LITMIR.BIZ

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to Martí:

      In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.31

      A similar passage about methodology can already be found in The Communist Manifesto, which Martí may or may not have been able to read, or at least hear about, during his years in New York City:

      We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.32

      Finally, toward the end of Extracts from The Capital by Karl Marx, the forty-two-page pamphlet that Martí may have read in Weydemeyer’s translation, this logic of radical social change is applied to the fate of capitalism itself:

      The privileges of capital now become fetters to the mode of production which has risen with them and through them. The contradiction of the means of production and the socialization of labor arrive at a point where they become incompatible with their capitalistic frame. It will be burst. The death-knell of the capitalistic private property is sounded. The appropriators of strange property will be expropriated. Thus the individual property will be re-instated, but on the basis of the acquisition of the modern mode of production. There will arise an amalgamation of free labor, which will collectively own the earth and the means of production created by labor.33

      If we limit ourselves to this conceptual juxtaposition without bringing up questions of form, there are already two important points of disagreement that immediately catch the eye. For Martí, first of all, there is no linear relation of causality between what, in light of the fragments from Marx, has come to be known as the base and the superstructure. On the contrary, political freedom and the democratization of knowledge, for example, can also come about prior to—or without—a corresponding transformation at the level of bourgeois-civil society or political economy. In fact, this is precisely the problem that besets the newly emergent nations in Latin America, where formal or political independence has not been matched by economic, social, or ideological independence. But there also appears to be a second, as yet understated or implicit disagreement in Martí’s phrasing, the consequences of which are, if possible, even more portentous for the interpretation of Marxism. This second disagreement has to do with the presupposition, which Marx and Martí at first sight would appear to share in common, that normally there exists an underlying harmony or correspondence between base and superstructure, or between the productive forces and the social relations of production with their legal, political, religious, and ideological superstructure: a correspondence interrupted only during times of revolutionary upheaval, but otherwise firmly asserted—or so it seems—as a regulative ideal by both Marx and Martí. And yet, contrary to the initial appearance of a shared presupposition, no sooner do we take a closer look at the peculiar literary-aesthetic formulation of this ideal in Lucía Jerez, as opposed to Martí’s more famous statements such as his prologue to Pérez Bonalde’s Poem of Niagara, than we have to come to the conclusion that all such presuppositions of harmony or correspondence turn out to be inoperative, if not for the capitalist world in general then at least in the specific context of Latin America.

      What I wish to underscore in relation to Martí’s novel is not just the surprising proximity to certain phrasings from Marx’s canonical texts so much as the literary form and generic structure adopted therein. Lucía Jerez, or Amistad funesta, in fact constitutes a sentimental romance that ends in nothing less than the violent destruction of all the ideals of natural or harmonious development for which Martí, in his chronicle about the death of Marx, thought he could still count on the support of the feminine soul. The melodrama of ill-fated friendship and unrequited love thus ends with the brutal assassination of Sol—the adolescent orphan whose physical beauty at the same time is supposed to embody the moral ideal as well—at the hands of her friend and potential rival or lover Lucía Jerez. Juan Jerez, on the other hand, never manages to fulfill his historical role as the story’s organic intellectual, his dream of becoming a man of letters—more specifically, a lawyer—at the service of the poor indigenous peasants. To be sure, like Marx, whom Martí does praise in his chronicle as “a man consumed with the desire to do good,” and who “saw in everything what he bore within: rebellion, the high road, combat,” Juan Jerez, too, seems destined for a higher moral mission: “Juan Jerez’s was one of those unhappy souls that can only do what is grand and love what is pure.”34 And yet, in the end, his obsession with righting the wrongs of the whole universe, his nostalgia for the heroic grandeur of epic deeds, and his well-nigh masochistic sense of duty lead him to an attitude of the “beautiful soul” whose only proof of moral integrity is that it is inversely proportionate to the sordidness of the world in which, despite everything, he is forced to circulate. “Everything on this earth, in these dark times, tends to degrade the soul: everything from books and paintings to business and affects,” to the point of provoking “the luminous illness of the great souls, reduced to petty chores by their current duties or the impositions of chance.”35

      Melodrama’s genre and gender conventions thus are put into play as the experimental ground for testing and interrogating the brusque alteration of social relations produced in Latin America by the newfound political liberties and the vulgarization of knowledge for which there has not been any corresponding change in the economical distribution of fortunes. “Melodrama links the crisis of modernity to desire and to the body, aside from facilitating an investigation into the processes of representation,” as Francine Masiello writes in a groundbreaking study, using Martí’s Lucía Jerez as one of her examples. “To put this still more radically, I propose that it is impossible to narrate the chaos of the fin de siècle in Latin America without melodrama.”36 The typical family romances such as Amalia by the Argentine José Mármol or María by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs that had served as “foundational fictions” for the joint construction of nation and narration in Latin America thus begin to come apart at the seams in the violent dislocations that give Lucía Jerez its melodramatic structure.

      On the one hand, Martí’s novel renders explicit the presuppositions behind the shift from politics to morals, which we saw was implicitly at work in his chronicle about Marx. Using a regionally inflected metaphor for a view that we otherwise would associate with vulgar Marxism, the narrator in yet another didactic digression tells us how, just as the mind’s well-being depends on the health of the stomach, so too the secret to a happy and well-ordered nation-state is to be found in the economy of the hacienda:

      A well-ordered hacienda is the base of universal happiness. In nations or in homes, it is in love—even the most unblemished and secure—that

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