Jose Marti and the Call of Technology in " Amor de ciudad grande "

Sometime in November of 1883, readers of the Spanish-language periodical La América opened their paper to discover that a fantastic-sounding invention had recently been unveiled at a technology exposition in Vienna. "Es un aparatillo ingeniosísimo," exclaimed José Martí, a correspondent for the paper:

Puesto en lo interior de la boca [...] reproduce [el habla] sobre el papel con perfección de escribiente del siglo XV. Sólo exige que se pronuncie con toda claridad; y cada sílaba, al punto que es pronunciada, ya es colocada sobre el papel que la espera, sin molestia alguna para el que habla; y sin confusión para el que lee, una vez que aprende la correspondencia de los nuevos signos.

(Obras 8:418)

Ever the poet, Martí's attention was especially drawn to the device's capacity to render in written form those aspects of the voice that had always eluded translation into a graphic medium: "Nunca, nunca llegará la mano rápida a reproducir los escarceos, carreras, súbitas paradas, inesperados arranques, hinchamientos de ola y revelamientos de corcel del pensamiento enardecido!" (418). But in spite of his evident enthusiasm for the invention—"¡Sea bienhadado el inventor del glosógrafo!"—Martí never mentions it again and, apparently, neither did anyone else. Although its potential as an aid for the deaf was briefly explored, very little came of it.¹

Setting aside whatever lessons the glossograph may teach us about the miscarriages of inventions in the marketplace,² the episode is suggestive in its variation on what by now has become a familiar theme: the encounter between the modern machine and the voice of the poet, an encounter that as much as any other typifies the tangled web of competing discourses we have come to associate with modernity. However, in Martí's case, it may also give us pause. It would have been unsurprising to see the avant-garde poets celebrate such a machine—one could easily imagine Marinetti or Maples Arce exploiting the creative potential of the glossograph—but modernista writers famously viewed emerging technologies with deep suspicion, if not outright hostility, fearing that the voice of the poet might be usurped by the voice of the machine or perhaps its engineer.³ With respect to the competing cultural and industrial aspects of modernity, other modernistas found little difficulty in drawing the battle lines in familiar ways. For Rodó and Darío, for instance, to be modern was to struggle agonically against forces that threatened to overwhelm intangible but profoundly ennobling forms of cultural expression. By positing, in effect, an alternative modernity, grounded in both classical and autochthonous cultures—they hoped to counter the materialistic modernity they associated with the United States.⁴

Although Martí also memorably criticized the dehumanizing conditions he saw in the North American variety of modernity, his own perspective vis-à-vis the new technological modernity of the North is decidedly more nuanced if not in its own way more conflicted and problematic. Although the glossograph would soon disappear without a trace, other inventions would prove more durable, threatening to encroach upon the privileged space that had traditionally belonged to the poet. Almost contemporaneous with modernismo's beginnings in the early 1880s, newly emergent technologies such as the telephone—Bell's patent was granted in 1876—and the phonograph—Edison's patent was granted the following year—were expressly designed to extend the spatial and even temporal range of the voice, making it iterable in previously unimaginable ways.

Such innovations would have been of more than passing interest to Martí. His journalistic career began in New York in 1880, scarcely three years after Buenos Aires' La Nación—for which he was to become a frequent correspondent—had begun to break new ground in its use of telegraphy in the transmission of journalistic dispatches posted from the United States, France, Africa...