Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age

Chapter 2: Consumption: Modernismo’s Import Catalogues

Ericka Beckman Capital Fictions Final proofs for press December 6, 2012, Page 42 42 Eric Cap Fina Dec Chapter 2 CONSUMPTION Modernismo’s Import Catalogues Chapter 1 investigated the capital fictions surrounding the production of export commodities in late nineteenth-century Latin America . As regional economies become more integrated into global networks of exchange, fantasies of production had to compete with a new aesthetic sensibility. With the emergence of the literary current known as Spanish American modernismo, the export reverie’s focus on commodity production was eclipsed by this current’s sustained focus on commodity consumption. The Cuban poet Julián del Casal’s sonnet “Mis amores” (My loves [1890]) exemplifies the aesthetic sensibility cultivated by Spanish American modernismo and its obsession with the pleasures of consumption: Amo el bronce, el cristal, las porcelanas, las vidrieras de múltiples colores, los tapices pintados de oro y flores y las brillantes lunas venecianas. (2001, lines 1–4) I love bronzes, crystal, porcelains, stained glass of multiple colors, tapestries painted in gold and flowers and brilliant Venetian mirrors.1 Recalling the texts studied in the previous chapter, Casal’s sonnet marks an enormous shift in style and form. Whereas earlier poems had almost always articulated Americanist or national projects, Casal’s sonnet is decidedly cosmopolitan in character. And while previous lettered projects had envisioned citizens dedicated to the common good, Casal’s poem projects a selfish “I” who loves not the beckman.indd 42 12/6/2012 8:54:33 PM Ericka Beckman Capital Fictions Final proofs for press December 6, 2012, Page 43 Consumption 43 patria, or even a woman, but a collection of superfluous objects. Casal is often contrasted with his contemporary and compatriot José Martí, and this contrast is warranted.2 While Martí always insisted on the productivity and utility of writing (a preference that can be seen in a text like Guatemala), Casal embraced the “useless” beauty of art. Furthermore, while Martí excoriated luxury as feminizing and morally corrosive in texts like “Nuestra América,” Casal clearly “loved” the excessive, sensuous dimensions of material objects. The contrast I am drawing refers to a larger shift in late nineteenth -century literary projects, from a civic-republican tradition toward a project of artistic autonomy.3 In the case of Casal, this search for autonomy was guided by an elitist (as opposed to republican or democratic) version of “art for art’s sake” inspired by contemporary European artistic trends such as symbolism and decadence. Martí’s insistence on the utility of literature within the polis is completely reversed in Casal to reveal a vision of art as beautiful , but utterly useless. In a word, literature is itself a luxury to be enjoyed by the poet and his readers, nothing more, nothing less. “Mis amores” functions as a list or catalogue of material objects, arranged within a “high” literary form: the sonnet. The poem takes shape around bronzes, crystal, and tapestries; even its rhyme pattern is driven by names of objects (porcelanas and venecianas) and the descriptors (flores and colores). The linguistic innovation constantly attributed to modernismo is, in this and other cases, driven by the qualities of specific commodities. In the next two stanzas, the poem goes on to name a set of cosmopolitan artistic forms (German ballads , Spanish castellanas), listed as if they were themselves collectible objects. The poem culminates in an image of a sumptuous bed of “sandalwood and gold,” one of Casal’s frequent references to objects hailing from the exotic and luxurious “Orient” (2001, 12). Casal’s sonnet is an example of what this chapter calls “the modernistimportcatalogue ,”anaestheticmodeofrepresentingimported commodities in fin-de-siècle Spanish America. Importantly, none of Casal’s objects of desire—save the sonnet itself—could have been produced in Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, they would have been brought from Europe in exchange for the beckman.indd 43 12/6/2012 8:54:33 PM Ericka Beckman Capital Fictions Final proofs for press December 6, 2012, Page 44 Consumption 44 Eric Cap Fina Dec island’s main export crop: sugar. From the vantage point of the world economy, Cuba—still a colonial possession of Spain—was a vast sugar plantation, where slavery had been abolished only two years earlier, in 1888. While Casal was himself the son of a ruined sugar planter, sugar never appears in his poems; nor do the people of sugar culture—(former...