honest American society. Reflecting the Enlightenment discourse on the possibility of pure representation, these linguistic proposals suggest an overlap between representative government and the representative use of language. This notion of America as a linguistic Eden serves as a precursor for the discussion of utopianism in the final chapter. In Chapter 5 I argue that Rodríguez’s radical stylistic departures are best understood as early branches of the original Saint-Simonian concept of an avant-garde as the artistic movement whose job it is to prepare the public consciousness to receive a political message. While Rodríguez’s visual techniques resemble those of the late nineteenth-century avant-garde that would eschew this notion of political responsibility, his own characterization of his style stresses its practicality as a tool for communicating with readers unused to formal prose. Reading Rodríguez alongside Robert Owen, the English socialist who in 1828 proposed a utopian community to the government of Mexico, I argue that both writers bridge the gap between the political (or Saint-Simonian) avant-garde of their own time and the sensibility that would lead to later, less politically committed versions. Both see the desire for a communitarian morality as galvanizing political and aesthetic force. Above all, this study seeks to reintroduce Simón Rodríguez in the context of a hemispheric aesthetic of North American and European intellectuals who made the “centaur of genres” a platform for dealing with the contradictions between the promises of Enlightenment philosophy and the political reality of independence and its aftermath.

Chapter 1

American Asylum and the Rhetoric of Escape

Stay there, where peace will find Sacred asylum, beautiful independence; Stay there, where finally you’ll receive A glorious prize for your august actions. (Quédate allá, donde sagrado asilo Tendrán la paz, la independencia hermosa; Quédate allá, donde por fin recibas El premio augusto de tu acción gloriosa.)

—José Manuel de Quintana, “Al la expedición española para propagar la vacuna en América bajo la dirección de don Francisco Balmis” (1806)

W

hen he referred to “America” as “an asylum for mankind” in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine gave an old political concept new life in the particular context of the struggle for independence (Thomas Paine 30). Characterizing the entire Western Hemisphere as an antechamber to European history, an escape valve whose discovery on the heels of the Protestant Reformation seemed almost preordained, “as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety” (20), Paine invited his readers to consider their own historical position as paradoxically related to European history. On the one hand, theirs was a narrative of originality, and their space that in which the difficulties and prejudices of the mother continent need not apply. On the other hand, his 21

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formulation envisioned a broader historical narrative in which a seminal event of European history, the Protestant Reformation and its bloody aftermath, becomes the raison d’être for American colonial civilization and, specifically, the thirteen English colonies of North America just entering open revolt. Simón Bolívar’s 1805 “Oath at the Sacred Mountain” ( Juramento en el Monte Sacro) would make a similar claim for his New World, invoking it as the space in which “the great problem of human freedom” (el gran problema del hombre en libertad) might finally be solved after having been neglected by so many centuries of otherwise progressive European history (Rodríguez 2:378). While Paine’s Common Sense was a media event designed to spur an indifferent or even loyalist North American public to support a rebellion that had begun with a handful of actions in a few northeastern cities, the circumstances of Bolívar’s text are more complex. Ostensibly uttered aloud on a hill outside Rome in 1805, the “Juramento” has come to be viewed widely as the culminating event of the Liberator’s walking tour from Paris, a journey in which he was accompanied by Simón Rodríguez, his former tutor, and during which the pair had stopped to witness Napoleon’s coronation at Naples. The “Juramento” itself, while referred to in an 1824 letter from Bolívar to Rodríguez, was first published by Manuel Uribe Angel after his 1850 interview with Rodríguez—more than four decades after the event. Susana Rotker has thus classified it as an imagined history, more concrete than a myth but something less than a fact: “I am referring here to episodes that are invented or reproduced or accepted with such resonance by the community that it ceases to be important whether they occurred or not: the image is so coherent that it should have happened that way” (Me refiero aquí a episodios inventados y reproducidos o aceptados con tal eco en la comunidad que deja de tener importancia si sucedieron o no: la imagen es tan coherente que debio suceder asíâ†œ) (“Evangelio” 31). And indeed the “Juramento” has achieved remarkable staying power, since, as Christopher Conway has argued, it “faithfully represents a foundational scene of Latin American identity” and “has become one of the cornerstone texts of the myth of Bolívar” (Cult 152, 151).1 In a sense Rotker and Conway agree that the “Juramento” derives its longevity from the felicitous concision with which it combines an image of the historical torch passing from East to West with the mythical figure of Bolívar. The doubtfulness of the text is the one aspect a contemporary scholar can be sure of,


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and Tomás Polanco Alcántara joins Rotker in pointing out that the story could not be exactly as Rodríguez described it, since his account eliminates the presence of the third member of the party and describes Bolívar, a twenty-two-year-old widower, as an “adolescent” (adolescente) (132–34). Here I have no dispute with Polanco Alcántara and Rotker’s critiques, which are fundamental to a proper understanding of the text’s precariousness.2 What is most of interest to the question of asylum is the degree to which an incident whose bare details Bolívar and Rodríguez at least agree on insists on casting the New World as a refreshing escape from Old World corruption—an asylum where universal history eludes European circumscription. The notion of asylum took root in Rodríguez’s own writings, too, as he peppered his addresses to a perceived Spanish American readership with injunctions to form original systems of government rather than slavish imitations of European or U.S. models. For Rodríguez, Spanish America’s great fortune was its temporal and physical position on the fringes of European enlightenment. Having had the opportunity to witness the French and U.S. revolutions as well as the equally revolutionary shift to an industrial economy in England, his Spanish American societies possessed, he believed, an unusual opportunity to practice discernment—they could learn from the mistakes and excesses of their precursors while copying and adapting the governmental and economic measures that were most successful. In contrast with contemporaries such as Sarmiento, who saw independence as the opportunity to call forth a wave of European immigrants with the goal of transforming the continent’s racial landscape, Rodríguez proposed colonizing empty American space with Americans as a solution that would strengthen agriculture, deurbanize the postcolonial societies, and encourage criollo identification with the American landscape. The use of the concept of asylum as a trope for the promise of American space was anything but a novelty introduced by the independence movement. J. H. Elliott has pointed out that “for Protestants and Catholics alike, America held a special place in God’s Providential design,” and as support he cites Cotton Mather (1663–1728) and Giovanni Botero (1544– 1617). Mather, the North American clergyman and historian, argued, just as Paine would, that America offered a divinely ordained escape from Catholic persecution of Protestants, while Botero “declared that it was divine providence which brought about the rejection of Columbus’s proposals by the kings of France and England, whose countries would subsequently

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fall prey to the supreme heresy of Calvinism,” seeing it as the means by which “God placed America in the safe hands of the Castilians and the Portuguese and their pious monarchs” (Empires 184).3 Focusing on British colonialism in North America, Marilyn C. Baseler notes a convergence of circumstances that solidified a perception of the colonies as an asylum decades before the independence movement ever took root. She cites the British Empire’s tendency to use the colonies as remote locations in which troublesome religious dissidents might be encouraged to resettle, spaces of refuge for political experiments that could not be tried in London (67–68). These practical considerations, and with them “the tendency of frustrated Englishmen to see the American colonies as a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their dreams,” thus created an American self-image and an English perception of America that would make Paine’s appeal resonate both in North America and in Europe (141).4 The notion of a nation profiting from the reception of political refugees was an old one, too, as almost a hundred years earlier Samuel von Pufendorf ’s Of the Law of Nature and Nations (De jure naturae et gentium) (1672) had extolled the act of providing asylum for political refugees as a means of raising a country’s socioeconomic status, provided, of course, that the refugees themselves be of sufficient education and class, and that they arrive in groups small enough so as not to overwhelm the social equilibrium of the host country. What is distinctive about the approach taken by Paine and Rodríguez is the sweeping nature of their claim. Asylum represents for them not a single virtuous mode of identification, but rather a paradigmshifting concept designed to reshape how the American public views itself and its relationship to Europe. Both Paine and Rodríguez begin with what should be an important weakness of the independence movement—its clear and continuing intellectual inheritance from Europe—and instead challenge their readers to rethink world geopolitics, imagining American space not as a projection of European dreams and avarice but rather as an objective space sufficiently distant from the drama of European history to allow its contemplation and use. Americans, in Paine’s and Rodríguez’s view, thus take on a perspective from which Europe might be viewed with objectivity and through which American civilization might escape its status as a victim of the machinery of colonial government.


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Paine’s Common Sense: Creating an Exiled Public The publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense marked an important event in the history of publishing itself, not simply a moment in the career of one pro-Independence thinker. Like Rodríguez, Paine can be accurately described as a transatlantic figure. Born in England in 1737, he departed for North America in 1774, fleeing bankruptcy and a failed marriage (Kuklick viii). Having met Benjamin Franklin in London before leaving, Paine arrived with his entrée into American publishing already won, and was soon employed as editor of The Pennsylvania Magazine (Kuklick ix). When open rebellion broke out between the colonists and the British army in 1775, he was perfectly positioned to respond with the famous and widely distributed pamphlet, which quickly became a blockbuster, as Gregory Claeys has noted, whose “sales soon vastly surpassed those of any of the other 400 pamphlets of the pre-revolutionary debate.” Claeys reports that “some 120,000 copies were sold in the first three months alone and perhaps half a million in the first year,” to say nothing of the burgeoning foreign market for which translations into French, Spanish, and German soon appeared. Claeys also alludes to the document’s importance in the Spanish American independence movement (Thomas Paine 51), and A. Owen Aldridge has chronicled Manuel García de Sena’s 1811 Philadelphia translation, which became the talk of enlightened commentators as far south as Buenos Aires (281–82). Like Simón Rodríguez, Paine pirouetted among nationalities, never finding a comfortable home in Europe or America. Claeys has remarked that “his status as a ‘free-floating’ intellectual with scant respect for established authority was central,” allowing him “to shake off the morality of subservience more easily than either native Americans or elder emigrants” (Thomas Paine 49–50). Passage from Europe to the Americas carried with it a broadening of frames that blunted national divisions, Paine would argue, and whatever nationalism or “nativism” marked his anti-British discourse, he was careful, within certain racial and geographical parameters, to posit the independent North American republic as an extranational creation.5 Paine’s marginal status as a lower-middle-class immigrant was indeed central to the event of Common Sense. Trish Loughran’s recent article on the myths surrounding books and nations calls into question “the Painite myth of mass diffusion” and the “powerful Enlightenment metanarrative [.â•¯.â•¯.] in which the practices of book-making and nation building continue

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to be imagined as inseparable” (3). In Loughran’s construction, the notion of Common Sense as an instant best seller read simultaneously by important segments of the North American population is itself revisionist history that allows the rhetoric of the book to transcend the difficulties of printing and distribution. Estimating that, given the publishing capacity of the colonial cities, “its circulation would not have exceeded 75,000,” Loughran argues that “the bestseller as a cultural form is simply anachronistic” to the historical context of 1776 (17, 18). She suggests that the real genesis of the best-seller myth lies in the assumptions of the narrator himself: “Paine may well have been the first author both to address every inhabitant of the colonies rhetorically and to believe (or behave as if ) he had actually succeeded” (8). Loughran’s article has far-reaching implications for the consideration of American asylum, a metaphorical construction that appears overtly at several points in Paine’s narrative. Paine’s own emigration saga makes for a tempting literal interpretation—Harvey J. Kaye has described how, “like many a fortunate immigrant before and since, he wrote as if reborn” (35)— but in Loughran’s reading he is as much an instrument as a master artist, commissioned by powerful political allies as the perfect not-so-anonymous author of a text whose publication entailed some personal risk and one “that both tested and shaped public opinion” (Loughran 13).6 Paine’s myth, in other words, the myth of a text that organically represented and was received by a “whole” American public, is by this reading encoded both in his text itself and in the generations of interpretive reinforcement that have sustained it as a foundational document of American independence. The essay itself moves from the general to the specific, beginning with a section on governments in general that narrows its focus to the English monarchy, then advancing to a general condemnation of hereditary succession before moving to a consideration of America’s current economic and political situation and suggesting a Constitutional Congress as the first step toward formulating an independent government. The appeals to America as the world’s historical and economic asylum serve both to create a sense of universal identity capable of transcending (European) nationality and to inspire in the American readership a sense of historical destiny. Virtue, gloriously undefined, performs continual unifying work as well, framing the revolution as both a radical readjustment of an unfair arrangement vis-à-vis the British government and a conservative bulwark against the “contamination” of “European corruption” (Paine, Thomas Paine 39–40).7 Just as Europe’s colonization of America tended to justify itself


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as a pragmatic response to the depravity of the savage landscape and its inhabitants, Paine’s use of the asylum trope imagined the dirty work of “separation” as the only responsible reaction to an English government he finds devoid of humanity.8 Beginning with a declaration of the universality of the cause of independence—“The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind” (2)—Paine quickly sketches a genealogy of human government as a contractual arrangement designed to bring about security and dependent on a shared “common interest” (5) between the government and the governed. Like Cotton Mather before him, Paine searches for republicanism’s religious roots and finds them in the Old Testament. The account of the Jews’ escape from Egypt and their struggle to found a viable government strikes him as a metaphor for any nation’s quest for independence. In this sense, he argues, the Bible provides anything but a justification for a divine right of kings, since for most of the first three thousand years after Creation “their form of government (except in extraordinary cases where the Almighty interposed) was a kind of republic, administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes.” In fact, Paine argues, the scriptural account shows a clear bias toward republicanism and away from monarchy: “Monarchy is ranked in scripture as one of the sins of the Jews, for which a curse in reserve is denounced against them” (9). Having established an argument for divine republicanism, Paine goes on to dismiss what he sees as the particular unreason of the British monarchy: “In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears” (15). The modern king thus depends on a certain national fervor to make that “setting it together by the ears” a viable political strategy. Patriotic fervor serves the monarchy, Paine concludes, because it provides one of the few effective means to rally the body politic in the absence of that “common interest” between the public and the king. Monarchy, in Paine’s retelling, is therefore an invented tradition, and arguments for a “divine” protection for monarchy represent an appeal from power to patriotism and religion rather than an original religious idea applied to the national context. In his view America represents a space particularly resistant to the manipulations of monarchism because its public is defined not by nationality in the conventional sense but by the experience of having sought asylum. To make this point Paine stresses that the North American colonies are less a “British” America than a pan-European one: “This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil

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and religious liberty from every part of Europe.” The relative cosmopolitanism of the American colonies thus allows a broader conception of identity—a humanistic vision impossible from within the physical confines of a single monarchy—and Paine revels in the notion of an American public whose concept of identity is broader and more sophisticated than that of the English: “we claim brotherhood with every European Christian, and triumph in the generosity of the sentiment.” This “generosity,” it goes without saying, remains inaccessible to those Europeans who have not crossed the Atlantic and experienced the shift in scale of living “in this extensive quarter of the globe” (18). Paine’s desire to short-circuit the concept of national identity leads him to speculate that even if all the colonists were descended from English nationals, the question of their identity would still be in doubt, since “the first king of England, of the present line (William the Conqueror) was a Frenchman, and half the peers of England are descendants from the same country” (19). Nationality, in other words, is for Paine a construct rather than a fixed form of identity, and by pointing out the inherent contradictions behind even the most stable of eighteenthcentury monarchies, he posits America’s national identity as a higher and more reasonable nationalism, a nationalism founded upon a shared experience rather than ancestry and the biographies of notable persons. Paine’s appeal to reason, coupled with the self-conscious employment of diction and syntax designed to attract a broad readership, has led Daniel C. Hoffman to investigate his use of the term “prejudice” as a “perceptual frame.” Noting Paine’s inheritance of an Enlightenment rhetoric of impartiality from Baconian empiricism and Lockean epistemology (388–90), Hoffman concludes that “Paine might well have seen his task in Common Sense as being to identify and explode the prejudices standing in the way of American independence” (390–91). Defining perceptual frames as “frames that bracket not objects, not acts of communication, but rather acts of perception,” Hoffman suggests that Paine’s text seeks to effect something more than logical persuasion in favor of the cause of independence: “In order for Paine’s argument for independence to succeed he would have to lead his readers to see not only that it was right to seek independence, but that they had been wrong all along in their views of the British” (393; italics in original). With a “usage of ‘prejudice’â•ƒ” that “paralleled the manner in which Puritan divines employed ‘sin’ to designate a condition that distorted perception and warped judgment,” Paine sought to provoke not only a public rethinking of the wisdom of reuniting with England but a public rethinking of its own thought—“a kind of conversion experience”


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(398). Hoffman’s construction is particularly useful here, because it highlights how Paine’s strategy of contrasting the prejudicial unreason of the arguments against independence helps turn the weaknesses of the pro-independence position into strengths. The asylum trope in particular works to develop a sense of opportunity centered on what might otherwise be sources of anxiety for the reading public—the abandonment of a centuries-old political relationship, the distance from a country the colonists had long looked to as a source of historical legitimacy and protection. Finally, by invoking the pan-European nature of the American population as a truer national identity than that of a single European nation, Paine takes on the contradictory task of, in Molly Anne Rothenberg’s words, “forming and maintaining a polity from a heterogeneous population while protecting maximum individual liberty” (332; italics in original).9 Along with the reversal in which heterogeneity becomes an argument for the reasonableness of the American notion of identity, Paine argues that America represents a refuge for a more reasonable approach to economics. He asserts that independence will right a perversion of Newtonian proportions, the “absurd” situation “supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island,” as reason (common sense) would dictate that “small islands not capable of protecting themselves are the proper objects for government to take under their care” (23). Since it is nature that reveals the absurdity of the colonial arrangement, it is, by Paine’s logic, nature that will guarantee the economic viability of the colonies as an independent nation. The likely result of independence would therefore be not chaos and strife but a more harmonious relationship in which the structure of government and the forces of commerce are aligned: “Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free portâ†œ” (19). Having argued extensively against monarchy as an arbitrary form of government masquerading as “natural,” Paine posits the American continent as an asylum not only for those fleeing European tyranny and poverty but also for the rule of law itself. If European tradition binds its nations to recognize and revere royal families that always turn out to be usurpers upon close historical investigation, America opens the door for the establishment of the dynasty of the rule of law: “so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king” (28). Paine’s task, however, is not simply to invoke the reasonable possibility of American independence. The “conversion” he hopes to induce in his readers will render them enthusiastic supporters of the movement willing

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to take risks for it, rather than mere onlookers.10 The asylum trope proves effective, paradoxically, at producing a sense of both urgency and historical inevitability, since the same asylum so reasonably and historically necessary can as easily be cast as under assault by the forces of unreason and historical regression. While insisting on the rightness and clarity of the American cause, Paine has no trouble describing this triumphant space of the future as under global siege. The pamphlet thus concludes with an appeal not to the flow of history and reason, but to the cause of independence as a last stand against the barbarian forces that oppose the progress of liberty: “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind” (30). In Paine’s final universalist construction, it is humankind itself that takes on the persona of the persecuted exile. And if God might be credited with having provided America as an asylum in one moment of purely religious turmoil—the Protestant Reformation—Paine suggests that the combination of religious, political, and economic vectors of flight demand a refuge that can be produced and maintained only by his readers.

Variations on a Theme: America as Refuge and as Future It would be no exaggeration to say that this complementary identification of American space as, on the one hand, humankind’s inevitable future and, on the other hand, a fragile refuge in need of constant re-creation and defense has colored discourse throughout the hemisphere ever since. The twentieth-century Mexican essayist and intellectual Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959) drew a clear line of cause and effect between the European reaction to the discovery of America and the progressive hopes of his own era. In an address to the Seventh International American Conference (VII Conferencia Internacional Americana) in 1933, Reyes characterized the continent with a poetic flourish as “the escape for adventure or for dreaming, of the mystical urge or the simple urge to power” (el escape de la aventura o del ensueño, del afán místico o del simple afán de poder). The inherent malleability of space that responds to all manner of urges leads to a pair of similes designed to capture the pure potentiality of the new continent when viewed from a European perspective. In Reyes’s construction


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the sculptor symbolizes the public and American space is the rock from which republican actions will be chiseled: “it is like the primary form of virtue or like the rock in which behavior will have to find its sculptures” (es como una forma primaria de virtud y como la roca en que la conducta habrá de hallar sus esculturas) (Ensayos 77). Later on, in a 1936 letter, Reyes refined the same descriptive approach, referring to America as Europe’s ethical challenge: “The Europeans, at the appearance of America, began to dream—each according to his or her ethical capacity—of improving” (Los europeos, al aparecer América, se dieron a soñar—cada uno según su capacidad ética—en ser mejores). Reyes concluded that America’s advocates could be distinguished from its adversaries based on that rhetorical template. The continent presents itself as “a possible theater of better experiences” (un posible teatro de mejores experiencias) (89), and those who view it from afar can either embrace or reject that moral potential. Reyes’s vision of the continent as virtue, rock, and theater invokes a vague sense of possibility rather than any particular moral or philosophical value. While the “primary form of virtue” suggests an identification between America and moral virtue, the movement toward a more neutral (and more vivid) marker—the rock of conduct’s sculptures, the raw material shaped by behavior—presents an America that looks more like primary material ready to be shaped by European desire. Carlos J. Alonso invokes a similar neutrality when he speaks of America’s ability to serve as “the object of a ceaselessly regenerating discourse of mystification and perpetual promise.” Alonso also notes how this apparently neutral position became useful for generating a discourse of American autonomy. The notion of America as the locus “of mystification and perpetual promise” easily morphs into “an instrument to curtail European hegemony in the New World” (8). Alonso calls this position “futurity vis-à-vis the Old World” and traces how it comes to be completely internalized by Latin American intellectuals (of Reyes’s generation and beyond) as a particular sort of ambivalence and displacement in which the language of autonomy “unavoidably reinforced the cultural myths of metropolitan superiority” (20), and in which the desired modernity takes up residence always just beyond the visible horizon (32). This identification with America as the locus of the future combined with the paradoxical necessity of European concepts to articulate that future takes on a special political charge in the era of independence, when the political implications of future-centered dreaming become concrete and inescapable. If Mather and Botero can contemplate America’s rela-

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tionship to European religious history with a certain security in which the past guarantees the rightness of the present rather than some dreamed-of future, the political context for Paine, Bolívar, and Rodríguez is more complex. Pressed on the one hand to produce compelling, immediate arguments for political independence, and on the other by the need to justify these arguments by appealing to recognized (European) notions of universal humanism, they produce what is often a mixture of unbridled futurity and the redemptive morality identified by Baseler—a morality in which, ironically enough, the new colonies take on the mantle of superiority first used to justify the European conquest. The notion of American space as a locus that combined moral and economic missions dates at least from Columbus’s arrival. In the diary entry from the first encounter with indigenous Americans, Columbus justified his gifts of “red hats and glass beads that they put around their necks, and many other things of little value” (unos bonetes colorados y unas cuentas de vidro que se ponían al pesqueço y otras cosas muchas de poco valor) as a peaceful means of tapping into what he perceived as their openness to receive the Catholic faith: “I could see that they were a people who could more easily be won over and converted to our holy faith by kindness than by force” (congnoscí que era gente que mejor se labraría y convertiría a nuestra sancta fe con amor que no por fuerça) (28; trans. 29). Nor did the moral mission long distract Columbus from the monetary possibilities presented by the new continent. Aside from his constant speculation about where precious metals might be found, he saw in the natives themselves a labor potential inseparable from their openness to Christian redemption: “They ought to make good slaves for they are of quick intelligence since I notice that they are quick to repeat what is said to them, and I believe that they could very easily become Christians, for it seemed to me they had no religion of their own” (Ellos deven ser buenos servidores y de buen ingenio, que veo que muy presto dizen todo lo que les dezía. Yo creo que ligeramente se harían cristianos, que pareçió que ninguna secta tenían) (30; trans. 31). The same “quickness” that gave them the potential to be converted into valuable slaves would also aid their conversion to Christianity. Here the apparent lack of religion in the New World is more an invitation to Christian missionaries than a source of puzzlement or horror—spiritual real estate on the new continent is apparently as open and available as land.11 Some three hundred years after Columbus’s landing, independencecentered writing on America, north and south, takes place against this


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backdrop of the American continent as the dual location of spiritual redemption and monetary promise. Here, too, Paine, Rodríguez, and Bolívar participate in a broad rhetorical trend that extracts political expediency from the notion of refuge. From the beginning a reflection of the Conquistador’s vision for the New World, the notion of American asylum flourishes in that uneasy space between monarchy and independence. When the royal expedition carrying the smallpox vaccine arrived in Venezuela in 1803, two poets, Andrés Bello of Venezuela and Manuel José Quintana of Spain, each penned an ode in honor of the occasion, and both make use of the term “asylum.”12 In Bello’s case the vaccine will purify the colonies so that they can become the refuge they should be for the transatlantic sailor who, after a long voyage, “requests in vain / The healthy asylum of ports” (en vano pide / El saludable asilo de los puertos) (Colección 65). Seen from the perspective of the sailor, then, the vaccine counts as a refuge restored and a feather in the cap of Spain’s king, Carlos IV, who is depicted as continuing his father’s reformist project: It is Jenner who finds beneath the roofs Of shepherds this so glorious discovery: He joyously publishes the happy news To the universe, and Carlos distributes This gift of heaven throughout the earth. ( Jenner es quien encuentra bajo el cielo De los pastores tan precioso hallazgo: El publica gozoso al universo La feliz nueva, y Carlos distribuye A la tierra la dádiva del cielo.) (66)

America, in Bello’s construction, ought to be an asylum for the weary traveler, as it was for Columbus, and in this case it takes the gift of heaven (and science) combined with the effort of an attentive king to make it so. For Quintana, too, America is an asylum—“The world’s virgin, innocent America” (¡Virgen del mundo, América inocente!) (4)—and smallpox is a marker for the violence that Europe has visited upon it, a construction that, as José Manuel Pereiro-Otero has pointed out, is the necessary antidote not only for the disease itself but the violence of its conquest.13 Lamenting that the expedition is a perfect example of the light of reason that has more or less gone out in his native Spain—“Of that light so high

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and divine / That in happier days / Reason, and virtue ignited here” (De aquella luz altísima y divina, / Que en días más felices / La razon, la virtud aquí encendieron!)—the speaker in Quintana’s poem advises the expedition’s leader not to return, since the American continent is a more hospitable place for that light: No longer is there grown in Europe The sacred laurel with which you might be adorned. Stay there, where peace will find Sacred asylum, beautiful independence; Stay there, where finally you’ll receive A glorious prize for your august actions. (No crece ya en Europa El sagrado laurel con que te adornes. Quédate allá, donde sagrado asilo Tendrán la paz, la independencia hermosa; Quédate allá, donde por fin recibas El premio augusto de tu acción gloriosa.) (5–6)

Like Bolívar’s conception of European history as a progression blocked in the Old World but able to expand and grow in the New, Quintana’s “light of reason” has been abandoned not only in Spain but in the rest of Europe, too. The expedition’s hero (who in this case is its leader, Balmis, rather than the king who ordered it) would do better to stay in America because only there does reason grow toward its logical conclusion. Along with its status as an escape from European unreasonableness and lack of respect for science, America becomes, in the rhetoric of asylum, a place in which European individuals might abandon their political and religious identities, reinventing themselves as exempt from old notions of patriotism and European wars. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) provides an eloquent though by no means singular articulation of this particular avatar of American exceptionalism. For Crèvecoeur, as for Paine, the United States is “this great American asylum,” though in his case this identity is as much economic as political: “the poor of Europe have by some means met together, and in consequence of various causes; to what purpose should they ask one another what countrymen they are?” Poverty, Crèvecoeur argues, breaks down national identities: “Can a wretch who wanders about, who works and starves, whose


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life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penny, can that man call England or any other kingdom his country?” (158–59). The answer to the rhetorical question is no, and Crèvecoeur goes on to give an even more vivid illustration of the transcendence of American identity by citing the case of “an American” “whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations” (659–60). The moral of the story is a vision of the American public as the sum of many European parts—“Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men”—but that together manages to be more than those identities added up, as this is a “new race” “whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” Having escaped the Europe that would divide them up with identities whose very mention only conjures memories of poverty and class conflict, these new people will nonetheless reflect on the continent they have left behind: “Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them the great mass of arts, sciences, vigor, and industry which began long since in the east; they will finish the great circle.” Here, of course, is the perfect blending of the religious and the secular, as the American public becomes a group of pilgrims who finish a circle that need not lead to the location of a miracle or some other divine visitation. These pilgrims bear “the great mass of arts, sciences, vigor, and industry” and quite literally move this intellectual cargo eastward across the globe. Crèvecoeur imagines this pilgrimage as a diaspora in reverse. The American public, formerly “scattered all over Europe,” has become “incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared”; the resulting amalgamation is, in Crèvecoeur’s construction, the recovery of a lost whole. Europe was the anomaly, America the reunion. Interestingly, Crèvecoeur makes these assertions about American destiny as a writer with distinctly loyalist sympathies. While he credits the economic opportunities afforded these displaced Europeans to a combination of work ethic and good government, he characterizes that government as “derived from the original genius and strong desire of the people ratified and confirmed by the crown” (Crèvecoeur 659–60). In this twist America becomes the place in which the British crown is able to work out a system of government (and population) infinitely more effective than that practiced at home.14 Two Spanish American writers of loyalist sympathies also wrote on the theme of identity, each presenting the American continent as the space for a perfected Spanishness, though in the case of one of these writers,

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the satirical Spanish poet Estaban Terralla Landa, this perfection is cause for ridicule rather than praise. For Antonio Sanchez Valverde, however, born in what is now the Dominican Republic, American origins provided the perfect platform upon which to defend both Spain and the colonies against attacks by prejudiced foreigners. In Terralla Landa’s Lima por dentro y por fuera, a series of vignettes about the excesses of Lima’s pretentious upper middle class leads him to conclude, in verse, what he confesses in his introduction: that “everywhere in the Old World and the New, there are—and would that it were not so—the same vices, the same corrupted customs, and the very same bad faith” (en todas partes del Mundo Viejo, y Nuevo, hay—y ojalá que no se hubiese—los mismos vicios, las mismas corrompidas costumbres y la mismísima mala fe” (4). Sanchez Valverde begins his assessment of the usefulness of the island of Hispañola with an open attack on the assertion of American inferiority in Cornelius de Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (1771), rating the work not a scientific evaluation of the Western Hemisphere but rather “a philosophical Romance on degeneration” (un Romance filosófico sobre la degeneración) (10). Evaluating de Pauw’s work as exemplary of the legion of foreign writers poised to attack the Spanish and criollo populations, Sanchez Valverde declares himself a pan-Hispanic advocate of the culture. He is careful to present himself not as a militant criollo but as a faithful defender of the crown. The interest of the entire Spanish Empire supersedes, he insists, “the passion for that part of the territory in which I was born, and whose advantages and utility I would like to make known, not particularly for its own benefit, but for that of the State” (la pasion de aquella porcion de terreno, en que nací, y cuyas ventajas, y utilidad quisiera dar à conocer, no precisamente por su particular beneficio, sino por el del Estado) (n.p.; Sanchez Valverde’s preface is not paginated). Like Crèvecoeur, Terralla Landa and Sanchez Valverde orient their descriptions of American space to a European readership, and like the loyalist, each sees America as offering support and opportunity for a metropolitan government whose legitimacy is taken as a matter of course. Yet it is not difficult to detect the same sort of tension that Pereira-Otero finds in Bello’s poem about the vaccine expedition. Sanchez Valverde’s careful positioning of himself as a patriot whose love for his native province is balanced against a greater concern for the Spanish state and Terralla Landa’s discomfort with criollo pretension both hint at a growing cultural divide that, like the crown’s supremacy, goes almost without saying. The dividing line between an America that offers, in the absence of regional bound-


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aries, an even stronger form of identity, and an America whose empty space beckons with an exhilarating and dangerous transcendence is clearly visible in Terralla Landa’s bitter description of the criollo who extends the xenophobia inherited (he admits) from Spanish forebears to a ridiculous extreme: but I am more Spanish than those selfsame Europeans. (pero soy más español que los mismos europeos.) (43)

Crèvecoeur, who publishes in the context of a soon-to-be-completed revolution, has a completely different set of circumstances to work with, but his construction of the American government as a combination of empty space and the crown’s benevolence points to a similar awkwardness. On the one hand these explainers of American space wish to legitimize its economic and social value to a European audience, but on the other hand they fight desperately to maintain a connecting chain between the colony and the metropolis. American space is a perfect investment for the crown because of the advantages it offers over Europe, but all the while it must be portrayed as inextricably tied to that metropolis despite this defining difference. The transcendent criollo identity is the most dangerous concept of all, and Crèvecoeur’s references to the crown, Sanchez Valverde’s invocation of a pan-Hispanic defense against foreign (read: Protestant) assault, and Terralla Landa’s breezy conclusion that criollo pretensions merely paper over a set of exaggerated Spanish vices are all attempts to dissolve American space and a growing American public into a concept of identity recognizable to European readers. Of course, all three of these writers identify with the colonizing metropolis rather than the political project of independence. When the frankly pro-independence North American Benjamin Franklin takes up his pen, at roughly the same time as Crèvecoeur, the game of explaining America to a sympathetic European audience reaches comic extremes. In “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” (1782), a text that Baseler has called “the most widely reprinted statement on America’s postwar immigration policy” (239), Franklin demonstrates just how deeply the connection to Europe and the flow of immigrants remained embedded in the North American consciousness even as the question of political in-

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dependence was being settled in the colonies’ favor. With his characteristic sarcasm, Franklin notes that noble birth is the worst sort of recommendation an immigrant can carry into the United States, where “the people have a saying, that God Almighty is Himself a mechanic, the greatest in the universe; and He is respected and admired more for the variety, ingenuity, and utility of His handiworks, than for the antiquity of his family” (460). After noting that characterizations of the continent as a repository for easily gotten wealth are exaggerations—“America is the land of labor, and by no means what the English call Lubberland and the French Pays de Cocagne” (“Information” 461)—Franklin gives further evidence of his desire to link the questions of spiritual and economic redemption in his description of the religious values of the American people. Making an implicit connection between economic activity and moral virtue—“Industry and constant employment are great preservatives of the morals and virtues of a nation”—Franklin takes care to reassure his likely skeptical audience about the orthodoxy of American religious belief: “Atheism is unknown there; infidelity rare and secret.” This final observation leads Franklin to conclude, in his usual ironic vein, that the economic realities of life in America could not help but confirm the belief in its providential destiny, a destiny that in this case reflects approval of the ecumenical gathering of sects that make up the American population rather than its faithfulness to any particular creed: “And the Divine Being seems to have manifested His approbation of the mutual forbearance and kindness with which the different sects treat each other, by the remarkable prosperity with which He has been pleased to favor the whole country” (464). Here, Franklin manages to ridicule Europe’s established churches and titled nobility by turning on their head the royalist arguments that held convention and tradition to be extensions of divine authority. He also manages to produce a clear demarcation of American space as an open country in which labor itself wields more authority than do titles or birth and in which the tolerance of varied religious sects garners the same nationalist identification between God and country proclaimed by European arrangements that literally name the head of state defender of a single faith. The context of Spanish American independence produced similarly co-opted arguments, despite the fact that both sides shared the same Catholic background and that independence leaders such as Bolívar went out of their way to make public displays of religious orthodoxy. Juan Germán Roscio, the Venezuelan lawyer who experienced the full force of pro-


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Â� independence thought as a Damascus road–style repentance for his earlier loyalism, published The Triumph of Liberty over Despotism (El triunfo de la libertad sobre el despotismo) in Philadelphia in 1817.15 Positioning his book as an attempt to counteract the deluge of anti-independence publications that had entered (and been produced by) the Spanish-speaking world since 1789 (see Ruiz 57–63), and voicing his determination to use the sort of biblical evidence employed by conservatives, Roscio begins in the Old Testament and moves through the Bible, compiling a list of incidents and arguments in favor of republican government. In an introduction addressed to the Deity, Roscio argues that his own education had made him an ineffective reader of religious texts and the world itself, as “following the false ideas that I had contracted in my education, I never consulted the holy book of nature; even reading the index written in your hand on every human being appeared to me a crime” (Siguiendo las falsas ideas que yo había contraído en mi educación, jamás consultaba el libro santo de la naturaleza; leer siquiera el índice escrito de vuestro puño sobre todos los hombres me parecía un crimen) (7). Having seen the light of reason, Roscio offers his book as a remedy to a public that has been deceived into viewing reason as heresy and perceiving as virtuous the Spanish authorities who are in fact the real heretics: “there are no heretics under question and banished, but those same inquisitors, and those who in imitation of them abuse that which is most sacred against the public’s benefit” (no hay otros herejes entredichos y proscriptos, que los mismos inquisidores, y cuantos a su imitación abusan de lo más sagrado contra la salud del pueblo) (6). Against this motif of a crisis in which antirepublican propaganda takes advantage of religious tradition, Roscio also sows hope that the independence movement will produce and maintain a refuge from those very forces. Speaking of the “inquisitors” just mentioned, Roscio declares the need to inspire the public with a sense that fighting for independence is a defensive act against heretical aggression: “Let us inspire in them all of the horror that these odious excommunicates deserve, as profaners of the sanctuary of Liberty” (Inspirémosle todo el horror que mercen estos excomulgados vitandos, como profanadores del santuario de la libertad) (6). If conventional wisdom made the rebels the excommunicates, since their political decision had separated them from the established government and the church with which it aligned itself, Roscio’s statement makes heretics of the opponents of independence, based on their willingness to separate what he views as one good, the authority of scripture, from another, the principle of popular sovereignty—a system of representation he

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finds endorsed throughout the Old Testament. Along with this defensive role comes the mantle of inevitability. With confidence in the unstoppable diffusion of knowledge that echoes Immanuel Kant’s notion of “popular enlightenment” (Kant 184, 186), Roscio claims that the steadfastness of the revolutionaries is a sign of the essential impossibility of a false doctrine’s triumph. Whatever earthly powers the forces of absolutism could muster, they always ran up against “the dignity and nature of mankind” (la dignidad y naturaleza del hombre), a contest in which nature eventually outlasts force: “State violence, to which the new doctors reduced the rational creature, could not be permanent” (La violencia del Estado, a que los nuevos doctores reducían la criatura racional, no podía ser permanente) (164). America thus becomes, as in Paine’s formulation, a last outpost of resistance against an all-powerful foe, but, paradoxically, this last outpost represents the tide of history and human nature—its very existence functions as a proof of its inevitable triumph. Together, these examples of asylum rhetoric demonstrate just how flexible the trope remains when applied to American space and, at the same time, the degree to which its history is circumscribed by the twin goals of spiritual fulfillment and economic gain expressed in Columbus’s diary entry for that first day on the beach. The common denominator between them is an implied European reader—indeed, the vision of America as an asylum presupposes a separate entity from which that asylum is sought. This relationship between European desire and American space has been explored by a number of critics. Arturo Uslar Pietri’s provocative essay “El mito Americano” characterizes the New World as Europe’s first utopia and its best mirror: “Utopia thus remained discovered and described from 1493 on. There was a magic mirror through which the Europeans could see all of the vicious and deformed ugliness of their world before that other” (Quedaba así descubierta y descrita la Utopía desde 1493. Había un espejo mágico para que los europeos vieran toda la deformada y viciosa fealdad de su mundo frente a aquel otro) (7–8). The mantle of conquest as a marker for Europe’s America, an interpretation brilliantly elucidated in Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, is the logical companion to the notion of asylum. Benedict Anderson, speaking of the growth of criollo nationalism, has noted that the wave of Bourbon reforms that preceded independence is commonly referred to as “the second conquest of the Americas” (50), and a hundred years earlier the Uruguayan intellectual José Enrique Rodó had noted the degree to which the lens of conquest refracted European history. After all, Rodó points out, the historical period Europe


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calls its “Renaissance” is the time of “Conquest” in the Americas, so “the Renaissance, would it not be called, for American history, the Conquest?” (el Renacimiento ¿no se llama, para la historia Americana, la Conquista?). By extension, the struggle to make America independent bears a similar taint: “The Liberator Bolívar could also be called the Reconquistador” (El Libertador Bolívar pudo llamarse también el Reconquistador) (130–31). As Simón Bolívar, Simón Rodríguez, and Thomas Paine turn their attention to the revolutionary uses of the asylum trope, the implied European reader is supplanted by an imagined criollo who might be persuaded to discount that European lens and renegotiate the New World’s position relative to its linguistic and governmental metropolis.

The Other Delirium at Chimborazo As noted earlier, Bolívar’s foundational “Juramento en el Monte Sacro” presents the cause of American independence as the literal culmination of European history.16 Like Crèvecoeur, Bolívar voices the promise of revolution as the fulfillment of historical progress begun in Europe. Bolívar sees this next step as anything but the closing of a circle. Rodríguez’s description introduces the oath by sketching their trip from France to Rome— “Sometimes we went on foot and sometimes by coach” (Unas veces íbamos a pie y otras en diligencia)—the sweaty climb up a relatively short hill, and their symbolic stopping point on top, where “we sat down on a piece of white marble, the remains of a column destroyed by time” (nos sentamos sobre un trozo de mármol blanco, resto de una columna desÂ�trozada por el tiempo). Having established the motif of a pair of modern-day pilgrims whose sojourn has led them from the unavoidable present (Napoleon) back to a mythological past that is both physically present in the broken marble that becomes their resting bench and visibly absent—the column’s decay an indicator of just how much time has passed since Rome’s apogee— Rodríguez presents Bolívar in a mythological light as well. The physical marks of the hot day’s climb are thus subsumed into what Rodríguez calls “a certain air of notable preoccupation and concentrated thought” (cierto aire de notable preocupación y concentrado pensamiento) (2:377) that he detects in his companion. At the moment just before Bolívar begins to speak, Rodríguez shifts the spotlight to his former pupil—“he stood up, and as if he were alone, he looked at all the points of the horizon, and over the yellow rays of the

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setting sun, he passed his scrutinizing gaze, brilliant and fixed, over all the principal points we had just managed to dominate” (se puso en pie y como si estuviese solo, miró a todos los puntos del horizonte, y a través de los amarillos rayos del sol poniente, paseó su mirada escrutadora, fija y brillante, por sobre los puntos principales que alcanzábamos a dominar) (2:377). Rodríguez’s portrait of Bolívar accomplishes several objectives at once. First, it frames the oath as an act that Bolívar performs alone, releÂ� gating the tutor to the essential role of witness and nothing more. If the two have traveled Europe and climbed this particular hill in tandem, it will be a lone Bolívar who stands up to make his pledge. Along with putting Bolívar alone in the center of the frame, the passage positions him as a high-altitude observer of the ruins below. All those “principal points” that the pair “had managed to dominate” are in effect the ruins of ancient Rome. The Bolívar who speaks is quite literally a traveler, and the description of the moment in which he stands very much of a piece with the genre of travel writing. Like the European explorers chronicled in Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, the Bolívar of Rodríguez’s portrait draws authority from the act of observing—it is he who is above and Rome below, his eyes that (like those “yellow rays of the setting sun”) dominate the long-lasting but ultimately perishable remains. What follows is a life-by-life summary of some of the highlights of Roman history, an oral exam on fast-forward. Bolívar describes the sad careers of Brutus, Anthony, and Tiberius before concluding that the history he has so long admired is as much a rogues’ gallery as a model of republican virtue: “For every Cincinnatus there were a hundred Caracallas. For every Trajan a hundred Caligulas, and for every Vespasian a hundred Claudios” (Por un Cincinato hubo cien Caracallas, por un Trajano cien Calígulas y por un Vespasiano cien Claudios). The description then becomes a catalogue of Roman excesses. Proclaiming that “this people has something of everything” (Este pueblo ha dado para todo), Bolívar lists its greatest hits, which range from “courage to conquer the entire world” (valor para conquistar el mundo entero) and “ambition to convert all of the States in the world into tributary suburbs” (ambición para convertir todos los Estados de la tierra en arrabales tributarios) to “catacombs for the Christians” (catacumbas para los cristianos) and “women to pass the sacrilegious wheels of the carriages over the destroyed torso of their fathers” (mujeres para pasar las ruedas sacrílegas de su carruaje sobre el tronco destrozado de sus padres). Rome, Bolívar concludes, has produced many exemplary people, in both the positive and negative sense of the word,


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but, for the emancipation of the spirit, for the uprooting of concerns, for the ennobling of man and for the definitive perfectibility of his reason, very little, if not nothing. The civilization that has blown in from the Orient has shown forth here all its facets, has revealed all its elements; but in terms of resolving the great problem of human freedom, it seems the matter has been forgotten and the clearing up of this mysterious unknown will not take place except in the New World.17 (pero para la emancipación del espíritu, para la extirpación de las preÂ� ocupaciones, para el enaltecimiento del hombre y para la perfectibilidad definitiva de su razón, bien poco, por no decir nada. La civilización que ha soplado del Oriente, ha mostrado aquí todas sus faces, ha hecho ver todos sus elementos; mas en cuanto a resolver el gran problema del hombre en libertad, parece que el asunto ha sido desconocido y que el despejo de esa misteriosa incógnita no ha de verificarse sino en el Nuevo Mundo.) (Rodríguez 2:378)

What is most startling, perhaps, is the clear Americanness of Bolívar’s perspective. Though obviously steeped in the intricacies of Roman history, like most criollo elites of his generation, north and south, he remains particularly conscious of his status as an outsider. For him Rome exists less as the font of solutions to the “problem of human freedom” and more as the social structure that most clearly articulates what the Western Hemisphere’s contribution should be. Bolívar’s rhetoric is nevertheless soaked with this Roman history. Antonio Cussen argues that Bolívar’s political rhetoric constantly works the tension between monarchy and republic— “Bolívar appropriates monarchic rhetoric in the transition from monarchy to republic” (78)—and in this case much of the authority of his oath derives from a manic demonstration of his competence in Roman history. When he finally makes the famous pledge—“I will not give rest to my arms nor repose to my soul, so long as I have not broken the chains that oppress us at the whim of Spanish power” (no daré descanso a mi brazo ni reposo a mi alma, hasta que no haya roto las cadenas que nos oprimen por voluntad del poder español) (Rodríguez 2:378)—he speaks of reworking the New World/Old World relationship on the basis of his deep knowledge of the triumphs and failures of the Old. Where European travelers come to conquer and to impress the fruits of their imagination on American space, this traveler has returned to a Rome that allows him at last a proper frame from which to plot America’s escape from European history.

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This motif of the traveler making discoveries continues throughout the scanty but intense correspondence between Bolívar and Rodríguez. Two decades after the trip to Rome (but almost two additional decades before the interview in which Rodríguez describes the “Juramento”), the old teacher returns to the American continent, where Bolívar has more or less made good on his oath. Upon hearing of Rodríguez’s arrival, Bolívar responds, in January 1824, with an ebullient letter that praises his tutor as a guiding presence—“You were my pilot, even if seated on one of the beaches of Europe” (V. fue mi piloto, aunque sentado sobre una de las playas de Europa)—and then offers the one existing confirmation on paper of his own conduct that day in Rome: “Do you remember when we went together to the Sacred Mountain in Rome to swear over that holy land the Liberty of the Patria?” (¿se acuerda V. cuando fuimos juntos al MonteSacro en Roma a jurar sobre aquella tierra santa la Libertad de la Patria?).18 Bolívar’s celebration of “that day of eternal glory for us: a day that advanced, in a manner of speaking, a prophetic oath to the hope we should not even have had” (aquel día de eterna gloria para nosotros: día que anticipó, por decirlo así, un juramento profético a la misma esperanza que no debíamos tener) (Rodríguez 1:511) invokes Rodríguez as a Â�coconspirator, a fellow traveler who can vouch for the Liberator’s deep political roots as a committed revolutionary rather than a political opportunist. Rodríguez also serves, ironically, as a voice of European authority, given his long exile on the continent. His old teacher’s very presence, Bolívar argues, is a blessing and endorsement for the nascent Colombia: “A thousand times blessed the day in which you stepped onto the beaches of ColomÂ�bia! Another sage, another righteous person, comes to crown the brow of Columbia’s uplifted head” (¡Mil veces dichoso el día en que V. pisó las playas de Colombia! Un sabio, un justo más, corona la frente de la erquida cabeza de Colombia) (Rodríguez 1:512). Having established Rodríguez’s power to bless the American continent with his accumulated learning and experience, Bolívar goes on to extol the continent’s virtues, sounding like a cross between a tour guide and an explorer explaining the advantages of his discovery to the kings back home. If Rodríguez will only come to Chimborazo, the Ecuadoran volcano that was the locus of the Liberator’s other mountaintop experience, he would be able to say, in Bolívar’s own quotation marks: “â•ƒ‘ Two eternities gaze up at me, that of the past and that still to come; and this throne of nature, identical to its Author, will be as lasting, indestructible and eternal as the Father of the Universe’â•ƒ” (“Dos eternidades me contemplan, la pasada y la que viene; y este trono


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de la naturaleza, idéntico a su Autor, será tan duradero, indestructible y eterno como el Padre del Universo”) (1:512). It is difficult to read this passage without noticing what Juan Liscano has called the “new style, flushed and passionate, metaphorical, labored and compulsive, that responds to the historic circumstances, to the republican fever and the actions of war” (nuevo estilo coloreado y apasionado, metafórico, entrecortado y compulsivo que responde a las circunstancias históricas, a la fiebre republicana y a la acción de guerra) (16). Bolívar’s passage, while certainly a patriotic invocation of the transcendent worth of the Gran Colombia that would, however briefly, include Ecuador and Chimborazo, also functions as a fairly obvious metaphorical readjustment of the progressive notion of world history. America, or Gran Colombia, is identified with the “eternity to come” visible from the mountain, an eternity that jumps off from a European-tinged colonial past whose “eternal” order has been finally extinguished by the independence movement. Chimborazo serves, interestingly, as a neutral space outside time from which this process can be observed. Just as the little hill outside Rome served as an observational sanctuary where the two out-ofplace Americans could contemplate how the historical order symbolized by ancient Rome would one day be superseded by an American one, the enormous (volcanic) hill in Ecuador will allow Rodríguez the metaphorical space to contemplate this change as it takes place. This moment of observational neutrality calls for an invocation of the old discoverer’s trope of the virgin America, an America uncorrupted by European mores: You have not seen in this fleeting world anything more than the relics and ruins of the provident Mother: there she is bent with the weight of the years, of the diseases and foul breath of men; here she is still a damsel, immaculate, beautiful, adorned by the very hand of the Creator. No: the profane touch of man has still not spoiled her divine allure, her marvelous graces, her intact virtues. (V. no ha visto en ese mundo caduco más que las reliquias y los desechos de la próvida Madre: allá está encorvada con el peso de los años, de las enfermedades y del hálito pestífero de los hombres; aquí está doncella, inmaculada, hermosa, adornada por la mano misma del Criador. No: el tacto profano del hombre todavía no ha marchitado sus divinos atractivos, sus gracias maravillosas, sus virtudes intactas.) (Rodríguez 1:512)

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Taking on a millennial rhetoric without any specific religious content, Bolívar juxtaposes a tired and corrupted Europe—a Europe that has in fact overburdened Mother Nature—with a free and clean America in which Mother Nature herself is different, an attractive and virginal damsel. For all the authority that Rodríguez’s European experience has given him, he has, in the Old World, seen only secondhand markers of the handiwork of this virginal Mother Nature that lives on in the New World. In both cases a peculiar kind of parallelism is at work, as the new (but original and youthful Mother Nature) exists alongside her older (but, in all senses of the word, contemporary) counterpart, who is in fact more distanced from the original work of creation.19 Likewise the two eternities, past and present, give Chimborazo its transcendent position between two worlds. The coming eternity may obliterate the old one, as, in Mary Pratt’s words, the text “subsumes history into eternity,” but the visual spectacle in which both are visible endures (178). Nearly a year later, Rodríguez writes a letter to Bolívar from Guayaquil, pointing out how much consternation the Liberator’s travels have caused for that portion of the public unable to see beyond its own local concerns. Summing up his own case, Rodríguez identifies himself as that rare independence-era actor whose promptings come from ideas rather than from local interests. Dismissing any notion of his return to the South American continent as the joyful end of an exile (and Rodríguez in fact never returned to his native Caracas), Rodríguez presents himself as a thinker, for whom Spanish America represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: I have not come to America because I was born there, but because its inhabitants are working on something that gratifies me, and it gratifies me because it is good, because the place is appropriate for conferences and projects, and because it is you who have provoked and sustained the idea. (No he venido a la América porque nací en ella, sino porque tratan sus habitantes ahora de una cosa que me agrada, y me agrada porque es buena, porque el lugar es propio para la conferencia y para los ensayos, y porque es U. quien ha suscitado y sostiene la idea.) (2:504)

Rodríguez’s use of the word “ensayos” is of particular interest. While he clearly intends the original meaning of “attempts” or “projects,” no one steeped in his writings could mistake the double meaning, since for Rodríguez, as for Paine, the didactic “project” of spreading enlightenment


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ideals and the writing that articulates that project are inseparably of a piece. Rodríguez’s empty American space is, like Paine’s, an empty page, too, and where the North American struggles to develop a writing style that will inspire the apathetic masses of his America, Rodríguez sees the chaos left by the Wars of Independence as a rare historical window.

Originality and Self-Esteem In 1828 Rodríguez published, in Arequipa, Peru, the first prose work of his postindependence career, American Societies in 1828 (Sociedades Americanas en 1828). In his November 1824 letter to Bolívar, he had alluded to a work in progress, noting that he wanted to be particularly careful about where and how he traveled, given the precious intellectual cargo he was carrying—“I have a number of things written for our country, and it would be a shame if they were to be lost” (Tengo muchas cosas escritas para nuesÂ� tro país, y sería lástima que se perdiesen) (2:503)—so it makes sense to imagine that the 1828 essay had been long in the making. Taking up the theme of the possibilities afforded by the chaos of war, Rodríguez speculates on the order that could fill Spanish America’s governmental vacuum. First he notes that the situation of the newly liberated republics—“The current state of America” (El estado actual de la América)—is one that “requires serious reflections” (pide serias reflexiones), and next he calls upon his readers to help create in the popular press a forum for reasoned consultation: “Let the Americans take advantage of the Freedom of the Press that has been given, in order to consult with one another on the important issue of their liberty” (Aprovechen los Americanos de la Libertad de Imprenta que se han dado, para consultarse sobre el importante negocio de su libertad) (1:261). Where Paine’s calamity was the opening of hostilities between North American patriots and the British army, and his task to inspire the American multitudes to take up arms, Rodríguez addresses an American public for whom the long-awaited cessation of hostilities has failed to deliver solvent systems of government. Declaring the postindependence moment in Spanish America as a historical crossroads of worldwide significance—“The public cause has an opportunity to make history” (La causa pública está en ocasión de hacer época)—Rodríguez describes the project of the hour as “truly republican government” (gobierno verdaderamente republicano). Just as Paine based his argument for the primacy of the North American

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experiment on the dearth of such experiments elsewhere in the world, so Rodríguez sees his America as a last, best historical refuge: “America is (at present) the only place where its establishment might be permitted” (La América es (en el día) el único lugar donde sea permitido establecerlo) (1:262). Or, as Rodríguez would say toward the end of the 1842 (Lima) edition of American Societies, America finds itself optimally positioned with the physical space necessary to take advantage of centuries of European learning: “There is no longer any soil as large and as inhabitable as that of America, and by coincidence it finds itself empty, at a time in which exÂ�periÂ�ence [which we call the Enlightenment of the Age] teaches what should be done, so that people enjoy the comforts of life, without having to destroy each other in order to provide them” (Ya no hai mas suelo grande i habitable que la América, i por casualidad se halla vacio, a tiempo en que Â� la exÂ�perienÂ�cia [que llamamos Luces del Siglo] enseña lo que debe hacerse, paraque los hombres gocen de las comodidades de la vida, sin deber destruirse para proporcionárselas) (1:388; italics in original). Rodríguez’s independence moment is therefore defined by the tension between originality and received ideas. Taking place as it does on the heels of the European Enlightenment—in his formulation a concrete historical process as important as the Reformation is to Paine’s—political independence offers the opportunity to create a new society, taking advantage of all the benefits of Europe’s history while allowing for a transcendent American identity that will steer clear of Europe’s national, ethnic, and religious disputes. Noteworthy, too, is the small degree of importance Rodríguez attaches to “state formation” in the conventional sense of the term. The “country” he claims to be writing for in his letter to Bolívar and the “America” he speaks of throughout his writings are the only markers he gives for Spanish American identity, assiduously avoiding mentioning himself or anyone else as the inhabitant of a “nation”—be it Venezuela, Gran Colombia, Peru, or any number of national territories he traversed in his peripatetic life. This formulation of a transcendent American identity creates more questions than it answers. It does not explain how the ethnic and political tensions that indeed fractured American society might be resolved, nor does it point to a clear strategy for dealing with Europe and the United States. As in Common Sense, the various avatars of American Societies seek above all to inspire public participation in a struggle: in Paine’s case the recognition that the battle against the British army has passed a point beyond which negotiation was impossible, in Rodríguez’s the recognition that victory on the battlefield has led only to the more difficult task of ef-


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fecting a social and economic revolution amid the ruins left by decades of war. Rodríguez makes his most profound attempt to work out America’s place within world history in his 1830 publication titled The Liberator of South America and His Comrades in Arms, Defended by a Friend of the Social Cause (El Libertador del Mediodía de América y sus compañeros de armas defendidos por un amigo de la causa social) and commonly referred to as the Defense of Bolívar. Written in 1828, according to the note that accompanies the title page, but left alone for two years because “the circumstances have not been favorable to publish a work that would have compromised the author with the Government of Peru” (las circunstancias no han sido favorables para publicar un escrito que habria comprometido al autor con el Gobierno del Perú) (2:193), the Defense navigates a Spanish America in which national governments often serve as obstacles to social change. Thus Rodríguez fronts the title page with a somewhat more complicated declaration of the social cause, positing a Bolívar who might himself serve as a unifying link: “The cause of General Bolivar / is that of the American Publics / and in which the Heads / of the new Republics have an interest” (La causa del Jeneral Bolívar / es la de los Pueblos Americanos / en ella se interesan los Jefes / de las nuevas Repúblicas) (2:191). Here the unifying American idea comes forth as a solution, or at least a palliative, to a political scene punctuated by warring pluralities. Addressing himself first to those military comrades who have seen their valiant and successful fight for independence degenerate into a poorquality performance of political theater—“a vintage comedy, retouched in a hurry, and sustained by certain short one-acts: neither the old nor the young applaud, because neither can see the ideas nor the tastes of their age” (una comedia añeja, retocada de priesa, y sostenida con ciertos sainetes: ni viejos ni mozos aplauden, porque ninguno ve ni las ideas, ni el gusto de su edad) (2:198)—Rodríguez paints a revolution betrayed by inept actors. This failure at once serves as an example of the public’s ingratitude toward its military heroes and their work and as an illustration of the difficulty of their task. A superior vision was leading the revolution all along, but it has been drowned out by the murmur of more petty (and more local) concerns: “Bolívar did not see, in the dependence on Spain, opprobrium nor shame, as the masses did; but rather an obstacle to the progress of society in his country” (Bolívar no vió, en la dependencia de la España, oprobio ni vergüenza, como veia el vulgo; sino un obstáculo á los progresos de la sociedad en su pais) (2:199). What had begun as a vision of the Enlightenment’s progress extending itself into the government of

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the American continent became, Rodríguez argues, something much less. This panoramic vision of Bolívar’s vision—a best possible interpretation of the motives behind his myriad political statements—centers itself less on the grandeur of Bolívar himself than on the particular social problems his revolution faced. The Liberator needed to exercise a broad historical consciousness of the sort on exhibit in Common Sense, Rodríguez asserts, precisely because his revolution depended on a society so different from that addressed by Paine. Despite his continually voiced call for originality of thought in Spanish America—on one occasion Rodríguez identifies “the wisdom of Europe / and the prosperity of the United States” (la sabiduría de Europa y la prosperidad de los Estados Unidos) as “two enemies of the freedom of thought / .â•¯.â•¯. in America” (dos enemigos de la libertad de pensar / .â•¯.â•¯. en América) (2:133)—Rodríguez’s Defense treats the North American and French revolutions as indispensable historical background for understanding Spanish America and Bolívar. An important difference, he suggests, is that in the North American and French cases “the Governors did not have to think about creating publics, but rather about directing them” (los Gobernantes no tuviéron qué pensar en crear pueblos, sino en dirijirlos). Bolívar’s task was quite different, since “Spanish America needed two revolutions at the same time, a Public one and an Economic one” (La América Española pedia dos revoluciones á un tiempo, la Pública y la Económica). If Bolívar’s military efforts have, by 1830, taken care of the first revolution, the second remains unresolved: “the obstacles that the concerns of the second present are enormous—General Bolivar sets out to remove them, and some individuals, in the name of the people, resist instead of helping” (los obstáculos que oponen las preocupaciones á la segunda son enormes— el Jeneral Bolívar emprende removerlos, y algunos sujetos, a nombre de los pueblos, le hacen resistencia en lugar de ayudarlo) (2:206). The result is the uneven spectacle in which triumph on the battlefield gives way to a political spectacle that is a “vintage comedy” promising a continuation of the inequalities of colonial rule. Near the conclusion of his Defense, Rodríguez takes up the thread of American difference, positing the gap in the composition of the respective American publics as justification for the governmental arrangements encouraged and led by Bolívar in the immediate postwar period. The Spanish American Liberator could not retire quietly, because so much of the work of revolution remained to be done. Rodríguez’s portrait of the North


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American people could have been drawn straight from the pages of Common Sense: In the United States there was not one person (except the slaves of Virginia) who did not have ideas about Social Independence; all had enjoyed it in Europe; and those who had not, had come seeking it. Some looking to be Independent, and some hoping to be more so, had come to inhabit the deserts of America. (En los Estados Unidos no habia un hombre [excepto los esclavos de Virjinia] que no tuviese ideas de la Independencia Social; todos habian gozado de ella en Europa; y los que nó, habian venido buscándola. Unos por ser Independientes, y otros por serlo mas, habian venido á habitar los desiertos de América.) (2:321)

Here, the North American public is a band of seekers whose experience with and desire for independence is what led them to cross the Atlantic in the first place. This construction is obviously problematic, failing as it does to take into account the profit motive and the indentured servitude under which many “free” Europeans immigrated. Finally, the understated allusion to “those slaves in Virginia” might well be read as an attempt to gloss over the supreme irony that slaves who not only did not “know” social freedom, but whose very status was an affront to the notion of social freedom, remained the economic backbone of a number of the colonies. Rather than questioning the Paine-like construction of the North American public guided by a notion of freedom that serves to subsume and erase all other worldly concerns, Rodríguez enlists this construction to highlight the difficulty of Bolívar’s task. What is most attractive to Rodríguez, what he takes away from the North American Revolution (on other occasions he can be deeply critical of the hypocrisy of chattel slavery in a free society) is the notion of a public founded upon aspiration, a reworking of the plot of the Conquest in which desire meets the blank slate of American space. The Spanish American public appears, in contrast, to be a work in progress. Rodríguez’s assessment of the sudden passage from “the stupor of slavery, to Republican delirium” (del estupor de la esclavitud, al delirio Republicano) (2:323) leads him to conclude that the American asylum contains a nightmarish side as well, especially when the combined effects of an absolutist government and decades of war are

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considered. In American Societies Rodríguez highlights this difficulty by dedicating the work “to those who are already acquainted with society— to those who have formed the customs to live well under the monarchal government under which they were born” (A los que conocen ya la sociedad—á los que tienen costumbres formadas para vivir bien bajo el gobierno monárquico en que naciéron), while arguing that it is intended “for those who are entering a society they are not acquainted with—to those who need to form customs of another sort, in order to live under a government different from the one their fathers had” (A los que entran en una sociedad que no conocen—á los que necesitan formar costumbres de otra especie, para vivir bajo un Gobierno diferente del que tuviéron sus padres” (1:268). The project is thus didactic. And if Rodríguez is willing to look at the monarchical history as a two-sided coin, on the one hand at least offering the opportunity for the development of social customs suited to “living well” and on the other setting the stage for the governmental vacuum of postindependence, he sees American space as an equally mixed blessing. Having declared republics, he notes, the American people find themselves attempting to forge coherent social and governmental structures in a population whose experience of isolation and war has been the best sort of antisocial education: “Some populations tossed loosely to the world, by Providence— abandoned in large part to their instincts in the countryside, or heaped up around a temple in the villages” (Unos pueblos echados al mundo, á granel, por la Providencia—abandonados en gran parte a su instinto en los campos, ó apiñados al rededor de un templo en los lugares) (2:344). The term “pueblo,” which I have translated as “populations,” is particularly rich. In Spanish the term can mean the public or even the masses, as well as denoting the place where people gather—a village or even a large town. In his essay on the complicated state of nationhood in postindependence Spanish America, François-Xavier Guerra parses the ambiguities of this term along with those of “patria” (fatherland or country), the word Rodríguez used in that early letter to Bolívar to allude to his yet unpublished writings on America. Guerra notes that “â•ƒ‘patria’ sometimes referred to America as a whole, but more often to local identities complicated by the pyramid organization of Spanish American urban centers,” while “the ‘pueblos’ (of various ranks in the pyramid hierarchy) that had assumed sovereignty beginning in 1810 long remained the principal actors and the primary focus of patriotic feeling” (“Forms” 32). Thus Rodríguez’s reference to “scattered populations” manages to refer both to the rural, largely agricultural zones


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that made up the vast majority of Spanish American spaces and to the isolated, church-centered villages and cities around which their government was structured.20 To fill this physical and governmental vacuum, Rodríguez imagines an internal didactic project rather than the wave of European immigration (and racial purification) called for by his contemporary, Sarmiento (see Gomes; Lasarte). His vision seeks to transcend racial identity not through pure erasure of the sort practiced by Common Sense but through an elevation of mestizaje—“The lust of Europeans established some time ago that America would be the place in which the three known races of man would be united—would cross—and would produce a single one” (La codicia de los Europeos destinó hace tiempo, la América á ser el lugar en que se han de reunir las tres razas de hombres conocidas—cruzarse—y producir una sola) (2:291). Realizing the explosive effects that racial prejudice could have on this mixture, Rodríguez pleads earnestly and ironically for the value of reason rather than racial, religious, or class identity as the marker of merit in independent America. His sarcasm bursts forth in response to the racial epithets sometimes levied at Bolívar—“It is objected that Bolívar is a zambo” (Objeta que Bolívar es zambo)—and he offers in return a caricature of the racial sensibilities the slur presupposes: “What would the whites of England, of Scotland, of France, and above all of .â•¯.â•¯. Andalusia say?!—a Zambo, commanding Indians in Peru! .â•¯.â•¯. what impropriety! (¿Qué dirán los rubios de Inglaterra, los de Escocia, los de Francia, y sobre todo los de .â•¯.â•¯. Andalucia!?—un Zambo, mandando Indios en el Perú! .â•¯.â•¯. ¡qué impropiedad!). Finally, Rodríguez appears to concede that the slur might indeed be true, but that a thinker’s reason should matter more than the thinker’s race: “Bolívar and his defender are zambos; but neither of the two is a fool” (Bolívar y su defensor son zambos; pero ninguno de los dos es necio) (2:290). Having ridiculed both the criollos’ overblown respect for Europeans (those white Anglos, Scots, and Franks), as well as the Spanish pretension to blood purity, Rodríguez makes a claim only to the reasonableness of his and the Liberator’s thinking and suggests that it is this trait, and not race, that most clearly separates him from the critics. In all earnestness Rodríguez suggests his own version of a divine mission for the American republics: that they should be not a safe haven for Protestants fleeing Catholics (or for Catholics fleeing Protestants) but rather a reservoir of reason against the unreasonable prejudices that so easily make the transatlantic crossing. Remarkably, Rodríguez concludes,

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the social insecurity common to climbing Americans has made the New World perhaps a worse place for racial harmony than the Old: “Nowhere does one see dissension nor discord, nor quarrels like those one sees in Spanish America over colors and pedigrees” (En ninguna parte se ven las disensiones, ni las discordias, ni los pleitos que se ven en la América Española sobre colores y sobre ejecutorias). As a solution Rodríguez suggests that his fellow citizens pay attention to how they speak. Self-discipline properly applied will work gradual changes, he argues, and if everyone starts to think consciously of just how coded with prejudice their common terminology has become, the linguistic and social milieu can be made to change, step by step: As everything progresses by degrees, let each one begin to abstain from mentioning colors and ancestry in the merit or demerit of persons, and one step will have been taken away from the mob—do not esteem nor scorn anyone for his place of birth, nor political profession nor religious belief .â•¯.â•¯. and one step more will have been taken. (Como todo progresa por grados, empiece cada uno á abstenerse de mencionar colores y ascendencias en el mérito ó demérito de las personas, y habrá dado un paso fuera del populacho—no aprecie ni desprecie á nadie por el lugar de su nacimiento, ni por su profesion política, ni por su creencia relijiosa .â•¯.â•¯. y habrá dado un paso mas.) (2:291)

In this case the phrase “fuera del populacho” (away from the mob) takes on a special meaning. Populacho carries particular resonance among learned criollos of Rodríguez’s generation as the term most often used to refer derisively to the unenlightened general public, and here Rodríguez suggests that a more careful approach could lead speakers away from using and being populacho, thus positing the disappearance of the term itself as the marker of an established equality among citizens.21 This notion of a radical equality like none found in Europe or the Americas becomes the crescendo of Rodríguez’s reassessment of America’s position in world history. In much the same way that North American Puritans saw their establishment as a beacon to the rest of humankind, a “city upon a hill” (Winthrop 180), Rodríguez posits his America as a society perfectly positioned to take advantage of the lessons of European history and become an example for the rest of the world:


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Do not throw the profession of someone’s father in his face, and do not become conceited with your hair or your papers: if you continue as you have up until now, your very relatives, in Europe, will take you for hicks, for colonists, for slaves. America is called (if those who govern it understand) to be a model of good society, with no more work than that of adapting. It has all been done (especially in Europe). Take up the good— leave behind the bad—imitate with judgment—and for whatever is missing invent. (No se echen en cara el oficio que tuvo el padre, ni se engrian con sus cabellos ni con sus papeles: si continuan como hasta aquí, sus parientes mismos, en Europa, los tendrán por payos, por colonos, por esclavos. La América está llamada (si los que la gobiernan lo entienden) á ser el moÂ� delo de la buena sociedad, sin mas trabajo que adaptar. Todo está hecho (en Europa especialmente). Tomen lo bueno—dejen lo malo—imiten con juicio—y por lo que les falte inventen.) (2:292)

Instead of a vision of a universalized Europe itself capable of transcending racial divisions, Rodríguez posits American space as a social and racial crucible in which the old divisions can be reworked and eventually eliminated. Calling on the same insecurity in his readers that he condemns in the caste and race obsession of the criollos, Rodríguez suggests that the voicing of race and class prejudices will never win them acceptance by Spaniards anyway. In fact, he counters, the more American criollos speak badly of one another, the more the speakers and the spoken-of come to resemble the insults. Like the concept of populacho, the fixation on ancestry and roots strikes Rodríguez as a creeping monster that eventually taints everyone who comes near it. Functioning as a symbol of all the internal divisions that threaten “American Societies,” the act of exorcising the taint of populacho calls forth a vision of American destiny in which the social pretensions of a criollo elite and the real class divisions that fuel them will finally be overcome. Finally, by invoking America’s position as a post-Enlightenment society, Rodríguez invites his fellow Americans citizens to look at Europe differently, not as an authority to be either loved and worshipped or hated and feared, but as a kind of political workshop in which a great deal of preliminary testing has already taken place. As a traveler who speaks firsthand of Europe and the United States, Rodríguez challenges his readers to demys-

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tify their own conceptions of the continent and to make America’s colonized status an advantage in historical perspective. The courage to invent, he argues, demands more than criollo patriotism or an uncritical embrace of the new. To create a new historical course informed by the revolutions in France and the United States, the American public will need the ability to read the events of those revolutions with discernment, to accept without prejudice what fits their own circumstances and reject without sentimentality what does not.

Conclusion: Erring and Inventing Toward the end of their respective texts, Paine and Rodríguez each invoke the spectre of loss, lest the notion of historical destiny become sufficiently convincing to lure their readers into complacency. Paine, who writes at the beginning of a long military struggle, fears that failure to form a government immediately might tempt “some Massanello [.â•¯.â•¯.] who, laying hold of popular disquietudes” might manage to rally sufficient support to “sweep away the liberties of the continent like deluge” (28). For Rodríguez, who writes on the heels of more than a decade of scorched-earth campaigns by loyalist and pro-independence forces, the clergy serves as a convenient symbol for the possibility that the opportunity for independent government won at such a horrific cost might be squandered: “every night some clergyman goes to bed with a stone under his blanket, taken from the foundation” (cada noche se retira un clérigo con una piedra bajo el mantero, sacado de los cimientos). This nightmare is only the tip of the iceberg, though, and Rodríguez can imagine the asylum’s collapse in more visually arresting terms: “Maybe, in order to finish sooner, we will not lack for a fanatical royalist, who wants to do a Samson, seeing the partisans of Liberty, in their temple, as careless as the Philistines” (Tal vez, por acabar mas pronto, no faltará un realista fanático, que quiera hacer de Sanson, viendo Â� á los partidarios de la Libertad, en su templo, tan descuidados como los Filisteos) (2:233). Both men fear, and want their readers to fear, that the space carved out by revolutionary struggle and historical circumstance could close, leaving the notion of American asylum as a lost historical moment rather than the harbinger of a future for Western civilization. The nervous tension between the promise of a refuge from world history and the danger that this promise could be lost on the very brink of


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being realized—John Adams called Paine’s style “clear, simple, concise and nervous” (qtd. in Hoffman 379)—is itself indicative of the sort of American consciousness each text attempts to inspire and construct. Paine’s invocation of the North American colonies as inheritors of a cosmopolitan European (but not African, Asian, or Amerindian) social milieu would inspire and haunt for centuries to come. Rodríguez, as a champion of American originality whose slogan “either we invent, or we err” (o inventamos o erraÂ� mos) has been elevated to the status of political talisman in twenty-firstcentury Venezuela, creates a vision of American invention tempered by European experience that depends on the same formulation of blank space that Rotker sees operative in the “Juramento”: “a project, an action without past or present, a future only” (un proyecto, una acción sin pasado ni presente, un sólo futuro) (“Evangelio” 32). Rotker’s formulation, of course, underlines the limits of the future-centered “promising” America offered by Paine and Rodríguez and suggested by the asylum trope in all its avatars. The particular brilliance of Paine’s Common Sense and Rodríguez’s Defense of Bolívar resides less in their ability to resolve the tension between the Old World and the New into an American starting point than in their insistence on and reflection of the continuing tension between those two worlds as the scope of the political and economic tasks in need of completion becomes broad, prolific, and concrete. Both ask their readers to dip into European history and the notions of national identity operative in the anti-independence movement in order to forge a reactive and creative definition of America that straddles the line between forgetting the Old World altogether and granting it a stifling intellectual superiority.

Chapter 2

Harmony in New World Nature and Old World Eyes

His ideas have been lost. The ambient barbarism destroyed or dispersed the manuscripts, which probably were used in grocery stores to wrap candles or cans of sardines. Now we go scrounging to discover a few lines of the many that he wrote. (Perdió sus ideas. La barbarie ambiente destruyó o dispersó los manuscritos, que probablemente sirvieron en las pulperías para envolver velas o latas de sardinas. Ahora nos desojamos por descubrir algunas líneas de las muchas que escribió.)

—Rufino Blanco Fombona, “El maestro autonomasia” (1954)

T

he political promises embedded in European conceptions of New World space, that is, the American dream of exploration and rebirth, come inextricably tied to what we might call the American nightmare—the fear of becoming lost in the chaos of that space. Even an early pro-independence newspaper, Bolívar’s own Correo del Orinoco, launches its defiant inaugural issue with an attempt to balance the promise of freedom against the privations of solitude. Apologizing that they come from “a country in which the only books one sees are those the Spanish brought to give the People lessons in barbarity, or, momentarily, those of some traveler, like loefling and humboldt” (un país en que no se ha visto mas libros que los que traian los Españoles para dar a los Pueblos lecciones de barbarie, ó momentaneamente los de algún viajero, como loefling y humboldt), the editors note that the very existence “in the center of the immense solitudes of the Orinoco” (en el centro de las inmensas soledades 58


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del Orinoco) of a paper such as theirs is nothing less than “a distinguished deed in the history of human talent” (un hecho señalado en la historia del talento humano) (Correo n.p.). While later issues of the Correo would go on to rehearse the trope of the New World as an ideal space for enacting a set of virtues abandoned by European monarchies, this opening announcement reveals the anxiety behind its promise of American asylum. On the one hand rejecting whatever “culture” might be associated with the Spanish metropolis—these are the books, after all, that give “lessons in barbarity”—the editors nonetheless mention Loefling and Humboldt by name and with some emphasis. These travelers’ works, like the Spanish books, prove an insufficient stay against the physical isolation of living in America, but in their case the problem is less a defect of the books themselves than a complaint of the momentary, exceptional nature of the encounter. The platform occupied by Spanish books is too barbaric; that of the continental European travel writers is too fleeting. Peter Loefling, the botanist who had studied under Linnaeus before journeying to Venezuela, and Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussiantrained mining expert and polymath, occupy an ambiguous space in the text as both insufficient European emissaries and legitimizing voices. The Correo’s editors may not be satisfied that Venezuela’s appearance in their travel books makes it part of Western culture, but they are happy to cite both authorities as proof of their own erudition and the fact that the wilderness they occupy has already been codified and reported by reliable Europeans. Some three years earlier Bolívar had cited Humboldt in his “Jamaica Letter” (Carta de Jamaica) (1815) as a hedge for his own predictions on how the struggle for independence might play out, arguing that even Humboldt, whose 1798–1804 estimates of the population of the New World colonies remained the most reliable source of population figures for the Spanish colonies, would have trouble predicting the outcome of the independence movements already under way in Mexico, Nueva Granada, Buenos Aires, and Venezuela (Doctrina 55). Bolívar suggests that his own efforts should therefore be critiqued not as authoritative pronouncements given from academic repose but as attempts, like those of the editors of Correo, to draw the most logical conclusions possible from the facts at hand—to rationalize a struggle whose very location conjures the entropy that stubbornly resists European desires for classification and mapping. Rodríguez, whom Camila Pulgar Machado has described as “a methodical scientist like Humboldt” (al igual que Humboldt, era un científico metódico) (145), would take on the task of dealing with the physical reality

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of that “wilderness” in print against the particular backdrop of precarious republican arrangements that represented a continuation of the colonial struggle against American nature rather than a new arrangement. During that fertile stay in Arequipa in which he published American Societies in 1828 and the Defense of Bolívar, Rodríguez also conducted a study of water management that appeared in 1830 under the moniker of the government printing office and the title observations on the terrain of vincocaya with Respect to the project of diverting the Natural Course of its waters and directing them through the zumbai river to the River of arequipa (observaciones sobre el terreno de vincocaya con respecto á la empresa de desviar el curso natural de sus aguas y conducirlas por el Rio zumbai al de arequipa). Five years later, when a large earthquake struck the Chilean coast and destroyed much of the city of Concepción, Rodríguez again took on the role of scientific observer, serving as coauthor of the institutionally titled Report Presented to the Intendancy of the Province of Concepcion, Chile by Ambrosio Lozier, Simón Rodríguez and Juan José Arteaga, Appointed to Examine the City of Concepcion and Its Outskirts after the Earthquake of February 20, 1835 (Informe presentado a la intendencia de la provincia de Concepción de Chile por Ambrosio Lozier, Simón Rodríguez y Juan José Arteaga, nombrados para reconocer la ciudad de Concepcion y sus cercanías despues del terremoto del 20 de Febrero de 1835). Both documents inserted themselves into the controversy about how best to deal with the American landscape and both used their ostensible official purposes as context for a broader critique of a colonial mindset out of synch with the demands of the natural world. Indeed, Luís Rubílar Solís has called Rodríguez “the traveler and ecologist don Simón Rodríguez” (el caminante y ecologista don Simón Rodríguez), while lauding the Observations for its early alarm at the consequences of deforestation (152; 152–53). The Observations begins by critiquing a plan to build dams and canals to secure water for the city of Arequipa and proposes instead what Rodríguez identifies as the more socially and environmentally progressive solution of a pair of canals to be maintained by the citizens who live along their shores. Written against the more urgent backdrop of the destruction of Concepción and the subsequent need to reconstruct the city as efficiently as possible, the Informe posits the city’s original location as an essentially unhealthy one, driven by the needs of colonial profiteers rather than by concerns for the long-term safety of its inhabitants. While carefully amassing the damage calculations required by his appointment, Rodríguez respectfully suggests a new location for the rebuilt city. Often neglected as the “scientific” or


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“technical” portion of Rodríguez’s opus, these two reports at once showcase his seriousness as a scientific observer and his willingness to inject the political cause of American social consciousness into every aspect of his writing. Taking on the mantle of esteemed European observer, with frequent allusions to development projects and scientific advances on the European continent, Rodríguez uses these documents to position himself as an enlightened voice interested in correcting Spanish misunderstandings of American space and the resulting disharmony between the Spanish American republics and the landscapes they inhabit. The harmony-based critique of colonial and postcolonial Spanish America did not begin with Simón Rodríguez. In the midst of the struggle for independence, Bolívar’s “Jamaica Letter” mentions another European authority, José María Blanco White, whose publication El Español should be, in Bolívar’s opinion, required reading for any student of proÂ�independence thought and its antecedents (Doctrina 64). Blanco White, who described himself as a “self-banished Spaniard,” had emigrated to England in 1810, horrified by the reactionary violence that had come to characterize both Napoleon’s invasion and the Spanish resistance.1 A former Catholic priest, he would convert twice, first to the Anglican church and finally to Unitarianism, earning a certain cachet among Spanish liberals for generations to come, as well as the opprobrium of that guardian of all things orthodox and Spanish, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo.2 Attempting to make a financial and intellectual way for himself in the burgeoning world of Spanish-language publishing in London, Blanco White adopted a moderate voice and took the Caracas revolutionaries at their word when they characterized independence as the patriotic Spanish reaction to the puppet government installed by Napoleon (see Langley 211–12). While his tacit support of independence from such an influential location would earn Bolívar’s admiration (and a special proclamation from Juan G. Roscío), Blanco White’s support always remained measured: he praised the Caracas junta for acting out of “love” for the metropolis and worried above all about the lasting negative effects of Spanish attempts to reconquer the colonies by force.3 Rodríguez, who never gets around to citing either Blanco White or Humboldt, writes from an “imagined community” that is less the individual nation-state than an internationalist vision of Spanish America inspired by Bolívar and made possible, ironically enough, by the very chaos of the armed struggle for independence. This community had been inevitably shaped by both thinkers—by Humboldt’s early attempt to patch together

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a narrative unity of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prose genres and by Blanco White’s efforts to at once preach to and create an international Spanish-language readership. In this chapter I examine how the question of nature inhabits the writings of both European thinkers, and conversely, how Rodríguez attempts to forge a narrative of American progress as harmony rather than rupture, thus correcting what he sees as the opposition generated by Spanish colonial rule. To frame the attempts of Blanco White, Humboldt, and Rodríguez to reimagine the role of American nature in a more global cosmography, I use Neil Browne’s term “pragmatist ecology.” Pinpointing the link between political consciousness and the position of humankind in the natural world, Browne identifies “pragmatist ecology” as a mindset that “offers to the public an articulation of ecological perception along with the aesthetic and ethical structures that can grow from that perception.” This aesthetic awakening, provoked by knowledge of one’s place as part of the larger world, is inherently democratic by Browne’s reasoning, since it popularizes “the ways and rhythms of knowing” (7). Since full democratic citizenship demands unfettered knowledge of the relationships that sustain the community, the diffusion of an ecological consciousness places ethical and aesthetic limits on human behavior that more accurately reflect our empirical knowledge of humanity’s integration into a larger web of relationships. The point seems obvious enough: if a government bases its existence on a myopic understanding of the limits and consequences of human actions, it circumscribes its citizens’ ability to form a realistic idea of their own position in the universe. Ecological consciousness, according to Jeffrey Myers, functions, in effect, as the absence that defines the criollo subject, since “the very existence of the Euro-American subject depends on imagining not only the racial Other, but a priori on imagining the essential ‘otherness’ of the physical world” (15). Myers’s notion of ecology combines, as Browne’s does, science and politics, or, in his words, “the scientific idea that organisms interact with each other and their habitats through a set of relationships as well as a social idea about sustainability and the ethicality of the human part in that set of relationships” (8). Defining this particular notion of oppositional subjectivity as “untenable,” Myers examines U.S. narratives of progress from “an ecocritical perspective,” a posture that, like Browne’s, carries with it the ethical responsibility of taking into account the impact of human decisions on the rest of the world (9–10). The myriad forces that manifested themselves in the violence of the independence period make this


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perspective particularly cogent to Spanish America. Elinor G. K. Melville has singled out this era in Spanish American history as one that reproduced the conditions of the early decades of the Conquest, as “once again nature is perceived as the victim of aggressive human/European behaviour” (187). If the political movements tended to transform their wars into crucibles for enacting their demands on a political and physical landscape, the task of destroying the old government and creating a new one revealed the delicate webs of relation behind both systems. For Blanco White, whose precise opinions on Spanish American independence moved from a moderate wish for reform and reconciliation to the hope that political upheavals in the Americas would come to play the revolutionary role in the Spanish consciousness denied by its own War of Independence, ecology takes on a purely political definition. Struggling in both his independence-era journalism and his later autobiographical writings to reconcile his desire for a rationalization of Spanish consciousness and the preservation of the cultural and linguistic ties uniting the Hispanic world, Blanco White finally arrives at a formulation in which those ties could become the very conduits of reform, bringing the spirit of the independence movement to bear on the absolutism awakened by popular resistance to the French invasion. For Humboldt, who wrote the narrative of his pre-independence exploration of the hemisphere from Europe once the battles that would decide independence were underway, ecology takes on a number of avatars. On the political front he laments the violence of the movement as an impediment to science and human progress in general, a posture that has led Michael Zeuske to rate him as anything but an unabashed champion of independence (20–22; see Zea for an example of the pro-independence Humboldt). Humboldt’s evaluation of the Spanish colonial government, however, while never overtly defiant, goes out of its way to sketch a mentality profoundly distanced from the physical reality of life in the Americas. In Humboldt’s eyes the opposition between colonial subjectivity and the physical world has reached an extreme that affects the day-to-day ability of the government to respond to the needs of its constituents. On the heels of the military achievement of independence, Rodríguez’s proposals for Vincocaya canals and the relocation of Concepción formulate a vision of human interaction with the natural world that will correct the excesses of colonial opposition. The thread connecting the three is precisely this desire to forge a notion of community from the rupture inherent in the achievement of independence.

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Blanco White and Humboldt: The Political Ecologies of Redemption Blanco White’s voice, which depended upon an idealized pan-Hispanic reading public most easily imagined from the world of London publishing, has inspired a famously contradictory critical reaction. James Fernández has used the word “trailer,” as in a Hollywood film trailer, to refer to the high-profile condemnations Blanco White’s tepid support for revolution provoked back in Spain (119). His own reading of Blanco White began under the influence of these “trailers,” Fernández notes, in which the thinker suffered the sort of rejection accorded a radical revolutionary. The moderation of the writings themselves was thus a shocking surprise (120). Blanco White’s reputation as a seminal and unique figure in Spanish intellectual history is not rooted merely in the criticism his writings inspired or in his now well-documented erasure from the Spanish tradition. This very tradition, composed by an establishment obsessed with the notion of patriotism, proved a particularly ill-fitting vessel for Blanco White’s intellectual and physical mobility. His intellectual life would be punctuated by the physical separation from his homeland that would be a precursor to his spiritual mobility—from Catholicism to Anglicanism to Unitarianism—as well as his political shifts vis-à-vis American independence, from measured support for the revolt against Napoleon’s puppet government (a support always couched in terms of eventual reconciliation), to a grudging (and pessimistic) acceptance of independence as the inevitable result of Spanish (and Spanish American) hardheadedness. Melendez y Pelayo’s famous condemnation of Blanco White as an intellectual and spiritual dilettante incapable of mustering the courage to pick a position and stick to it serves as a mirror for much of the praise Blanco White has received in more recent critical evaluations (see Dittberner; MacDonald; Brauchy; Loureiro). These reevaluations participate in the recent recovery of Blanco White as the forgotten enlightened figure in a Spanish tradition that offers few thinkers willing to trace Baconian empiricism to its logical conclusion and question the authority of the monarch and the Church. This recovery, in large part attributable to the efforts of Juan Goytisolo and Eduardo Subirats, views Blanco White less as an antidote than a symptom of a profound absence in Spanish intellectual culture—the absence of anything that might honestly be called Enlightenment, or, as Eduardo Subirats puts it, the situation in which even the most commonplace application of intel-


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lectual terminology exposes unexplored fissures in the Spanish conscience: “The denominations ‘Spanish Enlightenment’ or ‘Iberoamerican Enlightenment’ are conceptually empty” (Las denominaciones ‘Ilustración española’ o ‘Ilustración iberoamericana’ son conceptualmente vacías) (Memoria 173).4 For Subirats, Blanco White’s erasure is inseparable from his intellectual persona. As “a sonorous absence” (una sonora ausencia) and “the most unread intellectual figure of the Hispanic nineteenth century” (la figura intelectual más desleído del siglo XIX hispánico), Blanco White remains, by dint of his very existence, an accusation against the Spain he felt forced to abandon. Subirats focuses in particular on the troublesome subjectivity of Blanco White’s autobiographical writings, finding in the fissures between “his religious belief and enlightened spirit” (su creencia religiosa y su espíritu ilustrado) (245) the seeds of modern conscience (286).5 Far from being a stable representative of Enlightenment faith in rationality as a shaper of human history, Blanco White remains, in Subirats’s reading, “a belated and precarious figure of the modern spirit of the Enlightenment” (una fiÂ� gura tardía y precaria del espíritu moderno del Enlightenment) (260). But Subirats’s Blanco White is more than a canary in the coal mine of Spanish intellectual life. If Blanco White’s failure to become a public intellectual in his home country is diagnostic in itself, he also proves himself capable of rendering critical judgment, as seen in his writings on Spanish American independence. Here, Subirats establishes a parallel between Blanco White and Humboldt: both are able, with the perspective of distance, to interpret the rhetoric of independence as less a philosophical movement in its own right than a political adjustment in which “the New philosophy of Montesquieu, Voltaire or Rousseau served [.â•¯.â•¯.] as intellectual reference and a posteriori justification” (La Nueva filosofía de Montesquieu, Voltaire o Rousseau sirvió [.â•¯.â•¯.] como referencia intelectual y justificación a posteriori) (196). Subirats goes on to suggest the triangle of Humboldt, Blanco White, and Simón Rodríguez examined in this chapter by calling Rodríguez, in relation to Blanco White, “a parallel history and a similar exception” (una historia paralela y una excepción semejante) (244). Rodríguez, too, examines independence-era Spanish America with a disinterested eye and sees failure as an inevitable consequence if the political revolution does not develop an effective educational agenda. Despite their obvious differences of biography and place, Subirats also notes that the two thinkers coincide in producing an essentially didactic vision of how enlightenment should work as a political project (Memoria 258). The Blanco White who inhabits the time period of independence is es-

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sentially an itinerate journalist, and his postings as writer and editor for El Español and Variedades, two William Ackerman publications that Â�angled for a share of the still small but growing Spanish American market, are by definition intermediary, making him the Spanish-born, bilingual voice to a transatlantic reading public. In her study of the British publishing world during the era of independence, Eugenia Roldán Vera describes Blanco White’s role as that of “mediator” performing a role that tended to unite rather than disconnect the colonies and their metropolis (64). Blanco White biographer Martin Murphy has called El Español “unique in the history of Spanish journalism,” because Blanco White’s isolation from both his home country and the proposed Spanish American readership made his position akin to that of “a castaway on a desert island who sends off his message to the outside world in a bottle” (Self-Banished 65). Despite Blanco White’s deeply felt isolation as a moderate Spanish voice emanating from England, what is perhaps most startling about his experience with El Español is just how palpable the paper connection between London and Spanish America became for a small but influential group of readers.6 Nor is Bolívar’s mention of Blanco White in his “Carta de Jamaica” the only trace that the exiled Spaniard left among Spanish American republicans. His position as editor of El Español allowed him to participate in two important exchanges—public dialogues rather than monologues—with Juan Germán Roscio and Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, leading voices in the Venezuelan and Mexican independence movements. Blanco White’s positive evaluation of Venezuelan self-government as a logical response to the French invasion of Spain—“they are a thousand times more secure in the hands of a government the people considers its own, than in the hands of a viceroy or governor that they are accustomed to Â� obeying out of fear” (más seguras mil veces están en manos de un gobierno que el pueblo considera suyo, que no en las de un virrey o gobernador, a quién están acostumbrados a obedecer por miedo) (Conversaciones 61)—so impressed the Venezuelan republicans that Roscio, who would become famous for his theological arguments for independence in El triunfo de la libertad sobre el despotismo (Philadelphia, 1817), wrote in 1811 naming Blanco White an honorary citizen of Caracas. Praising Blanco White’s writing as proof that “not all Spaniards would have America’s fate fixed according to the axioms of oppression and servitude” (no todos los españoles habían de arreglar la suerte de la América por los axiomas de la opresión y la servidumbre), Roscio declares that “Caracas counts you among its most distinguished citizens and can, without overstepping, offer you similar sta-


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tus in all of free America” (Caracas lo cuenta a usted entre sus más distinguidos ciudadanos, y puede sin arbitrariedad ofrecerle igual carácter en toda la América libre) (116). In the throes of the “concept of a continent wide identity” whose political expediency Carlos Alonso attributes to the independence movement (18), Roscio does not hesitate to extend Caracas’s invitation to a mythical America that is as much a political entity as a continental one. Identifying Blanco White as one of “those Spaniards who knows how to distinguish fidelity from slavery” (los españoles que como usted sepan distinguir la fidelidad de la esclavitud) (Blanco White, Conversaciones 116)—a group therefore marked by its enlightened selfawareness—Roscio’s appeal to a “free America” extends this distinction to a larger scale, specifying his America as the territory imbued with the same powers of distinction. Roscio makes another interesting move when he appeals to the trope of asylum by suggesting that his America has given something to Blanco White as well: a fit subject for his philosophical and political contemplation (115). Its old utopian promise “regenerated,” this America offers Spaniards like Blanco White the possibility of their own regeneration, or at the very least a hopeful escape from the “unpleasantness” (sinsabores) that (it almost goes without saying) would accompany their thoughts of the mother country. Blanco White’s answer is couched in a tone of careful moderation out of balance with the hyperbole of Meléndez y Pelayo’s critique. He affirms Roscio’s assessment of what independence has done for his writing career, confessing that he had indeed given up writing “on political topics” (sobre materias políticas) when the news from Caracas awakened him. Blanco White concludes, also in agreement with Roscio, that American independence represents a last, best hope to Spaniards disgusted with the course of events at home: “the happiness of the Spaniards should be sought in America in case the glimmers of hope that remain for them in Europe should fade” (la felicidad de los españoles se debe buscar en América en caso de que se desvanezca la vislumbre de esperanza que les queda en Europa) (Conversaciones 116). Blanco White’s vision of history as a narrative in which the New World has surpassed the Old and becomes the old metropolis’s only hope of rescue from its own backwardness depends on the essential unity he sees between Spanish speakers in the two hemispheres. At this stage, at least, Blanco White seems more interested in the triumph of universal ideas than in the local, historical circumstances that might complicate their application. For Blanco White, as Manuel Moreno Alonso has put it, “essentially, liberty was the same”

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(esencialmente la libertad era la misma) (227), which is to say that this political concept had little to do with the political separation between metropolis and colonies. On the contrary, from Blanco White’s revolutionary perspective—“too modern to be understood by the peninsulars of his time” (demasiado moderno como para ser entendido por los peninsulares de su tiempo) (202)—liberty was a broad human struggle in which American independence (vis-à-vis Napoleon’s puppet Spanish government) and the Spanish people’s independence (vis-à-vis the same) were two fronts (227). With a breakthrough unlikely to happen in a popular Spanish uprising that had harnessed the people’s retrograde social prejudices, Blanco White looks across the Atlantic: “I proposed to contribute with all my powers to conceive happiness for Spanish America, from that part of my nation on whom good fortune smiled, with that other disgraced, European portion that groaned oppressed by every kind of hardship” (propuse coadyuvar con todas mis fuerzas a concibir la felicidad de la España americana, de esa parte de mi nación a quien convidaba la buena fortuna, con la de esta otra porción desgraciada de Europa que gime oprimida bajo todo género de males) (Conversaciones 117). The concept of “nation” employed here remains sufficiently large to include not only a transatlantic axis but also a continental one, yoking Roscio’s “free America” and the unfree America (Cuba, Puerto Rico) on its periphery into a single organic entity. Politically, at least, Blanco White seeks enlightenment with the quality of union rather than of rupture. With a clear perception of Spain’s political and philosophical decadence, Blanco White’s insistent faith in the shared Hispanic bond allowed him to hope, as he would later recount in his autobiography, that a negotiated independence could serve as a kind of surrogate revolution in which “Spain would not only survive, but recover her youth beyond the Atlantic” (187–88). Unlike Blanco White, Alexander von Humboldt was from the beginning accepted almost as though he were a Spanish American writer, so great was his influence on criollo sensibility. J. Andrew Brown has called Humboldt’s practical “success” as a publicist for the American natural world “a watershed moment for Latin American thought” (29–30), and Mary Louise Pratt has argued that his writings defy easy classification as either scientific description or personal travel narrative, mixing, as they do, “the specificity of science with the esthetics of the sublime” (124). Brown also cites Roberto González Echevarría’s argument for the primacy of travel writing as a rhetorical source for nineteenth-century novelists in Latin America. González Echevarría suggests that the language of the


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travel writer and that of the novelist share a common “consciousness” (conciencia) in nineteenth-century Latin America (37), and he singles out Humboldt as foremost among those travelers who as “agents of progress [.â•¯.â•¯.] had a revolutionary effect on Latin American societies” (agentes del progreso [.â•¯.â•¯.] tuvieron un efecto revolucionario en las sociedades latinoÂ� americanas) (151). If Humboldt’s early estimates of Spanish America’s population and generally favorable evaluation of its economic prospects provided the young Bolívar with desperately needed authoritative support for the independence project, his Personal Narrative of Travels, the compendium that had appeared in English and French by the time Rodríguez published American Societies in 1828, served as a template for the textual creation and ordering of Latin American space; in Brown’s words, “if one hoped to ‘tell the truth’ about Latin America, its land, its governance, or its people, one told that truth in the same way that Humboldt had” (29–30). Narrated by a scientifically informed eyewitness, Humboldt’s textual journey combined hyperbolic emotional reactions with colder, more objective-sounding evaluations of the landscape’s potential for economic exploitation.7 If independence in Spanish America began less as a political program than as a response to what Lester D. Langley has called the “disarray and confusion” produced by the French invasion of Spain, Humboldt’s perspective reflects a similar ambiguity. Jason Wilson has noted the contrast between his fervor for the French revolution and his exemplary conduct in Spanish America as an official guest of the Spanish government. Wilson argues that early on in his career Humboldt had learned the wisdom of occupying a “middle position” from which to push for reform without resorting to the overt rhetoric of revolution (xlvi). While avoiding sweeping declarations in favor of revolution, Humboldt does produce, in his day-to-day reaction to life in the colonies, a criticism of Spanish colonial rule that covers almost every facet of its administration. He finds colonial administration disorganized and forever characterized by the gap between American reality and the paper construction of it in Madrid, noting, for example, “that names of towns and villages are placed on the list of new conquests, long before their foundation.” This affords him the ironic pleasure of encountering settlements “which never had any other existence than in the maps of the missions engraved at Rome and Madrid”—an example of just the sort of cognitive, geographical problem that Rodríguez would diagnose in the founding of Concepción (4:392). Communication is a problem, too, and Humboldt recalls being asked to

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carry letters, since the poor state of the postal services meant “that private persons seldom entrust them with letters for the Llanos, or savannahs of the interior” (4:121–22). While announcing “that the immense progress of the art of navigation” has turned the Atlantic Ocean into “a narrow channel” (6:118), Humboldt recounts that communication within Spanish America was a different matter altogether. From Caracas, for example, “it would have been easier to make use of a draught upon Cadiz or London, than upon Carthagena, the Havannah, or Vera Cruz” (6:109). His retelling also makes clear the superiority of British naval power throughout the region. Every voyage departs under the shadow of possible British capture, and when Humboldt himself is unlucky enough to be taken prisoner it is his status as a well-known scientist that saves him: the British officers, having read of his journey in “the English newspapers,” invite him to stay in the captain’s stateroom (6:87). Jason Wilson has described Humboldt as “always thorough, and empirical, though not so strong on theory” (xlix). This utilitarian focus—also characteristic, according to Cañizares-Esguerra, of an Iberian research machine centered on “merchants, enterprising settlers, and bureaucrats” (“Iberian” 91)—finds its expression alongside the romantic urge to seek transcendent unity in the experience of nature. While Humboldt does complain of an American emphasis on utility as overbearing as that of Europe—“Here, as in many parts of Europe, the sciences are thought worthy to occupy the mind only so far as they confer some solid benefit to society” (6:9)—his critique of the shortfalls of Spanish government often focuses on its lack of utility, its failure to meet Bacon’s expectation of science as capable of bearing “interest” and “fruit.”8 When Humboldt reaches the Venezuelan Llanos, for example, he begins to speculate on how the region might be made more economically viable. He posits the relatively cheap cost of labor and food and the survival of a small sharecropping class as proof “that the continent of Spanish America can produce sugar and indigo by free hands” (4:127–28). Humboldt also argues that the large volume of uncultivated land within the Llanos proves only the lack of a concerted effort at cultivation, citing the success of small agricultural efforts near the towns of Calabozo and Pao (6:65). While hedging—“I am far from believing, that men will ever cause the savannahs to disappear entirely” (6:66)—Humboldt nonetheless predicts that in the future “a considerable portion of these plains, under a government favorable to industry, will lose the savage aspect they have preserved since the first conquest of the Europeans” (6:69; italics in original). The emphasis on the word “conquest”


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lends his suggestion a particular irony, indicating the incompleteness of that verb when applied to Spanish colonization. While Humboldt is often quick to note that industrial and agricultural progress faces a number of obstacles in Spanish America, he expresses clearly his sentiment that “a government favorable to industry” has not yet held sway. This evaluation applies to mining as well as agriculture. Educated as an inspector of mines, Humboldt confidently advertises his own writings on Spanish America as sources of “the first geognostic knowledge”—harbingers, in his conception, of a coming revolution in mineralogical investigation, and with it a more prudent, modern version of the Spanish obsession with silver and gold (6:651). Here, Humboldt combines the practical, profitable business of mining with enlightenment itself, suggesting long-term profits if European investors employ the “system of association” (6:655; italics in original), “and do not disdain to avail themselves of the light spread in America among men who have followed the labors of working and amalgamation” while avoiding “those illusions which the exaggerated hope of gain never fails to excite” (6:655). He thus balances the ethical demand of controlling greed against the real profit potential awakened by that “light spread in America”—knowledge of nature translates into the ability to convert natural resources into wealth. Humboldt’s use of the enlightenment metaphor at least suggests that this new light is coming from the Old World rather than the New, and from an Old World that most likely does not include Spain, since this “light” presumably did not arrive with Spanish colonization. Humboldt disciple Charles Darwin would rework this theme in his travel narrative The Voyage of the Beagle, in which a visit to the Chilean copper mines prompts the anecdotal recollection that superior English technology allowed British speculators to harvest copper ore from mines deemed worthless by the Chileans and sold “for a few dollars” (273). The operative assumption is that the state of colonial industry has left a valuable part of New World nature unexplored and that European capital would be needed to bring that nature under the umbrella of European scientific knowledge.9 And for all the emphasis he places on the modernizing project as one that will domesticate and cultivate New World nature, thus realizing untapped economic potential, Humboldt is quick to point out how the Spanish application of modernity has failed. In the missions, for example, the natives are deprived both of their normal social order and of the economic incentives present for Europeans. In addition to this surreal departure from any sense of community, the missions produce a geographic distress

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of their own born of the Spanish ignorance of the tropical climate. Foolishly positioning the missions close to the river and its mosquitoes, the missionaries create an environment in which the natives experience “a torment, which they scarcely know in their own inland dwellings” (5:105–6), centuries of experience having taught them to place their settlements away from the water. Depending, as they do, on water transport for all their communications with the metropolis, the Spanish see the riverside location altogether differently.10 Humboldt’s penchant for including American geography in a larger unity, a process that María-Rosario Martí Marco has referred to as inserting “the New Continent into the universal geographical ‘grammar’â•ƒ” (el Nuevo Continente en la ‘gramática’ geográfica universal) (161), exemplifies the unifying tendency that underpinned his investigation. Miguel Rojas Mix has likened Humboldt’s search for natural unity on a scientific and aesthetic plane to that of Chateaubriand’s Atala, a work the French writer would introduce as “the epic poem of man in nature” (la epopeya del hombre de la naturaleza) (Rojas Mix, América 181; italics in original). For both writers, Rojas Mix suggests, “the romantic conception of nature joins science and art” (la concepción romántica de la naturaleza hermana la ciencia y el arte) (América 181). Elsewhere Rojas Mix notes how Humboldt’s comprehensive vision links “the vegetable world” (el mundo vegetal) with “the spiritual attitudes of man” (las actitudes espirituales del hombre) (“Humboldt” 180). Simón Rodríguez, who translated Chateaubriand’s Atala, would make a similar series of connections in his approach to the relationship between the independent republic and the natural world. For him as for Humboldt, the investigation of that world via the techniques of experimental science would prove inseparable from a larger horizon of human relationships and emotions.

Rodríguez and the Vincocaya Canal: Social Consciousness and Public Works Rodríguez’s two ostensibly scientific texts, “La desviación del río Vincocaya” (Arequipa, 1830) and “El terremoto de Concepción” (Concepción, 1835), both take on concrete, expository problems and employ a minimum of the typographical innovations found in his other texts. The first criticizes an existing proposal to use dams and canals to control the flow of the Vincocaya River and offers as a counterproposal that two canals be


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dug to redirect its flow, while the second proposes to survey the damage of the 1835 earthquake and offer suggestions for reconstruction. While the majority of both texts maintains what we might call a normal appearance, both produce digressions in which the narrator deconstructs aphorisms he imagines some readers will apply and wonders verbally what sort of response his text will generate, engaging in the sort of virtual questionand-answer style that marks Rodríguez’s better-known political and educational writings. The real eccentricity of these texts stems, as tends to be the case with Rodríguez, from a combination of style and perspective: while fulfilling ostensibly straightforward administrative roles, the texts promote a perspective on American ecology designed to overturn the Baconian order of material and speculation that had long guided colonial (and postcolonial) governments. That order created what Ralph Bauer has called “a rationale for dividing intellectual labor” by differentiating between colonial material and metropolitan analysis: “the colonials in the ‘bowels’ of nature would provide the epistemic raw material, and the metropolitan natural philosopher would refine it into ‘truth’â•ƒ” (Cultural 18, 17). In Rodríguez’s vision the independence of the colony depends on a public assumption of the responsibility for both of these tasks. Furthermore, rather than responding to the perceived intrusion of European economic norms with a romantic appeal to the savage nobility of America à la Chateaubriand or Rousseau, Rodríguez articulates a critical approach that conÂ�demns both the Baconian speculator and the European romantic as out of touch with the practical social needs of the American public and its relationship with the natural world. Against the backdrop of a struggling Peruvian economy, a politically precarious government, and a landscape in which, as Sarah C. Chambers has put it, “the main hindrance to agriculture in Arequipa was the scarcity of water,” Rodríguez’s Vincocaya paper criticizes the newly proposed and widely supported project “to divert water from the upper Chili River and bring twelve thousand acres of land under cultivation” (Chambers 39). The original plan, which John Frederick Wibel labels “the ambitious ‘Vincocaya Project,’â•ƒ” proposed diverting the water with “a series of irrigation canals and dams” and enjoyed the support of the Peruvian government, the local prefect, and “private investors representing the local elite from the hacendado Mariano Miguel Ugarte to the cleric Manuel Fernández Córdoba, Dean of Arequipa’s cathedral chapter.” By the time Rodríguez took up his pen the project was already under construction (Wibel 361–62). Rodríguez composed the Vincocaya paper during the period that

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marks the greatest creative explosion in his career. On the heels of his failed relationship with the Sucre government and with it of his proposal for education reform, he published two of his most famous essays, American Societies in 1828 and Defense of Bolívar, in the arid Peruvian city where, as biographer Alfonso Rumazo González puts it, “Simón Rodríguez is born for the world as a writer” (Simón Rodríguez nace para el mundo como escritor) (Simón 173). In a city with a considerably more “benevolent” climate toward the radical writer than Bolivia’s had been (181), Rodríguez became for the first time a respected author and expert, whose judgment the government sought on the Vincocaya project, perhaps imagining the learned newcomer to be a less biased arbiter than were the town’s invested leading citizens (196). Nothing better exemplifies Rodríguez’s political temperament than the zeal with which he attacked a project already well under way and wholeheartedly supported by a wide selection of Arequipa’s movers and shakers, a project that, in Wibel’s estimation, “embodied the hopes of Arequipeños to turn the region into ‘the granary of the Republic’â•ƒ” (361). Citing his own European experience and thus positioning himself as a more knowledgeable observer than the project’s proponents, Rodríguez questions the popular wisdom behind the public preference for dams, bringing up less commonly acknowledged hazards such as weakness in the subsoil beneath the dam, the excess water pressures created by wind, and the porosity of the volcanic rock that was a principal material in the proposed work. He notes that St. Petersburg “experiences floods, simply by force of a wind strong enough to push the water against the current” (experimenta inundaciones, solo por la accion de un viento capaz de empujar las aguas contra-corriente), and takes on a pedagogic tone, pointing out that while the Dutch and Italians use volcanic materials, too, they do so in combination with other materials and not “in their natural state in which they are very porous” (en su estado natural cuando son muy porosas) (1:426–27). In conclusion, Rodríguez argues, the task of building a safe and durable dike is much more difficult than most of the project’s supporters would be willing to admit; what might at first glance appear to be the simplest solution is in fact the most complex and dangerous: “dikes are a violent means that should only be employed when it cannot be avoided” “(los diques son medios violentos, que solo se deben emplear cuando no pueden evitarse) (1:429). Here the influence of Rodríguez’s ecological sensibility is unmistakable. The dam represents a human attack on the river itself, and the oppositional forces—currents versus porous rocks


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and subsoil—that make the project dangerous in his estimation are the logical results of a project that physically aligns itself against the natural force of the river. The difference between canals and dams is in a sense temperamental: if the dam opposes the river’s natural course in a frontal assault, the canal seeks rather to redirect that force, manipulating the river, but maintaining the river’s momentum. The canal is a way of working with the river, while the dam seeks to attack it. Speaking of another problem commonly ignored—the water the proposed lake would lose to evaporation—Rodríguez notes in a peculiar digression that one particularly specious manner of begging this question is the appeal to a supposed “repositioning or compensation of mass” (reposicion ó compensacion de masas), the idea that the fixed quantity of water in the world would mean that all water that evaporated from the lake would have to reappear in liquid form: “if on the one hand the water is incessantly decomposing, in order to bring millions and millions of bodies into existence, on the other hand it is being composed from the living actions of some, and for an infinite number of combined motives in others” (si por una parte el agua está incesantemente descomponiéndose, para dar existencia á millones de millones de cuerpos, tambien se está componiendo por la accion de la vida en unos, y por una infinidad de motivos de combinacion en otros). Since “anything is possible when there is no evidence” (todo es posible cuando no hay pruebas), Rodríguez concludes that the second part of the theory “seems to be so” (parece ser asi), and that the first “could be” (puede ser). Whatever promises these theories might offer, Rodríguez continues, they are useless for the business of redirecting the river because their theoretical scope outstrips the available empirical evidence. Average water loss due to evaporation is calculable and therefore should take precedence: “Physics, means nature—and nature .â•¯.â•¯. for us .â•¯.â•¯. is known truth. The truth leaves no room for romance” (Fisica, quiere decir naturaleza—y naturaleza .â•¯.â•¯. para nosotros .â•¯.â•¯. es verdad conocida. La verdad no admite romances) (1:432). Rhetorically, at least, Rodríguez takes on all the authority of Baconian empiricism arbitrating between those branches of knowledge that “float in the air” and those that “rest on the solid foundations of experience” (Bacon 427). Appealing to a like-minded “nosotros,” Rodríguez posits truth and not “romance” as the bailiwick of his proposal. Along with these practical questions, the dam introduces a series of risks that, from Rodríguez’s perspective, raise social and political questions

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that have gone unnoticed. As the dam undergoes normal wear and tear, it will have to be repaired, he argues, and these repairs will necessarily interrupt irrigation, endangering new crops. A sudden drop in water in one section could produce drought there and flood another—“The repair of these damages would be very costly, perhaps impossible” (La reparacion de estos daños seria costosísima tal vez imposible). Against the supposed objection that he is just another not-in-my-backyarder stirring up fears to frighten the dam’s proponents into abandoning it, Rodríguez takes the political high road, casting himself as a disinterested voice of reason—“The company will judge if it’s better to be confident or fearful in these cases” (La compañia juzgará si es mejor confiar que temer en estos casos)—who is simply giving the company the information it needs to make an effective cost-benefit analysis. This analysis comes with clear didactic overtones. He offers a platitude of his own—“Fearing a danger is not safeguarding against it, nor is hiding it an honorable way to proceed” (Temer un peligro no es asegurarlo, ni el ocultarlo es proceder con honradez)—by way of introducing his own social vision: “men live in a society in order to share interests with one another” (los hombres viven en sociedad por interesarse unos por otros). With this vision comes a description of his own project, a canal that would solve the problem, “spending less than what is left to be spent in order to conclude the project that has already been started” (gasÂ� tando ménos de lo que falta que gastar para concluir la obra como se ha empezado) (1.436). Rodríguez’s political morsel bears parsing. First, he counters any critique that he is an alarmist by positing the “honor” of admitting danger rather than hiding it, an opposition that pits truth against “romance,” once again with a predictable result. Second, he presents the axiom that appears in one form or another in nearly every piece of prose Rodríguez ever wrote as a means of redirecting his proposal. While the immediate interest of the project’s elite proponents might lead them to oppose any objective review of its risks, Rodríguez posits a larger, shared interest the project must take into account. If mutual interest is the very motive behind the existence of social communities, as society is created “por” (because of ) a mutual interest rather than “para” (in order to) realize this shared interest in some dreamed-of future, then social costs are the company’s business, and the possible hidden costs of the dike are everyone’s shared risk. Immediately after this morally compelling if financially ambiguous calculation of social interest, Rodríguez tacks on a more concrete calculation and with it clear proof that his is something other than a knee-jerk reaction to the proposed


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project: he has a plan of his own that promises to produce greater benefits at lower risk for a fraction of the cost of the proposed dam. When Rodríguez begins to expound upon the manifold advantages of canals, he again appeals to a social vision, positioning them as a more collective project. Since the public will live literally “on its banks” (en sus oriÂ� llas), a canal becomes less a distant project to be admired than a collective responsibility: “each neighbor has an interest in preserving it, and does so because it costs him little” (cada vecino tiene un interés en conservarlo, y lo hace porque le cuesta poco). A canal thus produces a different social effect, inspiring feelings of “security” (seguridad) and “hope” (esperanzas) that a dam cannot, and working in harmony with rather than against the concept of shared interest and responsibility (1:438). Having placed the social effect of the project within the cost-benefit calculus, Rodríguez brings the topic up again when his point-by-point outline of the canal project reaches the “economics of the project” (economia de la obra) (1:446). Uncomfortable with the notion of having different companies compete for the lowest bid on discrete portions of the project “because it is a compromise of self-interest with that of other .â•¯.â•¯. without reciprocity” (porque es un compromiso del interes propio con el ajeno .â•¯.â•¯. sin reciprocidad)—that is, a situation in which benefit but not risk is shared—Rodríguez offers an approach that he calls “administration” (administracion) but about which he offers little in the way of explanation. What he does make clear, however, is his distaste for any investment scheme in which those who would gain from the project’s success do not share equally in its risks: “No one has a right to make money, except by employing his labor or risking his capital” (Nadie tiene derecho para ganar, sino empleando su trabajo ó arriÂ� esÂ�gando su capital) (1:447). Now, the canal appears as much an engine of social change as a counterproposal to the dam, and Rodríguez takes his revolutionary intentions one step further when he concludes his text with a call for “new rural establishments” (nuevos establecimientos rurales) (1:467). Proclaiming a social ethic we could well call “ecological” by Rojas Mix’s definition (“Humboldt” 177), Rodríguez argues that increased agricultural planning could help eliminate sudden drops in prices—“It is in superfluous production where ruin lies” (En la produccion superflua está toda su desgracia) (1:469)—and that new crops and grazing lands, absolute necessities for Arequipa’s prosperity, must be balanced by forests. These must be maintained because their ability to “keep the soil moist and fertilize them with their remains” (mantener húmedas las tierras y fertilizarlas con sus

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despojos) and the materials they provide—“rosins, tar, lumber for construction, cork [.â•¯.â•¯.] and firewood” (resinas, alquitran, madera de construccion, corcho [.â•¯.â•¯.] y leña)—are essential to long-term agricultural prosperity (1:468). Rodríguez adds, in a reprise of his condemnation of the theories of the equilibrium of water, that when it comes to rural issues science must compete with “romance”: “Even the poets take it upon themselves to make us believe that the rural folk are happy; especially the shepherds, because they spend the whole day sleeping” (Hasta los poetas toman á su largo el hacernos creer que la jente del campo es feliz; especialmente los pastores, porque pasan casi todo el dia durmiendo). Against these myths of pastoral life—“Eglogues, Idylls, little songs for the libraries of the nobles” (Eglogas, Idilios, villancetes para las bibliotecas de los Señores)—which serve to cover the reality of “the crassest ignorance, hunger and vulgarity in the servants’ shacks” (crasísima ignorancia, hambre, y groseria en las chozas de los siervos) (1:469), Rodríguez offers what he offers whenever he puts his pen to paper, whether the topic be an educational plan or a project to redirect a river—the promise of rendering the second revolution that independence has left undone. This concern follows logically from Rodríguez’s ever-present critique of the economic arrangements that govern criollo society, a system in which the landowner tells the worker, effectively, “as long as you’re serving me; you won’t starve to death” (mientras me estés sirviendo; no morirás de hambre), and which the worker, Rodríguez suggests, should answer this way: “Labor takes its value from ingenuity, time, and fatigue / you don’t pay for services with promises” (El trabajo saca su valor del injenio, de la fatiga y del tiempo / con promesas no se pagan servicios) (1:447–48; italics in original). This argument in favor of an economic revolution as the means for solidifying the political gains of independence—“A political revolution demands an economic revolution” (Una revolucion politica pide una revolucion economica) (1:469)—gives Rodríguez’s conclusion a tone that mixes his skepticism toward the promises of capital investment with economic boosterism of a sort familiar to nineteenth- (and twenty-first-) century readers. He promises his audience that the proposed canal, which has now grown into a proposed slate of economic reforms, will make Arequipa “the principal city of Peru” (la principal ciudad de Perú), with the caveat that two obstacles must be overcome: “the repugnance [felt] toward associating in order to get started ” (la repugnancia á asociarse para emprender) and “the fear of seeking counsel in order to proceed ” (el temor de aconsejarse para proceder). Finally, he closes by poking fun at his own narrative immoderation:


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Who would believe that an irrigation ditch could give cause for so much writing?! Either the one who writes is a talker and has taken advantage of the irrigation ditch Or the irrigation ditch was bursting to talk and has taken advantage of the writer. ¡¿Quien creeria que una acequia diese motivo para escribir tanto!? O el que escribe es un hablador y ha aprovechado de la acequia O la acequia estaba reventando por hablar, y ha aprovechado del escritor. (1:470; italics in original)

Rodríguez’s authorial anxiety about the relationship between nature and writing recalls Humboldt’s concern about the difficulty of capturing the New World’s splendor in measurements or in words (4:133–34), as well as the euphoric distortion of his own observational powers produced by the wonder of a new setting (1:89). Humboldt’s insensitive Spaniard is defined by his inability to adapt or react to the beauty around him; Rodríguez’s “reaction” to the drought positions his narrator as the interlocutor best able to handle the juncture between nature and prose. Where the proposed dam would conquer the river by violent and dangerous measures, Rodríguez shapes his own plan as an adaptation to circumstance, a push in the necessary direction of social reform, and a construction project whose simplicity is adapted to a workforce not yet well trained in the delicate art of masonry.11 Rodríguez’s parting joke again echoes Humboldt, the Humboldt described by Ottmar Ette as a writer constantly in search of an elusive form capable of capturing, “on the level of écriture,” “his aim of ‘floating above observation’â•ƒ” (“Towards” 135). Rodríguez, the reasonable upsetter of the “romances” by which, he charges, the Eurocentric mind looks at New World nature, here admits to a fancy of his own, a full-fledged proposal for economic and social revolution that grew out of the need to respond to a drought. Just as Humboldt uses the technique of “telescoping” (Ette, “Towards” 132) between fragments of empirical data and a more panoramic perspective to produce an overall construction of the natural world in which individual observations fit into a larger understanding, so Rodríguez insists that the mundane decision of what to do about the

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Vincocaya Project is related to the social future of the Spanish American public. “Without water there would be no culture” (Sin agua no habrá cultura) (1:466), he declares in his proposal, so the final paragraph represents something more than a sincere apology directed at his readers’ patience. The three terms “writing,” “talking,” and “irrigation ditch,” which are the a, b, c, of one couplet—“Either the one who writes is a talker / and has taken advantage of the irrigation ditch”—become the c, b, a, of the couplet that follows—“Or the irrigation ditch was bursting to talk, and has taken advantage of the writer”—and this reversal only reinforces the link between nature and communication. Speech and, by Rodríguez’s formulation, the preservation of speech through writing become syntactically and conceptually linked to the task of adapting to nature. That an irrigation ditch should lead to a broad proposal for social reform is anything but surprising when water is culture and the inability to deal practically with nature is the salient imperiling factor for colonial and postcolonial governments alike. In the event, Rodríguez’s objections were unnecessary to derail the planned series of dams. Wibel recounts that “the Vincocaya project proved a financial disaster and was finally abandoned in 1845,” having long since become a running joke for the citizens of Arequipa, who had themselves discerned the unrealistic nature of the promised wealth that irrigation would bring (362). The particular failure of the Vincocaya Project and the fact that Rodríguez’s proposed alternative never broke ground both speaks to the lingering precariousness of public works projects even in independent Peru. Like those Spanish maps with nonexistent towns that so fascinated Humboldt, the plans and schemes of the movers and shakers of the Independence era often served best to throw into stark relief the gap between expectations and reality; as Emilio Romero has put it, “the administrative annals of the Republic abound with concessions for irrigation, but there is no proof that practical results were ever achieved” (En los anales administrativos de la República abundan las concesiones para riegos, pero no existen pruebas de que se llegara a resultados prácticos) (280).12 Nor does the expressive shadow of the Vincocaya project stop with the leading citizens’ inability to carry it out. As recently as June 2007, Hugo Chávez invoked Simón Rodríguez’s Vincocaya essay in a speech, the “Swearing In of the Central Planning Commission” ( Juramentación de la Comisión Central de Planificación). Chávez begins with Rodríguez’s original exhortation, “Let the citizens of Arequipa meddle their way into


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doing, as Rodríguez has meddled his way into speaking, and Arequipa will be the principal city of Perú” (Entrométanse los arequipeños a hacer, como Rodríguez se ha entrometido a decir, y Arequipa será la principal ciudad de Perú) (qtd. in Chávez, n.p.; 1:470). He then adds a joking aside—“Very easy, no?” (¡Sencillito!, ¿no?)—before noting similar possibilities for Venezuela on an international scale: “Let the Venezuelans meddle their way into doing, doing, doing and doing .â•¯.â•¯. and Venezuela will be the American power we want it to be!” (entrometámonos los venezolanos a hacer, hacer y hacer .â•¯.â•¯. ¡y Venezuela será la potencia americana que queremos que sea!). Of course there was nothing sencillito about Rodríguez’s suggestion that the Arequipeños put the “public” back in “public works.” His own critique of the leading citizens’ project focuses on the intrinsic connection between the means—a large, expensive, environmentally and structurally questionable construction program—and its true end, confessed or not: colonial-style profiteering by Arequipeños with sufficient capital to invest. His counterproposal offers a more collective means and a more collective end in a deliberate rebuke to “development” as he sees it being practiced in the newly independent republic, which is to say development that has learned too little from the long years of struggle for independence.

Earthquakes and Opportunity: A Reimagined Concepción Rodríguez’s other scientific text, his report on the 1835 earthquake in Concepción, is similarly performative in that it charts the narrator’s progress from objective observer of natural phenomena to lyric advocate of social and political reform. By centering on the earthquake’s apparent ability to highlight physically the most glaring disharmonies of Spanish colonial civilization, it provides both a critique and a possibility for renewal. Rodríguez chanced to reside in Concepción on February 20, 1835, the date of the seismic event. Estimating the magnitude of the earthquake at 8 to 8.25, Cinna Lomnitz notes that it produced a tsunami in Talcahuano Bay that reached “25–30 feet above the high-water mark” (948). In Concepción itself Lomnitz lists five persons killed and thirty missing, but adds that “other deaths occurred in Talcahuano, Chillán, Constitución, Cauquenes, Talca, and perhaps other towns.” While Santiago escaped harm, Lomnitz reports that “all cities in the Central Valley south of Rancagua were Â�damaged” (947).

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Charles Darwin, who was at Valdivia, some two hundred miles south of Concepción, on February 20, begins that day’s entry with notice of “the most severe earthquake experienced by the oldest inhabitant,” a shock which “came on suddenly, and lasted two minutes, but the time appeared much longer” (313). On March 4 he arrived in Talcahuano Bay, the port of Concepción, where he found overwhelming evidence of the tsunami: “Besides chairs, tables, book-shelves, &c., in great numbers, there were several roofs of cottages, which had been transported almost whole” (314). The towns of Talcahuano and Concepción presented a similarly impressive spectacle: “the ruins were so mingled together, and the whole scene possessed so little the air of a habitable place, that it was scarcely possible to imagine its former condition.” The death toll remained relatively low, Darwin surmises, because the earthquake took place during the day, so most of the inhabitants were awake and able to resort to “the invariable practice of running out of doors at the first trembling of the ground” (315). Darwin estimated the elevation of land produced by the earthquake in different locations and speculated on the relationship between volcanic activity and earthquakes, noting the superstitious belief of “the lower orders in Talcahuana” “that the earthquake was caused by some old Indian women, who two years ago being offended stopped the volcano of Antuco.” If the “witchcraft” in the belief strikes Darwin as foolish, he nonetheless credits these “lower orders” with the observation “that there exists a relation between the suppressed action of the volcanoes, and the trembling of the ground” (318). Darwin’s intuition of a connection between “the forces that slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices” would be verified a century later by plate tectonics (323).13 For Rodríguez, Concepción had been, like Arequipa before it, a relatively comfortable place, at least by the austere standards of a traveling teacher and essayist. Having been invited there to work at a secondary school headed by José Antonio Alemparte, Rodríguez had instead taken a position as head of an elementary school, a position paying a salary of a thousand pesos that, in Rumazo González’s words, “was not even sufficient to allow a meager living” (no le alcanzaba ni para vivir pobremente) (Simón 201). Rumazo González notes, however, that with Antonio Alemparte’s support, the poorly paid teacher managed to publish, too, and that the earthquake thus shattered a rare idyll in which “school and graphic workshops were rhythmically at work” (escuela y talleres gráficos iban laborando rítmicamente) (Simón 213). Rodríguez found himself commissioned,


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a month after the earthquake, to prepare a report on the damage, along with Ambrosio Lozier and Juan José Arteaga. The report would be turned in on August 13 of that same year. Rodríguez’s time as an investigator of earthquake damage thus overlaps, as Whittembury et al. have shown, with Darwin’s and Captain Robert FitzRoy’s visits to the city. Furthermore, by comparing Darwin’s and FitzRoy’s reports on the elevation of land in other locations, figures which also appear in Rodríguez’s report, Whittembury et al. surmise that Rodríguez most likely conversed with Darwin, FitzRoy, or both, or at the very least spoke with a third person who had met the English explorers. Whittembury et al.’s is the only mention I have found of a possible meeting between Rodríguez and Darwin (though this sort of connection is a kind of obsession for Rodríguez enthusiasts, the Herman Melville–Manuela Sáenz–Rodríguez meeting depicted in Diego Rísquez’s 2000 film Manuela Sáenz being a case in point); theirs is also a rare treatment of the content of Rodríguez’s report on the earthquake, which they link with the Vincocaya proposal for its “heavy stress in nature conservancy in relation to economy and society” (552). It would be misleading to label Rodríguez’s the social report as compared to Darwin’s scientific offering. Darwin’s explorations of the geological basis for local folklore about the quake show an ecological dimension of their own, and he also points out the psychological and social consequences: a social disorder replete with thieves who “with one hand” “beat their breasts and cried ‘misericordia!’ and then with the other filched what they could from the ruins” (316), along with the contradictory feeling of shared circumstances in which “no one individual was humbled more than another, or could suspect his friends of coldness” (318). And the Rodríguez report is as much a technical evaluation of the earthquake damage as a plea for a reconstruction process that rethinks the relationship between government and nature. Calculating the damage to various buildings based on their construction materials, the report also estimates costs for demolishing buildings left partially destroyed, as well as for carting off the rubble. After noting the destruction and what it will cost to remove it, Rodríguez’s report takes on a more existential issue—whether or not it makes sense to rebuild the city in such an obviously vulnerable location. The habit of building settlements at the base of volcanic mountains might well be attributed to the “pardonable imprudence” (disculpable imprudencia) of the original settlers, the report concludes, before insisting that with increased knowledge comes an obligation to perform something other than the simple reconstruction of the city. If early settlers were ignorant

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of volcanoes and thus able to persuade themselves that “fire would always come out of the same crater, and that tremors bore no relation at all to explosions” (el fuego habia de salir siempre por el mismo cráter, y que los temblores no tenían relacion alguna con las explosiones), Rodríguez argues that his contemporaries know better. Concern over earthquakes leads Rodríguez and his coauthors to consider the other dangers of seaside cities at the base of volcanic mountains. Here, the style is clearly Rodríguez’s, as the passage begins with a characteristic play on the term “endemic”: Doctors call the diseases particular to a country endemic (these cannot be banished, or it would be difficult to happen upon the causes), and they also call endemic the fevers that are suffered in populous cities, for lack of hygiene or because the location has been chosen badly. (Endemicas llaman los medicos, las enfermedades propias del pais [estas no se pueden desterrar, o seria dificil ocurrir a las causas], y llaman endemicas tambien las fiebres que se padecen en las ciudades populosas, por el desaseo o por la mala eleccion de lugar.) (1:494; italics in original)

If “lack of hygiene” is easy enough to fix, “location” is usually something city planners have to live with once a city is built. What really bothers Rodríguez is the motivation laid bare in this particular case, in which “the comfort of not having to climb up and down” (la comodidad de no tener que subir y bajar) of a low-lying, seaside locale is chosen over “the convenience of living with health and good hygiene!” (la conveniencia de vivir aseado y sano!). Such a choice, Rodríguez asserts, “is forgetting the trunk in order to think about the legs” (es no pensar en el tronco, por considerar las piernas) (1:494; italics in original). Again, considerations of geography lead Rodríguez back to his organic notion of human community. The “trunk” of the deleterious health effects of humid, low-lying foundations might be called a “discovery” of nineteenth-century science unavailable to the early Spanish settlers, but as such it alters the question entirely, becoming part of the larger ecological field against which all scientific and social questions must be considered—we might call his approach, with a nod to Neil Browne, “ecological pragmatism” (7). Rodríguez’s intermingling of the organic concept of human community with the natural environment leaves him unsatisfied with a simple argument in favor of relocating to higher ground. He goes on to diag-


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nose the particular play of interests at work in creating towns vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunamis, and the “endemic” illnesses bred in the wetlands. Individual interests, he argues, do not necessarily add up to the common good, just as, in Brown’s evaluation of John Dewey’s Art and Experience, individual discovery does little good if it exists on a disciplinary island. Progressive thought, for both writers, involves the careful consideration of commonality, a consideration capable of taking more and more specialized discoveries into its imaginary without losing sight of the broader perspective (2–3). Rodríguez admits that he understands very well how history works—no one wants to locate a city in a dangerous place, but “special conveniences” (conveniencias especiales) often intervene, particularly when the city is built with a commercial or military purpose “to which all others are submitted” (al cual se someten siempre los demas) (1:495; italics in origiÂ� nal). The result, he concludes, is that in Spanish America these interests, specifically “war, mines, hunting, fishing, farm ponds, pastures, manufacturing, commerce” (la guerra, las minas, la caza, la pesca, los abrevaderos, los pastos, las manufacturas y el comercio) (1:495), take precedence over the overall health of the human population, leaving the city’s inhabitants “submerged in swamps—buried in sand—fighting the waves over here and the rocks over there—and as they come to the end of their days, letting themselves be eaten by mosquitoes” (sumerjidas en pantanos—enterradas en la arena—allí peleando con las olas, allá con los peñascos—y mientras ven llegar el fin de sus dias, dejandose comer por los mosquitos). Focusing on the fishermen who first built towns “where great fortunes are acquired at the cost of morality and health” (donde se adquieren grándes caudales a costa de la moral y de la salud), Rodríguez extends his analysis to the broad social ill of narrow-minded ambition: “But no one thinks the situation a bad one because no one thinks about anything except his own situation:—the fishermen judge a beach only by its fish,— the merchants see nothing in a port but their business” (Pero nadie cree estar mal porque en nada piensa menos que en su situacion:—los pescadores no juzgaron de la playa sino por los peces,—los comerciantes no ven en el puerto, sino sus negocios) (1:495). Rodríguez goes on to offer an analysis of possibilities for reconstruction: Punta de Parra, Cosmito, and Concepción. As in his proposal for the canal, he takes on the guise not of advocating a particular point of view, but of working through an orderly, disinterested decision-making process. Of course, the reasons under consideration slant in a clear direction. Reversing the standard real-estate tactic of showing the worst location first,

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Rodríguez begins by extolling Punta de Parra for its clear air, its wonderful views, and its easy defensibility against attack by sea. Cosmito offers similar advantages, he acknowledges, though it would be more difficult to defend. Concepción—last, and, in Rodríguez’s view, least—offers “the great advantage existence brings to the project of existing” (la gran ventaja que lleva la existencia al proyecto de existir), along with, of course, the easy commercial access to sea and land routes that caused it to be chosen in the first place (1:501). The list of its defects goes on for several pages and includes poor-quality soil—which is to say soft and always too humid—lack of drainage, mostly salty groundwater, and a reserve of standing water replete with breeding insects (1:501–3). After offering this tacit recommendation for Punta de Parra over Cosmito or the current site of Concepción, the report again retires behind a curtain of impartiality, its task being that of “recognizing and informing” (a reconocer y a informar) (1:506). Rodríguez and his fellow authors are not alone in their response to the earthquake as an opportunity to correct geographic errors committed by early settlers. Reinaldo Muñoz Olave chronicles a similar episode of soul-searching after the same earthquake destroyed the inland town of Chillán. There, the first meeting of the town’s leadership, held “the very afternoon of the 20th” (en la misma tarde del 20), quickly became a debate between those who wished to reconstruct the city where it was and those who hoped to relocate it. Nor was the question quickly resolved, he reports, and its continuation “brought damaging effects to the population, among them that of causing the rebuilding to be delayed several years and completed under unfavorable conditions” (trajo perjuicios gravísimos al vecindario, entre otros el de que la reedificación se demoró varios años y se hizo en condiciones desfavorables) (n.p.). Almost as soon as the coauthors of the Concepción report promise detachment, it melts away before the didactic heat of Rodríguez’s prose. Justifying its venture into “scientific explanations” (explicaciones científicas) as the result of obligation rather than caprice, the conclusion goes on to offer a combination of apologia and manifesto: Observations made with knowledge are REASONS, and they should be sought in the CAPACITIES and in the PROPERTIES of things: to base themselves on anything else would be to give what the Gov’t. Has not been able .â•¯.â•¯. which is to say, IMPRESSIONS or opinions. It is NOT to be believed that sensible persons will slander the results of experience as pure theory.


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Observaciones hechas con conocimiento son razones, y estas deben buscarse en las calidades y en las propiedades de las cosas: nó fundarse en ellas, seria dar lo que el Gobno. No ha podido .â•¯.â•¯. esto es, pareceres u opiniones. no es de creer que personas sensatas tachen de puras teorias los resultados de la experiencia. (1:507; italics in original)

Having invoked the human concerns behind the numbers on damage and rebuilding costs, Rodríguez insists that this “humane” dimension should not be misconstrued as the intrusion of opinion. It is, he maintains, experience rather than theoretical speculation that has given foundation to his report and on that basis he asks that it be considered part of a science of the grounded rather than the “floating in the air” variety. Taking the language and rhetoric of Baconian empiricism, Rodríguez creates an ecological way of talking about economic, political, and environmental progress. The end result is less a nationalistic or hemispheric repudiation of perceived “European ideas” than an attempt to ensure that the processes that guided the conquest be enlarged to take into account the continent’s human population. Finally, a noteworthy digression appears in the midst of Rodríguez’s ostensibly impartial listing of the advantages and disadvantages of each possible location. In a series of paragraphs labeled “Let it be said in passing” (Dígase de paso), Rodríguez warns of the spectre of deforestation, noting that the unregulated burning of forest to produce cropland results in the quick destruction of trees that “need eighty or a hundred years to be replaced” (necesitan 80 o 100 años para reponerse). He notes the restrictions on tree cutting in force in Europe “since the time of Buffon” (desde en tiempo de Buffon), as well as the fact that the salvation of forests in France and England has largely depended on the discovery of coal. Rodríguez couches his warning as a call for sustainability rather than for simple preservation. Chile, he argues, will need to industrialize in order to become economically independent, and in the absence of coal, “those factories served by fire (which are many)” (las fábricas que se sirven del Â�fuego [que son muchas]) will need a guaranteed supply of wood (1:498). His comments recall Humboldt’s insistence that deforestation produces often irreversible changes: “By felling the trees, that cover the tops and the sides of mountains, men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations: the want of fuel, and a scarcity of water” (4:143). While unabashedly in favor of industrialization and the use of forests as a source of fuel, both men see the unplanned destruction of forests as an

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example of unwise resource use—destroying with little return a source of economic progress that will likely prove impossible to replace. The human ecology behind Humboldt’s and Rodríguez’s rationale is a constant effort to balance immediate convenience with the predictable needs of the future.14 With emphasis clearly on human development rather than on the preservation of nature, both Rodríguez and Humboldt nonetheless insist that an intelligent development plan must take long-term needs into account and at all costs avoid destroying resources that will be difficult or impossible to replace. Rodríguez’s and Humboldt’s insistence on employing a geographically and temporally broad frame for the questions of New World interaction with nature reflects the same rhetorical move that Blanco White makes when he argues that the independence movement in America is substituting short-term political ends—separation—for the more pressing need to revolutionize all of Hispanic culture. Blanco White’s dream of a revolution that could begin with renegotiations of the pro-independence demands of the criollos imagines a forum for debate like that of the transatlantic readership of his own journals, a forum that never managed to materialize as a political force. The radical nature of all three thinkers’ critiques of Hispanic society depends upon their vision of Spanish America and Spain as part of a larger global system, and their suspicion of the tendency of local political demands to limit and at times oppose the progress of a deeper revolution in thought.

Example of Rodríguez’s visual emphasis. From Sociedades Americanas en 1828 (1840). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, *97-860. 89

Rodríguez explains how typography brings tones and pauses to the page. From Sociedades Americanas en 1828 (1840). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, *97-860. 90

Parallel between the listener (el Oyente) and the reader (el Lector). From Sociedades Americanas en 1828 (1840). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, *97-860. 91

Rodríguez asks his readers to show some republican virtues—whether they possess them or not. From Sociedades Americanas en 1828 (1840). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, *97-860. 92

If “gesticulating is painting in the air” (jesticular es pintar en el aire) then typography is painting on the page. From Sociedades Americanas en 1828 (1840). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, *97-860. 93

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Parallel between language and government. From Sociedades Americanas en 1828 (1828). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, SA 8647.5F.

Rodriguez calls for “peace and attention” (paz y atencion) and tells the American republics to “be friends if you want to be free” (sean amigas si quieren ser libres). From Sociedades Americanas en 1828 (1828). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, SA 8647.5F. 96

An emphasis on “dealing with things” (tratar con las cosas) rather than words. From Sociedades Americanas en 1828 (1842). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, SA 8647.5.2. 97

Europe and America compared, as political terminology descends into chaos between them. From Sociedades Americanas en 1828 (1842). Widener Library, Harvard College Library, SA 8647.5.2. 98

Chapter 3

Education, Republican Values, and Intellectual Independence

Do not be concerned about America: there is no better academy for the public than a revolution. (No tenga V. pues, cuidado por la América, no hay mejor academia para el pueblo que una revolución.)

—Carta del Dr. D. Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra al Español sobre su número 19 (1821)

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hile any examination of Rodríguez’s ecological thought presupposes a critical recovery of his most neglected texts, a reference to the Caraqueño’s thoughts on education demands a shift in the direction of the Rodríguez remembered popularly in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and recently recovered by the government itself. Bequeathed the honorary title Maestro del Libertador (the Liberator’s teacher), Simón Rodríguez haunts the contemporary Venezuelan landscape as a spectre of revolutionary conscience, of the nation’s social obligation to its youth. Recent publications such as Eduardo Morales Gil’s Simón Rodríguez and Simón Bolívar, Pioneers of Popular Education: Origins of the Bolivarian Schools (Simón Rodríguez y Simón Bolívar, pioneros de la educación popular: Orígenes de las Escuelas Bolivarianas) (Caracas, 2006) and Luis Gerardo González Briceño’s Simón Rodríguez: Political and Pedagogical Beliefs (Simón Rodríguez: Ideario pedagógico y político) (Caracas, 2005) tie Rodríguez to his famous pupil as well as to reforms now under way with the support of the government of Hugo Chávez. Morales Gil emphasizes the connections between that famous pupil 99

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and his teacher, noting that the bulk of Bolívar’s writings on education (his exact figure is 71 percent) date from the four-year period (1825–1828) “in which he was in contact with the enlightened Caraqueñan pedagogue” (en los cuales estuvo en contacto con el ilustrado pedagogo caraqueño) (154). Naming Rodríguez as one of the intellectual and moral influences responsible for Bolívar’s postwar interest in education, the author paints the two thinkers as proponents of a project whose completion remained suspended in the wake of Bolívar’s death and Rodríguez’s departure from the public stage. Now, his argument goes, has come the time “to pay off a historic debt contracted almost two centuries ago” (saldar una deuda histórica contraída desde hace dos siglos) and the current Venezuelan government accordingly takes on the role of realizing a lost dream, “the project of redemption of the excluded of America, using education as a tool for social change” (el proyecto de redención de los excluídos de América, utilizando a la educación como herramienta de cambio social) (206). Among its other features, Morales Gil’s approach tends to dehistoricize Rodríguez and Bolívar—the latter’s death is referred to as a “physical disappearance” (desaparición física), a construction that presumes an extraphysical presence—and to cast contemporary politics into revolutionary relief. Finally, the reference to America invokes the extranational sense of revolutionary project common to the thinkers of Rodríguez and Bolívar’s time. González Briceño’s book performs a similar operation, reifying rather than demystifying the saintly revolutionary leaders, but it aims at a younger audience and offers Bolívar’s and Rodríguez’s own words as the bulk of its text. Each chapter begins with a citation from the pupil alluding to a particular “problem,” “answered” by a list of related quotes from Rodríguez’s written oeuvre. Interspersed are drawings in which a Rodríguez in contemporary garb (even, in one case, a baseball cap) but still sporting nineteenth-century eyeglasses high-fives a Venezuelan youth or sheds a tear above headlines referring to the petroleum workers’ strike in opposition to the Chávez government. This Rodríguez is doubly dehistoricized, not only in visual terms, but also through the list of quotes, which takes his words out of their original textual habitat to create a collection of powerful and ambiguous sound bites endowed with the almost divine authority of Venezuela’s more famous Simón. Despite their differing focus and imagined audiences, Morales Gil and González Briceño converge on the notion of independence as an unfinished project, a vision that depends on the broadest possible interpretation of the word. Their “independence,” like that championed by Simón Rodríguez, signifies not a reordering of the politi-


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cal relationship with Spain but rather the social and political reordering of Spanish American society. And where Morales Gil highlights the failure of Rodríguez/Bolívar’s project as a spur to contemporary ones, González Briceño characterizes as a consequence of a failure of education the lapsed work of independence as a social project: “The incomprehension of a collective project—only explicable by means of education—was the reason for such ingratitude” (La incomprensión de un proyecto colectivo—sólo explicable a través de la educación—era la razón de tanta ingratitud) (n.p.). Or, to put the formulation another way, the Liberator’s disgrace and abandonment by a Venezuelan public interested in escaping from the Gran Colombia and suspicious of his autocratic tendencies is a clear result of his failure to educate that public about the collective nature of independence as a revolutionary project. Political failure, in this case, follows educational failure. Much of Rodríguez’s fame and much of the mythology that has been constructed around his life can be traced to his intermittent contact with Simón Bolívar, and a handful of letters between them. If one sort of Rodríguez historiography attempts to make a revolutionary out of the intellectual who in fact appeared on the scene only as the military part of the struggle was ending, its inverse employs Bolívar’s contact with his old teacher to advance a mythical vision of the Liberator as a dedicated educational reformer. Morales Gil’s mathematical attempt to link Bolívar’s educational writings to Rodríguez’s influence is particularly telling. Even if we accept the correlation as causality (discounting, for example, the fact that the period between 1825 and 1828 was the four years in which the Liberator had the greatest opportunity to address education and a host of other political concerns, with or without the intervention of Rodríguez), what emerges is a vision in which the old teacher sparked Bolívar’s interest in the subject of popular education rather than any particular pedagogical orientation. While it is certainly possible to reconstruct, as Armando Rojas has done, a systematic treatment of Bolívar’s educational thought, such treatments inevitably anthologize bits of larger political decrees or small documents such as the Liberator’s instructions for the education of his nephew. Even if we were to concede Rojas’s lyrical vision of the LibÂ�erator’s mind as a space in which Rousseau-inspired ideas “kept floating” (quedaron flotando), only “to spring up illuminated and colored by the accent of our old Caraqueño” (brotar iluminadas y coloreadas por el acento del viejo nuestro caraqueño) (23), the parallel between the two would do a

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serious injustice to Rodríguez’s status as an educational thinker. For if Bolívar on occasion wrote clearly and forcefully about education, his older teacher made of the topic a formal structure in which to express immediate and global political hopes. Furthermore, as Tomás Polanco Alcántara has noted, attempts to justify Rodríguez by way of the fame of Bolívar tend always to detract from Rodríguez’s salient contribution to Spanish American thought, his “having demonstrated the path that would have to be followed in order to shape citizens for the nascent republics” (haber demostrado el camino que se debía seguir para formar a los ciudadanos de las nacientes Repúblicas) (144). Rodríguez’s writings refer to education constantly, but by picking the texts that most overtly organize themselves around specific projects, it is possible to isolate an educational oeuvre that includes Reflections on the Current State of the School (Reflexiones sobre el estado actual de la escuela) (1794), a teacher’s-eye plea for practical reform of the Caracas schools, and two other texts written after his long sojourn in Europe: Enlightenment and Social Virtues (Luces y virtudes sociales) (1834) and Friendly Advice Given to the School at Latacunga (Consejos de amigo dados al Colejio de Latacunga) (1845), both of which focus on the pressing need for an educational system that would render the political project of independence enacted by Bolívar’s army an intellectual reality for the Spanish American public. In full flower, Rodríguez’s educational idea conceives the teacher’s role as a literal and metaphorical manifestation of the properly governed republic. His own sensibility nods in the direction of González-Briceño’s epitaph for Bolívar and the single most important point of agreement between teacher and pupil—the belief that a new sort of public must be created for the dreamed-of republic to have any chance of assuming stable and sustainable form. Written against the clear evidence of a failed social contract, Rodríguez’s final works amount to an impassioned plea for an educational parenthesis in time, a vision of the school as a last hope for the creation of a public more interested in common good than in personal gain. In Chile, Andrés Bello would make a similar set of arguments in his Oration at the Installation of the University of Chile (Discurso de instalación de la Universidad de Chile) (1843) and other texts, as would Ralph Waldo Emerson in The American Scholar (1837). These disparate thinkers and their separate historical and political contexts are united by their belief in an educational narrative designed to mimic that of the independence movement. Tracing an opposition to the rhetorical and the empirical articulated by Bacon and rendered into an educational context by Rousseau, I


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here read the notion of the revolutionary school in terms of Rodríguez and Emerson’s shared conviction of the importance of inspired reading and Rodríguez and Bello’s firm belief in the school’s role as a foundation for the yet-to-be-achieved political structures each sees as essential to the eventual triumph of Spanish American independence. The school, like the text, plays a double role, preparing a new generation for political leadership and modeling the patterns that leadership will take on a smaller and more controllable scale.

Colonial Roots of Reform It would be a mistake to attribute the explosion of educational reform plans in Spanish America solely to the idealism of the independence movement. By the end of the eighteenth century the enlightened monarchy of Carlos III had instituted a modest reform movement that dictated the creation of Escuelas Reales and the Real Comitiva, innovations that Gustavo Adolfo Ruiz identifies as “the culmination of the struggle of the avantgarde teachers to satisfy their desires for advancement and reform” (la culminación del batallar de los maestros de vanguardia por ver satisfechos sus anhelos de superación y reforma). Along with these institutional changes, Adolfo Ruiz notes that the teachers’ movement led to a more “transcendental” shift, “the affirmation of the State’s right to interfere decisively in the orientation, organization and management of education” (la afirmación del derecho del Estado a intervenir decisivamente en la orientación, organización y manejo de la educación) (81). The modernization project was an economic one as well, as evidenced by the formation of Economic Societies of the Friends of the Country (Sociedades Económicas de los Amigos del País) throughout Spanish America (Ruiz y González de Linares 52). This reform movement took inspiration from the economic ideas of Adam Smith as propagated by Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1744–1811) (24), as well as from the impetus of Jovellanos and others to make “a whole man” (un hombre integral) out of the Spanish worker (15–16). While the colonial government discouraged the sort of cosmopolitan exchange of books and periodicals possible in Paris, London, or Philadelphia, it did maintain open lines of communication between Caracas and Madrid, with the result that the reformist fervor in the colonies in the 1790s was as much a reflection of the climate in the metropolis as an assertion of intellectual independence.1

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Indeed, a number of Spanish American thinkers of Rodríguez’s generaÂ� tion expressed their belief in the overarching power of education, inspired by the French encyclopedists and voiced in the assertion of Claude-Adrien Helvetius (1715–1771) that “instruction can do everything” (L’instruction peut tout) and his insistence that the catalogue of present ignorance serves best “to make all the importance of education more strongly felt” (pour faire mieux sentir toute l’importance de l’éducation) (2:861–62). Writing from the viceroyalty of Peru, for example, Victorián de Villava made a similar point in his “Discurso sobre la mita de Potosí” (1793), arguing that “education can make a man whatever he wants to be” (la educación hace del hombre lo que quiere) (216), a line of reasoning that supported his attack on the colonial notion of indigenous Americans as intrinsically suited for forced labor in the mines. Villava also applied his argument at the level of government, asserting that, as “a sort of public education” (una suerte de educación pública), it practices a similarly pervasive influence over the character of nations (215).2 Another enlightened criollo, Rodríguez’s fellow Caraqueño Miguel José Sanz, stressed the social climate that fostered and was fostered by the educational system, a climate in which nobility and riches mattered more than knowledge, and the prejudices of elite criollos served as a primary impediment to economic development. Sanz detailed the irony of a school system that tended to squelch a child’s natural intellectual curiosity with “books replete with ridiculous and extravagant stories, with horrific Â�miracles, and with a superstitious devotion that is reduced to exterior forms only” (libros repletos de cuentos ridículos y extravagantes, de milagros horroríficos y de una devoción supersticiosa que se reduce únicamente a formas exteriores) (395). This emphasis on the exterior forms of knowledge produced educated elites unable to participate meaningfully in economic development, since “decency, in their opinion, bars them from agricultural jobs and makes them treat the mechanical arts with the most arrogant disdain” (la decencia, según su opinión, les impide seguir los trabajos de la agricultura y les hace tratar las artes mecánicas con el más soberano desprecio) (396). In fact, Sanz concluded, the end result was downright parasitic, as “the fields lie deserted” (los campos se hallan desiertos) and the educated class gave itself over “to the horrible vices of luxury, gambling, artifice, and slander” (a los horribles vicios del lujo, del juego, del artificio y de la calumnia) (397). Sanz’s and Villava’s arguments frame education on two different levels: for Sanz the problem with the colonial schools is that they reproduce a


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social hierarchy ill suited to the economic realities of the late eighteenth century. Hearkening back to that Baconian division between science that floats in the air and science that is grounded in the observation of material substances, he finds the colonial schools not only content but also determined to avoid addressing what Bacon would call real scientific exploration. Villava traces a larger circle, attacking long-standing prejudices based on class hierarchy by appealing to the essential malleability of the human subject—peasants and nobles are as much made as born, he maintains, so the argument that this or that subject of the Spanish crown deserves to be enslaved by reason of birth must be invalid. By positioning government as a form of “public education,” he takes the same conceptual step mentioned by Adolfo Ruiz, the validation of the government’s role as a shaper of its people. These two arcs, education as a process that should be based on encounters with the physical world rather than accounts of it once or twice removed, and education as a metaphor for and lever of the government’s influence over its people, become central tropes to the thinkers of Rodríguez’s generation who attack the problem of intellectual independence.3 Rodríguez, himself employed as a primary schoolteacher in Caracas, wrote his 1794 Reflections as both a critique of the existing system and a proposal for a set of reforms to professionalize and regularize the experience of students and teachers alike. After a preliminary section that details the neglect of primary education and, by extension, the irregular quality of instruction given even to the children of Caracas’s wealthiest residents, the essay proposes an expansion of the number of schools and a plan for a supervisory structure, as well as a system of funding them, then makes an impassioned argument for the professionalization (and fair pay) of teachers. Adolfo Ruiz has painstakingly demonstrated the text’s acknowledged debt to the reforms already under way in Madrid—indeed, Rodríguez suggests that the director maintain a contact in Madrid to speed the shipment of new materials and ideas (1:215)—and his argument convincingly exposes the error of those who would paint this document as an early precursor of the more radical thinking Rodríguez’s essays would demonstrate decades later (137–38). Inspired less by Rousseau or any other radical French thinker than by the practical approach of Jovellanos, the Rodríguez of the Reflections seeks to achieve for the primary school, in the words of Adolfo Ruiz, “an institutionalization that would accredit it before society and the authorities, so that they would come to support, protect and respect it” (una institucionalización que la acreditara ante la sociedad y las autoridades,

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de modo que llegaran a apoyarla, protegerla y respetarla) (137). Working within the social structure of the colonial government, Rodríguez attempts to create a larger and more habitable space for his own profession and institution. The Reflections do demonstrate some of the philosophical currents that will come to characterize the later writings. Rodríguez, for example, displays a concern for trades over the traditional professions (especially law) that had long held sway in colonial society. He presents as anything but a radical proposal his preference that all social classes should be educated, and that the education of workers should be as important to the state as the labor they provide: “Artisans and farmworkers are a class of men who should be as well attended as their professions are. The State’s interest in it is well known; and for that reason needs no proof ” (Los artesanos y labradores es una clase de hombres que debe ser tan atendida como son sus ocupaciones. El interés que tiene en ello el Estado es bien conocido; y por lo mismo excusa de pruebas) (1:200). He evinces the same exasperation with the social inertia inspired by tradition that will appear in his more radical avatar, lamenting that an overly critical attitude toward every new idea leads to blindness toward one’s own errors: “Each one [. . .] criticizes the new: and those who know their own defect are rare” (Cado uno [. . .] critica la novedad: y raros son los que conocen su defecto) (1:199–200). Finally, the Rodríguez who wishes to win greater esteem for primary schools shows an early concern for the mechanics of literacy that will later flower into a full-fledged metaphor for the state. He notes matter-of-factly that the business of teaching reading is related to the business of teaching writing and that any form of pedagogy that does not impart the communicative value of what is read or repeated promotes something less than literacy: “It is necessary to know how to read in every sense and to give each expression its own value” (Es necesario saber leer en todos sentidos y dar a cada expresión su propio valor) (1:205). Concerned more with the nuts and bolts of administering primary education in an effective way, Rodríguez’s most impassioned argument is for the social value of education itself. His concluding plea for a living wage for primary-school teachers invokes the value of their service in terms that echo the tone of his words on behalf of artisans and workers: “they do a particular service to God, to the King, and to the Country, and to the State; and no other reason is needed for assuring them a recompense proportional to their merit” (hacen un particular servicio a Dios, al Rey, y a la Patria, y al Estado; y no es menester más razón para que se les asegure una


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recompensa proporcionada a su mérito) (1:222). Having clearly expressed compelling arguments for the practical utility of education—a concept no Bourbon reformer of the era would dispute—Rodríguez embarked three years later on the European odyssey that would expose him to every political and philosophical current coursing through Western civilization. When he returned to the Americas in 1823, almost every practical circumstance (his and the region’s) had changed. His faith in the importance of education remained unshaken, and his ambitions had expanded far beyond the reform of any single system or school.

Of Earth and Air: The Legacy of Rousseau One of the reforming voices Rodríguez may have encountered before leaving Caracas and must have encountered during the years he spent in France is that of the Geneva-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1768). A great deal has been written about Rousseau’s influence on Simón Rodríguez, above all because of the ease with which a certain romantic urge can turn his short stint as Simón Bolívar’s teacher into a Spanish American version of the teacher-student relationship visualized in Rousseau’s Emile. Caracas was a port city, and despite the Spanish prohibition that would have made it impossible to buy or sell Rousseau’s books officially, the vision of Rodríguez reading Emile in secret immortalized in Arturo Uslar Pietri’s historical novel La isla de Róbinson has come to take on the patina of fact. In Pietri’s vision, Rodríguez “would read slowly, with the help of a dictionary” (leía lentamente, con la ayuda de un diccionario), while the rest of Caracas was asleep. This reading provokes a moment of epiphany—“It was necessary that that man should come and write those books so that suddenly everything would become clear” (Había sido necesario esperar a que llegara aquel hombre y escribiera esos libros para que de repente todo se hicera claro) (11)—and becomes a cornerstone of Rodríguez’s own pedagogy. Uslar Pietri wrote these lines several decades after Andre Â�Marius had anointed Rodríguez “a tropical Rousseau” (un Rousseau tropical) (41).4 Furthermore, Rodríguez, who made a point of not mentioning other writers, cites Rousseau five times, making the Genevan by far his favorite source.5 Finally, Rodríguez’s choice of pseudonym, Samuel Robinson, a nod in the direction of the protagonist of the novel Rousseau recommends as the central text of Emile’s education, acknowledges Rousseau in a curi-

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ously intimate way, literally putting Rodríguez’s traveling vision of himself in the Genevan’s orbit. Rousseau, who, like Simón Rodríguez, spent much of his life in roving exile, also resembled the Venezuelan in the esoteric nature of his compositions. From a systematic formulation of the origin and nature of human government, The Social Contract (Du contrat social) (1762), to the personal and lyrical exploration of Confessions (Les confessions) (1770), his oeuvre pushes the limits of expository prose and genre. Perhaps no work better encapsulates this hybrid nature than Emile, or On Education (Émile, ou de l’éducation) (1762). Introducing the book as “this collection of scattered thoughts and observations,” Rousseau confesses that it began as a tract on education, only to swell into a larger and more unwieldy form, “a sort of opus, too big, doubtless for what it contains, but too small for the matter it treats” (33). Alternately described as a bildungsroman and an educational treatise, Emile skirts the line between philosophy and fiction, narrating the childhood of the well-born Emile from the perspective of an enlightened tutor who teaches not by rote, but by a seemingly endless series of experimental encounters with the natural world—Baconian science rendered pedagogical and writ small. If Bacon had foreseen a revolution in science as the result of a grounding in physical experiment, Rousseau envisioned a similar process enacted in the education of Emile. First, instead of protecting a child from the world’s dangers until some mythical adulthood when the individual would be ready to face them, Rousseau counsels early exposure as the surest route to adaptation—“Why should he not live in all the elements? If he could be taught to fly in the air, I would make an eagle of him. I would make a salamander of him if a man could be hardened against fire” (132). Guided by this experiential spirit, the curriculum comes not from books but from experiments designed by the tutor and expanding from each encounter with the natural world: “Arrange things so that the child has knowledge of all these experiments, that he makes all those within his reach, and that he finds the others by induction.” Always, Rousseau adds the caveat that the way of learning matters more than the amount of content to be mastered. Experimentation is the content to be mastered, so any attempt to circumvent it by simply explaining or otherwise revealing the results short-circuits the entire educational process. Speaking of the results of those experiments, Rousseau cautions: “But I prefer a hundred times over his being ignorant of them to your having to tell them to him” (148). Rousseau’s educational system is sequential and improvisational—what


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Emile is being taught is not an abstract instrument to be applied to realworld situations, but rather the ability to create the proper instruments in response to those situations. Reminding his readers that, contrary to contemporary practice, “the spirit of my education consists not in teaching the child many things, but in never letting anything but accurate and clear ideas enter his brain” (171), Rousseau rates his vision of the scientific process as equally counterintuitive: “my object is not to give him science but to teach him to acquire science when needed, to make him estimate it for exactly what it is worth, and to make him love the truth above all.” Furthermore, Rousseau’s experiential philosophy corresponds not to an abstract notion of knowledge for its own sake, but to a pragmatic approach: “It is enough for me that he knows how to find the “what’s it good for?” in everything he does and the “why?” in everything he believes” (207). What most worries Rousseau is that the rhetoric of educated people will come to form a substitute for genuine understanding, that Emile will take on faith what his teachers say without himself investigating their claims. This mistrust of rhetoric, which became a staple among eighteenthcentury European educational reformers, finds perhaps its clearest expression in Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), whose concept of “intellectual property” distinguished between borrowed wares—rhetoric learned from others and repeated—and “the result of our own investigations,” with the latter being “our own intellectual property” (146). In all these cases the real worry is rooted in pedagogy’s ability to produce a false reproduction of the results of knowledge without re-creating the process by which the knowledge was produced in the first place. If Bacon sees science gradually conquering a body of knowledge that is the universe—“For I do not propose merely to survey these regions in my mind, like an augur taking auspices, but to enter them like a general who means to take possession” (440)—Pestalozzi’s and Rousseau’s approaches demand a plan that starts from scratch, since the act of accepting the work of previous generations of experimenters without repeating and confirming them would make science an authority to be respected on reputation rather than a process of rigorous experimentation. Crusoe, whose experience as a castaway forces him literally to create a homemade version of Western technology experiment by experiment, serves as an example of the experimental spirit to which Rousseau believes the young Emile should aspire. “I want him to think he is a Robinson himself ” (185), Rousseau declares, and by so doing he casts Emile’s pedagogical experience as both the realistic, practical approach to scientific

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experiment—building shelters, finding food, and so on—and as a fairy tale removed from space and time and all the worldly forces which would spoil Emile’s palate. Ian Watt’s classic essay “Robinson Crusoe as a Myth” points out the delicate tastemaking going on in the novel’s rough-hewn story of a hero stranded on a desert island. Crusoe gradually discovers that he can derive, slowly, fitfully, the mechanical processes of daily living that he had ignored in his bourgeois path—“as Reason is the Substance and Original of the Mathematicks, so by stating and squaring every thing by Reason, and by making the most rational Judgment of things, every Man may be in time Master of every mechanick Art” (50–51)—and this discovery, Watt argues, enacts an unraveling of the capitalist division of labor. The aesthetic result, he concludes, is paradoxical—“to enjoy the description of the elementary productive processes takes a sophisticated taste”—and the project proves inspirational to Rousseau and other educational reformers, he concludes, precisely because it undoes the division between “manual” and “mental labor” and with it “the unnatural intellectualism which society inflicts upon the middle class” (Watt 293). If the modern middle-class subject is a victim of industrial processes and their social consequences, Crusoe takes on an agency fueled by experimental reason. His isolation gives him the freedom to invent industrial society all by himself, and thus to confront manufacture as anything but a frightening and mystifying process. The imagined idylls of Rodríguez and Bolívar as utopian intellectuals enjoying a Crusoe-like intellectual interlude in the Venezuelan countryside offer a nod to the power of the figure of this brainy conqueror, this cacique fueled by reason rather than by brute force. This vision reaches a poetic height in Eduardo Galeano’s Faces and Masks (Las caras y las máscaras), which narrates Rodríguez’s education of Bolívar as an awakening to the promises of the Enlightenment and the realities of the Venezuelan landscape they inhabit: Far from Caracas, the tutor initiates the boy into the secrets of the universe and speaks to him of liberty, equality, fraternity; he reveals the hard lives of the slaves that work for him and he tells him that forget-me-nots are also called myosotis palustris. He shows him how the young colt is born from the womb of the mare and how the coffee and cacao fulfill their Â�cycles. Bolívar becomes a swimmer, a walker, a horseman; he learns to plant, to build a chair, and to name the stars in the skies of Aragua. Teacher and student traverse Venezuela, camping where they will, and together come


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to know the work that made them. By the light of a lamp, they read and discuss Robinson Crusoe and Plutarch’s Lives. (Lejos de Caracas, el preceptor inicia al muchacho en los secretos del universo y le habla de libertad, igualdad, fraternidad; le descubre la dura vida de los esclavos que trabajan para él y le cuenta que la nomolvides también se llama myosotis palustris. Le muestra cómo nace el potrillo del veintre de la yegua y cómo cumplen sus ciclos el cacao y el café. Bolívar se hace nadador, caminador y jinete; aprende a sembrar, a construir una silla y a nombrar las estrellas del cielo de Aragua. Maestro y alumno atraviesan Venezuela, acampando donde sea, y conocen juntos la tarea que los hizo. A la luz de un farol, leen y discuten Robinsón Crusoe y las Vidas de Plutarco.) (101)

Galeano’s account is, by most interpretations, fictional. Jesús Andrés LÂ�asheras has pointed out the lack of any evidence to support the conclusion that Rodríguez “maintained the Rousseauian pedagogical system” (sostuviera el sistema pedagógico rusoniano) (82) in the years prior to his leaving Venezuela, and goes so far as to suggest that despite the probability of an encounter with a forbidden copy of Emile “there is no proof of any kind that Simón Rodríguez read Rousseau’s Emile (no hay pruebas de ninguna especie de que Simón Rodríguez leyera el Emilio de Rousseau) (81).6 What is most striking about Galeano’s vision is the synthesis it attempts to cram into a single paragraph—a procedure that models the biographical synthesis it suggests, since the description, if true, would fit Bolívar’s entire education into a period of a few years. Ending with that heroic moment of readership in which the two men examine at least one forbidden book by lamplight, Galeano’s passage narrates an introduction into biology, an empathetic awakening into the economic system that supports criollo aristocrats like Bolívar, an exploration of the country’s cash crops, and a crash program for developing the physical stamina necessary for a student who wishes to explore the rugged countryside in person. If the division between intellectual and manual labor outlined by Watt is one of the fissures of the modern economy and of modernity itself, then the Rousseau-inflected vision of Rodríguez and his pupil makes the occasion of Spanish American independence something more than a political event: the Liberator might separate the colonies from their metropolis, but in legend he unites the highest and lowest strata of the Spanish American economy. Galeano’s idealized Bolívar presents an educational blueprint, too. His

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Bolívar is not opposed to reading—the cycle ends, after all, with Rousseau and Plutarch—but the educational sequence the passage maps out prioritizes practical experience, making reading something a student does after rather than before a systematic exploration of the territory he or she inhabits. This approach is very much in keeping with Rousseau’s own commentary about the education of Emile. In evincing his distrust of language— “never substitute the sign for the thing except when it is impossible for you to use the latter” (170)—Rousseau traces a division between words and things akin to Bacon’s distinction. Emphasizing the point, Rousseau offers a hyperbolic condemnation of the written word—“I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know” (184)—that works as a corollary to his belief that reading is a mere secondhand sort of experience: “No book other than the world, no instruction other than the facts” (168). In American Societies Rodríguez traces the progression from direct experience to the creation of abstract principles, constructing a process in which “sentiments are moderated as Ideas are rectified: and since Ideas come from Things” (los Sentimientos se moderan rectificando las Ideas: i como las Ideas vienen de las Cosas): dealing with things is the first part of Education & dealing with those who have them is the second According to this principle, take it as a maxim, in passing that a child learns more, in a short while, working with a little stick, than in entire days, conversing with a Teacher who speaks of abstractions superior to his or her experience. tratar con las cosas es la primera parte de la Educación i tratar con quien las tiene es la segunda Tómese, de paso, por máxima, segun este principio, que mas aprende un niño, en un rato, labrando un Palito, que en dias enteros, conversando con un Maestro que le habla de abstracciones superiores a su experiencia. (1:356)


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Rodríguez, who elsewhere criticizes the cost-cutting impulse behind Lancaster’s popular peer-education movement, makes a joke of efficiency by arguing that an experiential focus is not only more in line with how human thought approaches the universe, but also more efficient, given that the child learns more information from minutes of experimental activity than from days of traditional lecture. This passage strikes Lasheras as proof of the Lockean nature of Rodríguez’s thinking. Tracing the progression of “thing-sensation-idea-word” (cosa-sensación-idea-palabra) (282) to Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1671–1690), Lasheras concludes that Rodríguez has rendered an educational principle of the Scottish thinker’s distrust of the relationship between things, words, and abstract ideas, a principle that Lasheras distills into a single sentence: “No one can really learn from another from words alone if experience does not mediate” (Nadie puede aprender realmente de otro por simples palabras si no media la experiencia) (283). The analogous reach of the words/things division does not confine itself to the thought process of a single idealized student, either. Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama’s masterpiece, The Lettered City, constructs a vision of colonial Spanish America ruled by separate orders, a “material” one “inescapably subject to the flux of construction and destruction,” and a “symbolic” one “subject only to the rules governing the order of signs, which enjoy a stability impervious to the actions of the physical world” (8). J. H. Elliott has argued that this bifurcation of the colonial mindset molded its government as well, when incompatibilities between “the certainties of Madrid” and “the ambiguities” of America led to continual compromises in which colonial authorities chose “to observe but not obey” the legal decisions traveling by ship from a metropolis clearly out of touch with the material circumstances of the Western Hemisphere (“Spain” 75).7 For reformers of Rodríguez’s generation the rhetorical focus of the educational system inherited from the colonial government serves as a reminder, as its focus on the skills necessary to navigate the legal phrases emanating from Madrid strikes them as particularly ill suited to the concrete economic challenges facing the newly liberated republics. For all the reticence with which Rousseau views the use of books in education—indeed the book itself becomes a symbol for all the untested traditions that Emile must be taught not to accept at face value—the attention and importance he gives to the act of reading is undeniable. Janie Vanpée points out that Rousseau’s educational blueprint pays a great deal of attention to what and how Emile will read, and suggests that it would

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not be an exaggeration to call Emile a book about (and infused by) the act of reading: “it could be argued that reading, defined broadly as the deciphering of signs, subtends all of his education and functions as a master metaphor at every stage of his cognitive development” (“Rousseau’s” 164). If reading seems to fall within the bailiwick of the airy and theoretical as opposed to the grounded and empirical, “reading, defined broadly,” is the process necessary for interpreting both books and experiments. Vanpée’s argument, which interprets Emile “as a performative discourse enacting the very process it describes” (157), takes as its point of departure the inherent didacticism of a text that continually addresses the reader in the second person and that demands an allegorical reading rather than a literal one. The reader, Vanpée suggests, “must read Emile’s story not as a model to apply referentially to the practical world, but as an allegory of his own evolving understanding” (173–74). The allegorical applications of the act of reading only multiply in the political context of independence. Thomas Paine’s allegory of the growing child, for example, is Emile in reverse. The infant whose “first and favorite amusement [.â•¯.â•¯.] even before it begins to play, is that of imitating the works of man,” fashioning small mechanical devices of his own design, becomes something less than a natural scientist only when exposed to schools and their books: “It afterwards goes to school, where its genius is killed by the barren study of a dead language, and the philosopher is lost in the linguist” (Age 56). Paine’s obvious swipe at Latin and Greek is a commonplace among eighteenth-century thinkers, and one that will be explored in more detail in a later chapter, but the distinction between “philosopher” and “linguist” does not depend upon the language in question being a dead one. Philosophers, by Paine’s description, study the world, and linguists study the words that are used to describe it. In the context of a newly independent North America the political connotation is clear— Europe is the source of books and America of the nature those books at best describe. Early in his 1842 text “Enlightenment and Social Virtues,” Rodríguez evaluates Rousseau’s individualistic approach to education as a hedge against the possible social consequences of diffusing knowledge more widely: “Rousseau disapproved of general instruction, because he feared its effects: and he was not completely wrong:—To Instruct is not To Educate (it has been said): knowledge is a weapon, that in general is used against society” (Rousseau desaprobaba la instruccion jeneral, porque temia sus efectos: no le faltaba razon:—Instruir no es Educar (se ha dicho): los cono-


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cimientos son armas, de que, por lo regular, se sirve, contra la sociedad) (2:105). Nicola Miller has noted that Rodríguez responded differently to this risk: “his solution was not to restrict education (as Rousseau suggested) but, rather, to ensure that all were taught not only the basics but also how to be good citizens of the republic” (“â•ƒ‘ Immoral’â•ƒ” 14). Where both agreed was on education’s power to enact fundamental social changes. Rodríguez called primary schools “the foundation! of Knowledge” (el fundamento! del Saber) (2:13) and “the lever! [.â•¯.â•¯.] with which the peoples will have to be lifted to the Level of civilization! the Century demands” (la palanca! [.â•¯.â•¯.] con que han de levantar los pueblos al Grado de civilizacion! que pide el Siglo) (2:13), and Rousseau, in his Confessions, would consider government an educational engine. Noting that “the historical study of morals” had led him to conclude that “no people would be other than the nature of its government made it,” Rousseau began to ask the sort of questions of government that one might ask of an educational system: “What kind of government is best adapted to produce the most virtuous, the most enlightened, the wisest, and, in short, the best people, taking the word ‘best’ in its widest signification?” (417–18). Rousseau’s musings on the educational function of government suggest broader readings of Emile. If, as Carlos Jorge has argued ( Jorge, Educación 111; see also Trousson 252–53), the bourgeois individualism of Emile’s education renders it a poor model for Simón Rodríguez, Rousseau’s own oblique comments on the topic open the door for a more collectivist reading. Bernadette Baker, for example, points out that Rousseau’s description of the text “as being about the regeneration of society” (Baker 5–6) rendered Emile a particularly portable resource for the educational reformers who came a generation later. Written before debate over public education had begun to gel as an expression of the will of the state, Emile becomes, in Baker’s reading, the perfect text to serve as a retroactive support for nineteenth-century educational projects: “The shifting ‘homage’ paid to Emile has much to do with new visions of the state and the effort to secure particular kinds of Utopias through the professionalization of education” (16). The obsession with professionalizing education is, in Spanish America, by no means a strictly postindependence project. In a movement that combined, as Nicola Miller has noted, a “requirement for more skilled labour to improve economic prospects” with “the question of how to create citizens for the new republics,” Spanish American thinkers of Rodríguez’s generation worked within an already richly developed tradition of educational reform (“â•ƒ‘Immoral’â•ƒ” 12).

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Rodríguez’s 1794 report to the Caracas municipal government attacked the commonly accepted division between artisans and the educated letrados, insisting that a high degree of literacy would need to become universal as print became the standard method for disseminating scientific and agricultural discoveries; otherwise “they [the artisans] will always be in the dark in the midst of the lights that should illuminate them” (estarán siempre en tinieblas en medio de las luces que debían alumbrarlos) (1:200). Others (such as Miguel José Sanz, mentioned earlier) attacked the flip side of this division by suggesting that the educated elite’s obsession with the literary and rhetorical at the expense of the practical would have severe economic consequences. The Colombian naturalist Francisco José de Caldas (1768–1816), whose support for independence would cost him his life, took on the widespread ignorance of American geography in an 1808 essay published serially in El Seminario. Noting that the task of creating a comprehensive map of the Viceroyalty of Santa Fe de Bogotá (whose territory corresponded roughly to that of present-day Colombia) remained incomplete, Caldas suggested that more progress might be made “if instead of teaching our young people so much foolishness; if while we heat up their imaginations with the divisibility of material, we gave them some notice of the elements of astronomy and geography” (si en lugar de enseñar a nuestros jóvenes tantas bagatelas; si mientras se les acalora la imaginación con la divisibilidad de la materia, se les diese noticia de los elementos de astronomía y de geografía). The “foolishness” to which Caldas refers is his summing up of the speculative and theological dimension of the educational models still in vogue. He finally settles on frankly Baconian terminology, asking “if it is more advantageous for religion and the State to spend many weeks sustaining airy systems [.â•¯.â•¯.] than to dedicate this time to knowing our globe and the country we inhabit” (si es más venajosa al Estado y a la religión gastar muchas semanas en sostener sistemas aéreos [.â•¯.â•¯.] que dedicar este tiempo a conocer nuestro globo y el país que habitamos). Caldas’s rhetorical game of switching between the language of empirical science and that of education reaches its peak when he speaks of the religious orders charged with evangelizing the indigenous populations of the Spanish Empire. If properly instructed, he concludes, “these apostolic men could bring the barbarous nations the light of the useful sciences along with that of the Gospel” (estos hombres apostólicos llevarían a las naciones bárbaras, con la luz del Evangelio, la de las ciencias útiles) (341).8 Rodríguez, who had spent his European exile observing both the edu-


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cational techniques then in vogue and the style and habits of local artisans, transformed these into a set of specific instructions in his essay titled Friendly Advice Given to the School at Latacunga (Consejos de Amigo dados al Colejio de Latacunga), which suggested how the new school in a town just south of Quito might adjust its curriculum to the economic and political needs of its students. Peppering the advice with his usual good humor, Rodríguez notes that his plan for having specialists teach masonry, carpentry, and metalwork is particularly well suited to the earthquakeprone Andes: “In a country of Earthquakes it is necessary to build with .â•¯.â•¯. / much art!” (En pais de Temblores, es menester construir con .â•¯.â•¯. / mucho arte!) (2:49) Following the rhetorical track laid by Caldas, Rodríguez presents a hypothetical practical school as the antidote to those he imagines his readers to be familiar with. Where Caldas sees a link between scientific investigation and useful arts, Rodríguez highlights the economic possibilities of the natural world of America: “If in School they taught Exact and Observation-based Sciences / the Young would learn to appreciate what they tread, and many career fields / would be opened” (Si, en el Colejio se enseñaran Ciencias Exactas i de Observacion, / los Jóvenes aprenderían a apreciar lo que pisan, i se abririan / muchas carreras). Rodríguez warns, however, that “with Latin, Law, and Â�TheÂ�ology, they will not earn enough to Subsist on, or / they will Subsist amid Privation and Want” (Con Latin, Leyes i Teolojía, no ganarán de que Subsistir, o / Subsistirán entre Privaciones i Escaseces) (2:44). In an Andean economy that still practiced the obsession with mining inherited from the colonial government, Rodríguez suggests a new mineralogy that will focus on industrial products—“iron, lead, tin, copper, zinc, platinum, manganese, / and others” (hierro, plomo, estaño, cobre, zinc, platina, manganesa / i otros) (2:44)—rather than on the literal materials for making coin. While mining gold and silver might seem the epitome of hard or useful science, Rodríguez finds a mystical dimension to it. Along with the moral corruption that comes with the search for easy wealth—“silver and gold flatter one’s avarice, and in the end make the miner poor” (la plata i el oro halagan la avaricia, i al cabo empobrecen al minero) (2:44)—the obsession with mining feeds decidedly unscientific assumptions about metallurgy. Even a hungry dog, Rodríguez points out, eventually figures out that the meal he has just swallowed is indeed gone despite the lingering smell, “but the Miner believes that silver reproduces itself, / and calls the caves nurseries” (pero el Minero cree que la plata se reproduce, / i llama las cuevas criaderos) (2:44–45;

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see Bentancor for more on metallurgy and reproduction). An educational focus on agriculture and the more prosaic metals has social advantages as well, Rodríguez argues, since instruction in natural resources will create an army of graduates more interested in the development of their largely rural countries than in the social whirlwinds of capital cities—“they will prefer life in the Country to that of the Population Centers, because there they would / amuse themselves usefully” (preferirian la vida del Campo a la de los Poblados, porque se / distraerian con utilidad) (2:44).9 If Rousseau presents Emile’s story as a corrective for the moral decadence of a society incapable of passing self-sufficiency and morality along to its young, Rodríguez holds out for the moral redemption that will logically follow an education tailored to the dictates of empirical science.10

Rodríguez, Emerson, and a Nation of Readers The North American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) made the political connection to reading even more explicit in “An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837” and commonly titled “The American Scholar.” There are a number of reasons for bringing the North American into dialogue with Simón Rodríguez. As literal contemporaries, both inhabited newly independent nations and made a habit of addressing themselves to a readership whose implied bond was that process of independence—the United States for Emerson, and a more nebulous “Spanish America” for Rodríguez. Despite the already considerable differences in the historical circumstances of their respective nations—the United States was well on its way to becoming a prosperous world power, while most of Spanish America was still enduring civil disturbances that threatened to overturn the political gains of the Wars of Independence—both take a similar critical tack, arguing that success on the battlefield against the armies of the metropolis has translated into something less than full-fledged independence. As champions of the identification between America and the natural world, each criticizes the criollo habit of accepting European written authority. Where Rousseau’s Emile had already cast epistemological doubt on the reverence accorded the written word, Rodríguez and Emerson extended the metaphor to their own political situations. Infused with Lockean skepticism about the reliability of the connection between words and their definitions, Emerson and Rodríguez agitate for a more self-conscious kind of reading in which


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the written word is seen less as a transmission to be received than as half a dialogue awaiting completion. Both approach reading with the reticence toward language expressed by Thomas Paine in Age of Reason: “Learning does not consist, as the schools now make it consist, in the knowledge of languages, but in the knowledge of things to which language gives names” (46).11 As a citizen of the United States, Emerson participated in a rhetorical tradition that juxtaposed intellectual dependence upon and respect for English models with nationalistic pride in American originality. Jefferson, for example, had claimed (despite considerable historical and commonsense evidence to the contrary) that North America’s revolution could be distinguished by the lack of useful precedents: “We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts” (Complete 294). Elliott’s historical analysis of the North American and Spanish American revolutions makes precisely the opposite argument, stressing the degree to which thinkers like Paine drew on Lockean notions of government and on English common law (Empires 346). What is most interesting about Jefferson’s claim is the way it at once questions the authority of traditional political precedents—those “musty records” and “royal parchments”—in favor of a newer, more natural form of reading in which nature and the huÂ�man heart become stand-ins for the text. Here, reading nature and the Â�human heart becomes the properly republican intellectual task in a political example of the use of reading as a “master metaphor” that Vanpée notes in Rousseau. Calling the occasion of his address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society “the re-commencement of our literary year” (it was the beginning of the academic year), Emerson begins with a literal reference to literature as the burgeoning field he hopes will become a stage for U.S. achievement: “Perhaps the time is already come [.â•¯.â•¯.] when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill” (“American” 1021). If common knowledge credits the United States with material success—a mastery of things rather than of words—Emerson hopes that success will become rhetorical, too. Having made the scholar, or “Man Thinking” (1022), the subject of his address, Emerson goes on to break his analysis into a loose structure of three influences: nature, the past, and the world. Nature, by Emerson’s analysis, has become less a

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separate body of material to be studied than a photographic negative of the scholar’s inner life—“the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part.” Pursuing, like Humboldt, a sense of harmony behind the multiple perceptions commonly classed as “nature,” Emerson declares that a proper understanding of the imagination’s relationship to the natural world unites rather than divides, as “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim” (1023). Turning to the past, Emerson begins with what he calls the “noble” “theory of books.” In theory, he argues, the book takes momentary utterances from the scholar of a prior age and renders them transcendent: “It came to him—business; it went from him—poetry. It was—dead fact; now, it is quick thought” (1023). Something, however, is lost in this transaction, Emerson argues, or, to put it another way, something of the original utterance’s fleeting nature resists being transformed into “truth.” The result is that no book may pass seamlessly into another time period: “Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older generation will not fit this” (1023–24). Furthermore, Emerson points out, the human instinct to defer to authority means that this shaky foundation will inevitably be treated as an organic, indivisible whole: “Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles.” Bad reading, or unproblematized reading, leads to a false kind of writing—a writing based on other books. This leads Emerson to his famous remark on the irony of authority and creativity that leads “meek young men” to revere the old thinkers they encounter in libraries, “forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books” (1024). Now the original “theory of books” is reversed. Instead of rendering liquid and portable the utterances that would otherwise be stuck within their own historical circumstances, the book functions as anchor, giving the reader recorded utterances that serve as a substitute for new ones. “The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind,” Emerson concludes, “stop with some past utterance of genius.” Defining inspiration as the “right use” of books, Emerson declares, in hyperbole that smacks of Rousseau: “I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system” (1024). This astronomy-based metaphor is particularly apt given Emerson’s definition of right reading as an activity that demands that the reader pos-


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sess a certain creative gravity in his or her own person: “Man Thinking,” he declares, “must not be subdued by his instruments.” Comparing books to “boiled grass and the broth of shoes”—unappetizing food to be sure but not impossible sources of subsistence, given the adaptability of the human body—Emerson concedes that “the human mind can be fed by any knowledge” and that “great and heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the printed page,” before concluding “that it needs a strong head to bear that diet.” Lest the message go missing beneath his unorthodox metaphor, Emerson offers a straightforward version, too, along with a supporting aphorism: “One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, ‘He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies’â•ƒ” (1025). Emerson’s “proverb,” a reprise of a statement on travel writers attributed to Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, implies that mere observation is not enough to produce the magic of learning—the “print” that is the observed world functions only through the “seal” of the imagination. Emerson gives an interesting twist to Johnson’s words. The conversation recounted between Boswell and his subject centers on a travel book. Boswell mentions that “a great part of what was in his [ Johnson’s] ‘Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,’ had been in his mind before he left London.” Johnson readily assents, remarking that “books of travels will be good in proportion to what a man has previously in his mind,” the man in question being the author. In explanation of the Spanish proverb, Johnson offers a paraphrase: “a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.” Boswell, never one to let a subtle comment go unexamined, puts the paraphrase more economically—“The proverb, I suppose, Sir, means, he must carry a large stock with him to trade with” (2:216)—an interpretation Johnson confirms without further comment. Ever willing to recognize artifice in writing, Johnson stresses that the trip itself is a relatively small event, that the success of the book depends upon the writer’s powers of observation and ability to blend the experiences gained during the trip with the knowledge that preceded it. Raw experience would thus be of little literary use. In Emerson’s construction the writer turns into a reader, and reading a book stands in for actually taking a trip and writing about it. Just as Rousseau’s Emile holds forth against the esteem bestowed on the act of reading only to construct a narrative that is largely about reading, so Emerson turns Johnson’s synthesis of experience and literature into an aphorism that, however much it qualifies the importance of the text itself, makes reading its central metaphor.12

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Emerson’s focus on the book clearly invokes metaphorical implications of its own. In a nod to Enlightenment vocabulary, it recalls the notion of the universe as a text to be read by scientific investigators, a less forbidding variation on Bacon’s labyrinth and a construction employed by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), among others. In Galileo’s formulation, “philosophy is written in this grand book, the Universe, which stands continually open to our gaze” and is written not in words, but “in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it” (237–38). Reading, like travel, becomes synonymous with exploring the world, and the innate capacity of the observer determines the results. Lurking behind these rhetorical parallels is a concept that Vanpée calls “cognitive parity” (“Reading” 45). Vanpée’s argument begins with the supposition that Rousseau’s suspicion of reading seeks to problematize “a fundamental premise of the Enlightenment’s pedagogical identity,” namely the concept of “a reader modeled on an ideal ‘everyman’ and who would use the Encyclopédie as a means to expand or deepen his knowledge about the world” (41). While in Vanpée’s vision Rousseau does not wish to discard or even deemphasize the pedagogical importance of reading, he does suggest a pedagogical equilibrium that must be maintained between the child’s cognitive understanding and his or her ability to pronounce and reproduce rhetoric: “the child’s technical proficiency should not mislead the pedagogue into assuming that the child has also achieved cognitive parity” (45). Since the child’s ability to read, in the most literal sense of the word, will likely surpass his or her ability to understand the objects and actions described in a text, the teacher must control what the student reads and experiences with the care of an anesthesiologist, in “mastering this delicate balance between the pupil’s technical aptitude and his cognitive capacity, in never allowing one to dominate the other, and in monitoring his reading so as to program his cognitive response” (46). The teacher’s job is to make sure that the student possesses the cognitive gravitas to “carry out the wealth of the Indies” before allowing him or her to embark on the trip. Emerson’s concept of “creative reading” (“American” 1024) invokes a particularly open approach to textual interpretation. T. S. McMillin suggests that “since the infinitive [to inspire] is not followed by anything specific, it could be that books are to be understood as breathing life into our relationships with nature; and/or that reading should prompt us to relate to books and to nature in a different way” (7). If the problem with reading is its potential to displace the reader’s center of gravity, to over-


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whelm the stock of knowledge the reader brings to exchange with the book, McMillin suggests, an Emersonian definition of reading nonetheless demands risk on the part of the reader. If a scholar seeks “the opening up of meaning and not the pinning down of truth,” then “the scholar’s labor must always entail the unsettling of literature and especially the scholar’s own Â�unsettling” (124). Just as Emerson expects the scholar not to esteem books so much that they overwhelm the sense of self, he imagines his ideal scholar developing a strong enough sense of selfhood to weather the openended approach that creative reading demands. Where Rousseau is interested in the steps that must be taken to keep books from overwhelming his young scholar, Emerson is here addressing the phase of the scholar’s development that enables a fearless engagement with texts. Emerson’s third influence, which we might call engagement with the world, fashions the pedagogical metaphor into a spiritual sensibility. The act of reading serves as a metric here, too, as language becomes the measure of experience. Language itself depends on experience—“Instantly, we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not” (“American” 1026)—and even the scholar’s stock of words depends on real-world sources: “If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. [.â•¯.â•¯.] Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the workyard made” (1026). As “the world’s eye” and “the world’s heart” (1028), the scholar exercises a Rousseauian restraint, not attempting to stockpile and process a number of observations quickly, but waiting patiently until one observation might be understood completely, “happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly.” Proclaiming that “the world is his who can see through its pretension” (1029), Emerson couches the scholar’s skepticism as faith in the patient processing of observation—his scholar is audacious enough not to feel hurried into producing immediate answers but rather to trust both the pace and the results of a deliberate and solitary practice of reading the world. The political and, specifically, democratic implications of this notion of selfhood are, as Burkholder has pointed out, problematic: “democracy of a curiously Emersonian sort that does not empower the mass but the individual” (49). Indeed, Emerson defines U.S. democracy, paradoxically, as one in which citizens will not “be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, in the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong” and thus suffer the indignity of having “our opinion predicted geographically, as the north or the south.” He proposes instead that a radical vision of selfhood at the individual level should become the defining feature of the United States:

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“A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men” (1033). This “nation of men” is, in effect, a nation of readers whose particular “inspiration” is the individual gravity necessary to confront the texts that Emerson sees everywhere—experience, nature, and books. For Rodríguez, too, the concept of cognitive parity remains a central point for literacy and literacy education. In the 1842 edition of American Societies, he notes that governmental zeal to modernize has led to a set of decreed standards: “The Congresses have declared that by such and such a year, he who does not know how to read and write will not be a citizen” (Los Congresos han declarado que para el año de tantos, no será ciudadano el que no sepa leer i escribir) (1:401), and “that by such and such a year, he who cannot present a certificate of having been examined and approved in Logic, in language and in mathematics up to a certain level, will not be able to obtain public employment” (para el año de tantos, no obtendrá empleo público, el que no presente certificado de haber sido examinado i aprobado en Lójica, en su idioma i en matemáticas hasta tal grado). This emphasis on skills, if well intentioned, strikes Rodríguez as naïve, dependent on the assumption “that he who knows how to read looks for books, and that he who knows how to write takes note of what interests him” (que el que sabe leer busca libros, i que el que sabe escribir nota lo que le interesa) (1:402). Against this background of quantifiable modernization, Rodríguez raises a fundamental question—“What will he read who has no ideas?” (¿Qué leerá el que no tiene ideas?)—and, as is his narrative wont, provides his own answer: Except for some popular novels, that deal with love affairs, caverns and frights, there is no reading that can begin without an idea of the subject. To believe the contrary is to think like the poor farmer, who bought glasses to know how to read, because he had seen people put on glasses for reading. (Excepto unos pocos Romances, que tratan de amores, cavernas i espantos, no hai lectura que se emprenda, sin ideas de la materia. Creer lo contrario, es pensar como aquel pobre campesino, que compraba anteojos para saber leer, porque veia ponerse anteojos para leer.) (1:402)

Rodríguez here returns to Rousseau’s treatment of mimesis and the risk that the child’s imitation of language could grow out of proportion to his or


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her understanding of its meaning. In his metaphor, reading glasses stand in for the act of reading, equating the technical ability to recognize words on the page with a mechanical device necessary but insufficient to produce full comprehension.13 From a political perspective, the legislative obsession with fostering discrete skills strikes Rodríguez as part of a pattern of simplifying and underestimating the difficulty of the pedagogical task. This pattern bridges independence flawlessly, as Rodríguez’s 1794 critique of the colonial primary school system opens with three sections, titled respectively: “It [education; primary schools] Does Not Have the Esteem It Deserves” (No tiene la estimación que merece); “Few Understand Its Utility” (Pocos conocen su utilidad) (1:199); and “Everyone Considers Himself Capable of Imparting It” (Todos se consideran capaces de desempeñarla) (1:202). Where Emerson complicates the U.S. notion of itself as successfully (because politically and economically) independent of Europe, Rodríguez wishes to complicate the well-intentioned desire of the new Spanish American republics to educate themselves into the developed world. In Friendly Advice Given to the School at Latacunga, Rodríguez repeats his familiar criticism that schools are manufacturing degrees rather than knowledge. Noting that his travels in Europe have led him to conclude that “a bit less badly than here, they do the same in the old world” (un poco menos mal que acá, se hace lo mismo en el viejo mundo), Rodríguez paints a picture of intellectual lethargy in which the appearance of learning is taken for the genuine article. After leaving school, “some take up learning what they were told they knew: and others continue believing that they know, because their Teachers assured them that they wrote and did arithmetic well, and above all, that they read perfectly!” (unos se ponen a aprender lo que les dijeron que sabían: i otros se quedan creyendo que saben, porque sus Maestros les aseguráron que escribían y contaban bien, i, sobre todo, qe. leian perfectamente!). The results, Rodríguez argues, are less than the teachers promised. Despite their verbal wit—“the Lettered are Prosodists in Conversation” (Los Literatos son Prosodistas, en la Conversacion)—the act of reading aloud reveals just how stultifying their educations remain: “they remember the School singsong, and put everyone who hears them to sleep” (se acuerdan del tonillo de la Escuela, i adormecen al que los oye) (2:28). This entirely anecdotal and unscientific survey of the deficiency of Spanish America’s lettered elite, the class expected to bring on the sort of economic and political independence already established in the United

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States, sets up a verbal and visual manifesto on the subject of reading. Arguing that reading should be the last part of language study rather than the first—that a stock of trading ideas must be built up before the voyage to the intellectual Indies—Rodríguez unleashes his redefinition of the term: reading is the last part of the Job, In the Teaching of every language, which is to say, one does not disfigure Thoughts, reading, what one has worked to learn to read with meaning. To heap scorn on someone, for his or her ignorance, people say .â•¯.â•¯. “What sort of Person could he be .â•¯.â•¯. who cannot even read?” they would not say it, if they had been advised that .â•¯.â•¯. to read is to resuscitate ideas, sepulchred on paper: Every Word is an epitaph and that, in order to perform this sort of miracle it is necessary to know the spirits of the deceased, or to have equivalent spirits stand in for them. (leer, es la última parte! del Trabajo, en la Enseñanza de todo idioma, diga, el que no desfigura los Pensamientos, leyendo, lo que ha trabajado para aprender a leer con sentido. Para despreciar a alguno, por su Ignorancia, dicen .â•¯.â•¯. “¿Qué tal Sujeto será, cuando .â•¯.â•¯. ni leer sabe?” no lo dirian, si advirtieran que .â•¯.â•¯. leer, es resucitar ideas, sepultadas en el papel: Cada Palabra es un epitafio i que, para hacer esa especie de milagro! es menester conocer los espíritus de las difuntas, o tener espíritus equivalentes qué subrogarles.) (2:29)

Common wisdom, in Rodríguez’s experience, trivializes reading as the baseline for education, the single skill that one with a degree or a claim on elite status must necessarily have long since mastered. Taking to its logi-


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cal extreme the Rousseauian injunction not to let language outstrip ideas, Rodríguez, by comparing it to the mystical act of reviving the dead, distinguishes his elevated vision of reading from that practiced by the propagators of the “singsong” that reproduces the words without managing to bring them alive. As the reflection of the common wisdom, education has been structured to allow graduates to avoid the charge of “cannot even read,” rather than to pose to students the intellectual challenge of developing those “equivalent spirits” necessary for understanding, rather than reciting, words seen in books. McMillin’s puzzlement at Emerson’s ambiguous articulation of reading’s real purpose—to inspire—applies here as well (7), since Rodríguez does not explicitly say just what those “equivalent spirits” might be. Like Emerson’s, his emphasis on the agency of the reader works to foster independence of thought analogous to political independence. Reading as a metaphor for every form of interpretation works for Rodríguez as a means of criticizing an educational status quo that tended to reproduce rather than challenge the social hierarchies inherited from the colonial government. If right reading is defined as an intellectual exchange in which the student’s own ideas stand in for those on the page—an equivalent of Johnson’s and Emerson’s trade metaphor—then wrong reading is blind repetition that enforces in the classroom the monarchical habits the independence movement ostensibly opposed. Ridiculing the tendency of schoolmasters to substitute memorization of syllogisms for formal instruction in logic, Rodríguez likens the tactic to a kind of force-feeding: “Stuffed with Syllogisms, the Youth leave their Schools, / to vomit Fallacies, in Literary Salons” (Empachados de Silojismos, salen los Jóvenes de los Colejios, a vomitar Paralojismos, por las Tertulias) (2:26). The bad habit of repeating without understanding has concrete political consequences, Rodríguez argues: “to blindly obey, is the governing principle. / That is why there are so many Slaves—and why the first one who wants to be / is Master” (obedecer ciegamente, es el principio que gobierna. / Por eso hay tantos Esclavos—i por eso es Amo el primero que / quiere serlo) (2:27). If bad reading is thoughtless and passive, then bad readers are bad citizens, too. The moral decadence Emerson sees lurking in the U.S. obsession with business—“Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant” (“American” 1033)—is for Rodríguez even more worrisome because it threatens the very political foundations of the nascent Spanish American republics. Bad readers, he concludes, too easily become the tools of political usurpers.

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Toward a Revolutionary School By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, with a Bourbon monarchy determined to bring enlightened reform to the colonies, the colonial climate had become one in which progressive impulses emanated from Madrid only to encounter reactionary resistance in the Americas.14 In his 1793 Informe sobre la Ley Agraria, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos argued for public education as a doubly positive investment that promoted both the state’s morality and its economic progress: “If the nation did not owe this help to all of its members as the most marked act of protection and concern, it would owe it to itself as the means most likely to increase its power and glory” (Cuando la nación no debiese este auxilio a todos sus miembros como el acto más señalado de su protección y desvelo, se lo debería a sí mismo como el medio más posible de aumentar su poder y su gloria) (401). At the same time, education played a utopian role in Jovellanos’s vision of progress, as the increased knowledge of the natural world would increase the spiritual (as well as the economic) promise of the rural population: “Blessed be the parishes if, destined to live in the solitude of the countryside, they find in the cultivation of the useful sciences that attraction that makes life so sweet in the midst of the grand spectacle of nature” (¡Dichosos también los párrocos si, destinados a vivir en la soledad de los campos, hallaren en el cultivo de las ciencias útiles aquel atractivo que hace tan dulce la vida en medio del gran espectáculo de la naturaleza) (404). In this case the “grand spectacle of nature” also leads to greater virtue and communion with the divine (404). While the religious orthodoxy of Jovellanos’s spiritualism contrasts with Emerson’s thought, both envision a national spiritual renewal based on a mystical connection between the practical task of exploiting nature more efficiently and the impression that this same nature is expected to have on the mind of the person who learns about it. For Rodríguez the decades immediately following independence produced a set of circumstances even more perilous than the Panic of 1837 that confronted Emerson’s listeners. The revolutionary struggle itself had Â�grappled with what Luis Castro Leiva calls “the pendulum between poignancy and persuasion” (el péndulo entre comoción y persuasión), settling on an uneasy opposition between freedom as unhindered desire and freedom as a political state possible only within a legal regimen capable of molding that desire, a balance that depended on “an ought to be, metaphysically based in the reason for being of nature” (un deber ser, metafísicamente fundado en la razón de ser de la naturaleza). This “ought to be,” Castro


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Leiva argues, “does not mean the negation of human desire, but rather the very possibility of its perfection” (no significa la negación del querer humano sino la posibilidad misma de su perfección) (47). Citing Bolívar’s Cartagena Manifesto (1813), Castro Leiva presents a shift in which the realities of combat against the Spanish call for a more robust notion of virtue, based not on reason alone but “more and more on the force of the will” (cada vez más de la fuerza de la voluntad) (48). For Rodríguez, education remains the primary tool for spreading this sense of revolutionary virtue to the government itself. Referring to youths as “building blocks” (piedras) for the “Social Building” (Edificio Social), he counsels against listening to those who would cite the slowness of this generational change— “It’s long! .â•¯.â•¯. they will say. Never seeing it completed is longer still” (Es largo! .â•¯.â•¯. dirán. mas largo es no verlo nunca en pié)—and promises that the revolutionary changes could be little more than a decade away: “In ten years .â•¯.â•¯. there would be a new generation / ready to take on whatever was left over” (Al cabo de 10 años .â•¯.â•¯. habria una nueva jeneracion, / que haria frente a lo que quedase) (2:32). Educating the new generation would thus serve as a bloodless path to enforcing a sense of revolutionary virtue in which reason rather than custom would rule. There was of course nothing new about Rodríguez’s vision of revolution through primary-school reform. In book 7 of the Republic, Plato endorses a similar scheme and defines education in terms that prefigure Rousseau, an act of steering rather than the communication of specific content, not “the craft of putting right into the soul” but properly directing the “right” that is already there: “Education takes for granted that right is there but that it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it properly” (190). This act of steering takes on a collective dimension, as Plato imagines the possible effect of an educated generation of revolutionary shock troops:15 They’ll send everyone in the city who is over ten years old into the country. They’ll take possession of the children, who are now free from the ethos of their parents, and bring them up in their own customs and laws, which are the ones we’ve described. This is the quickest and easiest way for the city and constitution we’ve discussed to be established, become happy, and bring most benefit to the people among whom it’s established. (212)

With the rules and principles by which the ideal city will be governed already hammered out in discussion, education takes the stage as the means

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of interrupting the natural pattern by which parents pass on their own customs and prejudices to their children. Just as Rousseau provides his Emile with an education that appears natural by the supreme artifice of planning and governing his encounters with nature, this plan imagines the creation of an artificial ethos that would not otherwise take shape. Thus the ethos of the parents’ generation will be fenced off and left to wither and die away. The natural “steering” of the “right” that is already in the children’s souls will be the operative pedagogical principle, but the final goal is anything but natural or organic. In the Spanish American/North American context, this act of interruption is geographical and political as well as pedagogical, with the Atlantic standing in as a concrete marker of the distance separating the colonies from their parent countries. Emerson’s cry for intellectual freedom from European influence—“Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close”—finds an echo in Rodríguez’s concern that the newly independent Spanish American republics avoid the fate of imitating older political models instead of inventing new ones: “playing the role of an old woman, in its infancy” (hacer el papel de vieja, en su infancia) (2:51). If the political circumstances of independence provide the natural context for the sort of interruption necessary to create Plato’s republic, the condition of being a new nation also produces the anxiety that prompts easy deference to Old World authority.16 Against the framework of intellectual dependency clearly inherited from the colonial government, the Americanist rhetoric of Rodríguez and his contemporaries turns to other Rousseauian tactics—improvisation and derivation—to stress the need for building intellectual foundations within the newly independent nations despite (and in fact because of ) the easy availability of European models. Perhaps no Spanish American thinker proposed this vision in clearer terms than did Andrés Bello. Where Rodríguez’s brush with the political establishment ended with his resignation from the Bolivian government, Bello, offered a post in Chile, spent the rest of his life writing from that secure position, a professor and the national intellectual of the Chilean state. His “Discurso pronunciado en la instalación de la Universidad de Chile” (1843) employed an academic occasion not unlike that of “The American Scholar” to set forth the expectations for the Chilean university and the scholars it would produce (see Huerta; Briggs, “Naturaleza”) (124–25). Bello’s career as a public intellectual stretched as far back as the years before his journey from Caracas to


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London in 1810. Pedro Grases has identified him as the unnamed editor/ author of Caracas’s first newspaper, the at-first-monarchist La Gaceta de Caracas (Algunos temas 34). In London, Bello developed, like Rodríguez and Miranda, a cosmopolitan sense of Americanism perhaps possible only from an exile’s distance, a “firmly held and penetrating” (convencido y peneÂ�trante) Americanism, in Cesia Hirshbein’s words, fueled by the combination of his encounter with British intellectuals, his acquaintance with other exiles, and a force Hirshbein calls “the nostalgia of the exile” (la nostalgia del desterrado). An insatiable reader of British political philosophy, Bello lived in a London where a swirling collection of influences conspired to awaken the “unrest behind an Americanism that in him would be committed, fervent, constant, and faithful” (esa inquietud de un americanismo que en él será, ciertamente, comprometido, ferviente, constante y fiel) (La eterna 116–17). If Bello’s temperament tended to be conciliatory rather than revolutionary—“he always looked to conciliation as the best path for the comprehension and solution of conflicts” (siempre buscó la conÂ�ciliación como la mejor vía para el entendimiento y solución de los conflictos) (107)—and if he “often spoke of the need to ‘transplant’ the sciences from Europe to Spanish America” (Roldán Vera 178)—his educational musings stressed an Emile-like insistence that the adoption of sciences developed elsewhere be a process rather than a simple act of transfer. Bello’s 1843 “Discurso” carefully blends an attention to the historical narrative of Western culture reminiscent of Bolívar’s “Juramento en el Monte Sacro” (which would not be published until 1850) with an insistence that the American continent stands ready to make an essential contribution to that narrative. Bello seconded Jovellanos’s belief in the diffusive nature of knowledge. Jovellanos had argued that the education of an elite would help everyone in Spain, given knowledge’s irrepressible tendency to spread from person to person even across the barriers of social class: “the fluid of knowledge spreads and propagates itself from one class to another” (el fluido de la sabiduría cunde y se propaga de una clase en otra) (396–97). Citing what he calls “this vast political movement [.â•¯.â•¯.] that propagates itself in every sense, continuously accelerated by letters and the press” (este vasto movimiento político [.â•¯.â•¯.] que se propaga en todos senticontinuamente por la prensa i por las letras), Bello speaks of Â� dos, acelerado the spread of knowledge as a series of “waves” (ondulaciones) that eventually “will cover the surface of the globe” (cubrirán la superficie del globo) (La eterna 112). Emphasizing higher education as the impetus of reform

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(in contrast to Rodríguez), Bello argues that “nowhere has it been possible to generalize the elemental instruction called for by the working classes, the great majority of the human species, but where sciences and letters have flourished” (en ninguna parte, ha podido generalizarse la instrucción elemental que reclaman las clases laboriosas, la gran mayoría del jénero humano, sino donde han florecido las ciencias y las letras) (117). Stressing this almost physical diffusion of knowledge, Bello defines the university as “an eminently expansive and propagating body” (un cuerpo emanentaÂ� mente expansivo y propagador) (116), quite literally the center from which, at least in Chile, those waves of class-defying knowledge will be emitted. With a “we” that refers sometimes to the nation of Chile, sometimes to “nuestra América,” Bello specifies the care that will be taken in the university’s approach to European scientific progress. On the one hand he refers to the United States and Europe as “our model in so many respects” (nuestro modelo bajo tantos respectos) (La eterna 116), but on the other he underlines the university’s Chilean identity: “if it borrows scientific deductions from Europe, it is to apply them to Chile” (si toma prestadas de la Europa las deducciones de la ciencia, es para aplicarlas a Chile) (118), since “all the pathways in which it proposes to direct the research of its members, the studies of its students, will converge on one center, the patria” (todas las sendas en que se propone dirijer las investigaciones de sus miembros, el estudio de sus alumnos, converjen a un centro: la patria) (116). Furthermore, Bello maintains that the process of developing those sciences is as essential as that of applying them to the Chilean case. Condemning “those who believe we should receive the synthetic results of European enlightenment, dispensing with the examination of its titles, dispensing with the analytical procedure which is the only way to acquire true knowledge” (aquéllos que creen que debemos recibir los resultados sintéticos de la ilustración europea, dispensándonos del examen de sus títulos, dispensándonos del proceder analítico, único medio de adquirir verdaderaderos conocimientos) (124–25), Bello is invoking a concept of intellectual property akin to that of Pestalozzi. In this sense, intellectual property, unlike currency or other commodities, may not be simply traded or transferred but must be developed, since the process of developing it is an indispensable component of ownership. Bello provides an analogy that links classical learning with nineteenth-century philosophy, noting that it would be as foolish to practice “an adherence to the moral and political conclusions of Herder, for example, without the study of ancient and modern history”


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(el Â�atenernos a las conclusiones morales i políticas de Herder, por ejemplo, sin el estudio de la historia antigua y moderna) as it would be “to adopt the theorems of Euclid without the prior intellectual work of demonstration” (el adoptar los teoremas de Euclídes sin el previo trabajo intelectual de la demostración) (124–25).17 The salient difference between Bello’s thought and Emerson’s is roughly the same as the one that separates the North American from Rodríguez— where Emerson’s formulations take for granted a certain degree of functional social cohesion, Bello and Rodríguez look to education as the means of creating such cohesion in the vacuum left by the Wars of Independence. Bello’s 1836 essay “Educación,” for example, links the practical differences between professions to a broader discussion of the political and philosophical needs of a republic. Bello begins by arguing that education is universally useful in shaping human destiny, that humankind’s “distinctive character” (carácter distintivo) is in fact “the susceptibility to progressive improvement” (la susceptibilidad de mejora progresiva) (La eterna 129). Republican life, he continues, presupposes a certain equality, “above all in the participation in public rights” (sobre todo en la participación de los derechos públicos), combined with “an inequality of condition, an inequality of necessities, an inequality of way of life” (una desigualdad de condición, una desigualdad de necesidades, una desigualdad de método de vida). Despite these necessary inequalities, Bello goes on to argue that the newly independent republic indeed exists in a more egalitarian age, an age in which “for us the times are over in which people denied the intelligence of the masses of the people, and the human race was divided between oppressors and the oppressed” (concluyeron entre nosotros los tiempos en que se negaba la intelijencia a la masa de los pueblos, i se dividia la raza human en opresores i oprimidos) (131). Stressing the economic importance of an educational system that focuses on useful trades rather than on the production of an army of lawyers and bureaucrats, Bello argues that education should have a moral and political dimension, too. Republican government, he concludes, asks more of its citizens than the old system did. When sovereignty lies with the people rather than with the crown, “it is very difficult or impossible to conduct oneself with success in this social position, if it is not known what we can demand and what society can demand of us” (mui difícil o imposible es conducirse con acierto en esta posición social, si se ignora lo que podemos exijir i lo que puede exijir de nosotros la sociedad) (138). As a

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remedy for this difficulty Bello suggests cursory constitutional study, “not with the depth necessary to acquire a full knowledge of constitutional law, but committing some of its articles to memory, in order to become current on the organization of the political body to which we belong” (no con la profundidad necesaria para adquirir un conocimiento pleno de derecho constitucional, sino recomendando solo a la memoria sus artículos, para ponerse al cabo de la organización del cuerpo político a que pertencemos) (138). Bello’s methods place inordinate faith in the memorization of these articles—faith of the sort that Eduardo Galeano ridicules when he speaks of “enlightened Â�criollos, generals or professors” (criollos ilustrados, generales o doctores) who believe their foundational documents to be “the infallible elixir of public happiness” (la pócima infalible de la felicidad pública) (159–60)—but the connection he makes between the economic and political mission of the educational system parallels Rodríguez’s thought precisely. Both see what Simón Bolívar had diagnosed decades earlier as a frightening lack of political consciousness in the Spanish American public, and both give public education the task of fomenting a general republican knowledge along with the more practical role of providing vocational training in the trades most likely to provide jobs for future graduates. In Rodríguez’s vision this argument in favor of political education dovetails with a Rousseau-like suspicion of speculative or abstract studies. Just a few lines after pronouncing reading a “miracle” rather than a skill, Rodríguez adds that the stakes for educational reformers in the Americas are particularly high, since time spent teaching “Theologies, Psychologies, Laws, and Dead Languages” (Teolojías, Psicolojías, Derechos, i Lenguas Muertas) will take away from the more pressing responsibility to accomplish “something! For some Poor People, who do not know what to do with themselves, nor what to do with their children” (algo! por unos Pobres Pueblos, que no saben qué hacerse, ni qué hacer de sus hijos) (2:29). The most immediate concern, Rodríguez continues, is to universalize an individual consciousness of belonging to a larger political and social structure built on a web of rights and responsibilities: If the Governments managed to persuade themselves, that the first duty their Mission imposes, is to secure that there not be in their states a single individual! ignorant of his or her social rights and duties


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they will have taken a great step! in the Path of Civilization that the present century is opening. (Si los Gobiernos llegáran a persuadirse, de que el primer deber que les impone su Misión, es el de cuidar que no haya, en sus estados un solo individuo! que ignore sus derechos i deberes sociales, habrian dado un gran paso! en la Carrera de la Civilización, que abre el siglo presente.) (2:30)

For Bello and Rodríguez, the creation of a social structure is the universal curriculum that republican education must offer, along with the practical skill set necessary to make each pupil an economic contributor.

Conclusion: Rodríguez and the Imagined Educational State Lurking beneath this concern with political knowledge is the ever-present question of political virtue. A number of historians have commented on the sense of moral crisis that pervaded Spanish American thinkers of Bello and Rodríguez’s generation. Lester D. Langley speaks of a confrontation with “not only a decay in the moral order but a failure of public-Â�spiritedness” (248), and Richard Morse sees an underlying anxiety in the insistent constitutionality of the new nations, noting that “each new country duly produced its convention and Anglo-French constitution” but finding this official activity less a mark of independence than “the ancient habit of legalizing all public acts that had helped to cement the former empire” (111). For Bello, the necessary virtue of a free people is inseparable from the economic mission to produce wealth; the economic need is for skilled artisans who “from the habit of occupying themselves that they learned at a tender age, will not be prepared, later on, to look upon work with tedium” (por el hábito de ocuparse que contrajeron en la tierna edad, no se preparen para no ver despues con tedio el trabajo) (La eterna 139). Rodríguez is even more sweeping in his hopes for public virtue, suggesting that a properly managed system of social education will eliminate at the source those ills that would otherwise be impossible or problematic to police:

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When Social Instruction has produced the effects we should expect, there won’t be anyone who disapproves of Direct Taxes .â•¯.â•¯. .â•¯.â•¯. who dares to call out thieves! to the administrators of any Branch, .â•¯.â•¯. nor who lavishes insults in the gazettes: not for fear of legal sanctions— but because each one will want to preserve the reputation of being civilized. (Cuando la Instruccion Social haya producido los efectos que deben esperarse, no habrá quien desapruebe las Contribuciones Directas .â•¯.â•¯. .â•¯.â•¯. quien se atreva a tratar de ladrones! a los administradores de ningun Ramo, .â•¯.â•¯. ni quien prodigue dicterios en las gacetas: nó por el temor de penas legales— sino porque cada uno querrá conservar su reputacion de civilizado.) (2:61)

Here, Rodríguez imagines that two of the pressing issues postcolonial republics faced—the difficulty of raising funds to cover the cost of government and the conflict between the desire, on the one hand, to protect freedom of the press and, on the other, to protect the fragile national government against dissident voices—would in effect solve themselves with the creation of a sufficiently virtuous public. A public aware of its social responsibilities would support rather than sabotage reasonable attempts at taxation, and the moral influence of the desire to maintain one’s reputation would obviate the need for strict laws against slander and libel. With the memory of the Huanta revolt still fresh—an antirepublican uprising, it was sparked at least in part by taxation (see Méndez, especially 157–61)—and forever bitter over the treatment of Bolívar in the popular press, Rodríguez conceives an educational solution to the two problems that in his mind symbolize the myriad obstacles to successful republican government. Convinced as he is that all human misery results from ignorance rather than from some inherent defect in human character—“Ignorance is the cause of all the wrongs that man does to himself and to others” (La Ignorancia es la causa de todos los males que el hombre se hace i hace a otros)


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(1:329)—Rodríguez prescribes knowledge diffusion as the recipe for curing the ills of the postcolonial Americas. Addressing a task of grander scale than that invoked by Bello and Emerson, his solution synthesizes a number of the tropes that appeal to both: the opposition between practical and speculative education, the necessity for a spiritual renewal to match the political renewal spurred by revolution, and the tendency to identify national progress along the lines of an Emile-like educational narrative. Rodríguez, who tends to digress into educational reform whether the subject of his text be the Caracas primary school system or a grand plan for the creation of Spanish American consciousness, imagines education as both a finite solution to the postcolonial crisis and a representation of human progress itself. The school plan becomes, in his hands, at once a specific proposal for a safe Spanish America and a narrative representation of just what the necessary body politic might look like. In this sense Rodríguez very much fits into the pantheon of later Emile-inspired, “child-centered” reformers chronicled by Bernadette Baker. “Child-centered education,” Baker notes, “was a new vision of the state rather than simply a different kind of sensitivity for the young” (14), a sensibility that became possible, she argues, only when later readers of Rousseau adapted the text to their own circumstances. Rousseau critic Raymond Trousson is careful to point out that the text itself represents less an attempt to reform society through education, a prospect that struck Rousseau as dubious, than an effort “to find the means of preserving the original virtue of the individual within society as it is” (chercher le moyen de préserver la bonté originelle de l’individu au coeur de la société telle qu’elle est) (252–53). For Rodríguez, the relationship between the individual and his or her social milieu is even more complicated, since he seeks to create a mass of individuals whose consciousness will reshape the social environment and thus the state in which they live. Less an act of preservation than a progressive attempt to create a new kind of republican subject, Rodríguez’s conception of republican education functions at once as a critique of the inadequacies of the achieved independence and as a hope for better institutions to come.18

Chapter 4

The Quest for a New World Language

The objection you make to rectifying our alphabet, “that it will be attended with inconveniences and difficulties,” is a natural one; for it always occurs when any reformation is proposed, whether in religion, government, laws, and even down as low as roads and wheel carriages. —Benjamin Franklin, letter to Mary Stevenson, â•… September 28, 1768

M

ax Weinreich’s famous dismissal of the distinction â•‡ between a dialect and a language—“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”—draws its comic tension from the geopolitical pressures any discussion of language presupposes. An essential definition of language, it suggests, is nothing more than an ex post facto attempt to justify crass political realities in something other than crass political terms. In Spain’s case the military realities of conquest and discovery conspire with the 1492 publication of Nebrija’s Gramática de la lengua castellana to cement Castilian as the dialect that will become the Spanish language. If the history of the English language lacks such a point of historical convergence, it, too, culminates around a single publication, Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. Another dictionary, The Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary, credits Johnson with some of the particular discrepancies between pronunciation and spelling in contemporary English, noting that his work standardized English spelling even as pronunciation continued (and continues) to evolve (466–67). Language’s foundational role is no secret to revolutionaries either, as the struggle against colonial rule in both North America and Spanish America quickly became a grammatical and orthographic battle as well 138


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as a military one. In a study of Andrés Bello, Iván Jaksić finds connections between his subject’s 1823 “Indicaciones sobre la conveniencia de simplificar y uniformar la ortografía en América” and North American lexicographer and essayist Noah Webster’s 1783 introduction to his spelling book, commonly called the Blue-Backed Speller. In a footnote Jaksić goes on to suggest that movements toward language reform on the heels of the 1918 Bolshevik revolution might point to a trend in Occidental culture in which revolutionary political change demands an accompanying reconsideration of language (68). Indeed, in the linguistic dimension as well as the political one, all three of these revolutions are rightly considered manifestations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, products of an era that saw language as the primary currency of political exchange and thus a particularly necessary field for political reform. For the American hemisphere the era of independence proved to be a time of lexicographic and orthographic experimentation, as the North American and Spanish American revolutionaries sought to distinguish their own linguistic realities from those of their former metropolis. As analogies between political and linguistic independence became common currency in both Americas, language emerged as a great hemispheric paradox once the struggle moved from the battlefield to the realm of intellectual debate. United to a metropolis whose language and literary tradition their instincts told them to claim, nineteenth-century American thinkers nonetheless chafed under the notion of intellectual or cultural servitude. Dictionary making and orthographic reform provided a relatively comfortable space to assert independence on small points while leaving the lion’s share of the linguistic inheritance intact. If Spain and Britain ruled the Spanish and English publishing industry and remained the locus for literary taste making, this reservoir of linguistic authority also proved an inviting target for reformers such as Webster and Rodríguez, who could at once show their prowess in understanding and manipulating their native tongue while making a larger argument that its future evolutionary development would take place in the New World rather than the Old. Webster, who has become the most famous name in U.S. dictionaries, came of age as a writer in much the same way Rodríguez did, as a newspaper essayist attempting to explain how the military victory that ended a revolutionary war might be translated into intellectual and linguistic independence. Like Rodríguez, Webster began his professional life as a schoolteacher, though he soon found he could earn a more lucrative (if somewhat unsteady) living writing and publishing textbooks for use in American

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schools. His first writings on linguistic independence take the form of introductions to those textbooks, short essays meant to justify the publication and purchase of new classroom materials in response to U.S. independence from England, whose textbooks North American schools had been buying for over a century. Beginning with A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (that famous Blue-Backed Speller), Webster promoted the new textbooks as a patriotic response to independence, declaring that “the author wishes to promote the honour and prosperity of the confederated republics of America; and chearfully throws his mite into the common treasure of patriotic exertions” (Grammatical 14). While the Blue-Backed Speller recommended little in the way of linguistic change, deferring to Samuel Johnson on points of spelling, it did supplant with American place-names the English ones used as examples in old textbooks, and it did announce the mix of patriotism and linguistics that Webster would continue to weave into later works, Dissertations on the English Language (1789) and American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). Webster’s 1828 dictionary marked the culmination of decades of research into the etymology and history of the English language, as well as empirical data on usage in the United States. A radical work that advocated a number of spelling changes designed to make written English more clearly suggestive of proper pronunciation, Webster’s dictionary followed a set of principles he had first articulated some forty years before, in Dissertations: “The people are right, and a critical investigation of the subject, warrants me in saying, that common practice, even among the unlearned, is generally defensible by analogy” (viii). And if this insistence on usage rather than tradition as the lexicographer’s guide created an American English different from the language his learned contemporaries had mastered at university, Webster was unfazed: “If we do not respect ourselves, we may be assured that other nations will not respect us” (Dissertations 406). The confidence to create and codify linguistic reform, Webster argues, is the mark of an independent nation’s intellectual vigor, and here he prefigures Emerson’s more famous call for intellectual independence in “The American Scholar.” There are a number of reasons to compare Rodríguez and Webster, aside from their temporal convergence. Both maintained firm contact with the vortices of the intellectual centers of their respective revolutions, and both managed to be remembered selectively by the generations that followed, Rodríguez as “el Maestro del Libertador” and Webster as the biggest name in American dictionaries, while their specific arguments were


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subject to a curiously effective erasure. Writing from a historical context that readily elided governmental and linguistic reforms, both men represent forgotten extremes in the debate over intellectual independence whose rhetoric is easily co-opted to nationalistic ends but whose arguments have largely been ignored. Both rely on a pedagogical, Rousseauian construction of enlightenment, and both propose new alphabets as deep analogical partners for any new government. While a great deal has been written about the political and historical differences between the gaining of independence in the United States and Spanish America (differences in many cases correspondent to the varied forms of colonialism practiced by England and Spain), both produce a discourse in which pro-independence writers seek the rhetorical support of European authorities and at the same time argue for the essential originality of the revolutionary project. On both continents the revolutions coincide with a fervor for linguistic reform (or purification) that remains largely inseparable from politics. Christopher Looby notes that “it was an eighteenth-century commonplace that language was the medium, as it were, of political connection” (32–33), while Jay Fliegelman’s exploration of an early draft of the Declaration of Independence uncovers strange quotation and accent marks intended to mark “rhythmical pauses of emphatical stress” (1–15); thus the founding document of U.S. independence proposes to bring the art of political oratory to the written page. The shared trope in which language becomes both the medium of politics and its sign unite the discourses that Webster and Rodríguez inhabit. As radicals in both language and politics, Rodríguez and Webster provoked a good deal of resistance among their contemporaries. Rodríguez’s lively and unorthodox prose is often neglected in contemporary accounts of the literature of the period, and Webster, as Kenneth Cmiel and David Mickelthwait have pointed out, gained acceptance only when his dictionary fell into the hands of the Merriams. Through a combination of substantive changes and marketing, they managed to present his dictionary as an authority rather than a challenge to the established order: “the Merriams were successful in large part because they convinced the public that the dictionary was not a radical document, that it recorded the refined literary language of the mid-nineteenth century” (Cmiel 89).1 These two cases of revolutionary linguistic proposals in excess of what the temperament of their own (admittedly revolutionary) contexts would bear thus serve as unique windows into the limits of revolutionary thought as practiced in the postindependence Americas, as well as into the unrealized theoreti-

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cal possibilities those limits tended to marginalize. While the nineteenth century produced a number of linguistically inflected revolutionary movements in Europe, as Benedict Anderson has noted, the Spanish and British American empires have to some degree been defined by the common language on both sides of the Atlantic.2 Yet the concerns of lexicographers and reformers in the Americas take on a clear political tone throughout the independence struggle and its aftermath. This reading of Webster and Rodríguez seeks to complicate the legacy of two of the leading names in American independence and, by doing so, to further delineate the conservative fault-lines illuminated by the very radical nature of their proposals. Revolutionary language takes the particular trope of representative language and carries it through to its logical conclusion—a conclusion that proves equally threatening to popular language users and elites.

Language as a Pedagogical Tool Having begun their careers as humble colonial schoolteachers, Webster and Rodríguez approach the task of language reform with an eye to pedagogy—championing as one of the prime arguments in favor of simplified spelling its ease of adoption. Language serves both as a medium and an end, however, so the argument that a new way of spelling will make literacy training easier in the new republics coexists more or less peacefully with the more ambitious desire to transform writing and speech. In Webster’s view a proper correspondence between oral and written words will tend to smooth regional differences in pronunciation and thus preserve linguistic unity while reducing the role of the spoken word as a marker of socioeconomic class. Rodríguez, too, sees a formal correspondence between speech and writing as the best way to initiate the unlettered, largely oral culture of much of the Spanish American public into the lettered elite that had long controlled the levers of colonial (and independent) government. While both thinkers tout emancipation as the goal of their reforms, a number of critics have noted how seamlessly that promise morphs into linguistic control, as the goal of uniting writing and speech implies the ability to police them both. This analogy plays into Enlightenment notions about the division between words and things. When Pestalozzi proclaims that “the first rule is to teach by things rather than words,” he renders general Rousseau’s specific instructions for Emile—that learning should be based on experience


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rather than on readings of learned authority (Pestalozzi 143). Part of what Fliegelman calls “the demystifying agenda of Enlightenment science,” the elevation of things over words had, by the time of U.S. independence, become a salient point of convergence for linguistics and politics (108). All this suspicion of the written word leads, Fliegelman argues, “to the dream of a natural language,” a belief that words can be reformed to more perfectly resemble the things they signify (189).3 Johnson, writing decades before Jefferson, is quick to give words secondary status—“I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven”—and to propose the regularization of the written language as the most effective means of endowing language with the permanence of things (28). For Webster and Rodríguez, however, the spoken word becomes the permanent thing to which written language must bend itself.4 Benjamin Franklin had justified his phonetic alphabet—a particularly radical revision of English spelling that invents a number of new characters and is at best barely intelligible to the uninitiated—as a way of breaking down the barriers between written and oral culture with a flexibility that would allow it to survive the inevitable evolutions to come in English speech. Lurking behind this justification is the fear of linguistic chaos should the written word be allowed to lag too far behind the spoken. Such an eventuality, Franklin worries, would cause English to “become the same with the Chinese, as to the difficulty of learning and using it” (Papers 220). An orally based written language thus serves, paradoxically, to maintain a sense of linguistic order. This elevation of the spoken word over its written counterpart reflects what Jacques Derrida has called a linguistic version of sin, in which a pure spoken language represents the Garden of Eden to which the corrupt written language wishes to return. In Derrida’s view, reformers such as Rodríguez and Webster thus plot language’s recapture of a mythical original unity—“It must restore its absolute youth, and the purity of its origin, short of a history and a fall which would have perverted the relationships between outside and inside” (35). On the linguistic front, however, Derrida finds the elevation of pure orality to be more than just problematic, arguing that any broad understanding of what “writing” means makes the existence of society or, for that matter, language impossible without it. And if writing is only a poor supplement to speech, then it makes little sense to worry about its ability to corrupt the spoken word (109, 41).5 What is really going on, he concludes, is widespread discomfort with the power of the act

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of writing—a discomfort evidenced by the twin instincts of revolutionary and schoolmaster that intermingle when we plumb Rodríguez’s and Webster’s motives. On the one hand both speak the language of populism, ridiculing elitist pretensions of the nascent American bourgeoisie, while on the other hand, both lament language’s tendency to become corrupted by popular and elite users alike. Gary L. Jones, for example, has employed Gramsci’s concept of hegemonic language to parse Webster’s passage from linguistic order to social control—“By controlling language one is enabled to control and direct the opinions of men and thereby their behavior as well” (215)—and Miguel Gomes has taken a similar tack in his analysis of Rodríguez, highlighting what he calls the “educational imperative” (imperativo educativo) of a reformer who sees his own role as that of “national teacher” (maestro de la nación) (54–55). At the heart of Gomes’s argument is the notion of rhetorical techniques, particularly allegory and metaphor, as elements that tend to separate the popular masses from the lettered elites that employ them (41–42).6 While Webster (both in 1789 and 1828) warns of impending linguistic and, eventually, philosophical chaos if a uniform code of spelling is not Â�adopted throughout the United States, Rodríguez fears for the politiÂ� cal side of the analogy. And like the later, more conservative Webster, Rodríguez characterizes his own impulse toward reform as something more than populism. Noting that the act of having a political class represent the popular will tends to distance the public from political reality—“with prosthetic hands they perform that sacred work, the Constitution, and with their own hands they rend it” (con manos postizas hace la obra sagrada de su Constitución, y con sus propias manos la rasgan)—Rodríguez sees a defect in representative government that reminds him of English orthography in which the “A by itself is A / or is E / or is O / occurring by itself / and accompanied becomes whatever you want” (A sola es A / ó es E / ó es O / Segun ocurre / Y acompañada es lo que le parece) (1:273). The desire to preserve linguistic order against a perceived tendency toward dissolution had provided a key justification in Johnson’s preface to his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. Forthrightly privileging the written over the spoken, Johnson had sought to rescue a measure of permanence for words “altered by accident,” “depraved by ignorance,” and thus “variously written,” with the goal of producing another sort of correspondence between sign and signified, one in which “the signs might be permanent, like the things they denote” (26–27). His dictionary’s temperament is


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therefore at once creative and conservative. It proposed to create a stable written base for the English language as a stay against the inevitable chaos and depravity of daily use. At various points in his career Webster accepts and attacks different parts of Johnson’s product, praising at some stages his standards of pronunciation, ridiculing his often doubtful etymologies, but Webster’s resistance to the principle of written language as an anchor working against the evolution of the spoken remains constant. Always he seeks to reverse this vector and present the chaos of daily use as a dynamic force necessary to refresh the written product. While Johnson’s dictionary took on, in 1755, a language in which spelling was often a matter of debate, given the lack of accepted authorities and the fundamentally unphonetic nature of English, Rodríguez writes from within a more established tradition and one with a view of the relationship between writing and speech more in line with Webster than with Johnson. Rather than positing written language as a stable refuge from the vagaries of spoken variation, Nebrija had cited Quintilian—“therefore we must write as we pronounce and speak as we write” (assí tenemos descreuir como pronunciamos y hablar como escriuimos) (121)—and thus the very concept of standardized, written Spanish had been founded upon a direct relationship between the written and the spoken.7 With the Real Academia Española serving as a governing body and determining which spellings and uses would be deemed acceptable and which would not, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformers of Spanish orthography could work against an institutional context that English lacked. And while Castilian Spanish had never been a completely phonetic language, the correspondence between letter and sound was much closer to one to one than that permitted by English orthography. Nebrija’s writings on the subject stress that language’s role as a force for social coherence and stability depends not just on a stable orthography but on a correspondence between letters and sounds that may be clearly and unanimously understood. This is not to say that Nebrija would have written Spanish depend on the spoken—he suggests rather that written language should serve as a guide to pronunciation. Where written language fails to function phonetically, its dictates are not clear, and this lack of clarity could threaten the very social and religious fabric, since linguistic coherence serves as a metaphor for social coherence and since language itself functions as an important tool for communicating social custom and religious doctrine (120–21). Andrés Bello, a Caraqueño who had lived in London since serving as part of the first independent consular mission there in 1810 (along, for a

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time, with Simón Bolívar), made his own reform proposal in 1823 (“Indicaciones sobre la conveniencia de simplificar y uniformar la ortografía en América”), framing language in similarly pedagogical terms as a building block for thought itself: “Minds are formed by languages” (Se forman las cabezas por las lenguas), a notion he attributed to Rousseau’s Emile (“Indicaciones” 71).8 In a move that reprised Franklin’s and Webster’s pedagogical justification for their phonetic alphabet, Bello cited the widespread lack of linguistic proficiency that he claimed afflicted the vast majority of Spanish Americans, a condition he attributed to colonial neglect on the part of the Spanish government, as well as to the backwardness of Spain itself. Despite the pro-independence tone of his critique, Bello cites the Real Academia Española (and Nebrija and Quintilian) to give his proposal theoretical support. If language’s role is to serve as “a faithful and secure depository for laws, arts, sciences, and everything discussed by the educated and wise in all the professions” (un fiel y seguro depósito de las leyes, de las artes, de las ciencias, y de todo cuanto discurrieron los doctos y los sabios en todas profesiones), then an orthography that corresponds reliably to sound becomes the sole means of guaranteeing this function for future generations (72). Bello also follows Franklin’s precedent in his disdain for the focus on Latin and Greek as a basis for rules of grammar and orthography (although Bello himself first gained intellectual renown for his proficiency in Latin). To privilege ancient languages as authorities in the present is to give ancient civilizations veto power over the most important medium of communication, and in Bello’s argument, such an approach could lead only to the absurd idea of having present civilizations serve as compass points for the hypothetical ones still to come: “leaving, it would seem, our [language] to serve as an orthographic compass point for some society that will flourish two or three thousand years from now” (dejando, según parece, la nuestra para que sirva de norte a la ortografía de algún pueblo que ha de florecer de aquí a dos o tres mil años) (“Indicaciones” 79). This emphasis on independence from the past links up with Bello’s outrage at the state of literacy in Spanish America to make orthographic reform an independence-minded project that, however necessary in Spain, takes on an existential dimension in the newly independent republics. Toward the end of his introduction, Bello begs his reader’s pardon, suggesting that any errors stem not from malice but from “our desire to propagate enlightenment in America; the only means of building up rational liberty, and with it the benefits of civil culture and public prosperity” (nuestro celo por


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la propagación de luces en América; único medio de radicar una libertad racional, y con ella los bienes de la cultura civil y de la prosperidad pública) (87). The plan, which would confine each letter to one sound only, thus comes advertised as an educational instrument that derives its relevance from the circumstances of independence—in a republic, the argument goes, illiteracy is incompatible with citizenship. What ultimately unites the conservative and reformist perspectives on written dictionaries is an ordering impulse that sees written language as a force capable of uniting and stabilizing the spoken word. Johnson, for example, preaches a hierarchy of descending permanence that begins with physical objects, then moves to written words and finally to the spoken. Writing, while necessarily arbitrary and impermanent, thus functions as a brake on the inevitable shifts to which the spoken word will tend. Johnson seeks not so much to halt the evolution of the English language as to produce a record of it, intent on saving as many of the traditional forms of spelling as possible, always referring to older uses, older languages, and the final transcendent authority of the physical world itself. Nebrija takes on a similar role as the codifier of Castilian Spanish, and he works within a tradition in which the breach between written and spoken language is less apparent, at least at the level of orthography. For Nebrija, too, writing and speech interact in a more harmonious relationship; he argues that the same principles that allow memory to reproduce perception ought to govern the written language’s ability to reproduce words: Just as the concepts of understanding respond to the things we understand, and just as the sounds and words respond to those concepts, so the figures of letters must respond to those sounds, because if it were to be any other way, letters would be found useless and writing itself would be just as false, as though understanding had conceived one thing as another or words represented something other than what the understanding conceived. (Que assí como los conceptos del entendimiento responden a las cosas que entendemos, y assí como las bozes y palabras responden a los conceptos, assí las figures de las letras han de responder a las bozes, porqué si assí no fuera, en vano fueron halladas las letras, y la scriptura no menos sería falsa, que si el entendimiento concibiese una cosa por otra, y las palabras representassen otra cosa de lo quell entendimiento concibe.) (120)

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Nebrija’s picture of a world governed by analogical relationships gives language even greater power than does Bello’s citation of Rousseau. Not only is it true that minds are formed by languages, but to Nebrija any meaningful concept of thought depends on writing’s relationship to speech: just as written words capture voices, so the brain reproduces a simulacrum of every idea it understands. An orthography out of balance with speech therefore becomes an existential threat to human society—inviting confusion that would render writing (and with it the texts of Christianity) unfounded and that could extend to the very ability of human minds to produce a universe of thought in any way analogous to those of other minds and indeed to the physical universe itself. While roughly three centuries elapse between the lifetime of Nebrija and the careers of Webster, Bello, and Rodríguez, these three are writing in an age in which analogy and, in particular, analogical relationships between language, thought, and politics have become commonplace. For Rodríguez and Webster the task of promoting representative language overlaps continually with the political project of independence and at times produces a political dissonance in which the act of calling for emancipation involves a prescription for how all citizens should communicate.

Noah Webster: Linguistic Absolutism and Intellectual Independence Webster’s career is marked by his own persistent efforts as a self-publicist, which eventually led him, like the young Thomas Paine, into contact with the patriarchal figure of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, the self-taught scientist, philosopher, and printer who had published “A Scheme for a New Alphabet and Reformed Mode of Spelling” in 1779, passed this essay along to the young Yale graduate from Connecticut during the 1787 Constitutional Convention (Weinstein 92). Webster responded by including the text as an appendix to Dissertations on the English Language and dedicating the book itself to Franklin. Franklin’s own associations with the question of written language’s ability to capture the spoken word came to a head his 1773 publication of “An Edict by the King of Prussia” and his complaint, in a letter, that the editors of the newspaper had published it without following his typesetting instructions, causing it to appear “stripped of all the capitalling and italicing, that intimate the allusions and mark the emphasis of written discourses, to bring them as near as possible to those spoken” (Benjamin Franklin 886).9 When a correspondent objected


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to the difficulty of adjusting to the new alphabet, Franklin replied that the complaint “is a natural one; for it always occurs when any reformation is proposed, whether in religion, government, laws, and even down as low as roads and wheel carriages” (Papers 218), a defense Webster would echo in his Blue-Backed Speller: “Those who rail so much at new things ought to consider, that every improvement in life was once new; the reformation by Luther was once new; the Christian religion was once new; [.â•¯.â•¯.] and had these and other new things never been introduced, we should have all, this moment, been pagans and savages” (Grammatical 13; italics in original). Grammatical reform, in both Franklin’s and Webster’s conceptions, provokes the same prejudices that had always opposed even the most useful of changes and that were thus particularly ironic in a nation less than twentyfive years old that had come into existence by way of armed rebellion. Having begun his own career as a schoolteacher and having posited the Blue-Backed Speller as a language textbook for the new nation—it is time, he argues, for the newly independent American public “to attend to the arts of peace” (Grammatical 4; italics in original)—Webster settled comfortably into the role of national pedagogue. The spelling book, first published at the end of the American Revolution, a date Mickelthwait calls “no accident,” became “a publishing phenomenon” that would support Webster financially for the rest of his life (10). Always an active participant in the newspaper-centered discourse of U.S. politics, Webster would gradually become more conservative, finally taking a firm federalist position against Thomas Jefferson (and the excesses of the French Revolution), but never completely abandoning his populist take on language and thus remaining capable, as Harry Warfel has pointed out, of condemning the public “for ignorantly following a set of demagogues” on the one hand, and praising, on the other, “the superior mentality of the yeomanry of America whose language habits were more correct than the rules of Bishop Louth and Dr. Johnson” (261–62). He found unlimited freedom of the press a troubling concept (a feeling shared by Rodríguez) and thus occupies an uneasy and shifting position in the ideological context of his time.10 As early as 1783, Webster’s spelling book proclaims itself an American alternative to Dilworth’s English grammar, commonly used in American schools. Webster cites the emphasis on Greek and Latin as the linguistic basis for English as a central defect in language education as practiced in Great Britain: “they have attended more to the study of ancient and foreign languages, than to the improvement of their own.” Worse, he continues, the mores of the old country have been granted too much respect in

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the colonies, the result being the triumph of prestige over common sense: “the whispers of common sense, in favour of our native tongue, have been silenced amidst the clamour of pedantry in favour of Greek and Latin” (Grammatical 4). There is nothing novel about Webster’s assertion. Jefferson (who would become a political adversary as Webster’s conservatism hardened) and Franklin had both expressed a preference for modern languages as the most useful linguistic emphasis for American schools, and Franklin had gone so far as to ridicule the notion of deriving English grammar from Latin as a process that must, by its own logic, be incomplete, since students have never approached Latin by applying the rules of Greek (“The Autobiography” 552). As for pronunciation, Webster’s instinct remains well within American and English tradition, positing “the customary pronunciation of the most accurate scholars and literary Gentlemen” as his standard and making Dr. Johnson’s dictionary the authority in matters of spelling (Grammatical 6, 11). This change, he argues, will produce a unified language in which “those odious distinctions of provincial dialects” will no longer foment sectionalism (6). Like Rodríguez, Webster is an early proponent of professional instruction, and he worries that if a salient topic such as pronunciation should be “left to parents and nurses,” a lack of uniform standards will lead to a kind of linguistic anarchy: “every person will claim a right to pronounce most agreably to his own fancy, and the language will be exposed to perpetual fluctuation” (5). Here, an emphasis on pronunciation works less as a democratizing force than as a way of maintaining social order— if the system of schools and universities already serves to police writing among the learned, Webster seems ready to extend such policing to popular speech. At the same time, Webster connects his narrative on pronunciation to a nationalistic appeal to intellectual independence. In a move popularized by Thomas Paine in the United States and also employed by Fray Servando Teresa de Mier and Simón Rodríguez in Spanish America, Webster suggests a view in which Europe appears less the seat of Western culture than a decadent branch in need of reformation: “Europe is grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny.” Against this European decadence, the United States rises with the slate of human history before it, free “to select the wisdom of all nations, as the basis of her constitutions,” but also capable of looking on those other nations with discretion “to prevent the interruption of foreign vices and corruptions and check the career of her


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own.” Such a position allows the United States to aspire to greater human progress, “to diffuse an uniformity and purity of language,” and “to add superiour dignity to this infant Empire and to human nature” (Grammatical 14–15). Here, Webster is clearly making the same sort of argument that Paine makes in Common Sense when he speculates that the exploration of the Western hemisphere coincided with the Reformation because of a divine plan to create a physical refuge for Europe’s swelling population of dissidents. While not overtly sectarian or even religious, Webster’s reasoning does rely on a notion of the United States as a place where Europe’s vices might be purified, an argument for intellectual independence that will prove flexible enough to serve Bolívar, Rodríguez, and Teresa de Mier, whose revolutions have little to do with Protestantism. America, in Webster’s imaginary, becomes the sanctuary for the authority of oral rather than written speech, as well as for rights-based political liberty. His Dissertations on the English Language (1789) goes further in drawing a parallel between democracy in government and popular use as the authority in language. In Dissertations Webster reacts directly to Johnson’s bias against oral language use. Where the English lexicographer sees speech as “a linguistic dust-bin, unworthy of a legitimizing place in his dictionary” (Swann 60), Webster privileges speech as the proper bastion of linguistic authority. In theory, at least, Webster’s approach calls for a consultation with popular speech rather than the application of a set of learned rules designed to curb it. The great contradiction, of course, is that the vision of emancipation on a national level depends on a plan to control pronunciation among individual users of the language—the “social control” that forms the core of an analysis by Richard M. Rollins. As Belford Moré has pointed out, such an approach brings its own contradictions. Webster himself is careful to remark that along with the support of popular norms, his ideas about language have garnered the approval of “numerous and respectable authorities” (Dissertations xi), a phrase that reveals just how slippery the task of articulating a popular standard can be come. Moré notes that any attempt to come up with a standard based on speech “is only possible inasmuch as the phonetic level has been subject to a process of selection that has determined the legitimate forms,” which is to say that any attempt at even a normalized description of popular speech presupposes the suppression of forms deemed to be anomalies (52–53). Warfel has referred to Webster’s lack of skill as a transcriber of spoken English, and his belief in a popular

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standard represents the central dream of his vision of language, a corollary to his belief in the biblical narrative of linguistic development from a single, original language, and thus his search for a single origin for every word (66). If, as Rollins suggests, Webster’s lexicographic investigations might be viewed as sham science in which the answer precedes the experiment—“the literal extrapolation of scriptural truth into another field” (“Words” 422)—his vision of a popular standard of speech serves the same function as a mythical place-holder on which a pseudoempirical investigation depends. Webster is clearer when it comes to the political implications of his empiricism, or rather to the unique political circumstances that should, he argues, give rise to linguistic reform based on empirical principles. By the 1789 publication of Dissertations, he already sees the window of linguistic opportunity in danger of closing. The Blue-Backed Speller had been published on the heels of the Revolutionary War, the perfect occasion for a first independent American textbook, but even six years later Webster foresees a rise in “indolence” and “national acquiescence into error” if his plan is not implemented promptly (Dissertations 406). At the same time that revolutionary fervor may be in danger of flagging among the American public, Webster worries that the revolution itself remains incomplete, for everywhere he sees “an astonishing respect for the arts and literature of their parent country, and a blind imitation of its manners” (397–98). A grounded American study of the language, like the American phonetic alphabet proposed in conjunction with Franklin, thus emerges within a revolutionary frame as a way of translating the spirit of independence into the field of linguistics and of encouraging his compatriots who have wrought a great political change to turn their attention to the medium itself.

Simón Rodríguez: Analogy and Structural Reform The notion of intellectual independence and social unification as the unfinished business of independence would become something of a mantra for Rodríguez, who opens Sociedades Americanas with the announcement that the Spanish American public should think more about its own future than about the internal struggles for political power that immediately followed the defeat of the royalist forces on the battlefield.11 Like Webster, he links political and linguistic radicalism:


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The project of this work should seem just as exotic as the orthography with which it’s written seems strange. (Tan exótico debe parecer el proyecto de esta obra como extraña la ortografía en que va escrito.) (1:260)

Rodríguez, too, sees the end of military hostilities as only the beginning of a struggle for true intellectual independence—“In America what has been obtained is not Independence but rather an armistice in the War that will decide it” (Se ha obtenido ya en America, nó la Independencia, sino un armisticio en la Guerra que ha de decidirla) (1:272)—and he finds a hidden blessing in the apparent disarray of the newly freed republics, asserting, that as far as “truly republican government” (gobierno verdaÂ� derament republicano) goes, “America is (in the present day) the only place where its establishment might be permitted” (La América es [en el dia] el único lugar donde sea permitido establecerlo) (1:262). To this messianic sense of American possibility, Rodríguez adds a touch of Webster’s (and Jefferson’s and Locke’s) distrust of classical education, noting that in current political debate, “the truth has the disadvantage of appearing vulgar, and its demonstration trivial: that’s why doctors prescribe warm water in Latin” (la verdad tiene la desventaja de parecer vulgar, y su demostracion trivial: por eso los médicos recetan agua tibia en latin) (1:263; italics in original). He then posits the existence of two kinds of readers: the wise, for whom a simple explanation always works best, and the foolish, who manage to appear to know everything through the uninformed repetition of language. To those readers who do not count themselves among the fools, Rodríguez presents parallel descriptions of “language” and “government” in columns on his page.12 Where Webster took his political beliefs as a priori proof of the need for language reform, Rodríguez does the opposite, assuming his learned audience will know something about the Spanish debate over orthography via the tradition stretching back to Nebrija.13 Thus, language reform becomes the ongoing debate that everyone can be assumed to have an opinion about and the route by which analogy can catapult Rodríguez’s politics onto the scene. Positing language’s purpose as

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an essentially communicative one, “speaking to be understood ” (hablar para entenderse), Rodríguez gives government a tantalizingly vague statement of purpose—“carrying through one or more actions toward a determined end ” (llevar una ó mas acciones á un fin determinado)—before adding that the context of nationhood brings the two fields together, giving language the task of building a fourfold uniformity of citizens who “articulate it / sing it / construct it / and write it / in the same way” (la articulen / la cantan / la construyan / y la escriban / del mismo modo) and government that of “ordering / directing / managing / and commanding” (ordenar / dirijir / rejir / y mandar) (1:265; italics in original). As the columns continue, their twin bailiwicks find new and unexpected points of contact, allowing Rodríguez to echo U.S. federalists by criticizing the emptiness of postrevolutionary political rhetoric and to crack a joke on the revolutionary elimination of letters that echoes Franklin and makes an admonishing acknowledgment of the carnage of the French Revolution.14 Later on in Sociedades Americanas, Rodríguez will characterize himself as anything but a violent radical. Alluding to Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase on the periodic necessity for violent revolution, Rodríguez becomes very careful, pointing out that Jefferson’s principle has value only if “liberty” is correctly defined: “The tree of liberty must be watered with bloodâ†œæ¸€å±®” is a true concept, if by Liberty we mean Independence to work in one’s own benefit, without harming anyone else; but it is a false concept, if we believe, that in order to reach an understanding about the way of working, and to settle on a principle that will regulate this way, it will be necessary to quarrel: the result would therefore be a perpetual war, and thus, annihilation. (“El árbol de la libertad se ha de regar con sangre” es un concepto verdadero, si por Libertad se entiende la Independencia para obrar a favor propio, sin daño ajeno; pero será un falso concepto, si se cree, que para entenderse so bre el modo de obrar, y sentar un principio que regle este modo, sea menester reñir: el resultado seria entónces una guerra perpetua, por consiguiente, la aniquilacion.) (1:273; italics in original)

Here, Rodríguez’s context does much to bring him closer to Webster. Where the U.S. federalist would, when not compiling his dictionary, warn then-president Jefferson about the fragility of the U.S. government, asking how anything could be called a “successful experiment” if it (among other


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charges) “has spread discord over our peaceful country” and “converted our printing presses into convenient instruments of slander and malice” (Miscellaneous, 10), Rodríguez writes from a Bolivia in which the existence of social and political chaos is not a matter of debate. Less than two years earlier, Rodríguez’s superior, Antonio José de Sucre, had written Bolívar of his own horror at the prospect of attempting to govern a country where centuries of colonial rule, the devastation of a long war, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of warring factions made democratic theory exceedingly difficult to apply (Sucre, De mi 332–33). So, for Rodríguez, social responsibility trumps personal liberty as a point of emphasis for founding Spanish American democracy, and the transcendental truth capable of bridging the gap between words and things will be not God but a sense of shared economic and political destiny among the American people—“to live by an industry that does not jeopardize oneself or anyone else, either directly or indirectly” (vivir de una industria que no le perjudique, ni perjudique á otro, directa ni indirectamente) (1:283; italics in original). Fully cognizant of the revolutionary change in attitude he is suggesting, Rodríguez posits language reform as the analogous and in this case more believable possibility. Real relinquishment of the vestiges of monarchy means accepting the possibility of substantive change in government, Rodríguez argues in the governmental column, but the institutions of the independent republics have done little to bring such change about: “Everywhere we see Public Schools teaching new names for the same things; and formulating, in another style, the order of another time. The words are new, in effect, and the things appear to be so, but in reality .â•¯.â•¯. the terms have never changed” (Por todas partes se ven Escuelas Políticas enseñando á dar otros nombres á las mismas cosas; y á formular, en otro estilo, las órdenes del otro dia. Las voces son nuevas, en efecto, y las cosas parecen serlo; pero en realidad .â•¯.â•¯. de plan no se ha variado) (1:267). In the language column opposite, it is the letters themselves that go on the chopping block—those that don’t correspond to Nebrija’s injunction to represent only one “voz”: If there were a revolution in the alphabet, theâ•…â•…h theâ•…â•…v and theâ•…â•…c would complain about finding themselves excluded. Why wouldn’t they leave the country? [.â•¯.â•¯.] How many privileged men aren’t crying today .â•¯.â•¯. (close to or far from their homes) about their goods and titles?

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(Si se hiciese una revolucion en el alfabeto, se quejarian laâ•…â•…h laâ•…â•…v y laâ•…â•… c de verse excluidas ¿por qué no emigrarian? [.â•¯.â•¯.] ¡Cuántos hombres de bien no lloran hoy [léjos ó cerca de sus hogares] sus bienes ó sus títulos!) (1:267)

Revolution brings with it a certain loss of privilege, Rodríguez seems to be saying, and complaints about former wealth and titles should sound as ridiculous in a free republic as would the protests of unsounded and therefore foundationless letters of the alphabet. On the heels of this admonition to those nostalgic for monarchy, a significant political current throughout the former Spanish colonies, Rodríguez shows that orthography can provide moderating analogies as well, as in his call for the return of the letter x to its former place.15 Here, he starts from a rather arcane point of the orthographic debate, what to do with the letter that in Spanish makes a sound identical to that of the j (México) but that also forms a sound that combines k and s (examen) and performs a role basically indistinguishable from the s when placed before a consonant (experimentar). At the time Rodríguez was writing American Societies, the letter remained a flashpoint of debate. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento would take up its case in 1843 and 1844, noting that the Spanish Royal Academy had limited the x to representing the cs sound in 1806, and that before this date it was often used interchangeably with the j, citing baxo, dixo, and luxo for bajo, dijo, and lujo as three examples (Ortografía 146, 149). Praising this resolution, which indeed remains the rule in contemporary usage, Sarmiento proposes going further, expressing himself with the rhetoric of a revolutionary leader: “be firm, and down with the z, the h, the v, and the x” (tenéos firmes, i abajo con la z, la h, la v, i la x) (30). SarÂ� miento’s reasoning emanates from a concern for the authority of the spoken language: he cites Nebrija and argues, in the spirit of Webster, for the authority of popular use. These letters trouble him in particular because their ambiguous relationship to pronunciation has turned them into written shibboleths useful only for producing an artificial separation between the educated and the ignorant. Sarmiento’s solution would demand not only obedience to the Academy’s 1806 ruling on the x but also retrofitting words such as México


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(Méjico) whose spelling had been fixed in more lax times. Two other reforms would necessarily emerge as well, replacement of the preconsonant x by s, turning experiencia into esperiencia, and direct expression of the c and s, producing, as Bello’s treatise had pointed out, approximations such as ecsamen or eqsamen (“Indicaciones” 83). Neither of these reforms would find a permanent home in written Spanish, and indeed a hundred years after American Societies the argument against the preconsonant x would resurface, so Rodríguez takes up his pen at a moment when the letter x finds itself quite literally on the chopping block, downsized in 1806 and now threatened with complete elimination.16 Bello, too, had acknowledged this possibility but concluded that the fifty-fifty division between the k and s sounds suggests a harsher pronunciation than that most familiar to the Â�ears of Spanish speakers (here, of course, the tension between regulating pronunciation and following it becomes readily apparent) (83–84). Rodríguez’s old colleague from his days in France, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, had weighed in on this controversy, too, arguing that changing the spelling of names such as México took the reform too far, since the x had begun as the missionaries’ approximation of Nahuatl pronunciation and not as a sign for the more guttural sound of the j. For Fray Servando the imposition of the j in proper Mexican names was a vivid symbol of the violence of the conquest (“Carta de despedida” 8). Rodríguez, perhaps influenced by his contact with Servando, also finds the overall elimination of the x to be too drastic a reform, but he couches his objection differently. Something about the revolutionary mentality resists the gentle blending of the single letter, Rodríguez suggests, so the most extreme reformers acted in the spirit of Robespierre (though with the form of punishment favored by Spain’s colonial governors): But since in all revolutions someone cries and someone sings, the x ought to return to what it was. It represented, in a single sign, the guttural and sibilant: but since it resisted being divided, they had it drawn and quartered. It suffered for the cause: justice would be restoring its old functions. If only it were so easy to reform morals as it is to reform Orthography! (Pero como en todas las revoluciones hay quien llore y quien cante, la x deberia volver á lo que era. Ella representaba bajo un solo signo la guturación y el silvo: pero porque se resistia á la division, la descuartizaron. Padeció por la causa: justo seria que se le repusiese en sus funciones.

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¡Asi fuera tan fácil hacer reformas en la moral como en la Ortografia!) (1:267)

However exhilarating such a sacrifice might be, Rodríguez suggests that revolutionary judgment demands careful consideration to restore to their places forces that, perhaps from necessity, lost limbs in the revolutionary struggle. It remains unclear what exactly the x is supposed to represent, but by stretching the analogy a bit further Rodríguez obviates any question about a particular reference.17 Restoring the loss should be no problem, he argues, just give the x its old (1806) place back—but where the vagaries of orthographic reform might be bloodlessly corrected, war and revolution present more complicated problems. Here, he reverses Webster’s analogy, as the orthographical ferment already under way gives him inspiration to imagine that politics might change, too. Rodríguez is nonetheless careful to see the limits of his own construction—political reformers must convince the people whose customs they wish to transform, while orthographic reformers can simply send letters to their graves and, if they were mistaken, bring them back to life.18

Conclusion: The Limits of Orthography Like Webster, Rodríguez is capable of lifting his insistence on American originality to nationalistic extremes, lamenting the fad of cosmopolitanism that puts the children of Spanish America’s elite in schools “where they aren’t permitted to speak except in English, or French, or perhaps some little word in cahteyano, so their mothers might understand them on Sunday” (donde no se les permite hablar sino Inglés, i Francés, i una que otra palabrita en cajteyano, paraque se entiendan con sus madres los domingos) (1:348–49). Yet this is the same Rodríguez who in a letter to a student’s father would promise to teach the boy to converse in Spanish and Quechua, so his problem is not with multilingualism per se but with modish (and to his mind pusillanimous) appeals to European authority.19 The real political problem he faces is a social order that has, despite its independence, never really sloughed off the mores of the aristocratic, monarchic one that preceded it. In these circumstances political reform is reduced to little more than an empty exercise in renaming (1:367). Rodríguez’s appeal to widespread political reform (which he will elsewhere flesh out as a crash


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program for locally operated “republican” schools) finally comes to rest on the firm belief that orthography can serve as an example: It’s normal that, with time, orthography should become more simplified and fixed, .â•¯.â•¯. since every year a new one comes out with something added or subtracted. But if nothing is done to remove Republican Government from the conformity of principles it keeps with monarchy, it probably will return to what it was in the days of Fernando the First of Navarre. (Es regular que, con el tiempo, llegue la ortografía á simplificarse y fijarse, .â•¯.â•¯. puesto que cada año sale una nueva, con algo de mas ó de menos. Pero si nada se hace para sacar el Gobierno Republicano de la conformidad de principios que tiene con el monárquico, es probable que vuelva á lo que era en tiempo de Fernando 1.º de Navarra.) (1:290)

In other words, if the ebb and flow of new proposals for orthography has become a condition of having a written language that changes with pronunciation to follow Nebrija’s dictate, then governmental forms, too, should change with the popular will they are designed to represent. And Rodríguez is careful to call this process of orthographic change anything but revolutionary, focusing not on any particular proposal but on their proliferation as proof of a critical mass of debate and hope for change. Webster could provide some meaningful advice on the danger of taking this analogy too far. After all, as David Soibelman has pointed out, Webster “did not succeed in taking the a out of leather, feather, and weather, nor in changing tongue to tung and ton and tonnage to tun and tunnage.” In fact, Soibelman’s argument suggests, along with Swann’s and Weinstein’s studies, that orthographic reform (at least in the United States) proved an almost impossible sell to the public whose very speech the new language was to represent more closely (9–10). Swann notes that by 1809 “orthographical reform was a battle that Webster felt he had lost” (72), while Weinstein cites a cooling of Webster’s nationalistic fervor along with the recognition that popularizing orthography ran clearly counter to his own class interest: “The people with whom he shared the most in terms of class, region, religion, and political beliefs urged restraint” (98). In the Spanish-speaking world, too, popular resistance to grand orthographic change served more as a cautionary tale than as an inspiration to rebellion. Rosenblat discusses Correas, a contemporary of Nebrija, by pointing out the ferocious resis-

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tance that the former’s more radical proposal provoked (xxix, xxlix). And in Rodríguez’s lifetime, the reforms proposed in Chile amid the ferment stoked by Bello and the exiled Sarmiento would quickly fail in their own right, despite the considerable political and cultural capital invested in their widespread adoption (see Páez Urdaneta). By analogy, orthographic reform suggests the extreme difficulty faced by liberal reformers who, by the very radical nature of their proposals, might be accused of implementing nothing more than a new form of linguistic tyranny. For Rodríguez, whose real interest was politics and for whom language (and his important visual innovations within the genre of the essay) served as a means of communicating his message more effectively, the analogy between language and government also effectively predicts his failure as a political reformer. Where the patent stability of the U.S. republic made government the least interesting part of Webster’s analogy, despite his own unflagging engagement in the political topics of the day, Rodríguez’s argument depended on language’s ability to serve as a metaphor and indicator of broader political change. And if, as Rodríguez would assert, “it’s as foolish to fight for Independence with words as it would be to settle questions of law with bullets” (tan improprio seria el disputar la Independencia con escritos, como el discutir un código á balazos) (1:273), then the moments just after independence indeed called for a focus on different tools—from Webster’s America, where an early insistence on sweeping spelling reforms gave way to a less ambitious focus on linguistic legitimacy, to the America of Rodríguez, where the wholesale reordering of political and social structures would prove no easier than the task of making the a in feather disappear.20

Chapter 5

The Political and Artistic Avant-Garde

It is neither dream nor delirium, but rather philosophy .â•¯.â•¯. ; nor is the place where it will be done imaginary, like that imagined by Chancellor Thomas More: his Utopia will be, in reality, America. (No es sueño ni delirio, sino filosofia .â•¯.â•¯. ; ni el lugar donde esto se haga será imajinario, como el que se figuró el Canciller Tomas Morus: su Utopia será, en realidad, la América.) —Simón Rodríguez, “Luces y virtudes sociales” (1840)

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n his Recuerdos literarios, Chilean intellectual José Vicâ•‡ torino Lastarria recounts meeting the elderly Simón Rodríguez in the company of his own elderly mentor, Andrés Bello.1 The elders were both from Caracas, and each had weathered the Wars of Independence in exile abroad, but on this occasion their discussion of politics was more local than global, as Rodríguez told how he once served a formal banquet to Mariscal Sucre (then president of Bolivia) on bedpans. The normally stern Bello cried with laughter, Lastarria noted, adding that Rodríguez told the story with “the emphasis and those elegant intonations” (el énfasis i aquellas intonaciones elegantes) that he attempted to reproduce graphically in his writings (48–49). When it came to philosophy, Â�Lastarria continues, Rodríguez remained something of an enigma, a reformer who sought to improve the lot of the poor through practical, vocational education but whose real or imagined originality was such that he denied knowing anything about Saint-Simon or Fourier, despite having spent two decades in France. The salient European influence, Lastarria suggests, is Robert Owen, the English factory manager/owner whose Co-operative Magazine 161

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introduced “socialism” into print in English and whose experiments in the textile town of New-Lanark combined industrial production with a similar belief in the power of vocationally minded education (Â�Lastarria 45–46; Donnachie 135). Writing several decades after Rodríguez’s death, Lastarria took up a critical thread that would remain unexplored until the second half of the twentieth century. As Lastarria himself pointed out, his contemporaries tended to ignore Rodríguez, put off by the very appearance of the writing—its use of bold type, italics, all capitals, and unorthodox layout—with the result that “his clarity, which was the quality most appreciated by the author, almost disappeared beneath the sculpted forms of his language and his writing, whose strangeness was jarring” (su claridad, que era la cualidad mas apreciada por el autor, casi desaparecia bajo las formas plásticas de su lenguaje i de su escritura, que chocaba por su estrañeza) (46). Another nineteenth-century observer, Arístedes Rojas, counted himself firmly among those who found the writings merely jarring, describing Rodríguez as a “utopian, dreamer, monomaniac” (utopista, soñador, monomaniaco), and proposing that “Don Simón wanted to reform modern society with the delirium of an exalted imagination” (Don Simón quiso reformar la sociedad moderna con los delirios de una imaginación exaltada) (242, 244). Twentieth-century critics such as Germán Arciniegas and Ángel Rama would be kinder, the former evaluating Rodríguez’s educational plan as “one of the most curious and intelligent works ever written on its subject in America,” and the latter calling the writing itself “a rigorous, rational transcription for the mechanism of thought” (Arciniegas, Latin 310; Rama 49). Rama would even make a tantalizing comparison suggesting that “his theory of pedagogy did something similar to what Mallarmé did with poetry later in the century” (49). For Venezuelan critic Susana Rotker, Rodríguez’s strange essays represented nothing less than a mimetic reflection of “the marginalization and the social unrest experienced by South America,” and thus a straightforward attempt to depict realities that might elude a more traditional style of writing (“Nation” 255). When Rodríguez’s first published essay appeared in Arequipa, Peru, in 1828, Robert Owen had already spent more than a decade leading social reform movements as the manager of the factory town of New Lanark and the founder of a colony in New Harmony, Indiana. He had been hailed in his native England and in the United States—his subscribers at New Lanark included Jeremy Bentham, he spoke twice before the U.S. Congress in 1825 between interviews with Thomas Jefferson and Presi-


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dent James Monroe, and his newspaper essays and letters had created an international following.2 Arguing from the central supposition that human character is the product of circumstances rather than of will, Owen proposed a social perspective that focused on the pursuit of happiness at the community rather than the individual level and a system of education designed to teach each child, both on the playground and in the formal curriculum, “that ‘he is never to injure his playfellows; but that, on the contrary, he is to contribute all in his power to make them happy’â•ƒ” (New View 39). This philosophy harmonizes nicely with Rodríguez’s call for shared “faculties”: there are no independent faculties and therefore there is no faculty of one’s own that can be exercised without the concourse of other people’s faculties. (no hai facultades independientes siendo así no hay facultad propia que pueda ejercerse sin el concurso de facultades ajenas.) (2:116)

Owen’s philosophy of the pursuit of happiness remained the basis for his religious and economic orientation, from his opposition to sectarianism to his suggestion that activities such as cooking and eating be communalized. If Rodríguez is remembered as the interesting essayist who failed as a practical reformer, then Owen is just the reverse—in A History of British Socialism, Max Beer calls him “the first British socialist who did not turn to the past for inspiration,” while noting that he was “distinguished neither by original philosophic speculations nor outstanding literary achievements, but by strength of character and untiring reform activities” (162, 160). In 1828 each of the two writers stepped out onto an American stage with an expository project for saving the embattled republics of the former Spanish America—Rodríguez proclaiming a new epistemological model in Sociedades Americanas en 1828 and Owen writing the government of México with a proposal to found a utopian community in largely uninhabited lands in Coahuila and Texas. Rodríguez’s new episteme depends upon a correlation between popular will and government he defines as parallel

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to that between written language and the spoken word: “Orthological orthography, which is to say, founded in the mouth” (Ortografía Ortolójica, es decir, fundada en la boca) and “Ethological government, which is founded in customs” (gobierno Etolójico, esto es fundado en las costumbres) (1:269). Given the evident failure of warfare as a means for building stable political structures, he suggests that a social education designed to produce good citizens is the only way to assure that these citizens will come to demand proper representation in government. His grassroots approach posits a moral principle of community as its central social obligation: “live by an industry that does not damage oneself, and does not damage another, either directly or indirectly” (vivir de una industria que no le perjudique, ni perjudique á otro, directa ni indirectamente) (1:283; italics in original). The two writers coincide in their meticulous planning for an educational philosophy designed to propagate a definition of community very much at odds with that of the industrialized age they inhabit, and in this chapter I will explore their expressive techniques—how each defines that philosophy in writing and how each sees writing itself as a potentially revolutionary act. Owen’s and Rodríguez’s essays occupy an unexplored branch of avant-gardism often overshadowed by the more autonomous but less politically engaged visions of the avant-garde that followed (and that continue to dominate our understanding of the term). This is not to say that Rodríguez is part of a genealogy of avant-gardism from which descended either the French or the Latin American innovators who followed. Indeed, I have found no evidence of his influence on the avant-gardists of the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century. What does tie Rodríguez to the poetic experiments of Stéphane Mallarmé and Guillaume Apollinaire, along with the obvious similarities in textual appearance, is the belief in typographical manipulation as an aesthetic and a practical technique—a means of applying technology to communicate more effectively with readers. Rodríguez and Owen shared a belief that the social message their writings delivered was urgent and necessary news for the readership they imagined, and their techniques took as their point of departure the overlap between efficiency and individual expression. Their own idiosyncratic styles thus functioned as reflections of a desire to produce something more than individual expression, and they therefore occupy the slippery space between political and artistic avant-gardism.


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Recovering Saint-Simon’s Avant-Garde Against the context of the same industrialized Europe from which Owen plans his utopian communities and from which Rodríguez will depart for the newly independent Americas, Henri de Saint-Simon formulates the extramilitary use of the term “avant-garde” in his dialogue between an artist, a scientist, and an industrialist, who discuss their roles in bringing about the revolution that will produce a rational society. The artist describes his role as that of the avant-garde: We—the artists—will be your vanguard. The power of the arts is in effect the most immediate and most rapid of all powers. We have all kinds of weapons. When we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or canvas; we popularize them in poetry and song; we use, in turn, the lyre or the tabor, the ode or the ballad, the story or the novel; the drama is open to us, and through it, above all, we are able to exercise an electric and victorious influence. We address ourselves to man’s imagination and sentiments; consequently we are always bound to have the sharpest and most decisive effect. (Selected 281)

Saint-Simon, a veteran/survivor of both the American and French revolutions, posits here, as he does throughout his career, a plan for reorganizing industrial society. His system, which Emile Durkheim has identified as socialist rather than communist or utopian, envisions a new society in which economic interests themselves control the government. In this order a network of “commercial tribunals” finally becomes the effective government, as “men of industry have as their judges only peers and colleagues, while the role of legal socialists is reduced to a minimum” (Durkheim 126). Saint-Simon puts three supergroups of exceptional citizens—and here one’s status as exceptional depends upon merit rather than birth—in the role of directorship, and he calls these groups the industrials, the scholars, and the artists. Frank Manuel has argued that these three classes correspond to classifications identified by French physiologist Marie François Xavier Bichat—“psychophysiological types, so to speak, in each of which one quality predominated, the motor, the rational, or the emotive”—and that “as a rule, under the new division of labor the emotive or moralist branch tended to initiate projects, the scientific to criticize and evaluate them, and the administrators to execute them.” Manuel concludes that if “the spirit rather than the letter of Saint-Simon’s last writings is con-

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sidered,” the moral function, which would be filled by the artist, assumes a role more important than that of the scientist (121–22). Durkheim, in contrast, finds the artist’s position the least secure of the three, and Jack Himelblau has noted “Saint-Simón’s continual wavering and not trusting society to the artist” (Durkheim 137; Himelblau 75). Himelblau and Manuel agree, however, on the final importance the artist obtains in Saint-Simon’s last writings, literally becoming the conscience of the social body. Artists play the role of propagandists—“the artists, the men of imagination will begin the march; they will proclaim the future of the human species” (les artistes, les hommes à imagination Â�ouvriront la marche; ils proclameront l’avenir de l’espèce humaine)—but Saint-Simon expects them to do more than merely make change popular. If the new order is to endure, they must also serve as spiritual guides for the public—“to make society fascinated with its own well-being” (à passioner la société pour son bien-être général) (Christianisme 134). To Himelblau, though, the elevation of the artist comes with a price. By bestowing on the artist “sacerdotal characteristics,” Saint-Simon has in effect made the artist “a social servant, depriving him of his artistic freedom and hampering necessarily artistic creation,” since his idea of art derives its new powers not from intrinsic aesthetic value but from the salutary effects that value exerts on the general public (76). As Saint-Simon himself points out, the line between autonomy and propaganda remains anything but a clean division, as art had a long history of promoting, among other things, “the people’s belief in the superstitious ideas on which the popes had founded their omnipotence” (la croyance des peuples aux idées superstitieuses sur lesquelles les papes avaient fondé leur omnipotence) (Christianisme 129). In the new Saint-Simonist order, too, the artist will enjoy something less than complete autonomy, being yoked to a social body that also includes its rational and industrial elements. But art’s importance remains elemental—that same aesthetic beauty that served kings and popes remains a nonnegotiable component not only of the Saint-Simonist system but of the education of each citizen. Himelblau’s argument becomes particularly pertinent when viewed alongside contemporary notions of artistic integrity rather than an older system of noble patronage. Clearly some sort of shift has occurred between the thoroughly responsible presence of the artist in Saint-Simon’s vision and the now more familiar figure of the avant-gardist as an artist who sees himself or herself as anything but the first wave of a planned revolution. When an avant-gardist more familiar to contemporary ears, such as Mal-


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larmé, claims that the unorthodox textual design of Un coup de dés invokes a simultaneity impossible for traditionally laid-out verse, or when Apollinaire describes his own Calligrammes as the last gasp of the printed word “in the era when typography brilliantly ends its career” (à l’époque où la typographie termine brillamment sa carrière) before the eventual and inevitable domination of sound and movie recording, both are giving art itself a far more central role than that outlined by Saint-Simon’s artist.3 Indeed, by the reckoning of Saint-Simon’s artist, the poets have it backward, since the Saint-Simonist avant-garde seeks to employ art as a tool for making the general public more receptive to industrial progress and structural reforms. Art, in this view, seeks to aid the industrialists and philosophers in their mission to impose a new economic order and not to adapt in response to an economic order that changes of its own accord. Mallarmé and Apollinaire suggest that particularly expressive effects rather than political change might be the central goal of a new artistic project. Of course these expressive effects come intrinsically tied to technological advances outside the arts, and neither artist feels himself capable of winning a battle against technology—their innovations rather serve as analogies to technological advances: in the realm of artistic expression they claim to produce the same sort of leaps their readers have already seen and been influenced by in a larger, commercial sphere. Where these avantgardists differ from those of Saint-Simon is in their reason why; Mallarmé and Apollinaire posit expression itself as an end rather than a pedagogical tool. To Donald Drew Egbert this shift in perspective is an inevitable result of the untenable position in which Saint-Simon places the individual artist, giving him or her a mystical ability to sway public opinion but little role in making decisions about what this ability will accomplish. At once a servant of the idea makers and of the propaganda engine that makes the popularization of those ideas possible, the Saint-Simonist artist soon finds this sense of revolutionary power impossible to contain. Thus the artists remained “enchanted” with the power Saint-Simon granted them, but “rejected his belief that art should be devoted to achieving social goals, and therefore should be functional, utilitarian, didactic, and easily understandable” (122). So the faithful first wave of Saint-Simon’s military metaphor holds on to its literal leading role while ceasing to accommodate the main body of troops that comes behind it. There is also something delightfully prelapsarian in the notion of a golden age before the barrier between art and life became an essential concept for twentieth-century avant-gardism. Renato Poggioli places the

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division in late nineteenth-century France, arguing that La Revue indépendant “was perhaps the last organ to gather fraternally, under the same banner, the rebels of politics and the rebels of art,” before concluding that such unity became impossible at the end of the nineteenth century when “what might be called the divorce of the two avant-gardes took place” (11). Avant-gardism, in Poggioli’s theory, comes to be defined by “the dialectic of a movement,” a dialectic that inevitably ends in failure as the artistic movement shifts from “activism” to “antagonism” to “nihilism,” before finally reaching a self-destructive “agonistic moment” when it manages to rejoice in its own destruction “as an obscure or unknown sacrifice to the success of future movements” (25–26). Thus the avant-gardist sees himself or herself not as the harbinger of inevitable human progress, but as a dissident voice that will at best inspire the unborn dissidents of the future. Two leading twentieth-century theorists of the avant-garde have defined the concept in terms of the relationship between art and politics: Peter Bürger couches avant-gardism in terms of an attack on the institution of art, while Andreas Huyssen insists on the avant-garde’s need “to remain dialectically related to that for which it serves as the vanguard” (4–5). For Bürger the bounds of avant-gardism are those of art itself. That is, the avant-gardist begins as an artist who wishes to destroy the conventions of art in order to create a new, institution-free art “integrated into the praxis of life” (53–54). Approaching the process as a great historical failure, Bürger focuses on the inherent contradictions in the avant-gardist’s position, given that this “integration into the praxis of life” represents anything but liberation. Noting that the utopian visions of the avant-garde depend upon “an element of the noncommittal and an absence of any consequences,” Bürger points out that much is lost when art becomes “wholly absorbed” in life. The artist, then, faces two contradictory forces, since the very power of “art” that he or she wishes to use to change “life” is literally a function of the distance between them. Furthermore, the creation of utopian alternatives to “life” as it exists will not necessarily spark societal change, given that the “better order” created by art “relieves the existing society of those forces that make for change” (50). Bringing about a better social order through art, be it written, visual, or musical, thus remains an elusive goal, in Bürger’s view, and the artist’s attempt to achieve it faces the Scylla of an art that disappears into “life” and the Charybdis of an autonomous creation that becomes a simulacrum of the desired social change. Huyssen’s characterization of the avant-garde as an artistic institution goes back to Henri de Saint-Simon’s description of the role of art itself


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in the dreamed-of revolution: a wing of the revolutionary party charged with using the attractiveness of artistic genres to make the public more Â�amenable to the party message. Like Poggioli, Huyssen sees a divorce between this historical mission and the more clearly aesthetic one invoked by the term today, though he puts that divorce in the 1930s rather than at the end of the nineteenth century, while noting that “as early as the 1890’s the avant-garde’s insistence on cultural revolt clashed with the bourgeoisie’s need for cultural legitimation,” that is, the reality of material progress and the artistic techniques designed to propagandize that progress failed to stick together (5). In both Huyssen’s and Bürger’s conceptions of the term, artistic aspirations and political ones remain fundamentally contradictory. An artist is only a useful technician for revolution in a social context in which his or her techniques are important. Huyssen, however, offers mass culture as a consolation for this failure, a place where “the utopian hopes of the historical avantgarde are preserved, even though in a distorted form,” and it is mass culture that finally links reformist projects like those of Rodríguez, Owen, and Saint-Simon to avant-garde movements like futurism and dadaism (15). If the commercialization of mass culture indeed allows the artist/advertiser to serve as a first wave of something, so long as that something remains subordinate to the larger social order the artist/advertiser and his or her mission/employer inhabit, the twentieth-century vision of the failed avant-garde loops back toward an earlier failure—the final inefficacy of reformist visions to find, in the lecture hall and newspaper, the means of radically changing the economic and social conditions that made those instruments possible in the first place. The inadequacy of all these theories in the face of a thorough mixture of political and artistic avant-gardism such as that we see suggested in Owen’s essays and embodied in those of Rodríguez is painfully clear. Each depends on a meaningful demarcation between “life” and “art,” and without a sense of this demarcation as an unavoidable reality all its own, even the nostalgic wish for a prelapsarian unification of art and politics loses its tragic tension. Nor do we lack for compelling arguments to this effect. Guido A. Podestá notes how clearly useless Bürger’s concept of the avantgarde becomes when placed beside American examples of avant-gardism, given that the “institution of art” might be the last thing these movements seek to attack.4 Despite and in fact because of this particular disconnection between artistic avant-gardism as it is commonly understood and the political strain practiced by Simón Rodríguez and Robert Owen, it is im-

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portant to analyze what threads do connect their utopianism and the artistic movements theorized in the twentieth century as avant-gardist. While never self-consciously regarding themselves as artists, both thinkers see the presentation of their ideas as something more than a mere communicative exercise—namely, as a means of exemplifying the new epistemes they wish to propose.

Robert Owen: The Transmissible Utopian Community Robert Owen’s writing career begins with a series of four essays produced between 1813 and 1816 and published together in various editions under the title A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, and the Application of the Principle to Practice. Published some thirteen years after his initial arrival in New Lanark, these essays cite the practical success of his reforms as proof of the essential truth of his message, a truth he expresses in economic terms as “improvements of the living machinery” that “are now producing a return exceeding fifty per cent, and will shortly create profits equal to cent per cent on the original capital expended in them.” In short, his argument goes, the series of humanitarian reforms by which he improved the hygiene, morale, and overall well-being of the workers at New Lanark should be viewed as anything but charity. Rather, the law of the market itself supports the logic of such reforms, or, as Owen puts it: “If, then, due care as to the state of your inanimate machines can produce such beneficial results, what may not be expected if you devote equal attention to your vital machines, which are far more wonderfully constructed?” (New View 5). Owen’s interest in improving the human “machinery” naturally leads him to focus on education; what W. H. G. Armytage has called “the invariable concomitant of Utopist endeavor” thus forms a core of Owen’s plan (36). Declaring reading and writing to be “merely instruments by which knowledge either true or false may be imparted,” Owen emphasizes the ethical principle of shared happiness as the foundation that must underlie whatever skills are developed—the “manner” of education, he argues, matters less than the “matter” to be taught (New View 75). Part of Owen’s method is the requirement that the principle of shared happiness be treated not as an abstract concept for memorization and discussion but as the practical rule governing every aspect of playground and classroom


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life. Having already posited the school as a refuge from the influence of “untrained parents,” he further suggests that it function as a universe in which this moral principle holds sway, just as Copernican physics might be said to “govern” the real universe. Thus, in a move common among eighteenth-century thinkers, Owen comfortably makes scientific progress a metaphor for social progress and suggests that though “man” seems “to have remained as ignorant of himself as he was of the solar system prior to the days of Copernicus and Galileo,” his schools will strive to embed the principle of shared happiness so seamlessly into everyday life that the students “will receive the same conviction of its truth, that those familiar with mathematics now entertain of the demonstrations of Euclid” (New View 42, 48).5 By the time Owen comes to write his missive to the Mexican government, he has already participated in the founding of two utopian communities, the successful venture at New Lanark and the failure at New Harmony, Indiana. Beginning with a nod toward the difficulties inherent in founding a new republic—“formidable obstacles which will retard, if not impede, the achievement of your desires” (obstáculos formidables que retardarán, ya que no impedirán, la realización de vuestros deseos)— he offers “some measures that will provide you with the means of making the difficulties that surround you disappear” (algunos medios que os proporcionarán el modo de hacer desaparecer las dificultades de que estáis rodeados) (“Petición” 183). After making the claim we might expect—that his own experience and research had allowed him to master two “sciences” necessary for creating “a superior character in children” (un carácter superior en los niños) and of educating each student “in such a way that he or she will enjoy the most complete security from birth until death” (de manera que goce de la más completa seguridad desde su nacimiento hasta su muerte)—Owen goes on to suggest that America, and Mexico in particular, offers the only ideal space in which to realize his experiment (184). Owen argues, with remarkable tone-deafness toward the Mexican government, that his experiment needs the legal equivalent of empty space—“a new province in which there are no laws, institutions or known concerns” (una nueva comarca en que no existen las leyes, instituciones y preocupaciones conocidas)—and that Texas and Coahuila provide such space in abundance (“Petición” 184). He promises to cobble together a community “of individuals of any nationality whose spirits will be so enlightened as to make them superior to all questions of locality” (de individuos de cualquier nacionalidad cuyo ánimo sea tan ilustrado que se haga superior a las preÂ�

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ocupaciones de la localidad) and to deliver, with this community, a solution to every division that separates humankind: “it will be a society which will prepare the means to put an end to wars, religious animosity, the mercantile rivalry between nations, and dissension between individuals” (será una sociedad que prepara los medios de poner fin a las guerras, a las animosidades religiosas y a las rivalidades mercantiles entre las naciones, y a las disensiones entre los individuos) (185). Owen thus posits a prototype of the larger harmony he hopes to inspire. He will eliminate national, economic, and religious boundaries by offering a community whose united emphasis on shared happiness and education will transcend such banal divisions. Owen concludes with a gloss of the relationship between scientific progress and social reform, finally putting his own proposal in perspective not as a brave venture into uncharted waters but as a logical reaction: The increase of human knowledge, the progress of science, and more than anything, the prolific nature of mechanical inventions and chemical discoveries, which will make much manual labor unnecessary, now demand a change, in the government of the world, a moral revolution that will better the condition of producers and keep them from destroying, by means of a physical revolution, those who do not produce. (El aumento de los conocimientos humanos, el progreso de las ciencias y, más que todo, los prodigios de las invenciones mecánicas y de los descubrimientos químicos, que evitan la necesidad de mucho trabajo manual, exigen hoy un cambio, en el gobierno del mundo, una revolución moral que mejore la condición de los productores y les impida destruir, por medio de una revolución física, a los no productores.) (“Petición” 186)

Here, the mission of social change is to provide a nonviolent outlet for the social shifts that modernity has rendered necessary: “It is to be desired by everyone that revolutions do not take place, and that the improvements that are added to the era in which we live be made without violence by the established governments” (Es de desear para todo el mundo que no haya revoluciones, y que las mejoras que aumentan en la época en que vivimos se hagan sin violencia por los Gobiernos establecidos) (186–87). In keeping with what Bestor defines as the communitarian’s middle way of “demanding reforms as far-reaching, as drastic and rapid as those that appeared in any revolutionary program” while at the same time objecting to “the method of revolution,” Owen is proposing an alternative reality in which


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persuasion rather than violence causes governmental change and in which governments listen to reason rather than to threats of violent dissolution (Bestor 9). In this sense Owen shows a certain respect for established government, positing his community not as the nucleus of a sweeping revolution but as a social laboratory whose results will convince those “Gobiernos establecidos” to take on the necessary reforms themselves. The Rodríguez who published Sociedades Americanas en 1828 had also shown a certain respect for established government. His career had begun with his 1794 proposal for the professionalization of the Caracas school system, and later, as the first education minister of independent Bolivia, he saw his proposals for a secular public school system fall victim to the traditionalism of the public and his disagreements with Sucre. By the time he formulates an essay-length microcosm for an enlightened American future, his views have organized themselves around an epistemological principle similar to Owen’s. Furthermore, since he writes from an American continent recently liberated after decades of revolutionary violence, Rodríguez need not search for an open space in which to put his radical reforms into practice. He makes, for the South American continent, the same claim Owen does for Texas and Coahuila. When he begins to argue the nuts and bolts of his beliefs about education and society, Rodríguez echoes Owen on several fronts. For example, he, too, sees the school as a special microcosm for freeing the younger generation from the prejudices of its elders—“The damage done to society by an ignorant old man, conversing with a little grandchild, is greater than the good promoted by a thousand philosophers writing .â•¯.â•¯. volumes” (Mas es el daño que hace, á la sociedad, un viejo ignorante, conversando con un nietecito, que el bien que promueven mil filósovos escribiendo .â•¯.â•¯. volúmenes)—and, like Owen, he downplays the significance of literacy itself: “ideas! .â•¯.â•¯. ideas! before letters” (ideas! .â•¯.â•¯. ideas! primero que letras) (2:112, 130–31). Finally, and most importantly, Rodríguez, too, defines a guiding moral principle as his core educational value; and his principle, like Owen’s, is clearly, to use Bestor’s term, communitarian.6 Where Owen sought to inculcate a concept of shared happiness to bind individual interests, Rodríguez invokes as his core social value empathy based on knowledge of one’s fellow citizens: “among all the knowledge that man should acquire, there is one that is a strict obligation .â•¯.â•¯. that of his peers” (entre los conocimientos que el hombre puede adquirir, hay uno que le es de estricta obligacion .â•¯.â•¯. el de sus semejantes) (2:115). This principle of social knowledge leads Rodríguez to another core truth about social

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behavior, the implicit limits that a community places on individual freedom, and this focus on the social dimension of human behavior leads him to the concept of “shared faculties” mentioned earlier (2:116). Rodríguez goes on to make a series of arguments for government involvement in education, suggesting that the government take over the role of “common parent in education” (padre comun en la educación), likening the necessity of universal education to that of the vaccine against smallpox, which had been instituted in colonial Venezuela (2:120, 124). In true communitarian fashion, and in echo of Owen, he argues that the progressive enlightenment of the Spanish American public will prevent at least a certain kind of revolution, in which the public rebels against its leader “as the humors rebel against an individual” (como se rebelan los humores contra el individuo) (2:126). While the revolution of a long-repressed and ignorant public holds no attraction whatsoever for Rodríguez, he does not advocate education as a road toward public docility. What concerns him is rather the false docility brought on by ignorance. Rodríguez is always careful to distinguish between the violent wars called “revolutions” and the deep epistemological shift from authority to reason that the term implies. Just as Owen casts broad societal change as the inevitable future— “the world approves—and none can resist” (this despite a number of practical setbacks)—Rodríguez invokes the inevitability of scientific discovery as a metaphor for the progress he is calling for: “there is no truth that can be hidden after the instant in which nature has revealed it” (no hay verdad que pueda ocultarse desde el instante en que la naturaleza la descubre) (Owen, New View 225; Rodríguez 2:167). And with this, both writers invoke the precariousness of their own position. On the one hand, each is a prophet proclaiming an unpopular truth to a skeptical public whose imagination will not brook this inevitable future. On the other hand, each sees himself as a propagandist whose job it is to communicate this message to an audience that may be swayed by what it reads.

A Forum of the Newspaper and Mail Coach Owen’s successful effort to launch his career through a propaganda blitz has been well documented. Bestor and Armytage both cite Owen’s account of an 1817 campaign to send newspaper versions of his essays, sometimes


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in the form of letters, to—among others—“each of the leading persons in all classes” at a total cost of four thousand pounds; Armytage notes, again echoing Owen, that the volume of his mailings was such that “on one occasion his newspapers caused the mail coaches a delay of twenty minutes” (Bestor 71; Armytage 81).7 Noting that Owen’s status as a well-known voice of reform dated from this burst of publicity, Bestor characterizes the four thousand pounds as “money well spent” (71). For Rodríguez, whose writings reveal similar ambitions, the intricacies of newspaper publishing and publicity proved less friendly in the absence of a fortune sufficient to send tens of thousands of copies of his essays to the movers and shakers of Spanish American society. Lastarria’s commentary on the disgust that Rodríguez’s unorthodox style produced in much of the reading public has already been pointed out, and Rodríguez spends a great deal of ink defending his style, even including, at the beginning of the 1834 edition of Luces y virtudes sociales, a laudatory quote from the editor of El Mercurio Peruano. The editor characterizes Rodríguez as “a meditating genius” (un jenio meditador) who has managed “the singular innovation of painting thoughts before the eyes, by means of the size and form of letters, the artificial placement of words, and the isolation of phrases” (la singular innovacion de pintar, á los ojos, los pensamientos, por medio del tamaño y forma de las letras, de la colocacion artificiosa de las palabras, y del aislamiento de las frases) (2:99). Rather than let the editor’s words stand on their own, Rodríguez adds his own commentary, insisting that readers take note that this particular intellectual authority has found the eccentricity of his text’s presentation altogether suited to its message: “he says that the method of writing is a singular innovation, he does not say (as the professor of various sciences does) that it is a ruse to sell more papers: he says that the production is unique and that it has merit—he does not say that it is a collection of advice and little stories nor a grab-bag” (dice que el modo de escribir es una singular innovacion, no dice (como el profesor de varias ciencias) que es un arbitrio para vender papel: dice que la produccion es singular y que tiene mérito—no dice que es coleccion de consejos y cuenÂ�tecitos, ni cajon de sastre) (2:100). Clearly Rodríguez’s encounters with critics have already provided a laundry list of condemnations of his typographical layouts. The editor, who serves as something closer to an ideal reader, thus becomes an example for Rodríguez to brandish before potential readers in an attempt to preempt any knee-jerk reactions to his style. Along with demonstrating Rodríguez’s faith in this particular newspaper’s

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intellectual capital, this preface represents a catalogue of his frustrations— the plea of an innovative writer suffering the indifference and misreadings of his contemporaries. The homage both Owen and Rodríguez pay to the newspaper, the first by purchasing and mailing thousands of them and the second by citing an editor’s praise, recalls Benedict Anderson’s well-known formulation of the press as a space in which the “imagined community” of the nationstate takes its shape. Arguing that a nation-state’s existence stems from the collective imagination of a public that never sees itself—since most citizens never lay eyes on most of their fellows—Anderson identifies the newspaper as the prime source of this community.8 The press’s function as an imaginary tool for the public imagination also lends itself to manipulating that imagination, a move Jürgen Habermas calls the loss of the public sphere’s “political character,” with the result “that the means of ‘psychological facilitation’ could become an end in itself for a commercially fostered consumer attitude” (169). In this structural critique of the public sphere, the people’s role as the authors of imagined community becomes more precarious. The same forum that creates a vibrant, politically active public can become a tool for controlling and manipulating that public.9 Thus, the power to emancipate implies, and indeed demands, the power to enslave by rhetorical and emotional manipulation.10 Owen’s testimonial writing—his explanation for how he came to possess the truth about how economic communities should be organized— brings with it, as Bestor has pointed out, a mystical, even religious dimension. The power for sympathy seems, in Owen’s description, to come from above or, as Bestor puts it, from “God (or the Owenite equivalent),” as though some supernatural force had ordained him the prophet of human happiness (61). In his 1816 “Address Delivered to the Inhabitants of New Lanark,” Owen explains his activism by asking his audience how he, seeing the human suffering that surrounded him, could “remain an idle spectator.” Before this question leads any listeners to wonder about their own status as spectators, Owen answers it with a resounding no, going on to point out that this empathy has been his special gift and the driving force behind his public persona: No! The cause which fashioned me from the womb—the circumstances by which I was surrounded from my birth, and over which I had no influence whatever, formed me with far other faculties, habits, and sentiments. These gave me a mind that could not rest satisfied without trying every possible


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expedient to relieve my fellow men from their wretched situation, and formed it of such a texture that obstacles of the most formidable nature served but to increase my ardour, and to fix within me a settled determination, either to overcome them, or to die in the attempt. (New View 122)

While this answer is unsystematic, it does betray Owen’s beliefs about the deterministic power of circumstances—albeit in a context of extracircumstantial determination. What is peculiar about this passage is how meaningless that argument about circumstance becomes when placed in an atmosphere of pure determinism of the sort that Bestor finds so troubling: “The basic dilemma of any deterministic philosophy Owen never understood, for he never troubled to explain how he, alone among men, had broken the iron chain of cause and consequence” (61). While Owen can call circumstance the author of his particular gift for empathy, he still cannot explain why these circumstances should affect him so differently than they did others who grew up against a backdrop of similar economic inequality—basically any English urbanite of his generation. Still, his immediate rhetorical aims are clear. A middle-class factory manager turned factory owner speaking to a crowd of workers whose experience has undoubtedly taught them to greet members of Owen’s class with a healthy dose of skepticism, he is attempting, above all else, to prove his sincerity. While he elsewhere makes arguments about the economic viability of a humanely structured factory community, here he works hard to establish his altruism. This movement toward sincerity, the lifeblood of the reliable essayistic voice, reaches a kind of apex in a letter published in 1817 in a London newspaper (and most likely shipped, by Owen, all over the world). Remarking on his own appearance at a recent public meeting, Owen recounts that he had come unprepared—“I could not finish my preparations for it in time even to read over a fair copy of them”—but that the sheer force of his message had trumped any impediment his lack of preparation might have caused: “I knew then, however, as I did before, and as I know now, that the subject would carry me through; and it will continue to do so, whatever obstacles, trivial or important, may intervene” (New View 187). Here he manages not only to comment on his present faith in the cause, but to cite a past success as proof that he has long possessed such faith. The biblical echo, too, is impossible to miss. The reformer whose early religious impulses had led him to read widely before concluding, at the age of ten, “that all existing theologies were erroneous” finds himself proclaiming a secularist version of Christ’s advice to his disciples,

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who, when “brought before governors and kings,” are instructed to “take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak” (Claeys, Introduction vii; Matt. 10:18–19). In Owen’s formulation it is social equality that reaches the transcendent status of divine intervention. For Owen this account of inspiration’s triumph over technique represents a high-water mark for his interest in the formal presentation of his ideas. He goes to great lengths to ensure that learned and influential people see those ideas in print but his essays offer little reflection on how the act of expression and the act of thinking might overlap. Rodríguez, who also looks to newspapers as platforms that will at once transmit his ideas and legitimize them, goes further in attempting to theorize an aesthetic of the essay. In his case the overlap between a functional transmission of ideas and a reflection on how they are conceived remains a constant source of narrative tension. Luces y virtudes sociales, for example, is composed in three phases that become separate rhetorical approaches to the argument that stable democracy depends on a national commitment to social education. His first approach, written in an erudite but conversational style reminiscent of Montaigne for its affability and use of historical anecdote, turns on its head the eighteenth-century argument favoring practical, mechanical education over classical languages: if living in a republic means adopting a wholly new concept of authority and citizenship, his reasoning goes, then an education in political theory becomes the most practical education citizens could hope to give their children. Finding that the recently independent societies of South America are divided between two forces—“the moral, in the distinguished class, and the material, among the common people” (la moral en la clase distinguida, y la material en el pueblo)— Rodríguez compares this arrangement to the reproductive structure of a dioecian plant and suggests that a new arrangement is needed “in imitation of those plants that have both powers in a single stem” (á imitacion de otras plantas que en un mismo pié, tienen los dos poderes) (2:107). Americans, Rodríguez continues, should make it their obligation to read more educational theory as a way of approaching and if possible closing this gap. As the paragraphs unfold, the bursts of unconventional text design serve mainly to punctuate the conventional prose layout. Arguing that Europe’s splendor only hides “the horrible picture of its misery and vice— rising from a foundation of ignorance” (el horroroso cuadro de su miseria


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y de sus vicios—resaltando en un fondo de ignorancia), Rodríguez uses a variation in type to create an interruption: europe ignorant!!

(some will interrupt)

(ignorante la europa!! [interrumpirán algunos]) (2:109)

Rodríguez responds to this interruption with a catalogue of European depravity that ranges from Russian serfdom to the continent’s widespread anti-Semitism. In conclusion, he notes the effect this catalogue should have had on the reader when he points out that, in light of his arguments, the famed “enlightenment” of European nations should provoke anything but admiration: “then think about the effects produced, in people of all classes, by those rays of light that this so admired wisdom has given off, and one will conclude that” (piénsese, despues, en el efecto que han producido, en todas las clases del pueblo, los rayos de luz que ha despedido, esa misma sabiduria que se admira, y se concluirá que) public instruction in the 19th century demands much philosophy that the general interest is clamoring for a reform and that america is called by its circumstances, to ignite it it will seem a daring paradox .â•¯.â•¯. .â•¯.â•¯. but that doesn’t matter .â•¯.â•¯. events will go on proving that it is a very obvious truth America should not imitate slavishly but rather be original. (la instrucción publica en el siglo 19 pide mucha filosofia

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que el interes jeneral está clamando por una reforma y que la america está llamada por las circunstancias, á emprenderla atrevida paradoja parecerá .â•¯.â•¯. .â•¯.â•¯. no importa .â•¯.â•¯. los acontecimientos irán probando, que es una verdad muy obvia la América no debe imitar servilmente sinó ser orijinal.) (2:109–10)

On a purely visual level, the passage stands out from the rest of Rodríguez’s essay like a billboard. Essentially a block quote, it permits Rodríguez to cite himself, speaking in a clear, aphoristic voice that seems an external authority. And soon the voice splits again. After offering the startling argument that the philosophical process in America must save the world from Europe’s vices, an understated voice—the real narrator, readers are expected to assume—steps in to offer reassurance in italics that seem quiet in the midst of so much visual action. For readers who are not yet convinced, this voice says not to worry—observation itself will eventually prove the passage’s oracular conclusion. If the genre’s roots in Montaigne and Bacon already give the essay a certain bias toward reading as observation, in which the reader apparently “sees” the writer thinking in real time, as Michael Hall has argued, this passage initiates a process of doubling back that allows the reader access to the process by which Rodríguez’s argument convinces (Hall 79). Alicia Ríos has called the effect produced by Rodríguez’s rhetorical questionand-answer technique “this false pretension of the reader’s active participation in the intertextual dialogue” (esa falsa pretensión de participación activa del lector dentro del diálogo intertextual), since whatever plurality the discourse may contain is ultimately artifice on the narrator’s part (152).11 Here, along with this effect of quasi-dialogue, Rodríguez produces a moment of theater in which the reader sees his ideas at work on a narrative stage. The technique of breaking the argument into rhetorical chunks allows Rodríguez to diagram the process by which it finally becomes convincing and, at the same time, to make that process appear to be


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something that “events” (los acontecimientos) will inevitably prove. Where Owen counts on his own sincerity as narrator and the moral imperative of his message, Rodríguez explores cognition itself, and even a moment of bold theatrical presentation fails to quiet his worries about how difficult that process might turn out to be. Toward the conclusion of the first part of Luces y virtudes sociales, Rodríguez makes a favorite argument on the insufficiency of functional literacy—“what will he speak of who has no ideas?” (¿de qué hablará el que no tenga ideas?)—before positing the precarious condition of his own essay as an example of the feebleness of books: into how many hands will it fall that will deign to open it? .â•¯.â•¯. Having seen the title, how many will there be that want to read the book? .â•¯.â•¯. once the reading is begun, how many will finish it? .â•¯.â•¯. How many will understand what they have read? .â•¯.â•¯. How many new partisans will General Instruction have gained? .â•¯.â•¯. how many will defend it actively? .â•¯.â•¯. and who will put it into practice?! .â•¯.â•¯. ?! .â•¯.â•¯. ?! (¿en cuantas manos caerá que se dignen abrirlo? .â•¯.â•¯. Visto el título ¿Cuántos habrá que quieran leer el libro? .â•¯.â•¯. emprendida la lectura ¿cuantos la acabarán? .â•¯.â•¯. ¿Cuántos entenderán bien lo que hayan leido? .â•¯.â•¯. ¿Cuántos partidarios habrá ganado la Instrucción Jeneral?.â•¯.â•¯. cuantos la protejerán activamente? .â•¯.â•¯. y ¿¡quien la pondrá en práctica?! .â•¯.â•¯. ?! .â•¯.â•¯. ?!) (2:130–31)

Against all these possible difficulties, Rodríguez offers the rationale for his tripartite structure. This detailed and intimate introduction comprises the first part and will be followed by a radically condensed synopsis justified as a nod toward his learned readers: To the wise one should speak in sentences (he who understands them is wise) and they should be talked to that way, because for them sentences are words. (A los sabios se debe hablar por sentencias [el que las entienda es sabio] y se les debe hablar así, porque para ellos las sentencias son palabras.) (2:136)

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The final part will employ on a wider scale the typographical techniques just analyzed to represent visually the logic behind his arguments, an expressive task he regards as the writer’s responsibility: however the question is posed: there are rules for establishing it: in the process of resolving it certain modifications figure in that without altering the Idea can clarify or obscure it. (de cualquer modo se propone una cuestion: para sentarla hay reglas: en el trabajo de resolverla caben modificaciones que, sin alterar la Idea pueden aclararla ú oscurecerla.) (2:138)

Here, of course, Rodríguez proposes going beyond the mere transmission of ideas and creating a discursive space in which to work through them in real time, like a mathematics professor solving problems on a chalkboard. Where Owen promises new ideas in the familiar forums of the public meeting and newspaper letter, Rodríguez proposes a rethinking of the essay itself.12

Conclusion: The Medium and the Message Along with their literal employment of the technical instruments of the nineteenth-century press—circulation and mail service for Owen, and typographic innovation for Rodríguez—the two writers’ reformist postures combine the political commitment of Saint-Simonism with a general notion of technological progress that prefigures the later avant-garde’s emphasis on technology as an epistemological force. Consciously linking the new political order he sees on the horizon to the technological process of the printing press, Owen notes that this medium’s productions now show the errors of the systems of our forefathers so distinctly, that they must be, when pointed out, evident to all classes of the community, and render it absolutely necessary that new legislative measures be im-


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mediately adopted to prevent the confusion which must arise from even the most ignorant being competent to detect the absurdity and glaring injustice of many of those laws by which they are now governed. (New View 21–22)

Rather than positing himself an agent of change within a static institution, Owen claims, like Mallarmé or Apollinaire, to have adapted his productions to the demands of broader technological change. Such a claim also comes through in his descriptions of the performance of utopian avantgardism, not only as a spirit capable of carrying him through a difficult speaking engagement, but also as a rational technique for impressing upon others the economic realities of the industrial world. Rodríguez, too, defines his mission as a response to larger developments and counts the press among them, describing it as the “candelabrum” (candelabro) of enlightenment and arguing for its power as a means of making knowledge popular (2:171): One divulges, everything that one divulges to the vulgate, by means of announcements, posters, or gazettes; but one does not generalize anything except by extending it with art, so that it arrives, in contrast, to all of the individuals in a single body. (Se divulga, todo lo que se difunde en el vulgo, por medio de pregones, carteles ó gacetas; pero no se jeneraliza sino lo que se extiende con arte, paraque llegue, en excepcion, á todos los individuos de un cuerpo.) (2:137).

Rodríguez’s appropriation of the term “arte” is particularly interesting here, as he places it not in an elevated, autonomous position, but as playing something akin to the role of Saint-Simon’s propagandist. Art, for Rodríguez, is the skill necessary to render difficult ideas fit for popular consumption without diluting them in the process. He goes on to define this practice of “extending with art” as an ethical responsibility for writers and publishers alike: “the possession of media implies the obligation to make use of them” (la posesion de los medios, impone la obligacion de hacer uso de ellos) (2:137). Thus Rodríguez articulates the ethic of an avant-garde that never managed to be remembered, an ethic that defines “media” as a means of pedagogy and thus ties possession of the means of communication to a responsibility for fostering popular enlightenment. Owen practices what Rodríguez preaches, using his wealth to effectively

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commandeer a portion of the English press, but Rodríguez goes further by defining the “art” of publishing in relation to an ethical duty to employ new techniques. What he calls the “painting of words” implies the writer’s task to provide visual evidence of the “connection of Ideas and the connection of thoughts” (conexion de Ideas y conexion de pensamientos) (2:151–52). So when Rodríguez claims early on that his text will demonstrate his ideas visually— In the questions that follow one will see â•…â•… (En las cuestiones â•…â•… iguientes se ve

}-{ }-{

the author’s way of thinking what he pretends and what he hopes for el modo de pensar del autor lo que pretende y lo que espera) (2:139)

—the “art” he defines innovates for the sake of “generalizing” the communication of increasingly complicated ideas. For Rodríguez, as for Owen and Saint-Simon, the power of innovation lies not in its ability to destroy the institution of art but in its coercion of artistic expression as a means of spreading ideas. In Rodríguez’s case, though, this transformation is as much a process of education as of exhortation. He imagines the printed page as a pedagogical space in which sentences and paragraphs might be dissected and demystified before a reading public that will in turn develop its own faculties of analysis. This posture raises as many questions as it answers, since the demystifying narrator occupies a particularly strong position from which to manipulate readers. Rodríguez’s continued selfconscious reflection on the process of reading and writing thus represents more a struggle with the mantle of enlightened narrator than a solution of its paradox.

Conclusion

A Hemisphere Created for the Page

I

f, as Jorge Luis Borges asserts, every new writer “creates his preâ•‡ cursors” (crea a sus precursores) (109), forcing a reimagination of the literary past on the part of readers and critics, then the recovery of Simón Rodríguez cannot help but produce repercussions. In the case of a writer so long forgotten, the re-creation of the canon necessary to accommodate his work invites another imaginary history, one in which Sociedades Americanas became a widely cited touchstone for Spanish American social criticism, and in which Rodríguez’s notion of “social education” became as common a term as Miranda and Martí’s “Nuestra América.” Of course such an imaginary history would be false, and so the reconstructed Rodríguez suffers the peculiar fate of being read into a twenty-first-century vision of the Spanish American project to which he did not contribute, a project created at least in part by excluding heterodox voices. Susana Rotker has pointed out that Rodríguez’s definition of social virtue as a deeply felt “sympathy between equals” (simpatía entre iguales) remains “transgressive” (transgresora) a century and a half after his death (“Simón Rodríguez” 57). Rodríguez’s contradictions make it difficult to categorize him within the dominant reading of Spanish American enlightenment as a clash between European ideals and practical realities. An experienced European traveler, Rodríguez insisted on an American privilege of discernment—the privilege to investigate European (and U.S.) history and apply it when necessary without feeling bound to it and without imagining that application as an invasion into an imagined autochthonous reality. With his insistence on imagining human progress according to a vision of enlightenment as a universal project in the broadest sense of the 185

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word, that is, as universally human rather than as the result of an imposed European and imperial unity, Rodríguez sees free thought as always and everywhere an original act. Nor does this idealistic notion of human reasonableness necessarily put him at odds with the complication of his time. The list of Rodríguez’s political positions reveals anything but an obsession with an idée fixe in defiance of his surrounding reality. Foreseeing the dire economic consequences of the free trade promoted by Bolívar and others for Spanish America’s artisan economy and agriculture, Rodríguez proposed industrialization with homegrown capital, and a conscious government effort to populate uninhabited lands with Spanish American colonists. An anticlerical, freethinking revolutionary, he proposed religious tolerance rather than “freedom of religion,” concerned that U.S.- or British-style proliferation of sects would erode the Catholic Church’s role as a force for social cohesion. Finally, as a lifelong advocate of a professional teaching corps (an attitude that put him at odds with Joseph Lancaster, one of Bolívar’s favorite reformers), Rodríguez tended to propose his schools as small, locally funded units, which made them more closely resemble Thomas Jefferson’s vision of municipal “wards” than a Jacobin vision of education as a machine for controlling public opinion. If the postrevolutionary period inspired an epidemic of soul-searching in which learned Spanish Americans turned their gazes back across the Atlantic, expecting to find their governmental magic bullet “not as a function of their own reality but in comparison with the European model” (no en función de la propia realidad sino por comparación con el modelo europeo) even as they searched for an original solution, Rodríguez sought to defuse that model by scripting an America in which enlightenment would be an ongoing pedagogical process (Rotker, “Evangelio” 32). Bolívar, for example, would complain about the gap between republican ideals and the public “material” of which the Spanish American republics were actually made up, invoking Montesquieu and the need to reconcile “the business of the legislatures” with “the spirit of the nation” (Montesquieu 294). What Bolívar was warning against, of course, was the implementation of a federalist system modeled on the United States in a society with a much thinner experience of self-rule. Where the Liberator’s search for a golden mean led him to combine in the constitution of Bolivia a life long presidency with a parliamentary structure, a kind of hybrid between a monarchist and republican conception of government, Rodríguez opted, in both a temporal and a hierarchal sense, for the bottom-up approach of first reforming education.

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On a temporal axis, Rodríguez proposes as the salient aspect of republican government not a new constitution or governing structure, but a commitment to public education.1 In this vision Spanish America, like Rousseau’s Emile, would undergo a one-generation process of enlightenment that the new, enlightened generation would then enshrine into government policy. By Rodríguez’s plan the goal is a future constitution and the immediate concern is to put in operation the schools where its authors will be taught.2 Furthermore, rather than expecting a legislative body to shape and change the public, Rodríguez looks to education as the only means of founding a new public that will then become the legislators and voters of the future republic. His bare-bones plan for funding schools at the town level might thus be viewed less as a federalist posture than as a compromise with reality, since only at the local level could such a change happen immediately. His posture takes risks, of course, permitting the possibility of abuse should the school system itself become corrupt or should that educated public behave with a violent or tyrannical will. Rodríguez, like Thomas Paine before him, tempers these concerns about the public’s excesses by insisting on the triumph of reason, believing that the spread of an empirical, secular, and essentially skeptical view of human knowledge will in the end lead to future governments less prone to excess and abuse. Along with the radical nature of this educational approach to governmental reform, Rodríguez’s signature graphic devices show an equally “transgressive” (to borrow from Susana Rotker) or “insurrectional” (in the words of Paul Giles) approach to aesthetics.3 Giles uses the term not to refer to Rodríguez, but to propose an alternate model for understanding U.S. literary discourse via the influence of the old country. By underlining Benjamin Franklin’s deliberately “transgressive” style of narration, in which the narrator constantly calls his own motives into question and undermines his own credibility, Giles ties the quintessential North American writer to the English novelist Samuel Richardson. Giles then proposes the “insurrectional” view of U.S. literature as an antidote to what he calls “the classic Cold War reading of American culture as founded upon an ethic of natural originality running from the Puritans through to Emerson” (30). If the novel, per Roberto González Echevarría’s reading, always poses as some other sort of text, the essay presents itself with at least the straightforward appearance of a monologue that is nonetheless conversational. While Rodríguez’s voice lacks the warmth of Montaigne (or even of Emerson), it works hard to create an effect of its own. Avoiding actual citations but touching on a catalogue of Enlightenment themes—the desire for trans-

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parent languages, the elevation of empirical knowledge, and the suspicion of political and intellectual authorities—it produces the illusion of centuries’ worth of philosophy coalescing, in the space of a few pages, into a vigorous definition of democratic government and a plan for achieving it. Rodríguez’s narrator takes on the appearance of working, like Robinson Crusoe, from scratch, deriving his plan from a point-to-point attention to the very terms used in contemporary political debate, just as the castaway derives every “mechanick Art” in response to his immediate surroundings (Defoe 50–51). By virtue of his marginality, Rodríguez has managed to attract, as Alicia Ríos, Javier Lasarte, and Miguel Gomes have pointed out, critical approaches more attuned to celebrating the value of his particular illusions than to critiquing them. A comparative approach is particularly useful for Rodríguez because it throws his “marginality” into a clarifying relief, demonstrating the degree to which his work belongs to a long hemispheric tradition in which the essay serves as a metaphor and vehicle for social and political possibility. Reclaiming Rodríguez, then, means something more than inserting him into the tradition of nation-building essayist that has long been a foundational category for the study of nineteenthcentury Spanish American letters. Rodríguez’s organic cosmopolitanism, I have argued, may indeed be largely unreadable or at least unclassifiable if shoehorned into this category. When viewed hemispherically, however, his writings represent an original appropriation different from those of his contemporaries but equally dependent on his transatlantic perspective toward European history. Thus, for Rodríguez the impulse to write transformative prose is inseparable from the impulse to provoke transformative change in the social and political makeup of his America.

Legacy of an Unmoored Intellectual Rodríguez’s relationship with Simón Bolívar, his inexorable connection to at least one sort of undying fame, underscores the perils of an intellectual who exists at the edges of the formative nation-state. Bolívar, of course, died as lonely a death in 1830 as his former teacher would suffer in 1854. The Liberator, banished by both his native Venezuela and all the other territory he had hoped to include in his Gran Colombia, perished in poverty and oblivion, dependent upon the kindness of strangers and unable to muster even the necessary resources for a respectable exile (see Lynch 275–

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79). John Lynch’s biography points out how quickly this oblivion would be converted into a pragmatic embrace, as autocratic leaders attempted to co-opt the historical transcendence of Bolívar’s military success into a coherent vision of a heroic Venezuelan past, appropriating to Bolívar a kind of patriotic nationalism that his writings and biography resist (299–304). With this regeneration has come Bolívar’s elevation to a symbolic figure of the transnational vision of Spanish American solidarity. Christopher Conway has analyzed the tendency of literary constructions of the Liberator to “insist on wounding his symbolic body” and he concludes “that such treatments of Bolívar were targeting the failures of Latin American modernity” (11). Germán Carrera Damas had come to a similar conclusion about Bolívar’s transcendent role within the Venezuelan imagination— “everything related to Bolívar is, in Venezuela, transcendental and denotes expansiveness” (todo lo tocante a Bolívar es, en Venezuela, trascendental y denota amplitud) (El culto 21). Carrera Damas, of course, was writing almost a decade before the government of Hugo Chávez would rename the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (La República Bolivariana de Venezuela) and establish a political coalition that combined elements of Western European social democracy and a Cuban-style mix of populism and Marxist ideology, all under the moniker “Bolivarian.” Even before the political evolution that Chávez refers to as the Bolivarian Revolution (Revolución Bolivariana), Carrera Damas underlined the political usefulness of Bolívar’s new literary and symbolic role as the heroic figure of independence and, by logical (if not historically accurate) deduction, the resulting nation-state. His symbolic role—“the opposition between lyrical optimism and systematic pessimism” (la oposición entre el optimismo lírico y el pesimismo sistemático) (El culto 118)—becomes particularly important, Carrera Damas argues, in the context of governmental failure, when Bolivarian dreaming becomes the antidote to practical difficulties of the sort that doomed the Liberator’s own political career. The result, he concludes, is a kind of periodic amnesia in which remembrance of distant historic times provokes each generation of leaders to imagine itself re-creating Venezuela in a vacuum, thus forgetting the historic times of the not-so-distant past, the political progress, however imperfect, that has in fact been made since independence. VeneÂ� zuelan historian Elías Pino Iturrieta seconds this conclusion, referring to the endemic habit of contrasting real and present leaders with the heroic memories of independence myth, a habit he sees as tending to disable any present attempt to fire up the “engines” of political reform: “It replaces

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gasoline with useless holy water” (Cambia el combustible por una inútil agua bendita) (El divino 12). Bolívar, we could argue, has been “saved” by a succession of Venezuelan governments because of the political utility and cover his figure provides. Rodríguez has indeed been pulled along on Bolívar’s historical coattails, and his relationship of dependency to his old student is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the contemporary Venezuelan tendency to refer to him always as “el Maestro” and less frequently as a writer or a thinker, this despite his relatively small degree of contact with Bolívar and the years spent developing a theory of public education as a precondition for a functioning Spanish American nation-state. Rodríguez’s writings, while no more complicated and contradictory than those of the Liberator, lend themselves less easily to political appropriation in large part because they are written to resist patriotic readings. With his stylistic commitment to deconstructing political rhetoric functioning as a lodestar, Rodríguez more closely resembles what Molly Ann Rothenberg calls, referring to Thomas Paine and citing Deleuze and Guattari, a “nomad scientist” who employs “the production of heterogeneities in a strategy to dissolve consolidated forms of power and interest in order to have the maximum dynamism and superior fluidity in constituting political, economic and even technological forms” (351). Paine, by this reasoning, is something more and something less than a “national” figure because he designs a logical structure with the subversion of national mythologies in mind. Rodríguez, too, provides much in the way of critique of colonial and republican policy, but little (at least as a writer) that might be construed as “lyrical optimism.” Thus the gentle, Rousseau-like tutor to a young Liberator serves as a more easily domesticated metaphor than that of the wandering, struggling essayist. His brief stint as Bolívar’s tutor at least took place on Venezuelan soil. To revive Rodríguez as a writer has thus required displacing or at least revising the small but essential role he plays in the mythology of Simón Bolívar. In one sense something is lost when the focus shifts from the Rodríguez who “successfully” educated a mythical and undeniably heroic Simón Bolívar to a Rodríguez who failed as education minister in Bolivia and whose own lack of readership casts a dismal shadow over the newspaper universe in which he wrote, a universe in which his call for a radical, government-changing shift in social priorities was neither accepted nor attacked but tacitly ignored. Paine, Jefferson, Webster, Emerson, and other leading voices of the independence and postindependence United

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States are less easily dismissed (despite the fact that the radical nature of their proposals is often elided or ignored), because they become subsumed in a national myth of the successful republic, an elegant counterpoint to the motif of constant “crisis” that Carrera Damas finds forever playing as a background to any existential discussion of Spanish America (El culto 127). In the Venezuelan case, a national myth of independence-era heroism plays a role analogous to that of U.S. triumph, allowing a minor figure like Rodríguez to enjoy the Liberator’s reflective glow, his writings “protected” by his old pupil’s fame, in death, just as they were conveniently ignored during his lifetime. This study has attempted to reveal a more complicated and challenging Rodríguez who effectively subverts the patriotic myths that have arisen in the Liberator’s wake, just as he worked against facile notions of revolutionary triumph as victory in the battlefield was shifting to the narrative of crisis.

Reflections on Enlightened Failure Coming to grips with Rodríguez as a writer has meant taking failure into account and indeed plotting its consequences as an indictment of the societies on whose periphery he wrote. In his critical assessment of Blanco White, Eduardo Subirats stresses the self-consciousness of failure as a mark of the liberal Spaniard’s modernity (Memoria 286). Indeed, if fragmentation is an essential component of the modern identity’s reaction to an incoherent political reality, then the religious and philosophical vacillations that so horrified more conventionally patriotic observers in fact serve as markers of Blanco White’s intellectual honesty. Confronted with a contradictory national identity, his sense of intellectual rigor never allowed a retreat into patriotism. Rodríguez’s eccentricities are likewise commonly cited as the causes of the failure of his message. Those who praise his intellectual rigor would tend to read his texts as attempts to reflect the social reality of a Spanish America marked by, in Richard Morse’s words, “a collapse of the moral order” (111). U.S. Bolívar biographer Waldo Frank would opine that it was Rodríguez’s luck to live in a time that “neither nourished nor sustained him,” a fate he compares to that of famed North American educator John Dewey (396). If Frank’s assessment shows a clear U.S. bias (glossing over, for example, how controversial and misunderstood Dewey would be in his native land), it nonetheless places Rodríguez within a particular category of American

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thinkers—that of the unmoored intellectual who, deprived of a proper setting, fashions a new order out of gross disorder. This is the construction Vera Kutzinski uses to describe U.S. writer William Carlos Williams and in particular his unusual prose piece In the American Grain, which confounded critics with its mixture of lyric and expository qualities. Kutzinski refers to “Williams’s own madness,” a quality she defines as “his resistance to ‘colonial imitation’ and his affirmation of original differences in the act of destroying Europe’s tyrannous arguments of unity” (18). For Rodríguez (as for Humboldt and for Blanco White) the act of writing about the encounter between the Old World and the New introduced a maelstrom of contradictory urges. The tension settles above all on the tug between a desire to see independence as a political act of rupture and to cast that rupture as part of a larger order violated by colonial rule.4 Reproducing on the page what Nicola Miller has called “the slippages of meaning” (Reinventing 55) that dominated postcolonial discourse, Rodríguez’s essays perform a delicate act of posturing, as well, assuming the authority of the Baconian speculator from a locus that is clearly American. In Rodríguez’s case that incongruity provokes associations not only with the figurative madness outlined by Kutzinski, but also with madness as a psychological diagnosis. Arístides Rojas famously compared Rodríguez to Bolívar, noting that while the former was “genius, visionary, prophet” (genio, visionario, profeta), the latter might be described as “utopian, dreamer, monomaniac” (utopista, soñador, monomaniaco). The problem, from Rojas’s perspective, was that Rodríguez’s vision of educating a generation with a renewed social conscience ran contrary to human nature—a beautiful plan, he admits, but one that looked to create “angel citizens” (ciudadanos ángeles) out of human material (244). In 1913 famed Rodríguez biographer Fabio Lozano y Lozano would cite Chilean writer Augusto Orrego Luco’s characterization of Rodríguez as a mental inÂ�habiÂ� tant of the “â•ƒ‘ intermediate zone’ between sane intelligence and perturbed intelligence” (“zona intermediaria” entre la inteligencia sana y la inteligencia perturbada), a position that created a “strange coexistence of genius and madness” (rara convivencia de genio y locura) (16–17). This perception of Rodríguez would persist into the mid-twentieth century, when Mercedes M. Álvarez F.’s audaciously titled Simón Rodríguez Just as He Was: Perennial Validity of His Teaching (Simón Rodríguez tal cual fue: Vigencia perenne de su magisterio) opined that “scientists have classified him as a mixed type, which is to say neither absolutely sane nor completely crazy”

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([l]os científicos lo han clasificado como tipo mixto, es decir ni absolutamente cuerdo ni completamente loco) (197). Other twentieth-century critics would decry this characterization of Rodríguez as partly crazy, calling it the “falsified Simón Rodríguez” (Simón Rodríguez falseado), “a Simón Rodríguez for the after-dinner anecdote collection” (un Simón Rodríguez para el anecdotario de sobremesa) (Siso Martínez 15), and renouncing the “banalization .â•¯.â•¯. by way of anecdote, as a means of hiding his doctrinary cargo” (banalización .â•¯.â•¯. por vía de anécdota, como un modo de ocultar la carga doctrinaria) (Miliani, “Simón” 14).5 For this wave of late twentieth-century thinking, the creation of a crazy or partly crazy Rodríguez served the purpose of diluting his acid critique of the colonial and postcolonial order in Spanish America, a critique clearly capable of creating discomfort among Spanish American elites and of inspiring those who see themselves as marginalized.6 However, even favorable interpretations of Rodríguez’s cogency as a thinker and critic have tended to view his authority as divided, or as defined by the expression of division. Susana Rotker and Nicola Miller would praise the unconventional layout of his prose as an expression of the incongruous reality of the postrevolutionary Americas, a reality that belied the elite pretensions of letrado culture (Rotker, “Nation” 264; Miller, “â•ƒ‘Immoral’â•ƒ” 19). Moving the assessment from a graphic plane to a temporal one, Germán Carrera Damas’s 1971 Simón Rodríguez: Hombre de tres siglos would find in the Rodríguez imaginary an eighteenth-century colonial critique that acted in concert with “the dynamic of the deepest strata of the implanted colonial society in crisis at the beginning of the 19th century” (la dinámica de los más profundos estratos de la sociedad implantada colonial en crisis a comienzos del siglo XIX) to produce “a prognosis on the feeble American nationalities whose reach implicates much of our twentieth century” (un pronóstico sobre las endebles nacionalidades americanas cuyo alcance compromete buena parte de nuestro siglo XX) (6). Carrera Damas’s temporal approach is particularly interesting, because it employs the old critique of Rodríguez as a thinker misplaced within his own time, stuck in “unready soil,” with an altogether different spirit. Carrera Damas’s Rodríguez takes shape less as a prisoner of his own stressful times than as a thinker (on the page at least) capable of transcending them, just as his internationalist vision transcended the national boundaries that, for all the political and intellectual capital expended on them, would remain Â�“feeble” a century and a half later. In this sense, too, what might work against

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Rodríguez’s recognition within the canon of Latin American literature— his lack of connection with a single nation-state—can also be interpreted as a circumstantial gift. Elena Altuna argues that Rodríguez’s ability to produce “an oeuvre that with continental rather than national addressees” (una obra que no tenía destinatarios nacionales sino continentales) fixes his place within a generation of revolutionaries “that felt themselves Spanish Americans or Americans before being Venezuelans, Peruvians, or Argentines” (que se sentían españoles-americanos o americanos, antes de ser venezolanos, peruanos o argentinos), a state of mind, she concludes, that connects Rodríguez not only with his pupil Bolívar but also with José Martí (115–16).7 Rodríguez, I have argued, fits more coherently into a hemispheric canon because his insistence on presenting “American societies” as entities to be defined and constructed on the page elides any attempt to pigeonhole him into a single national pantheon. Generations of critical readings have attempted to inflate some dominant aspect of his life or work as the salient memorable detail that will overshadow his radical critique of the philosophical vacuity of nation-building as practiced in postcolonial Spanish America, but the writings themselves belie critical attempts at dismissal precisely because of their insistent engagement with a broader historical consciousness, a narrative informed by the North American and French revolutions as well as by the limits and promise of the Spanish reformers who preceded him. Perhaps the only writer in any country to claim as precursors both Voltaire and Feijoo, Rodríguez constructed a learned narrator aspiring to become the docent of republicans with a rhetorical appropriation of the tropes of Enlightenment possible only from the American hemisphere. As an act of publicity or mass persuasion the project most assuredly failed, but as an experiment in the aesthetic and political limits of the Enlightenment project, it remains a singularly eloquent and radical example.

Notes

introduction 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

Specific historical references, unless otherwise noted, are taken from a chronology compiled by Fabio Morales and included in the 1990 edition of Sociedades Americanas edited by Oscar Rodríguez Ortiz. John Lynch describes the primary school as a “ramshackle institution, where education was rudimentary; pupils arrived at any hour, some paid, some did not” (17). The facts of this episode are taken from Lynch’s account, which makes the point that Rodríguez and Bolívar were something less than the happy tutor and student depicted in legend. Lynch notes that “whatever their subsequent relationship they had only brief contact in Caracas, and the boy’s resistance to authority in 1795 appears to have been directed against his teacher Rodríguez as well as his uncle” (17). Of course, the two would meet again in Europe and, decades later, in postrevolutionary Bolivia. Lynch finds Bolívar’s continued affinity for Rodríguez difficult to explain (282). Lynch notes that in an act of high colonial theater, “España was taken and executed in the main square of Caracas, accompanied by tolling bells, solicitous priests and a military detachment, and his limbs were placed on pikes on the highroads, while his wife was imprisoned for protecting him” (13). Adolfo Ruiz emphasizes the influence of the Bourbon reforms on Rodríguez as evidence that the young teacher had not yet become converted to anything resembling the pro-independence stance of his later years (137, 139). Jesús Andrés Lasheras agrees with this interpretation, looking to the lack of action on the educational proposal as a likely cause, though noting that it has not yet been proven to his satisfaction: “We dare to present a hypothesis—which we hope to be able to prove with documentation one day: Simón Rodríguez did not leave Venezuela fleeing from anyone but rather in search of a field of educational action which in Caracas had so brusquely been closed to him” ([N]os atrevemos a presentar una hipótesis—que esperamos poder probar documentalmente algún día: Simón Rodríguez no salió de Venezuela huyendo de nadie sino en busca de

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Notes to Pages 7–15

un campo de acción educativa que en Caracas se le había cerrado bruscamente) (186). 6. Sucre’s frustration would reach Bolivarian heights in some of the letters from this period. He would complain of the negative effects of centuries of Spanish rule (De mi 301) and reach a poetic crescendo of his own in search of a metaphor for the government’s uncertainty: “I am persuaded that the terrain on which we are working is mud or sand; and that on such a foundation no building can stand. The theories we defend in America are very beautiful. Would that they were practiced!” (Estoy persuadido que el terreno sobre que trabajamos es fango o arena; y que sobre tal base ningún edificio puede subsistir. Muy bellas son las teorías que defendemos en América. ¡Ojalá se practiquen!) (332–33). 7. Throughout the book, ellipses in quotations appear in the original, with the exception of bracketed ellipses, which indicate text omitted from the quotation. Also, I have made occasional adjustments to Rodríguez’s idiosyncratic punctuation, such as two commas in a row, extra ellipsis points, and a space before a colon. 8. Unless otherwise noted, all Rodríguez citations refer to the two-volume 1988 edition of his Obras completas and all translations into English are mine. 9. Rousseau insists on a link between persuasion and the political value of language, maintaining “that any tongue with which one cannot make oneself understood to the people assembled is a slavish tongue” (On the Origin 73). 10. Jefferson uses the phrase in a 1787 letter to William Stephens Smith (Works 362). 11. Ralph Bauer’s “Hemispheric Studies” provides an excellent overview of the “hemispheric turn” in the U.S. academy. He notes that while Hanke’s contributors “gave this ‘Bolton Thesis’ a decided mixed review, the thesis provided the inspiration for Peréz Firmat’s landmark collection and a starting point for much subsequent hemispheric scholarship” (234). Peréz Firmat’s book, Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? moves Hanke’s question into the realm of the literary. 12. Camila Pulgar Machado’s provocative study The Matter and the Individual: A Literary Study of Simón Rodríguez’s American Societies (2006) (La materia y el individuo: Estudio literario de Sociedades Americanas de Simón Rodríguez) underlines the degree to which nationalism is anachronistic with regard to Rodríguez and his Spanish American contemporaries: “Rodríguez, like most readers of the time, does not yet possess the notion of a ferocious nationalism. The expression is South America in the geopolitical fullness and mobility of the moment. It therefore becomes difficult to locate American Societies’ critique strictly in relation to Venezuela, for example” (Rodríguez, como la gran parte de los lectores del momento, no posee aún la noción de un férreo nacionalismo. La expresión es la América del Sur en su amplitud y movilidad goepolítica de entonces. Así se hace difícil ubicar la crítica de sus Sociedades Americanas en función únicamente de Venezuela, por ejemplo) (54–55).


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chapter 1 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

Included in both the Obras completas of Simón Rodríguez and similar compilations of Bolívar, the text is framed differently according to venue. In Rodríguez’s byline it begins with the tutor’s account of the climb to the top of the mountain followed by a direct quote from Bolívar that is the “Juramento” proper. Bolivarian presentations of the text generally include only the direct quote. For more on the controversy see Rotker, “Evangelio,” and Conway, Cult. On the other hand, Venezuelan historian Rafael Ramón Castellanos strikes a defensive posture, arguing that Rodríguez “made an exact and faithful recounting, there is no reason to doubt it, 45 years later” (hizo un recuento exacto y fidedigno, no hay porque dudarlo, 45 años después) (179). Elain Kaner Ginsberg has noted two independence-era examples of the same sort of providential rhetoric: John Adams’s 1765 assertion that American civilization was God’s way of jump-starting the process of Enlightenment, and Philadelphia clergyman William Smith’s 1775 sermon denominating America as a space set aside by God for human freedom (101–2). Baseler notes, for example, that the Continental Congress itself prepared and distributed “open letters” “inviting Britons everywhere to participate in the struggle to preserve liberty” in Europe and in other British colonies (138). While this appeal proved more effective to a European audience than to “fellow subjects throughout the British empire” (141), it did create “new channels of communication” across the Atlantic (138). At the same time, American revolutionaries co-opted Britain’s own self-image as “the world’s freest government and arrogated to themselves the title of guardians of liberty” (7). When it came to the business of declaring independence, pragmatism and idealism often coexisted uneasily. John Charles Chasteen has noted the attractive power of the “nativist card” even among revolutionaries theoretically inclined toward universalism: “Every successful independence movement in the hemisphere played the nativist card, proclaiming ‘America for the Americans’â•ƒ” (Introduction xv). Claeys notes that “Paine’s authorship remained unknown at first, partly because he had resided only briefly in the colonies and did not want this to prejudice his readers” (Thomas Paine xxiii). In the appendix penned in response to a speech by King George III, Paine uses these very terms to argue that even the most conservative Americans might be led by their beliefs in preserving virtue to banish from their minds any possibility of reconciliation: “YE, whose office it is to watch the morals of a nation, of whatsoever sect or denomination ye are of, as well as ye who are more immediately the guardians of public liberty, if ye wish to preserve your native country uncontaminated by European corruption, ye must in secret wish a separation” (39–40). Unless otherwise noted, all Paine citations in this chapter refer to Thomas Paine: Political Writings. Focusing on Paine’s use of the figure of the “parasite” as a model for the sort of “virtue” Paine sees an independent America exercising vis-à-vis the

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Notes to Pages 30–35 Europeans, Rothenberg notes that his definition of the American body politic exercises a paradoxical logic in which “America’s strength is to be found in her heterogeneity, her cosmopolitanism, her capacity to disrupt world alliances, and her own internal instability” (343). Hoffman points out that the early North American designs against English rule “at first conceived the object of their armed resistance to be the restoration of their rights as British subjects.” It was only after “a massive shift of popular opinion” occurred during the first half of 1776—a shift Hoffman attributes in part to Common Sense—that the notion of a struggle for independence became widely understood (374). Rotker notes that the “Juramento” has come to occupy a position in the Hispanic imaginary analogous and in some degree equivalent to “Christopher Columbus and his men planting an enormous cross in the ground, with the caravels as a backdrop” (Cristóbal Colón y sus hombres sembrando una enorme cruz en tierra, con las carabelas como telón de fondo) (“Evangelio” 32). The connection between these two poems was first brought to my attention by José Manuel Pereira-Otero in a paper presented at the International Conference on Caribbean Studies held at the University of Texas–Pan American in November 2006. The paper later appeared as “Conquistas vi(r)olentas y vacunas independentistas: Andrés Bello y Manuel José Quintana ante la enfermedad de la colonia,” Hispanic Review 76.2 (Spring 2008): 109–33. Pereira-Otero argues that in the case of Bello and Quintana’s poems the poem itself becomes identified metaphorically with the vaccine (114–15). In Quintana’s more strident critique of the Spanish government, liberty becomes part of the prescription: “The only logical solution to the persistence of this system which perpetuates epidemics is, of course, to immunize its body, inoculating it with the revolutionary disturbance: liberty is achieved by fighting, but also by vaccine and by a writing committed to the cause of independence” (La única solución lógica a la permanencia de este sistema que perpetúa la epidemia es, claro, inmunizar su cuerpo inoculando la perturbación revolucionaria: la libertad consequida a través de la lucha, pero también a través de la vacuna y a través de una escritura comprometida con la causa independentista) (118). In Bello, what Pereira-Otero detects is less a desire for independence than a discomfort with the task of reconciling deeply felt respect for the Spanish monarchy with the reality of an ecological arrangement that gave birth to the epidemic: “at the base of Bello’s texts there is an underlying problem of how to express the goodness of a colonial system that has generated its own disease symbolically and literally” (en la base de los textos de Bello subyace la problemática de cómo expresar las bondades del sistema colonialista que han generado su propia enfermedad simbólica y literalmente) (121). Ralph Bauer has noted the Baconian dimension to Crèvecoeur’s self-presentation as narrator who “gradually transforms from a Baconian miner into a Baconian speculator, thereby subverting the geo-political order of the imperial production of knowledge” (Cultural Geography 217), and he notes that this phenomenon is stylistic as well. Crèvecoeur’s prose shines with “the ‘primitive eloquence’ of a ‘new man’ of pure experience, not in the refined eloquence of the European

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

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whose perceptions have been corrupted by the medieval ‘idols of the marketplace’ as Bacon frequently called the reliance on language as a key to truth in the Novum organon” (Cultural Geography 217). Nydia Ruiz describes Roscio’s conversion from “a faithful vassal of the Spanish monarchy” (un fiel vasallo del monarca español) as having taken place in 1809, less than two years before Venezuela’s first declaration of independence. His sense of personal mission was a firmly rhetorical one, Ruiz argues, a pledge “to combat what before had been his discourse” (a combatir el que antes había sido su discurso) (16). Susana Rotker makes the comparison between the “Juramento” and Bolívar’s “My Delirium at Chimborazo,” by noting that both are the object of at best questionable claims of authorship. She argues that despite the forcefulness of the imagery of the Chimborazo text, the “Juramento” has become canonical because of the taut metaphorical work it performs: “The text of the ‘Oath in the Sacred Mountain,’ on the other hand, has all the flavor of origin: it is the cornerstone, the text that opens the anthologies and launches the heroic action, almost like God’s pact with Abraham that declares his descendants as the chosen people. The New World there, too, is something like the faraway Canaan that the old civilization has dreamed of but will never reach” (El texto del “Juramento en el Monte Sacro,” en cambio, tiene godo el sabor del origen: es la piedra fundacional, el texto que abre las antologías y que desencadena la acción heroica, casi como el pacto de Dios con Abraham que declara a su descendencia como el pueblo elegido. El Nuevo Mundo es allí también algo así como el lejano Canaan con el que la antigua civilización ha soñado pero jamás alcanzará) (“Evangelio” 42). Bolívar’s insistence on emphasizing Rome rather than America strikes Rotker as a false note, and she suggests that this insistence likely reflects the “movement of reaffirmation of the Hispanic, which developed toward the end of the [nineteenth] century, untying itself from Spain in order to define this America concretely as ‘Latin’â•ƒ” (movimiento de reafirmación de la hispanidad que se desarrolla hacia el fin de siglo, desligándose de España para definir a esta América como “latina”) (“Evangelio” 40), which is to say more appropriate to the era of its retelling and publication than to the historical moment in which it allegedly took place. Rotker points out that the letter serves only as proof “that something happened on the Sacred Mountain” (a que algo ocurrió en el Monte Sacro), since the “terms of the Oath are even more vague than in the revealed text” (los términos del Juramento sean aun más vagos que en el texto divulgado) (“Evangelio” 37). Benedict Anderson employs the term “parallel” to describe the effect in which the colonists imagined their own existence as simultaneous to that of the metropolis, a belief exemplified in the arrangement of naming in which “â•ƒ‘new’ and ‘old’ were understood synchronically, coexisting within homogeneous, empty time.” By this arrangement “Vizcaya was there alongside Nueva Vizcaya, New London alongside London: an idiom of sibling competition rather than of inheritance” (187). Elsewhere Guerra details what he describes as the governmental consequences of an administration grouped around city centers but administering to a largely rural population: “America lacks, to an even greater degree than the Peninsula,

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an intermediate community between the cities and the kingdom, the province” (Falta en América, en mayor grado aún que en la Península, una comunidad intermedia entre las ciudades y el reino, la provincial) (“Identidad” 214). Guerra argues that in Spanish America, as in Spain, the province denotes less a real governmental unit than a simple description of the territory surrounding a city, with the city itself being the only meaningful seat of government. This is very different, he points out, from the common arrangement in the North American colonies: “But there do not exist, as in the British colonies of North America, provinces that are a superior circumscription of the city and are granted representative institutions beyond the municipal level; this absence would make itself cruelly felt in the era of Independence” (Pero no existen, como en las colonias británicas de América del Norte, provincias que sean una circunscripción superior a la ciudad y dotadas de instituciones representativas supramunicipales; su ausencia se hará cruelmente sentir en la época de la Independencia) (214–15). 21. In fact, Javier Lasarte uses the term “populacho” to argue that an essential elitism buttresses Rodríguez’s didactic project, an elitism based on “society as an inevitable—and desirable?—pyramid” (la sociedad como una inevitable—¿y deseable?—pirámide) (34–35), albeit a pyramid based on intellectual merit and achievement rather than race or social class: “his project passes necessarily through the conversion of the ‘Lower public,’ of the ‘mass of the Public,’ of the ‘unfortunate Class,’ of the ‘mob’ into a ‘Republican Public,’ which is to say, a citizen” (su proyecto pasa necesariamente por la conversion del ‘Pueblo inferior’, de la ‘masa del Pueblo’, de la ‘clase ínfima’, del ‘populacho’ en ‘Pueblo Republicano’, es decir, en ciudadano” (34–35).

chapter 2 1. 2.

Blanco White used the term to refer to himself in Letters from Spain, published under the pseudonym Leucado Doblado, and Martin Murphy employs it in the title of his 1989 biography, Blanco White: Self-Banished Spaniard. Menéndez y Pelayo would go on to call Blanco White on the carpet for his failure to adhere to the orthodox political and religious beliefs of educated Spaniards, chalking this eccentricity up to an imbalance between the rational and emotional faculties: “he was a pitiful mirror of moral disorganization and the unbridled love of his own thought, which, being averse to any dogmatic solution, was never even able to quiet itself in skepticism, but rather rode zealously and over twisted paths in search of unity” (fue espejo lastimosísimo de la desorganización moral y el amor desenfrenado del propio pensar, que, con ser adverso a toda solución dogmática, tampoco en el escepticismo se aquietaba nunca, sino que cabalgaba afanosamente y por sendas torcidas en busca de la unidad) (910). Daniel Rees has also mentioned Blanco White’s political beliefs as obstacles in his intellectual and theological development. Rees, for example, opines “that had he been less obsessive in his crusade against Orthodoxy, less prompt to dissipate his talents in writing works of controversy and textbooks

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for model schools in model republics in South America, he could have been, in English or Spanish, a man of letters of the first rank” (236). Noting early on that “Venezuela’s proclamation exudes affection for the Spanish” (La proclama de Venezuela respira amor a los españoles) (Conversaciones 57), Blanco White worries most that the political struggle for independence will induce the opposite emotion in both parties: “The great risk that I conceive in America’s current situation is that the hatred between Spaniards and criollos should grow and be confirmed; that they should come to see one another as different nations” (El gran riesgo que yo concibo en la actual situación de América, es el que crezca y se confirme el odio entre españoles y criollos; el que se lleguen a mirar como dos naciones distintas) (118). In his introduction to an anthology of Blanco White’s English writings, Goytisolo describes Spanish censorship as a repressive force particularly interested in representation—“in the mirror and not in the reality that it reflects” (en el espejo y no en la realidad que refleja) (14). This censorship maintains its insidious character from Blanco White’s time forward to the waning years of Franco’s dictatorship from which Goytisolo writes. If Blanco White’s conscience is divided against itself in complicated ways—he loves and misses Spain but cannot imagine going back there; he hopes independence will be part of an intellectual movement that saves the mother country; he has difficulty reconciling his own spiritual proclivities with any single organized tradition— these contradictions are the reality of growing up with a censored mirror. Fernández weighs in on the self-consciousness of Blanco White’s narrative self by likening him to another great Enlightenment autobiographer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “it would be difficult to find in world literature another author more concerned about his recipients—about the fate—of his writing [ J. J. Rousseau being perhaps his only rival in this sense]” (sería difícil encontrar en la literatura universal a otro autor más preocupado que Blanco por los destinatarios—por los destinos—de su escritura [quizás sea su único rival en este sentido J. J. Rousseau]) (117). Vera Roldán points out that Ackerman’s support for Venezuelan revolution was more than philosophical, as he gave “the rebels of Venezuela two portable lithographic presses on credit (£45.1.6).” Noting that one of the two presses ended up in Angostura, the point of origin for El Correo del Orinoco, she concludes that “either of these presses could have been the one Simón Bolívar carried in his military campaigns, since it is known that by 1810 there was only one printing press in that country” (103). J. Andrew Brown notes just how essential the combination of personal experience and scientific knowledge becomes in the Latin American context by citing Lucio V. Mansilla’s evocation of the Prussian explorer—“he is like Humboldt both because he is an eyewitness and because he has studied the natural world”—as a means of securing a reputation as a writer at once future oriented and backed by a long tradition of scientific writing (64). In the introduction to the Instauratio Magna, which lays out the plan for the larger work, Bacon uses both “fruit” and “interest” as metaphors for the human

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benefits derived from scientific investigation. He explains his own patience in making small experiments on discrete subjects as that of the wise farmer—“I wait for harvest-time, and do not attempt to mow the moss or reap the green corn” (446–47)—and describes the “temporary use” to be made of the phase that precedes “active science” (his final goal) as “interest payable from time to time until the principal be forthcoming” (447–48). 9. For more on the process of amalgamation and its political and philosophical resonance in colonial Spain, see Bentancor, as well as Cañizares-Esguerra, “Iberian Science.” Bentancor uses the Heideggerian notion of the standing reserve to frame Alvaro Alonso Barba’s explanation of amalgamation as the result of “a changing productive virtue inherent to the nature of metals” (117). Cañizares-Esguerra summarizes the debate and cites López Piñero’s research that complicates the notion of amalgamation as a universal process that could be “discovered” once and for all (105). 10. In his critique of Spanish and, by extension, Spanish American underdevelopment, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento takes an opposite tack, finding that the lack of a “spirit of navigation” (espíritu de navegación) on the part of the Spanish has led to an aversion to water on the part of the gaucho, who views the river more as “an obstacle opposed to his movements than as the most powerful means of facilitating them” (Facundo 58). What Sarmiento’s approach has in common with Humboldt’s is the emphasis on a Spanish and Spanish American inability to adapt to the environment, settling near the tropical rivers of Venezuela that breed mosquitoes and disease while neglecting Argentina’s temperate waterways. The problem, as Sarmiento sees it (and here Humboldt would agree), is that “these immense canals excavated by the helping hand of nature do not introduce the slightest change in national custom” (estos inmensos canales excavados por la solícita mano de la naturaleza no introducen cambio ninguno en las costumbres nacionales) (Facundo 57–58). The mindset of Spanish colonialism remains, in both writers’ estimation, immune to the correction of experience. 11. Rodríguez notes, in a tone very much in keeping with his critique of the independence movement, that political declarations do not necessarily alter the reality on the ground: “The Government and the Magistrate of a place had the power to make the poor Indian leave his shack and to put him on the road to Vincocaya; but not to infuse him, suddenly, with the skill of working” (El Gobierno y el Alcalde de un lugar tuviéron poder para hacer salir al pobre indio de su choza, y encaminarlo á Vincocaya; para nó para infudirle, de repente, el arte de trabajar). The canal project represents a lesser disturbance than would a dam because it would allow communal participation along the route of the canal rather than requiring a large gathering of workers by force in a single location. Since the work required would be of a less exacting nature, the project would allow less skilled citizens full participation and avoid, in the most pragmatic way, what Rodríguez describes as the folly of large-scale work projects: “No matter how much the teacher shouts and despairs, the Indians will do the reverse of what he wants, employing much time in doing very little” (Por mas


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que el maestro grite y se desespere, los Indios harán al reves de lo que él quiere, emplearán mucho tiempo para hacer muy poco) (1.448). 12. Curiously, Romero presents the Vincocaya Project as though it were Rodríguez’s own, claiming that the plan to build the dam was proposed by the Caraqueño in 1824. This contradicts Rodríguez’s own account, as well as Wibel’s broader historical overview. 13. Whittembury et al. note that while the earthquake observations “were quickly forgotten after Darwin’s lecture to the Geological Society on Mar. 7, 1838,” the theory of plate tectonics would reveal “how right Darwin had been all along” (552). 14. Elsewhere Humboldt suggests that deforestation might be a good idea if its climatological effects will in fact help agriculture. He suggests that “the bans of the Upper Guainia will be more productive, when the destruction of the forests has diminished the excessive humidity of the air and the soil, and the insects, which devour the roots and leaves of the herbaceous plants, are reduced in number” (5.368). The constant seems to be his desire for a responsible planning process that will capitalize on one developmental trend, deforestation, to aid agriculture, too. Humboldt is not, of course, giving his assent to this deforestation, but rather predicting that it will at least make possible a kind of agricultural development that the river valley’s natural state seems to oppose.

chapter 3 1.

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Adolfo Ruiz argues that Rodríguez’s Reflexiones sobre el estado actual de la escuela should be read less as a precursor of the rhetoric of originality that would characterize his later writings than as an indication of his thorough knowledge of the reforms then under way in Spain and his willingness to apply them in the Venezuelan context (139, 146–47). Victorián Villava begins by opposing “education” and “government” as separate entities, and then by equating government to a kind of education practiced on a grand scale: “Climate, education, the constitution of the government, all contribute to form the character of man and nations, but nothing as much as the last item, since it is a kind of public education, always more effective than the private” (El clima, la educación, la constitución del gobierno, todo contribuye a formar el carácter del hombre y las naciones, pero nada tanto como la última, por ser una especie de educación pública, siempre más eficaz que la privada) (215). The elevation of style (title) over substance remains a focus for critique in Rodríguez’s postcolonial context. In Sociedades Americanas Rodríguez laments, very much in the vein of Sanz’s commentary, that “everyone wants to be distinguished by title, not for what they know, and much less for what they do” (todos quieren distinguirse por títulos, nó por lo que saben, ni mucho menos por lo que hacen) (1:274). Writing more recently, Ricardo Vélez-Rodríguez cites Rodríguez not only as a faithful receptor of Rousseauian philosophy but also as the biographical embodiment of the Genevan’s thoughts, a kind of literal example, on American

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Notes to Pages 107–18 soil, of European thought-experiments: “If anyone one day managed to incarnate faithfully the lifestyle and humanistic conception preached by Rousseau, it was Simón Rodríguez” (Si quelqu’un parvint un jour à incarner fidèlement l’idéal de vie et la conception humaniste prêchés par Rousseau, ce fut Simón Rodríguez) (1063). Carlos Jorge, while working to correct what he sees as the overemphasis on Emile in critical treatments of Rodríguez, is nonetheless careful to point out the important connections between the two writers: “What we are affirming is not to say that Simón Rodríguez denied Rousseau, the author most cited by the Caraqueño: five times. Fundamentally, Simón Rodríguez presupposes Rousseau” (Esto que estamos afirmando no dice que Simón Rodríguez niegue a Rousseau, el autor más citado por el caraqueño: cinco veces. Fundamentalmente, Simón Rodríguez presupone a Rousseau) (Educación, 113). Tomás Polanco Alcántara agrees with Lasheras’s assessment and stresses that the mythological constructions of Rousseauian experience for the Liberator and Rodríguez play fast and loose with the more prosaic facts of a teacherstudent relationship that was “troubled, painful, unsuccessful, and complicated” (accidentado, penoso, sin éxito y complicado) (20). For more on the principle of “to observe but not obey” see Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and America, 1492–1830, in which he characterizes this “formula” as a rhetorical technique “deriving from the Basques” that served as a crucial safety valve: “This formula, which was to be incorporated into the laws of the Indies in 1528, provided an ideal mechanism for containing dissent, and preventing disputes from turning into open confrontation” (131–32). Two Venezuelan writers, Fermín Toro and Cecilio Acosta, would make similar statements in 1842 and 1856, lamenting the continued indifference to those useful sciences. Toro lamented that Venezuela’s economic development might actually be a decline, and he pinned the blame on a lack of attention to its natural resources—“our vegetable and mineral riches are still waiting to be sampled” (nuestras riquezas minerales y vegetales están por catarse) (94); Acosta, who identified himself as a proponent of the dis-Aristotelization of the educational system (coining the Spanish verb desaristotelizar), offers a rhetorical question: “How long will we prefer Nebrija, which makes us hungry, to the textbook of the [useful] arts, which feeds us, and the abstractions of the schoolhouse to the realities of the workshop?” (¿Hasta cuándo se ha de preferir el Nebrija, que da hambre, a la cartilla de artes, que da pan, y las abstracciones del colegio a las realidades del taller?) (59). Toro and Acosta are really attacking the same old concept of “decency” that had struck Miguel José de Sanz as anachronistic two decades before independence was won on the battlefield. Rodríguez is expressing a common sentiment in his praise for the inherent virtue of country and agricultural life compared to that of urban centers. The Spanish liberal reformer Jovellanos had employed a similar argument in his Informe sobre la Ley Agraria (1795). Attempting to convince Carlos IV’s government of the utility of selling off unused land, he argued that the creation of a more rural public would bring social as well as economic benefits: “The colonist, situated on his lot and free of the jolt of passions that trouble those who are gathered

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in villages, will be more distant from the ferment of corruption that luxury, to a greater or lesser degree, always inspires in them” (El colono, situado sobre su suerte y libre del choque de pasiones que agitan a los hombres reunidos pueblos, estará más distante de aquel fermento de corrupción que el lujo infunde siempre en ellos con más o menos actividad) (272). Janie Vanpée describes Emile as “a stopgap measure” that presupposes a certain moral decadence in the society to which it is addressed: “the very foundation of Rousseau’s pedagogical enterprise is predicated on the recognition of the failure of transmission between parent and child. His work begins as an attempt to mend or repair the break in the ‘natural’ channels that exist between father and son, mother and child, and that society has disrupted” (“Rousseau’s” 156). Paine’s expression could well be borrowed from Locke’s educational adaptation of Bacon: “Those who would advance in knowledge, and not deceive and swell themselves with a little articulated air, should lay down this as a fundamental rule, not to take words for things, nor suppose that names in books signify real entities in nature, till they can frame clear and distinct ideas of those entities” (Educational 234). J. H. Elliott has noted the Lockean dimension of North American political thought, describing a public full of individuals who “had become Lockeans almost without realizing it” (Empires 350). Emerson’s insistence on the necessity of creative reading, in which the reader’s inventive powers must match those of the book, carries with it a number of pedagogical and philosophical implications. Kenneth Sacks has pointed out the degree to which the inherited controversy between a Lockean emphasis on the “observation of external phenomena” and a Kantian focus in which “the more important traits are eternal and intuitive” filtered into the controversy between the Kantian Transcendentalists, for whom Emerson’s was the emerging voice, and the Lockean Unitarian establishment represented by Harvard University (16). The preference for the internal and immutable over the observable world is also particularly convenient, as Robert E. Burkholder has noted, given the dire economic circumstances against which Emerson gave his address. While the United States of 1837 was by any estimation an ascendant economic power, the Panic of 1837 had cast a somber light on the prospects for graduating college seniors. Emerson’s emphasis on the soul’s resistance to external economic circumstances thus served as “a way of countering both the real bankruptcy and despair of the financial crisis and, more important, the causal bankruptcy of the spirit so that he could literally arm the young men at Harvard with hope” (52). Combining Burkholder’s and Sacks’s assessments, we might conclude that the intimidating economic reality of 1837 provided particular purchase for Emerson’s Kantian tendencies. Given that “the values of its audience” would be at odds with the message of “The American Scholar” (Sacks 16), the “economic calamities and the concomitant social and political turmoil of the summer of 1837” represented an opportunity “to teach the lesson” that Emerson had long wished to communicate to the Unitarian establishment of his alma mater (Burkholder 52). See Enrique García Santo-Tomás for an interesting discussion of the literary symbolism of eye-glasses in seventeenth-century Spain. Describing the 1781 comunero manifesto in Bogota, J. H. Elliott notes that “it was

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the authorities who wished to promote the cause of Enlightenment in the face of resistance from society” (Empires 365), in an ironic posture that was again turned on its head by the independence movement: “Later the administration was to reap the reward of its educational efforts when it found itself confronted by a new generation all too willing to embrace foreign and revolutionary ideas” (366). 15. See Jorge, Un nuevo poder, for an extensive discussion of Rodríguez’s links to Plato’s writings. 16. Elliott has noted what he calls a “paradox” of criollo existence: “The stronger the determination of criollo communities to demonstrate their similarity to the mother country, the more obvious it became, not only to Europeans but also to themselves, that the resemblance fell short” (248). Similarly, the chaotic experience of independence tended to invoke nostalgic feelings for the colonial system, particularly during the drawn-out wars that ravaged much of South America. In The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), Charles Darwin recounted that in his encounters with disaffected indigenous communities, grievances were carefully aimed at the independent governments: “The Indians ended all their complaints by saying, ‘And it is only because we are poor Indians, and have nothing; but it was not so when we had a King’â•ƒ” (307). The Ayacucho region of Peru, where Rodríguez published his 1828 version of American Societies, was racked by its own monarchist counter-rebellion, as chronicled in Cecilia Méndez’s book-length study. 17. In an essay that compares Bello’s “Discurso” with Emerson’s “American Scholar,” Teresa Huerta detects a connection between the latter’s reticence toward books in general and the former’s approach to scientific investigation. Paraphrasing Emerson’s injunction that “books should be used the right way, as a source of inspiration” (los libros deben usarse de la manera correcta, como fuente de inspiración), Huerta notes that “these words find an echo in the ideas expressed by Bello in relation to European scientific and literary sources” ([e]stas palabras hacen eco a las ideas expresadas por Bello en relación a las fuentes científicoliterarias europeas). While carefully noting the contextual differences between the two thinkers—Bello seeks to foment “a social and economic progress that the Hispanoamerican countries so desperately need” (un progreso social y económico que los países hispanoamericanos necesitan tan desesperadamente) (456), while Emerson’s more patriotic optimism is a logical result of his country’s “high degree of political stability and economic progress” (alto grado de estabilidad política y progreso económico)—Huerta notes that an idealism based in the rhetoric of the Wars of Independence unites them both (455). As champions of the moral and social benefits of “creative intellectual work” (labor intelectual creativa), both find that their own experience as creative thinkers “translates also into an interest in formulating policies concerning the education of youth” (se traduce además en su interés por formular políticas concernientes a la educación de los jóvenes) (456). Having themselves enjoyed, as Bello puts it, “the recompense of letters” (las recompensas de las letras) (La eterna 115), both thinkers are keen to imagine collective identities based on the shared experience


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of an educational program capable of reproducing that recompense in the minds of generations to come. 18. In Memoria y exilio, Eduardo Subirats characterizes the failure of Spanish American independence in terms of the revolution’s inability to create a new kind of subject: “In contrast to Jefferson or Paine, Bolívar was not able to enunciate the universality of a new subject constituted from a rational system of thought, founded in a radical principle of political and moral autonomy, and integrated into a secular conception of history as progress” (A diferencia de Jefferson o Paine, Bolívar no fue capaz de enunciar la universalidad de un nuevo sujeto constituido a partir de un sistema racional de conocimiento, fundado en un principio radical de autonomía moral y política, e integrado en una concepción secular de la historia como progreso) (200).

chapter 4 1.

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4. 5.

Mickelthwait presents Webster’s loss of control over his dictionary as an essential ingredient in the creation of the final product. Under the care of Webster’s executor, Chauncy Allen Goodrich, it underwent a pruning in which the most unconventional-looking phonetic constructions became footnotes to the definitions of words spelled in the traditional way. The result, Mickelthwait concludes, was an ingenious and insidious compromise: “The abridged dictionary was structured in such a way that, though many of the eccentric spellings remained, they might never be noticed by the average reader” (201). Benedict Anderson compares the North American and Spanish American revolutions with those of nineteenth-century European nationalists: “The energetic activities of these professional intellectuals were central to the shaping of nineteenth-century European nationalisms in complete contrast to the situation in the Americas between 1770 and 1830” (71). Anderson does take note of Webster and other American lexicographers, but he concludes that in the Americas “any attempt to give historical depth to nationality via linguistic means faced insuperable obstacles” (197). While I agree with Anderson’s assessment of these “obstacles,” I will be arguing that the shared language creates its own sense of transatlantic tension in which defining an American language indeed becomes an important move for lexicographers and political leaders alike. Bynack sees a connection between this concept of natural language and the romantic appeal of the common: “On both sides of the Atlantic at the end of the eighteenth century, intellectuals had begun to hope that in the untutored thought and expression of the nation’s ordinary people might lie a way out of a solipsistic, ‘self-created,’ ‘arbitrary and capricious’ universe, as Wordsworth put it in the 1800 ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, the universe of post-Lockean epistemology” (106). Swann finds that “in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there was, both in England and America, a perceived connection between spelling reform and democratic politics” (68). Derrida also attacks Saussure’s attempt to minimize the importance of writing

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Notes to Pages 144–54 before an oral ideal, finding a plethora of contradictions: “It seems then as if Saussure wishes at the same time to demonstrate the corruption of speech by writing, to denounce the harm that the latter does to the former, and to underline the inalterable and natural independence of the language” (41). Rotker sees anything but elitism in Rodríguez’s unorthodox style, positing it as a calculated affront to the lettered elite of his time: “In the first half of the nineteenth century, writing was for a society of equals, white lettered bourgeoisie or oligarchy of diverse political affinity that recognized their own reflection in this form and style of writing; Rodríguez broke these codes and exposed the complicitous winks between the members of his own class” (“Nation” 264). The reference to Nebrija also appears in Rosenblat, prologue to Estudios gramaticales, xxiii. Pulgar Machado has employed the notion of language as an essential tool for regulating human thought to link Bello and Rodríguez to one another and to a larger eighteenth-century tradition—“Rousseau, Diderot, Hobbes, Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, etc.”—characterized by its fascination with the link between language and thought, with language seen as an “essential instrument for the mastery of reality” (un instrumento esencial para el dominio de la realidad) (32). Christopher Looby notes a confluence of verbal and visual style in the original version of Franklin’s text: “rhetorical complication (irony) was meant to restore clarity of communication, and typographical complexity was meant to reinstate simple vocal expression” (73–74). For some critical perspectives on the politics of Webster’s lexicography, see Warfel, Rollins, and Mickelthwait. Frederic Michael Litto points out that Webster’s primary political critique of his fellow citizens shapes up as an admonition not to imagine the work of revolution completed—“To him it had just begun, for a new governmental foundation was not enough” (147). Carlos Jorge has addressed the link between Rodríguez’s analogy of language and government and that proposed by Rousseau in Essay on the Origin of Languages, which suggests a connection between eloquence and political liberty (On the Origin 72–73). As Jorge puts it, “Simón Rodríguez begins where the Genevan finishes” (Simón Rodríguez empieza donde el ginebrino termina) (Un nuevo poder 238–39). See Rosenblat, prologue to Estudios gramaticales, cvi–cviii, cxix. Indeed, orthographic reform would remain a hot topic in Latin America for decades after the publication of Sociedades Americanas, flaring up again with Sarmiento’s proposal that a set of reforms similar to those proposed by Bello be adopted unapologetically as “American” norms. Despite mollifying commentary from Bello himself, Sarmiento would inspire at least some of Chile’s newspapers to adopt the reforms for a period of several years. On this point Simpson cites Washington Irving’s Salmagundi and its conservative parody of the newly independent United States as a nation led by a “â•ƒ‘government of words’ in which anyone with ‘a plentiful stock of verbosity’ may succeed.” This critique, analogous as it is to Rodríguez’s pro-independence claim that only terminology has changed in the wake of the Wars of Independence,

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19.


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presents the lexicographer (whatever his stance on politics) with the task of setting things aright (Simpson 112). Rodríguez O. points out that in the newly freed republics the known past of the monarchy often presented a comforting memory to citizens who had the most to lose in terms of power and capital: “Although the power of the Spanish Monarchy in America had finally ended, many members of the urban middle and upper classes remained ambivalent about independence. Despite its iniquities, the old political order had provided opportunity as well as stability. The future seemed uncertain and very threatening” (237). In 1928 Miguel Luís Amunátegui Reyes renewed the call for turning experiencia into esperiencia on the grounds that “this x which no one pronounces serves for nothing more than the ostentation of an erudition that ordinarily very few achieve” (esta x que nadie pronuncia, no sirve más que para ostentar una erudición que ordinariamente mui pocos alcanzan) (151–52). And in “Alfonso Reyes, lector [reader] de Fray Servando,” Celina Manzoni uncovers a mention of the controversy in the writings of the twentieth-century Mexican essayist’s communications with the Argentine Academy of Letters: “The legacy of rejecting the substitution of the j in place of the x is taken up again, perhaps with an ironic slant, by Alfonso Reyes, in his reply to the Argentine Academy of Letters, when he was his country’s ambassador to ours” (La herencia del rechazo de la sustitución de x por la j, es retomada, quizás con un sesgo irónico por Alfonso Reyes, en su respuesta a la Academia Argentina de letras, cuando era Embajador de su país ante el nuestro) (n.p.). Franklin makes a similar though more personal joke on the revolutionary elimination of a letter when he suggests that the letter z could be banished, citing “his own small usefulness, and the little occasion there is for him in the Republic of letters, since S whom he so despises can so well serve instead of him” (Writings 9:550–51). Schiff identifies this z as a thinly veiled stand-in for Ralph Izard, a colleague in the U.S. mission to France with whom Franklin had a particularly difficult relationship (204). Rodríguez offers a bilingual education in a letter to General don Francisco de Paulo Otero: “As the child will leave my house, after a period of time, knowing what is reason or nonsense—truth or lie—modesty or hypocrisy, speaking in Castilian and Quechua, as necessary (but not all together), the little that a boy can speak—writing it with the necessary letters—and reading it with sense, not shouting nor with the chirp of a grasshopper .â•¯.â•¯. the esteemed General Otero will have done much to cement the education of his son, the rest he’ll do himself, and I’ll have the satisfaction of having served him in some way” (Como el niño salga de mi casa, al cabo de algún tiempo, sabiendo lo que es razón o disparate—verdad o mentira—modestia o hipocresía, hablando en castellano o en quechua, según convenga (pero no todo junto), lo poco de que un muchacho puede hablar—escribiéndolo con las letras que debe—y leyéndolo con sentido, no a gritos, ni en tono de cigarrón .â•¯.â•¯. habrá el señor general Otero conseguido mucho para cimentar la educación de su hijo, lo demás él lo hará, y yo tendré la satisfacción de haberle servido en algo) (2:516).

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20. See Claeys, Thomas Paine 56–57, for more on the mindset of the North American colonies before and during the revolution.

chapter 5 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

This chapter was published in a slightly different form as “â•ƒ‘the sole object of all my efforts is to do you good’: Robert Owen, Simón Rodríguez, and the Saint-Simonist Avant-Garde,” Decimonónica 5.1 (2008): 1–20. These historical details are taken from Arthur Eugene Bestor Jr.’s study of utopian communities in the United States, Backwoods Utopias. Mallarmé proclaims the expressive goal of producing “a simultaneous vision of the Page” (une vision simultanée de la Page) and describes his poems as producing, in cinematographic terms, “an exact spiritual mise en scène” (mise en scène spirituelle exacte) (405–6). In Apollinaire’s view his own innovations are already anachronistic, representing the influences of the cinema and phonograph, art forms that truly rule the times, on a genre that clearly belongs to an earlier age. Both explain their innovations as responses to industrial progress rather than as tools to bring about further political or economic reform. Podestá puts it this way: “It is possible to argue against Peter Bürger’s assertion that all the avant-garde movements, and surrealism in particular, tried to destroy literature as an institution. However, this goal was a complete non-sense for Harlem Renaissance and Latin American writers” (418). Isaiah Berlin characterizes the sensibility of the eighteenth century in terms of the intellectual desire to extend the breakthroughs in physics and astronomy into the realms of human behavior: “there was a fairly wide consensus that what Newton had achieved in the region of physics could surely also be applied to the regions of ethics and of politics” (23). Bestor sees in nineteenth-century communitarianism a middle ground between gradual reform and violent revolution. That is, while revolutionaries seek the overthrow of government, and reformers place a certain implicit trust in government, communitarians seek “an immediate, root-and-branch reform, and a peaceable, nonrevolutionary accomplishment thereof,” an accomplishment that could occur without violence since the communitarian believed that a small community “could undergo drastic change in complete harmony and order, and the great world outside could be relied on to imitate a successful experiment without coercion or conflict” (4). Owen’s claim is cited by Bestor, who also notes that Owen commissioned and paid for a printing of New View of Society “in three numbered broadsides” that numbered “forty thousand copies” (71). Anderson cites Hegel’s description of the modern newspaper as a substitute for public prayer, a “mass ceremony” in which each citizen reads alone while knowing “that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion” (35). This potential for slippage puts the public in a position analogous to that Kant


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described by “under tutelage, and still in need of Enlightenment,” while at the same time “claiming the maturity of people capable of enlightenment” (105). 10. Peter Howell invokes the imperfect fit between Habermas’s vision of a public linked by newspapers and the reality of the postcolonial moment in North America, arguing that “the story to be told is not one of a transition to a ‘genuinely critical public,’ but on the contrary, of a radical conflict in the assumptions and necessities that formed the locus, procedure and aims of discourse and representation in the public-political arena” (363). Javier Lasarte has analyzed Rodríguez’s cultivation of a politically disinterested (and stylistically eccentric) narrator, asking if one might call Rodríguez “intransigent in a double sense: intransigent with regard to negotiating a return to the Colony with all that would betray the republican revolutionary principles, but also intransigent about dealing with reality and its powers” (intransigente en un doble sentido: instransigente para pactar con la vuelta a la Colonia con todo lo que traicione los principios republicanos revolucionarios, pero también intransigente tanto para negociar con la realidad y sus poderes) (52). Miguel Gomes argues that this new visual form of prose functions not to democratize Rodríguez’s writing but to create yet another barrier between the writer and the public, in a classic letrado power play (54–55). 11. Miliani describes the relationship between Rodríguez’s narrator and reader in terms that invoke twentieth-century experimentation: “The reader of the essays belongs, therefore, to the Cortazarian category of the complicit reader” (El lector de sus ensayos pertenece, pues, a la categoría cortazariana de léctor cómplice) (“Poesía” 15). In terms of the appearance of text on the page, he finds in Rodríguez’s aesthetic “the poetry of textual space” (la poesía del espacio textual) (12). 12. Ángel Rama has invoked the textbook as a model for Rodríguez’s vision for essayistic space: “Rodríguez removed writing from its normal patterns, purged it of rhetorical adornment, extracted its essences, and boiled them down to their most laconic expression, then distributed them textbook-style, on the page so that the reasoning process and its component concepts would be accessible to the eye” (49). Miguel Gomes compares Rodríguez’s page to a chalkboard (54–55).

conclusion 1.

2.

Arturo Uslar Pietri describes Rodríguez’s project in terms of a temporal rupture, which he identifies as the salient “utopian” aspect of his thinking: “What Rodríguez proposes is to stop history so as to be able to create a new time. In this sense he is a precursor to the utopian regimes of our time that have dedicated themselves to the creation of a new man” (Lo que propone Rodríguez es cortar la historia para que se pueda crear un nuevo tiempo. En este sentido es un precursor de los regímenes utópicos de nuestro tiempo que se han empeñado en crear un hombre nuevo) (Godos 34). Jorge describes Rodríguez’s formulation as one that makes education a means

212

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Notes to Pages 187–94 rather than an end to the act of “constituting” governmental power: “Education is the most appropriate means by which great human masses might gain access to power, constituting it” (La educación es el medio más idóneo para que grandes masas humanas accedan al poder, constituyéndolo) (Un nuevo poder 375). Giles in fact uses both terms, citing the “transgressive styles of duality” of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Richardson and suggesting an “insurrectional” framework as the template from which to view the literary relationship between England and North America (91, 195). In his survey of mid-twentieth-century Hispanism, “â•ƒ‘La hora ha llegado,’â•ƒ” Sebastiaan Faber speaks to a corollary tension that continues to reverberate in contemporary attempts to articulate Hispanism, namely “an unresolved tension between a universalist, humanist, Enlightenment conception of culture, and a Romantic, essentialist, or exceptionalist one” (63). Miliani lumps Rodríguez in with his sometime Paris companion, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, another thinker whose radical critiques of colonial order provoked charges of insanity. Both, he argues, are remembered unfortunately more as eccentrics than thinkers. Miliani even goes so far as to attribute their appearance in Reinaldo Arenas’s historical novel El mundo alucinante to this process of “banalización”—a reading that is certainly debatable, given the complexity of Arenas’s vision (“Simón” 14). Nicola Miller notes that if Rodríguez lost the battle for influence in his own time, “all the issues raised by Rodríguez resurfaced as the mass politics of the twentieth century finally undermined the legitimacy of the lettered city, and brought forth a variety of attempts to revive the founding idealism of the republics of the New World,” with Hugo Chávez’s political success in Venezuela being the most obvious example (“â•ƒ‘ Immoral’â•ƒ” 19). For more on the connection between continental political and pedagogical thinking in Rodríguez and Martí, see Hernández Pardo, 91–93.

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Index

Illustrations indicated in bold.

Ackerman, William, 66, 201n6 Acosta, Cecilio, 204n8 Adams, John, 57, 197n3 “Address Delivered to the Inhabitants of New Lanark” (Owen), 176 Adolfo Ruiz, Gustavo, 4, 103, 105, 195n5, 203n1 Age of Reason (Paine), 114, 119 agriculture, 70–71, 117–18 Aldridge, A. Owen, 25 Alonso, Carlos J., 31, 67 alphabet, phonetic, 143 Altuna, Elena, 194 Alvarez F., Mercedes M., 192 America Alonso on, 31 American identity, 35, 48 American space, 18, 30–32, 36–38, 40, 52–53, 197n3 conceptualization of, 18 discovery of, 30–31 independence-centered writing on, 32–33 independence of, 29–30, 41, 67–68, 198n10 moral and economic missions in, 32 nationalism of, 28 notion of identity, 29 Reyes on, 30–31 Rodríguez on, 47–49, 54–55 term, 16 virgin America, 45 American asylum anxiety behind, 59

Bello on, 33 British colonies and, 24 in Common Sense, 26 Crèvecoeur on, 34–35, 37 Elliott on, 23–24 as escape from European unreasonableness, 34–35 Franklin on, 37–38 in “Juramento en el Monte Sacro,” 22–23 Paine on, 21–22, 24, 56–57 Quintana on, 33–34 Rodríguez on, 23, 24, 56–57 Roscio on, 39–40 Sanchez Valverde on, 36 Terralla Landa on, 36 American Dictionary of the English Language (Webster), 140, 141, 207n1 American Scholar, The (Emerson), 102–3, 118, 119–24, 205n12 American Societies in 1828 (Rodríguez) audience for, 52 books and reading in, 124–27 description, 8 experiential focus, 112 on postindependence in Spanish America, 47–49 revolution in, 154 Rodríguez on, 47–49, 52 on titles, 203n3 titles in, 203n3 as touchstone for criticism, 185 Amunátegui Reyes, Miguel Luís, 209n16 Anderson, Benedict, 40, 142, 176, 207n2

229

230


Angel, Manuel Uribe, 22 Antonio Alemparte, José, 82 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 164, 166, 210n3 Arciniegas, Germán, 5, 10–11, 162 Arenas, Reinaldo, 212n5 Arequipa, Peru, 60, 73, 78, 80–81 Armytage, W. H. G., 170, 174–75 art and artists, 165–70, 183–84 Art and Experience (Dewey), 85 Arteaga, Juan José, 83 asylum (term), 33 Atala (Chateaubriand), 5, 72 avant-garde, 165–70 Bacon, Francis, 10, 14, 17, 108, 199n14, 201–2n8, 205n11 Baker, Bernadette, 115, 137 Baseler, Marilyn C., 24, 32, 197n4 Bauer, Ralph, 16–17, 73, 198n14 Beer, Max, 163 Bello, Andrés on American asylum, 33 on education, 133–34 Jaksić on, 139 on letter x, 157 nationality of, 1 Rodríguez and, 9, 161, 208n8 on smallpox vaccine, 33, 198n13 on spelling, 145–47 Bello, Andrés: works “Discurso pronunciado en la instalación de la Universidad de Chilé,” 130–35, 206–7n17 “Educación,” 133 “Indicaciones sobre la conveniencia de simplificar y uniformar la ortografía en América,” 139, 146–47 Oration at the Installation of the University of Chile, 102 Bentham, Jeremy, 162 Berlin, Isaiah, 210n5 Bestor, Arthur Eugene, Jr., 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 210n6 Bichat, Marie François Xavier, 165 Blanco White (Murphy), 200n1 Blanco White, José María on American independence, 67–68 autobiographical writings, 65, 201n5

critical reaction to, 64 El Español and, 61–62 as enlightened figure, 64–65 Goytisolo on, 201n4 Humboldt and, 65 on independence, 18 Letters from Spain, 200n1 Menéndez y Pelayo on, 64, 200n2 Rees on, 200–201n2 Rodríguez and, 65 Roscio and, 66 Roscio on, 66–67 separation from homeland, 64 Spain and, 201n4 on Spanish American independence, 63, 64, 201n3 Spanish language readership and, 62 spiritual mobility, 64 Subirats on, 64–65, 191 Variedades and, 66 on Venezuelan self-government, 66 as writer and journalist, 65–66, 67 Blue-Backed Speller (Webster), 139, 140, 149–50, 152 Bolívar, Simón correspondence with Rodríguez, 7, 22, 44–46, 47–48 death, 188 early years, 3 in Europe, 5, 22, 41–42 Morales Gil on, 100, 101 New World term and, 16 racial epithets and, 53 Rodríguez and, 5, 41–42 on Rome, 42–43, 199n17 on Spanish America, 186 as student of Rodríguez, 3, 44, 110–12, 190, 195n3, 204n6 transcendent role, 189–90 writings, 100, 101 Bolívar, Simón: works Cartagena Manifesto, 129 “Jamaica Letter” (Carta de Jamaica), 59, 61, 66 “My Delirium at Chimborazo,” 199n16 “Oath at the Sacred Mountain” ( Juramento en el Monte Sacro), 22–23, 41, 57, 197n1, 198n11, 199n16 Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 189

Index

231

Bolivarian Revolution, 189 Bolton theory, 13, 196n11 books and reading Emerson on, 118–19, 120–24, 127, 205n12 in Emile, 113–14 reader participation, 180 Rodríguez on, 118–24 Rousseau on, 113–14, 122, 123 Vanpée on, 113–14 See also essays; novels; textbooks Borges, Jorge Luis, 185 Boswell, James, 121 Botero, Giovanni, 23, 31 Brickhouse, Anna, 16 Britain colonies, 24, 27–28, 200n20 monarchy, 27–28 Brown, J. Andrew, 68, 69, 85, 201n7 Browne, Neil, 62, 84 Bürger, Peter, 168, 169, 210n4 Burkholder, Robert E., 123, 205n12 Bynack, V. P., 207n3

Columbus, Christopher, 32 Common Sense (Paine), 21–22, 25–30, 48, 57, 151 communitarianism, 173, 210n6 comunero manifesto (1781), 128, 205–6n14 Concepción, Chile earthquake, 60–61, 73, 81–88 relocation of, 63 Rodríguez on, 85–86 Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, The (Rousseau), 115 Conn, Robert, 11 Conway, Christopher, 22, 189 Co-operative Magazine, 161–62 Correo del Orinoco (newspaper), 58–59, 201n6 Cosmito, Chile, reconstruction, 85–86 coup de dés, Un (Mallarmé), 166 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 34–35, 37, 198–99n14 criollo identity, 37, 40, 62, 206n16 Cussen, Antonio, 43

Caldas, Francisco José de, 116, 117 Calligrammes (Apollinaire), 166 canals, 72–73, 75, 77, 202–3n11 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, 13, 70 Carlos III (king), 103 Carlos IV (king), 33 Carreño, Alejandro, 3 Carreño, José Cayetano del Carmen, 3 Carrera Damas, Germán, 189, 191, 193 “Carta de Jamaica” (Bolívar), 59, 61, 66 Cartagena Manifesto (Bolívar), 129 Castellanos, Rafael Ramón, 197n2 Castilian dialect, 138, 145, 147 Castro Leiva, Luis, 128–29 Chambers, Sarah C., 73 Chasteen, John Charles, 17, 197n5 Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, 5, 72 Chávez, Hugo, 1, 80–81, 189 Chillán earthquake, 86 Chimborazo (volcano), 44–46 Cinna Lomnitz earthquake, 81 Claeys, Gregory, 25, 197n6 Cmiel, Kenneth, 141 cognitive parity, 122 colonies and colonialism, 24, 73, 200n20

dams, 72–73, 74–77. See also Vincocaya Project Darwin, Charles, 8, 71, 82, 83, 206n16 Declaration of Independence (U.S.), 141 Defense of Bolívar (Rodríguez), 8, 49–51, 57 Defoe, Daniel, 109–10 deforestation, 87–88, 203n14 democratic politics, 207n4 De Pauw, Cornelius, 36 Derrida, Jacques, 143, 207–8n5 “desviación del rio Vincocaya, La” (Rodríguez), 72–80, 202–3n11 Dewey, John, 85, 191 dialect, 138 Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE), 9–10 dictionaries, 139, 147. See also specific titles Dictionary of the English Language ( Johnson), 138, 144–45 dikes, 74, 76 Dilworth’s English grammar, 149 “Discurso pronunciado en la instalación de la Universidad de Chilé” (Bello), 130–35, 206–7n17 “Discurso sobre la mita de Potosi” (Villava), 104–5

232


Dissertations on the English Language (Webster), 140, 148, 151 Do the Americas Have a Common History? (Hanke), 13 DRAE (Diccionario de la Real Academia Española), 9–10 Durkheim, Emile, 165, 166 earthquakes, 60–61, 73, 81–88 ecological consciousness, 62, 84 ecology, 18, 62, 63, 84 Economic Societies of the Friends of the Country, 103 “Edict by the King of Prussia, An” (Franklin), 148–49, 208n9 “Educación” (Bello), 133 education agricultural focus, 117–18, 204–5n9 Bello on, 133–34 bilingual education, 158–59, 209n19 child-centered education, 137 dis-Aristotelization of, 204n8 experiential focus on, 112–13 Jovellanos on, 128 Owen on, 170–71 peer-education movement, 113 political education, 134 primary education, 105 public education, 134, 173 republican education, 133–37 revolution and, 129 rhetorical focus of, 113 Rodríguez on, 135–37, 173–74, 178–79, 186–87, 211–12n2 See also primary schools educational reforms, 3, 18–19, 102–7, 115, 186–87, 203n1, 203n2 Egbert, Donald Drew, 166 elitism, 54, 144, 200n21 Elliott, J. H., 23–24, 113, 119, 204n7, 205n11, 205–6n14 Emerson, Ralph Waldo on books and reading, 118–19, 120–24, 127, 205n12 on intellectual freedom, 130 on language, 123–24 on literature, 119 on nature, 119–20

Emerson, Ralph Waldo: works The American Scholar, 102–3, 118, 119–24, 205n12 “An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837,” 118, 119 Emile, or On Education (Rousseau), 107–15, 118, 121, 130, 204n5, 205n10 Empires of the Atlantic World (Elliott), 204n7 Enlightenment and Social Virtues (1834) (Rodríguez), 8–9, 102 “Enlightenment and Social Virtues” (1842) (Rodríguez), 114–15 ensayo (term), 9–10, 46. See also essays Escuelas Reales, 103 España, José María, 4, 195n4 Español (magazine), 61–62, 66 Essais (Montaigne), 10 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 113 Essay on the Origin of Language (Rousseau), 208n12 essays American essay, 16 Arciniegas on, 10–11 definition, 10–11 ensayo (term), 9–10, 46 essayists, 12–13, 16 as genre, 11–12 González Echevarría on, 187 Hall on, 12 notion of pleasure and, 14 readers of, 211n11 reading as observation and, 180 Reyes on, 11 Rodríguez and, 162–64, 178–82, 188, 211n12 Spanish American Literature and, 12 Essays (Bacon), 10 Ette, Ottmar, 79 Faber, Sebastiaan, 212n4 Faces and Masks (Galeano), 110 FBR-200, 1 Feijoo, Benito Jerónimo, 10, 14–15 Fernández, James, 64, 201n5 FitzRoy, Robert, 83

Index Fliegelman, Jay, 141, 143 forests, 87–88, 203n14 Forner, Juan Pablo, 10 Frank, Waldo, 191–92 Franklin, Benjamin, 37–38, 143, 148–49, 150, 187, 208n9, 209n18 Friendly Advice Given to the School at Latacunga (Rodríguez), 9, 102, 117, 125–27 Gaceta de Caracas (newspaper), 131 Galeano, Eduardo, 110, 134 Galileo, 122 Gaul, Manuel, 4 George III (king), 197n7 Giles, Paul, 187, 212n3 Ginsberg, Elain Kaner, 197n3 glasses, reading, 125 Gomes, Miguel, 144, 188, 211n10 González Briceño, Luis Gerardo, 99, 100–101 González Echevarría, Roberto, 11, 68–69, 187 Goodrich, Chauncy Allen, 207n1 Goytisolo, Juan, 64, 201n4 Gramática de la lengua castellana (Nebrija), 138 grammatical reform, 149 Grases, Pedro, 5, 131 Guerra, François-Xavier, 52, 199–200n20 Habermas, Jürgen, 176, 211n10 Hall, Michael, 12, 180 Hanke, Lewis, 13 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 210n8 Helvetius, Claude-Adrien, 104 hemispheric studies, 15, 17 Himelblau, Jack, 166 Hirshbein, Cesia, 131 Hispanism, 14, 212n4 History of British Socialism, A (Beer), 163 Hoffman, Daniel C., 28 “hora ha llegado, La” (Faber), 212n4 Howell, Peter, 211n10 Huanta revolt, 136 Huerta, Teresa, 206–7n17 Humboldt, Alexander von Blanco White and, 65 Brown on, 68

233

in Correo del Orinoco, 58–59 on deforestation, 87–88, 203n14 on ecology, 63 on Ette, 79 on independence, 18 influence on criollo sensibility, 68 Personal Narrative of Travels, 69 Pratt on, 68 as prisoner, 70 prose genres and, 61–62 on Spanish America, 69, 70–72 Subirats on, 65 telescoping technique, 79 Wilson on, 69, 70 writings, 68–69 Huyssen, Andreas, 168–69 Imperial Eyes (Pratt), 40, 42 “Indicaciones sobre la conveniencia de simplificar y uniformar la ortografía en América” (Bello), 139, 146–47 “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” (Franklin), 37 Informe sobre la Ley Agraria ( Jovellanos), 128, 204–5n9 Instauratio Magna (Bacon), 201–2n8 intellectual freedom, 130 intellectual independence, 150–51, 152–53 intellectual property, 109, 132 In the American Grain (Williams), 192 irrigation ditches, 79–80 Irving, Washington, 208n14 isla de Róbinson, La (Uslar Pietri), 107 Izard, Richard, 209n18 Jaksić, Iván, 139 “Jamaica Letter” (Bolívar), 59, 61, 66 Jefferson, Thomas, 119, 149, 150, 154 Jeremiad, 14 Johnson, Samuel, 10, 121, 138, 143, 144–45 Jones, Gary L., 144 Jorge, Carlos, 115, 204n5, 208n12, 211–12n2 “Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland” (Boswell), 121 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de, 10, 103, 105, 128, 131, 204–5n9 “Juramento en el Monte Sacro” (Bolívar), 22–23, 41, 57, 197n1, 198n11, 199n16

234


Kant, Immanuel, 40 Kantian Transcendentalists, 205n12 Kaye, Harvey J., 26 Kutzinski, Vera, 15, 192 Lancaster, Joseph, 186 Langley, Lester D., 69, 135 language dialect and, 138 Emerson on, 123–24 foundational role of, 138–39 government and, 152–58, 208n12 hegemonic language, 144 linguistic order, 144 natural language, 143, 207n3 as pedagogical tool, 142–48 politics and, 139, 141 reform of, 142, 153–54, 155 regulation of human thought and, 208n8 revolutionary language, 141–42 Rousseau on, 196n9 spoken language, 142–48, 151–52 written language, 142–48, 151–52, 159 Lasarte, Javier, 188, 200n21, 211n10 Lasheras, Jesús Andrés, 111, 113, 195n5 Lastarria, José Victorino, 9, 161–62, 175 Lettered City, The (Rama), 113 Letters from an American Farmer (Crèvecoeur), 34 Letters from Spain (Blanco White), 200n1 Levander, Caroline, 15 Levine, Robert S., 15 Leyenda Negra (Shumway), 14 Lima por dentro y por fuera (Terralla Landa), 36 Liscano, Juan, 45 Litto, Frederic Michael, 208n11 Llanos, Venezuela, 70 Locke, John, 113, 205n11 Lockean Unitarian establishment, 205n12 Loefling, Peter, 58–59 Looby, Christopher, 141, 208n9 Loughran, Trish, 25–26 Lozano y Lozano, Fabio, 2, 192 Lozier, Ambrosio, 83 Luces y Virtudes Sociales (Rodríguez), 175, 178–82 Lynch, John, 17, 189

mail coaches, 174–75 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 164, 166–67, 210n3 “Man Thinking” (Emersonian concept), 119, 121 Manuel, Frank, 165–66 Manuela Sáenz (film), 83 Manzoni, Celina, 209n17 Marcoy, Paul, 6, 9 Marius, Andre, 107 Martí Marco, María-Rosario, 72 Mather, Cotton, 23, 27, 31 McMillin, T. S., 122–23, 127 Meléndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, 61, 64 Melville, Elinor G. K., 63 Melville, Herman, 83 Memoirs of Fray Servando, The (Rotker, ed.), 5 Memoria y Exilio (Subirats), 207n18 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, 61, 64, 200n2 Mercurio Peruano (newspaper), 175 Merriams, the, 141 metallurgy, 117–18 Mickelthwait, David, 141, 149, 207n1 Miliani, Domingo, 4, 211n11, 212n5 Miller, Nicola, 115, 193, 212n5 mining, 71, 117 Miranda, Francisco de, 5 Misión Robinson, 1 “mito Americano, El” (Uslar Pietri), 40 Monroe Doctrine, 16 Montaigne, Michel de, 10, 12 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 186 Morales Gil, Eduardo, 99–100, 101 Moré, Belford, 151 Morse, Richard, 135, 191 mundo alucinante, El (Arenas), 212n5 Muñoz Olave, Reinaldo, 86 Murphy, Martin, 66, 200n1 “My Delirium at Chimborazo” (Bolívar), 199n16 Myers, Jeffrey, 62 Myth and Archive (González Echevarría), 11 natural language, 143, 207n3 nature, 119–20 Nebrija, Antonio de, 138, 145, 147–48

Index New Harmony, Indiana (utopian community), 162, 171 New Lanark (utopian community), 162, 171 newspapers, 174–75, 176, 178, 210n8, 211n10 New View of Society . . . , A (Owen), 170 New World (term), 16 North America colonial rule in, 24, 138–39, 200n20 language, 139 Lockean political thought and, 205n11 postcolonial moments in, 211n10 North American Revolution, 51, 119, 207n2 novels, 187 “Oath at the Sacred Mountain” (Bolívar), 22–23, 41, 57, 197n1, 198n11, 199n16 Obras completas (Rodríguez), 197n1 Observations on the Terrain of Vincocaya . . . (Rodríguez), 60–61 OED (Oxford English Dictionary), 9–10 Of the Law of Nature and Nations (Von Pufendorf ), 24 O’Leary, Daniel, 6, 7 “Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837, An” (Emerson), 118, 119 Oration at the Installation of the University of Chile (Bello), 102 Orrego Luco, Augusto, 192 orthography, 144–48, 156, 158–60, 207n4, 208n13 Otero, Francisco de Paulo, 209n19 “Our America Is an Essay” (Arciniegas), 10–11 Owen, Robert Co-operative Magazine, 161–62 on education, 170–71 newspapers and, 176 on printing presses, 182–84 publicity by, 174–75, 210n7 Rodríguez, comparisons with, 19 utopian communities and, 162–63, 171–73 writing career, 170 Owen, Robert: works “Address Delivered to the Inhabitants of New Lanark,” 176 A New View of Society . . . , 170 Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary, 138 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 9–10

235

Paine, Thomas on American asylum, 21–22, 24, 56–57 on American independence, 29–30 on American notion of identity, 29 American space and, 18 birth, 25 on British monarchy, 27–28 Claeys on, 197n6 nationalities of, 25 on nationality, 28, 190 New World (term), 16 publishing career, 25 style of, 57, 119 Paine, Thomas: works Age of Reason, 114, 119 Common Sense, 21–22, 25–30, 48, 57, 151 Palacios, Carlos, 3 parallel (term), 199n19 patria (term), 52 Pereiro-Otero, José Manuel, 33, 198n12–13 Personal Narrative of Travels (Humboldt), 69 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 109, 142–43 phonetic alphabet, 143 Picornell, Juan Bautista, 4 Pino Iturrieta, Elías, 189 plate tectonics, 82, 203n13 Plato, 129 Podestá, Guido A., 169, 210n4 Poggioli, Renato, 166–68 Polanco Alcántara, Tomás, 22–23, 102, 204n6 political education, 134 political reform, 158–59 populacho (term), 54, 55, 200n21 popular enlightenment, notion of, 40 pragmatist ecology, 62, 84 Pratt, Mary Louise, 40, 42, 68 primary schools, 3, 105–6, 115, 129, 195n2 printing presses, 182–84 pronunciation, 150, 151 prose genres, 61–62 public education, 134, 173 publicity, 175 public works, 80–81 pueblo (term), 52 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 24 Pulgar Machado, Camila, 59, 208n8 Punta de Parra, reconstruction, 85–86 Quintana, Manuel José, 33–34, 198n13

236


race and racism, 53–54 Rama, Ángel, 113, 162, 211n12 reading. See books and reading reading glasses, 125 Real Academia Española, 145, 146 Real Comitiva, 103 Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (De Pauw), 36 Recuerdos literarias (Lastarria), 161–62 Rees, Daniel, 200–201n2 Reflections on the Current State of the School (Rodríguez), 3, 102, 105–6, 203n1 Report Presented to the Intendancy of the Provence of Concepción, Chile . . . (Rodríguez), 60–61 Republic (Plato), 129 republican education, 133–37 republicanism, 27 republican virtues, 92 revolution, 129, 155–56 Revue indépendant, 168 Reyes, Alfonso, 11, 30–31 Richardson, Samuel, 187, 212n3 Ríos, Alicia, 180, 188 Rísquez, Diego, 83 Robinson, Simon (pseud.). See Rodríguez, Simón Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 109–10 “Robinson Crusoe as a Myth” (Watt), 110 Rodó, José Enrique, 14, 40–41 Rodríguez, Simón as Bolívar’s teacher, 3, 44, 110–12, 190, 204n6 call for shared faculties, 163 correspondence with Bolívar, 7, 22, 44–46, 47–48 “dealings with things” rather than words, 97 death, 2, 9, 188 early years, 2–3 educational reforms and, 3 as education minister, 6–7 as essayist, 139, 162–64 in Europe, 4–6, 22, 41–42, 107, 116–17 Europe and America compared, 98 exile from Venezuela, 1, 4 fame and mythology, 101 on government, 173

later years, 7–9 literary career, 8 madness and, 192–93, 212n5 as Maestro del Libertador, 99, 140, 190 marriage, 3 messages to American republics, 96 parallels between listener and reader, 91 politics of, 186 pseudonym, 4, 107 republican virtues, 92 style of, 73, 208n6 as teacher, 3, 4, 82, 195n5 typographical innovations, 2, 8, 9, 17, 88–89, 93–94, 164, 175–76, 178–80, 182, 184, 211n10 as writer, 74, 191–92 writings, 1–2, 73, 102–3, 190 Rodríguez, Simón: works American Societies in 1828 (see American Societies in 1828 (Rodríguez)) Atala translation, 5, 72 Defense of Bolívar, 8, 49–51, 57, 60, 74 “La desviación del rio Vincocaya,” 72–80, 202–3n11 Enlightenment and Social Virtues (1824), 8–9, 102 “Enlightenment and Social Virtues” (1842), 114–15 Friendly Advice to the School at Latacunga, 9, 102, 117, 125–27 Luces y Virtudes Sociales, 175, 178–82 Obras completas, 197n1 Observations on the Terrain of Vincocaya . . . , 60–61 Reflections on the Current State of the School, 3, 102, 105–6, 203n1 Report Presented to the Intendancy of the Provence of Concepción, Chile . . . , 60–61 “El terremoto de Concepción,” 72–73, 81–88 Rojas, Arístedes, 162, 192 Rojas, Armando, 101 Rojas Mix, Miguel, 72 Roldán Vera, Eugenia, 66, 201n6 Rollins, Richard M., 151 Rome Bolívar on, 42–43, 199n17 Sacred Mountain, 44, 199n18

Index Romero, Emilio, 80, 203n12 Roscio, Juan Germán, 39–40, 61, 66–67, 199n15 Rosenblat, Ángel, 159–60 Rothenberg, Molly Anne, 29, 190, 198n9 Rotker, Susana on “Juramento en el Monte Sacro,” 22–23, 57, 198n11, 199n16 The Memoirs of Fray Servando (ed.), 5 on Rodríguez, 162–63, 185, 193, 208n6 on Sacred Mountain, 199n18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques on books and reading, 113–14, 122, 123 compositions, 108 educational approach, 114–15 Fernández on, 201n5 influence on Rodríguez, 4, 107–8 on language, 196n9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: works The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, 115 Emile, or On Education, 107–15, 118, 121, 130, 204n5, 205n10 Essay on the Origin of Language, 208n12 The Social Contract, 108 Rubílar Solís, Luís, 60 Ruiz, Nydia, 199n15 Rumazo González, Alfonso, 4, 74, 82 Sacks, Kenneth, 205n12 Sacred Mountain, 44, 199n18 Sáenz, Manuela, 9, 83 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 165–70 Salmagundi (Irving), 208n14 Sanchez Valverde, Antonio, 36, 37 Santos Roca, María de los, 3 Sanz, Caraqueño Miguel José, 104–5, 204n8 Sarmiento, Benito Faustino, 1, 23, 53, 156–57, 202n10, 208n13 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 207–8n5 “Scheme for a New Alphabet and Reformed Mode of Spelling, A” (Franklin), 148 Schiff, Stacy, 209n18 Sena, Manuel García de, 25 Shumway, Nicolas, 13–14, 15 Simón Rodríguez (Carrera Damas), 193 Simón Rodríguez (González Briceño), 99, 100–101

237

Simón Rodríguez and Simón Bolívar, Pioneers of Popular Education (Morales Gil), 99–100 Simón Rodríguez Just as He Was (Alvarez F.), 192 slaves and slavery, 51 smallpox, 33 smallpox vaccines, 33, 198n13 Smith, Adam, 103 Smith, William, 197n3 Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 108 social virtue, 185 Soilbelman, David, 159 Soler, Ricaurte, 16 South America, 178, 206n16. See also Spanish America and Spanish Americans Spain and Spanish peoples Blanco White and, 201n4 censorship, 201n4 environment adaptation, 202n10 language, 138 underdevelopment, 202n10 Spanish America and Spanish Americans agriculture, 70–71 American Societies in 1828 on, 47–49 Bolívar on, 186 colonial rule in, 63, 138–39 communication within, 70 educational reform and, 103–7 environment adaptation, 202n10 harmony-based critique of, 61 Humboldt on, 69, 70–72 independence, 61–64, 69, 118, 130, 141, 201n3, 207n18 language, 139 mining, 71, 117 missions in, 71–72 populations, 52–53, 199–200n20 public works, 80–81 race and racism in, 54 revolutions, 207n2 Rodríguez on, 23, 186, 193, 211n1 Spanish American literature, 12 underdevelopment of, 202n10 utility in, 70–72 War of Independence, 63, 118, 119 See also criollo identity; South America spelling, 144–48, 156, 158–60, 207n4, 208n13

238


spoken language, 142–48, 151–52 Subirats, Eduardo, 64–65, 191, 207n18 Sucre, Antonio José de, 6–7, 155, 196n6 Swann, Charles, 159 “Swearing In of the Central Planning Commission” (Chávez), 80–81 Talcahuano Bay, tsunami in, 81, 82 Teresa de Mier, Servando, 4, 5, 66, 157, 212n5 Terralla Landa, Esteban, 36, 37 “terremoto de Concepción, El” (Rodríguez), 72–73, 81–88 textbooks, 139–40, 211n12 Toro, Fermín, 204n8 Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Brickhouse), 16 Triumph of Liberty over Despotism, The (Roscio), 39 triunfo de la libertad sobre el despotismo, El (Roscio), 66–67 Trousson, Raymond, 137 tsunamis, 81, 82 United States independence, 118, 141 Panic of 1837, 205n12 Webster on government of, 154–55 Uslar Pietri, Arturo, 16, 40, 107, 211n1 utopian communities, 162–63, 170–74, 176–77 vaccines, smallpox, 33, 198n13 Vanpée, Janie, 113–14, 122, 205n10 Variedades (magazine), 66 Velez-Rodríguez, Ricardo, 203n4 Venezuela Chávez and, 189 economic development, 204n8 government of, 66, 189 Villava, Victorián de, 104–5, 203n2 Vincocaya Project, 63, 73–76, 80, 203n12 Voyage of the Beagle, The (Darwin), 71, 206n16

Warfel, Harry, 149, 151 Watt, Ian, 110, 111 Webster, Noah on Dictionary of the English Language, 145 Franklin and, 148 on intellectual independence, 150–51 language reform and, 142 as national pedagogue, 149 political critiques of, 152, 208n11 politics of, 149 on pronunciation, 150 Rodríguez, comparisons with, 140–42 spelling and, 144, 159 spoken and written language and, 143–44, 151–52 as teacher, 139 on U.S. government, 154–55 as writer, 139–40 Webster, Noah: works American Dictionary of the English Language, 140, 141, 207n1 Blue-Backed Speller, 139, 140, 149–50, 152 Dissertations on the English Language, 140, 148, 151 Weinreich, Max, 138 Weinstein, Brian, 159 Whittembury, Guillermo, 83 Wibel, John Frederick, 73, 74, 80 Williams, William Carlos, 192 William the Conqueror, 28 Wilson, Jason, 69, 70 words/things division, 113 written language, 142–48, 151–52, 159 x, letter, 156–58, 209n16, 209n17 z, letter, 209n18 Zeuske, Michael, 63

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