Cosmopolitanism in the Americas

CHAPTER TWO: Cosmopolitan Topographies of Paris: Citing Balzac

43 CHAPTER TWO Cosmopolitan Topographies of Paris: Citing Balzac Paris and Immigration Although Paris had become shorthand for cosmopolitan hospitality, this was more an effect of a literary imagination than the actual experience of the city. Paris was more imagined than real, its mythology disseminated by a number of writers associated with its cultural landscape. Charles Baudelaire scandalized his reading public with seductive itineraries of the synesthetic experience of walking the city streets, traversing territories marked out and split open by various kinds of traffic and trafficking. Baudelaire returned the experience of walking the streets to some primal trauma, full of ruptures and liminal zones where the promenader experiences rapid population changes, the threat of becoming lost or cut off, and surprising and chaotic conjunctures. What Baudelaire discovered or recovered, is the idea that there is a world of otherness and difference in the city, one that is exstatic and de-localizing. Paris became, in this way, understood as a global or world city, a crossroads of international travelers, ideas, and commerce. The idea of the global city replaced the world tour, which had become a tedious and laborious gathering of cultural capital and place. The new way of knowing place and self was by experiencing a displacement from self and the familiar at home rather than sending oneself into some faraway out-there. Paris, for Baudelaire, had become the world that one traversed to gain culture and knowledge. It had become for this reason the capital of the world and of the nineteenth century. Baudelaire did for Paris after the turn of the century what Balzac struggled with, and indeed had cornered the market on prior to the great sea-change characterized as later modernity. Paris was the place where the world gathered and convened , the scene of modernity; yet many stories about the city reveal that its borders were not so permeable and the city not so hospitable to strangers. Visiting virtualized Paris means returning to its most prolific signifying name, Balzac, whose work on Paris is nothing less than iconic. This chapter follows one strain of 44 Chapter Two the infinite strands of review and influence generated by the Balzacian corpus, a strand that emerges during the turn-of-the-century migration to Paris from all over the world. More specifically, Balzac’s La fille aux yeux d’or (1835) (The Girl with the Golden Eyes) exposes a complex of issues surrounding the migrations of Latin Americans into Paris that stands in for a larger idiom of immigration and the symbolic practices that it generates. The Girl with the Golden Eyes is frank in its depiction of various interethnic, interracial, and same-sex encounters. Balzac critiques this licentious cosmopolitanism indirectly through a long prefatory discourse on the pernicious culture of commodity fetishism (the fetish for gold) in which the desire for gold and pleasure trump all other concerns. He then weaves the main themes of this socioeconomic critique, gold and pleasure, into a scandalous tale that associates them with the dangerously alluring and sexually “perverse ” Cuban-Georgian girl with the golden eyes. The story combines racial and commodity fetishism to fill various slots and gaps in a national discourse about the deleterious effects of immigration and capitalism. Balzac’s constitution of the Latin American in Paris does not remain uncontested . At the height of the cosmopolitan vogue in turn-of-the-century Paris, Enrique Gómez Carrillo rewrites Balzac’s La fille aux yeux d’or in his Almas y cerebros; historias sentimentales, intimidades parisienses, etc. (Mind and Soul, Sentimental Stories, Parisian Intimacies, etc.) (1898). Almas y cerebros, part of his double set of cosmopolitan works, is already a nod to Balzac’s Scènes de la vie parisienne (Scenes from Parisian Life) in its appropriation of work associated with Parisian literary culture. Almas y cerebros makes its case in an explicit rewriting of The Girl with the Golden Eyes with the short story “Marta y Hortensia.” This story offers an example of how postcolonial cosmopolitan readings reshape colonial texts, offering the different vantage of disadvantage and reconstruing the vision of Paris as an open cosmotopia. Gómez Carrillo appropriates the story of the girl with the golden eyes, refurbishes it, and, by removing its xenophobic discourse, turns it into quite another thing. For Gómez Carrillo, “perversion” resides not with the Latin American “other,” but is closely associated with Paris. It is the Parisian in “Marta y Hortensia” who, like Balzac, fails to identify the figure...