Too Wilde for Comfort: Desire and Ideology in Fin-de-Siecle Spanish America
1992; Duke University Press; Issue: 31/32 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/466225
ISSN1527-1951
Autores Tópico(s)Spanish Literature and Culture Studies
ResumoThis piece is part of a larger reflection on turn-of-the-century Latin American cultures, most especially on paranoid construction of gender and sexual norm, and of gender and sexual difference. It will assume that definition of norm does not precede but is arrived at, and indeed derives from, gender and sexual differences that purportedly deviate from it in same way that definition of health, in psycholegal studies of period, follows that of disease, and decadence gives birth retrospectively to notions of maturity and fullness. This assumption measures paranoia informing those constructions and definitions. By focussing my reflection on Latin America at turn of century, that is, at moment of its complex entrance into modernity, I shall take into account two related issues: first, ideological implications of these constructions in debates on national identity and national, even continental, health; second, double pressure of continued cultural dependence vis-A-vis Europe, and of United States political expansionism, that informs these debates on national identity as, indeed, all forms of cultural production of period. I shall begin with a little gossip. On evening of January 7, 1882 Cuban writer Jos6 Marti attended a lecture in New York City. In spite of rival attractions, there was a very large crowd at Chickering Hall, Marti reports in La Naci6n of Buenos Aires, one that struck him both for its size and its elegance. title of lecture Marti heard was The English Renaissance of Art and lecturer, of course, was Oscar Wilde. This occasion, which I have chosen to make emblematic for purpose of my argument, is culturally significant. Marti, arguably most important Latin American intellectual figure of his time, encounters this other, influential innovator, come to United States, as prophet of a new imagination, to reveal to his public that the secret of life is in art.' Encounter is too generous a word, of course, since two men never met and since Wilde was totally unaware of Martif's existence. What interests me here, to begin with, is precisely that imbalance which affords Marti a particularly interesting vantage point. Lost in a New York crowd, Marti, foreign correspondent, gazes upon, better still, spies on Wilde, carefully taking in man and his words, better to report his experience
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