Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age by Ericka Beckman (review)

Ericka Beckman’s Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age describes how the dynamics of the financial system are a foundational trope of Spanish American letters between 1870 and 1930. Through analysis of canonical writers and texts of the period coupled with archival research focusing on images, correspondence, political history, journalism and economic data, Professor Beckman reads literary and cultural production through the lenses of emerging capitalist discourses in the Americas. Connecting concrete socioeconomic factors and events to the literature of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Latin America follows a rich genealogy beginning with Ángel Rama’s representation of the modernista movement paralleling the economic struggles of the region. Studies by Noé Jitrik, Françoise Perus, Beatriz Sarlo, Julio Ramos, Carlos Alonso, Alejandro Mejías-López and others have continued to tie in factors of the market to the literary concerns of the fin de siècle. Beckman’s text is a provocative and refreshing addition to works by these scholars and is a convincing account of how fiction echoed the elusive, mythical and contradictory flows of capital during the period.

To begin, the book’s greatest strength is in its study of financial discourses taken from historical contexts of Spanish American export economies and then reconstructing this economic syntax as a theoretical device in order to read texts by writers such as José Martí, Rubén Darío, José Asunción Silva, Julián del Casal, José Enrique Rodó, José Eustasio Rivera and others. This innovative move results in highly original readings of the Spanish American cannon which highlight the vast influence of the mythologies of economic prosperity, progress and growth on the literary sphere. Archival images, from chocolate and department store advertisements to monetary iconography, are effectively positioned to bolster Beckman’s textual commentary. In addition, extensive footnotes indicate the author’s far-reaching research and thorough study of not only primary texts and literary criticism, but a background in western economic philosophies and history. In the book, Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin serve as touchstones for depicting money as fetish and fiction as well as the conflation between economic fantasy and reality in capitalist societies. Beckman coins several critical maxims to tie economic discourses to her readings. Phrases such as “export reverie,” “the modernist import catalogue,” “narrative solutions” to capitalist crises, “poetics of bankruptcy,” and “export real”—referring to the practices of counterfeiting and accounting—all contribute to the complex intersection of narrative and capital. Through these economically based narrative structures, the author traces the founding of modern Spanish American narrative through the export-based cycles of financial success and monetary crisis and failure.

What is particularly useful is Beckman’s distancing of the literary with objective and tactile progress and modernization by calling into question the so-called realities of the global market. By fictionalizing capitalism and the shifting dynamics of the global marketplace, the study is able to translate with ease the fields of literature and economics. This reading results in Professor Beckman’s construction of a fascinating evolution in literary history that corresponds with the narrative of capital; and I should point out that this economic narrative is represented in the text as just as captivating as the literary texts themselves.

The book begins its narrative history with D. F. Sarmiento and the dream of a bright economic future as “the necessary starting point for its transformation” (17). The book continues with a fascinating and little known early José Martí pamphlet Guatemala that “reads as a political treatise dedicated to defining the ideal contours of the export republic” (24). This re-reading of the Cuban revolutionary coincides with recent scholarly demythification of Martí as a strident anti-liberal voice who instead created conflicting discourses often praising the projection of economic expansion. The text then transitions to a reading of modernismo as a move away from the “ideal” economic condition to a focus on commodity consumption. Through...