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José Martí's “Evening of Emerson” and the United Statesian Literary Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

LAURA LOMAS
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Abstract

Revising a century of interpretation that has emphasized the identification of José Martí with Ralph Waldo Emerson, this essay draws on Martí's unpublished and published manuscripts about Emerson to reveal Martí's keen sense of his difference from the New England bard. When we read Martí's 1882 eulogy to Emerson alongside contemporaneous essays about the Chinese Exclusion Act and the War of the Pacific, Martí's epiphany – which he calls the “evening of Emerson” – comes to suggest the evanescence of Emerson's influence. Martí here glimpses his contribution: a creative resignification and translation of Emerson and US culture more broadly in order to arrive at a distinct version of nuestra América. Although Emerson's influence persists, as he provides the phrase “our America,” Martí's interpretation transposes the phrase to a minor key and reveals the perspective of the Latin American migrant who presciently observes the threat of imperial expansion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , April 2009 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Oscar Montero, José Martí: An Introduction (London: Palgrave, 2004), 117.

2 The US-funded propaganda machines, radio and television, are two prominent examples of such institutions. For news of the success of these projects see Robbins, Anne, “Our Jam in Havana: This U.S. Station Does Not Rate in Cuba,” Wall Street Journal, 25 Nov. 1997.Google Scholar

3 I develop this argument about Martí's “translations” of US literary and popular culture of the Gilded Age in my book Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects and American Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

4 Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” trans. Anthony Bonner, Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 48.

5 See George W. Bush's claim that Martí would have supported the US-led policy of a “Free-Trade Area of the Americas,” New York Times, 22 April 2001, 1.

6 I use this contemporary term “Latino” to refer to practices that define the culture of Latin Americans and their descendants living in the United States.

7 Félix Lizaso, “Emerson visto por Martí,” Humanismo, 23 Sept. 1954, 35; Oscar Montero, José Martí (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 106. See Shuler, Esther, “José Martí, su crítica de algunos escritores norteamericanos,” Archivo José Martí (La Habana), 16 (1950), 164–92, esp. 175.Google Scholar

8 Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 350, n. 36.

9 Ibid., 146, 327.

10 Ballón quotes in extensu the American Adam passage from Emerson's journal no less than three times throughout Autonomía cultural americana: Emerson y Martí (Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1986), 16, 137, 179.

11 See Ignacio Díaz Ruiz, “Presentación,” in Lecturas norteamericanas de José Martí: Emerson y el socialismo contemporaneo (1880–1887) (México: Univ. Nac. Autonoma de México, 1995), xii; Anne Fountain, José Martí and U.S. Writers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 27, discusses Emerson and Martí as “kindred souls.”

12 Silviano Santiago, “Latin American Discourse: The Space In-Between,” and “Eça, Author of Madame Bovary,” in idem, The Space In-Between: Essays in Latin American Culture, trans. Ana Lucía Gazzola, Tom Burns and Gareth Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 31, 63.

13 Ballón, 66. John Englekirk also claims Martí's prominent role in establishing Emerson's influence in Latin America in “Notes on Emerson in Latin America,” PMLA, 76, 3 (1961), 227–32.

14 José Martí, Obras Completas, Volume 21 (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975), 163. All translations from the Spanish are mine unless otherwise indicated. Hereafter I cite this edition as OC, with volume and page number separated by a comma.

15 See Jenine Abboushi Dallal's discussion of Emerson's investment in US expansion in “American Imperialism UnManifest: Emerson's ‘Inquest’ and Cultural Regeneration,” American Literature, 73, 1 (2001), 47–83.

16 Emerson, “Fate,” in idem, Conduct of Life (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888), 36; quoted in Doris Sommer, “A Vindication of Double Consciousness,” in Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwartz, eds., Companion to Post-colonial Studies (London: Blackwell, 2000), 167.

17 Emerson, “Race,” in idem, English Traits (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888), 50. See Castillo, Susan, “‘The Best of Nations? Race and Imperial Destinies in Emerson's English Traits,” Yearbook of English Studies, 34, 13 (2004), 100–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Quotation is from Emerson, “The Poet,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1957), 236.

19 Emerson, “Which [states] should lead that movement, if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American?”, in “The Young American” (1844), in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume I, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 239.

20 On Emerson and the Young Americans see Brady Harrison, Agent of Empire (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 27–51.

21 See Martí's “Escenas Neoyorkinas,” in which a collectivity of “those from below … advance shoulder to shoulder,” rpt from La América, in El Triunfo (La Habana), 7, 208 (5 Sept. 1884), 2; and in Santiago: Revista de la Universidad de Oriente, 46 (June 1982), 205–18, quote at 215. Thanks to Maria Caridad Pacheco, who brought this publication to my attention.

22 In his journal, around 7 April 1840, Emerson notes, “In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.” Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, 139.

23 Emerson, “The Poet,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, 240, 224.

24 Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, 195.

25 Emerson, “Self Reliance,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, 152, 148, 155; “The American Scholar,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, 75.

26 This figure also appears among Martí's typed fragments; OC 22, 306. Here and below in this paper, SW refers to José Martí, Selected Writings, ed. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin, 2002).

27 Martí, “Emerson,” OC 19, 353. See my forthcoming book Translating Empire for a fuller description of this and related texts.

28 Emerson, “Nature,” in Complete Works, Volume. III, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (New York: AMS Press, 1979), 196; quoted in Martí, OC 21, 408; OC 19, 370.

29 See Martí's alarmed observation of “what may be the gravest change that the United States has experienced since the war”: “It involves nothing less than the preparation of a pacific and decisive occupation of Central America and of adjacent islands through a system of commercial treaties and other conventions.” La Nación, 22 Feb. 1885; rpt. OC 8, 87.

30 Giles, Paul, “The Parallel Worlds of José Martí,” Radical History Review, 89 (Spring 2004), 185–90, esp. 187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Paul Giles: “In this light, Martí's most pressing concern seems to be not so much imperialism, but globalization and displacement. As someone who was himself traversing national frontiers continually and who felt most at home, paradoxically, among exiles, Martí employed contradiction not as a method merely of subversion but as an engaged way of intimating how every situation and social organization could be looked at from a different point of view … If the most compelling part of Emerson's writing is its plausibility, its willing accommodation of neoplatonic ideas to a politics of everyday experience, perhaps the most striking aspect of Martí's life and work is its ultimate impossibility.” Ibid. 187–88.

32 See references to and descriptions of the “evening of Emerson” at Martí, OC 21, 387; and OC 22, 323.

33 Ballón, Autonomía cultural, 31; Fountain, 41; Montero, José Martí, 121.

34 Emerson, “Nature,” 24.

35 Paul Blouët, Jonathan and His Continent (Rambles through American Society) by Max O'Rell and Jack Allyn (New York: Cassell & Company, 1889), 158–62.

36 See analysis of Johannes Keppler's 1880 centerfold illustration in Puck's entitled “The Chinese Invasion,” which helped cast the bipartisan racial stereotype of Chinese as alien invaders, in John Kuo Wei, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 214–18.

37 Brook Thomas has suggested Josiah Strong's expansionist and evangelical tract Our Country (1885) as a possible source for Martí's phrase in “Turner, Martí, a Home on the Range,” in Jeffrey Belnap and Raul Fernández, eds., José Martí's “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 285. However, Martí's significant engagement with Emerson's work points to the latter's use of the exact phrase in “Fate”: “Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.” In Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, 331.