Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

5 Cuban Cogito: Reinaldo Arenas and the Negative Historical Imagination

5 Cuban Cogito Reinaldo Arenas and the Negative Historical Imagination I am like a prisoner who is enjoying an imaginary freedom while asleep; as he begins to suspect that he is asleep, he dreads being woken up, and goes along with the pleasant illusion as long as he can. René Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy” The world is independent of my will. . . . Even if all that we were to wish for were to happen, still this would only be a favor granted by fate, so to speak: for there is no logical connection between the will and the world, which would guarantee it, and the supposed physical connection itself is surely not something we could will. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus Grito, luego, existo. Reinaldo Arenas, Antes que anochezca Wittgenstein’s proposition, as stated in the epigraph— that there is no causality between the will and the world—might be taken generally as an anti-Enlightenment position. The Enlightenment held that the will can to some extent determine the world, that the latter is largely a question and result of the former. What is required is a conscious decision to declare one’s own autonomy, to throw off the yoke of extraneous authority, whether that authority consists of an oppressive political system, a comforting system of religious beliefs, or even a doctor’s prescription for a healthy diet. For Kant, the enlightened individual need not look beyond his own intelligence for these prescriptive guidelines. Enlightenment proclaims the sovereignty of the will, that the world is subject to it, or that at least a proper (or improper) application of the will can determine the world to a degree. For Diderot, the determining factor in politics is not this or that form of government, but rather whether or not a monarchy or democracy is subservient to a sovereign “general will.”1 For Adorno and Horkheimer, the Enlightenment in fact begins 132 The Center and the Periphery Cannot Hold with the imposition of humanity’s will over nature, the conversion of the world into a tool for man’s will. And yet mastery over this aspect of the world is also the seed of the Enlightenment’s failure: “Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them only insofar as he can manipulate them.”2 The mere postulating of a causal dynamic between the will and the world indicates some kind of hypostatized rupture between the two entities. Myth is understood not only as an originary dynamic that the Enlightenment aimed to tear down, in which the will was subordinate to the world, but also as a lost plenitude, a “time” when the will was subordinate to the world because it formed part of it. Upon asserting sovereignty over the world, the will stood apart from it. Following Adorno and Horkheimer, this rupture or separation does not in itself constitute the Enlightenment’s failure. Rather, if the relationship between the will and the world has been recast as a subject/object dynamic, then the Enlightenment ’s failure resides in its neglect to take account of this very dynamic : “The point is rather that the Enlightenment must consider itself, if men are not to be wholly betrayed. . . . Ruthlessly, in despite of itself the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.”3 One might argue that Latin America and the Caribbean have never had the luxury of eclipsing their own self-consciousness regarding the Enlightenment—this might be viewed as a paradoxical benefit of modernity ’s ambivalent legacy here. But if Carpentier and James represent a modern generation of Caribbean writers who participate, from Europe ’s “periphery,” in Adorno and Horkheimer’s call for self-reflexivity, a reevaluation of the Enlightenment’s legacy, then a more recent generation of writers, including Reinaldo Arenas and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá in addition to Maryse Condé, write in response to this elevated historical purpose in a mode resembling parody or pastiche. Aníbal González discerns the existence of a tradition of novels from the 1960s and 1970s “in which the legacy of Carpentier’s historical fiction is reevaluated.”4 Though González focuses his reading on Rodríguez Juliá, a specific text by the Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas...