[In the following essay, Sommer analyzes the influence of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans on Sarmiento's Facundo, focusing especially on how Sarmiento incorporates Cooper's new way of writing about the Americas.]

Poor Cora! Why must James Fenimore Cooper kill her off in The Last of the Mohicans (1826)? After lingering so long on her heroism, generosity, resourcefulness, and sheer ethical strength (not to speak of the physical attractions that fix Cooper on Cora) her death seems entirely undeserved. And poor us. Why make Cora so admirable only to deny us the continuing fantasy of possessing, or of being, her? This is especially distressing in a romance, or sentimental novel, which should typically unite hero and heroine after making them overcome apparently insurmountable odds.

One of the problems is that she is not the heroine at all. Nor, much less, is the Mohican Uncas her hero. Cora is a woman marked by a racially crossed past that would have compromised the clear order Cooper wanted for America. And this is precisely why, tragically, he has to kill her off: to stop us short in our sentimental sidetracks, and to leave us only the legitimate lovers who must command our lasting sympathy. They are childlike Alice, Cora's half sister, and her dashing English suitor, Major Heyward.

I should confess right away that my responses to Cooper, romantic heartbreak alternating with practical resignation, are marked by my own past as a reader of Cooper's Latin American heirs. They reread and rewrote him, either to defend Cora's death as a necessary sacrifice or to redeem her as America's more colorful and more convincing heroine. Given the inevitable years and books that have intervened between Cooper and me, I cannot help but read him through these writers, just as Jorge Luis Borges read Don Quixote through Pierre Menard's rewriting. Like Menard in Borges's story, the Latin Americans produced contemporary texts with each rereading of Cooper. Borges tells us that “Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)”¹ When Cervantes wrote, for example, that history is the mother of truth, he was merely a “lay genius” offering rhetorical praise for history. But when Menard writes it, Borges finds that “the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.” Borges comes to understand that this brilliant updating of the text should not be surprising, because Menard had taught him that,

“Thinking, analyzing, inventing … are not anomalous acts; they are the normal respiration of the intelligence.” … Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: … that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid. … This technique fills the most placid works with adventure.²

Why not, then, read Cooper through the Latin American writers who read him? Each reading is original, because none really is, since the very pretense of originality is mocked by the endless success(ion) of rereadings. Originality is precisely what is unstable, that which decomposes and recomposes itself with every reading. Menard's lesson is that even if we could succeed in bracketing all the texts that have come between Cooper and us we would be fetishizing his novel by assuming that “thinking, analyzing, inventing” are discrete activities. And worse, perhaps, we would miss a series of “adventurous” Latin American revisions.³

Cooper himself might well have objected to these exploits when it came to exploiting The Last of the Mohicans. All such liberties would surely confound his foundational project, a book that became America's “gymnasium of the heart” according to a century and a half of autobiographical testimony by “politicians, businessmen, and soldiers—but also those who became her historians, preachers, writers.”⁴ To be fair, few nation-builders would have welcomed other writers to tinker with their constructions. Nor could they have appreciated the controlling charm of Walt Whitman's injunction to “stray from me,” a liberating gesture that of course insures a paradoxical obedience by granting the right to disobey: “yet who can stray from me?”⁵ And Cooper seems particularly defensive about his founding text for America: tampering was tantamount to meddling with Providence, because Cooper's pretext for writing was (to defend) God's own creation, the pristine and natural lines of America. It denounces no traces of writing, but reveals a perfect creation that a spiritual elite may inherit. More true certainly than “cowardly” written histories, whose absent authors avoid criticism (35),⁶ and truer even than the Bible, in which God's intentions are colored by fallible human language (107), America's Wilderness is His transparent writing. When David Gamut misses Hawk-eye's reference to the only book worth reading, the scout explains,

“'Tis open before your eyes, … and he who owns it is not a niggard of its use. I have heard it said that there are men who read in books to convince themselves there is a God. I know not but man may so deform his works in the settlements, as to leave that which is so clear in the wilderness a matter of doubt among traders and priests. If any such there be, and he will follow me from sun to sun, through the windings of the forest, he shall see enough to teach him that he is a fool, and that the greatest of his folly lies in striving to rise to the level of One he can never equal, be it in goodness, or be it in power”.

(138)

Yet, the very novel he gives us to read shows that Cooper is his own Menard, taking timeless nature as a pretense for adventurous historical embellishments. If God has already written, who is man to overwrite the creation until nature spells civilization? This contradiction certainly seems to nag Cooper as he reduces the divine work to writerly raw material. Only the author's forbearance, and the Puritans' mission to make God's signs visible, can hope to resolve it. Cooper seems alive to the problem and makes visible efforts at writing an extension of Nature, thus to provide his heroes with a legitimating prehistory. But extending, interpreting, writing, inevitably produce supplements. And in Cooper they convert an alleged static plenitude into the animated project of endless rewritings.

The ways in which Latin Americans rewrote Cooper assume a reason why they gave him so much attention. Why did they? Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) gives more than a clue. Probably the foremost author of the Argentine nation as journalist, ideologue, general, and president, Sarmiento provided an argument for Cooper's usefulness to other national authors which practically set off a Coopermania among them. His reasons were evidently powerful enough to make Sarmiento refer in great detail to Cooper's novels at the beginning of Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (1845), translated as Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants.⁷ Something about Cooper's writing warrants the Argentine's review of several scenes from The Last of the Mohicans and from The Prairie (1827) in order to launch his own book, a book that seems to have little to do with fiction and less to do with North America. Or was that something, perhaps, Cooper's emblematic value among European readers as the American writer of his day? These admirably civilized readers admired Cooper—and this is Sarmiento's argument—because he had developed a formula for writing about America that took advantage of her originality, and that should therefore be taken as a model of New World writing. It amounted to removing “la escena de sus descripciones fuera del círculo ocupado por los plantadores, al límite entre la vida bárbara y la civilizada, al teatro de la guerra en que las razas indígenas y la raza sajona están combatiendo por la posesión del terreno” (“the scene of the events he described from the settled portion of the country to the borderland between civilized life and that of the savage, the theater of war for the possession of the soil waged against each other, by the native tribes and the Saxon race”).⁸

THE DOUBLE CROSS: RACIAL AND GENDER CROSSINGS CROSSED OUT

This is one hint that Sarmiento understood Cooper's sign for the natural, legitimate hero and heroine as, rather, a lack of sign, a pristine blankness in the original sense of whiteness, that leaves fair Alice and Heyward unblemished.⁹ Unlike Cora, whose dark hair and dignified manner denote a complicated history, and Uncas, whose race is marked by his savage coloring, no mark or trace of a compromising past, no “cross” of blood, burdens Alice or Heyward. They not only survive more colorful Cora and Uncas, but also, presumably, prosper and populate the innocent and benign America. Inheriting her by virtue of a mutual love that bears no crosses of the past, they set out together, he to inscribe himself on, and she to be inscribed along with, an equally untraced Wilderness.

The heroine of the piece is, then, also America, both mother and consort to the founding white fathers. By the same token, seen from its flip side, women can offer the legitimate ground for society only if they seem unmarked and nonhistorical, as America appeared to the settlers who called her a Wilderness. Rhetorical figures like the “virgin forest” and her “bosom” are so standard here that one may miss the vanishing act of a language that vaporizes woman by substitution. Cooper's romance gives a domestic cast to what has been called America's pastoral dream, and helps to relieve some ambiguity or guilt over the white man's conquest of a Virgin Land.¹⁰ What could be more legitimate than courting and winning a virgin? If man's penetration threatened to destroy the Wilderness, certainly this was not true once conquest was figured as mutual love. Or was it? The domestic conquest of women was not entirely benign, as we see from Cora's case. How could it be when, for apparently ethical and historical reasons, women should be inert terrain for human activity?¹¹ Those who can serve do not act. And those who cannot serve are eliminated.

Reducing the female to a blank page, the better to bear man's inscription, means that Cora will not do. Her flaw is not only a racial slippage, but also a certain gender indeterminacy evident in her manly dignity (119). Similarly, Uncas is victim to this founding romance not only because he threatens to complicate Cora's racial crossings, but also because his masculinity has room for the grace and sensitivity associated with women. Both characters cross over the rigid racial and sexual divides, although readers have more often noted Cooper's defense of racial purity than his simultaneous policing of gender boundaries. Misgivings about miscegenation spill over into misogyny. I do not mean to ignore the pained ambiguity that one senses each time this exterminating angel waxes critical of pure whites, or each time Cooper prefers women with histories. I merely want to underline the pain, the cathartic sacrifice of social impurities, that became necessary if the nation was to be established in the clearest possible terms.

From reading Michel Foucault, one might imagine that Cooper's defense of racial and gender purity is consistent with an eighteenth-century “map” or “grid” of knowledge. Foucault understands the classical episteme to posit a universal plenitude, every part of which fits neatly into a table of categories; any spillovers from one category to the other were simply errors, or symptoms of the temporary limits of human knowledge. Science, in one form or another, was taxonomic. Yet Cooper either shows that this view of the eighteenth century is unnecessarily static, or that he is caught between a classical affirmation of knowledge and the daring nineteenth-century pursuit of new categories. Taxonomies, Foucault continues, were giving way to histories, and attention shifted from static parts to unstable organisms, changeable combinations that disturbed and finally dismantled the meticulous grids of classical knowledge.¹² Charles Brockden Brown was already dabbling with crossovers in Arthur Mervyn (1799), where the hero's marriage to a Portuguese-Jewish widow makes social order seem possible through inclusion rather than elimination.¹³ But he worried along with Cooper about the appropriateness of certain mixes for America. Various Europeans might combine, as they do in Cooper's The Pioneers (1823), but cautiously.

In the more defensive Mohicans written three years later, both Sarmiento and his straying Latin American readers would find an endorsement of their alternative assumptions about order and progress. On the one (Sarmentine) hand, each of the characters in the novel can be located on a stable graph of utility in: language (French being inferior to English, for instance); musicality and religiosity (David Gamut's excess in contrast to Iroquois paucity); domestic practices (the cooking Mohicans and the raw-eating Iroquois); and gender (Alice's ideally infantile femininity, Heyward's masculinity, and the confused categories of Cora and Uncas). These hierarchies function more to establish a grid of values than to motivate the novel. Motivation comes precisely from a commitment to keep the categories pure against the disturbances in gender and, more conspicuously perhaps, against racial amalgamations. It is bad enough to be an Indian or even a Frenchman, but much worse to be a mixture that upsets the neat rungs of the racial ladder. That is why Hawk-eye keeps insisting, rather defensively, that he is a man without a cross (of blood); but Chingachgook, too, is bound to call himself “an unmixed man” (37).¹⁴ As for Cora, her tragedy is announced by the fact that she is the product of a leaky grid of blood. Her blood was so rich that it “seemed ready to burst its bounds” (21). It stains her, makes her literally uncategorizable—that is, an epistemological error.¹⁵ Heyward agrees that this is “unfortunate” because even though there is no blame in Cora, there is a blemish that “obscures” her worth (308). By contrast, Alice is pure, named for truth itself and for the mother who sacrificed her youth to remain true to Munro.

But on the other (romantic novelists') hand, Cooper's novel seems ready to explode the Classical prison house of knowledge by way of its most vital and most admirable characters. Through them, America and the nineteenth century practically promise to be the place and time for new possibilities and unplotted histories. If America is different from Europe, as Cooper's and Sarmiento's nationalism must insist that she is, surely her children must subject Old World categories to a new reflexivity and to new combinations. How could it be otherwise, if instead of the historicized Nature of Europe, America was a Wilderness, an unknown and surprising land? Therefore, along with their map of civilization, Cooper and Sarmiento give us guides to the unknown, a scout named Hawk-eye and an entire class of mestizo Argentine pathfinders. And alongside this quintessentially “American” character whose rustic nobility dares to straddle social categories, we get a combination of “masculine” dignity and “feminine” sensuality in Cora.

We do not get them for long, however, as Sarmiento is quick to recognize. Cooper introduces these anomalous figures as if to pledge that America can be original by providing the space for differences, variations, and crossings. But then he recoils from them, almost as if they were monsters, misfits. If Hawk-eye seems redeemable inside the gridwork of a classical reading because, unlike the gauchos, he is a man without a cross, he is finally as doomed as they are by Cooper's obsessive social neatness. Hawk-eye disturbs the ideal hierarchies that Sarmiento and his Cooper have in mind, because neither birth nor language can measure his worth. And Cooper leaves the scout behind as surely as his characters leave their crossover identities after the carnival-like masquerade of the final rescue scenes. Chingachgook can no more remain a beaver than Heyward can be a buffoon or Alice an Indian. And Cora, already exposed as impersonating a white maiden, can hardly remain the beloved of a Mohican. At her funeral Munro asks Hawk-eye to comfort the mourners with the promise that “the time shall not be distant when we may assemble around [God's] throne without distinction of sex, or rank, or color.” The more “natural” man objects: “To tell them this … would be to tell them that the snows come not in the winter” (411). To be beautiful, vital, virtuous, and resourceful was not enough for Cora; rather, it was too much for any woman.

Some readers weep along with the Indian maids. Sarmiento may have wept too, but with the grateful cathartic tears that felt the profound injustice, but also the “necessity,” of what had already become a policy of Indian removal or genocide in both the U.S. and in Argentina. For Sarmiento, Cooper's dedication to progress made the sacrifice inevitable. Surely Cooper could not have been serious about imagining that America was already the rational and uncorrupted given order of things. Instead, she was clearly available for men to impose clarity and rationality. Apparently loyal to the eighteenth-century episteme, Cooper seemed to defend the purity of her Wilderness, just as he insisted on the transparent simplicity of his virginal heroine. But what he really wants, in Sarmiento's reading, is to defend the nature of society, for inchoate Nature to embrace Civilization. This reader is untroubled by the possible paradox of loving the Wilderness to death,¹⁶ or by the related paradox of loving virgins like Alice. Love a virgin and she stops being one; inhabit the pristine Wilderness of America and you have civilized it. The violation of the purity that seems to legitimize America may be a problem for some North American readers, but it was precisely what Sarmiento wanted: to engender civilized settlers who would conquer the still overpowering Land.

He had no pretense of preserving the virginity or totality of America; quite the contrary. Empty spaces were the problem itself: “Its own extent is the evil from which the Argentine Republic suffers.”¹⁷ The country's demographic and discursive nature was an emptiness that “se le insinúa en las entrañas” (“threatened to invade her entrails”),¹⁸ and that invited man's writing and the supplement they could produce together. That meant, of course, bodies to populate the Pampa and modern systems of production and exchange. But Sarmiento's immediate supplement was, in fact, his native overwriting of “exotic” texts, travelogues, and voyagers' accounts that provided the only Pampa he knew.¹⁹ As for the danger that objections to Nature could be construed as blasphemy, Sarmiento arrogantly quips, “Debiéramos quejarnos ante la Providencia y pedirle que rectifique la configuración de la tierra” (“We should lodge a complaint against Providence and ask it to correct the land's configuration”).²⁰ (Mann's pious mistranslation reads: “This would be to complain of Providence and call upon it to alter physical outlines.”)²¹ Sarmiento and his Cooper then proceeded to take Providence in hand; he resents the awe-inspiring Land, so immense and empty that it was uncontrollable.²² The indistinct horizon on an endless Pampa may inspire the American sublime and may be a source of national pride—as in Sarmiento's reverie about the American subject whose gaze “sinks into that shifting, hazy, undefined horizon, the further it withdraws from him, the more it fascinates and confuses him, and plunges him in contemplation and doubt. …”²³ But that same obdurate landscape defeats reason and industriousness.

More specifically, it mocks him in the figure of an overwhelming tease, a taunting and tempting virgin who doesn't quite have the shape of a woman because no one has yet been able to make a woman of her. Unlike Cooper's Wilderness, Argentina's Pampa is chaste only in the most technical sense. Demanding to be admired in her natural wild and shapeless state, the Land lies ready for the man who dares to make her productive. She “flaunts her smooth, infinite, downy²⁴ brow without frontiers, without any landmarks; it's the very image of the sea on land, … the land still waiting for the command to bring forth every herb yielding seed after its kind.”²⁵ The American sublime may well be that conflicted response to the combination of responsibility and inadequacy, the duty to intervene and the helplessness before an enormous hermetic body. In any case, Sarmiento is saying that Argentina needs the manageable, recognizably demarcated body that a modern subject could love, because his real passion was for progress.

That is why the Land's unproductive consorts, Indians and gauchos so indolently at peace in unredeemed Nature, had to be erased from the national project. They were racially unfit, in Sarmiento's protopositivist language, for associative behavior.²⁶ Learning about European positivism in Latin America was like learning that people spoke in prose. As in Europe, positivism was a habit of thought that had developed from certain disappointments with revolutionary idealism. Very broadly, positivism in Latin America is an often eclectic tradition that combines a reverence for positive or “scientific” (empirical) data along with the assumption that the emerging social sciences should take the physical sciences, mostly biology, as their models. Social ills were duly diagnosed and remedies were prescribed. Herbert Spencer's organicism was especially popular and coordinated with a Comtian schema of the progressive stages of history.²⁷ Since growth meant modernization and Europeanization, the more extreme ideologues advocated a combined policy of white immigration and Indian or black removal, while others settled for redeeming the “primitive” races through miscegenation and ideological whitening. Cooper's nineteenth-century Latin American readers either defended Sarmiento's categorical position or, as we will see below, developed a more conciliatory and romantic one.

SELF-AUTHORIZED DISCIPLES

The book that Sarmiento wrote to follow (from) his praise for Cooper's novels seems dutifully to follow the master's lead. In Facundo, Sarmiento was in fact writing America through her racial and cultural conflicts, and he produced what is probably the widest read and the most influential of any book Cooper may have inspired. Yet my point here will be that Sarmiento's endorsement of Cooper is quite subtle, even paradoxically self-advancing. By establishing Cooper's America as a model for Argentina, Sarmiento will hardly sacrifice his own particularity or his country's; Sarmiento is far too cunning an author simply to subordinate either himself or the nation he hopes to lead to another's authority. He was in the habit of giving strong readings or, as Sylvia Molloy astutely points out, translating others' work, an operation she shows was related to plagiarism.²⁸ I will be suggesting that in the case of his Cooper, and in multiple cases from Recuerdos de provincia (Provincial Memoirs, 1850), Sarmiento's apparently deferential gesture and his respectful naming of masters and models is merely a strategic distancing. It constitutes the second move in a maneuver that works like a boomerang, ultimately circling back with the spoils of borrowed authority. The first step, logically, is to wield the rhetorical boomerang, assume full control, announce the pursuit, and predict the prize.

Everyone who reads Spanish-American literature, history, or politics knows what Sarmiento is pursuing in Facundo. He practically tells us what the prize is in the book's subtitle, Civilization and Barbarism. This opposition constructs a normative difference between what Argentina should be and what it now is, between productive control and desultory excess, a difference that amounts to a program for accomplishing one by eliminating the other. Sarmiento reviles Argentina's present excess as unproductive waste. He does so repeatedly and passionately every time he mentions a gaucho who butchers a cow just to eat its tongue, or a regional caudillo like Facundo Quiroga who sacrifices whole armies to his personal glory and scores of women to his lust.

Yet excess is precisely what characterizes Sarmiento's writing in this exorbitant text, half fiction, half biography, half political history, half manifesto, a generically immoderate book that obviously adds up to much more than one.²⁹ He is writing inside what he might have called the American idiom, as well as against it, writing in conflict as well as about it. Sarmiento is founding a peculiarly American political rhetoric by resisting, simultaneously, his anarchic environment and the unnatural constraints of European genres that would distinguish between poetry and politics and that keep missing the specificity of American life.³⁰Facundo spills over standard generic categories, and even seems to be written out of Sarmiento's writerly control; it reads like a feverish product of an inspiration that never condescended to an editing job. On rereading the very title, we may notice that the equivalence introduced by the colon makes both opposing terms of the subtitle curiously apposite to the name Facundo.³¹ The explosive rhetorical pressure keeps threatening to blow up (in both senses of exaggerating and destroying) his initial dichotomy of civilization vs. barbarism, and the ones that follow from it: the future vs. the past; Europeans vs. Indians; settlers vs. nomads; and, generally, deliberation vs. passion. These oppositions tend to cross out/into one another until Sarmiento himself admits how useless it may be to keep them straight. One notorious example is his treatment of the “savage” dictator Rosas, who is credited with having accomplished the national unity that his civilized Unitarian antagonists only dreamed of. Their improvement on Rosas would certainly not be to level his top-down style, but to replace him at the top with a more legitimately elite leadership.³² Far from wanting to destroy the work of this authentically Argentine “barbarian” (just because some defensively dichotomous definition would make barbarians incapable of real work), Sarmiento wanted to appropriate it, in the same way that he wanted to appropriate whatever was salvageable in Argentina's special character. Her originality, after all, was the justification for Independence and for the patriotism that Sarmiento must attribute to himself in order to win support for his own leadership.

His paean to that originality comes early on, long before his treatment of Rosas, and even before the bulk of the book where he sketches out the figure of the national tyrant in Facundo's minor regional lines. It comes in the first section, after Sarmiento rushes his reader through the vast, empty expanse of the country left barren by nomadic gauchos and Indians, an emptiness that mutely invites him to write. Chapter two is where Sarmiento pauses at his own dichotomy as he stops, with some pride, to consider the “Originalidad y Caracteres Argentinos. El Rastreador. El Baqueano. El Gaucho malo. El Cantor.” This early doubletake about laudable Argentine peculiarities in Sarmiento's apparently single-minded campaign for civilization is, as I said, itself a peculiarly Sarmentine move. He shows his American self to have non-European tastes, values, structures of feeling. Different from Europeans on the one hand and from native nomads on the other, Americans are also extensions of both; they are culturally doubled and different from themselves, a violent excess. Therefore, a truly American literature would necessarily be unorthodox by European standards; it would attend to “escenas tan peculiares, tan fuera del círculo de ideas en que se ha educado el espíritu europeo, porque los resortes dramáticos se vuelven desconocidos fuera del país donde se tornan los usos sorprendentes y originales los caracteres” (“scenes so peculiar, so characteristic, and so far outside the circle of ideas in which the European mind has been educated, that their dramatic relations would be unrecognized machinery outside the country that developed these surprising customs and original characters”).³³

Those inimitable Argentine characters occupy Sarmiento in this second chapter, where his legitimacy as a specifically Argentine leader must be established. And yet Sarmiento's literary model for describing the indigenous drama and the extravagant actors is, as I have already said, the North American Cooper. How strange that Sarmiento should refer to a foreigner precisely when he is celebrating that which is most homespun and characteristic. It is as if the difference between domestic self and imported other did not matter when it came to marketing his national political identity. One explanation Sarmiento offers is that he senses the stirrings of a local, properly American aesthetic in Cooper's work, a barbarous aesthetic of the sublime (probably taken more from travels in the U.S., like Chateaubriand's, than from Cooper)³⁴ that was both deferential to and contemptuous of Europe. “The natural peculiarities of any region give rise to customs and practices of a corresponding peculiarity, so that where the same circumstances reappear, we find the same means of controlling them invented by different nations.”³⁵ But to offer this explanation, Sarmiento has had to tailor Cooper to fit Argentina; he purposefully ignores the differences in terrain among Cooper's novels, which by Sarmiento's own deterministic logic (roughly, geography is destiny) should have mattered. Whereas Cooper's Wilderness is a womb-like enclosure in The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie shows a blinding expanse. It is this expansive landscape that Sarmiento chooses to universalize for America. “To arouse the poetic sense … we need the sight of beauty, of terrible power, of immensity of extent, of something vague and incomprehensible. … Hence it follows that the disposition and nature of the Argentine [and North American?] people are poetic. How can such feelings fail to exist, when a black storm-cloud rises, no one knows whence, in the midst of a calm, pleasant afternoon, and spreads over the sky before a word can be uttered?”³⁶

It is very possible that Sarmiento's apparently eccentric national identity—seemingly mirrored through Cooper's America—was programmatic for a man who wanted to modernize his country through “Europeanization” or “North Americanization.” What interests me here is less the degree to which Sarmiento may be borrowing from Cooper's originality than the way he manages to invert the terms and perhaps even the implied debts. He manages through a double-dealing logic that begins by announcing programmatic oppositions between civilization and barbarism, then proceeds to defer to a model of writing about American oppositions, a model endorsed, significantly, by a European (exoticizing) standard that allegedly glorifies the Land. She had resisted domesticating inscriptions, for Cooper as much as for Sarmiento, because “Mr. Right” and his writing tool had not yet come along. To whose authority would the virtuous, or stubborn, Land yield? Whom would she allow to inscribe his name, to produce a landmark? Certainly not the Indians. They had had their chance and were obviously unequal to the challenge, mostly because they had been cast as nomads in the discourse of America ever since the sixteenth-century settlement of Roanoke and Shakespeare's The Tempest. And since civilization meant stable settlements for the Europeans, the Indians were practically synonymous with barbarism. From the European “discovery” through the period of imperialist rivalries and internal conquests, the Americas were named and renamed after the fathers who fought on and over her. Cooper traces one such history of conflict over what is now called Lake George. The Jesuits had given it the “title of lake ‘du Saint Sacrement.’ The less zealous English thought they conferred a sufficient honor on its unsullied fountains when they bestowed the name of their reigning prince,” both having blotted out the “original appellation of ‘Horican.’” (12).

If Cooper was indeed convincing himself that America was worthy of love because she was pristine and untouched by history, it must have been to establish her legitimacy as wife. To acknowledge her former consorts might have been to cast doubt on the permanence of her current ones. Cooper, in fact, manages with one hand to write the Land's “erotic” prehistory with the Indians and the French, and to erase it with the other. Like Alice, whose family history leaves no mark of experience, the landscape around Lake George remains a Wilderness because it shows no trace of rivalries and intrigues. These became the history of her suitors, but not hers. “Forts were erected at the different points that commanded the facilities of the route, and were taken and retaken, razed and rebuilt, as victory alighted on the hostile banners” (13). Perhaps her innocence, her wildness, allowed her to resist their efforts to brand her.³⁷ In any case, the traces of successive inscriptions would have been problematic for Cooper if he hoped to convince us that the Wilderness was pure and virginal. The Father may be willing to share his Virgin child with a worthy husband, so that they might be fruitful and multiply. But her chastity and the transparency of her language cannot survive the marriage.

With far less show of guilt or nostalgia, Sarmiento performs a similar ninguneo, the “nobody-ing” of a threatening somebody.³⁸ Calling the Indians and the mestizo gauchos “American Bedouins” in Facundo³⁹ is enough to eliminate them from history, since “there can be no progress without permanent possession of the soil, or without cities …”⁴⁰ This would be embarrassing enough for today's readers if nomadism really canceled “conjugal” rights to the Land. After all, the Old Testament promised Land to the patriarchs and the prophets, so dear to the Puritan settlers and so inspiring to Sarmiento.⁴¹ Their nomadic life was the only spiritual safeguard in a world of decadent settlements. But recent work shows that the North American Indians he gleefully saw exterminated were not invariably nomadic. In fact, the Algonkin word for the Land known now by the pristine name of “Virginia” meant “densely populated.” Algonkins typically lived in towns, to which the English settlers would flee periodically when their own resources failed them.⁴² The obviously winning suitors are the Europeans, the ones who know how to write on smooth surfaces. Sarmiento does not mince words, because he casts himself here as none other than Mr. Right, writing an epic of (pro)creation; and he can attribute no less to his putative model, Cooper.

The third step in Sarmiento's roundabout rhetorical trajectory is, then, to close up the distance between imported models and local manufacture. His Cooper evidently supported the extreme racist position that backed Sarmiento against some critics at home.⁴³ If he had paused to consider that Cooper's struggle for the Land probably had as much to do with his own rearguard defense of “feudal” rights in New York State (besieged by the antirent legislation of the democratizing “masses”) as with Monroe's Indian removal policy formulated in 1824, Sarmiento might have admired him even more.⁴⁴ It was as easy for the Argentine as for the New Yorker to conflate the “anarchic” landless classes with “savages.” Unfortunately for Cooper, the “masses” were winning some ground, while the more obliging Indians continued to lose it. Jane Tompkins underlines how typical Cooper's guilt-ridden celebration of that loss was in those years. “Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, Americans wrote seventy-three novels dealing with Indian-white relations. … With few exceptions, the white hero and heroine marry at the end, the bad … Indians are killed, and the good Indian either dies, or dies out. …”⁴⁵ These blood-purging novels lament the sacrifice, as Sarmiento apparently laments it in the second chapter of Facundo, but not so loudly that readers could miss the barely muffled gasp of relief.

Sarmiento's Cooper is uncannily close to a Marxist Cooper, like the one Lukács remembers through Gorky, one who bids a mournful but necessary farewell to the primitive world that capitalism replaces.⁴⁶ Neither Lukács nor Sarmiento could afford to worry themselves over Cooper's possibly ambivalent position between classical, clearly defined signs and romantic evolutionism.⁴⁷ Sarmiento “knew” that Cooper was a modern man dedicated to progress and change. And he also “knew” that progress depended on keeping the signs clear; it depended on distinguishing Indian from white and male from female, so that in the battle for America the best man would win. His Cooper was not only tidying up the sloppy signs that exceeded ideal categories. He was also setting the American record straight by clearing up the space that previous settlers had scribbled on, before the Ideal English writers appeared. So, unlike the average North American reader and the Latin American novelists who would follow, Sarmiento doesn't allow sentimentality to distract him. He assures us that genocide is the necessary condition for progress; and he affirms that this is the deepest and the most significant message of Cooper's novels.

And right after he establishes Cooper as the model for literary and military exploits that Argentina would do well to imitate, Sarmiento makes the fourth and final move in his magisterially circular (or twisted) logic. He boldly questions the master's own originality by noting that Cooper's “descripciones de usos y costumbres … paracen plagiadas de la pampa” (“descriptions of practices and customs … seem plagiarized from the Pampa”).⁴⁸ Notice that he says “plagiarized,” not inspired, or suggested, or even copied. What could Sarmiento possibly have meant with that word? Is he simply telling us that the North American experience is notably similar to that of South America? If that were the case, then why not point out the reverse relationship and say that the South shows similarities with the North? This would maintain the chronological (and ontological) order between Cooper's text and Sarmiento's commentary, between center and periphery. In other words, why not say that the Pampa seems like a copy of the Prairie? After all, it is rather obvious from the very fact of his references to Cooper—not to mention his national catching-up projects—that the U.S. provided the model for Argentina, and not the other way around. Of course his comment could pass for an offhand or ironic way of emphasizing the similarities and thus establishing the possibility that Argentina could develop just like the U.S. did. It might pass for levity, perhaps, if it were not for the nature of the details from Cooper's novels that Sarmiento finds so appropriate(able), and that immediately precede the remark about plagiarism. Those details, which I mentioned as the measure of Sarmiento's admiration for Cooper and which we should consider now, are some significantly predictable scenes for the Argentine reader:

When I came to the passage in Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, where Hawkeye and Uncas lose the trail of the Mingos in a brook, I said to myself: “They will dam up the brook.” When the trapper in The Prairie waits in irresolute anxiety while the fire is threatening him and his companions, an Argentine would have recommended the same plan which the trapper finally proposes—that of clearing a space for immediate protection, and setting a new fire, so as to be able to retire upon the ground over which it had passed beyond the reach of the approaching flames. …

When the fugitives in The Prairie arrive at a river, and Cooper describes the mysterious way in which the Pawnee gathers together the buffalo's hide, “He is making a pelota,” said I to myself. “It is a pity there is no woman to tow it,” for among us it is the women who tow pelotas across rivers with lassos held between their teeth. The way in which a buffalo's head is roasted in the desert is the same which we use for cooking a cow's head or a loin of veal. I omit many other facts which prove the truth that analogies in the soil bring with them analogous customs, resources, and expedients. This explains our finding in Cooper's works accounts of practices and customs which seem plagiarized from the pampa. …⁴⁹

Sarmiento can tell, before Cooper tells him, how the most characteristically American characters will (or, in the case of the Pawnees, should) behave. This sustained display of foreknowledge has a peculiar effect: it suggests that the real Cooper was (and maybe is) Sarmiento himself, especially if the redundancy of publishing what the Argentine public already knew could have occurred to him. Sarmiento practically boasts of having anticipated many of Cooper's pages before he read them. And one can just imagine how he read, almost preparing textual ambushes and traps for poor Cooper, to see if the revered American author could get out of his own tight spots with the right American solutions.

Perhaps already sensitive to his reputation as an inveterate braggart, Sarmiento slyly evades any renewed imputations of arrogance by removing himself from the comparison with Cooper. Sarmiento was not, he implies, competing with or, much less, improving on Cooper. Cooper's copying was not of Sarmiento at all, but of the Pampa, since the plagiarism which he attributes to Cooper is not of a particular text, or even of the Pampa's foremost interpreter, Sarmiento himself. It is having deliberately imitated the Land, God's creation, the divine Text that Cooper says he respects. And Sarmiento's attribution of a divine inspiration for Cooper's plagiarism is even more crafty than the calculated modesty of avoiding a comparison. It safeguards the model's value as an American artist. If Cooper, plagiarist that he was, were not also valuable as the honorably mimetic portrait-maker of American reality, he would be no good to Sarmiento as a point of departure or as a mentor.

Sarmiento's double-take here is to reduce the stature of his model and to keep him as a model at the same time. It responds to a characteristic double-bind for some national authors in Latin America; that is, a certain reticence to share authority, even with the models who bestow it on their disciples and who, therefore, must be respected as legitimate. In Sarmiento's exemplary case, Cooper is as much an opportunity to improve on the model as to improve himself. If it were not for Cooper's success, and for the success of the country he helped to found, what foundation would Sarmiento have for writing America? On the other hand, if Sarmiento let himself become a simple copy of Cooper, or if the Pampa were an imitation of the Prairie, where could his own authority come from, and where the very sovereignty of his country? The military strategist in Sarmiento surely understood that the best defense is sometimes an offensive move. So, in a tactic designed to free himself and his country from the ignominious charge of being mere copies (which he was more than willing to acknowledge in his arguments for modernization in this same book), Sarmiento fires the first shot at Cooper. Of course, he aims to do very little damage, because without his opponent as counterpart, without the mirror that would reflect back a legitimate American name, Sarmiento could not have hoped to make a name for himself.

What does he hope to accomplish, then, by sowing a seed of doubt about the North American model's originality, suggesting that it might be the copy of his own imitation of Argentina? He hopes, I am suggesting, to harvest an irrefutable originality that is well rooted in a stable landscape of precursors. And Sarmiento's desire for unquestionable authority is so great, that instead of simply cannibalizing Cooper's text as a subtext, as a pre-text of his own work (a consumption that would make conspicuous the model's priority), Sarmiento prefers to toy with it, as if time and linearity were illusory, and as if a reader could be the greatest authority of someone else's text.

This displacement or metaleptic inversion between text and commentary, between master and disciple, will repeat itself in Recuerdos de provincia, where at one revealing point Sarmiento makes the paradigmatically circular and self-serving assertion that “A mi progenie me sucedo yo” (“to my progeny I am my own successor”).⁵⁰ In general, the book's self-reflexive logic, twisted always to reflect well on its author, needs to propose a revalorization of plagiarism. It does this quite explicitly through mention of Deacon Funes, about whom Sarmiento writes, “he has been burdened too long with the charge of plagiarism, which for me turns into something far from a reproach, but rather a sure sign of merit,”⁵¹ the merit of erudition and good taste. This indulgence bordering on enthusiasm for plagiarists frees Sarmiento from any qualms about plagiarizing his own biography from Benjamin Franklin's. “No other book has done me as much good as this one. … I felt I was Franklin,” he says, immediately to ask himself rhetorically and a bit defensively, “and why not? I was very poor, just like he was, a diligent student like he was.” That is, a veritable “Franklincito” before discovering his own person in someone else's book. A little later he adds, “prodding myself on and following his footsteps, I could one day become as accomplished … and make a name for myself in American literature and politics.”⁵² Sarmiento's staged adulation here is probably meant to dramatize his endorsement of Franklin's book for Argentine schoolboys. In general, Sarmiento instructs us in one of the appendices—which lists some of his publications and promises others—that “Biography is the most original kind of book that South America can produce in our times, and the best material we can offer history.” It is the genre, according to him, to which Facundo and Recuerdos belong, both being personal stories about exemplary persons.

But Sarmiento's celebration of Franklin's achievements may also serve to provide a measure for the celebrant's even greater success. He must already have felt the satisfaction of surpassing Franklin, both in terms of literary accomplishments and of the brilliant political career that these very Recuerdos helped to assure. While he was writing them, as a kind of narrative curriculum vitae or political self-portrait,⁵³ he was also circulating a photographic portrait with the caption, “Sarmiento, future president of Argentina.”⁵⁴ If his cautiously respectful diminution of Franklin seems a daring appropriation, Sarmiento had anticipated it in his lines about Cooper; and he had also gone arguably further in an earlier chapter of the Recuerdos. It is the one dedicated to Domingo de Oro as the “model and archetype of the future Argentine.”⁵⁵ But this future model is past history for the prophetic Sarmiento who declares, “De Oro's life is proof of the way I understood his rare eloquence.”⁵⁶ How do we disentangle the subject from his representation here? How do we know where priority resides? In the prophecy, or in the proof?

This tactical inversion will already be familiar to us through Pierre Menard's work. If it seems a bit anachronistic to read Sarmiento via Borges, it is at least a strategy that both teach us. It would be almost perverse to miss reading Sarmiento as Cooper's and Franklin's and de Oro's Menard. If we had attempted respectfully to stabilize some of his sources as Cooper's novels, Franklin's biography, and de Oro's life we would have been mistaking “thinking, analyzing, inventing” as discrete activities. And if we care to be even more anachronistic, we could mention that Jean Baudrillard makes a similar observation about production in the “postmodern” world, an observation which should have little relevance for a nineteenth-century writer who found that his country was already behind the times. Alleging that Western culture used to be or to feel itself more solidly grounded, Baudrillard complains that all we can produce today are simulacra, copies of models that are themselves unauthentic. Even what we call reality is nothing more than a series of fictitious constructions, neither more nor less genuine than their “re-presentations.”⁵⁷

Baudrillard begins his meditation with a gesture that has evidently become stylish in French philosophy. He begins with a Borgesian parable, that of the cartographers who are so determined to make a scientifically exact representation of reality that they produce a map as big as the empire. He starts with Borges in order to promptly discard the model, condescendingly charging that Borges's irony depends on a naive notion of the Real, on an empire that precedes the map.⁵⁸ Baudrillard thus reads without mentioning Borges's proverbial circularity, the textual whirlwind that blows away any pretense of stable originality and that is so notorious among his French fans. Whether or not this reading does justice to Borges's thought, one must agree that Baudrillard's is a strategic reading (in the same way that Sarmiento strategically misreads Cooper). It would be rather out of character for the theorist of simulation and of the failure of referentiality to refer respectfully to the authority who gave him the base for theorizing. Baudrillard evidently opted for intellectual orphanhood, perhaps in order to dramatize (not to say represent) his own theme: the impossibility of lineage and of the relationship between origin and following. If everything is (and all of us are) unauthentic, it would be absurd to follow in anyone's footsteps.

But it was not absurd for Sarmiento, who preferred another option. I say option, because I imagine in my necessarily Menardian reading that he had several to choose from. One was to resign himself to renouncing originality, with the same ironic and haughty modesty that Baudrillard and Borges no doubt affected. Another was to assume absolute, practically divine originality, as Sarmiento does in Mi defensa (1843) and, by an apparent rhetorical slip as he does once in Recuerdos. “When I had finished this work (a book on pedagogy), I could say in my rejoicing that I had produced something worthy: et vidi quod esset bonum. Then I applauded myself.”⁵⁹ A third option was what I am calling the boomerang effect: to attribute originality and the authority it implies to someone else, so that they may be snatched out of the model's hands in a lightning game of “now you see it, now you don't.” If the strategy Sarmiento used with Cooper is characteristic, it follows from the subsequent uses he made of Funes, Franklin, de Oro, and others that he clearly preferred this last choice. He proposes models, cuts them down to manageable superable size, and glories in their presumed (or explicit) approval, even when they have doubtful credentials. The chapter on de Oro, for example, criticizes the model's misdirected shrewdness which results in clearing the political obstacles to Rosas's victory. Yet the chapter ends by quoting in its entirety a letter of recommendation that de Oro had sent the author.

Sarmiento distances himself from his models only enough to outdistance them, so as not to dismiss either them or their offer of legitimacy. The ambiguity is really ingenious here for someone who may have “known” history to be a fiction, a simulacrum. If he did, it was always as an opportune fiction for the writer who dared to invent it. Sarmiento succeeds in attributing to himself the authority and the privilege of a foundational thinker. At the same time his claim to legitimacy is based on implied approval by an established origin, an origin established by the very fact that he considers it a model. Facundo, after all, had something to do with Cooper's exemplary status among Latin Americans who admired, imitated, and adopted him as the first among (North) American narrators.

PIERRE MENARD'S COOPERS

Menardian readers that they were, though, Latin American novelists followed neither the foreign model nor the Argentine purveyor too closely, unless of course, following Sarmiento means learning a Whitmanian step that strays enough to find comparably opportune uses for Cooper. These are the national authors, in the same multivalent sense that describes Sarmiento, who occupy me in Foundational Fictions, so that short mentions may suffice here as I consider the (perhaps imagined) repercussions of Sarmiento's praise for Cooper.⁶⁰ As novelists they were generally bound to challenge Sarmiento's assumptions about the didactic and socially constructive potential of exemplary single lives.⁶¹ Writing novels was already a statement about the collective or coupling nature of nation-building. If one of the main goals of Argentina's national program was to populate the deserted Pampa, if for the modernizing bourgeois culture that South America's elites were trying to adopt sexual desire had indeed become what Foucault characterized as “the explanation for everything,” heroic biographies would hardly be (re)productive enough.⁶² Typically, the novelists presumed to “correct” Cooper, or at least to read him correctly. Most knew, for instance, that the author of The Last of the Mohicans really preferred (or should have preferred) Cora as America's archetypal mother. Rather than keep America racially pure, a “Latin Americanized” and romantic Cooper was warning his compatriots that their country's hope for peace and progress should not be sacrificed to an ideal of purity as anachronistic and self-destructive as military heroism. National consolidation needed the reconciliation of differences, not their exclusion. The hegemonic project of the dominant class had to win the support of other interests for a (usually) liberal national project that would benefit them all, just as the hero of romance won the heroine through love and practical concern for her well-being.⁶³ A white elite, often in the large port cities, had to convince everyone—from landholders and miners to the indigenous, black, and mulatto masses—that liberal leadership would bridge traditionally antagonistic races and regions in a new prosperity.

In political practice, Argentines were evidently far less jealous husbands than was Cooper. In Foundational Fictions I show that jurisprudent Juan Bautista Alberdi recognized his own national shortcomings and made a virtue of the necessity to share his patrimony with foreigners—to import Anglo-Saxon studs in order to develop a superior and manageable breed, one might say in the cattle-breeding logic that prevailed. Sexual love would do the rest, once Argentina's army of desirable women conquered the white would-be conquerors. But Cooper, convinced of his own superiority, had seen no advantage to amalgamation. After all, he is the Anglo-Saxon Prince Charming whom the swarthier Argentines want.

Is it possible that the erotic or fairy tale rhetoric that I am attributing to the political theorist Alberdi comes from contemporary Latin American novels rather than from his own juridical discourse? Is it also possible that I have been reading Sarmiento's Cooper as an advocate for enlightened inscription, or the civilizing kiss, through this same literary tangle of romance and nation-building? Perhaps Sarmiento was insensible to the love story between the Land and the men who would make her prosper. The drama of seduction may be superfluous to a man accustomed to command. If I am caught in a rhetorical jumble, it owes as much to a tradition of Latin American writing as to my belated reading. Sarmiento became the pre-text for so many other Pierre Menards in Latin America. Nevertheless, to defend this possibly misplaced “romantic” reading of Sarmiento, I should point out that he practically invents the term “romancista” for Cooper, which Mann variously translates as “romancer” and “novelist.”⁶⁴ The difference between these terms is a tradition in Anglo-American criticism, romance referring to broadly allegorical (male) adventures or histories, and novels being sentimental (female) tales of everyday life.⁶⁵ But in Spanish this difference makes little sense, since the word “romance” had already slipped away from its traditional literary sense of ballad and meant what it means now: a love story. This is how Sarmiento uses it in a sarcastic remark about Facundo's abuse of his girlfriend, “No es éste un lindo romance?” (“Isn't this a fine romance?”).⁶⁶ I choose, then, to read Sarmiento's epithet as acknowledging the erotic core in Cooper's work.

The national novelists certainly read it as erotic. Their Cooper allegorized Sarmiento's pseudoscientific rhetoric about civilization and barbarism—white settlers tackling the Pampa—into a story of requited love. Therefore, the ideal national marriages were often projected in romances between whites and Indians (the title characters of José de Alencar's Brazilian O guaraní [1857] and Iracema [1865] are examples), or mestizas inspired no doubt from Chateaubriand's Atala (such as Manuel de Jesús Galván's Doña Mencía in Enriquillo [Dominican Republic, 1882] and Marisela in Doña Bárbara [Venezuela, 1929] by Rómulo Gallegos). The ideal of mestizaje, so pejoratively translated into English as miscegenation, was based in the reality of mixed races to which different virtues and failings were ascribed, and which had to be amalgamated in some countries if anything like national unity was to be produced. Unity, in positivist rhetoric, was not so much a political or economic concept as it was biological. José Vasconcelos gave probably the most famous and utopian formulation in Raza cósmica (1925), written when the post-revolutionary Indian masses forced themselves into any consideration of Mexican nationalism and progress. But as early as Simón Bolívar's famous discourse at Angostura, Latin Americans have at least rhetorically assumed a racially mixed identity. “It is impossible to correctly determine,” said the Liberator, “to which human family we belong. … Born all of the same mother, our fathers [are] of different origins and blood.”⁶⁷

Only an atypical novel like Jorge Isaacs's María (Colombia, 1867), his swan song for the slavocracy, could afford to revive Cooper-like pessimism about mestizaje. Like double-crossed Cora, the originally Jewish María was born in the West Indies (Jamaica), and though perfectly innocent and admirable, she too bears a blemish of racial difference. It is a Jewish stain, and serves as a sign for the more troubling differences between blacks and whites. As in Enriquillo and in O guaraní, the real threat that darkens a plantation society becomes unspeakable to Isaacs. Instead, he seems to be saying that no amalgamation, however innocent and sincere, can be productive in the aristocratic society he yearns for.⁶⁸ Although more programmatic, perhaps, Uruguay's Tabaré (1888), by Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, is atypical too for its sacrifice of racial difference in the person of the mestizo hero. The blue-eyed Indian is as out of place in either white or native society as was Cooper's tragic, culturally mestiza Ruth, the captive of The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (1829). Most Latin American writers by far, however, tended to be programmatic in a more synthetic way. When the lovers in romance are both white, they probably come from mutually hostile areas, as in José Mármol's Amalia (1851), where the hero is a Buenos Aires boy and his heroine a childless young widow from the rival center of Tucumán. Far from being put off by his heroine's past, as an unassimilated Cooper might have been, Mármol admitted that Argentina had an unproductive history that national romance would cure. And Alberto Blest Gana's Martín Rivas (1862) joins the son of a bankrupted mining entrepreneur in the north of Chile to the daughter of the usurer in Santiago who had acquired the mine. The hero finally convinces Santiago's bankers that getting together would be mutually satisfying, at the same time that Chile's elite sectors were making political and financial deals. Where racial and regional differences keep lovers apart, as in Cuba's abolitionist novels, Francisco (1839) by Anselmo Suárez y Romero, Cecilia Valdés (1839, 1882) by Cirilo Villaverde, and Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, the blame for personal and national tragedy falls on archaic and un-American habits of social ordering. The implied or explicit program for change saves these novels from the ruthlessness of Sarmiento's Cooper and from the pessimism of Isaacs's tragedy. This is not to say that racism and economic partiality ceased to exist among the novelists. To see prejudice at work, one has only to observe that Indian and mestiza lovers appear in books like O guaraní and Enriquillo so that blacks can disappear, or that Amalia's Tucumán remains a background producer for the trade decisions made in Buenos Aires. Hegemony, after all, is not an egalitarian project, but one that legitimizes the leadership of one social sector by winning the consent of others. Romance had, therefore, to give a loving cast to national unity, not necessarily to equalize the lovers.

The Latin Americans must have been relieved to see that Cora Munro was redeemed at home after the defensive nervousness about gender- and race-coding relaxes; that is, after the man's work is done and the West is won. She comes back to be celebrated in the late and “decadent” period of dime novels. Cooper himself paved the way by freeing at least one legitimate heroine, Ellen Wade in The Prairie (1827), from the noble birth that confers inhuman paralysis on his women,⁶⁹ and especially in “self-reliant” Mabel Dunham of The Pathfinder (1840). In fact, Cooper's dime-novel writing Menards of the North became fond of celebrating half-breed heroines and even of displacing the traditional genteel heroes with savage women protagonists. The great difference from South America is that the mass industry of Western novels, starting with Beadles's literary industry in 1858, was less an enterprise to establish an American consciousness and national project than to mine that earlier effort in order to supply the growing market for sensationalism. The Amazon cum heroine of the end of the century, according to Henry Nash Smith, is one exemplary innovation that marks the decay of dime Westerns which learned to pander to an American public hungry for ever more gratuitous adventure.⁷⁰ But if we read more sympathetically, these ungenteel heroines encode the return of the repressed Cora. Cooper may have been compelled to doom her because she was too able and too full of surprises for the benighted hero's taste. Her self-motivation complicated his rights to motivate her, and by extension to manipulate the Land. But for his Menards to the South, Cooper may also have preferred her. In that case, his novel is a tragedy, along the lines of Isaacs's María and Cuba's heartrending antislavery novels. To prove the tradition's profound preference for Cora they could point to her domestic line of descendants: the straight-shooting, hard-drinking Calamity Janes who get their men one way or another.

I am suggesting, perhaps provocatively, that gender-crossing is as endemic to foundational romances in Latin America as are racial and regional crossings. Even in a late, defensive, “populist” romance such as Doña Bárbara, written when men were men and women women, again the apparently ideal hero has a paradoxical lesson to learn from women. He has to fall helplessly in love with the right one in order to maintain his masterly control.

These romancers understood why Cooper had to make impressionable Heyward, rather than the ideally male Hawk-eye, a founding father. They also felt the tragedy of sacrificing as graceful and sensitive a man as Uncas, whom Alencar revives to be the hero of O guaraní. Some readers, including Sarmiento, may have thought that Cooper's ideal America was based on precise gender and racial categories, but Latin American romancers recognized the unproductive distance that ideal opposites have to maintain in order to stay pure. If a lover at all, Hawk-eye is in love with the equally pure Wilderness, which is as sublimely simple as Alice, or with impassive Chingachgook, D. H. Lawrence's choice. In fact, their mutual affection is most convincing if we consider the two men bound together through their equal respect, rather than their erotic love, for Nature. Their very chaste version of homosocial desire⁷¹ takes the form of a ménage à trois where nobody really violates anybody else. Nobody makes children either. This categorical purity is one reason why Natty must shun Judith Hutter in The Deerslayer (1841). What other readers have called his chastity is also his pride in being a “man without a cross,” as free of feminized, domestic inclinations as he is of Indian blood. North American readers may be concerned with what appears to be the unresolvable dual allegiance to civilization and to barbarism that plays itself out through Hawk-eye's contradictions. He of course betrays Chingachgook by acting as scout for the other men, those who “civilize” the wilderness, marry virgins, and turn them into mothers. But the Cooper whom Latin American romancers read calmly kissed Hawk-eye's ideal and obsolete masculinity good-bye, just as they had turned their backs, during this peaceful moment, on heroic Bolívar and San Martín.

Their impressive chain of reading and writing Cooper surely began from a particular text. But after Sarmiento's playful remark about plagiarism, after noting that it is he who makes Cooper a landmark in South American literature, we should wonder whose text is originary. Is it Cooper's, or is it Sarmiento's appropriation? Is it the father who makes the son, or is it because of the son that the father recognizes himself as such? With this simile, I want to suggest the Oedipal character of this inversion between model and commentator, aligning it therefore with a strategy that Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo have identified so convincingly in Recuerdos de provincia. I am referring to Sarmiento's repeated denial of his paternal lineage, and of his father's personal importance. The son seems to have engendered himself upon the body and the genealogy of his mother, whose identity is sometimes and purposefully confused with that of the motherland. The superfluous father is infantilized, or feminized (which amounts to the same thing), so that Sarmiento can replace him in the familial text.⁷²

Yet despite a possible parallel between his father and Cooper, or any other model in Recuerdos, Sarmiento's rivalry with adoptive mentors allowed for something different from denial, something that must have been an inspiration for other national authors. It allowed him to subordinate the master, gently and without eliminating him, so as not to lose the legitimacy of the master's approval that Sarmiento attributes to himself. This difference (which Tulio Halperin Donghi also suggested when he contrasted the self-creation of Mi defensa with the respect for lineage in Recuerdos)⁷³ suggests a pattern for the strategy that I have been trailing here. It may be parallel to parricide, but it is cunningly restrained. I mean Sarmiento's practice of making plagiarism count for the most efficient originality by inverting the priority between model and revision.

Happily for authorized imitators like Sarmiento, and for their Menardian readers, imitation often surpasses the model,⁷⁴ even as it constitutes the model as such. It is, to sum up, doubly foundational: first by establishing the origin, and second by improving on it. And if this displacement tends to throw all pretension of originality in doubt, the liberating side of doubt for latecomers to writing and to history is that it leaves unresolved the question of priority between master and pupil. Sarmiento turns out to be a proto-Borgesian priest who unites the two with a Möbius ring for which inside and outside, origin and trajectory, are only illusions of perspective. After this marriage, it would be rather mean-spirited to remind Cooper of his distance from Argentina, as mean-spirited as reminding Sarmiento of his debts as a disciple.

Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Labyrinths, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 42.

2. Ibid., 44.

3. The opportunity for misreadings, even in so didactic and heavy-handed a novel as Cooper's, is the only point at which I depart from Jane Tompkins's excellent Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Her welcome and rather convincing defense of best-sellers as indicators and arbiters of our political culture tends, nonetheless, to underestimate the likelihood that messages may be processed differently even when they are passionately put forth. “The text succeeds or fails on the basis of its ‘fit’ with the features of its immediate context, on the degree to which it provokes the desired response, and not in relation to unchanging formal, psychological, or philosophical standards of complexity, or truth, or correctness” (xviii). I would add that the standards are so changeable that the responses a text provokes may vary quite a bit. Literary ambiguity, and especially the particular usefulness that a reader may have in mind, do not belong exclusively to modernist or poststructural readings.

4. Martin Green, The Great American Adventure (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 23.

5. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in The Portable Walt Whitman, selected and with notes by Mark Van Doren, revised by Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 92.

6. All page references to James Fenimore Cooper are from The Last of the Mohicans (New York: Signet Classic, New American Library, 1980).

7. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilización y Barbarie, 8th ed. (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1970), hereinafter cited as Sarmiento, Facundo; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; or, Civilization and Barbarism, trans. Mrs. Horace Mann (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1868), hereinafter cited as Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic.

8. Sarmiento, Facundo, 24 (Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic, 25).

9. Nina Baym, “The Women of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales,” American Quarterly 23 (1971): 696-709. Baym observes (698) that women are the “chief signs, the language of social communication between males”; and thus the basis for male civilization. To develop this we might say that the ideal basis for Cooper's civilization was the transparent, unmarked language that Alice represented rather than the polyvalent traces that Cora bore.

10. Annette Kolodny explores the Land-as-Woman metaphor and Americans' self-defeating relationships to it. See her The Lay of the Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 90-97. She points out an inevitable slippage from our pastoral desire to regress to a pre-Oedipal and “passive” love for the Land-as-Mother, through the fear of castration and enclosure, to an aggressive post-Oedipal desire to dominate her, a desire I identify with romance. Despite this repeated move (farther and farther West), Kolodny continues to plead for a pastoral America. The scene at Glenn's Falls (Mohicans, 66-63) shows the extended company of heroes and helpers hiding in Nature's caverns, which open conveniently from the front and the back (96-97). See also Cecilia Tichi, New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans to Whitman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 173.

11. The assumption of female stability that “grounds” male activity is provocatively developed by Luce Irigaray in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). See especially the essay “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the ‘Masculine’” (133-46):

    Subjectivity denied to woman: indisputably this provides the financial backing for every irreducible constitution as an object: of representation, of discourse, of desire. Once imagine that woman imagines and the object loses its fixed, obsessional character. As a benchmark that is ultimately more crucial than the subject, for he can sustain himself only by bouncing back off some objectiveness, some objective. If there is no more “earth” to press down/repress, to work, to represent, but also and always to desire (for one's own), no opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what pedestal remains for the existence of the “subject”? If the earth turned and more especially turned upon herself, the erection of the subject might thereby be disconcerted and risk losing its elevation and penetration.”

    (133)

12. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), especially 55-63, where the Classical episteme is shown to treat language as transparent. It orders knowledge through mutually exclusive comparisons, as opposed to the sixteenth-century supposition of correspondences, and thus produces an exhaustive categorical arrangement of knowledge through the “justified arbitrariness” (63) of the sign system. See also the section on “taxonomia” (71-76): “The project of a general science of order; a theory of signs analyzing representation; the arrangement of identities and differences into ordered tables: these constituted an area of empiricity in the Classical Age that had not existed until the end of the Renaissance and that was destined to disappear early in the nineteenth century” (71). Foucault also points out that “from the nineteenth century, History was to deploy, in a temporal series, the analogies that connect distinct organic structures to one another” (219).

13. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, is at least one recent North American reader who might agree with Sarmiento's brutally lucid reading of Cooper. She notes that Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn is about cross-cultural marriage as resolution to social tension; the hero marries a Portuguese-Jewish widow (94). This is the kind of mix that doesn't happen in The Last of the Mohicans. She claims that most critics try to apologize for Cooper's plots and characters, but Tompkins wisely attends to the obvious and conventional racism in Cooper. The subject of The Last of the Mohicans is cultural miscegenation (114). And the lesson, especially at Fort William Henry, is that when social controls start to break down the ultimate consequence is a bloodbath (117).

14. See Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966). Fiedler reads The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish as “the first antimiscegenation novel in our literature.” He continues that “The Last of the Mohicans must be reread in its light” (204).

15. Her father confesses to Heyward that in the West Indies, “[I]t was my lot to form a connection with one who in time became my wife, and the mother of Cora. She was the daughter of a gentleman of those isles, by a lady whose misfortune it was, if you will, … to be descended remotely from that unfortunate class who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people. Aye, sir, that is a curse entailed on Scotland by her unnatural union with a foreign and trading people” (187-88). Tompkins's excellent chapter in Sensational Designs, “No Apologies for the Iroquois,” makes too simple a case for Cora's whiteness. The danger of her confrontation with Magua is compounded, I think, by the fact that she is already a corrupt category, porous to his darkening effect. Wayne Franklin even surmises that she feels an erotic attraction to Magua. See his The New World of James Fenimore Cooper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 224.

16. In The Lay of the Land (90-97), Kolodny shows that Cooper's relationship to the organizing metaphor of the American pastoral offers a good case for reading both the self-defeating dimension of Land-as-Woman and the reifying dimension of Woman-as-Land. Like many of the authors Kolodny studies, Cooper has his share of ecological guilt that predicts either barrenness or Nature's revenge by entrapping the despoilers in her womb.

17. Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic, 1.

18. Typically, this is an image that Mann judiciously substitutes for dead metaphors in English: “penetrates its very heart.” See Sarmiento, Facundo, 9: “El mal que aqueja a la República Argentina es la extensión: el desierto la rodea por todas partes, se le insinúa en las entrañas; la soledad, el despoblado sin una habitación humana. …”

19. Roberto González Echevarría reminds us of Sarmiento's secondhand nativism and develops an argument about the travelogue nature of Facundo, which like other books of its genre, takes care to produce an identification with civilized readers at home by distancing the narrator from the strange or wonderful scenes beheld. See his “Redescubrimiento del mundo perdido: El Facundo de Sarmiento,” Revista Iberoamericana 54, 143 (April-June 1988): 385-406. “Todas estas inversiones han preparado al lector para lo inusual, lo inesperado, la ‘escena extraña’ que se va a relatar, en la que el hombre es el objeto de la caza, y no al revés” (403). Nevertheless, this traveler at home identifies most intimately with marvelous and monstrous Facundo (406).

20. Sarmiento, Facundo, 12 (my emphasis). He continues: “No siendo esto posible, demos por bien hecho lo que de mano del Maestro está hecho.”

21. Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic, 6.

22. Ibid., 1-2: “Its own extent is the evil from which the Argentine Republic suffers; the desert encompasses it on every side and penetrates its very heart; wastes containing no human dwelling are, generally speaking, the unmistakable boundaries between its several provinces.”

23. Ibid., 27.

24. Ibid., 2. Mann's chaste version reads “velvet-like” while the Spanish word velludo is unmistakably associated with pubic hair.

25. Sarmiento, Facundo, 10-11.

26. Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic, 10. “[A] homogeneous whole has resulted from the fusion of the three above named families [Spaniard, Indian, Black]. It is characterized by love of idleness and incapacity for industry. … To a great extent, this unfortunate result is owing to the incorporation of the native tribes, effected by the process of colonization. … But the Spanish race has not shown itself more energetic than the aborigines.”

27. See Leopoldo Zea's classic work, The Latin American Mind (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), and his prologue to the anthology he edited, Pensamiento positivista latinoamericano (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979).

28. See Sylvia Molloy's excellent “Sarmiento, lector de sí mismo en Recuerdos de Provincia,” Revista Iberoamericana 54, 143 (April-June 1988): 407-18, especially 415 and 417.

29. For the most passionate and playful guide to hearing that multiplicity and the conflict with the gaucho genre of poetry that also constitutes Facundo, see Josefina Ludmer, El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1988). She writes, “Sólo el texto da Sarmiento, el otro padre de la patria (alongside historian Mitre), es a la vez un clásico de la literatura, de la política y de la historia.” Elizabeth Garrels notes that Sarmiento chose to publish Facundo during 1845 in the new section for serialized novels in El Progreso, the newspaper he edited in Santiago between 1842 and 1845. By contrast, he published his perhaps comparable biography of Aldao in the “Sección Correspondencia.” See her “El Facundo como folletín,” Revista Iberoamericana 54, 143 (April-June 1988): 419-47.

30. For this powerful observation, I am indebted to Carlos Alonso's excellent paper, “Reading Sarmiento: One More Time, with Passion,” delivered at the 1988 mla meeting. “[T]he successive projects that would subsume Latin 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—and an attempt to stave off the rhetorical disenfranchisement with which modernity threatened the Latin American writer at every turn” (11). See also Julio Ramos, “Saber del otro: Escritura y oralidad en el Facundo de D. F. Sarmiento,” Revista Iberoamericana 54, 143 (April-June 1988): 551-69, especially 561. There Ramos reviews the criticism of Facundo by Valentín Alsina, who objected to Sarmiento's poetic flights in a book that should have been objective and “true social history.” But Sarmiento's defense of his spontaneous (poetic or barbarous) style in the modernizing project underlines his practice as an American writer.

31. Ludmer, El género gauchesco, makes a similar point: “La barbarie no sólo dramatiza el enfrentamiento con ‘la civilización’ sino un segundo enfrentamiento, interior, consigo misma. El lugar tenso y dual de la barbarie en Facundo es ése hostil a la sociedad civilizada y hostil a sí misma. … La doble tensión, hacia afuera y adentro de sí es la mejor definición de Facundo, el texto de Sarmiento.”

32. Sarmiento mentions this early (6); but later he is more explicit (217): “La idea de los unitarios está realizada; sólo está de más el tirano; el día que un buen gobierno se establezca, hallará las resistencias locales vencidas y todo dispuesto para la unión.”

33. Sarmiento, Facundo, 24; Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic, 24 (with my adjustments for a more literal translation).

34. More than from Cooper, Sarmiento probably learned about the “American” sublime from François-René de Chateaubriand's chapter “To America” in his Memoirs, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1961), 114-61. About Niagara Falls, for example, he writes, “I was unable to express the thoughts which stirred me at the sight of such sublime disorder” (150).

35. Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic, 25.

36. Ibid., 27: “… for the fables of the imagination, the ideal world, begin only where the actual and the commonplace end … simple act of fixing his eyes upon the horizon, and seeing nothing?—for the deeper his gaze sinks into that shifting, hazy, undefined horizon, the further it withdraws from him, the more it fascinates and confuses him, and plunges him in contemplation and doubt …” Is it possible to imagine Alice, in her blankness, sublime, so colorless that, like Melville's “white,” men get lost in her? Could Sarmiento have found Alice sublime? But this seems to stretch even our Borgesian fiction of possible misreadings.

37. While it is true that Cooper lamented the “corruption” of place-names in his 1826 preface, he also laments Cora's death, the Mohicans' demise, and the general disturbance of paradise. Yet the narrative shows him willing, for the time, to pay the price in order to establish his American family. Later, the more circumspect and less optimistic Cooper of The Deerslayer (1841) attempts to forswear the violence of naming, even as he writes about Glimmerglass, or Otsego Lake: “‘I'm glad it has no name,’ resumed Deerslayer, ‘or, at least, no paleface name; for their christenings always foretell waste and destruction.’”

38. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959), 40.

39. Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic, 12. He reports that Walter Scott said: “‘The vast plains of Buenos Aires … are inhabited only by Christian savages known as Guachos [gauchos, he should have said] whose furniture is chiefly composed of horses' skulls, whose food is raw beef and water, and whose favorite pastime is running horses to death. Unfortunately,’ adds the good foreigner, ‘they prefer their national independence to our cottons and muslins.’

    “It would be well to ask England to say at a venture how many yards of linen and pieces of muslin she would give to own these plains of Buenos Ayres.”

40. Ibid., 15.

41. Ibid.: “[T]he life of Abraham, which is that of the Bedouin of today prevails in the Argentine plains, …” But he also writes about a proprietor in Sierra de San Luis, “I seemed to be living in the times of Abraham, in his presence, in that of God, and of the nature which reveals Him” (19).

42. Peter Hulme, “Versions of Virginia: Crossing Cultures in Early Colonial America,” in his Colonial Encounters (London: Methuen, 1987). See also Michael Rogin, who refers to the differences between the “northern tribes which were smaller and more numerous than the five southern Indian confederations. They were less settled than the southern tribes, and never developed so large-scale an agriculture or so complexly stratified a social structure.” To locate Cooper in a general moment of Indian removal, see Michael Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975), 166-67.

43. His most ferocious critic was Juan Bautista Alberdi, one of the original members of the Generation of 1837, later called “Young Argentina.” These romantic, rebellious youths had pledged themselves to overcoming the fratricidal antagonism between Europeanizing Centralists called Unitarians, based in Buenos Aires, and the more autochthonous Federalists who were then in control under the dictator Rosas. As the dictatorship turned to terror, practically all of the Generation of '37 retreated to Unitarian sectarianism, except for Alberdi. And his criticism of Sarmiento's Facundo revives the principle of flexibility and conciliation. See his Cartas quillotanas where Alberdi objects to Sarmiento's binary formulation of city and country desert:

    Ud. pone en los campos la edad media y el antiguo régimen español, y en las ciudades el siglo XIX y el moderno régimen.

    La vista nos enseña que no es así. La colonia, es decir, la edad media de la Europa, estaba en los campos y estaba en las ciudades, lo mismo que había existido en Europa. La revolución a su vez, es decir, el siglo XIX de la Europa, invadió todo nuestro suelo, abrazó los campos y las ciudades. De ambas partes salieron los ejércitos que conquistaron la independencia. Las ciudades dieron infantes, los campos cabellerías. Los gauchos nunca han sido realistas después de 1810.

    La localización de la civilización en las ciudades y la barbarie en las campañas, es un error de historia y de observación, y manantial de antipatías artificiales entre localidades que se necesitan y complentan mutuamente.

    (Quoted from Historia de la literatura argentina [Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1967] 1:308.)

    Moreover, Sarmiento knew he was being schematic. He admits, for example, that blacks have integrated well, but also rejoices over their near extermination in the wars. See the suggestive essay by William H. Katra, “Reading Facundo as Historical Novel,” in The Historical Novel in Latin America, ed. Daniel Balderston (Gaithersburg, Md.: Ediciones Hispamérica, 1986), 31-46. “Mitre's and Sarmiento's writings, Alberdi stated, were examples of ‘la historia forjada por la vanidad, una especie de mitología política con base histórica [history forged in vanity, a kind of political mythology with historical grounding]’” (36).

44. See Brook Thomas, Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 23. “When Van Buren spoke against New York's ‘aristocracy,’ he was not making a claim for popular rule. The governing elite (to which Cooper belonged) was sustained by social position and family connection. Van Buren wanted to replace it with a new leadership of the rising powerful—the Albany Regency. The constitution that had ruled New York State from the Revolution until 1821 was an object of Van Buren's attack because it, along with residual elements of the old Dutch patroon system, protected the interests of what the Federalists called the ‘guardian class.’”

45. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 110.

46. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). “Gorky's fine analysis of Cooper's novels … shows the divided attitude of the classics of the historical novel clearly. They have to affirm the downfall of the humanly noble Indian, the straightforwardly decent, straightforwardly heroic ‘leather-stocking,’ treating it as a necessary step of progress, and yet cannot help seeing and depicting the human inferiority of the victors. This is the necessary fate of every primitive culture with which capitalism comes into contact” (346). Katra, The Historical Novel in Latin America, 39, then reads Lukács through Sarmiento and concludes rather hastily that both celebrated this “pitiless march of progress,” when, in fact, Lukács tries to draw a distinction between classical historical novels and those of the Popular Front that can accommodate the “primative communism.” Compare Lukács (347).

47. I am referring here to Michel Foucault's arguably schematic distinction in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). See note 12.

48. Sarmiento, Facundo, 26; Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic, 26.

49. Ibid., 26.

50. See Sylvia Molloy's wonderfully probing discussion (416).

51. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Recuerdos de provincia (Barcelona: Ramón Sopena, 1931), 107-8. The passage continues: “Aquello, pues, que llamamos hoy plagio, era entonces erudición y riqueza; y yo prefiriera oír segunda vez a un autor digno de ser leído cien veces, a los ensayos incompletos de la razón y del estilo que aun están en embrión, porque nuestra inteligencia nacional no se ha desenvuelto lo bastante para rivalizar con los autores que el concepto del mundo reputa dignos de ser escuchados.”

52. Sarmiento, Recuerdos, 161. “La vida de Franklin debiera formar parte de los libros de las escuelas primarias. Alienta tanto su ejemplo, está tan al alcance de todos lla carrera que él recorría, que no habría muchacho un poco bien inclinado que no se tentase a ser un Franklincito, por aquella bella tendencia del espíritu humano a imitar los modelos de la perfección que concibe.”

53. William J. Nowak argues that the gesture to make himself representative of Argentina, the synecdoche for an entire country, meant that Sarmiento's self-portrait was purposefully impersonal. See “La personificación en Recuerdos de provincia: La despersonalización de D. F. Sarmiento,” Revista Iberoamericana 54, 143 (April-June 1988): 585-601.

54. Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo, “La estrategia de Recuerdos de provincia,” in Literatura/Sociedad (Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1983), 165.

55. Sarmiento, Recuerdos, 68 (my translation). Sarmiento wrote, “Oro ha dado el modelo y el tipo del futuro argentino, europeo hasta los últimos refinamientos de las bellas artes, americano hasta cabalgar el potro indómito; parisiense por el espíritu, pampa por la energía y los poderes físicos.”

56. Ibid., 69.

57. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), Inc., Columbia University, 1983), 11: “Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false, representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.”

58. Ibid., 2.

59. Sarmiento, Recuerdos, 142 (my translation).

60. An extended discussion of these authors will appear in Foundational Fictions: When History Was Romance in Latin America (forthcoming from University of California Press).

61. Historians of the period, most notably Bartolomé Mitre, were also writing biography as one of the most compelling kinds of history.

62. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 78.

63. For a succinct definition of this Gramscian concept, see Chantal Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 181. “[A] hegemonic class has been able to articulate the interests of other social groups to its own by means of ideological struggle. This, according to G, is only possible if this class renounces a strictly corporatist conception …”

64. Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic, trans., 24-25: “[I]t cannot be denied … that this state of things has its poetic side, and possesses aspects worthy of the pen of the romancer. … The only North American novelist [romancista in Spanish] who has gained a European reputation is Fenimore Cooper.”

65. The tradition probably originated with Dr. Johnson's definition of romance as “a military fable of the middle ages; a tale of wild adventures in love and chivalry.” The novel, on the other hand, was “a smooth tale, generally of love.” But Walter Scott adjusted Johnson's definitions in his own article on romance (1823) for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, stressing the novel's “ordinary train of human events (in) the modern state of society.” See Walter Scott, “Essay on Romance,” in Essays on Chivalry, Romance and the Drama, ed. Leslie Fiedler (London: Frederick Warne, 1887), 65-108. That is to say, or imply, that it is a lesser genre, fit more for lady writers and readers than for robust men.

    In the U.S., writers like Hawthorne and his admirer Melville picked up this distinction, and insisted they were writing romance as opposed to the novels of “female scribblers.” Cooper, at least, suggested the connection between the public good and private desire when he boasted that the distinguishing characteristic of romance was that it aimed to deal poetic justice all around, and thus achieve a higher truth than any available from chronicles where too many heroes marry the wrong girls. (See Perry Miller, Nature's Nation [Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1958], 250). North American critics have also noticed that the apparently male romance and female novels keep very close company. Leslie Fiedler points out that only several years before he wrote his great romances, Cooper was training himself as a writer by imitating, not the manly historical romancer Walter Scott, but that English gentlewoman and mistress of the domestic psychological novel, Ms. Jane Austen. See Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 186, 190. In general Fiedler shows how the genres bleed into one another even in their own nineteenth-century terms.

    For Myra Jehlen, the distinction would be moot, since all U.S. fiction of the nineteenth century was some variety of romance. She argues that our contemporary theories of the novel tend to distinguish it from nineteenth-century American works in general. If Bakhtin, Bloch, and Lukács are right to call the novel a self-conscious construction that resists a predictable closure, neither the high-minded adventure stories nor the sentimental tales of this hemisphere qualify as examples. Their desire is ultimately contained in the lap of family life. See Myra Jehlen, “New World Epics: The Novel and the Middle Class in America,” Salmagundi 36 (Winter 1977): 49-68.

66. Sarmiento, Facundo, 126.

67. Simón Bolívar, in Pensamiento Político de la Emancipación, ed. José Luis Romero (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977), 114 (my translation).

68. I detail this perhaps provocative reading in “María's Disease: A National Novel (Con)Founded” (forthcoming).

69. Henry Nash Smith, “The Dime Novel Heroine,” in his Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 126-35.

70. Baym, “The Women of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales,” 706.

71. For the definitive formulation of this idea see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

72. Altamirano and Sarlo, “La estrategia de Recuerdos de provincia,” 163-208.

73. Tulio Halperin Donghi, “Intelectuales, sociedad y vida pública en Hispanoamérica a través de la literatura autobiográfica,” in El espejo de la historia: Problemas argentinos y perspectivas latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1987), 58. “Denunciado como hombre de origen modesto, Sarmiento extrema la acusación y la transforma en reivindicación: no ha nacido en un barrio modesto y de familia oscura, como alegan sus enemigos; su origen es una población marginal, y desde los quince años, por deserción de su padre, ha sido jefe de su propia familia: es, en otras palabras, y de acuerdo con la expresión llena de sentido que ha comenzado ya a ganar circulación, un hijo de sus obras. … Unos años después el mismo Sarmiento iba a dar de nuevo cuenta de sí mismo en Recuerdos de provincia, y aquí el hijo de sus obras abre literalmente el volumen con su árbol genealógico: su esfuerzo se define ahora como el de adaptar la tradición de la elite letrada al clima social e ideológico de la era republicana.”

74. It is like the lost objects in Tlön that are later found enlarged and improved. I owe this reference to my colleague Antonio Benítez-Rojo. Borges writes, “No es infrecuente, en las regiones más antiguas de Tlön, la duplicación de objetos perdidos. Dos personas buscan un lápiz; la primera lo encuentra y no dice nada; la segunda encuentra un segundo lápiz no menos real, pero más ajustado a su expectativa. Esos objetos secundarios se llaman hrönir y son, aunque de forma desairada, un poco más largos. Hasta hace poco los hrönir fueron hijos casuales de la distracción y el olvido. Parece mentira que su metódica producción cuente apenas cien años, pero así lo declara el Onceno Tomo.” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Ficciones (Buenos Aires: Alianza, 1982), 28-29.