Wonder and Exile in the New World - Alex Nava

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So much for aesthetic abandon—when exile enters the feast, the expression of wonder takes on a different tone, something closer to dread than ecstasy. This face of wonder is tormented and foreboding, and makes the blood freeze, the soul shudder. Wonder takes on something like a blue note in these circumstances, sounding like a scorched voice, a tear in the throat, a melancholic expression of what is both aweinspiring and awful at once. Under the impact of exile, wonder is dragged through muddy waters and it hollers, screams, shudders, wails, laments. And in this process, wonder emerges more soulful than before.

      In speaking of this blues-like shading of wonder, I am looking at wonder in light of the post-lapsarian history of humankind going back to Adam and Eve’s expulsion. In fact, wonder would have no meaning in a pre-fallen Edenic world. It has its reason for being only in the tormented history of the human race. Punished for breaching the limits of knowledge, for wanting too much, Adam and Eve would lose the garden for the desert and here they would know fear and shame. Now their lives and loves would be subject to the pains and pangs of a naked, fragile mortal condition. They would have to earn their daily bread by an arduous contest with the parched desert soil. Neither the fruits of the earth nor the fruits of knowledge would ever again be as accessible as in Eden. Like fruit fallen from a tree, worm-eaten and decayed, knowledge tumbled away and suffered dispersion and deferral, making truth into something indeterminate and inaccessible. Wonder had its humble origins here, when Adam and Eve began their nomadic wanderings, far from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The human capacity for wonder is born in this distance from Eden, in this desert experience of dispossession.

      Or, in philosophical language, a postlapsarian version of wonder has some of the dark, scarred features of the sublime. For many contemporary thinkers, at least, the sublime is a version of wonder in a wounded, fragmented form. It shares with wonder the encounter with something indeterminate or unthinkable, but in this account (an unorthodox reading of Kant’s third critique), the sublime fragments and disrupts the harmony of classic aesthetics.1 It introduces us to something that would make reason cringe and recoil, the presence of an absence or void that has suffering written all over it.

      When wonder embodies the sublime, then, it sings the blues and gives tortured voice to the alphabet of suffering. And make no mistake about it: the alphabet of suffering is never like the innocent and thrilling first moments of a child learning his or her letters. It is, instead, a scrambled alphabet, hard to decipher, unintelligible, inscrutable. If something is learned from it, it exacts a heavy price for disclosing its secrets. And this is, perhaps, one of the lessons of both wonder and exile: that for mere mortals, wisdom is always an inexact science, always a kind of knowledge that comprises jumbled letters, half-heard words, stammering expressions. It is, at best, a gift half understood, half comprehended.

      Notorious for its inclusive and bountiful imagination, the Baroque, or so my book argues, is one of these gifts, a capacious, beautiful, tragic representation of wonder in a variety of guises, including this trace of the sublime. Anticipating modern and even postmodern themes, the Baroque included doses of both dimensions of wonder noted above, like a brew made with a variety of potions, some charming and delightful, others frightening. The Baroque combined the beautiful, strange, and terrible in an uneasy and disjointed harmony. The result was intoxicating, a Baroque concoction that has something of the dark arts in it. Initiated into these arts by the deeply felt misfortunes and struggles of their age, Baroque artists would give us classic descriptions of the tragic contours of wonder. They would create black magic out of the terrors of their own soul and give us something similar to Rudolph Otto’s account of the sacred as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.2

      The book before the reader is devoted to travelers that knew this ambiguity of the sacred, its allures and terrors. Their capacity for wonder propelled them on quests of the most uncanny and foreign sort, even at the price of great danger and peril, like having to cross the menacing abysses of ocean or desert, having to go farther than anyone has gone before. The course of my book follows the imagination of American explorers, beginning with the figures of the Conquest (Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, Bartolomé de Las Casas in chapter 2) through the Baroque (Cervantes and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in chapters 3–4) and into twentieth-century literature with the genre of so-called magical realism (Miguel Ángel Asturias and Alejo Carpentier in chapter 5). I am interested in how these explorers and artists represented wonder and what this can teach us about the history of the New World, from its great promises to its failures and tragedies. Each of my subjects in this study has something valuable to say in this regard, including the one who never made it to the New World despite numerous attempts to secure a post in the Indies (Cervantes).

      Indeed, because Cervantes seems to be the exception to my focus on New World figures, a comment is in order about his inclusion. In addition to the biographical fact that Cervantes had requested on at least two occasions (in the early 1580s and early 1590s) to travel and work in the New World (his petitions were denied by the Council of the Indies), his literary creations seemed to follow in spirit this desire of his and, thus, are imbued with a plethora of New World themes, images, dreams, and aspirations. As Diana de Armas Wilson has shown so well, Cervantes’s novels traveled to the Indies in imagination when he was prohibited from going in person.3 The most notable case of this concerns the intersection of Don Quixote’s chivalrous dreams with the imperial and conquering dreams of Columbus and other conquistadors. Traces of this impulse are evident in many instances, but when Don Quixote describes to us the military attributes of the knight in shining armor, resonances with Spanish imperialism are loud and clear. Clearly, and notwithstanding Don Quixote’s other lofty and admirable purposes, Don Quixote celebrates the great pleasure of victory in battle: “What greater contentment or pleasure can there be in the world than winning a battle and triumphing over one’s enemy?” (DQ, part 1, 18). Columbus and other conquistadors may not have described this pleasure in such a candid and blunt manner, but it is impossible to deny that their aspirations were concentrated on conquest and that their lives and chronicles had quixotic traits (hopelessly romantic or wildly delirious, as the term “quixotic” suggests in our own time).4

      If this is at all true, and if the final purpose of Cervantes’s novel is to destroy the illusions and fantasies of the chivalric genre (as the last page of the novel suggests), then Don Quixote represents a deconstructive satire of the “real-world discourses connected with the conquest and colonization of the Hispanic Indies,” and a criticism of what is insane about Spanish imperialism.5 In the terms of my study, we can say that Don Quixote is a warning and censure of any form of wonder (from fantasy to religious fanaticism) that soars too far from the earthly, historical, mortal nature of the human condition.

      In studying Cervantes in this way—in light of the New World—we would also be faithful to Walter Mignolo’s insistence on recognizing the “darker side of the Renaissance” by meditating on the Renaissance and Baroque from the perspective of the colonies, vis-à-vis the Atlantic and Pacific.6 It would enable us to bring greater attention to the part played by the history of conquest and colonialism in the formation of the modern age (and on this matter, Mignolo acknowledges the pioneering work of the theologian Enrique Dussel). And it would force us to reconsider the work of many of the greatest artists of the early modern age, to see how the wounding traces and scars opened up by 1492 altered their conceptual

      maps and consciousness.

      The inclusion of Cervantes in my study, finally, should remind us that we cannot subject the continents of the Old and New Worlds to a “historiographical divorce” (in the words of J. H. Elliott).7 There are numerous instances in my book where I travel between the two worlds in seeking to understand the pleasures and wounds of wonder and exile. My book follows the same restlessness of Don Quixote’s wandering (another metaphor of the impulse for travel and exploration widespread in the sixteenth century), and hopes to shed light on various artists as they grappled with suffering and injustice, with beauty and mystery. It follows in the footsteps of these ancient travelers as they crossed borders of ocean and

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