Wonder and Exile in the New World - Alex Nava

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latter preoccupation should make clear that my study is interested in the theological inclinations of New World explorers, writers, and poets. In interpreting the language of wonder and exile, therefore, special care is devoted to the matters of the soul among these pioneering American voices. In fact, the theological features of my study are crucial to the particular accent of it, thus distinguishing it from other studies that have influenced my approach (like the work of Stephen Greenblatt, Lois Parkinson Zamora, Roberto González Echevarría, Rolena Adorno, Walter Mignolo, and others). This book could not have been written without their scholarship. I am, however, also leaning on a rich tradition of religious studies in the course of my study. In this case, I am working with an assumption that, I trust, is not too contentious: that religion is a key feature of Latin American cultures and traditions. Indeed, I would echo Cornel West’s claim that religion is fundamental to many of the cultures of the oppressed in the Americas. For West, one of the greatest flaws and prejudices among the political left concerns its refusal to appreciate the role of religion among oppressed peoples. “It is,” he writes, “the European Enlightenment legacy . . . that stands between contemporary Marxism and oppressed people. And it is the arrogance of this legacy, the snobbery of this tradition, that precludes Marxists from taking seriously religion, a crucial element of the culture of the oppressed.”8 Fortunately, none of the scholars mentioned above suffers from this snobbery, but it is, nevertheless, an active presence in the world of academic scholarship. I hope that my study threatens any form of this presumption, from enlightened contempt for religion to fundamentalist confidences.

      In addition to this fidelity to the cultures of the oppressed in the New World, there is another benefit, it seems to me, about a theological approach, and it concerns the wide-ranging scope of my book. As my study unfolds, it should become clear that my primary concern in exploring the history of the New World is the value of the past for present-day problems and issues. Though the historical method is essential to any study of the past and informs every page of my book, theological concerns demand attention to the constructive nature of historical studies, to their relevance in our own time. In my reading of the theological enterprise (in the tradition of Karl Rahner, Paul Tillich, and David Tracy), theology must always be able to demonstrate the relevance and importance of past traditions for our contemporary situation, to correlate the voices of ancestors with the voices of the present.

      I am interested, thus, in the ideas of past masters for how they enrich our present and future, how they can elevate our lives. In addition to the theological method, I am following Nietzsche in this way, by insisting that history provide us with the models and incentives to re-create, invent, and discover anew, not to remain fixed and frozen in the remote past.9 As Nietzsche argued, when the historical method is the sole and determining approach, intolerant to anything other than its dream of “objectivity,” it becomes the domain of the “spoiled idler in the garden of knowledge” and, subsequently, withers and degenerates.10 As he suggests, we must pry history loose from antiquarians and specialists in order to move forward and not stand still, in order to use history not only to preserve but to create life. The broad span of time in my book has this purpose in mind, then, to appropriate the images and monuments of the New World past for the struggles and hopes of our own age.

      In fact, even better than Nietzsche’s portrait of the uses and abuses of history is the model Cervantes gives us. He reminds us what happens to the mind and spirit of someone who is trapped in the remote past: he loses his mind. Though we admire Don Quixote’s defense of ancient values, every reader knows that this comes at the heavy price of his sanity. With his sole concentration on the immediate present, however, Sancho Panza’s perspective is not without its problems and shortcomings. In balancing multiple voices and perspectives, Cervantes was able to achieve a brilliant fusion of the past and present. According to Carlos Fuentes, this was Cervantes’s major achievement in the creation we know as the novel: “Cervantes was able to go beyond the consecration of the past and the consecration of the present to grapple with the problem of the fusion of past and present. . . . The past (Don Quixote’s illusion of himself as a knight errant of old) illuminates the present (the concrete world of inns and roads, muleteers and scullery maids); and the present (the harsh life of men and women struggling to survive in a cruel, unjust and shabby world) illuminates the past (Don Quixote’s ideals of justice, freedom and a Golden Age of abundance and equality).”11

      This fusion of the past and present in Don Quixote, where the narratives of the past meet the conflicts, uncertainties, and disasters of our present, is the model for my own study. In my reading of past masters—from Las Casas, Cervantes, and Sor Juana to twentieth-century “magical realists”—I am following Don Quixote’s enchanted imagination in his defense of ancient values, in his devotion to the ideals of justice, freedom, and equality. And with Sancho Panza, on the other hand, my study hopes to remain grounded in the concrete beatings and nightmares that constitute the histories of the New World. Thus, guided by the knight of faith and his squire, this study will explore the histories of wonder and exile in the New World.

      In order to understand better the theological approach of my study, I begin in chapter 1 with a preliminary exploration of the language of wonder and exile in light of the mystical and prophetic traditions of Judaism and Christianity. The distinctiveness of my study from strictly literary approaches shines brightest here and should illuminate the interpretive method used throughout the rest of my book.

      The central thesis of this study is that wonder and exile are both forms

      of absence or dispossession: wonder as a form of absence in the order of knowledge, and exile, in place and location. Wonder is defined by an encounter with something we do not and cannot fully understand, or by a recognition, and here I am following Stephen Greenblatt, that our grasp of the world is always incomplete and indeterminate.12 Wonder marks the radical otherness and impenetrability of a given phenomenon, the ineradicable mystery at the heart of all human knowledge. Given this feature of wonder—its intellectual modesty and learned ignorance—our age would do well to embrace it to resist the self-righteous triumphalism and absolutism of any form of human understanding, from religious fundamentalism to the fundamentalism of some Enlightenment narratives. If human knowledge is frozen in place, definitive and confident, there will be no place for wonder and, thus, nothing will be surprising, nothing remarkable, nothing novel.

      Exile, too, is characterized by absence, but with the terrifying face of absence, an absence that is intimate with the terrors of history, with the forced displacement and dispossession of the poor and oppressed of the world. As a tear and cut from house and home, exile is wounding and heavy-handed, born of history’s cruel passages. Our own age is reeling from the effects of exile, and there is no greater evidence of this than the desperate exoduses of millions of migrants throughout the world. Whether forced or voluntary, the passage of migrants in our times is the clearest manifestation of our unsettled and unhoused age. Homi Bhabha calls these facts the defining features of our postmodern condition:

      If the jargon of our times—postmodernity, postcoloniality, postfeminism—has any meaning at all, it does not lie in the popular use of the “post” to indicate sequentiality. . . . For instance, if the interest in postmodernism is limited to a celebration of the fragmentation of the “grand narratives” of postenlightenment rationalism then, for all its intellectual excitement, it remains a profoundly parochial enterprise. . . . For the demography of the new internationalism is the history of postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora, the major social displacements of peasant and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, the grim prose of political and economic refugees.13

      As much as my book is concerned with the portrait of wonder in the New World, then, a central concern is with these great migrations and displacements, past and present. As a Mexican American myself, born close to the U.S.-Mexico border in Tucson, I can testify to the stream, or better, river of migrants walking through the vast and perilous deserts of border territories, dying to live, desperately wanting the opportunity to live and blossom in a context that provides the body and soul oxygen to breathe. Every year, hundreds do not make it so far and end their long sojourns in the middle of the desert, to die, like Moses, before ever making it

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