SOURCE: Kaplan, Marina. “The Latin American Romance in Sarmiento, Borges, Ribeyro, Cortázar, and Rulfo.” In Sarmiento, Author of a Nation, pp. 314-26. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

[In the following excerpt, Kaplan looks at Facundo as a romance, commenting also on the stylistic elements of the novel and magic realism in the text.]

[Y] así la humanidad va amontonando leyes, principios, monumentos inmensos, sobre estas oscuras bases cuyos orígenes, cuyas cavidades están ocupadas por un error, por un misterio, por un crimen.

—Joaquín V. González, La tradición nacional (1888)

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's essay, Facundo, Civilización y barbarie (1845), analyzes the causes of civil strife in Argentina during the period following the country's independence from Spain. Sarmiento's thesis is that the Argentine struggle, usually couched in conventional political terms (such as “federalism” and “unitarianism”), was in reality a fight between two ways of life: that of the Europeanized, cultured inhabitants of the cities and the primitive, autochthonous, “American” life-style of the rural gauchos. The eloquence of his arguments, his vigorous style, his colorful scenes depicting native “types” and the vast, mysterious pampas, as well as the very passion of his political project, all contributed to the influence that his work had on successive generations of Latin American writers. Indeed, Civilización y barbarie established the discursive parameters within which the social sciences and the novel operated until, roughly, 1930. Thus, for example, both in terms of liberal ideology and of prominence of the telluric element, Rómulo Gallegos's Doña Bárbara and the “novelas de la tierra,” written in the first quarter of this century, can be read as the direct descendants of Facundo.

My purpose in this essay is to explore a different, less documented continuity between Sarmiento's text and more recent works of literature. In order to do so, I will suggest a genre for Facundo and will trace the persistence of similar generic traits in some contemporary narratives that belong, with the exception of Julio Ramón Ribeyro's novella, to the realm of fantastic or “magic realist” writing. It is a truism that Civilización y barbarie is a romantic hybrid as far as its genre is concerned; nevertheless, by bracketing its generic heterogeneity, I hope to bring into strong relief a particular narrative configuration whose singular endurance in the Latin American imaginary is what I consider culturally significant.

Two constitutive elements of genre will interest me in this analysis: the structure of the plot and the fabula. The latter is the Russian formalists' term for the summary (the amalgamation of a single level of sense) of a narrative. As Umberto Eco points out, the construction of such a microstory involves an interpretation on the part of the reader, who will perform selections or semantic activations in order to arrive at his particular summary of what a text is really about. The result is that a plot can validly yield more than one fabula.¹ A quick example from the Facundo might illustrate this last point, by concentrating on a secondary incident that can yield divergent readings. When the conquest of Tucumán is achieved, Facundo Quiroga, triumphant, confiscates goods and money from the inhabitants. This is in keeping with his despotic nature and, I should add, with the customs of the time. But Quiroga also takes part in the auction of goods: “Facundo himself sells shirts, women's petticoats, children's clothes, unfolding and displaying them to the crowd. Half a real, one real, any bid was welcome.”² How is the reader to reconcile the titanic image of the caudillo, which the text reinforces throughout, with this one of a street vendor? The reader can do so in at least two ways. He can ignore or “narcotize” the scene because, though part of the plot, it is incongruent with a more abstract significant whole. This is what I have chosen to do. Alternatively, he can acknowledge the scene and then conclude, as does Noël Salomon, that the figure of Quiroga illustrates the romantic mixture of the sublime and the grotesque.³

The repetition of a narrative structure and a fabula creates, in turn, a literary genre and its concomitant “horizon of expectation.” In other words, a genre is an inductive construct based on a study of literary works along their synchronic and/or diachronic axes.⁴

The above-mentioned hybrid generic nature of the Facundo (it is a biography, a historical and sociological essay, a political pamphlet) includes an important literary aspect traditionally associated with the novel. “If Facundo is a novel,” writes, for example, Salomon, “it is above all a romantic novel” (“Valores románticos,” p. 154). “Facundo is the paradigmatic example of the historical novel,” concludes William Katra for his part.⁵ My aim here is to propose a different generic filiation for Sarmiento's text, not in order to accomplish a totalizing new reading of a classic but, rather, to highlight those organizational parameters that are the deeper way in which literature speaks about history. It is the semantic values of the structure and the fabula that interest me, as well as their persistence along the diachronic axis of Latin American literature. Consequently, the genre proposed in this essay is to be understood as a heuristic tool and a construction of meaning, not as a prescriptive or formal label.

My thesis is that Facundo, read as a work of fiction, resembles a romance more than it does a novel. Since this is an English distinction which does not exist in Spanish criticism,⁶ I will first explain it and then discuss how it relates to Sarmiento's text. In modern literature, the difference between romance and novel is essentially one of degree: of verisimilitude, of precise naturalistic causality. While the novel is concerned with plausibility, the romance indulges in extravagance, a reminder of the unrestricted fantasy of its medieval models.⁷ To a modern sensibility this can appear as problematic, especially in the case of those nineteenth-century romances where codes are mixed in unclear proportions: in them, within a realist fable, traces of an older, mythic imaginary can either delight or disconcert the careful reader. Criticisms will then stem from an expectation of naturalist portrayals of events which the romance, faithful to a different generic code, frustrates. This need on the part of the reader for a clear demarcation between fact and fiction, this desire that the text unhesitatingly throw in its lot with either reality or magic, is satisfied by fantastic literature, the twentieth-century heir of the romance (Jameson, “Magical Narratives,” p. 145), but it is neglected in many earlier works. The issue can be particularly disconcerting in those cases in which the text proposes itself as “history.”

Such a troubled response on the reader's part does not occur solely with regard to modern works. Ezra Pound, for example, complained that sentimentality, lack of common sense, and exaggeration were blemishes of the Chanson de Roland, which, as a “geste” (i.e., as a poem rooted in historical facts) was unsatisfactory, not up to the robust realism of the Poema de Mio Cid. His remarks, which are standard objections to any uncertain mixture of fact and fantasy, will serve to clarify right away what English criticism understands by romance in the medieval sense. “Whatever the ‘Cid’ owes to the ‘Roland,’” writes Pound,

it is an immeasurable advance in simplicity; it is free from the striving for effect, as in the two trees and four white stones of marble: it is free from any such exaggerations as a horn heard at thirty leagues distance. Indeed, the “Roland” is either too marvellous to be natural or too historical to allure by its mystery. In the realm of magic, the land of the “Romances,” one expects, one demands, the delight of haunted fountains, bewitched castles, ships that move unguided to their appropriate havens; and the Breton cycle, the cycle of Arthur, was already furnishing them to the mediaeval audience and supplanting the semi-verities of the “Matter of France.”⁸

“Striving for effect,” “exaggerations,” the “marvellous,” and the stylization of the “two trees and four white stones” are all elements of the genre; their appearance in the Roland weakens it as an epic, without, however, being marvelous enough to define the work as a romance. If we may grant this for medieval times—i.e., if, as Pound suggests, there is a minimum amount of “marvel” required for a work to be a romance—we may nevertheless consider that the situation is much more flexible in the nineteenth century in Latin America. In this latter case, what is significant is that there should be any “marvel” left at all, given that during this period of national projects the secular reason of the Enlightenment strove to prevail against anything reminiscent of irrationality, obscurantism, or fantasy. As such, reason was a censor of unbounded imagination.⁹ Consequently, in a programmatic essay such as Sarmiento's, the domain of fantasy that Pound expected to find in a romance is restricted to descriptive details or, more interestingly, is hidden in the structural organization of the work and in its denouement. The fact that the “marvellous” was not eliminated, but rather preserved, even if camouflaged, is what I consider important.

Pound's strictures immediately recall Bartolomé Mitre's objections in the case of Sarmiento's text: no gaucho could perform the feat of lassoing a bull from a distance of forty pies because no lasso is that long. This is an unrealistic “exaggeration,” just like Roland's horn heard at thirty leagues.¹⁰ The same lack of realistic proportion is also criticized by Valentín Alsina, who reminds Sarmiento that hyperbole is appropriate only to poetry, to “a romance, or an epic”—in other words, to fiction. “You did not intend to write a romance, or an epic,” he admonishes, “but a true social, political, and even military history” (Facundo, Palcos ed., p. 364). What it was that Sarmiento had wanted to write we will return to later. First I want to sketch what I consider the specific romance traits of his work.

The central conflict occurs between two orders of the real which, traditionally, had been the divine and the demonic, white and black magic, or the civilized castle and its opposite: the enchanted forest (the site of adventure par excellence). In the Latin American examples that I will discuss here, that enchanted forest where adventure takes place is the mysterious pampa, in Facundo; an isolated farm on that same pampa, in “El Evangelio según Marcos” by Jorge Luis Borges; a modern Paris where nothing is what it used to be, in “La juventud en la otra ribera” by Julio Ramón Ribeyro; a silent aquarium in the Jardin des Plantes, in “Axolotl” by Julio Cortázar; and the land of the dead, in Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo. Thus isolated from the world of everyday events, the characters in these stories, like modern knights-errant, engage in combats where modernity and the past fight a battle to the death over the meaning, or the meaninglessness, of history. Stylization proposes their confrontation as a transcendent adventure.

This exemplary division of the narrative world is a defining trait of the medieval romance, whose reappearance in romantic texts such as Sarmiento's suggests the following hypothesis: in its modern form, the genre represents an attempt to recover the possibility, or lament the impossibility, of absolute affirmations or negations in a now desacralized world.¹¹ In other words, by positing a narrative world constituted exclusively of antagonistic moral landscapes, which are mirror images of each other, the text harks back to an earlier ethic of unqualified truths. In doing so, it brackets the modern absence of a metaphysical substratum for such truths. That is why the romance, unlike the novel, keeps its distance with regard to reality.

In the realist novel, which I consider here as paradigmatic of the genre, the genesis of characters and events obeys a rational, progressive causality and there are multiple points of view. Characters and readers share an Umwelt, fictionally reinforced by anaphora and redundancy, which allows them to judge the course of the action apparently without direct intervention from the author. The novel, consequently, can afford gray areas. In the romance, on the other hand, characters and events can appear ready-made (an old man with wings can fall in somebody's backyard, as in Gabriel García Márquez's “Un hombre muy viejo con unas alas enormes”) and the point of view is the author's, who supplies the fictional world with an idiosyncratic coherence: he legislates what is possible or impossible (time can stand still for a year, as in Borges's “El milagro secreto”) and he presents us with a causality that is realistic at times (a man has to put on a sweater), magical at others (when the same man desperately manages to get his head through the neck of the sweater, his own hand attacks him and he dies, in Cortázar's “No se culpe a nadie”).¹² The romance shuns the grayness of realism. By thus relaxing the demands of verisimilitude, it can approximate the myth or the fairy tale.

These narrative options work jointly with the divided landscape of the genre: in the enchanted forest strange things happen. Thus in Facundo (pp. 69-70), beyond the obvious mystery of the pampas, the province of La Rioja itself, birthplace of Quiroga and the stage of his early actions, is compared to Palestine, its inhabitants to the hermit of Engedi. The scenery is colored with magic because La Rioja is a chosen, or a cursed, land. As such it is admonished, with biblical language, and reminded that its suffering is an atonement for the evils that the province has unleashed on the Republic: “In truth I say to you that Sodom and Gomorrah were better treated than what you shall be,” concludes Sarmiento (p. 70). This hallowed, or damned, environment in turn allows the reader to accept that Quiroga, in consonance with the demonic landscape of his origin, should be someone beyond rational explanation, simply “born” to be great (pp. 60, 63, and 168), predestined to be a scourge of his country (p. 105). (One should keep in mind that this contradicts the geographic determinism of the essay.) The discourse betrays a similar dream of a mythic genesis (“born” great, predestined, etc.) in the urgency with which the establishment of civilization is envisioned: Bernardino Rivadavia, we are told, would have poured Europe's laws onto the American lands all at once (“de golpe,” p. 91; also pp. 63 and 185). “The Argentine republic,” we read elsewhere, “finds itself today in the situation of the Roman Senate which, by decree, would order five hundred cities raised, and the cities would appear in response to that call” (p. 223; emphasis added). Magic in this last example is projected onto the dimension of political utopias, and the word is, consequently, a “decree.” Civilization achieved “de golpe,” or cities that spring up in response to a call, are emblematic of the thrust of the essay. At work in these figures of speech is a remnant of more archaic epistemological constructs in which words could conjure up realities. Such dreams of omnipotence are also glimpsed, to show but one last (and different) example, in the description of Quiroga attacking La Rioja: “Quiroga ardently accepts [the one hundred men offered by Carlos Aldao], marches toward the city, takes it, apprehends the government officers, sends them confessors and the order to prepare themselves to die. What purpose does he pursue in this revolution? None; he has felt strong, has stretched his arms and defeated the city. Is it his fault?” (p. 73) Quiroga destroyed La Rioja through an excess of vitality, Sarmiento seems to say, and not through any ulterior motive. The physical movement of the caudillo toppled the city, as if he were not a man but a giant.

Such a narrative world is an idealized one, whose miracles and giants coincide with the dream images of its society: expressions of serenity or horror, the realization of desires, or the exorcism of threats. As Gillian Beer summarizes this, the romance “offers a peculiarly precise register of the ideals and terrors of the age” (The Romance, p. 58); the latter in turn represent, beyond the surface narrative, the social instability that accompanies the rise of the genre, which flourishes in periods of consolidation of new social formations (p. 78). Unlike realism, which relishes its immediate context by re-creating it, the romance withdraws, through stylization, to the topography of the imaginary, where the author can sketch with greater vigor and less ambiguity the world either feared or longed for by his contemporaries.

From this ensues another important characteristic of the romance which I want to discuss in some detail with regard to Facundo: idealism. John Stevens concludes that this is the genre's fundamental trait: “The ‘claim of the ideal,’ I have argued, is the central experience of romance, and all the basic conventions have emerged, crystallized, to express it—not only conventions of setting and location, but conventions of plot and action (including the usual ‘happy ending’), of characterization and of motive” (Medieval Romance, p. 169). In the Facundo, that “claim of the ideal” is summarized in the concept of “civilization.” The term appears to function as a Lacanian name-of-the-father: it generates a symbolic order and underpins an ideological discourse by means of which Argentine anarchy, ultimately equated with the state of nature, is explained, condemned, and transcended.¹³ What is important to point out, though, is that this father is an ideal one. Argentines, Sarmiento tells us in Facundo, had searched in Europe for “their ancestors, their fathers, their models” (p. 211). Even though the real France and the real England had disappointed them, they had found their model in the “ideal” France, which they had learned to love in books (p. 214). Thus understood, this name-of-the-father is not, as it is in the case of the European novel, the reality principle. It is not the rigor of the real which awakens heroes from their dreams and forces them to accept the existing social order (the paradigmatic example here would be Don Quijote). On the contrary, Sarmiento's “civilization” is only a desired state which coincides with the designs of Providence and infuses the text with a utopian impulse characteristically romancesque. The envisioned reign of order in Facundo is both a social blueprint and an incantation; this latter quality ends up overpowering the real events narrated and produces a magical (i.e., contradictory) denouement.

The first example of these contradictions is the final reconciliation, which is disconcerting because it is not a logical outcome of the plot. Critics of Sarmiento's text have been conscious of this problematic resolution, which they have variously labeled as Machiavellian, conciliatory, or as a “mortal leap of logic.”¹⁴ In the last chapter in particular, “Presente y porvenir,” the regeneration of a fallen society occurs as if that society had been magically seduced by order. It is a “happy ending” stubbornly rescued from among the fatal consequences of violence. Indeed, after so much horror, writes Sarmiento, Rivadavia's goal, hindered for so long by fighting and fragmentation, has finally become a reality: the country is now united and ready to embark on a progressive course.

Let no one assume that Rosas has not managed to bring progress to the Republic which he is tearing apart. No. He is, in fact, a great and powerful instrument of Providence, that fulfills everything that is of import to the future of the nation. See how: there existed before him and Quiroga a federal spirit in the provinces, in the cities, among the federales and among the unitarios themselves; he extinguished it, and organized for his own self-benefit that unitarian system which Rivadavia wanted for the good of all. Today all those petty caudillos from the interior, degraded, debased, tremble at the thought of displeasing Rosas and hardly breathe without his consent. The ideal of the unitarios is now realized; only the tyrant is beside the point; the day when a good government is established, it will find local resistances defeated and everything in place for unity.

[Facundo, p. 217]

If the reader can distance himself from the persuasive force of this passage, he can then remember that in 1845, when the text was written, civilization had lost the battle. Sarmiento had fulminated against such an outcome up to this point. No matter, though. In this last part, he managed to rescue positive values from the country's ordeal and to find something good even in the omnipotence of his enemy. More than shrewd, “Machiavellian” thinking, as Alberdi charged, what we have here is a set of conclusions overdetermined by faith in progress. Superimposed upon the fable, forcing it to serve optimistic ends, a teleological conception of history interprets events—even the most negative ones—as indices of mankind's unstoppable march toward harmonious polities. This is the linear and positive view of history that had come into being during the Enlightenment and that was adopted by romantic historiography.

At the inception of this new, secularized view of the meaning of history, Immanuel Kant had acknowledged and defended the fact that such a view, such an optimistic lens through which to read the past, was bound to shape the resulting narrative in the form of a “romance.” “It is strange and apparently silly,” wrote Kant, “to wish to write a history in accordance with an Idea of how the course of the world should be if it is to lead to certain rational ends. It seems that with such an Idea only a romance could be written. Nevertheless, if one may assume that Nature, even in the play of human freedom, works not without plan or purpose, this Idea could still be of use.”¹⁵ Kant correctly anticipated the effect that the concept of progress, in its function as a masterplot, would have on historiography. The belief in the “rational ends” in store for mankind, equated with historical providentialism (elsewhere Kant, just like Sarmiento, speaks of Providence), functions like ancient magic. This last provocative term of comparison is only metaphorically implicit in Kant's reference to the romance, but it is directly, and mischievously, spelled out by Fredric Jameson with regard to Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi—a representative text in this regard. In it, observes Jameson, the notion of foreordained progress serves as a teleological force capable of bringing about miracles in a world that is incompletely secularized (“Magical Narratives,” p. 143). Lionel Gossman finds similar structural elements in the case of Augustin Thierry's history of France. “Thierry emplots history as a romance, or a divine comedy,” he concludes.¹⁶

This “salvational logic,” as Gossman calls it, appropriates unto itself even the realm of evil. The manner in which this is brought about is peculiar to romances: the bearers of evil abruptly change their sign and join the good society. This is the second mechanism that accounts for Facundo's contradictory resolution. In the last part of Sarmiento's essay there is a veritable avalanche of such sudden transformations, whose aim is to show that social regeneration is now absolute. Thus the gauchos, at the end of the narrative, have begun to become true “citizens”—either through contact with civilized people exiled from Buenos Aires by Rosas's policies (p. 212), or by becoming familiar and eventually sympathizing with the cause of the cities they have invaded (p. 217). Federales, unitarios, and the young have deposed their antagonisms in order to unite in the struggle against Rosas (p. 229). The earlier irreducible antinomies have dissolved, and the country which had been in danger of fragmentation is now united: “The fight of the countryside against the cities is over” (p. 217). Even the mazorqueros, those sinister lackeys of Rosas, may perhaps hide, under the “exteriorities of crime, virtues that some day will be rewarded” (p. 226).

These changes ensure rather hastily the triumph of a social cohesion whose fracture the text has until then denounced. What I want to stress is that this harmony is recovered not by the victory of one group over the other (indeed, if anything has triumphed in Facundo it is the barbarism of the countryside) but, rather, by the surprising change of value of the antagonists. The bad guys have become good. This is a characteristic of romance intimately related to those mentioned earlier: the polarized ethical landscapes, the utopian ideal, and the magical force that watches over the affairs of men. Romances deal with emotional and moral extremes not subordinated to the conventions of realism.¹⁷ However, good and evil, personified in characters without nuances, are not exclusive to romance: the “Western” film and, at the other distant end of time, the chanson de geste (which, as a genre, precedes the romance) share what Jameson calls a “positional notion” of good and evil. But in these latter cases the enemy, the “other,” the “bad” one, remains so until the end. In the romance, on the other hand, the antagonist surprises both the protagonist and the reader when, after innumerable adventures, he reveals his true identity and discovers that he is not the villain. His wickedness turns out to have been mere appearance, and he ends up being a member of the good group.

Jameson, whom I am following here, considers this type of surprising conversion to be a fundamental trait of the genre which, in its origins, adopted a traditional literary structure—that of the enemies of the chanson de geste—and adapted it to a new social reality: the emergence of feudal nobility as a universal class (“Magical Narratives,” p. 161). He who was an enemy in earlier times is now another nobleman, and the texts reflect this in the sudden transformation of the antagonist into a member of the normative group. An appropriate illustration, in addition to those mentioned by Jameson, is the anonymous late-fourteenth-century English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: at the end of his adventure, Sir Gawain and the reader discover that the terrible giant of the title is but a mask behind which is disguised Gawain's elegant host. The peril of the anticipated fight against the monstrous green knight is dissolved, and the characters celebrate the reestablished harmony of peers. The last section of the Facundo brings us close to this manner of portraying social reintegration by means of universalizing the domain of the positive characters. In summary, this rapid change of sign, in which the green knight turns out to be a nobleman—or, to give two other common illustrations, the destitute heroine discovers her aristocratic parents, and the beast proves to be the prince—is similar to the revelation that Rosas is a tool of Providence and that even the mazorqueros may hold some good. Such a swift reversal partakes both of wishful thinking (the true realm of the imaginary and the romance) and of an ideology in the process of asserting itself. The romance, more than the novel, camouflages the complexities of reality and, through magic, suppresses difference by means of miraculous, last-minute revelations of sameness. In Sarmiento's text, this conversion of the bad characters serves to universalize liberal ideals, proposed throughout the work as the exalted domain of the good.

In the case of Quiroga himself, this change of value (which, it should be recalled, was one of the contradictions that so angered Alberdi) has an additional meaning and broader implications. In the last chapter devoted to the character's life, “Barranca Yaco,” Sarmiento turns the whole country into a stage for the silent duel between Quiroga and Rosas. In the description of Quiroga's trip, all his actions raise his stature and contribute to change his sign: the comparison of Facundo's premonitions with those of Napoleon (Facundo, p. 173); his ghostly carriage, in which he speeds across the country with death always behind; his obstinacy in continuing to travel to an encounter with his murderers, about whom he has had repeated warnings; the dignity with which he confronts them, and the tragedy to which he drags his unfortunate companions—all this rounds off the portrait of a hero. If until then Facundo, of black locks and glaring eyes, has incarnated Evil, in the death scene he suddenly changes, in a reversal whose distant antecedent is the unmasking of the antagonists of medieval romance. Facundo the monster who, frustrated in his desire, had bathed in blood the young woman that rejected him, Facundo who had broken her skull with his heel (p. 126), Facundo “the bad gaucho of the Llanos,” ends up dying with grandeur.

Before continuing with this motif, which is a structural permutation of values, it is important to remark that Facundo's death represents, at the symbolic level, the death of an older world—glimpsed in the code of values that his final actions embody. When confronting his assassins the caudillo behaves like a feudal lord, sure of his place in the world, and opens the door of the carriage in order to control his enemies by his mere presence. He expects individual hierarchies, those based on strength, valor, and fame, to be respected and privileged. But his enemies no longer respond to such norms: a hired killer treacherously shoots him down. His death signals the passing away of the gaucho aristocracy of courage, defeated by a now impersonal and cowardly efficiency. This end of a world, suggested through images, is reinscribed into a more explicitly historical frame by the subsequent comparison of Quiroga's assassin to Danton (Facundo, p. 179). Facundo's death is thus the Argentine version of 1789, the moment when the pampean old regime gives way to a new order. (We will see this allusion to the French Revolution acquire an inverted meaning in Ribeyro's story.)

Facundo's stay in Buenos Aires, prior to his trip, serves to prepare the reader for the caudillo's metamorphosis. Like a knight-errant in the city, he is subjected to a test: that of porteño civilization, its laws and its comforts. He emerges transformed and he doubts, for the first time, that physical force is the absolute source of power (Facundo, p. 169). This loss of his earlier assurance foreshadows both his imminent ruin as a protagonist and his change of value as an actant. His earlier “barbaric” traits begin to wane in Buenos Aires, so that it is his superior bravery, stripped of contradictions, that is exalted when he undertakes his last, rash, and fatal act of daring. In the episode of “Barranca Yaco,” the creature of nature, as Sarmiento had called him, acquires his mask, his social persona: specifically his heroism, in which his identity will now be fixed and for whose sake, we may suspect, he will repress his common sense and lose his life. (Of course, I am speculating on the motivations of a fictional, not an empirical, character.) He dies like a hero, and this allows Sarmiento to change his sign: for someone of Facundo's newfound stature there is a place in the pantheon of Argentine history. There he enters, having acquired, in the words of Sarmiento years later, “the sculptural forms of the primitive heroes, of Ajax and Achilles.”¹⁸

This returns us to the question left open at the beginning of the present essay: how Sarmiento saw his own work. When writing about it in the eighties (Facundo was written in 1845, some forty years earlier), he referred without ambiguity to the importance of his text as a romance. His words are worth quoting in full, since they are usually repeated only fragmentarily. Facundo, he tells us, is comparable to Sallust's account of the war against Jugurtha, because both are books without subject matter. This is so because the adventure they narrate leaves no “mark in history; it is merely an inconsequential episode.” In other words, it is not their historical content that makes these books great, but rather their exotic landscapes, the grandeur of their scenes, and all those other qualities that Sarmiento himself had defined, in the text of Facundo, as being traits of romances. In the case of the Latin treatise,

What Rome saw was a book, and what students and Latin scholars see is the figure of Jugurtha the Numid, with his white burnoose, on a black horse, making razzias, fancy charges, or marauding in front of the Roman legions. It is Sallust, the painter of Africa, of the desert.

Naturally, the implication is that all these features are the enduring literary qualities of the Facundo, too. Precisely because the value of his work is literary, Sarmiento goes on to defend it against the demands of strict historical realism which, in his opinion, miss the point:

Let not the historian, who searches for graphic truths, wound with his scalpel the flesh of Facundo, which is alive. Do not touch it! As it is, with all its flaws, all its imperfections, the book was loved by its contemporaries, honored by all foreign literatures; it haunted those who read it for the first time, and the Argentine pampa is as poetic today around the world as are the mountains of Scotland portrayed by Walter Scott for the solace of men's minds.¹⁹

The elderly Sarmiento thus disagrees, indirectly, with the reading of Valentín Alsina and with that of the majority of his present-day readers in the social sciences: the value of his Facundo, he affirms, is poetic. His account, like Sallust's, is “a book” and not history.

Of course this is only one reading among several. (Sarmiento knew this when, in the same article, he congratulated himself on the ideological success of his book, saying that it had been “a veritable rock” thrown at the head of one titan by another.) However, if we pursue this single fabula, we will notice that it is Quiroga's abrupt change from destroyer to destroyed, from enemy to hero, from bad to good, that makes possible all the ensuing transformations of “Presente y porvenir.” His final tragic nobility seems to unleash a change in the whole society and initiates the recovery of harmony of the last two chapters. After “Barranca Yaco,” the social body appears to have been purged. This organization of the narrative suggests a causal connection between the end of the caudillo and the subsequent reconstitution of society. We could then say that the assassination of Facundo is similar in its function to that of the victim of ritual sacrifice in primitive religions: like the immolation of the pharmakos studied by René Girard, the elimination of Quiroga is the catalyst that converts an “infectious violence into positive cultural values.”²⁰

This was Joaquín V. González's intuition concerning order, as expressed in the epigraph to the present essay.²¹ Speculating on Facundo's death, González wrote that society erects its laws and monuments on obscure foundations whose hollow core encloses a crime. This hollow core, this “cavity,” is also an “origin.” Inside it, a mystery, a murder. The genesis of the social order—genesis with its maternal cavities and its paternal monuments, their union a “doubtful formula,” their offspring “un delito”—is thus apprehended in all its painful ambiguity, as if anticipating modern formulations of the sacrifice imposed by the symbolic order, or the violence of arche-writing.²² Facundo's immolation represents, for González, that error, mystery, or crime which makes possible the founding of institutions.

Here, it seems to me, is the primal scene of several future Latin American romances: the death of the pharmakos as the pivot on which hinges the fortunate or impossible resolution of the constitution of society. Unlike all the other characteristics already mentioned, this is not a typical trait of earlier European romances. …

Notes

1. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). In general, I am relying for these definitions on pp. 27-31 and the last chapter of Eco's study, titled “Lector in Fabula” (pp. 200-260). Here is further elaboration by Eco of what a fabula is and of its level of generalization, intermediate between plot and theme: “In order to recognize a given fabula the reader has to identify a narrative topic or a main theme. A narrative topic is nothing but a higher-level fabula or an ultimate macroproposition” (p. 209).

2. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo, Civilización y barbarie (henceforth Facundo), 9th ed. (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1972), p. 154. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of this and the other Spanish-language texts discussed are my own.

3. The reader can “blow up or narcotize” given semantic properties of texts (Eco, Role of the Reader, p. 27). For Noël Salomon's reading, see his “Los valores románticos y novelescos en el ‘Facundo,’” in Realidad, ideología y literatura en el “Facundo” de D. F. Sarmiento (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), p. 154.

4. The genre, a contract between author and reader and not a preceptive, is the formal configuration that gives coherence to the narrative material and that, in the process of so doing, controls the reception of the text. Consequently, it is not an ideologically inert construct but rather a signifying strategy which, as such, resolves, contests, or sidesteps social contradictions. To posit a generic filiation for Facundo, therefore, is not an attempt to neutralize its polemic nature as a political tract, but an effort to reorient its analysis toward other parameters, also producers of intelligibility.

5. William Katra, “Reading Facundo as Historical Novel,” The Historical Novel in Latin America: A Symposium, ed. Daniel Balderston (Gaithersburg, Md.: Hispamérica and the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies, Tulane University, 1986), p. 39.

6. In Spanish, a “romance” is either a type of poem (whose English equivalent might be the ballad) or a sentimental love story. The absence of an explanation of the term is troublesome in Djelal Kadir's recent study of the topic: Questing Fictions: Latin America's Family Romance, foreword by Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). His Latin American or, in general, Hispanic readers may not grasp the implications of a genre that Kadir simply defines as a quest, a form of errantry. As such, the term seems vaguely applicable to all literature. For an excellent bibliographic review essay of deconstructive readings of the North American romance, see R. C. de Prospo's “Deconstructive Poe(tics),” Diacritics 18, no. 3 (1988): 43-64.

7. The now classic definition of the genre is Northrop Frye's in The Anatomy of Criticism (1957). I have used the Spanish translation, in which the pertinent section is “El mythos del verano: El Romance,” Anatomía de la crítica (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1977), pp. 245-271. Essential is Fredric Jameson's very lucid study, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary History 7 (1975): 135-164. I have also profited from Gillian Beer's The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970); John Stevens's Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches (London: Hutchinson, 1973); and Frye's more recent The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).

   It is interesting that we do not have in Spanish the category of “romance” in the sense in which I am using it here. A. D. Deyermond addresses this issue in “The Lost Genre of Medieval Spanish Literature,” Hispanic Review 43 (1975): 231-259. Hispanists have ignored this genre, proposes Deyermond, because of an axiomatic adherence to Ramón Menéndez Pidal's equation of the Spanish ethos with realism. Works that are not realistic have either been ignored as not representative or have been reduced to a few examples of a subgenre: the novels of chivalry.

   Deyermond a medievalist, apparently is not aware of the nineteenth-century familiarity with the concept, at least among the Argentine Generation of 1837, nor does he explain the presumed absence of theoretical formulations anywhere in the Hispanic world prior to Menéndez Pidal's writings. After all, if the category exists in English, it is as a result of extensive elaborations throughout the eighteenth century, which led to the establishment of a clear distinction between “old” and “new” romances. The wavering and initially uncertain usage of these terms is amply illustrated in Geoffrey Day, From Fiction to the Novel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). Edith Kern supplies abundant documentation on the earlier origin and usage mutations, in Romance languages and in English, of the terms “romance,” “novel,” and “novella.” See her “The Romance of Novel/Novella,” in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation and History Honoring Renée Wellek, ed. Peter Demetz et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 511-530.

   In Facundo, Sarmiento uses the term “romance” several times: when he refers to the literary elaboration of what is peculiarly American, which he understands in terms of a majestic nature (p. 24), original human types (p. 29), and, above all, as the struggle between “European civilization and indigenous barbarism, between intelligence and matter” (p. 24); or when he explains that the “romancesque fame” (p. 132) of Juan Lavalle is derived from the admiration elicited by his cavalry charges, which are a gaucho, Argentine way of fighting in war. Thus understood, then, the term “romance” connotes the exotic, vast, intense, or original. Valentín Alsina uses “romance” as synonymous with fiction. Both Sarmiento and Alsina oppose, tacitly or explicitly, “romance” (i.e., fiction) to history (i.e., truth, facts). (Alsina's letter to Sarmiento is included in Alberto Palcos's edition of Facundo [La Plata: Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 1938], p. 364. Hereafter: Facundo, Palcos ed.)

   Elizabeth Garrels has studied Sarmiento's use of the term in the Facundo and infers that he considered it the appropriate genre for descriptions of past times of war and anarchy. From this, Garrels draws the inevitable corollary that no more “romances” about heroic figures will be written once Argentina becomes civilized. The new genre for the new country, she concludes, will be the novel, with its mediocre protagonists. See her “La historia como romance en el Facundo,” in Balderston, ed., The Historical Novel in Latin America, pp. 75-84. Doris Sommer, for her part, proposes that the nineteenth-century Latin American novel is all a romance. Her definition of the genre, however, differs from mine in that she is concerned with the sentimental romance, the love story. On this basis, Sommer establishes a metaphoric equivalence between the conjugal union of the protagonists of the novels and national reconciliation. See Sommer, “Not Just Any Narrative: How Romance Can Love Us to Death,” in Balderston, ed., The Historical Novel in Latin America, pp. 45-74.

8. Pound, The Spirit of Romance (London: Dent & Sons, [1910]), p. 77.

9. That this resulted in the absence of a true romantic movement is Octavio Paz's thesis in Los hijos del limo: Del romanticismo a la vanguardia (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974). According to Paz, the essence of romanticism—the revolt against systematic reason—was delayed in Latin America, where it did not appear until the advent of the fin de siècle modernist movement.

10. Mitre's remark is quoted in Ana María Barrenechea, “Función estética y significación histórica de las campañas pastoras en el Facundo,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 15 (1961): 319.

11. This is Peter Brooks's thesis in his very suggestive study of nineteenth-century melodrama, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976). The romance has many points of contact with the melodrama.

12. Since I am more familiar with modern Latin American literature than with medieval romances, I am offering here Latin American examples. The reader is referred to the studies cited in note 7, above, for numerous illustrations taken from medieval literature as well as for discussions of other characteristics of the genre.

13. The name-of-the-father is, in Lacan's psychoanalytic terminology, the equivalent of the cultural (patriarchal, obviously) order. It breaks the symbiotic, imaginary relationship between mother and child, and forces the latter to enter the shifting grounds of language and society, where her/his place is no longer one of absolute, interchangeable positions, of I-thou, of mirror images, of pure love or hatred. It is important to add that both stages of development, the imaginary and the symbolic, are forms of alienation: there is no original, authentic, or essential ground. Elaborations and definitions of this and other Lacanian terms are found, for example, in his Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) or in The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, preliminary study, ed. and trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). I have studied the function of the father and have analyzed Facundo as an Oedipal text in “Sarmiento y el (anti)-padre americano,” Revista Occidental 6-7 (1985): 153-166.

14. Respectively: Juan Bautista Alberdi, La barbarie histórica de Sarmiento (Buenos Aires: Pampa y Cielo, 1964), p. 19; Julio Caillet-Bois, “Naturaleza e historia, providencia y libertad en “Facundo” de Sarmiento,” Bulletin Hispanique 75, nos. 3-4 (1973): 350; and Garrels, “La historia como romance,” p. 79.

15. Kant, On History, ed. Lewis White Beck; trans. Lewis White Beck et al. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), pp. 24-25 (emphasis added).

16. Lionel Gossman, Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography, introduction by Hayden White (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), p. 39.

17. Starting with the gothic novel, these characters can be internal, conflicting parts of a single personality which tend to double each other. Examples are Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

18. These were Sarmiento's words in 1885, when he visited Facundo's grave in the Recoleta (Facundo, Palcos ed., p. 464).

19. This is in an article published in El Nacional, September 22, 1881, upon publication of the Italian translation of Facundo (see Palcos ed., pp. 459-460).

20. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 107. The pharmakos (scapegoat), both despised and elevated, guilty and redeemer, is prerationalistic, mythic—i.e., outside the domain of the identity principle—and thus, in modern terms, a contradictory cultural function which will later, in modern societies, be replaced by the law. Sarmiento's “book” is precisely the identification of a pharmakos, who is condemned, eventually exalted in contradictory fashion, and ultimately transcended as society accedes to the domain of the law. The latter transition is the happy ending of his romance and, in Lacanian terms, constitutes the shift from the imaginary to the symbolic realm. My emphasis thus departs from Caillet-Bois's binary summary concerning Quiroga: “Facundo is the symbol of nature redeemed by society and reconciled to it; he is the martyr for the generous cause of future unity” (“Naturaleza e historia,” p. 350). “Martyr,” furthermore, seems to imply that the Tiger of the Llanos willingly renounced his life for the sake of unity.

21. “And thus humanity goes along erecting laws, principles, immense monuments, on these obscure foundations whose origins, whose hollow recesses enclose an error, a mystery, a crime.” Joaquín V. González, La tradición nacional, excerpted in Armando Zárate, Facundo Quiroga, Barranca Yaco: Juicios y testimonios (Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1985), p. 214.

22. Julia Kristeva refers to “the sacrificial logic of separation and syntactical sequence at the foundation of language and the social code” (The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], p. 199). Similarly, Jacques Derrida has pushed to a rigorous extreme the nonessentialist, purely differential system of culture and language, whose originary violence consists of “inscribing within a difference, … classifying, … suspending the vocative absolute” (Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], p. 112). “To think the unique within the system,” he elaborates, “to inscribe it there, such is the gesture of the arche-writing: arche-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence.”

I am grateful to the editors who invited me to participate in this collection and who organized the excellent conference for which many of these papers were prepared. My essay is a substantially revised and expanded version of an earlier study, which did not include the sections on Borges and Ribeyro: “El romance lationamericano: El género del Facundo y algunas de sus proyecciones recientes,” Dispositio 15, no. 39 (1990): 67-84. Diana Sorensen Goodrich offered intelligent suggestions for that initial study. I also wish to thank the following colleagues for probing questions or helpful comments: Jaime Concha, Martine Gantrel, William Katra, Erna Berndt Kelley, Reyes Lázaro, and Sylvia Molloy. Julie Jones originally shared with me her interest in Ribeyro's wonderful stories, and Alberto Julián Pérez directed me to his own excellent study of genre in Borges's fiction. Thomas Montgomery read this essay with extreme thoroughness and kindness and, as always, Daniel Balderston encouraged my research and shared his own with me.