Modernism and Latin America

Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange

Patricia Novillo-Corvalán

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315315829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

This book is the first in-depth exploration of the relationship between Latin American and European modernisms during the long twentieth century. Drawing on comparative, historical, and postcolonial reading strategies (including archival research), it seeks to reenergize the study of modernism by putting the spotlight on the cultural networks and aesthetic dialogues that developed between European and non-European writers, including Pablo Neruda, James Joyce, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Victoria Ocampo, Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortázar, Samuel Beckett, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Malcolm Lowry. The book explores a wide range of texts that reflect these writers' complex concerns with questions of exile, space, empire, colonization, reception, translation, human subjectivity, and modernist experimentation. By rethinking modernism comparatively and by placing this intricate web of cultural interconnections within an expansive transnational (and transcontinental) framework, this unique study opens up new perspectives that delineate the construction of a polycentric geography of modernism. It will be of interest to those studying global modernisms, as well as Latin American literature, transatlantic studies, comparative literature, world literature, translation studies, and the global south.

Part I

1 Empire and Commerce in Latin America

Historicising Woolf’s The Voyage Out

Michèle Barrett has unearthed significant archival material preserved at the Leonard Woolf archives, which has revealed Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary contribution to her husband’s book, Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (1920) in her role as research assistant or, even more appropriately, collaborator.¹ Leonard Woolf’s book had been commissioned by the Fabian Society and was published under the imprint of the Labour Research Department and George Allen & Unwin in 1920. According to Barrett, the complex research and analysis of empirical data that Virginia Woolf conducted for the project in 1917 shed new light on her ‘relationship with her husband, and the critical and intellectual and political ideas they shared about British imperialism’. She also observes that the research reveals an image of ‘Virginia Woolf as a meticulous, even slightly pedantic scholar [with a remarkable] facility with factual data’.² Crucially, Virginia Woolf’s research notes are not just confined to Africa but also cover extensive empirical data on Latin America, since Leonard Woolf had originally signed a contract for a more ambitious book on International Trade, yet gradually reduced its scope by specifically focusing on a single continent. Therefore, in the early stages of the research for the global version of the project, Virginia Woolf took copious and detailed notes of British Consular Reports concerning international trade relations with Latin America. The research notes are ordered alphabetically and begin with the Argentine Republic, a country to which she devotes 13 pages of notecards (most of them neatly written in longhand in her distinctive purple ink). The notes are itemised under the heading ‘Return of Foreign Trade of the Argentine Republic during the years 1893–1891’.³ Despite the fact that this research was undertaken two years after the publication of The Voyage Out, I suggest that Virginia Woolf’s knowledge of political-economic issues related to the Latin American nations (her reports cover a wide range of countries, including Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Argentina) can, potentially, seriously reconceive her depiction of the continent in the novel. In concert with Barrett and Anna Snaith, I recognise the significance of performing an ‘intertwined reading’ of the Woolfs’ engagement with imperialism,⁴ particularly as this chapter seeks to provide a conceptual framework that strategically reads The Voyage Out alongside Empire and Commerce, while also paying rigorous attention to Virginia Woolf’s research notes held at the Leonard Woolf archives.⁵

In this way, I seek to explicate the way in which Virginia Woolf’s research for the original International Trade project can retrospectively ‘legitimise’ her aesthetic engagement with Latin America, in an attempt to challenge a critical paradigm that has anchored Woolf’s knowledge of the continent in a rhetoric of exoticism and orientalising images of butterflies linked to the Argentine writer, critic, and feminist, Victoria Ocampo. This implies that the ‘spatial’ dimension of the novel, which E. M. Forster once dismissed as ‘a South America not found on any map and reached by a boat which would not float on any sea’,⁶ may be taken more seriously. Critics such as Fiona Parrot, Laura Lojo Rodríguez, and Giulia Negrello have shown that Woolf’s imaginary excursions to South America anticipated her final and most significant encounter with the continent that was embodied in the larger-than-life figure of Ocampo. Parrot states that ‘Woolf enjoyed Ocampo’s company but often imagined her as a fabulous character from a strange and distant land she knew little about’, while Lojo Rodríguez notes that ‘for Virginia Woolf, Victoria Ocampo was an example of remote and exotic exuberance’ and, in a similar vein, Giulia Negrello concludes that ‘Woolf projected onto Ocampo her idealised vision of South America’.⁷ Although it cannot be denied that in her correspondence with Victoria Ocampo Woolf narrowly defines a continent of the scale, diversity, and complexity of South America as ‘a land of great butterflies and vast fields’ (L5 365), it must be borne in mind that such remarks were prompted by the lavish and stereotypical gifts that Ocampo bestowed upon Woolf:

You are too generous. And I must compare you to a butterfly if you send me these gorgeous purple butterflies [orchids]. I opened the box and thought “this is what a garden in South America looks like!” I am sitting in their shade at the moment, and must thank you a thousand times.⁸

(L5 348–9)

If Ocampo willingly encouraged Woolf’s exotic fantasies through her extravagant gifts, it has to be said that she also patiently tolerated the latter’s orientalising responses. As Gayle Rogers points out, in her transmission of Woolf’s works in her native Argentina, Ocampo tactfully revised ‘Woolf’s Eurocentrism’ (143)⁹ in order to convey her cultural politics as part of a liberating feminist agenda that the two women passionately shared through their aesthetic commitment to gender equality. The powerful confluence between two icons of twentieth-century feminism – one English, the other Argentine, one publisher of the Hogarth Press, the other of Editorial Sur – initiated an aesthetic fulcrum that played a decisive role in the formation and circulation of transatlantic modernist practices.

In the course of this chapter, I shall question some of the assumptions undergirding Woolf’s relationship to Latin America in an endeavour to challenge the prevailing view that her knowledge of the continent was vague, deficient and, at its worst, nonexistent. Rather, I seek to show that she was the possessor of a complex socio-economic knowledge of a country such as Argentina, a claim based not only on crucial documentation gathered from the research notes she undertook for Empire and Commerce but also on textual evidence drawn from The Voyage Out and Melymbrosia. By elucidating Woolf’s complex awareness of pressing geopolitical issues in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin America, I seek to move beyond the romanticised rhetoric that constitutes an integral part of her epistolary relationship with Ocampo and that has so far framed the majority of scholarly work on this subject. Whereas my present intention is to historicise the contemporary political-economic contexts of The Voyage Out by recuperating Woolf’s more sophisticated knowledge of crucial Latin American issues, this does not suggest that I am critically unaware of the novel’s exoticising proclivities nor, for the same matter, of its equally noticeable inattention to regional details. A number of scholars have drawn attention to the contradictory ideology underpinning the novel, a political tension marked by Woolf’s strong anti-imperialist and feminist agenda, on one level, and by a tendency to orientalise and stereotype colonised nations, on another. Critics such as Mark Wollaeger, Steven Putzel, Alissa Karl, Carey Snyder, and Andrea Lewis are among those who claim that Woolf’s resistance to British imperialism and patriarchal institutions has been partially undermined by her dehumanising depiction of the native women in The Voyage Out.¹⁰ For example, Wollaeger states that whereas Woolf ‘clearly indicates that the gender politics informing Rachel’s life also govern the native village’, her colonial critique is further complicated by the fact that she is transforming ‘the native women into a mere backdrop for Rachel’s inner drama’, which ‘partially reproduces the imperial hierarchy the novel otherwise attacks’.¹¹ Meanwhile, Jane Marcus’s oft-quoted observation that in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf was not immune to racial prejudice despite her best intentions to ‘dissociate herself from the racism of her family and class by announcing that she could pass even a “very fine Negress” without wanting to “make an Englishwoman of her”’ further exposes her complicity with Orientalism.¹² At the same time, John Batchelor has devoted some thought to Woolf’s deeply problematic representation of the tropical setting in South America, a continent she had never visited. He claims that Woolf ‘makes elementary mistakes: forgetting that the seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, she has the climate in this imaginary country advancing from mild early spring to intolerably hot summer between the months of March and May’.¹³ Batchelor is referring here to the way Woolf’s Edwardian personages often make embarrassing geographical slips, such as forgetting that in South America the month of March should announce the arrival of autumn, not spring:

The three months which had passed had brought them to the beginning of March. The climate had kept its promise, and the change of season from winter to spring had made very little difference, so that Helen, who was sitting in the drawing-room with a pen in her hand, could keep the windows open though a great fire of logs burnt on one side of her.

(VO 103)

At the other end of the spectrum, however, Woolf is not unaware of the politics of representing imperial locations, an aspect that is constantly interrogated in the novel and that is indissolubly linked to the phenomenon of economic imperialism. As Kathy Phillips points out, ‘despite Virginia Woolf’s residual insensitivity to colonized people and her lack of first-hand knowledge of the colonies, she felt strongly that the English civilization which the British imposed on their subjects was not worth exporting’.¹⁴ Her rejection of colonialism, Julia Kuehn explains, ‘sprang from her great-grandfather’s, grandfather’s and father’s nationalist fervour and critique of Empire respectively [as well as] her relationship with Leonard Woolf’.¹⁵ Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the British imperial mindset, together with its ingrained sense of racial, moral, and cultural superiority, is constantly questioned, mocked, and satirised in the novel. Notice, for example, the discussion that takes place at the beginning of Chapter XI:

One of these parties was dominated by Hughling Elliot and Mrs Thornbury, who, having both read the same books and considered the same questions, were now anxious to name the places beneath them and to hang upon them stores of information about navies and armies, political parties, natives and mineral products – all of which combined, they said, to prove that South America was the country of the future.

(VO 151, my emphasis)

While the above extract appears to end in a note of optimism, the assertion is ironic since to succinctly claim that ‘South America was the country of the future’ in a politically loaded debate about empire, cartography, militarisation, and the acquisition of raw materials, implies a tacit endorsement of British imperialism, not least since the ‘future’ of the continent of South America has been irreversibly blighted by the atrocities committed (or about to be committed) by the dominant European powers. Manifestly, the pompous Hughling Elliot and Mrs. Thornbury arrogantly uphold South America as the ‘future’ of Europe, namely, as the world’s richest source of raw materials to be liberally plundered by the European coloniser. Furthermore, Mrs. Thornbury glorifies the colonial exploits of the British Empire by boasting that she has sons ‘in the navy […] and in the army too; and one son who makes speeches at the Union – my baby!’ (VO 125). Later on,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Bibliography
• Index