Fidelismo sin Fidel

During the first week of June 1962, Robert Lowell flew to Brazil with his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and their 5-year-old daughter, Harriet. They were met in Para by journalist Keith Botsford. All went well until Elizabeth and Harriet returned to the United States, leaving Lowell to continue his trip without them. On Sept. 4, accompanied only by Botsford, Lowell left for Argentina.

In Buenos Aires, the trouble started. Lowell threw away the pills prescribed for his manic depression, took a string of double martinis at a reception in the presidential palace and, to the bewilderment of the assembled generals, announced that he was “Caesar of Argentina” and Botsford his “lieutenant.” He then gave a speech extolling Hitler and the superman ideology before stripping naked and mounting an equestrian statue in one of the city’s main squares. After continuing in this way for several days, he was eventually overpowered in his hotel, wrestled into a straitjacket and taken to the Clinica Bethlehem, where his legs and arms were bound with leather straps while he was injected with vast doses of Thorazine. Botsford’s humiliation was completed when Lowell, from this position of Prometheus bound, ordered him to whistle “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Later that month, Mary McCarthy wrote to Hannah Arendt that she had just learned “that Cal Lowell was in a mental ward in Buenos Aires and that Marilyn Monroe committed suicide because she had been having an affair with Bobby Kennedy and the White House had intervened .... Our age begins to sound like some awful colossal movie about the late Roman Emperors and their Messalinas and Poppaeas.”

These episodes don’t feature in Jean Franco’s book, but the disintegration of Lowell and the decadence of the Kennedy prefecture speak eloquently to its title, “The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City.” Franco’s lettered city is Latin, not North, America, of course, but the two could never be separated as long as the Cold War continued. Indeed, Lowell’s tour was a small chapter in the kulturkampf at the heart of that conflict, planned as it was by the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had chosen him “as an outstanding American to counteract ... Communist people like Neruda.” As it turned out, Lowell was less an emissary for the virtues of American anti-communism than for the efficiency of Thorazine, but the failure of his trip merely encouraged the CIA to refine its machinations.

Franco’s project is to examine the efforts of writers, over the Cold War decades, to open a new space in the cultural and political imagination of Latin America and to chart the loss of their utopian aspirations in the course of the continent’s conversion to neo-liberalism and a free-market economy. It’s curious, therefore, that she shows only a glancing interest in U.S. strategies to muscle in on this space. To this end, the CIA owned several highbrow magazines circulated behind the Tortilla Curtain, notably Cuadernos and its successor, Mundo Nuevo (edited by Uruguayan literary critic Rodriguez Monegal, and designed to promote the theme of Fidelismo sin Fidel). To ignore the influence of these journals and the significance of their links to the U.S. intelligence community seems almost perverse in a study built around the phrases “Cold War” and “Lettered City.”

Perhaps the omission is in deference to existing scholarship, in particular Maria Eugenia Mudrovcic’s “Mundo Nuevo: Cultura y Guerra Fria en la decada del 60.” More likely, Franco simply couldn’t find room for such investigation in a study that is already bursting at the bindings with discoveries of a different kind. For example: “Progress is illusory from its initiation, giving Schopenhauer’s veil of illusion and Mauthner’s radical nominalism a certain plausibility in the Latin American context.” Er, right. Or, of Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and several other writers: “What is interesting about them is not so much their heuristic potential as their ascending hierarchy that puts a totally diverse group ... at the highest level of abstraction and hence creativity.” Just so. Or even (under the section heading “The Scopic Regime”): “Power seduces. The penis is the instrument of phallic power, that which activates meaning and fantasy.”

Adorno, Horkheimer, Althusser, Eagleton, Levi-Strauss, Lyotard, Foucault--these murderously difficult figures who refused to stay murdered--bleed all over this book, the Banquo’s ghost of all that frenzied excitement about critical theory and post-structuralism. Franco is rarely able to shrug them off in her prodigious survey of postwar Latin American literature; when she does, her insights--as well as her writing--are illuminating. In a section on “powerful cadavers,” she is fascinating on the post-mortem myths that congealed around the corpses of Che Guevara and Eva Peron (whose body made a nomadic tour of several continents before being repatriated to Argentina in 1974). Franco goes on to reveal how potent images of the body in Latin America are intrinsic to the phenomenon of “disappearance.” She retrieves the origins of magical realism and correctly identifies the moment of its debasement in Western culture (“When Bloomingdale ads began to mention magical realism, it was clear that the term had passed into the twilight zone of ‘idees recues.’ ”

Franco rightly observes that “Latin America had, from the conquest onward, been an experimental body on which the developed world showed off its virtuosity.” She gives many examples of this, but her most piercing critique is of Werner Herzog’s 1982 film, “Fitzcarraldo,” which staged imperial nostalgia as cultural enrichment. In tracing the impact of the rubber boom and its exploitation of native labor, the film’s makers seemed to find nothing odd about the fact that for their reenactment, “they deployed a plane, a helicopter, three ancient steamboats, a cast of about 700 extras--including Campa, Machiguenga, Camisea and Shivancoreni Indians, some prostitutes, flush toilets, cold-water showers and electric generators, and a bulldozer that used 150 gallons of fuel that had to be flown in by light plane and ferried up the river in dugout canoes. All of this was mobilized, at great expense, to give the film its air of ‘authenticity,’ which was ironically underscored when lives were lost. One of the Indians drowned, others got sick, and a plane crash severely injured the pilot and five Indians who were being flown in.” Herzog was recorded as saying, without a hint of irony, that “we will probably have one of the last feature films with authentic natives in it. They are fading away very quickly.”

While closing on a note of optimism, Franco’s study is really an extended exposition of the failure of Latin American writers’ to claim that creative freedom they sought. It wasn’t so much the Cold War as the pressures of globalization and the ooze of low culture that destroyed their dreams. Fuentes anticipated this when, in 1966, he complained: “No sir, we no longer have Parnassus of the spirit nor Arcadias of good taste: we are up to our necks in the rat race, we are submerged like any gringo or Frenchman in the world of competition and status symbols, the world of neon lights and Sears Roebuck and washing machines, the films of James Bond and Campbell’s soup cans.”

Franco shares Fuentes’ disgust, I suspect. Ultimately, it’s impossible to discern her views, buried as they are in a welter of academic obfuscation. Because the book is part of a series, edited by Edward Said, called Convergences, it is a pity that it simply fails to converge.