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eBook details

• Title: Troubadours and Bedouins on the Pampas: Medievalism and Orientalism in Sarmiento's Facundo
• Author : Chasqui
• Release Date : January 01, 2009
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 86 KB

Description

Critics have consistently pointed to the impurity and hybridity of D.F. Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), signaling Sarmiento's obsessive citation of European authors (whom he often mis-quotes), far-reaching comparisons, and frequent contradictions. As Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria writes, Facundo is "intertextual web of quotations, epigraphs, and allusions" (237), holding within them "simultaneously multiple layers of time (238)." Neither novel nor essay nor pamphlet, but an uneven "stack" (to use David Vinas' characterization [217]) of citations and mis-citations, personal observations, commercial fantasies and scientific programs, Facundo defies categorization by genre. It is the question of multiple layers of time I want to explore in this essay, via two of Sarmiento's favorite references: the Middle Ages and the Orient. Why is it that in order to make nineteenth-century Argentina intelligible to his reader, Sarmiento seeks recourse to times and spaces so far outside of Argentina? Significantly, Sarmiento's Middle Ages and Orient are outside the time of European modernity, something he wants to stress in relation to the "barbaric" Rosas regime. Each becomes a spatial marker of distance as well: for Argentina never had a Middle Ages, at least according to the same linear, Europe-centered chronologies Sarmiento seems to accept. And although he transplants Palestine, Babylon, Egypt and Algeria to the ubiquitous pampas, and turns Rosas' strongmen into a Bedouins, patriarchs, and Oriental despots, Sarmiento's East exists at a vast geographical remove from Argentina. Why, then, the Middle Ages and the Orient? What kind of explanatory power do they hold for Sarmiento, as he appropriates discourses that seemingly belong to Europe? Is Sarmiento merely trying to insinuate himself into a European master narrative of history, or does his appropriation signal the production of a new kind of knowledge and mode of representation? Sarmiento, as we will see, was eager to call on nineteenth-century European categories of time and space to diagnose Argentina's barbarism under Rosas, condensed onto the figure of the infamous caudillo Facundo; at the same time, however, Sarmiento deployed metropolitan knowledge in sui generis ways, choosing two points of comparison outside--yet inside--of Argentina. In The Burden of Modernity, Carlos Alonso argues that while all appeals to authority necessarily imply citation, this rhetorical condition has acquired particular salience in Latin American narratives of modernity, in which the citation of European norms simultaneously confers and destabilizes the speaker's authority. From this perspective, modernity figures as both an "ideal and curse" (1), forever postponed by the very rhetorical construct through which it is invoked. The question at hand, then, is not whether Sarmiento cites, but rather how he does it, and with which effects. Through which rhetorical maneuvers does Sarmiento make Argentina legible via the Middle Ages and the Orient, and for whom?

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