Man on the Market: Jose Martıand the Poetics of Commerce

ericka beckman

university of illinois, urbana-champaign

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Artes y Sociedad economica van aparejadas.—Jose Martı, Guatemala (1877)

Jose Martı is without a doubt the most prominent figure in the articulation ofan anti-imperialist and anti-commercial Latin Americanist discourse at the

turn of the nineteenth century. Here I understand Latin Americanism to meanthe construction of a unified, continental identity in opposition to Anglo-America and/or Northern Europe, from the late nineteenth century untiltoday.1 A key element of this discourse is the assertion that the ‘‘value’’ of LatinAmerica lies in spiritual—and not material—wealth: if the United States andBritain were characterized by ‘‘materialism,’’ in this context a codeword for themoney economy, Latin America was governed by a superior order of values.Today, Martı’s Latin Americanism is rather consistently associated with anti-economist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist positions (usually posited as inter-changeable). He is considered the architect of a spiritual and political economybased upon a uniquely American aesthetic expression, continental brotherhood,and national autonomy in opposition to the imperialist designs of the UnitedStates. The 1959 Cuban revolution, especially, has cast Martı retroactively as anenemy of capitalist society; or, as Roberto Fernandez Retamar has put it, as antici-pating the socialist future ‘‘sin haber sido socialista el mismo’’ (44). Most re-cently, within the U.S. academy, scholars in postcolonial, Latino/a and ethnicstudies have looked to Martı as a cultural bridge between Americas North and

1 One of the most important assumptions of Latin Americanism—or in the case of Martı,‘Nuestro americanismo’—is that certain attitudes, beliefs, and practices are appropriate (pro-pios) while others are foreign (ajenos) to Latin America. An excellent description of Martı’sliterary-humanist articulation of the Latin American ‘‘we’’ in opposition to U.S. market soci-ety is elaborated by Julio Ramos. In his excavation of Latin Americanist discourse, Ramosplaces Martı in dialogue with key forerunners like Francisco Bilbao and Eugenio Marıa deHostos; and later twentieth-century figures such as Pedro Henrıquez Urena and AlfonsoReyes. In a different sense, the term Latin Americanism has been used recently to describethe discursive practices deployed to create ‘‘Latin America’’ as an object of study within theU.S. academy (under area studies paradigms within the social sciences, and through thepopularity of ‘‘Boom’’ literature within Spanish literature departments). See Roman de laCampa.

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South, denouncing U.S. racism and imperialism in favor of a more fluid, inclu-sive utopia of regional identity.2

Yet Martı’s passionate anti-imperialist stance and defense of national, spiritualand aesthetic values above and beyond commodity exchange did not mean thathe was entirely opposed to the institutions and practices of bourgeois liberalism;instead, he often looked to the ‘‘free’’ market as a utopian space of democratiza-tion and decolonization, a position that is rarely accorded critical attention.Martı became a key figure in the articulation of an anti-commercial, anti-imperialist regional identity, even as he worked to construct an eminently com-mercial vision of ‘‘Nuestra America.’’ This argument is developed in two parts.First, I explore how ‘‘nature’’ became the materia prima of an aesthetic economyexisting in willful opposition to the capitalist market in the well-known 1882prologue to J.A. Perez Bonalde’s Poema del Niagara. Not coincidentally, Martı’sinvocation of nature as non-commodifiable value coincided exactly with the con-solidation of primary export economies in most of Latin America, as part of anemerging world-system in which peripheral nations and colonies alike becamelocked into providing the raw materials for industrial growth in capitalist centers.In dialogue with this paradigm, another set of Martı’s texts from the late 1870sand early 1880s reveal an economic substrate to ‘‘nature’’ as the backbone ofmaterial progress in Latin America. Martı, taking on the double role of poet anddeveloper, thus attempted to make aesthetic production ‘‘useful’’ to commercethrough an emerging discourse of marketing, presenting a rather contradictoryconceptualization of the place of aesthetic production within regimes of capital-ist modernization.

Studies by Angel Rama, Julio Ramos, Susana Rotker, and Gene Bell-Villada,among others, have productively explored the contradictory consequences ofthe professionalization of writing in Latin America during this period. As socie-ties experienced intense processes of modernization and commercialization inthe last decades of the nineteenth century, writing increasingly became a paidprofession—especially as a result of the boom in newspaper publishing—and thetext a commodity. Martı, along with contemporaries like Ruben Darıo, has be-come a model of sorts for examining the effects of this process. In general, criticshave emphasized authors’ grave discomfort with the effects of commercializa-tion, an ideological stance that transformed modern literary discourse into a siteof market resistance. If we turn to a different set of texts, however, resistancemorphs into celebration, and poetry into marketing. On levels of both ideologyand form, then, Martı’s critiques of the market coexisted with aesthetically-driven celebrations of its potential, opening up alternate conceptualizations of‘‘the literary’’ at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Scholars have already pointed out an enduring conflict between Martı’s attrac-tion to and rejection of commerce. Angel Rama, in a key essay, writes that Martı‘‘[no] se aparto un apice de su filosofıa librecambista: solo al final viendo algu-nas perniciosas formas del liberalismo pidio atemperamiento de sus excesos’’(141). More recently, Beatriz Gonzalez Stephan has read Martı’s essay on the

2 Gayatri Spivak, for example, has recently called upon Martı as a representative of postco-lonial nationalism (96). See also Belnap and Fernandez (eds.), De Sousa Santos, and Saldıvar.

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1889 Universal Exposition in Paris (published in La edad de oro) as demonstrating‘‘no poca confianza en los logros materiales de la modernizacion y las posibili-dades de su difusion democratizada’’ (237). I will examine Martı’s simultaneouscritique and embrace of commercial expansion, especially with regard to thedifferent uses of aesthetic representation vis-a-vis market expansion. Aestheticexpression could provide a refuge from the destabilizing currents of the market,yet, in some contexts, it could also transform the market itself into an object ofdesire for the modern Latin American subject.

‘‘Natural Poetry’’ and the Critique of the Market

The 1882 prologue to J.A. Perez Bonalde’s Poema del Niagara, widely considereda literary manifesto of Spanish American modernism, is one of Martı’s most com-pelling defenses of the place of poetry in a world characterized by modern fluxand uncertainty. This text is important in casting the literary object in oppositionto the negative effects of capitalist modernity (what Raymond Williams hastermed in a different context a higher ‘‘Court of Appeal’’ [64]), as well as in itsattempt to grasp linguistically the promise and threat of modern transformation.A double movement marks the text: modernity is seen to destroy an anteriororder that needs to be restored through poetry, while it is the vast upheavalunleashed by modernity that provides the images and sensations at the heart ofa new literary aesthetic.

Regarding the prologue, Julio Ramos has written that Martı looked to litera-ture as a depository of cultural value in stubborn resistance to U.S. capitalism, abinary opposition that would come to characterize twentieth-century latinoameri-canismo:

Before the form of knowledge privileged by modern rationalization,Martı asserted the superiority of an alternative ‘knowledge’ found inart, capable of even imagining a future harmony. For Martı, the au-thority of modern literature was rooted precisely in its resistance to thedeterritorialized flows rampant in capitalist modernization. (xxxix,emphasis in original)

Martı wrote his prologue in the United States (for a poem written about NiagaraFalls by a Venezuelan author), and I wish to approach it in dialogue with fourspecific elements that the author sees at the heart of commercial society in theU.S.: the rapid march of technological innovation, the hegemony of the moneyeconomy, rampant financial speculation, and feminine luxury consumption.These characteristics run a line from the most socially productive (the steamtrain) and materially tangible (gold), to the most intangible (finance) and de-ceptive (luxury), infusing an uneven density and intensity into Martı’s critiqueof northern modernity.

In the line that perhaps best summarizes the aesthetic sensibility sketched inthe prologue, Martı writes: ‘‘Una tempestad es mas bella que una locomotora’’(OC 7: 234). Calling upon the breakneck speed and thrilling promise of the

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locomotive, a metonym for modernity in Martı’s time, the natural phenomenonis chosen as the more beautiful spectacle of the two. But already, his defense ofthe ‘‘natural’’ over and against the technology of the steam train is ambiguous,since it is the radical proliferation of ideas and objects in modern society thatprovide the terms and framework for a new aesthetic program in the first place.Marshall Berman, after Marx, has called modernity a state in which ‘‘everythingsolid melts into air.’’ This statement is echoed in the prologue: in the ‘‘nuevoestado social,’’ ‘‘los ferrocarriles echan abajo la selva; los diarios la selva hu-mana’’ (OC 7: 225). Here Martı refers again to the omnipresence of the railwayin late-nineteenth cultural imaginaries, and adds the newspaper, an industriallyproduced object that would mark his own life in profound ways. For it was ekingout a meager living as a journalist in New York City in the 1880s that Martıwas able to disseminate his thoughts to readers across Latin America, especiallythrough his widely reproduced chronicles of life in the United States.

In the prologue, the confusion and destructive pull of the times have weak-ened the place of poetry in society. The classical model of the poet-warrior isgone; today, we see poor, pallid young men, poets with ‘‘broken wings,’’ facedwith ‘‘nostalgia for the great deed.’’ This crisis is brought on by the general upsetof modernity, but it is marked particularly as a result of the decline of ‘‘spiritual’’values and the predominance of ‘‘material’’ ones. It is thus that poetry—thereserve of spiritual value par excellence for Martı—is called upon explicitly tocounteract this fall into commerce:

¡Ruines tiempos, en que no priva mas arte que el de llenar bien losgraneros de la casa, y sentarse en silla de oro, y vivir todo dorado; sinver que la naturaleza humana no ha de cambiar de como es, y consacar el oro afuera, no se hace sino quedarse sin oro alguno adentro!(OC 7: 223)

The true social function of art—to express human nature—has become subordi-nated to the spurious ‘‘art’’ of individual gain. If the ‘‘gold without’’ belongs tothe money economy, ‘‘the gold within’’ should be inalienable. But to the extentthat material gold is accumulated, the reserve of ‘‘inner’’ gold—virtue—is de-pleted. The epic poet, once guard over this fund of virtue, has lost his place in aworld run by the money form: today, Martı writes, ‘‘apenas tienen hoy los hom-bres tiempo para beber el oro de los vasos, y cubrir de el a las mujeres, y sacarlode las minas’’ (OC 7: 224), signaling a turn away from civic duty, and toward thesatisfaction of individual material desires.

If for Martı the money economy is false when compared with the true ‘‘gold’’of the poet (a concept that resonates with the ideas of the Victorian philosopherThomas Carlyle),3 even more worrisome was the fact that this money economy

3 Martı was familiar with Thomas Carlyle by way of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a great admirerof the Victorian philosopher. In Carlyle’s famous lectures, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and theHeroic in History, delivered in 1840, he lamented the presence of ‘‘counterfeit’’ subjects inthe midst of the ‘‘gold’’ of true heroes: ‘‘They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries,all representing gold—and several of them, alas, always are forged notes. We can do withsome forged false notes; with a good many even; but not with all, or the most of themforged!’’ (12).

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was based on the fictitious and duplicitous machinations of financial speculation.I would like to turn briefly here to a chronicle Martı wrote about the dishonestbusiness practices and ensuing bankruptcy of General Ulysses S. Grant’s firm,Grant and Ward, in 1884, published in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nacion.Here the author provides further insight into what is wrong with modern marketsociety: it is a system in which value surges and deflates not in accordance withany natural law, but according to the whims of the market:

Es legıtimo el trafico en valores, y ha de haber un lugar donde el quese vea corto de dinero, y sobrado de papeles que lo representan,venda, y compre el que quiera colocar sus fondos. Pero hinchar lasacciones a precios que no estan en relacion con sus orıgenes y valorpresente y probable; imponer a papeles nulos un valor ficticio; forzar,con escaramuzas y asedios de bolsa, que no son en sı mas que volunta-rias suposiciones, ocultaciones culpables y descaradas mentiras, alzaso bajas que no proceden de los cambios reales del valor represen-tado—es una estafa indigna de que las gentes honradas pongan suinteligencia en organizarla, o su limpia fortuna en mantenerla enmovimiento y credito. Ha echado por caminos la existencia moderna,en que la serenidad del animo, la claridad de lo interior y la vidalegıtima van siendo imposibles. (OC 10: 62)

‘‘Traffic’’ in stocks is legitimate, Martı writes; the problem arises when represen-tations exceed true value. Stocks, as paper representations of value, can easily beinflated, manipulated and forced, resulting in bald-faced lies and outright fraud.‘‘Fictitious’’ value, a term often applied to credit-based wealth, provokes materialcrises; more broadly, however, the machinations of the stock market point toa larger crisis in representation, by which it becomes increasingly difficult todistinguish truth from falsehood, and honor from corruption.

To return to the prologue, Martı’s critique of fictitious value in a financialsystem might be read through his stern critique of those poets who have aban-doned virtue in favor of artifice and caprice:

¡Son los hombres como ciertas damiselas, que se prendan de las vir-tudes cuando las ven encomiadas por los demas, o sublimadas ensonante prosa o en alados versos, mas luego que se han abrazado a lavirtud, que tiene forma de cruz, la echan de sı con espanto, como sifuera mortaja roedora que les comiera las rosas de las mejillas, y elgozo de los besos, y ese collar de mariposas de colores que gustan decenirse al cuello las mujeres! (OC 7: 223)

Here Martı stresses the qualities that should not guide literary productionthrough the men whose moral values fluctuate like those of the stock market,embracing and rejecting virtue at whim. And like the caprice of the stock market(often represented as a fickle woman, as Laura Brown has shown), moral volubil-ity is expressly feminized. The ‘‘damiselas’’ he invokes here are fickle, but theyare also coded as consumers bedazzled with bright objects, metaphorized through

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their non-committal trying on and casting off ‘‘butterfly necklaces.’’ While Martıis surely talking about the conditions of literary production, in which the writer’swork becomes subject to market demands, he is also commenting upon the insa-tiable desire to consume objects under commodity culture, a desire he associates,in dialogue with contemporary discourses on fashion and shopping, with women(see Bowlby, Felski).

A consistent theme in Martı’s writings is his deep mistrust of ‘‘superfluous’’consumption, inserting him within a long anti-luxury tradition of Westernthought.4 His most immediate reference was without a doubt Rousseau (a guid-ing figure for generations of Spanish American letrados), refracted via a Krausistvision of Republican virtue and austerity.5 In keeping with earlier discourses onconsumption, luxury’s ‘‘name’’ is Woman. As he wrote in a second installmentof ‘‘Impressions of America’’ written in English for The Hour in 1880:

We must ask women for the natural end of their inextinguishablethirst for pleasure and amusement. We must ask them if being soexclusively devoted to the possession of silk dresses, dazzling dia-monds and all kinds of costly fancies could afterwards carry into theirhomes those solid virtues, those sweet feelings, that kind resignation,that evangelic power of consolation which can only keep up a hearthshaken by misfortune and inspire children with contempt for regularpleasures and the love of internal satisfactions that make men happyand strong, as they did Ishmael, against the days of poverty.’’ (OC 19:121)6

It is worth noting that Martı calls upon present-day Ishmaels as the male subjectsthreatened by women’s poisonous attachment to luxury. This Biblical name, ofcourse, was immortalized in the same year in Ismaelillo (1880), a collection ofverses dedicated to his absent son Pepe, from which women are conspicuouslyabsent.7

Here it is important to point out that luxury is rejected on both social andaesthetic levels as a threat to ideals of masculine civic duty and community. In

4 John Sekora provides a thorough discussion of the transhistorical associations betweenluxury and foreignness (especially via Asia), and luxury and femininity (by way of Eve inChristian thought). Of special interest to a discussion of Martı is the Roman oppositionbetween luxus and virtus articulated by Cicero and others, which would resound within laterarticulations of manly Republican virtue in nineteenth-century Latin America and elsewhere.

5 For a discussion of the Bolivarian Republican ideal of austerity inherited from Rousseau,among others, see Castro Leiva. For an analysis of Martı’s adhesion to the neo-Kantianthought of Karl Krause, characterized in part by its aversion to luxury and frivolity, see PeterTurton. Richard Rosa provides an excellent analysis of the Latin American civic tradition inthe writings of Eugenio Marıa de Hostos.

6 Martı, of course, was not the only Latin American author to associate the ills of modernitywith feminine luxury consumption. This theme organizes several nineteenth-century novels,running from the Peruvian Benjamın Cisneros’s Julia (1860), to the Uruguayan Lola Larro-sa’s El lujo (1880), to better-known texts such as Lucio V. Lopez’s La gran aldea (1884).

7 As Angel Rama points out, Martı’s Ismaelillo is predicated upon a father-son relationshipin which any trace of the feminine is erased; instead, the two form a ‘‘ferrea y autosuficientepareja masculina’’ (150).

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this regard Martı should be distinguished from contemporaries such as RubenDarıo, Julian del Casal, and Jose Asuncion Silva, all of whom cultivated theiraesthetic sensibilities in positive relation to luxury (even as they distanced them-selves from luxury’s feminine identifications). Instead, more in line with earlierwriter-statesmen ranging from Simon Bolıvar and Andres Bello to Domingo F.Sarmiento and Eugenio Marıa de Hostos, Martı was characterized by sobrietyand austerity in his attitudes toward consumption; also like these figures, hewould insist that writing be socially useful, and denounce luxury as a threat to theRepublic.

It is against this array of threats to masculine integrity that Martı’s prologueadvocates the restoration of a male code of honor through natural poetry, anartistic form that rejects (feminized) duplicity, artifice, and excess of the urbanmarketplace in its turn toward nature:

Lo que el Niagara cuenta; las voces del torrente; los gemidos del almahumana; la majestad del alma universal; el dialogo titanico entre elhombre impaciente y la naturaleza desdenosa; el clamor desesperadode hijo de gran padre desconocido, que pide a su madre muda elsecreto de su nacimiento. (OC 7: 231)

In contrast with the modern city, there is a soothing element to the forces ofNiagara Falls, designed by a divine hand. Notably, the feminine becomes reassur-ing again, as the mute mother and ever-faithful wife (‘‘esposa que jamas desama’’[OC 7: 231]); the father is absent, allowing the new men to direct their owndestinies; ‘‘Urge devolver los hombres a sı mismos,’’ Martı writes (OC 7:230),positing the possibility of the reconstitution of virtue in nature. Importantly, thisattempt occurs against the backdrop of unstable, permanently fluctuating andfeminizing urban modernity, marking manliness and ‘‘nature’’—the only real‘‘gold’’ possible—off limits from capitalist exchange.

Utility and Transcendence: The Natural Poet Goes to Market

The setting of the poem considered by Martı, Niagara Falls, had become anicon of sublime nature for generations of Latin American authors, providing atouchstone for a Latin American poetic community via the cataract on the U.S./Canada border.8 Ironically, however, as Elizabeth McKinsey has shown, this sitehad become a major tourist attraction by the end of the nineteenth century,replete with the ‘‘artificial’’ and crassly commercial elements most despised byMartı (who, it should be noted, never visited the Falls himself): alongside thenatural phenomenon stood the commodity spectacle, signaled by a proliferationof souvenir stands, rubber-suited tour guides, and Irish immigrants dressed as

8 The Cuban Jose M. Heredia’s 1824 poem ‘‘Niagara’’ served as inspiration for PerezBonalde; other nineteenth-century Latin American writers who wrote about Niagara Fallsinclude Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Eduardo Mansilla, and JustoSierra.

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American Indians. In this sense, Niagara Falls in 1882 might have shared somecharacteristics with Coney Island, the urban tourist attraction Martı had chroni-cled for a Bogota newspaper a year earlier. It was in this later text, Julio Ramoshas argued, that the Cuban author expressed an understanding of a spiritual-ized, aestheticized Latin American ‘‘we’’ in opposition to the commercial lawsgoverning U.S. society (206). Standing apart from the reveling urban masses,Martı writes: ‘‘Otros pueblos—y nosotros entre ellos—vivimos devorados por unsublime demonio interior, que nos empuja a la persecucion infatigable de unideal de amor o gloria [ . . . ]. No ası aquellos espıritus tranquilos, turbados solopor el ansia de la posesion de una fortuna’’ (OC 9: 126).

In contrast with Coney Island as tourist mecca, the commodification of Niag-ara Falls is not an issue for Martı’s discussion of a poem, even though its Venezue-lan author had written his verses as a tourist there in 1880. What we might call acommercial prehistory of the prologue to the Poema del Niagara involves PerezBonalde himself as prototype for the ‘‘natural poet.’’ For this figure, when notwriting about Niagara Falls, was a commercial agent for the New York-based per-fume and soap firm Lanman and Kemp. A gifted linguist, he was in charge ofmarketing the company’s products in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and pen-ning advertisements for its toiletries.9 It was in this double capacity, as ad-manand poet, that Martı met Perez Bonalde first in Venezuela and later in Spanish-speaking New York literary circles in the early 1880s.10

What does it mean that the site identified with a non-commodifiable fund ofspiritual value in Martı’s prologue was well on its way to becoming one of themost notorious late-nineteenth-century representatives of nature commodified?Why is the commodification of nature suppressed in the prologue, while it be-comes the organizing element of his critique of U.S. culture in texts like ‘‘ConeyIsland’’? On the other hand, what does it mean that Martı’s ‘‘natural poet’’marketed luxury commodities (most likely to female consumers)? The utopian,unmediated relationship between ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘nature’’ sought after in the pro-logue (and in Perez Bonalde’s poem itself) is thus undergirded by a set of cir-cumstances that openly contradict the vigorously wrought separation betweenthe poet and the feminized commodity culture surrounding him. For what couldbe more contrary to the values of ‘‘nature’’ than advertising, a genre that self-consciously deploys representative language to inflate the value of commodities?Given Martı’s critique of the duplicity of modern market culture, how can weinterpret the fact that the male poetic subject he showcased was engaged in themost ‘‘insincere’’ of professions? In posing these questions, I do not wish tosuggest that Martı (or Perez Bonalde for that matter) was naive or ‘‘insincere’’;rather, I want to point out the extent to which an emerging literary discoursewas deeply embedded within the market conditions it rejected.

9 Perez Bonalde’s advertisements for Lanman and Kemp were written in seven languagesand appeared in different media over the course of eighteen years (1870–1888; see Paredes).In 1890, the Colombian poet Jose Asuncion Silva, in a text on the uses of advertising inBogota admired the campaigns launched by Lanman and Kemp in New York City newspa-pers, and proposed them as a model for Colombian businessmen (Santos Molano 5).

10 Martı and Perez Bonalde became friends as participants in the literary group that metat the Salon Theiss, on 14th Street in New York City. It seems that in later years this friendshipsoured, as Perez Bonalde became addicted to morphine (see Martı, OC 20: 123).

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Perez Bonalde was not the only writer engaged in marketing products in hisday-to-day life. Martı, as I will show in this section, was also a consummate pro-moter of Latin American commodities, especially with regard to the region’snatural resources. Nature as poetic ideal, in some cases, acquires an explicitlyeconomic dimension as Latin America’s main mode of production during thelast decades of the nineteenth century.

The Practical-Utilitarian Critique of Literary Production

When viewed from the United States, modern market society was the negativeobject against which the natural poet could articulate a code of values superiorto those governing the money economy, a recurring element of modern culturaldiscourse in Latin America. When discussing the future of the region, however,Martı often reversed this formula by subordinating literature to matters of mate-rial progress. In January 1884, more than a year after publishing his prologue tothe Poema del Niagara, he provided a very different evaluation of the place ofliterary expression under capitalist modernity. He addressed the Spanish-speaking readers of the New York-based commercial newspaper La America, towhich he recently had been appointed director:

De unas tierras se piden que sea periodico exclusivamente literario.Hermoso serıa un periodico de este genero; pero los tiempos songraves, y acaso temibles, y ni un apice menos que crıticos. Se vanlevantando en el espacio, como inmensos y lentos fantasmas, los pro-blemas vitales de America:—piden los tiempos algo mas que fabricas deimaginacion y urdimbres de belleza. Se puede ver en todos los rostros yen todos los paıses, como sımbolos de la epoca, la vacilacion y laangustia.—El Mundo entero es hoy una inmensa pregunta. (OC 8:266; emphasis added)

The ‘‘ruinous age’’ of the prologue is here referred to as ‘‘grave times,’’ in whichthe problems of modernity arise like immense, looming specters. Taking a sen-tence almost verbatim from the prologue, in which he notes that in the present‘‘todo es pregunta’’ (OC 7: 232), Martı underscores the utter instability of mod-ern life. But while the first text proposes to deal with flux and uncertaintythrough ‘‘natural poetry,’’ the editorial in La America tells us that literature is notenough, suggesting that the ‘‘factories of the imagination’’ and ‘‘machinationsof beauty’’ are just as fleeting as the ghosts of modernity; they are mere specula-tions. The contours of a split subjectivity begin to emerge, as Martı in differentmoments and in different contexts alternately upholds literature as a moral com-pass for ‘‘Nuestra America,’’ and dismisses it as an impediment to the region’smaterial progress.

The ‘‘grave times’’ invoked in this editorial must be situated within the vastmaterial transformations experienced by Latin American countries in the 1870sand 1880s. Significantly, the fin-de-siecle discourse of Latin ‘‘spirit’’ in opposi-tion to U.S. ‘‘materialism’’ articulated by Martı (and reaching its maximum ex-

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pression with Rodo’s arielismo) emerged at a moment in which the region’scountries were being incorporated on an unprecedented scale into global net-works of commodity exchange, especially as providers of ‘‘raw’’ mineral and ag-ricultural commodities such as coffee, sugar, timber, nitrates, and copper. Martı’sCuba, while ruled by an agonizing Spanish Empire, had a booming sugar econ-omy that fell increasingly into U.S. orbit. For historians such as Tulio HalperınDonghi, the last two decades of the nineteenth century represented ‘‘the matur-ity of the neocolonial order’’ across Latin America; for Steven C. Topik andAllen Wells, this period marked a ‘‘Second Conquest’’ of the region, this time bynothern European and U.S. capital. Precisely during this time Latin Americansocieties were being made over in the image of global capital—albeit to varyingdegrees—through increased export capacity, the construction of railways, in-fluxes of foreign goods, and, in some places, rapid urbanization and Europeanimmigration. The tumultuous, destructive and ‘‘unnatural’’ pull of capital, then,was not affecting just the United States, but the community Martı famously re-ferred to as ‘‘Nuestra America.’’ While living in New York City, Martı was under-standably most captivated by the transformations wrought by commercializationin the United States; as many of his writings show, however, he was very con-cerned with processes of modernization in Latin America. And, importantly formy argument, Martı would never view these parallel stories of market expansionwith the same degree of suspicion. Instead, a whole subset of his writings di-rected the aesthetic power of literature toward cultivating a sense of the utopianpossibilities promised by commercial expansion in the South.

Contradictorily for Martı, it was in part because men were too concerned with‘‘purely literary’’ concerns that Latin America faced such grave dangers. In thisway, he invokes the nineteenth-century trope of Spanish-inherited ‘‘literariness’’as an obstacle to ‘‘progress’’ in Latin America. This mistrust of the literary hasearly roots in Martı’s writings. During his stay in Mexico in 1875, in an articlepublished in the Revista Universal, he lamented the fact that America lacked theability to channel creative potential into economic productivity. The Latin Amer-ican subject ‘‘vuela errante por lo improductivo y lo ilımite y hace de la vidaoficio de poeta, el que tiene el deber formal de hacerla oficio de hombre’’ (OC6:81). Here ‘‘oficio de poeta’’ is the negative definition of ‘‘oficio de hombre,’’setting up the first as that which must be modified in order for the second toemerge. Manly civic duty is equated with economic production, measuredagainst a feminizing penchant for the non-productive labor of the poet, reversingthe opposition between manly poetry and feminizing market society. Remainingstable, however, is Martı’s privileging of the masculine term in opposition to athreat coded as feminine. Depending upon the context, then, the threat can bethe ‘‘unnaturalness’’ of market society; at other times it is poetry, a frivolousactivity that impedes manly productive duty.

In his unfavorable diagnosis of the gulf between Latin poetic sentiment andU.S. practicality, Martı echoes Domingo F. Sarmiento, the predecessor withwhom he is most often contrasted. In his Viajes, Sarmiento bid an irritated fare-well to his continent by condemning Spanish colonial literary habits for the re-gion’s ineptitude in commerce and industry. The Spaniard, ‘‘inhabil para elcomercio [. . .] negado para la industria [. . .] se encierra en sı mismo y hace

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versos’’ (49–50). For both Sarmiento and Martı—two figures often posed aspolar opposites, especially with regard to the latter’s rejection of the former’sracist Eurocentrism—the Spanish colonial legacy is marked by a certain kind ofornamental (and feminized) writing that impedes commercial progress. Tothrow off that yoke, then, meant aligning the lettered project with more ‘‘practi-cal’’ endeavors, which in the late nineteenth century necessarily involved com-mercial enterprise. Martı, of course, was far more critical than Sarmiento of U.S.commercial expansion. Yet even for the Cuban, poetic sentiment was at oncefundamental to the Latin American community and a constant threat to its integ-rity.

Americanist Journalism and the Poetry of Commerce

It is with this utilitarian-practical critique of literature in mind that I would liketo turn to a speech Martı delivered in 1881 to inaugurate the Caracas Club deComercio. While the speech was delivered in the context of a velada literaria, orliterary evening, it provides a dramatic illustration of the poet in the role of‘‘spiritual guide’’ to creole businessmen:

Y yo vi entonces, desde estos vastos valles, un espectaculo futuro enque yo quiero, o caer o tomar parte.—Vi hervir las fuerzas de la tie-rra;—y cubrirse como de humeantes desfiles de alegres barcos losbullentes rıos; y abatirse (tenderse) los bosques por la yerba (tierra),para dar paso a esa gran conquistadora que gime, vuela y brama;—yverdear las faldas de los montes, no con el verde oscuro de la selvasino con el verde claro de la hacienda;—y sobre la meseta vi erguirsepueblos (el pueblo);—y en los puertos, como bandadas de mariposas,vi aletear (flamear), en mastiles delgados regocijados, (alegres y) nu-merosısimas banderas;—y vi, puestos al servicio de los hombres, elagua del rıo, la entrana de la tierra, el fuego del volcan. (OC 7: 282)

From a multiple set of locations (valleys, plateaus, mountains, rivers), the poet-seer produces a landscape. An image of the sublime, terrifying movements ofthe earth gives way to one of harmonious movement, as ‘‘happy boats’’ glidealong rivers, their flags flapping in the wind. In contrast with his exaltation of‘‘raw’’ nature in the ‘‘Prologo al Poema del Niagara,’’ this text seeks beauty in thedomestication of the landscape. It does not bother Martı that the forest submitsto the hacienda, because the results are productive. Indeed, the water of theriver, the entrails of the earth, and the fire of the volcano are beautiful insofaras they are transformed and made economically useful. A rather different aes-thetic is at work, one which identifies utility as beautiful and morally good.

Strangely in this passage, the hacienda—epitome of Spanish exploitation—isexalted as an image of modernity and economic productivity. What is being pro-duced in the hacienda is not mentioned. In 1880s Venezuela, the vast majorityof haciendas were most likely dedicated to the cultivation of coffee (as werethose in Brazil, Colombia, and Guatemala), following this crop’s spectacular rise

30 � Revista Hispanica Moderna 61.1 (2008)

to global prominence in the 1870s. Nor does Martı make reference to who ownsthe haciendas, and who works them. Instead, he prefers images of harmony, inwhich the winds of commerce enrich the nation as a whole.

There are many more instances in Martı’s oeuvre of an attempt to harnessaesthetic representation to market expansion in Latin America. In a series ofjournalistic texts produced in Mexico, Guatemala, and Venezuela between 1877and 1881, literary language sometimes becomes a marketing tool, infusing aes-thetic value into different elements of projects of export-led modernization. Im-portant to note is the fact that, as in his critiques of U.S. modernity, there is anuneven density to Martı’s songs to rural progress: he prefers agricultural produc-tion to mineral extraction (a kind of ‘‘fictitious’’ or ‘‘accidental’’ wealth, becauseit is not grown from the earth), and the cultivation of coffee over sugar, a com-modity associated with back-breaking slave labor. In his pamphlet Guatemala,published as a guide to export crops in that country, Martı celebrates coffee as‘‘el rico grano, que enardece la sangre, anima la pasion, aleja el sueno, inquie-tısimo salta en las venas, hace llama y aroma en el cerebro; el que afama aUruapan, mantiene a Colima y realza a Java; el haschich [sic] de America’’ (OC 7:133). While other texts excoriate luxurious consumption, this text and othersencourage people to be literally carried away by the stimulant properties ofcoffee.

Throughout the commercial pamphlet Guatemala (whose explicit purpose isto promote everything that the country produces), literary language becomes‘‘useful’’ in promoting a commodity. This lyricism is found on the level of con-tent, but also that of form. The syntax and rhythmic patterns of the pamphletcall a poetic economy to mind, just as the one-sentence paragraphs resemble theformal organization of a lined poem:

Llaman Retalhuleu a un departamento que rebosa maderas, ysuculento cacao, y el exquisito grano americano.

Esto y cana produce Mazatenango, del mercantil Quezaltenango fieltributario.

En Quezaltenango abundan, sobre las fertilidades apuntadas, losganados lanares. Inexplotado este ramo, es fuente segura deriqueza. Mucho tienen que hacer allı cardadores, exportadores,tejedores.

San Marcos crıa ganado bueno a fe; espiga el trigo de oro, cultiva elmaız nutritivo, amen de los productos generales. (OC 7: 132)

Guatemala’s abundance and plenty are stressed with the use of adjectives suchas suculento, exquisito, nutritivo, and verbs such as rebosar and abundar. The imageof a self-contained, harmonious universe is interrupted, however, when in themiddle of the passage Martı notes that wool is a ‘‘fuente segura de riqueza,’’inserting ‘‘practical’’ advice within his aesthetically-driven prose. The beautiful,the indigenously American, the ‘‘natural’’ (via agriculture) is thus made eco-nomically productive. Or is it the other way around? Is it that that which is eco-nomically productive is beautiful? This is certainly not the case when Martı talksabout urban commodity culture from New York. But when it comes to America,

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its inhabitants, and its rural landscapes redolent with the products of nature, adifferent kind of aesthetic sensibility asserts itself.

Martı’s tendency to collapse physical and material variants of ‘‘nature’’ in histexts on Latin America has led Fina Garcıa Marruz to remark that the poet ‘‘[v]e,en lo fısico y en lo espiritual, la fuerza virgen, los recursos no explotados’’ (230).Marruz notes a ‘‘quixotic’’ element in Martı’s early Latin Americanist prose, butdoes not go on to discuss its specific manifestations; indeed, little critical atten-tion has been accorded to the specific ways in which Martı shaped his literaryprogram in positive (and not merely negative) relationship to global commoditymarkets. This oversight is important, not only because it gives us a different senseof Martı’s understanding of the role of aesthetic production within modernity,but because it poses a series of questions about how the turn-of-the-century cre-ole letrado could reject the commercial corruption of United States society whileat the same time upholding the free market as a site of utopian possibility forLatin America.

While in the U.S. commerce leads to excessive individualism and materialism,texts such as Guatemala show commercial expansion as key to securing the publicgood. There is no point in any of Martı’s pro-market texts in which he asks forcommercial activity to be tempered, lest the men going to market become tooobsessed with money, luxury, or power. These vices, of course, are the mainobjects of his critique of U.S. commercial society. Also worthy of note is the factthat Martı assumes that creole men will lead the project of commercialization.Guatemala, for example, will be ‘‘hospitable’’ to potential investors who wish toplant coffee on the country’s vast expanses of land: ‘‘Porque es ir, plantar,esperar y hacerse rico.’’ (OC 7: 133). But Martı assumes that these planters, arriv-ing with capital and an interest in exporting coffee, will act according to a codeof republican virtue, working for personal gain at the same time as they improvethe country for the good of all. I do not think he is so naive as to think thatcreoles are naturally virtuous; instead, his critiques of the effeminacy and ineffi-ciency of this group recur throughout his writings—we need only remember hisscorn for the fashion-addicted, frivolous ‘‘sietemesinos’’ of the essay ‘‘NuestraAmerica.’’ Rather Martı seemingly views them as the only class—at least fornow—able to lead America; he therefore wills them to become hard-working,enterprising, and virtuous leaders. And he does so, not by positioning these fig-ures in resistance to the market, but by inserting them within the new structuresof transnational capitalism spreading throughout Latin America. Another as-sumption latent in Martı’s commercial texts is that the market is a just, harmoni-ous and self-regulating force, a liberal fantasy that stretches back to eighteenth-century thinkers such as Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith. Nowhere is this fantasyof stability better expressed than in his depictions of agriculture, an activity thatfor Martı conjures images of stability, simplicity, and communion with the earth.If we remember that for Martı instability and fluctuation were two of the mostdangerous characteristics of modern capitalism in the U.S., he often writes as ifthese elements did not mark commercial expansion in Latin America. He in-stead goes out of his way to present a vision of utter harmony in ‘‘nature,’’ whenit was precisely a reliance on single crops such as coffee that provoked economicinstability across the region.

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‘‘El que no anuncia no vende’’: On the Uses of Advertising

Of course, Martı would become a well-known critic of mono-export regimes pre-cisely because of their radical instability, a position he would articulate on thepages of the Cuban-owned commercial journal La America. It was in this publica-tion that he added a rather ‘‘practical’’ bent to his poetics of export production.Assuming a sober tone, he warns in April 1884 that global markets are inundatedwith ‘‘easy’’ cash crops (‘‘frutos faciles’’). Latin American producers of sugarcane, corn, and potatoes were faced with fierce competition from foreign lands:‘‘el cafe viene a barcadas de la India’’ (OC 8: 366). Accepting that for the mo-ment there was no way around dependence upon raw material exports as themotor of economic growth in Latin America, Martı advocates for the diversifica-tion of crops. What is most interesting about this article is that diversification isnot the only solution he proposes. Instead, he turns to a rationalized use ofmarketing techniques as a corrective to market gluts and competition (an indica-tion that for Martı the movements of the market were not as ‘‘natural’’ as histexts from Venezuela and Guatemala made it seem). Men need to find ‘‘nuevasfuentes de riqueza’’ and, in addition, know how to showcase them: ‘‘nadie com-pra a vendedor que no se anuncia, como no va a buscar la Fama al hombre demerito que no saca de sı palabra ni obra’’ (OC 8: 37). ‘‘Fame’’ is used to conjurea set of classical references to heroic deeds (the values celebrated by epicpoetry); surprisingly, however, this concept is reworked to encourage a represen-tational strategy belonging to the modern era: advertising.

Alluding to Martı’s collaboration with La America, Susana Rotker writes that‘‘even Martı had to write advertisements,’’ (33, emphasis added) suggesting thathad it not been for economic necessity, the author would not have worked thisovertly commercial genre. Yet the assumption that Martı had to write advertise-ments overlooks the author’s avid interest in the economic benefits of market-ing. Martı’s texts in La America are full of marketing maxims inspired by theheyday of commercial expositions in the United States. Regarding the BostonExposition of 1883, he notes: ‘‘No esta todo en producir, sino en saber presentar.Dama gallarda, parece mejor sin afeites, pero con aseado alino. En envolver bienesta a las veces el unico secreto de vender mucho’’ (OC 8: 351). Let us note herethe guarded defense of feminine decoration (elsewhere decried as deceptionand luxury). Running contrary to his attempts to see beyond ornamentation,and to strip language of deception, we have an instance in which secrets areunlocked not by the thing itself, but by its outward appearance.

Yet Martı’s attraction to advertising becomes highly contradictory when weconsider his insistence elsewhere that language avoid artifice and duplicity. Inthe prologue to Lucıa Jerez, for example, the novel he wrote in seven days to earnbadly needed income, Martı apologizes to his readers for having produced thistext. The author, he notes, does not approve of the genre because ‘‘hay muchoque fingir en el,’’ writing scenes he never witnessed, and inventing dialogues henever heard (xxvii). He notes (only partly in jest, I think) that this is a sin:‘‘Peque, Senor, peque [. . .] Senor, no lo hare mas’’ (xxviii); indeed, Martı wouldnever write another novel. Instead, as we have seen, Martı’s highest ideal is ‘‘nat-ural’’ poetry, a genre defined by its rejection of duplicity and artifice in the realm

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of language. We might also gather that Martı hates the novel because it is anovertly commercial genre, an interpretation upheld by the fact that he wrote itfor money, in contrast with his poems. At the same time, it is worth noting thatin Martı’s time the novel was a feminine genre; not coincidentally, he wrote underthe pseudonym Adelaida Ral, in a reference to Adelaida Baralt, the female friendoriginally commissioned to write the novel.

Let us now compare this rejection of ‘‘duplicitous’’ speech with another text,‘‘Una indicacion de La America,’’ published in November, 1883. In it, Martı in-vents a discussion among men enthusiastic about the possibility of installing apermanent exhibition of Latin American products in the United States. Onesays: ‘‘Artes, productos del cultivo, muestras de las industrias incipientes, queservirıan por lo menos para revelar a los capitalistas lo que se puede hacer denuestras materias primas’’ (OC 8: 363). Interestingly, Martı invokes art here as asupport for commercial exchange; as cultural capital, it is invested in materialprofits for the nation. Another participant in this dialogue chimes in: ‘‘—Mas,mas serıa—dijo otro.—Necesitamos inspirar respeto; necesitamos ponernos enpie de una vez con toda nuestra estatura, necesitamos reivindicar por la fama denuestras Exposiciones lo que hemos perdido por la fama de nuestras revolucio-nes’’ (OC 8: 363). While we are ostensibly listening to a group of men, the voicebelongs unmistakably to Martı, who does precisely what he says he hates in LucıaJerez. The proper display of products will help to change Latin America’s reputa-tion for revolution and civil war among trading nations, relying on representa-tion and image—rather than things in themselves—to generate economicsuccess.

The text from La America displays a keen interest in the techniques of salesman-ship through different forms of advertising: the exhibit, to be sure, but the ideafor exhibit is expressed through a ‘‘fiction’’ created to stimulate interest in itsinstallment. And as in all advertising ventures, this maneuver implies some de-gree of linguistic duplicity. This chronicle-advertisement, tucked in the pages ofLa America, shows little discomfort with the inherently representative nature ofmarketing genres (and of commercial society itself). What the author apologizesfor with regard to Lucıa Jerez becomes a source of pride when encouraging theincreased circulation of other kinds of commodities such as agricultural prod-ucts and industrial implements. While Martı atones for the ‘‘sin’’ of having writ-ten a novel, by nature ‘‘artificial,’’ his text in La America relies upon thisartificiality. And while the embarrassed novelist wishes to distance himself fromthe alliance between femininity and commercialism behind the novel, the ad-man seems quite happy to promote what is coded as a socially and economically‘‘productive’’ commercial endeavor. Contradictorily, what is deemed unaccept-able in literary production becomes the source of effectiveness of advertising. Asin the prologue to the Poema del Niagara, the writer cannot avoid market society;different here, however, is the extent to which he chooses to immerse himself init head-on.

Martı’s ambivalent and contradictory understandings of the relationship be-tween literature and the market attest to the fact that literature was never toremain outside of the goals of economic production under an expanding systemof transnational capitalist exchange. Indeed, the only ‘‘good’’ literature for Martı

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seems to be literature that ‘‘invests’’ in the future of the nation or regional com-munity, an investment that often assumes an explicitly economic character. Inthis sense, writing becomes productive when it brings ‘‘spiritual’’ and materialenrichment, or when it transforms material wealth into spiritual plenitude, giv-ing a different inflection to our understandings of the anti-commercial stancewe associate with latinoamericanismo. While Martı himself was no capitalist in amaterial sense, his writings continue to provide a source of symbolic capitalwithin regional literary and political imaginaries, much like the inalienable fundof ‘‘inner gold’’ he envisioned in his 1882 prologue to Perez Bonalde’s Poema delNiagara. In this regard, it is clear why Darıo called Martı ‘‘el Vanderbilt de nues-tras letras’’ (53), a metaphor for the dazzling and seemingly endless store ofliterary riches the Cuban writer offers his readers. More recently, Rafael Rojashas remarked on the commodification of Martı himself within Cuban politicalimaginaries, calling him ‘‘el sımbolo nacional mas mercantilizado de la polıticacubana en el siglo XX, la moneda de cambio mas activa en la guerra de losemblemas’’ (294). This essay has pointed to some of the ways in which Martıhimself engaged in processes of commodification, and to the complex and con-tradictory visions of ‘‘Nuestra America’’ as seen from the author’s alternate rejec-tion and embrace of the global market.

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