A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture by Castro-Klaren Sara

Author:Castro-Klaren, Sara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

Imagined Sexualities and Historical Communities

I have already hinted at why eroticism and nationalism become figures for each other in modernizing fictions. Now, I would like to suggest how this works rhetorically. It is through a literary sleight-of-the-invisible-hand that legitimates heterosexual passion in patriotism, and reciprocally legitimates hegemonic states in sexual desire. I want to consider these forces, and merely to suggest the matter of reciprocal allegory, which I argue elsewhere.14 Briefly, Eros and Polis take each other as the stable ground of their own narrative. One represents the other and fuels it. The unrequited passion of the love story produces a surplus of energy, just as Rousseau suggested it would,15 a surplus that can hope to overcome the political interference between the lovers. And the enormity of social abuse invests the love story with an almost sublime sense of purpose. As the story progresses, the pitch of sentiment raises along with it a cry of commitment, until the din makes it ever more difficult to distinguish between our erotic and political fantasies.

What I find ingenious, brilliant, about this novel productivity is that one libidinal investment ups the ante for the other. And every obstacle that the lovers encounter heightens more than their mutual desire to (be a) couple, more than our voyeuristic but keenly felt passion; it also heightens their/our love for the possible nation in which the affair could be consummated. The two levels of desire are different, which allows us to remark on an allegorical structure; but they are not discrete.16 Desire weaves between the individual and the public family in a way that shows the terms to be contiguous, coextensive as opposed to merely analogous. And the desire keeps weaving, or simply doubling itself at personal and political levels, because the obstacles it encounters threaten both levels of happiness.

From our historical distance, both romantic love and patriotism can seem natural, although we know them to be produced, perhaps, by the very novels that (re)present them. To acknowledge this possibility is also to ask whether what may have passed for effects of the greater culture in the novel (romantic love or conciliatory nationalism) may be causes of that culture. If heroes and heroines in Latin American novels were passionately desiring one another by trespassing traditional lines and desiring the new state that would join them, they were not repeating timeless or essential affections. Those passions would not have prospered earlier. In fact, modernizing lovers were learning how to dream their erotic fantasies by reading the frustrating European romances they hoped to improve.

The appropriateness of European fiction for Latin American founders may perhaps be read backward (in a reflex learned from Benedict Anderson, who sees European nations imitate the Americans17), meaning that the appropriateness suggests a cultural intersection that points both ways. Therefore, my rather local observations about a particular moment and genre in Latin America tempt me to hazard some conjectures about more general implications. Is it possible, for example, that outside of Latin America, political passion was

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