Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture (review)

Sorensen, Diana. Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1996. x + 218 pp.

When toward the middle of her very illuminating book Diana Sorensen asserts that the acclaim for Sarmiento's Civilización y barbarie was "the result of a complex system of linkages between power, knowledge, institutions, intellectuals, population changes, and the state, as they are intersected at the end of the ninenteenth century in Argentina" (102), she creates an emblem for the cultural apparatuses she addresses and undresses in the six chapters that compose her study.

Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture, recently translated into Spanish, is a masterful and definitive interdisciplinary statement on one of the most perplexing volumes of the Spanish American canon, and mine is only one of the reviews that confirm it. With typical élan and fluid prose, Sorensen once again confirms her status as a premier scholar with whom to reckon in the study of nineteenth-century Spanish America. Going against the critical grain that paradoxically gerrymanders the disciplines with which it imbues itself, she opts for intellectual history as the sensible factotum that explains the state to the nation, the nation to culture, and all their relations to the readers.

Drawing from her experience in the testing of reading and reception theories with Spanish American literature, she assimilates and integrates the most pertinent bibliography on her topic, and then some. Quite elegantly, the holy trinity of race, class and gender is perforated to reveal a greater network behind the purported Spanish American misunderstandings about modernity. Also perforated are postmodernism's positionings, not in terms of some specific conceptual stances, but rather regarding the linguistic ones that border on agressive relativism.

That greater in situ network had really been undeciphered by the naïveté with which its components have been dealt by critics of the nineteenth century, and it is from that misstate of the art that Sorensen's painstaking archival and theoretical work comes to the forth. Given that Facundo or Sarmiento studies are like Peronism, a religion of true believers in anything having to do with the sect, Sorensen sensibly opts for examining eight Sarmiento interpreters and the author himself. She covers roughly a century of criticism from the time the book was published and examines letters, newspapers, and just about every paratext one can imagine finding among the primary sources.

By 1945, argues the last chapter, the "definitive" reading of Sarmiento's masterpiece had been posited by Rojas and Lugones, and "there are several instances in which Sarmiento's book works as an unavowed repository for the presentation of Lugones's own ideas" (162). Those readings became influential for most subsequent interpretations, and Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture, an award-winning book, seems to dispense with the reading of Sarmiento in the second half of this century. As she argues regarding Facundo's "travels" outside Argentina, the traces of ruling discourses betray the imprint of certain supremacy and its effect on the migration of texts (91).

Yet, The names of Barrenechea, Martínez Estrada, Jitrik and to a lesser extent others come to mind, and indeed Sorensen refers to them throughout her book. Thus the argument that more attention should have been given to them is futile, because Sorensen states very clearly that she mainly contextualizes a century of scholarship after Sarmiento's work was published, the paradigmatic reception, as it were. It is a shrewd exegetical move, girded by the lack of a conventional conclusion. It is as if she were saying that a rehash of rehashes is preaching to some of the converted above, and Sorensen is too subtle a critic to do that.

What she intuits in every one of her chapters, and then disassembles into its intellectual components and influences, is the originality of Sarmiento's contribution to the development of Argentina, and above all to the ideas and ideals that prevail in that country. Sorensen...