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

5. The Political and Artistic Avant-Garde

161 Chapter 5 The Political and Artistic Avant-Garde It is neither dream nor delirium, but rather philosophy . . . ; 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 . . . ; 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) In his Recuerdos literarios, Chilean intellectual José Victorino 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, ­ 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 162 Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar 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 (­ 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- The Political and Artistic Avant-Garde 163 dent James Monroe, and his newspaper...