Things with a History

Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America

Héctor Hoyos

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231550123
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Can rubber trees, silicone dolls, corpses, soil, subatomic particles, designer shoes, and discarded computers become the protagonists of contemporary literature—and what does this tell us about the relationship between humans and objects? In Things with a History, Héctor Hoyos argues that the roles of objects in recent Latin American fiction offer a way to integrate materialisms old and new, transforming our understanding of how things shape social and political relations.

Discussing contemporary authors including Roberto Bolaño, Ariel Magnus, César Aira, and Blanca Wiethüchter as well as classic writers such as Fernando Ortiz and José Eustasio Rivera, Hoyos considers how Latin American literature has cast things as repositories of history, with an emphasis on the radically transformed circulation of artifacts under globalization. He traces a tradition of thought, transcultural materialism, that draws from the capacity of literary language to defamiliarize our place within the tangible world. Hoyos contrasts new materialisms with historical-materialist approaches, exposing how recent tendencies sometimes sidestep concepts such as primitive accumulation, commodity fetishism, and conspicuous consumption, which have been central to Latin American history and literature. He contends that an integrative approach informed by both historical and new materialisms can balance seeing things as a means to reveal the true nature of social relations with appraisals of things in their autonomy. Things with a History simultaneously offers a sweeping account of the material turn in recent Latin American culture and reinvigorates social theory and cultural critique.

PART ONE

Objects

CHAPTER ONE

Raw Stuff Disavowed

There are many terms in language that prescribe a certain relationship to nonhumans. Take the term “meat,” which establishes a clear-cut separation from the living being that gave its life for it. Though the organic properties of the signified are identical, “meat” is so different from “flesh” that it would be odd, even blasphemous, for a priest to say at the altar: “Christ gave his meat to save us” (I give this example not out of religious sentiment but for emphasis). Or take the term “beef,” which somehow sanitizes the fact that, well, one is eating from a calf; or “ham,” a piglet; “poultry,” a chick; and so on. Some are terms of untroubled consumption, others of endearment; some describe an animal mass, others a singular animal. And yet they refer to the same “thing.” Or take the term “thing” to begin with! It is anthropocentrism at its best: an umbrella for everything else, a perfect device of othering. Never mind that humans are animals, and things, too: we are mammals like those we eat; we are made of carbon and water, like those things out there. The TV host–astronomer wonders that we humans are made of the same stuff as stars. Well, what else could we be made of?

This line of reasoning will be familiar to readers of new materialism and cognate critical currents. In “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” Bruno Latour criticizes how humans claim preeminence over “mute things”; meanwhile, Peter Singer makes an ethical argument for vegetarianism on the basis of our shared animality with livestock.¹ This chapter’s contribution to those debates revolves around language, particularly the contributions of literary language in decentering the human. In the introduction, I have presented my notion of “transcultural materialism,” which I continue to develop in the pages ahead and throughout this book. Two elements that I would like to flesh out at present (pun intended) are the postanthropocentric thrust of this narrative mode and the manner in which it cuts across cultural divides. This two-pronged investigation recalls a comparable pairing in the work of Fernando Ortiz: on the one hand, the idea that sugar and tobacco are actors alongside plantation workers; on the other, the finding that the cultural traditions of Africans and Creoles—that rub against each other, eventually configuring Cubanness—are always already embedded in material transformation. The German term Geisteswissenschaften, literally the “sciences of the spirit,” is most at odds with my Ortizian approach, which foregoes the rigors of science for the insightfulness of storytelling and finds that “the spirit of the Cuban people,” or any other cultural phenomena for that matter, is not ectoplasmic, like a spirit, but rather solid as clay.

I have just used a term in a foreign language to stress a specifically cultural element. The language we use to other the nonhuman does not always translate well. As Patricia Valderrama pointed out to me, Colombians would not raise an eyebrow when hearing the terms jamón de pollo or jamón de cordero: literally, “chicken ham” and “lamb ham.” In the country, jamón is generic for sliced, processed, or cured meat; it is not specific to any one animal. This mismatch is revealing; if we read into it, we will discover an instance of how language and its gaps can reinforce or question anthropocentrism. We assert our preeminence as the earth’s top predator also in words; in words, we can undo it. Meanwhile, Russian formalists considered that literary language was a different province within language—an idea that, if taken to its limits, is easily discredited by the close proximity of the everyday to the literary.² However, I believe we can adopt a more modest version of that view. Literary and nonliterary utterances are easy to distinguish, in fact, in everyday life: there can be bursts of poetry in the metro or the stadium bathroom, say, but generally poetry happens in books, readings, and similar contexts. It’s all part of the same language, but it can be used literarily or not—the two modes are not always easy to distinguish, but they are distinguishable for the most part. A foreign language—which, as modern translators understand it, is horizontally and not diametrically separated from our own, like a somewhat removed city rather than a parallel universe—allows us, in the examples above, to reframe human-nonhuman interaction. Couldn’t literature do the same?

In this chapter, I shall focus on a notion that is particularly adept at capturing the role of language in prescribing a certain relationship to nonhumans: “raw material”—in Spanish, materia prima. What is raw or primordial about a sheep, a mountain of gold, a forest of rubber trees? Primordialness, in these cases, lies in the eyes of the beholder—and in her language, novels included, unless we read them against the grain. We have understood since Ferdinand de Saussure that language signifies through differentiation. This means that the core operation of generating difference is codified in all language; arguably, it can be decodified there too. And since everyday language is straightforward and communicative, while literary language can afford a different economy, the latter seems to be the place to look for answers. With this in mind, I now focus on raw material to develop a facet of transcultural materialism. Ortiz relied on literary examples, but he did not develop the implications of his work for hermeneutics. This is, of course, a task that Ángel Rama undertook under the aegis of historical materialism.³ As previously stated, my own take converses with that tradition but drives it in a different direction. Here, I show how transcultural materialism can be a way of reading literature. First, I will compare two narratives that, as I argue, interrogate raw material. One is from the early decades of the twentieth century, the other from those of the twenty-first. In a second moment, this comparison will allow me to further characterize the post-1989 material turn and the shifting role of fiction within it. The ultimate goal of this chapter is to make explicit the main tenets of transcultural materialism as a means for the study of contemporary literature.

The Black Flock

For a thought-provoking image of raw material, picture the massive, twenty-to-fifty-kilogram balls of natural rubber that tappers would send floating downstream in the Amazon basin to be harvested closer to major maritime ports (figure 1.1). A liberal economic historian might regard the scene as a token of ingenuity, for this process saves the redundant effort of loading the rubber onto a boat. A Marxist historian might rightly wonder about the strenuous labor involved before and after the balls are afloat. Whether one intuits here wealth-creation or exploitation, these perspectives have in common the parsing out of human and nonhuman elements: in both accounts, the life of the commodity has begun, and the organic connection to the surrounding jungle is suspended. By contrast, José Eustasio Rivera’s 1924 The Vortex gives us the formidable metaphor of the rebaño negro—a “black flock,” as if the rubber was ushered by an invisible human shepherd, or as if the river itself showed the way.⁴ Here, in greatly condensed form, the relationship of humans, rubber, and jungle is remediated. Given the abusive, unsustainable collective of human and nonhuman elements that made the extraction possible, this is rightfully rendered as an ominous sight. The metaphor counteracts that other, more pervasive metaphor that is “raw material” in the first place.

FIGURE 1.1 Workers and extracted rubber in the Amazon basin.

Arquivo historico de Manaus.

Some of the works studied in the present volume are underappreciated local gems; others are undisputed regional classics. The Vortex belongs to the latter. It tells the story of how Arturo Cova, his lover Alicia, and their allies win a battle against ruthless rubber tappers who seek to enslave them, but ultimately lose the war against the jungle. The backdrop is the first rubber boom in the Amazon, periodized (by Tulio Halperín Dongui and others) between approximately 1870 and 1910.⁵ The atrocities committed by rubber barons on indigenous peoples and other enslaved workers are so egregious that talking about nonhumans in this context seems, well, inhuman, even in literary criticism. But given that an ample human-centric bibliography exists and that, after all, rubber is at the heart of the matter, I would like to explore that less-traveled road. This does not suspend the political and ethical concerns that influence even the more philological, stylistic analyses. Actually, it contributes to a better understanding of such issues, for the forces of capitalism alone did not dictate the fate of the victims of the rubber boom. If Rivera wanted to write an essay about greed and the limits of the rule of law in the Amazon, he would have done so. (Indeed, some of his letters and other documents set themselves to the task.) As purposefully uneconomical as Ortiz, Rivera recreates complex assemblages that revolve around rubber: think of sliced barks of trees, whipped human backs, water currents and mood swings, guns and insects, the fevers of beriberi. Let us examine, then, what the novel can tell us about power relations across the human-nonhuman divide.

Glimpses of nonhuman autonomy are numerous: Cova hears the sands asking him to tread lightly and toss them into the wind, shortly before he himself fears becoming a tree; he learns that the son of Clemente Silva, his guide through the jungle, was “killed by a tree”; an “accomplice” tree tangles Silva in his lianas, aiding his persecutors; referring again to Silva, the narrator reports that “the secret voice [of things] filled his soul.”⁶ The jungle makes men mad; the jungle suspends moral precepts; and so forth. Eco-critical readings downplay these descriptions of Nature as ruthless and evil, favoring instead the passages where characters extol the jungle or decry the extinction of a species, as Scott DeVries observes in the case of the balatá.⁷ Similarly, Jennifer French claims the text anticipates radical environmentalism.⁸ But how can a text that vilifies the jungle so extensively be properly environmentalist? Or should we just look at the passages that suggest the opposite?

This environmentalist cherry-picking is the opposite pair of socio-critical readings that turn their backs on Nature. The Russian translation of La vorágine, which appeared in the Soviet Union in 1935 and may very well epitomize this trend, introduces Rivera as “a great and honest bourgeois artist” whose work offers “a view that overcame bourgeois class to appreciate the authentic social truth.”⁹ William Bull goes as far as to suggest that an “excessive” psychological characterization would result from Rivera not being able to grasp the objective realities of rubber tappers.¹⁰ David Viñas, in a lucid but rather partial statement, claims that “Cova’s vital immersion in peasant barbarism produces…the bookish emergence of Rivera in the city. The rural ‘coming of age’ of the protagonist ends with the publication of a book for a bourgeois readership in Bogotá.”¹¹ Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees: those readings miss the trees to begin with. They want so much for the book to make a legible social critique that they rewrite it in their minds. Mutatis mutandis, the same can be said of some environmentalist readings, although, in addition to being partial explanations, they reproduce what they seek to challenge—that is, the separation of nature and culture.

There is no depiction of the “environment” in a novel where the jungle is a protagonist; there are networks that bind quasi subjects and quasi objects. La vorágine is as much about capitalism as it is about our interactions with nonhumans. Even sexual desire, which we often fancy to be an exclusive province of the human, involves the assemblage. The rich literature on The Vortex has rightly noted that Cova’s dreams symbolically approximate rubber milk with semen and rubber trees with phalluses, among several other more or less veiled sexual references. In an often-overlooked passage, however, Cova is literally aroused by feathers:

That afternoon, sadness possessed my spirit. Why must I always live alone? Why could I not share with someone these ermine feathers; this wing of the marine codúa, where the rainbow lies imprisoned; this spring-time vision of birds and colour?

With humiliating pain I discovered Alicia flitting in the hazy background of my dreams; and then with crude and bitter realism I strove to blight the thoughts that harboured the intruder.¹²

The feathers in this scene would not be out of place in a story by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, except that, given the setting, the fetish is emphatically a part of the natural world. The final allusion to ejaculation is lyrical to the point of being hermetic—that is, circuitous enough so as not to be censored for a mainstream readership of the 1920s. Yet it is unequivocal. Disturbingly, it involves rage, as the protagonist resents longing for Alicia, whom he thinks has been unfaithful. Passages like this have rightly led Monserrat Ordóñez and Sharon Magnarelli to note that the novel presents a masculinist storyline through the eyes of the protagonist, but also provides spaces for the critique of patriarchy in the silences and contradictions of his discourse.¹³ Ordóñez also reminds us that feathers were commodities; indigenous gatherers picked them up in the jungle and sold them to criollos, who would export them.¹⁴ In a sense, then, Cova is getting off to the thought of riches. Beckman elaborates on this point to show how the sexual frustrations of Cova mirror the export reveries of capital fictions.¹⁵ I would, however, like to complement such interpretations by recentering, if you will, the feather as feather. Its materiality, which we should not ignore, reveals the hybrid cathexis of the novel.

It is useful to turn for a moment to Michael Pollan, who rethinks desire in light of the coevolution of humans and nonhumans.¹⁶ “Coevolution” is a more accurate term than “domestication,” which is one-sided. So-called domestic plants and animals get phenomenal returns from their dealings with humans: rosemary thrives on this planet, as do dogs. Nonhumans give and they receive; they domesticate us, we them—intention is beside the point. Thus a desire for sweetness informs our relationship with apples; for beauty, with tulips; and for intoxication, with marijuana. Like human bumblebees, we have favored colored tulips and other flowers; they, in turn, have an effect on our ideals of beauty, as countless metaphors attest. But of the plants Pollan analyzes, I find that none comes closer to rubber than potatoes. Potatoes codify a desire for control: the fantasy that the human species can feed any number of its individual members, any time, in any weather. This backfires, surely: think of the Great Famine of the nineteenth-century in Ireland. Or consider today’s genetically enhanced potatoes, which accompany a global desire for, say, McDonald’s fries to taste the same wherever we go, regardless of the unreali...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Tale of Two Materialisms
• Part One: Objects
• Part Two: Assemblages
• Conclusions: Extractivism Estranged
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index