SKURSKI - The Ambiguities of Authenticity

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TheAmbiguitiesofAuthenticityn LatinAmerica:DoinaBarbaraand the Construction fNational IdentityJulie Skurski

Anthropology,Michigan

We ... do not even retain the vestiges of our origi-nal being. We are but a mixed species of aboriginesand Spaniards. Americans by birth and Europeans bylaw, we find ourselves engaged in a dual conflict: weare disputing with the natives for titles of ownership,and at the same time we are struggling to maintainourselves in the country that gave us birth against theopposition of the invaders. Sim6n Bolivar, Congressof Angostura, 1819

Abstract This article argues that in Latin America nationalism's claims tounity and authenticity are premised upon ambiguous notions of civilizinghierarchy and exclusion. It traces the links between the establishment ofR6mulo Gallegos's 1929 novel Doha Bdrbaraas a mythic charter of the populist-nationalist project in Venezuela and the context of the novel's production andearly reception. Integrating Enlightenment and "irrationalist" ntellectual cur-rents, Dona Bdrbara provided a model for the identification of the reformist

Aspects of this research formed part of ajoint project,undertaken with FernandoCoronil, which was partly supported by the Spencer Foundation. The Centro deEstudios LatinoamericanosR6mulo Gallegos (CELARG)in Venezuelaoffered me itshospitality while I was working on this project. For their insightful suggestionsconcerning the issues I develop here, I would like especially to thank Lauren Ber-lant, Fernando Coronil, Geoff Eley, Roger Rouse, and David Scobey. I have alsobenefited greatly from discussions with CriscaBierwert, RaymondGrew,YolandaLecuna, Roberto da Matta, Sabine MacCormack,Sherry Ortner, Doris Sommer,Ann Stoler, Rebecca Scott, and the members of the women's history discussiongroup at the Universityof Michigan.PoeticsToday15:4 (Winter 1994). Copyright ? 1994 by The Porter Institute forPoetics and Semiotics. CCC0333-5372/94/$2.50.


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606 PoeticsToday 15:4middle-classelite as the agent of civilizingmodernity,capableof negotiatingunstableclaims to authoritywithin a fracturedpolity.In the turbulent period following World War I, a powerful strandof nationalist discourse contributed to the reconfiguration of politi-cal possibilities in Latin America. Claiming that the region could helprevitalize world civilization through its fusion of disparate cultures,the discourse of authenticity defined a position from which ascendingmiddle-class elites sought to reformulate the basis of national iden-tity. Fashioned in response to both imperial and domestic pressures, itdrew on idealist and "irrationalist" currents of thought which made astrong intellectual impact on the metropolitan centers in this period.These currents challenged the determinist evolutionary concepts thatguided ruling groups in much of Latin America while valorizing thespiritual and instinctual dimensions of life, which had long been dis-dained by liberal republicanism.The broad appeal of the discourse of authenticity lay in its dualthrust: it criticized the mimetic upper-class elites for divorcing them-selves from the pueblo (people), and it promoted the formation ofa nationally grounded elite which could channel popular energies.From this perspective, the hybrid racial makeup of Latin America wasboth a source of creative energy and a threat to civilized order. Theemerging middle-class elite sought to negotiate conflicting claims toauthority across class and national borders, consolidating yet conceal-ing the ambiguity at the center of the nationalist project.The discourse of authenticity constructed the figure of the spiritu-ally elevated leader as a solution to the problem of authority in soci-eties fractured by colonial relations. Romulo Gallegos (1884-1969),Venezuelan novelist and political leader, had a leading role in weav-ing this solution. His classic 1929 novel Dona Barbara imagined thepeaceful unification of Venezuela's land and people in the wake ofcivil strife and turned a newly hopeful gaze upon the terrain and cus-toms of the cattle-savanna frontier, the llanos. This novel of nationalorigins has been identified by its commentators primarily with theEnlightenment ideals that have guided modernity. Yet critical analy-ses of Dona Bdrbara have directed little attention to the undercurrentof metaphysical beliefs that sustain it or to the relational notions ofidentity and authority that it proposes.I discuss in this essay the emergence of a discourse of national iden-tity which involved the redefinition of the elite's link to the pueblo.Continuing to express the historical concern of Latin American think-ers with the unresolved issue of identity for a continent shaped by con-quest, colonization, and neocolonialism, the discourse of authenticitysought to present the nation's geography and untutored population as


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 607sources of untapped energy for resolving the opposition between theforces of "civilization" and of "barbarism."According to Gallegos's in-fluential vision of this conflict in DonaBarbara,the nation could achievethe synthesis of forces promised by Latin America's mestizaje(racialmixing) only if its elite became morally and culturally transformedthrough its efforts to redeem and reshape the pueblo.

AmbiguousFoundationsDona Barbaraaddresses the expansion of the polity and the legitimacyof authority in a nation ruled by regional caudillos and prey to for-eign incursions. As Doris Sommer argues in her innovative analysis,this novel is a populist version of the national romance. It allegoricallydepicts the political union between the state and the popular classesas simultaneously reflected in and dependent on the achievement of aromantic union between lovers of disparate class and racial origins. Bybridging vertical class differences to create a bond based on love, thecouple ultimately legitimizes the "nation-family." While sharing theconcerns and narrative structure of the nineteenth-century nationalromance, which addressed the problem of fissures within the elite anddepicted the union of lovers who had relatively equal status and flex-ible gender roles, the populist romance reinforces gender boundariesand reiterates social hierarchies. Concerned with legitimating an ex-panded state and pacifying an unruly populace, it seeks to establishclosure and hierarchy and to impose boundaries from a position ofauthority (see Sommer 1991: 286-89). Sommer's earlier analysis ex-plored how the populist narrative helped to prepare the culture ofpopulism by fixing categories and heroizing male authority (see Som-mer 1990: 90). This focus highlights an important dimension of thenovel's effectiveness: its naturalization of the nation as a bounded unitthat inspires passionate attachments.On this unstable postcolonial terrain, however, neither unity norauthority could be secured. My discussion here foregrounds the ambi-guity underlying this unity which at once destabilizes authority andauthorizes its renewal through the ongoing need to assert fluid bound-aries.' This process recreates the appeal of authority, making it seemboth desirable and necessary. It thus establishes a model for legiti-mate rule which rests on the power to negotiate the contradictoryallegiances and claims of the populist elite.Literary commentary on Dona Bdrbarareflects the growth and de-mise of the promise of progress for Latin America. During the rise ofeconomic nationalism and of modernization theory, critics praised the1. See Carlos J. Alonso (1990) for discussion of allegorical excess and fluid mean-ings in Dona Barbara.


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608 PoeticsToday 15:4novel's epic depiction of an "optimistic" resolution to the problem ofbackwardness in Latin America. But economic decline and political re-action fundamentally challenged the modernization project's premiseof linear progress, and with it the ordering intent of nation-buildingliterature. Latin America's literary Boom of the 1960s and 1970s,which was linked to the critique of modernization's homogenizing as-sumptions and marginalizing consequences, brought with it a rejectionof Dona Barbara on the part of many writers. They saw its depictionof a harmonious path to national unity by means of "love" ratherthan violence as an effect of a totalizing voice, one that echoed thestate's effort to construct itself as the locus of truth (ibid.: 72-74). Crit-ics contrasted it to contemporary novels that imaginatively renderedthe indeterminacy of meaning and the arbitrariness of authority thatnation-building novels suppressed.The conflicting claims for Dona Barbara as either an expression ofLatin America's authentic nature or a homogenizing construct thatconceals Latin America's actual play of reality and illusion tend to re-produce an assumption of authenticity rather than analyzing the novelin relation to the historical construction of authenticity as a concept.2My examination of the historical conditions of this novel's produc-tion and reception addresses the continuities between elite republicandiscourse and populist ideology, highlighting the interplay betweenrepresentations of unity and of subordination in the construction ofnational community.3

The Politicsof FraternalCommunityBenedict Anderson (1991), in an unusual step that has received littleattention, raises the issue of Latin America's role in formulating na-tionalism as a cultural construct. He credits the Creole elite, whichplayed a leading role in the foundation of the Latin American repub-lics, with having pioneered the formulation of modern nationalismin its fullest form. As exemplified by Simon Bolivar's proposals, thisformulation asserted an unequivocal relationship between the nation-state and the bond of citizenship that linked all those born withinthe national territory. This conceptualization of a horizontal and un-2. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria (1985) takes an alternative position, making theinteresting argument that contemporary Latin American literature is character-ized by its deconstructive stance toward writing. However, at one level his argumentcontinues the search for an authentic Latin American identity. He places Dona Bdr-bara within this deconstructive current and, in so doing, severs it from the socialrelations to which it was addressed.3. See Raymond Williams (1979) on the historical analysis of literary works. Mydiscussion also draws on Stuart Hall's (1986) interpretation of Gramsci; FredricJameson's (1981) analysis of the political unconscious; and Lauren Berlant's (1991)analysis of national subjects.


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 609differentiated unity among the people who shared the birthplace ofa given bounded land was transformative for the history of nation-alism. It set the parameters for the construction of what Andersondefines, "in an anthropological spirit," as an "imagined political com-munity." The national community, he argues, is not a fabrication or afalsehood, but a particular kind of cultural creation: an imagining ofan abstract common tie of citizenship that extends uniformly acrossthe territory, uniting the members of "even the smallest nation." Al-though most members of a nation remain unknown to each other, "inthe minds of each lives the image of their communion" (ibid.: 5-7).Through a myriad of regulatory techniques and standardizing con-cepts, national belonging becomes constructed as a natural attributeof identity. Above all, the construct of the nation is built on an abstractand decontextualized foundation from which it derives its modularcharacter. Buttressed by regulatory technologies that represent citi-zens and nations as identical to their respective peers and that collec-tively construct them as a "fraternity of equals," nationalism reordersidentities and experiences on the basis of a disjunction between repre-sentation and social practice. For the "fraternal"bond that unites thenational community, Anderson argues, is achieved apartfrom existingpractices of domination: "Regardless of the actual inequality and ex-ploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as adeep, horizontal comradeship" (ibid.: 6-7).Anderson's argument asks us to make the leap from an elite con-struct whose content is highly contested to a belief that is collectivelyheld across social divisions. In his view, the equalizing concept ofnationhood and the printed word that disseminated it were so com-pelling that the memory of the elite's effort to control the fearedmasses during the nation-state's foundation was quickly "washed away."Cleansed of these memories, the independent nation soon became amodel available for "pirating"by aspiring or threatened elites in otherregions of the world (ibid.: 81). Yet this assertion ignores the constitu-tive relationship between the model and its conditions of productionand reproduction. The Creole elite's struggle for independence wasinseparable from its efforts to resist both royal and popular pressurefor reform and to maintain control over land and labor. Violent con-flicts over citizenship, including civil wars inflected by class and raceand campaigns to suppress indigenous peoples, rent Latin Americanrepublics during their independence struggles and up to the end of thecentury. While Anderson notes the elite's defensive stance, he never-theless presents the concept of the nation as inclusive and as capableof equally motivating masses and elites to fight on its behalf.44. See Guha's (1985) critical comments on Anderson's attention to elite nationalismat the expense of popular-sector initiatives.


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610 PoeticsToday 15:4In analyzing the nation's universalizing form apart from the fullrange of its conceptual and institutional foundations, he also ignoresthe foundational exclusion of women from the national fraternity,uncritically utilizing "fraternity," associated with male bonds, as animage of inclusive and equalizing secular community. Anderson thuscontinues what Carol Pateman (1989) argues is the contemporary em-brace of fraternity as the favored model of freely undertaken com-munal civic bonds. As a result, fraternity has become the emblemof cooperative association, with little attention given to the historicalexclusions that have shaped its development (ibid.: 78-81). Comment-

ing on the unremarked exclusion of women from Anderson's model,Mary Louise Pratt (1987) has argued that his "community approach"reproduces certain assumptions of liberal ideology. This type of analy-sis treats "communities" in an idealized fashion, as if they were finite,autonomous, and homogeneous. Consequently, it either ignores rela-tions of hierarchy or examines the dominant and the dominated asseparate groups rather than as mutually constituted sectors, each withan "identity" that is bound up with the other's.5The disjunction in Anderson's analysis between the form of domi-nant belief and the conditions and meanings which inform its con-struction and appropriation poses the question of the relationshipbetween representation and power. Can we fruitfully analyze national-ism as a cultural artifact if it is severed from the hierarchical field of re-lations within which it is constituted and toward which it is addressed?How are its seemingly immutable features related to the contestedfield of meanings within which it is locally elaborated? Does nation-alism as an anticolonial construct set within neocolonial relations takeform and develop in specific ways?

While the concept of the nation represents itself in abstract terms,representations of national belonging weave together images thatpromise collective unity as well as collective exclusions and thus inter-lock, in Jameson's (1981) terms, the utopian and the ideological di-mensions of national consciousness. Without reducing nationalism toits expressive or instrumental functions, I wish to examine the con-struction of conceptions of unity and exclusion, of equality and hier-archy, as they address and encode historical practices and politicalprojects.Double Discourseand Authenticity

Anticolonial nationalism frequently claims as its goal the recovery ofan authentic communal past. It assumes that a colonized people share5. Pratt cites examples from studies of linguistic communities in which Black En-glish is essentialized as authentic and the impact of power differentials on gendereddifferences in speech behavior is ignored.


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Skurski*Ambiguities of Authenticity 611an original identity which can be liberated or restored through therejection of colonialism's pervasive influence. This assumption linksauthenticity to ideas of undisputed origins, original creation, and sus-tained tradition rather than to notions of imitation, appropriation,and syncretism. It evokes the image of a unified past from which thepresent is derived, in contrast to the ruptures and fragmentation in-duced by colonizing powers. In this guise, authenticity is called on toimpart certainty and wholeness to collective existence.However, in Venezuela, as in much of Latin America, anticolonialnationalist discourse was based on an ambiguous relationship to thepast and thus to the notion of authenticity as regards origins andpurity. The Creole elite could not claim the precolonial past as its own,for its power rested on the Spanish Empire's domination of indige-nous peoples and suppression of their past. Compounding the rupturewas the elite's view of Venezuela's native cultures as of a lower orderthan the acknowledged great civilizations of ancient Mexico and Peru.They lacked the visible signs of institutionalized state, religious, andintellectual authority to which the elite could lay claim as heirs.6 Para-doxically, the elite claimed that the indigenous resistance to conquestwhich characterized the nation's colonial past was central to Vene-zuela's authentic character, the origin of the rebellious spirit that runsthrough "Venezuelan blood." Rebelliousness was transformed from asign of savagery to a mark of national independence.The elite, in its quest for legitimacy, repudiated declining Spain andsaw its legacy as a colonial power as one of social degeneration ratherthan of community. Officially, the nation was conceptualized in termsof the Enlightenment promise that national unity could be achievedby eschewing the past and embracing the rule of reason and citizens'rights.7 Yet the elite resisted the transformation of colonial economicand social relations required by these principles. Thus abstract lib-eral rhetoric and law preceded the establishment of effective state au-thority in the new republic, and successive strong-man regimes utilizedthese abstractions as instruments of legitimation and concealment. Asa result, a divorce between the state's unifying claims and the exclu-sionary practices and beliefs they sustained became institutionalizedin the post-Independence period.86. Venezuela lacked a major indigenous civilization, such as Mexico had in theAztecs, which could serve as a corresponding source of past greatness for the Cre-ole elite (Pagden 1990). The native population was viewed largely as the degradedproduct of conquest and thus as a threat to progress.7. Anthony Pagden (1990) has stressed the abstract character of liberal discoursein Latin America, while Ernesto Laclau (1979: 178-79) has emphasized its anti-democratic, elitist character.8. Echoing a widely held conviction, Octavio Paz (1980: 111) has decried the divi-sive and oppressive effects of liberal rhetoric in Mexico: "Liberal democratic ideol-


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612 PoeticsToday 15:4Duality and ambiguity as regards the bases of collective authoritythus characterized the formation of the elite-led nationalist project,giving rise to a double discourse of national identity. Reflecting andeffecting divisions in the source of authority as well as concealingand recreating the fractures of a colonial legacy, this discourse hasnegotiated the shifting meanings attached to seemingly opposed socialcategories. The Creole elite was constituted by these divisions. Undercolonialism, this elite had been simultaneously defined as a "colonialcommunity and an upper class,"and thus was subject to imperial domi-nation, but also ruled as part of the colonial system (Anderson 1991:59). In the postcolonial project of nation-building, the elite could belocated within what Homi Bhabha (1990) calls a "doubly shifting fieldof categories." Belonging to a nation at the periphery of the metropoli-tan centers made the elite the object of ambiguous colonizing notionsof the colonial other. Caught between the need to deny and the need toassert its difference from the metropolitan power, the elite remainedunable to establish its authority through the authenticity of its origins(Bhabha 1985: 162).9Nationalist discourse reflects these contradictory impulses: on the

one hand, it presents itself as expressing a challenge to colonial andimperial domination, while, on the other, it promotes the goal of re-making society in the image of international progress. As Partha Chat-terjee (1986: 30) has argued, the foundational principles legitimizingthe domestic elite's rule are split between a commitment to nationalautonomy and an acceptance of "the very intellectual premises of'modernity' on which colonial domination was based." 0This split hascharacterized the elite's efforts to assert authority in Latin America, asits nationalist discourse embraced metropolitan models in the name ofindependence. In response to demands for reforms which would havechallenged oligarchic control and imperial expansion, the discourseof authenticity offered a new narrative of the nation's origins. Turningthe national landscape into a domestic space, it made authenticity theoffspring of the relationship between elite and pueblo on the nationalsoil.logy, far from expressing our concrete historicalsituation,concealed it. Thepoliticallie was virtuallyconstitutionallyinstalled among our peoples" (his emphases).9. Bhabha (1985: 150) links this division within the colonized to that within thecolonizer: "The colonial presence is alwaysambivalent, split between its appear-ance as original and authoritativeand its articulationas repetition and difference."10. Chatterjee elaborates here on the contradictory dynamics of nationalist dis-course, which, in its quest to deny the alleged inferiority of the colonized people,assertsthe nation'sabilityto undertakemodernizationon its own and thus endorsesthe premises of "modernity"on which colonial domination was based.11. See Berlant's (1991) innovative analysis of national fantasy and the state-mediated construction of identities.


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 613

Fraternityand MatrimonyThe concept of the nation as the source of collective authority andidentity was only marginally related to the political practices and be-liefs that prevailed during the founding period of the Venezuelanrepublic. Political independence from Spain, achieved after a long,devastating war (1811-1821), raised the issue of the arbitrary colonialdivisions among the empire's territories and foregrounded the fra-gility of the local state and the lack of attachment by the populace tothe nation.12 While the ruling elites elaborated a rhetoric of nationalprogress and popular sovereignty, they nevertheless continued to im-plement and defend an exclusionary system of class and ethnic rela-tions throughout the nineteenth century. The symbols and regulatorypractices of nationhood emerged more as a result of their internal con-flicts and efforts to attract foreign capital than from the establishmentof promised reforms.By the post-World War I period, civil order and state consolidationhad been achieved under the autocratic rule of General Juan VicenteGomez (1908-35). Political demands for the removal of G6mez andfor the modernization of the state then arose, with implications at theideological level of a need to endow the nation's past and its pueblowith positive cultural content. In the context of domestic as well ashemispheric challenges to oligarchic control, the effort made by somesectors of the intelligentsia to find value and promise in the raciallymixed population had great political significance.This quest for national identity did not entail validating Venezuela'scultural origins, but rather forging a synthesis of elite reason andpopular energy through the taming of the nation's social and physicalterrain. The discourse of authenticity posited a distinct Latin Ameri-can path to civilization marked by the ascendancy of spiritual andtelluric forces, guided by reason, over mere rationalist determinism.Central to the effort to renegotiate the relationship between LatinAmerica and the metropolitan powers, this discourse inverted theterms of dominant ideology, aligning materialist progress with spiri-tual debasement and coercion, and spiritualism with universality andhumanism.Gender was to play a crucial role in configuring this project. During12. Venezuela was not a separate administrative unit during most of the colo-nial period. Sim6n Bolivar, leader of the independence struggle in Venezuela andnorthern South America, attempted to reunite the territories that had once beenjoined to create a new nation, Gran Colombia, composed of Venezuela, Colombia(including Panama), and Ecuador. The union disintegrated in 1830, along withBolivar's dream of Pan-American unity, at the time of his death. See Arturo Ardao(1978) on the idea of Gran Colombia.


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614 PoeticsToday 15:4the independence struggle, patriarchal family metaphors were usedto justify revolt and to image political union with appeals to a son'sjustified rebellion against a stunting or tyrannical parent and to thefraternal right of male independence leaders to claim their patrimony(Felstiner 1983). At this time, the male military hero, the virile de-fender of abused national honor and territory, became the sacred iconof independent nationhood. In the subsequent period of national inte-gration, however, the gendered configuration of nationalist discoursebecame more complex. Women were closely associated with the forcesof the land to be tamed and protected, for example, while the familyunit became a metaphor for the unification of the fatherland under acentral authority which could defend it. The married couple, boundby a natural hierarchy that included the wife's dependence and thehusband's enlightened authority, metaphorically imaged the educa-tion of subordinate sectors of the population by the modernizing elitein a mutually energizing relationship. A metaphor that blurred classand ethnic divisions, the image of the nation as a family unit in whichopposing principles were synthesized and productively channeled em-bodied the promise of civilizing reforms.Dona Bdrbararepresents the primitive pueblo in ambiguous terms.The pueblo's barbarism, at once alluring and repellent, is intimatelylinked to women and to female forces. And, like the incomplete do-mestication of women, its disorderliness is never fully resolved by theproject of reform. With the argument that national identity could beconstructed through the synthesis of contradictory forces, ambiguitywould no longer be banished as a legacy of colonialism, but wouldbe incorporated into the ordering of evolving social relations. DonaBarbara offered a symbolic model for this synthesis within a familialunion bound by emotional ties of love and desire. This widely dis-seminated model has become an element in the "National Symbolic,"which, Lauren Berlant (1991) argues, operates as "the order of discur-sive practices" that makes those born within a national terrain "subjectsof a collectively-held history." This order, providing "a common lan-guage of a common space," is deployed in nationalist discourse "toproduce a fantasy of national integration" (ibid.: 20-22).

Bolivar:SpiritualGuideIn order to understand the ideological foundations of the discourse ofauthenticity, it is helpful to examine the early Republican leadership'sdebates, for they shaped the commonsense beliefs that the discoursereelaborated. In this respect, Bolivar's thought is central. Althoughhis efforts to advance social reform in the republics were defeated bythe landed elite during his lifetime, his thought later became canon-


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 615ized as Republican scripture.'3 Considered the manifest expression ofan already accomplished political emancipation, Bolivar's thought wasinvoked by contending forces to validate their respective claims.14Bolivar's address to the Congress of Angostura in 1819, near theend of the War of Independence, was pivotal to the subsequent for-mulation of nationalist ideology. His utopian vision of the Republic;his conviction that popular upheaval and the elite's divided identitythreatened the Republic's survival; his assertion that racial mixing wasthe only equalizing solution to social divisions; and his conviction thatthe political leadership was responsible for the moral elevation of themasses framed nationalist doctrine. Bolivar's concluding injunction tothe Republic to achieve racial, and thus class, unity reflected the on-going effort to contain revolt and to establish the foundations of anideology of mestizaje:

All our moralpowerswill not sufficeto save our infantrepublicfrom thischaos unless we fuse the massof the people, the government,the legisla-tion, and the nationalspirit into a single united body. Unity, unity, unitymust be our mottoin all things.The blood of ourcitizens s varied: et it bemixed for the sakeof unity. (Bolivar1951: 191)Bolivar offered the leaders of the divisive War of Independence animage of the Creole elite's split identity. On the one hand, the elite washeir to Europe's civilization and its beliefs and rules should rightfullybe adhered to by the refractory population. Yet the Creole elite, likethe popular masses, had been oppressed by Spain and should right-fully lead the masses in the struggle for freedom and independence.Thus Bolivar acknowledged the elite's conflicting allegiances to thecolonizer and the colonized.As a result of the elite's role as an agent of domination, however, thepopular masses did not recognize it as their rightful leader. Faced withthe threatened dissolution of the Republic, Bolivar argued for the cre-ation of a strong central government to control popular anarchic ten-dencies. Although citizens enjoyed "complete political equality" underthe Constitution, most of them had been corrupted by Spain's degrad-ing system of rule and their full political participation would produceonly a dangerous illusion of democracy.15The state had to "reeducate

13. Bolivar's persistent efforts to abolish slaveryand to redistribute the land, inparticular, met with failure. See Miguel Izard's(1979) discussion of the conserva-tive Creole elite's resistance to reform and the popular rebellion that it provoked.14. Fora pathbreakingdiscussionof the virtualdeificationof Bolivar,see GermanCarrera Damas (1969).15. Pagden (1990) underlines Rousseau's nfluence on Bolivar,as regards his con-cept of democracy and the popular will, so that by "the people" Bolivar meant


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616 PoeticsToday 15:4men" degraded by this "pernicious teacher" (ibid: 176-77). With thecreation of hereditary seats in a Senate composed of select men, thecitizenry could be educated in the "love of country" and "love of law"that they lacked.16 Through a distinction between elevated and de-graded spirits, this solution naturalized a division between the tutelaryelite and the untutored people.Bolivar closed his speech with a utopian flight "to the ages to come,"in which he imagined the nascent nation as part of a united continent,a paragon of civilized life. This image laid the ground for his laterefforts to promote a conception of the Americas as a cultural wholeand to invert the existing hierarchy of world civilization. Marvelingat "the prosperity, the splendor, the fullness of life which will thenflourish in this vast region," Bolivar envisioned a future when the newRepublic, no longer a backward colony, would be located at the very"heart of the universe," a source of mineral treasures, healing plants,and secret knowledge with which it would supply the rest of the world."I can see her crowned by glory, seated upon the throne of libertywith the sceptre of Justice in her hand, disclosing to the Old Worldthe majesty of the New" (ibid.: 197).In this address, Bolivar renounced his military title, "The Libera-tor," and asked to be called "The Good Citizen" (El Buen Ciudadano),for he felt that the nation's leaders should attend to the formationof an enlightened citizenry, the basis for which was civic education.With his passage from military defender of liberty to civil tutor offraternity, Bolivar established the opposing poles between which theconstruction of nationalist discourse was to oscillate.

TheMakingof a NationalistMythA mythic battle between the spirits of two leaders structures DonaBarbara. Simon Bolivar and Juan Vicente G6mez, Venezuelan leadersalmost one hundred years apart, both became woven into political dis-course and popular imagery as figures of extraordinary powers. Theyare juxtaposed in the novel through their incarnations, the morallythose who had sufficient standing and education to engage in the political processas citizens.16. Bolivar proposed a hereditary Senate divided into two chambers: Moralityand Education. He claimed as models for this entity the British Parliament and thegoverning bodies of antiquity to be found in Athens, Sparta, and Rome (Bolivar1951: 192). An electoral division between "active" and "passive" citizens, whichwas not based on clear class distinctions, would allow the select few to check the"popular will" and promote "popular enlightenment." This proposal was rejectedby Congress. Bolivar feared the divisive actions of a conservative elite that wieldedpower but was unprepared for leadership, so he sought a structure that wouldeducate the elite as well as the masses.


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 617principled reformer Santos Luzardo and the voracious tyrant DonaBarbara.

An epic tale of combat on the cattle plains between the forces ofcivilization and barbarism, Dofia Barbara depicts the triumph of thecultivated urban lawyer Santos Luzardo, a seeker of political reform,over Dona Barbara, a personification of rural despotism.17 In Lu-zardo's quest to bring peace and legal order to the plains, he mustexpel from the region the primitive mestiza Dona Barbara, who de-vours land and men, as well as her predatory Yankee ally, Mr. Danger,an adventurer who laughs at the nation's feeble laws. In an under-taking that parallels this battle, Luzardo instructs the lovely, innocentMarisela in correct speech and good manners. She is the untutoreddaughter of Dona Barbara, who abandoned her, and Luzardo's cousin,Lorenzo Barquero, a former law student who sank into moral decay.Luzardo succeeds in vanquishing Dona Barbara through legal meansrather than by violence, likewise domesticating Marisela through "edu-cation" and "love." The marriage between Luzardo and Marisela an-nounced at the novel's end represents the promise of the nation's har-monious and productive future under the direction of the benevolentliberal state. The family will become orderly and productive, just asthe llanos will be fenced and the cattle domesticated.Gomez had governed Venezuela for twenty-one years by the timeDona Bdrbara was written.18 A rural strong man from the Andeanregion who had little formal education, he occupied high governmentpositions after 1899 and became president in 1908 by deposing theman who had brought him to power. Ruling during the years whenGallegos began to teach and write, Gomez came to embody for the au-thor the defeat of the Bolivarian promise to elevate the pueblo. Muchof the propertied and professional elite allied themselves with Gomez,for he ended civil conflict among regional caudillos. Civil peace andthe suppression of dissent allowed the agrarian export economy to17. The civilization/barbarismopposition structured nineteenth-century liberaldiscourse, and the names of DonaBdrbara'smain characters ocate them in relationto this conflict. Santos Luzardo'sname suggests "HolyLight,"while Dona Barbarameans "Madam Barbarian."The title "Dona,"reserved in colonial times for thewhite elite woman, signifies her status as a landowner (duena)and powerful localfigure. As Roberto da Matta (1991) points out in his pioneering work on ambi-guity and figures of power, Dona Barbara, like other female literary figures ofLatin America, is able to exercise power from within the strictures of patriarchalrelations.18. G6mez ruled from 1908 until his death in 1935. He secured political powerthrough his monopolistic hold over land, industry,and trade, which brought himenormous wealth. He allowed no political organizationsand repressed all opposi-tion, asserting that Venezuela'spolitical parties were but fronts for the privilegedpursuit of financial gain and incitement of civil strife.


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618 PoeticsToday 15:4recover and provided a favorable climate for attracting foreign petro-leum companies. In the 1920s, these companies established the oilexport industry which was to transform the country.19In G6mez's handpicked Senate sat intellectuals who drew on Euro-pean geographic and racially determinist theories to argue that theautocratic Gomez was the "necessary gendarme" for Venezuela's un-ruly people. The writings of his leading ideologue, Laureano Valle-nilla Lanz, a conservative thinker whose critique of liberal institutionsas unsuited to Latin American reality was influential outside Vene-zuela, defined the Gomez regime as "Democratic Caesarism," the formof government appropriate to overseeing the evolution of an anar-chic, mixed-race society.20This doctrine, he claimed, derived from theideas of Bolivar, who had proclaimed himself dictator for life in thewake of strife within the new Republic. Gomez was indifferent to thesetheories, but revered Bolivar as a military leader and an advocate ofstrong central rule. Rejecting the language of abstractlyequal subjects,Gomez constructed an image of the national community on the modelof an orderly and productive cattle hacienda under his patriarchalrule.21

Opponents of Gomez also drew on Bolivar's legacy to construct acritique of the regime. In 1928, the first mass protest against G6mez,which began as a celebration of the university, linked the leaders of In-dependence to popular struggles against oppression. Student speechesrhetorically identified the university's Queen of the Students with thespirit of liberty and called on Bolivar's spirit to lead the people inher defense against domestic and foreign oppressors.22They revived asuppressed Bolivarian image of the national community as a fraternalmember of a Latin American union formed to repel colonizing as-saults. In this vision, the repositories of national value, that is, libertyand the land, were imaged as female.The demonstrations and subsequent arrests were pivotal to the for-mation of a new opposition leadership and consciousness. They drew19. See Fernando Coronil (in press) for an analysis of the transformations thatoccurred in the definitions of value and national identity with the rise of thepetroleum industry.20. Vallenilla Lanz, positivist sociologist, president of the Senate, and editor ofthe regime's newspaper, wrote articles on social evolution and history that werecollected in his influential Cesarismo emocrdticoVallenillaLanz 1952 [1919]). SeeCharles A. Hale (1986: 413) on the intellectualcontext of Vallenilla's hought.21. On the still inadequatelystudied G6mez regime, see B. S. McBeth(1983), EliasPino Iturrieta (1988), Tomas Polanco Alcantara(1990), Yolanda Segnini (1982),Arturo Sosa (1985), and William Roseberry(1986).22. See Mario Torrealba Lossi (1979: 63-94) for an accountof these events, andSkurski(1993) for an analysisof the actionstakenand speeches made at the studentdemonstrations.


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 619broad expressions of support from across social classes, and the im-prisonment of sons of the middle and upper class disturbed even theregime's allies. Out of this experience the nuclei of future politicalparties were conceived, led by those who became collectively known asthe "Generation of '28."Romulo Gallegos wrote Dona Barbara in dialogue with these pro-tests and with the suppressed dissent to the regime that they revealed.Many of the students who were arrested had studied with him at theCaracas high school where he not only taught, but was the director,and regarded him as their mentor. Throughout his career as an es-sayist, fiction writer, and educator, Gallegos expressed his belief in theneed to govern the pueblo by law rather than by force. In a politicalculture characterized by violent competition for power, he sought toconstruct a model of the virile reformer of nonviolent means.

Following the protests, Gallegos revised the manuscript of his latestnovel, which concerned a female rural boss on the llanos.23With thesechanges, it became a tightly structured mythic tale, an allegory of thenation's rule by despotism and of the projected triumph of the lib-eral, modernizing state. Uncertain as to the reaction of the repressiveGomez regime, Gallegos published Dona Barbara in Spain, at his ownexpense, while he was in Europe. It won a literary prize, and Spanishcritics hailed it as an authentic expression of Latin America's humandrama. This recognition by Europe at once validated the work in theview of the Venezuelan public and defined it as an expression of aLatin American reality for readers elsewhere. Critics in Latin Americahailed Dona Barbara as a work of "universal literature," deeming it"classic" in style, resonant of Cervantes and Tolstoy, and free of the"parochial descriptions" (costumbrismo)ound in much of the region'sliterature. These critics in Spain and Latin America accorded DonaBarbaraliterary greatness because it had turned its gaze inward towardthe rural heart of the nation, yet had adopted a narrative positionof distance from and mastery over the scenes it presented.24 It was23. Gallegos began to write essays on civic affairs and public morality in 1908,with G6mez's ascent, for a journal optimisticallytitled La Alborada The Dawn),which was soon closed down by the regime. See Rafael Fauquie Bescos (1985),on Gallegos'searly writings. For an account of the circumstancesunder which hewrote-and revised-Doha Bdrbara, ee Juan Liscano (1969), D. L. Shaw (1972),and John E. Englekirk (1948).24. Critics widely viewed Dona Barbaraas a nationalist reworking of prevailingpositivist notions of progress and regarded it as a descendant of Domingo Sar-miento's 1845 denunciation of rural caudillismo, Facundo.Sarmiento, an Argen-tine reformer and statesman, had also promoted popular education and was oncepresident of his country. However,he sought to imitate and import European andU.S. models of progress and disparagedthe rural population (see Sarmiento 1985[1845]).


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620 PoeticsToday 15:4identifiably local and yet abstract, it avoided implicating the nationalelite directly in its denunciation, and it was thus accessible to differentpolitical sectors in diverse countries.Written in visibly symbolic terms and in the familiar form of a ro-mance, Doia Barbarawas intended to reach an audience beyond liter-ary circles. Eschewing the era's literary conventions, Gallegos soughtto incorporate both elite and popular speech and practices withina narrative structure that would model the principles of social andindividual transformation that he promoted.25 This ambitious intent,which is often misread by today's critics and readers, transformed thedescriptive material about life on the llanos into symbolic expressionsof archetypal cosmic and psychic forces. In doing so, the novel ad-dressed Venezuelan and Latin American readers as participants in theworld of "universal" literary works and historical processes.This populist national romance dressed in positivist clothing ap-peared at a time when the social basis of the regime was beginningto shift. Given Gomez's monopolization of power and wealth in thecontext of the nation's increasing incorporation into the internationaleconomy, discontent with the regime's restrictions was growing withinthe elite and among foreign powers. While the Gomez regime hadlong employed a conservative rhetoric of progress, it then began torefashion its image to convey an appearance of reform.Dona Barbara lent itself to a variety of political interpretations, in-cluding those consistent with dominant evolutionary assumptions. Inan incident which is not included in contemporary official discourse,for it suggests dangerous continuities with the present, Gomez madea striking effort to appropriate Doia Barbara as an expression of hisregime's civilizing vision. As the story goes, Gomez, who closely moni-tored suspected critics of his regime, heard conflicting reports aboutGallegos's novel and its intent. While many praised its optimistic visionof orderly progress, others warned Gomez that the novel criticized hisrule through the figure of the brutal Dona Barbara, a landowner whoruled the llanos by means of magic, seduction, and force. Orderinghis secretary to read the novel out loud to him at his hacienda, fromwhich he governed, Gomez was transfixed by the story, insisting thathis secretary finish reading the book by the light of car headlights.This book, Gomez allegedly declared with satisfaction, was not againsthim. Indeed, writing such books was what all writers should be doing,instead of fomenting foolish revolutions (Liscano 1969: 117). Gomezthen sought to align Gallegos with his regime and thus to intervene inthe novel's reception by casting it as a tribute to his pacification of the25. On the trends that were popular among the literary vanguard of this period,see T. Nelson Osorio (1985).


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 621countryside. He appointed Gallegos Senator from Apure, the llanosstate in which the novel was set and which had been a source of troopsfor the War of Independence. With one gesture, then, Gomez at-tempted to incorporate author, novel, and region, along with their re-spective associations of Independence, into his centralizing project.26In an effort to establish himself and his novel as a voice and anexpression of opposition, Gallegos left Venezuela for exile in Spainuntil Gomez's death.27 There he wrote novels and became an adviserfor and emblem of non-Marxist reform movements in Latin America.With his return to Venezuela in 1936, he moved from emblem to activeleader of the democratic opposition, working to found a multi-classreformist party which would be neither Marxist nor conservative. Thismass party, "Acci6n Democratica" (Democratic Action), was foundedin 1941, with Gallegos as its president, and Dona Barbara'selevation tothe status of national novel accompanied the rise of the party. When ADheld power from 1945 to 1948, it launched a capitalist reform projectthat party followers believed mirrored the novel's vision.28 Gallegos,who had become publicly identified with the redemptive figure ofSantos Luzardo, won an overwhelming victory in 1947 as the nation'sfirst president to be elected under universal suffrage. However, he wasoverthrown by the military and was exiled again nine months aftertaking office. With AD'Sreturn to power in 1959 and with the con-solidation of oil rent-based democracy in the following decades, DonaBarbara became institutionalized as the mythic charter for the mod-ern state, a representation of unity that elided and concealed classdifferences.29

FluidIdentitiesBeneath Dona Barbara's didactic narrative voice, which persistentlyseeks to establish unambiguous categories, lies an unsettling recogni-tion of the instability of meanings. Opposing forces traverse land andpeople, dissolving moral boundaries and awakening transgressive de-sires, thereby revealing the arbitrary marks of colonizing authority.26. See S. R. D. Baretta and John Markoff (1978) for an innovative study of thecattle plains' associations with Independence and with violence.27. In a public letter from his preliminary exile in New York, Gallegos refused hisappointment to the puppet Senate and denounced the G6mez regime as unconsti-tutional (see Liscano 1969: 120).28. Acci6n Democratica came to power in a contradictory fashion, namely, througha military coup against the elite-controlled but reformist Medina regime. See SteveEllner (1980) on AD'S expansion during this period.29. For discussion of Dona Barbara's appropriation by official and opposition dis-course and the populist project's construction of authority, see Coronil and Skurski(1991), and Skurski and Coronil (1993).


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622 PoeticsToday 15:4In what Maya Scharer-Nussberger (1979a: 509-17) terms a pendularmovement between subject and object, characters interact with theirexternalized self-reflection, become puppets of their mythic creations,and merge fantasy with reality.30This relational model of identity formation, which draws on Roman-tic subject/object paradigms, gives subjective content to a hierarchicalmodel of spiritual evolution and moral authority. Shifting categoriesinteract with the normative framework in a movement of reciprocalconstruction. The result is neither the fixing of unambiguous cate-gories nor the deconstruction of categories by the indeterminacy ofmeaning. Instead, new authority is constituted through the negotia-tion of ambiguity. Santos Luzardo and Dona Barbara exemplify thisrelational model of self-realization. Luzardo's sense of identity is bothrenewed and threatened by his immersion in a land which is primitivebut not pristine. The land was taken from the natives by conquerors,yet the land conquered the invaders, in turn, by making them mixed-race, semi-barbarians who plague the embattled cities. The violenceof llanos life is rendered both as authentically Venezuelan and as asign of the nonviability of Venezuela's nationhood.31

Luzardo is split into opposing selves which reflect the fractures ofhis class. Upon reencountering his cousin, Lorenzo Barquero, who isthe helpless discard of despotism, he "sees"what he himself could be-come under the seductive influence of life on the lawless llanos. Hiscousin had also once been a brilliant lawyer in the capital, a glitteringorator among the imitative urban elite who had argued for politicalreform. But when Barquero realized that his knowledge of the lawwas a meaningless artifice, an illusion of rhetoric, he had become con-sumed with self-loathing and had returned to the llanos. There, he30. Scharer-Nussberger (1979a, 1979b) provides a compelling analysisof the de-constructiveinterchange between the subjectand its fetishizedreflection. However,in treating the power of ambiguityas the novel'sactual but unintended meaning,she contradicts Gallegos'sdidactic purpose. In doing so, she ignores the link be-tween the dissolution of identities and the reassertionof them withina relationshipof power.31. Dona Bdrbarapresents the plainsmen as the indigenous people of this land,while the Indians, reduced to a miserableresidual population, live at the marginsof even this frontier. The novel regards Indians with repugnance. They embodygross superstition and unsocializedbehavior; ungle Indianstaught the young Bar-baraevil spells and sexual magic so that she could enslave men, for example, whileMarisela chases Indian beggars from Luzardo's door, calling them pigs. TheIndian of the national landscape exists only as a curse on the land left by thevanquished and as living proof that certain character traits, such as indolenceand cruelty,are inherited, carried within the blood from generation to generation(Gallegos 1959 [1929]: 517, 570, 646, 661).


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 623succumbed to his obsession with Dona Barbara, "bewitched by the in-satiable woman and victim of the aphrodisiac potion she made himdrink" (Gallegos 1959 [1929]: 578, 519). Luzardo recognizes in hiscousin, a figure of "enlightened barbarism," the elite's failure to con-quer and domesticate rural barbarism and thus its failure to establishits authority by anchoring meaning to moral action.32Yet the conquest of barbarism implies the need for Luzardo tocontrol his own potential for barbarism, the "Centaur" he carrieswithin him. He almost succumbs to the lure of lawlessness and self-gratification, strongly attracted as he is to its unbounded freedom andits seeming inescapability. In the process of proving himself as a man,by meeting challenges to his leadership and physical prowess, he be-gins to become despotic and violent. He is only redeemed throughMarisela's love, with her domestication rendered as the product ofhis benevolent instruction.33 Luzardo's formation as a truly mascu-line leader, ruled by rationality, requires that he develop a spiritual,feminine side.Dona Barbara is also split into opposing selves-in her case, as aconsequence of colonialism's predatory violence. In the past she hadbeen simply Barbara, an innocent, untutored girl who yearned for loveand whose youthful self is later mirrored in her daughter, Marisela.Now she has become the feared Dona Barbara, a destructive figure ofundifferentiated sexual energy, with male and female impulses mix-ing in a "monstrous hybrid combination," driven to conquer men inrevenge for her own conquest. She is the creation of a monstrous act,for she was raped as an adolescent by men who also murdered theyoung man from whom she had learned to read and who had arousedfeelings of love and respect in her. Thus Dona Barbara's encounterwith Luzardo unexpectedly transforms her, as she responds to himunconsciously as the incarnation of her murdered love and, corre-spondingly, as the enlightened "law"that she desires. Aware that sheis becoming domesticated and feminine, Dona Barbara reflects uponherself in a rare moment of introspection. She acknowledges the de-stabilizing effect on her identity of her desire for Luzardo, telling him,32. Gonzalez Echevarria (1985: 54-55) regards Barquero as having "the finalauthority in the novel," for his insight into the nonreferentiality of language de-constructs signification. However, the dissolution of meaning that Barquero enactscan be seen alternatively as the sterile response of an imitative elite that refuses toground its knowledge in engagement with social reality. Luzardo is ratified in thenovel as a creator of meaning through his efforts to link word and deed.33. For an illuminating discussion of the formation of the bourgeois subjectthrough the differentiation and mutual constitution of high and low, see PeterStallybrass and Allon White (1986).


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624 PoeticsToday 15:4"If I had encountered men like you in my path before, my story wouldbe a different one" (ibid.: 654). From this insight follows her attemptto undo her life of despotism. Her spirit familiar tells her, in what thenarrator calls "Kabbalistic"words, "Things return to the place fromwhence they came" (ibid.: 709). She rids herself of her henchmen,her stolen lands, and her masculine demeanor, and she grants herabandoned daughter the inheritance due her. Yet she cannot becomeanother in the eyes of Luzardo, for he regards her transformation asbut a change in appearance.With an act in which she returns to her origins as the hate-filledDona Barbara, she achieves authentic change. Upon seeing Mariselaand Santos Luzardo in affectionate conversation, Dona Barbara isseized by an impulse to shoot Marisela and eliminate her rival. But shesuddenly "sees," as in a vision, her former self incarnated in the per-son of Marisela and decides instead to leave the llanos. By renouncingher desire to possess through violence, she makes it possible for theparallel domestication of the llanos to begin. As she recedes downriverto her place of origin, the barbarous currents within Luzardo andMarisela subside as well, and they agree to marry. But as the ambigu-ous ending suggests, with its evocation of indigenous beliefs in hiddenwater spirits, Dona Barbara remains as a submerged presence. Shelives on in legend and fantasy, a symbol of seductive primal instinctswithin leader and pueblo alike. As she returns to her riverbed, in thenovel's last line, she leaves behind the llanos, where "agood race [raza]loves, suffers and hopes."

MetaphysicalNationalismThis relational construct of identities mediated by mythic forces andintuitive comprehension draws on the critique of rationalism and de-terminism that gained acceptance among the intelligentsia during theinterwar period. However, largely because of their modernizing as-sumptions, accounts of nationalism's consolidation in Latin Americatend to present a genealogy of ideas divorced from their social con-text and from their role in the production of the social order. Suchaccounts devote little attention to nationalism's cultural dimension,abstracting it from the religious beliefs and historical memories thatinflected political concepts derived from European contexts. Secular-izing assumptions and reductionist notions of power have thus beenprojected onto nationalist movements and projects, obscuring dimen-sions of meaning that have been refracted through the experience ofcolonialism.The prevailing currents of nationalist thought in Latin Americaafter World War I involved a critique of determinist theories of racial


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 625evolution and the assertion of mestizaje as a uniquely Latin Ameri-can contribution to the advancement of world civilization.34 Prior tothis period, the European-oriented domestic elites, allied with foreigninterests, had promoted positivist evolutionism. Based on a biologi-cally defined notion of race and a belief in the superiority of theracially pure, then modified by Comtean notions of geographic de-terminism, this theory closely accorded with the imperial division ofthe world.35 Latin America's mixed-race societies were relegated tothe bottom rung of the social-evolutionary ladder, justifying their con-signment to the margins of world civilization and their passive role assuppliers of materials and recipients of material progress.36Those intellectuals who employed the discourse of authenticitysought to counter this Eurocentric model, which threatened to even-tually destroy national culture and autonomy. Rejecting biological de-terminants in relation to national potential, they built on a geoculturalconcept of the pueblo as a product of evolution on a shared terrain.The theory that geography and people interacted historically to pro-duce a collective soul became the basis of the notion of race, or "raza,"as people. The environment was a factor that both conditioned andexpressed a people's character. Raza became the defining term in theeffort to cast Latin America as a site of historical agency and source ofcultural originality. While the land-based notion of raza originated inpositivist geographic determinism and retained some of its essential-izing assumptions, it was combined with relativizing anthropologicalfindings on non-Western cultures and neo-Romantic concepts of spiri-tual forces in order to call into question unilinear notions of progress.This rejection of a biological concept of race was accordingly part ofan epistemological critique of the rationalist premises that sustainedevolutionary determinism. The postulation of industrial progress asthe highest form of civilization, critics argued, rested on a dichotomybetween mind and spirit, a dichotomy that permitted the uncheckedadvance of materialism and that valorized a notion of progress di-vorced from moral and spiritual development. Anglo-American capi-talism, they claimed, promoted material progress at the cost of human34. For discussions about the diverse thinkers who contributed to the culturalnationalist critique, see MartinS. Stabb(1967), H. E. Davis (1963), Nicolas Shum-way(1991), Leopoldo Zea(1944), Ofelia Schutte (1993), RichardM. Morse(1989),and Charles A. Hale (1986).35. Positivistevolutionism was builton the theories of Darwinand Spencer, whichdominated Anglo-American scientificdiscourseof the late nineteenth century.SeeNancy Stepan (1982) on the Britishdevelopmentof theories of racialdeterminism.36. Ann Stoler (1992) offers an insightful analysisof the politically charged pro-cess by which those of mixed race are defined.


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626 PoeticsToday 15:4spiritual impoverishment.37 This "civilized barbarism" had been un-leashed upon the world, displacing older forms of civilization. Itsmimicry by the Latin American elite was an expression of "enlight-ened barbarism" (la barbarielustrada),the nation's worst enemy.38Thiscritique, which focused on capitalism's imperialist manifestations andon Anglo-American control, sought to center a humane capitalismwithin the domestic elite's domain.The articulation of these ideas involved the intelligentsia in directengagement with social and political issues, for a central tenet of thisphilosophical reorientation was that the nation's leadership must havean intimate knowledge of the pueblo in order to uplift it.39This effortto reverse colonialist conceptions of backwardness was crucial for thepolitical elite's assumption of a position of authority within the con-text of national political reform. If the intellectual leadership turnedto an exploration of the national terrain, it did so not in order to givea voice to the pueblo, but to discover and synthesize popular elementsin its construction of an authentic national identity.The goal of seeking new sources of creativity within the nation ac-corded new value to the spiritual and religious dimensions of life thatwere important to both pueblo and elite. This intersection in LatinAmerica between religious beliefs and a political nationalism infusedwith mystical notions has been largely overlooked. Yet many wereconcerned with these issues, and their concepts were familiar amongbroad sectors of the political and intellectual elite in Europe and LatinAmerica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theimpulse to link nationalism with metaphysical or mystical beliefs re-ceived strong support from the European thinkers who identified withthe challenge to positivism and the turn toward the "irrational."Public37. These ideas, although common to many,became closely associated with JoseEnrique Rod6. This Uruguayanwriter's nfluential 1900 essayArieldefined an elit-ist brand of idealism in which Anglo-Saxon culture was regarded as lacking in theaesthetics and vision that characterizedLatin culture and which posited the right-ful leadership by a natural meritocracycomposed of the intellectual elite (Stabb1967: 35-42).38. Many of these ideas had been developing since the mid-nineteenth century.Argentine thinkers and political leaders in particularformulated conflicting theo-ries of the civilization/barbarismopposition with reference to the clash betweencentralists and federalists. Forexample, Alberdi lauded regional life and attackedthe artificial "barbarie lustrada" n writingswith which Gallegos was familiar.SeeJose Luis G6mez-Martinez(1980: 492), and Shumway(1991).39. For examples in relation to Mexico, see Zea (1944); for those pertainingto Argentina, see Shumway (1991). Mabel Morana (1984) discusses the impactof changing center/periphery and class relations on political thought duringthe period. On the continuing engagement with authenticity in Latin Americanthought, see Mario Samborino(1980).


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 627interest centered on two, closely interrelated areas: scholarly theoriesthat affirmed the priority of the nonrational in the development andperception of the world; and the popularization of Eastern thought,the Kabbalah, Freemasonry, spiritualism, and the occult.Latin American thinkers applied the European challenge to posi-tivism toward the revaluation of Latin American culture's spiritualcharacter. The formulation of a nationalist critique of dominant ma-terialist theories drew heavily on Hegel, especially on his concept ofhistory as a dialectic of self-realizing spirit, and on Nietzsche, particu-larly his concept of the spiritually elite as capable of attaining freewill.40Bergson's and Sorel's theories concerning the intuitive appre-hension of reality, the central role of symbols and myth in history, andthe relativity of time also had a strong impact on arguments for LatinAmerica's nonmaterialist culture.

European self-questionings became implicated in the redefinitionof Latin America's identity. After World War I, which had provokeda broad challenge to the belief in progress, many influential Euro-pean thinkers began to express a conviction that Western civilizationhad become dangerously ossified and that "barbarism"could providea revitalizing infusion of primal energy. Rather than being viewedas a threatening source of anarchy, societies and peoples associatedwith barbarism were regarded from this perspective as sources of cre-ative power and imagination waiting to be tapped. The quest by socialthinkers for these sources, the turn toward the primitive occurring inthe European arts, and the search by mystical thinkers for terrainsthat would be receptive to the development of esoteric knowledge con-verged to reconfigure Latin America as a privileged site of spiritualrevitalization.

For the intelligentsia in Latin America, the leading source for theseviews was an influential journal published in Spain, Revistade Occidente(Journal of the Occident), founded in 1923 by the Spanish philosopherJose Ortega y Gasset. This journal, which featured articles by Germanidealist and phenomenological philosophers, tended to problematizerationalism.41 The journal grew out of Spain's identity crisis follow-ing its final defeat as an imperial power by the United States in 1898.40. On the impact of the Kabbalah on Hegel and other European thinkers, seeBruce F. Campbell (1980: 13), and Gershom Scholem (1941: 203; 1974: 200).41. See Gonzalez Echevarria's (1977: 52-61) discussion of thejournal's impact andits influence on the rise of the Afro-Cuban movement in the arts. "Despite its namethe Revista de Occidente disseminated in the twenties theories of culture in whichWestern civilization no longer occupied a privileged place." He cites references tothe Kabbalah in the writings of Alejo Carpentier, a leading Cuban novelist activein the European avant-garde, as an expression of this period's strong interest inthe hidden dimension of reality.


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628 PoeticsToday 15:4Ortega y Gasset asked how Spain could join, yet not be marginalizedby, Europe's stifling civilization. Influenced by Hegel and Nietzsche,he argued that an enlightened elite must guide the impulses of themasses in order to develop a nation's vitality. Latin America, he con-cluded, offered the vigorous barbarism that Europe needed, one thatpromised to restore Europe's greatness.42The journal also published Spanish translations of major books onthese subjects, which circulated widely in Latin America. Two of theseare relevant to this discussion: Oswald Spengler's (1926 [1918]) Declineof theWest,n 1923, and Count Hermann Keyserling's 1932 SouthAmeri-can Meditations,in 1933.43 Spengler, who was read avidly by a broadpublic, drew on theorists of the unconscious and historical idealists toinform his argument that cultures follow independent paths of growthin cyclical rhythms and evolve through unique racial syntheses of cos-mic and psychic forces. Like Nietzsche before him, Spengler believedthat only an injection of energy from primitive sources could halt thedecline of the materially advanced West. His influential work not onlyinspired the Latin American intelligentsia to explore autochthonouscultural expressions, but his ideas, appropriated from the margins ofthe metropolitan West, were seen as ratifying Latin America's iden-tity as an original, synthetic civilization derived from the mixing ofdifferent races on American soil.Count Keyserling synthesized the diverse currents of Eastern, spiri-tualist, and esoteric thought, which were enjoying a widespread re-vival at that time in Europe. A member of the German aristocracyin Estonia, he wrote for and lectured to a largely elite audience inWestern Europe on the future of civilization, the nature of cosmicorder, and the path to enlightenment. More optimistic than Spengler,Keyserling predicted the birth of a vigorous civilization on the SouthAmerican continent, although at present, he noted, this region hadreached only "the third day of creation." The continent was still at aprimordial stage, he declared, as shown by the Andean people, whowere "mineraloid men," and life there was driven purely by telluricenergy and was still devoid of spirituality (Keyserling 1933 [1932]:14-41).4442. Ortega y Gasset expressed these ideas in his 1926 essay "Hegel and America"(Ortega y Gasset (1957 [1926]). He first visited Latin America in 1914 (Stabb 1967:70-71).43. Keyserling's (1927) World in the Making was well-known in European intel-lectual circles. Essays by these authors appeared in the journal as well (see, e.g.,Spengler [1924] on "race" and "people").44. According to Keyserling (1933 [1932]: 238), "It is possible and even probablethat the next rebirth of that spirit which made possible in ancient times the Greekmiracle ... will arise in South America, for the salvation of all men and to redeem


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 629While Latin America provided for European intellectuals a revital-izing encounter with the primitive Other, the Latin American intel-lectual elite defined its own encounter with the internal Other asa recognition of Self. Three influential works by leading intellectu-als celebrated mestizaje as Latin America's indigenous cultural con-tribution to world civilization: Jose Vasconcelos's (1948 [1926]) Laraza cosmica;Ricardo Rojas's (1924) "Eurindia";and Raul Haya de laTorre's (1936) A dondeva Indoamerica?By "indigenous," Vasconcelosand Rojas meant the people who had settled the American lands, notthe "Indians," whom they regarded as conquered and broken.45 Forthem, the idea of mixing, or synthesis, was part of an evolutionarymovement toward "white,"understood as modern, culture.46"Perhapsamong all the characters of the fifth race those of the white one willpredominate, but this supremacy should be the fruit of the free eleva-tion of choice" (Vasconcelos 1948 [1925]: 37). Through a spirituallyguided process of mestizaje, argued Vasconcelos, in terms resonantwith mystical references, evolution toward a final "cosmic race" wouldoccur.Haya de la Torre, a leading Peruvian political figure whose nation-

alist doctrine was influential across the continent, asserted that theIndian rather than the Hispanic past provided an image of communalunity and a promise of the future equality that would be attained bythe region's new raza.47Drawing on Inca culture and steeped in mys-them from savagery." One of Keyserling's followers noted with surprise that SouthAmerican readers were not alienated by this book despite its unflattering portrayalof the people there. Because South America had "a continental inferiority com-plex," she reasoned, readers there were "extremely flattered to have Keyserlingwrite a whole thick volume about it, declaring it to be the most important andsignificant continent in the world, even if only in a creepy, slimy, reptilian sort ofway" (Parks 1934: 272).45. Rojas, a leading Argentinian literary critic, made nativism a metaphor fordomestic culture, which he associated with the aesthetic, the land, and freedom,and called for its integration with cosmopolitan culture, which he associated withmaterial advancement and political organization. Their synthesis would create anational culture, "Eurindia."46. Vasconcelos, Mexico's Minister of Education in the post-Revolutionary period,influenced the turn in the arts and education toward the glorification of indigenouselements in Mexican culture. In his Spenglerian work La raza c6smica(Vasconcelos1948 [1925]), he envisioned the development of a cosmic race in the tropics, nearthe site of the lost continent of Atlantis, that would revive the ancient Egyptianideal of harmony among three states: the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the ma-terial. See Ronald Stutzman (1981) for a discussion of mestizaje as an ideology ofcultural "whitening." On the promotion of cultural "whitening" in Venezuela, seeWinthrop Wright (1990) and, in Brazil and Mexico, see Richard Graham (1990).47. Haya de la Torre was the founder of Peru's Alianza Popular RevolucionariaAmericana (APRA) movement and a major voice in the reconfigured nationalist


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630 PoeticsToday 15:4ticism, Eastern philosophy, and occult beliefs derived from his studiesin Europe, particularly of Count Keyserling's work, Haya formulateda theory of "historical space-time" on which he based his vision ofcivilization's regeneration in the Americas. This rebirth would dependon the intervention of spiritually prepared leaders who, through theiraccess to special sources of knowledge, would be able to synthesize theforces associated with the different civilizations then at odds in thehemisphere: the Anglo-European, and the Indo-American. This taskcould be accomplished only by leaders who had attained the highestlevels of consciousness.48These thinkers all assumed that the unformed pueblo could attainconsciousness as a historical subject through the mediation of its en-lightened leadership. Yet they offered no explanation of how either ofthese subjects would emerge. Their discourse exemplified what TerryEagleton (1990: 28) refers to as "the metaphysics of nationalism,"which speaks of "the entry into full self-realization of a unitary subjectknown as the people." This monadic subject, curiously, is assumed to"preexist its own process of materialization," to be equipped with "de-terminate needs and desires, on the model of the autonomous humanpersonality." And it was to the human personality that this discourseturned.

The AuthenticLeaderIn light of this discussion, we can better locate Dona Barbara withinthe intersecting currents of social and intellectual life that framed itsproduction. During the forced quiescence of political and cultural lifeunder Gomez, buttressed by elite support for his project as well as byhis effective system of repression, opposition discourse slowly devel-oped between the lines of official political discourse. It incorporateddiscourse of Latin America, a region which he renamed "Indo-America" in 1924.He helped chart a centrist program for nationalism, at once anti-imperialist anddevelopmentalist, to be directed by a populist party with middle-class leaders. Hiswritings influenced the evolution of Venezuela's Acci6n Democritica party; seeFredrick B. Pike (1986) for an innovative discussion of the sources and develop-ment of Haya's mystical beliefs.48. Augusto Sandino, the Nicaraguan revolutionary leader of the 1920s, was of asimilar persuasion, although

the content of his politics was quite different. He be-came a radical Freemason in Mexico and was an adherent of anarcho-syndicalismas well as a spiritualist, and he joined the Magnetic-Spiritual School of the Univer-sal Commune. As a student of the occult, Sandino situated the Mexican Revolutionand his battle in Nicaragua against the United States within a cosmology of anearthly redemptive struggle between the forces of good and evil. Bolivar was acentral figure in his system of belief. For a discussion of the origins of his thought,see Donald C. Hodges (1986).


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 631the language and assumptions of positivist evolutionism into a revisedframework that was informed by idealist and neo-Romantic beliefs.

This emergent opposition discourse, while reflecting an evolution-ary framework and an emphasis on geographic determinism, effectedimportant transformations as well: the spiritually elevated individualbecame an agent of free will; the pueblo was endowed with a ca-pacity for redemption; and the land was infused with a positive force.Together, these concepts sustained the opposition to autocracy andsupport for a constitutional regime.Gallegos was particularly critical of the imitative traditional elite,the "barbarie ilustrada," and of its failure to provide an enlight-ened leadership that could wrest control from the backward caudillos.In the context,of political repression and elite complicity, his self-constructed persona of an authentic civic leader, one who broughtword and deed together in active unity, had a broad political pur-pose. We may see Gallegos's assertion of the link between his life andhis writings as a practical critique of rationalist assumptions throughwhich he established his "locus of enunciation" (Mignolo [in press]).Identity, Gallegos argued in his writings and in the classroom, was theproduct of one's acting upon one's surroundings, a process throughwhich self-recognition and moral development were achieved. Thisposition, which refused to set artistic creation apart from collectiveconcerns, aligned him with Ortega y Gasset's influential philosophy of"circumstantialism."

Gallegos regarded his life as a text of his own making, and his texts,in turn, as actors in his life. His biographer and friend, the authorJuan Liscano (1969: 9) wrote that his "life and work so complementedeach other that one could compose a novel in his own style using hisbiography." Furthermore, "Gallegos created himself in contrast to thedictatorship and the dictator," as if they embodied conflicting prin-ciples. "For Gallegos, public and political action was the opportunityto identify himself with the figures of his books, to embody them"(Liscano 1985: 117, 202).49He sought to constitute the nation's historyand himself through his writing and his actions; his life and his writ-ing, the nation's history and his representations of it, interpenetrated.Through his own actions, the script he wrote for his characters tookon new life.

His central concern in his writing was the creation of a Bolivar-49. For Liscano (1985: 202), Gallegos became the incarnation of Santos Luzardowhen in 1948, while serving as Venezuela's president, he refused to compromisewith the military and was overthrown. Humberto Garcia Arocha (1985), a closeassociate and friend of Gallegos, has claimed that Gallegos identified with Luzardo(an assertion that Garcia Arocha repeated in a personal interview, June 1989).


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632 PoeticsToday 15:4ian vision of social reform that was rooted in the nation's origins andincarnated in heroic figures, a cultural foundation for the populistproject whose language spoke to broad social sectors. The parallels be-tween the personas of Gallegos and Bolivar are striking. Both leadersrepresented themselves as educators of the unformed pueblo. Theyspoke as moral guides from an elevated plane of existence who soughtto channel the people's unruly spirit toward a higher degree of devel-opment. For Gallegos, Bolivar the civic reformer and moral educator,rather than the military leader, was his model and the source of hisreformist ideas. He wrote extensively on educational reform and onthe role of the leader as an educator in terms that resembled Boli-var's writings on these subjects. Publicly known as "El Maestro" ("TheTeacher") until his death, he played the role of a moral leader, nota politician, and found in Santos Luzardo the literary representationof this role. Through his conduct and his literary characterization, hemade the exemplary individual his Bolivarian answer to the problemof authority on a postcolonial terrain.50In an early essay of 1912, "La Necesidad de Valores Culturales,"Gallegos defined the intellectual as a product of a superior culturewho helps bring about the evolution of the masses by channeling their"vital energies," which are "instinctual forces like rivers overflowingtheir bed" (Gallegos 1954: I, 95-97). For in Venezuela, he argued in1931, strikingly foreshadowing Count Keyserling, the "sixth day ofcreation" had not yet ended; in this unfinished, seething land, satanicforces shaped souls into barbarism, and men hastily formed from theresidue of creation emerged from the earth to don uniforms and exerttheir rule (ibid.: 116-19). As a writer, he explained in 1954, he didnot seek to depict this landscape for purely creative purposes, but tosymbolize through his characters the "intellectual or moral forms of[his] concerns with regard to the problems of the Venezuelan realitywithin which [he had] lived." He grounded his symbols in his experi-ence and created them to help alter his society, he explained, for thenation needed myths through which to recognize and represent itself.He created the figure of Dofia Barbara so that through her "a dra-matic aspect of the Venezuela in which [he had] lived [might] becomevisible, and so that in some fashion her imposing character [might]help us remove from our souls that part of her that resides in us"(ibid.: II, 116-17).5150. There is a common perception that Gallegos and Santos Luzardo are Boli-varian figures. The spirit of Bolivar is considered in popular belief and religiouspractice to inspire national and popular struggles and to work through the mediumof superior individuals.51. Liscano has argued that Gallegos had a mystical relationship to the land, whichhe regarded as a site of cosmic forces and primordial creation. His symbols were


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Skurski* Ambiguities of Authenticity 633Gallegos's concern for the spiritual was grounded in the earthlyconstruction of a harmonious society governed by moral and aestheticprinciples.52 Yet his creation of archetypal characters through whomvital forces could manifest themselves and his belief in the redemptivecapacity of spiritually elevated individuals to direct these forces wereinformed by the Romantic, phenomenological, and idealist thought ofthe period, as inflected by elements of mysticism.53With its international success, Dona Barbara came to rewrite Galle-

gos's life, as the novel constructed him as a voice of the continent.Mexico's Jose Vasconcelos, himself a founding figure of mestizaje asan ideology and political program, lauded Dona Barbara in 1931; itwas, he asserted, an expression of Hispanic America's soul, "the bestnovel in America, without excluding the good novels that have beenwritten in English, in the North" (Vasconcelos 1982 [1931]: 50).54Dur-ing the interwar period, Gallegos spoke not as a political party leaderor officeholder, both of which he would later become, but as thatimagined ideal, the voice of a single, unified pueblo.

TransformativemagesKeeping in mind the novel's role as a charter of Venezuelan nation-alism, we may now turn to Dona Barbara's reception in Venezuela,focusing on the upper- and middle-class reading public.55 Changesbrought about by the impact of the oil export industry helped create adesire among the conservative elite for a constitutional regime, whilecreated to perform a kind of "exorcism" of this land, banishing destructive forcesfrom it (see Liscano 1969: 101-17; 1985: 207). This account has parallels to certainconcepts in popular religious beliefs.52. Gallegos regarded the human imaginative capacity to create art and scienceas the highest expression of its spirit, while imagination placed at the service ofcommercial ends or industrial production was a lower expression (see Gallegos1954: I, 123).53. While a university student in 1905, Gallegos read widely in European andLatin American thought. As a result, he left the Catholic Church, the faith inwhich he had been a "mystical" believer, to become a "free thinker." His readingscentered on Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and classical and contemporary Spanish writers,especially Cervantes and Unamuno, and he participated in a literary group thatread Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente(Liscano 1985: 203).54. Vasconcelos's review was mainly taken up with two other novels, Ifigenia andLas Memorias de Mamd Blanca, by the Venezuelan author Teresa de la Parra (1981[1926], 1985 [1929]). It is striking that these novels by writers of opposing literarystyles and political outlooks were equally well received by the author of La razac6smica. For excellent discussions of de la Parra, see Garrels (1986) and Sommer(1991).55. At the time of Dona Bdrbara's publication in 1929, Venezuela's population wasapproximately 75 percent rural and had a very low literacy rate (estimates rangefrom 20-30 percent). See John Beverley (1987) for an informative discussion ofVenezuela's literary history.


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634 PoeticsToday 15:4demands for democracy and reform arose primarily from the nascentmiddle class. The incipient organization of labor in cities and amongpetroleum workers also brought a new class component to the projectof political change.56Dona Barbara presented a mythic construct in which presumably allsectors of the population could see themselves reflected. This sym-bolic construct at once imaged their present existence and envisionedtheir future transformation within a hierarchical yet integrative socialorder. It portrayed the demise of the elite in its role as an adjunctto military and foreign interests and its rebirth as an enlightened,civ

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