SOURCE: Alonso, Carlos J. “Reading Sarmiento: Once More, with Passion.” Hispanic Review 62, no. 1 (winter 1994): 35-52.

[In the following essay, Alonso argues that Sarmiento writes with passion more than logic, linking this characteristic to trends of modernity and cultural identity in South American literature.]

Cualquiera puede corregir lo escrito por él [Sarmiento]; pero nadie puede igualarlo.

(J. L. Borges 130)

Anyone who has read Sarmiento in a more than casual fashion has probably experienced what I can only describe as a sensation of unsettledness, a moment when one feels that there is something uncanny, something bizarre transpiring before one's eyes; a feeling that some impenetrable and elusive force is at work in the text that is being examined. It begins as a suspicion that Sarmiento's discourse is not governed by the requirements of logic or analysis; that reason and reasonableness may not be the best instruments for moving along its conceptual, tropological or thematic paths. This impression becomes even more pronounced as one ventures into the vast dimension that comprises the fifty-two volumes of Sarmiento's still incomplete works and encounters fragments such as the following, from a letter written to a friend upon learning that his name was being mentioned as a possible presidential candidate:

Por mi parte, y esto para ti solo, te diré que si me dejan, le haré a la historia americana un hijo. Treinta años de estudios, viajes, experiencias y el espectáculo de otras naciones que aquéllas de aldeas me han enseñado mucho. Si fuera un estúpido, razón tendría todavía de creer que más se me alcanza que a los niños con canas que tienen embrollada la fiesta.¹

The simultaneous attraction and aversion—in short—the amazement that such a passage elicits in us is a remarkably common experience for a reader of Sarmiento's oeuvre. One could offer as a further illustration the vulgar sublimity of Sarmiento's polemicizing with Alberdi in Las ciento y una, in which at different moments he uses the ensuing rhetorical gems to execrate his erstwhile admired antagonist:

camorrista, charlatán malcriado; truchimán; lechoncito; ratoncito roepapeles; jorobado de la civilización; mujer por la voz, conejo por el miedo; sacacallos sublime; eunuco; bodeguero; esponja de limpiar muebles; botarate insignificante.²

In his manner of arguing—Sarmiento will claim in a final rhapsodic torrent of abuse—Alberdi “es como los perros que trotan de soslayo” (15: 370).

Furthermore, this is a textual universe where contradictions proliferate, inconsistencies flourish, outlandish turns of phrase or metaphors arise unexpectedly, wrongly attributed or incomplete quotations abound, digressions multiply, and where tone can shift from the sublime to the maudlin or crass in the space of a single sentence. By the same token, intentions advertised early-on are seemingly abandoned after a few pages, the vehemence displayed at any one time is often out of proportion to the subject at hand, and generic expectations are—as it is already commonplace to assert—thoroughly thwarted. Specific examples of these qualities abound: the notorious metamorphoses in Sarmiento's attitudes regarding the protagonists of his biographies and the targets of his invectives (Facundo and Rosas are, respectively, widely acknowledged examples of this tendency); one of the epigraphs to Recuerdos de provincia that mistakenly attributes the provenance of a quotation from Macbeth to Hamlet—“Es este un cuento que con aspavientos y gritos, refiere un loco y que no significa nada” (3: 26)—and in which Shakespeare's original “idiot” is transformed into an outright “madman” by Sarmiento's awkward translation; the proliferation of dichotomies that can be identified throughout the text of Facundo and which fracture endlessly the coherence and viability of the work's conceptual scaffolding; the doleful and almost whimpering sentimentality of Vida de Dominguito. In all, this writing that we call Sarmiento does not quite make sense, either in the conventional or the literal meanings of that phrase.

And yet, we inevitably struggle to fight off this realization, persist in our interpretive intention, renew our hermeneutic charge on the text and, by hook or by crook, in the end we manage to produce what we like to refer to as “our reading” of Sarmiento. In the process contradictions are either disregarded or highlighted as examples of a text that dismantles its own assertions from within (and here I include my own previous work on Sarmiento); inconsistencies become “slippages” or “blanks” that are then used to explain subsequent divergent readings of Sarmiento's texts, whether one claims that he intended this to be the case or not; the mercurial unevenness of voice and tone are ascribed to the demands of Sarmiento's polemical newspaper style; or when all else fails, these problematic qualities are taken to be simply the frail stammerings of a dependent subject writing in a peripheral situation with respect to his metropolitan models. In the finest and most powerful critical readings of Sarmiento, those that have contributed the most to our contemporary understanding of him—Sarlo, Jitrik, Molloy and others come immediately to mind—an impasse, an unresolved internal difference or contradiction is consistently the teleological terminus of the critical itinerary. But just as consistently there is always a further effort to subdue, to bring under critical control the unsettledness, the threat entailed by that internal disjunction. There are times, indeed, when one can almost hear the critical gears groaning under the strain demanded by the effort of imposing coherence on Sarmiento's unmanageable writing: for example, after having identified one such problematic instance at the very core of Recuerdos de provincia, the historian Tulio Halperín Donghi concludes the following: “Pero no parece sufficiente concluir que Sarmiento se ha resignado a la presencia de un ineliminable elemento de ambigüedad: … podría decirse más bien que atesora esa ambigüedad” (22), an obvious effort to tame contradiction and ambiguity by understanding it finally as the mark of a supposedly conscious ideological stratagem.

And yet, pretending that to find contradictions, décalages, openings and slippages in Sarmiento is a meaningful hermeneutical discovery is like being excited about holding the winning lottery ticket when, unbeknownst to one, everybody else chose the same number. It is not that these textual incongruities are not there, scattered about, like easily garnered specimens for a rhetorical teratology; it is rather that there are so many of them that they lose whatever interpretive leverage they might have wielded had they appeared as discrete and isolated instances. Almost every assertion in Sarmiento can be confronted with an opposite opinion, often appearing in the same work, sometimes in the same chapter or page; the most hated character can later become the object of admiration; the grandest pronouncement is soon undermined and reduced by its equally important exception. This is why there is always, at least in me, the lingering apprehension that after plying our critical tools on Sarmiento so very much has been left unaccounted for—that there is an untamable, overwhelming quality to Sarmiento's writing that refuses to be reduced to any category marshalled, no matter how capacious or rigorous it might be. I am aware that this incommensurability of the text with respect to critical discourse on it is, to some degree or another, a circumstance that is attendant to every exegetical enterprise; for interpretation invariably implies an element of willful inattentiveness, of blindness to those aspects of the work that do not quite conform to our chosen critical scheme. But I would also argue that with Sarmiento's works the effort to impose coherence through interpretive closure is always accompanied by the jarring knowledge of its insufficiency, by the glaring awareness of its inadequacy. Sarmiento's discourse never stands still, so to speak, never seems to cohere, and the fixity that interpretation seeks to impose on it always has to end by recognizing its utter fragility and impermanence.

This incommensurable quality of Sarmiento's discourse has been anthropomorphized in the reputation for being a madman, “el loco Sarmiento,” that seems to have surrounded him throughout his career, and which has become a leitmotif of biographical writing on Sarmiento. Hence, one finds that what seem to be merely physical or psychological characterizations of Sarmiento are really attempts to describe the unsettled, incongruous quality of his writing. This collapsing together of discursive qualities and physiognomical traits is abetted, to say the least, by the radically autobiographic dimension of Sarmiento's works; for even if, as has been remarked many times, Sarmiento had a predilection for biographical writing—his accounts of the lives of Aldao, Facundo Quiroga and Dominguito come immediately to mind—it is no less true that all these presumed works on Another are for Sarmiento thinly disguised opportunities to speak about himself. His “being,” his “voice” are so thoroughly interwoven with his writing that it is perhaps not surprising that the qualities of the discourse should have finally been attributed to the person. I offer as examples two verbal portraits of Sarmiento, one of which focuses on the physical, the other on the spiritual. The first is by the Franco—Argentine man of letters Paul Groussac in his “Artículo fúnebre” on Sarmiento: “Tal cual se me aparece aún, espaldudo y macizo, rugoso y desarmónico, con su abollada máscara de Sócrates guerrero, cuyos ojos y frente de inspirado dominan una boca y una mandíbula de primitivo, mitad sublime, mitad grotesco, evocando a un tiempo el pórtico de Atenas y el antro del cíclope, queda en pie en mi recuerdo como uno de los seres más extraordinarios que me fue dado contemplar” (quoted by Martínez Estrada 164). The second is from Enrique Anderson Imbert's introduction to his 1981 edition of Recuerdos de provincia, and it reads as follows:

Lo cierto es que Sarmiento tenía una complejísima idiosincracia. Era un razonador inteligente, capaz de penetrantes análisis, de ágiles síntesis y de rigurosa dialéctica; pero también era un energúmeno todo estremecido por efluvios de la naturaleza, ramalazos de la subconciencia, golpes de sangre y apetitos urgentes. … Era viril pero propenso al llanto; robusto pero delicado y nervioso; agresivo, pero tierno y cortés; intransigente pero comprensivo; sañudo y magnánimo; estudioso e improvisador; truculento y humorista; egocéntrico y excéntrico, con ciclos de euforia y depresión.

(59)

I would argue that the preceding descriptions portray not so much a person as a modality of discourse that exhibits the contradictions and inconsistencies detailed above. These incongruities are subsequently ascribed to Sarmiento's character and physical attributes, following a metonymical line of least resistance that travels from the written word to its avowed source, which is presumed to share the same qualities, and which in this particular case is always projecting itself forcefully in the text under a number of guises. But even if we keep in mind that these are, rather, the salient discursive qualities of the writing that we identify as “Sarmiento,” the implications of such a characterization remain to be explored. What, for instance, is the status of a writing that does not seem answerable to the customary demands of internal coherence; and, concomitantly, what are the prospects for criticism when confronting a text that thwarts the usual practice of documenting a critical assertion through the citation of a passage designated as privileged, given that an opposite conclusion invariably lurks never too far away?

I propose that these incongruous characteristics of Sarmiento's prose can be best accounted for when his writing is conceptualized as discourse in its most naked rendition; discourse as performance, as an activity in which intentionality and language intersect in the uninterrupted flow of writing. For discourse in Sarmiento is, more than a disquisition about or towards something, an act ultimately justified in its own factuality. Accordingly, there is a certain emergency to Sarmiento's prose, in more than one sense of the word: first, as a writing that positions itself as responsive to the avowed offense, crisis or otherwise demanding circumstance that it is purportedly addressing; but also, and especially, as discourse tied in a radical fashion to the very instant of its emergence. This is the reason why Sarmiento's works are persistently reproached for their superficial, spontaneous and unfinished quality, as the following quotation by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada amply demonstrates:

[Sarmiento] no ha podido meditar ninguno de los temas que ha expuesto, y de ahí la impresión de que nos ha dejado colosales bosquejos incoherentes de una obra no realizada. Sus ideas brotan espontáneamente … sin el cuidado del último retoque. Nada hay en su pensamiento que se proyecte a lo interno ni que surja de complicados laberintos; su pensamiento se parece mucho a los ademanes y los gestos del hombre que habla siempre en voz alta.

(164)

To which Martínez Estrada later adds an oxymoronic observation that, given what has been presented this far, seems strangely enough to make sense: “Lo más logrado de Sarmiento es lo impremeditado” (177).³ Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano echo this impression in their splendid reading of Sarmiento's principal autobiographical work: “Recuerdos de provincia conserva todos los rastros del primer trabajo de escritura, todo lo que en la segunda lectura y en la corrección se elimina para alcanzar cierto ideal compositivo limpio de desorden, de repetición, de obsesiones, de idas y de vueltas” (8). It was specifically this quality that led Carlos Alberto Erro to declare that the most idiosyncratic of Spanish American authors nonetheless does not have a style that is recognizably his own:

¿Qué importancia tiene que a veces se empleen mal los gerundios y se cometan tropiezos idiomáticos, si se es capaz de escribir Facundo y Recuerdos de provincia? Escribe Sarmiento como si su prosa fuera la natural respiración de su espíritu. Nunca se le ve componer, preparar o pulir. … Su prosa es … el aparato circulatorio de su pensamiento, ramificado canal por donde circula un contenido vivo, cálido, poderoso. Escribe como vive; y sus escritos tienen envión de luchador, filo y fuerza de hacha más que de espada, aliento de pecho ancho, de resuello profundo. Por eso no se le conocen los ‘tics’ que dan sello personal a tantos estilos y que se explican en quienes tienen que detenerse para volver a empezar. La prosa de Sarmiento sigue su marcha sin mirar hacia atrás.

(X)

In my view, though, these qualities of Sarmiento's writing are not, as these and many other commentators of his works would have it, a reflection of his lack of deliberation, ideological inconsistency or shallowness of mind. They are, rather, a result of the way in which Sarmiento projects his discourse as indistinguishable from the instance, the act of its production. Sarmiento's writing aims to be discourse itself pure and simple; continuously to “represent”—a word I intentionally use here in its theatrical connotation—the emergence, the coming into being of discourse.

The explanation for such a discursive praxis is to be found, I believe, in the larger context of the foundation of cultural discourse in Spanish America in the nineteenth century. It is there, and specifically in the conflictual relationship between Spanish America and modernity, that Sarmiento's peculiar writing shall be subsequently shown to acquire its ultimate significance.

It is routinely asserted nowadays that Spanish America did not experience modernity as a historical reality.⁴ I would argue, however, that lost in that denial is the all-important fact that this was, nonetheless, the essence of Spanish America's experience of modernity: it was an absence, a negation, but one that in turn generated a rhetorical predicament that in effect has become the constitutive element of Spanish America's cultural and discursive enterprise. I believe in fact that it is only when confronting the realization that Spanish American modernity was above all a rhetorical phenomenon that we can begin to confront it in all its complexity. With the assertion that Spanish America's experience of modernity was fundamentally rhetorical I refer to more than its quality as a phenomenon or effect of discourse: that is to say, a discursive event that was not accompanied by the material trappings of modernity. To be sure, modernity in Spanish America manifested itself superficially as an almost indiscriminate appropriation of discourses that were considered “modern,” with the somewhat ingenuous intention of attaining modernity itself in the process of wielding them. Nevertheless, my principal objective in using the term rhetorical is not to underscore or reflect this circumstance, but rather to suggest that modernity was experienced by Spanish American writers and intellectuals as a predicament that was rhetorical in nature.

The fundamental features of this predicament could be summarized in the following fashion: given that Spanish America did not possess the objective material conditions to sustain convincingly the discourse of modernity, the seemingly unanimous adoption of the rhetoric of modernity by Spanish American intellectuals was accompanied by a surreptitious gesture that sought deliverance from the constative exigencies of that rhetoric. In other words, while invoking the values, goals and ideology of modernity, Spanish American writers also needed to define simultaneously a space outside that rhetoric, since the discourse of modernity unremittingly put in question the discursive authority of the Spanish American writing subject. Thus, the Spanish American author adopts a rhetorical mode that it identifies with modernity, but simultaneously proceeds to argue in a way that suggests that that rhetorical mode is somehow not commensurate with the Spanish American text.

Seen in this light, Spanish America's relationship with modernity has incorporated from the outset a dimension that could be best described as critical, if we keep in mind the “displacement from” or “separation” that is part of the adjective's etymological charge. Spanish American writers and intellectuals have consistently engaged modernity with a critical stance, but not of the sort that Octavio Paz has identified in Los hijos del limo with European Romanticism or its putative Spanish American counterpart, modernismo. In Paz's scheme this critique is philosophical and existential, expressed through the Romantic insistence on Analogy as an epistemological principle that supersedes rationalism. In my view, this critical gesture reveals itself in the Spanish American text as an internal rhetorical difference, a turning away from itself that originates in, and is expressive of, a discursive entanglement.

It is not difficult to visualize how this internal rhetorical displacement should have hypostatized itself into an exaggerated affirmation of another difference, one centered on the specificity and singularity of autochthonous cultural characteristics and values. Through a literal rendition and inversion of the traditional metaphor that conceives of discourse as a series of rhetorical topoi or loci, a problematics of rhetorical legitimation would then surface thematized as a preoccupation with the place whence that discourse emerges. The rhetorical difference intrinsic to the text is thereby projected, reified outside the realm of discourse; in turn, this externality enables it to become the object of a discursive cultural enterprise defined as the ceaseless exploration of that very difference. The outcome is Spanish American cultural discourse, where Spanish America becomes an historical and geographic space in which an irreducible difference is persistently and repeatedly reaffirmed. This is the case even in texts that appear to call vehemently for the eradication of that essential difference through the total incorporation of Spanish America into a modernity that is conceived of as an intrinsically European phenomenon, since their rhetorical authority is grounded on the continued existence of the difference assumed by that specificity. In these works—and I have in mind texts such as Sarmiento's own Facundo, the writings by the Cuban Abolitionists and Bunge's Nuestra América—Spanish America's historical and socio-economic idiosyncracies are depicted as detrimental from the point of view of modernity; but the difference represented by those idiosyncracies is also the mark of a discursive maneuver essential for the text's affirmation of its own authority, and therefore for its coming into being.

The result is that when examined from this perspective, even those works that purport to diagnose the ills that postpone Spanish America's participation in the modern can be shown to affirm through their own discursive performance the fundamental eccentricity of Spanish America vis-à-vis modernity—its irreducibility to the coordinates of the modern. In this way, the successive projects that would subsume Spanish America under the mantle of modernity are simultaneously and paradoxically engaged in the affirmation of a radical cultural difference, a cultural claim to exception from the demands of modernity that is the expression of a discursive will-to-power—an attempt to stave off the rhetorical disenfranchisement with which modernity threatened the Spanish American writer at every turn.

Since the resolute embracing of modern values and categories is also resolutely challenged by the rhetorical exigencies of the Spanish American discursive situation as described above, it becomes impossible to assert with any degree of certainty whether Spanish American cultural discourse is modern or anti-modern; what must be understood, though, is that this undecidability is the essence of Spanish America's experience of, and participation in, modernity.⁵ It might seem, on account of the necessary breadth of my argument, that I am disregarding the fact that the chasm between the rhetoric of modernity and Spanish American circumstance has varied greatly from Buenos Aires to Venezuela to Bolivia, for example. I am keenly aware of those differences; but my principal intention here is to point to the existence of that fissure itself, regardless of its specific local features, and to delineate in general terms the complex maneuver of rhetorical enabling with which Spanish American writers addressed the resulting crisis.

Discourse in Spanish America has been consistently produced in the midst of this disjunction; in turn, the rhetorical predicament has found its most persistent expression in the affirmation of Spanish America's irrepressible cultural difference. And yet, one can readily sense the complications that arise when the discursive authority of a text is sustained through the effective disavowal or dismantling of its chosen rhetorical mode. This incongruous circumstance reveals itself in the fact that the projects, solutions, reforms and manifestos that have been advanced in order to make Spanish America consonant with modernity have always exhibited a simplistic, doctrinaire and generally hyperbolic nature, betraying in their exaggerated gesturing the ambivalent wellspring that nurtures their explicit reformist designs. This circumstance can also be invoked to account, in turn, for the profoundly aesthetic character, the intensely gestural nature of Spanish American modernity.

In light of this discussion, the unremitting Spanish American affirmation of an autochthonous cultural essence would have to be interpreted in a novel fashion: it should be construed as a strategy designed to fashion a rhetorical foundation, a position of rhetorical authority in the face of the difficult discursive situation described above. In the end, this ceaseless search for a cultural identity must be understood and addressed as an equally inexhaustible stratagem to empower rhetorically the Spanish American writer in the face of modernity's threat to undermine the legitimacy of his discourse. That is to say, the assumption of Spanish America's difference has created the rhetorical space and possibility for a Spanish American discourse, a space that by definition can never be foreclosed by the demands and challenges of modernity, because that difference guarantees that Spanish America is from the outset hors jeu, fuera del juego with respect to modernity. This would account for the apparent naïveté that always seems to allow for one more formulation of autochthony, since each text must express anew the gesture that underwrites its discursive authority. In this sense, the thematic repetitiveness within the textual tradition of cultural definition could be considered another symptom of the blindness that necessarily accompanies this requisite and iterative maneuver of rhetorical foundation.⁶

By this point our original subject—Sarmiento—might seem to loom far afield, the casualty of a lengthy digressive interlude. And yet, I would argue that it is precisely in the space opened by the preceding discussion that the essential characteristics of Sarmiento's writing begin to acquire their ultimate significance. For one could construe Sarmiento's discursive posture as a strategy designed to secure a position of rhetorical legitimacy in the context of the discursive crisis outlined above. Sarmiento's stratagem within the larger phenomenon just described, his “solution” to the crisis, so to say, consists of an attempt to found the authority of his writing in a conception of discourse as an act that is continuously being performed before the reader's eyes. In this conception, discourse has no past and no future, no internal principle of self-consistency or accountability, which explains the repeated and seemingly unproblematic presence of incongruities and contradictions in Sarmiento's prose. Writing in Sarmiento's works becomes simultaneous with the volition of which it is an expression: discourse is represented as an immediate act of the will, as occurring at the very moment when a subjective intentionality avails itself of language for its peremptory needs. This is why the word that first comes to my mind to describe this writing is passion, because in it, discourse is depicted as being ultimately ruled by the relentless, contradictory drives of a desiring subject.

I am fully aware that there is a potential peril in the sort of reading that I am proposing here: the danger of having Sarmiento's writing retreat into the opacity of the self-contradictory and the incomprehensible; and if, as I propose, his rhetorical circumstance is coextensive with Spanish American discourse in general, there is consequently also a danger of identifying that entire discursive production with the unintelligible. Nevertheless, I believe that in entertaining this reproach one would indulge in a more dangerous mystification: that of walking into the trap of endowing Western discourse with an internal consistency and self-centeredness that the most recent literary and philosophical critiques have irrefutably revealed to be essentially a mirage. What should be emphasized instead is the productive aspect of this rhetorical stroke, the empowerment that it has represented for the Spanish American discursive circumstance. Spanish American modernity must be understood as a cultural activity possessing meaning unto itself; that is, as an ongoing process of cultural production that engages in a symbolic appropriation of historical and cultural experience.⁷

On the other hand, given the discursive predicament that I have detailed, one is tempted to claim that there is something innately heroic about the existence of Spanish American discourse, or that this discourse represents a critique of hegemonic discursive modalities.

The agonistic vision of the universe of discourse entailed by the first of these possibilities (the heroic) must yield to Foucault's insight that the mere fact of discourse always implies that the speaker is immersed in a complex strategic situation that sustains the network of power in a given historical moment. The second one, the critical view, is a more tantalizing possibility but equally problematic: because if we succumb to the temptation of granting a demystifying value to the difference entailed by Latin American discourse, we run the risk of fetishizing that difference, of becoming enamored of the critical opportunities that it affords, thereby drawing attention away from the concrete situation of exploitation from which it arises; and the price for engaging in such a critique can become an investment in sustaining the condition of economic and political subjection on which the affirmation of cultural difference is predicated, as well as the acceptance (however joyously embraced) of a marginality that hegemonic cultural discourse is only too willing to confirm in the first place.⁸

Hence, my aim has not been to argue for a recuperation of Sarmiento through tragic pathos or critical leverage, but to understand the essential qualities of his discourse as they point to the existence of a concrete strategy of rhetorical empowerment. Sarmiento's resolute embracing of modernity explains many of the calamitous policies that he pursued when as President he was in a position to translate that commitment into action; but his writing also betrays both the constant discursive peril that accompanied that commitment and his negotiating of that threat through a turning away from the modern. Sarmiento attempted to exorcise the resulting ambivalence with respect to modernity in the unusual severity of his official actions, proving once again that we always despise others who remind us of those attributes we cannot bear to recognize in ourselves.

Furthermore, it should be noted that, in his peculiar way of disentangling himself from the demands of the modern, Sarmiento's discourse may have arrived nonetheless at a most consummate realization of modernity: writing as an unpremeditated, spontaneous act that knows no past, and which burns without surcease in the resplendence of the present moment. It is not simply that Sarmiento consistently endeavored to anchor his writing in the peremptory affairs of his biography or his season in history; these were simply rhetorical devices for the mise-en-scène of his discursive performance. Sarmiento's writing attempts to reside perpetually in that point of insertion of the “I,” that moment when, as Benveniste phrased it in his now classic work on pronouns, “the speaker takes over all the resources of language for his own behalf,” to “effect a conversion of language into discourse” (220). It is hardly surprising then, to find that one of the most disseminated sobriquets that his enemies brandished against Sarmiento was the revealing nickname of Don YO.

Given all of the above, I argue here in favor of what could be called a passionate, or pulsional reading of Sarmiento's texts; a reading that is attentive to the power and drive of Sarmiento's discourse as opposed to circumventing, taming or overlooking it; a reading that is not oblivious to that aspect of Sarmiento that is alluded to by Martínez Estrada when he identifies in his writings “una oleada de sangre caliente, un calor de tórax abierto como no lo hay parecido en toda nuestra literatura” (136), and which he also describes as “una animalidad sublimada” (136). All these locutions and many more similar ones that could be mentioned here are, I believe, tropological constructions that unknowingly attempt to portray the force, the passion that is indissolubly coupled to Sarmiento's discourse.⁹ No comprehensive account of Sarmiento can fail to address this component of his writing, particularly because it is ultimately perhaps the single invariant quality that circumscribes its specificity. Moreover, I would contend finally that it is this very aspect of it that keeps beckoning us back, against our own critical best judgment, to the inhospitable morass of Sarmiento's texts.

Indeed, I have often wondered why I, and seemingly everyone who has written about Sarmiento, seem unable to leave well enough alone; why we always find ourselves returning to his works: hence the “once more” of my title. Of course, the liminary position that Sarmiento occupies in the development of Spanish American cultural discourse seems a more than reasonable justification. Yet I believe that a more compelling, a more passionate reason, shall we say, can also be adduced. I suspect that there is in us a recognition at some level that this writing—the imperious, supple, cajoling, histrionic, contradictory and superficial discourse that we call Sarmiento—discloses the fragile precipice that tempts our own writing at every turn: that of giving ourselves wholly to the pure thrust of discourse, of allowing writing to be the force from which discourse always springs, as opposed to being reduced merely to detecting the faint embers of this force in a language that has already been subjected to the strictures and necessities of communication.

This should not be construed as a post-lapsarian hankering after a discourse that is truly ours, one that would reveal the specific imprint of a personality on language, but rather as a desire to dwell, if only briefly, within that dimension of language where, in fact, personality is no longer a significant category. For, as Benjamin has made clear, there is in all linguistic creations, in addition to what is conveyed, something that cannot be communicated, a measure of signifying intention that he refers to as pure language: “In this pure language,” he says, “—which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages—all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished” (80). The movement, the pulsion that rules Sarmiento's discourse, discernible in its inattention to internal coherence, harmony and self-consistency, reminds us that a similar force is at work in our own writing; but it also makes us aware of how far we have gone to suppress it as well, a circumstance that might be encapsulated in Derrida's assertion that criticism is always in the pursuit of structure because “form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself” (4). This is precisely why, if we are to write at all, we must berate this writing that we have named “Sarmiento,” and endlessly denounce it as demented, inconstant, willful and bizarre.

And yet, we always go back to “el loco Sarmiento,” perhaps because paradoxically we can only come in contact with that dimension of our own writing through the writing of others like him. Indeed, could we not discern in the impetuous, breathless prose of Martí, a man both fascinated and consumed by the modern if there was ever one, some of the qualities that have been identified in Sarmiento's discourse? And conversely, could the carefully parsed, hyper-analytical coolness of Borges be the writing of someone fearful of the profligacy and excess that haunts him as an ever-present threat? Maybe this is why Sarmiento is continuously daring us, defying us to stop reading him, or directing us to destroy his pages once we are through with them, as in the blazing introduction to Recuerdos de provincia: “Sin placer, como sin zozobra, ofrezco a mis compatriotas estas páginas. … Después de leídas, pueden aniquilarlas, pues pertenecen al número de las publicaciones que deben su existencia a circunstancias del momento, pasadas las cuales nadie las comprendería” (III: 28). But Sarmiento knows better than that. And the fact that we do go back to his works means that we also know better; that in spite of all the incongruities and contradictions we have managed to understand him only too well.

Notes

1. “Carta a José Posse,” in Sarmiento's Memorias. Obras completas, XLIX: 267.

2. I offer here a shortened reproduction of a list compiled by Barreiro (75), who asserts that “cuando enfrentó la polémica [Sarmiento], perdió todo dominio y fue deslenguado, safio, procaz, implacable. … Ingenieros afirmará que ‘Sarmiento contestó con golpes de hacha a las finísimas estocadas de su adversario’” (75).

3. Manuel Gálvez refers to an incident in Sarmiento's youth that reveals, according to him, “la impremeditación que tendrá toda su vida” (51). Later he argues that “Sarmiento procedía por impulsos espontáneos e incontenibles que se renovaban sin cesar, sobre todo cuando algo los obstaculizaba” (444).

4. What follows is a much abbreviated version of an argument I develop in the first chapter of my book The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony.

5. Parenthetically, this is also why it seems to me that the late Angel Rama, Françoise Pérus and other critics whose works imply that modernity becomes an element to contend with in our cultural domain only when the material conditions for modernity begin to be obtained in Spanish America (that is, the last quarter of the nineteenth century) miss the essentially rhetorical nature of Spanish America's experience of the modern. What does indeed happen in the last decades of the previous century is an intensification of the difficulty that from the beginning was always a constitutive part of cultural discourse in Spanish America: a heightening of the problematic relationship with modernity dictated, paradoxically enough, by what seemed to be its imminence—much the same way in which a mass will accelerate and heat up as it approaches the dark body under whose gravitational spell it lies.

6. The fact that Spanish American writing is continually dealing with the issue of rhetorical authority may account for the commonplace notion that Spanish American literature has a persistently Romantic strain. As we know, Romanticism was intensely preoccupied with the problem of discursive legitimacy, that is, how to provide a foundation for new modalities of writing without the benefit of the authority provided by the canonical genres.

7. My argument here reflects issues that are currently debated in anthropological theory. See, for instance, Sahlins (Historical … 1-8, and “The Stranger King”), Fabian, Geertz (201-07), and Bourdieu's illuminating work.

8. Jennifer Wicke has discussed cogently some of these issues. Or as Djelal Kadir has said: “Emergent cultures are emerging from a Eurocentered colonial past into a Eurocentered paradigm of cultural advancement. … We appropriated [the other] as a colony, expropriated it as a former colony, to reappropriate it as cultural complement and reflective object” (13).

9. For instance: “La contradictoria presencia de Sarmiento, entonces y hoy, seguirá desafiando toda clasificación. … Sus escritos han sido continuo objeto de polémicas, si no de disputas. Pero después de bajar los puños y calmarse las voces, los lectores de Sarmiento siempre terminan por afirmar la extraña belleza y la inexplicable atracción de esta obra apasionante” (Katra 549, my emphasis).

Works Cited

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———. “Civilización y barbarie.” Hispania 72 (1989): 256-63.

———. The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Altamirano, Carlos, and Beatriz Sarlo. “Una vida ejemplar: la estrategia de Recuerdos de provincia.” Escritura 9 (1980): 3-48.

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Barreiro, José P, ed. Cartas y discursos políticos: itinerario de una pasión republicana. Volume 3 of Edición especial de seis tomos de la obra de D. F. Sarmiento. Buenos Aires: Culturales Argentinas, 1965.

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Gálvez, Manuel. Vida de Sarmiento: el hombre de autoridad. Buenos Aires: Tor, 1952.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973.

Halperín Donghi, Tulio. “El antiguo orden y su crisis como tema de Recuerdos de provincia.” Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “Dr. E. Ravignani” 1 (3a. serie, 1989): 7-22.

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———. “The Stranger King.” The Journal of Pacific History 16.3 (1981): 107-32.

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Wicke, Jennifer. “Postmodernism: The Perfume of Information.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 1.2 (1988): 145-60.