Martí y la tecnología Amor de ciudad grande

José Martí and the Call of Technology in "Amor de ciudad grande"Author(s): David LarawaySource: MLN, Vol. 119, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 2004), pp. 290-301Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251774 .

Accessed: 26/01/2014 13:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toMLN.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Sun, 26 Jan 2014 13:15:54 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251774?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Jose Marti and the Call of Technology in

"Amor de ciudad grande"

David Laraway

Sometime in November of 1883, readers of the Spanish-language periodical La Ameica opened their paper to discover that a fantastic-

sounding invention had recently been unveiled at a technology exposition in Vienna. "Es un aparatillo ingeniosisimo," exclaimed

Jos6 Marti, a correspondent for the paper:

Puesto en lo interior de la boca [...] reproduce [el habla] sobre el papel con perfecci6n de escribiente del siglo XV. S6lo exige que se pronuncie con toda claridad; y cada silaba, al punto que es pronunciada, ya es colocada sobre el papel que la espera, sin molestia alguna para el que habla; y sin confusi6n para el que lee, una vez que aprende la

correspondencia de los nuevos signos. (Obras 8:418)

Ever the poet, Marti's attention was especially drawn to the device's

capacity to render in written form those aspects of the voice that had

always eluded translation into a graphic medium: "Nunca, nunca

llegara la mano rapida a reproducir los escarceos, carreras, sfibitas

paradas, inesperados arranques, hinchamientos de ola y revelamientos de corcel del pensamiento enardecido!" (418). But in spite of his evident enthusiasm for the invention-" iSea bienhadado el inventor del glos6grafo!"-Marti never mentions it again and, apparently, neither did anyone else. Although its potential as an aid for the deaf was briefly explored, very little came of it.1

'For a more comprehensive early description of the glossograph, see Fay 67-69.

MLN 119 (2004): 290-301 ? 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



M L N

Setting aside whatever lessons the glossograph may teach us about the miscarriages of inventions in the marketplace,2 the episode is

suggestive in its variation on what by now has become a familiar theme: the encounter between the modern machine and the voice of the poet, an encounter that as much as any other typifies the tangled web of competing discourses we have come to associate with moder-

nity. However, in Marti's case, it may also give us pause. It would have been unsurprising to see the avant-garde poets celebrate such a machine-one could easily imagine Marinetti or Maples Arce exploit- ing the creative potential of the glossograph-but modernista writers

famously viewed emerging technologies with deep suspicion, if not

outright hostility, fearing that the voice of the poet might be usurped by the voice of the machine or perhaps its engineer.3 With respect to the competing cultural and industrial aspects of modernity, other modernistas found little difficulty in drawing the battle lines in familiar

ways. For Rod6 and Dario, for instance, to be modern was to struggle agonically against forces that threatened to overwhelm intangible but

profoundly ennobling forms of cultural expression. By positing, in

effect, an alternative modernity, grounded in both classical and autochthonous cultures-they hoped to counter the materialistic

modernity they associated with the United States.4

Although Marti also memorably criticized the dehumanizing conditions he saw in the North American variety of modernity, his own

perspective vis-a-vis the new technological modernity of the North is

2 An intriguing discussion of how the reception of new technologies is intertwined with social necessities may be found in Winston.

3Julio Ramos has gathered a number of representative statements on technology from the leading modernistas: "Gutierrez Najera: 'la tos asmatica de la locomotora, el agrio chirriar de los rieles y el silbato de las fabricas [no permiten] hablar de los jardines de Academus, de las fiestas de Aspasia, del arbol de Pireo, en el habla sosegada y blanda de los poetas.' Dario: 'El artista es sustituido por el ingeniero.' La ciencia, 'interpretada con el criterio estrecho de una escuela, ha podido danar alguna vez el espiritu de religiosidad o al espiritu de la poesia,' segin Rod6" (157). Dario had elsewhere declared, "las musas se van porque vinieron las maquinas y apagan el eco de las liras" (ctd. in Rivera-Melendez 185-86). Marti for his part had similarly noted that "ahoga el ruido de los carros las voces de la lira," but insisted, somewhat more optimistically, "se espera la lira nueva, que hara cuerdas con los ejes de los carros" (ctd. in Ramos 153).

4 NoeJitrik has offered a provocative reading of this tension, particularly with respect to Dario. According toJitrik, the modernista poet appropriates the productive model of the machine, applying its generative mechanisms to his own poetry: "tenemos, entonces, un pequeno sistema semi6tico que tiende a ligar una producci6n especifica, la poetica, con una generica, la social: su elemento esencial es la 'maquina' como fundamento de la poetica y, al mismo tiempo, como esperanza y/o realidad de la industrializaci6n" (83). For a response to Jitrik, see Anibal Gonzalez 10-12.

291



DAVID LARAWAY

decidedly more nuanced if not in its own way more conflicted and

problematic. Although the glossograph would soon disappear without a trace, other inventions would prove more durable, threatening to encroach upon the privileged space that had traditionally be-

longed to the poet. Almost contemporaneous with modernismo's

beginnings in the early 1880s, newly emergent technologies such as the telephone-Bell's patent was granted in 1876-and the phonograph-Edison's patent was granted the following year-were ex-

pressly designed to extend the spatial and even temporal range of the voice, making it iterable in previously unimaginable ways.

Such innovations would have been of more than passing interest to Marti. His journalistic career began in New York in 1880, scarcely three years after Buenos Aires' La Nacidn-for which he was to become a frequent correspondent-had begun to break new ground in its use of telegraphy in the transmission of journalistic dispatches posted from the United States, France, Africa, and elsewhere (Rotker 33). Indeed, given the timing of Marti'sjournalistic and poetic career it is not surprising that a recurring theme in his work is the

development of new communicative and other technologies, along with the pedagogical and vocational issues they raised. As Blanca Rivera-Melendez has observed, of the fifty-four pieces of journalism that he published in La America and La Nacion, twenty-four touched on topics of a technical or vocational nature (188). The tone of Marti's writing-unlike that of his modernista counterparts-is gener- ally measured on technological issues: if anything it errs on the side of enthusiasm. Consider an article he published in Mexico's El Partido Liberal in 1890 on the growing popularity of the phonograph, which at that time served not only for playback but for recording as well:

Hasta los poetas han empezado a mirarlo con favor; porque en las altas horas de la noche, cuando las ideas echan alas, y se tine la sombra de colores [...], el poeta, que no puede perder tiempo en buscar f6sforos, sacude las sabanas fogosas, palpa en la oscuridad el fon6grafo que tiene a su cabecera, habla por la trompeta al rollo que recoge sus imagenes: y a la manana siguiente, con poner en el fon6grafo el rollo, los versos salen cantando. El comerciante hace lo mismo: tiene en su casa un fon6grafo, y en su oficina otro: dicta sus cartas de noche, lleva al otro dia los rollos a su despacho, y el fon6grafo va lentamente dictando las cartas al amanuense sentado a la maquina de escribir. (Enciclopedia 8: 384)

To be sure, this conjunction of commerce and culture-presented here without a trace of irony in the figures of the poet and the businessman-would have been unthinkable for Dario or Gutierrez

292



M L N

Najera. It is a commonplace that the modernistas as a whole were entranced with the consumption of material goods rather than their mode of production, since they found the worlds of commerce and literature sufficiently antithetical that any conjunction of the two could only come at the detriment of poetry. Even so, the question remains: how was it possible for the same poet who once said of his verses that they were written, "no en tinta de Academia, sino en mi

propia sangre" (58)5 could have also waxed eloquent about these

prosthetics of the voice? Marti's journalism provides us with an invaluable perspective on

the role of technology in framing the question of Latin American

modernity; certainly it gives us a more nuanced view than we might have otherwise achieved had we limited ourselves to the polemical broadsides of Dario and others. Julio Ramos, for one, has found in Marti's New York journalism an important emblem of the contradic-

tory nature of that modernity. Caught between the relentlessly homogenizing functions of emerging technologies and the heteroge- neous stylization peculiar to literary expression, Marti's journalistic prose comes to articulate, on Ramos's reading, the conditions of the

inherently uneven and unbalanced modernity peculiar to Latin America (153-75). Consequently the task for the poet is to respond to such fragmentation by articulating a distinctively poetic mode of discourse (164; cf. Canfas 81).

While the theme of technology plays a prominent role in Martf's

journalism, the problem is also interrogated in his poetry. To be sure, technology-at least in what Heidegger would call its instrumental and anthropological dimensions (5)-is rarely an explicit theme of his verse. But it is in his poetry that we find perhaps Martf's most

rigorous exploration of the essence of technology. While he is not oblivious to the dangers presented by technology, he nevertheless

appreciates the inseparability of those dangers from the essence of art itself.

Set against the backdrop of a city that is rarely evoked explicitly- but whose presence the reader can readily intuit (Canas 66)-Marti's Versos libres stands at the head of a long tradition of urban poetry in Latin America (Gonzalez Echevarria 30). Even while the theme of

technology is not often broached directly, at certain crucial moments

5 Except where otherwise noted, references to Marti's poetic works will be to the 1998 edition of the Poesia completa, edited by Cintio Vitier et al.

293



DAVID LARAWAY

the questions that it poses appear inevitable. "Amor de ciudad grande" presents us with a case in point:

De gorja son y rapidez los tiempos. Corre cual luz la voz; en alta aguja Cual nave despenada en sirte horrenda Huindese el rayo, y en ligera barca El hombre, como alado, el aire hiende.

(88)

The almost telegraphic style of the opening line-"de gorja son y rapidez los tiempos"-mirrors the conceptual density of Marti's

imagery. The difficult syntax and obscure lexicon underscores the theme of communicative failure. Although subsequent verses are somewhat more fluid, they nevertheless constitute a poetic style that is so elliptical as to render interpretation extremely problematic.

Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria has provided an influential reading of "Amor de ciudad grande" that takes the poem as a touchstone for discussing Marti's modernity. On Gonzalez Echevarria's view, "gorja"- an archaic synonym, he tells us, of "garganta"-becomes an onomato-

peyic proto-sign which is prior to the production of speech itself and which dramatizes the poem's struggle to find a voice of its own (33- 34). The reference to the flight of the voice-"corre cual luz la voz"-

signals a crucial disconnect between the message and the message bearer, something like, as he colorfully explains, "como cuando vemos una pelicula en que la banda sonora esta mal sincronizada, y los labios de los actores se mueven despu6s de haber escuchado sus voces" (35). Finally, the image of the winged man, piercing the air, is to be understood as "el desarraigo y vacio de ese intervalo arritmico

que media entre el principio y el final de ese acto" [i.e. of the articulation of poetic language] (35). The purpose of the poem is

finally to explore the idea that "el vacio antes del poema es el mundo anterior a la caida; la ciudad es el mundo postedenico, bab6lico"

(36). There is much to be said for Gonzalez Echevarria's subtle reading

of the poem; I think he is correct to regard it as embodying the poet's struggle to articulate a suitably human poetics within the confines of an environment apparently inimical to it. But it is less clear that his

interpretation fully accounts for the importance of the poet's urban milieu, particularly with regard to the question of technology. It is

important to recognize that the interpretive challenges that the poem raises are not to be found exclusively in the expressive obscurity of

294



M LN

the text. Rather, "Amor de ciudad grande" may also be read in a more

explicitly material register, one which more vividly brings out the communicative obstacles presented by the poet's surroundings.

We might begin by recalling the historical circumstances of the

poem's composition. In the last two decades of the nineteenth

century, the New York City skyline was rapidly evolving, and not simply in terms of the construction of new skyscrapers. When Marti looked out his apartment window or strolled outside, he would most

likely have been greeted not only by the familiar urban scenes we

commonly associate with the city, but, additionally, a virtual forest of wires strung between poles throughout city streets, connecting residence to residence, business to business, building to building. Al-

though the telephone had been patented only six years earlier, the

popularity of the device was such that, by 1884, the New York State

legislature would be obliged to take action to deal with the unsightli- ness of such a proliferation of cables, mandating that by November 1 of the following year, telephone wires were to be located under-

ground in all large cities (Brooks 87). However, if existing photo- graphs are any indication, the measure was hardly an immediate success (figure 1).

For any visitor to New York at the time-to say nothing of a recently arrived foreigner such as Marti-such a scene would have made it almost impossible not to reflect upon the apparently diminished status of the human in view of the new technologies everywhere in evidence. "Amor de ciudad grande" need not be read therefore as some kind of abstract search for the origin of the poetic voice, but rather as an examination of the fate of that voice once it has been

transposed into a new technological medium. When the poet an- nounces, "corre cual luz la voz," it is not clear that his language is figurative at all. Once we have appreciated the underlying material substratum of the text, we can see that what may have initially appeared to be an abstruse metaphor is rather a literal description of the voice's new, boundless domain.

The human voice, the initial stanza of "Amor de ciudad grande" declares, has now been transformed into an electrical charge, a pulse of energy transmitted by means of a complex mechanical system. Not

only does it now become iterable in formerly unimaginable ways but it becomes an object capable of undergoing a radical transformation while nevertheless conserving something of its phenomenal charac- ter qua voice. Of course this kind of transformation is part and parcel of modernity as a social phenomenon. Julio Ramos has observed the

295



DAVID LARAWAY

Fig. 1. New York City phone lines, circa 1888. Photograph courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

following of modernity's homogenizing tendencies: "la cuantificaci6n no esta orientada hacia el objeto de la presentaci6n; el objeto s6lo existe en terminos de su intercambiabilidad, de su ajuste a los

parametros que impone la medida del cambio" (168). Just as the

system of telephony was to become a dominant medium of communicative exchange, the voice itself undergoes a transformation in which its very being is owed to its communicability by technological means.

296



M LN

We are now better prepared to return to the question of the figuration of language implicit in the opening lines of "Amor de ciudad grande." When the poet affirms, "corre cual luz la voz," what might have initially appeared to be a purely linguistic conceit common to a great deal of modernista verse-the synaesthesia of the voice that travels like light-turns out to be, as it were, the rhetoric of the things themselves. The emergence of these new communicative

technologies explains the synaesthetic effect of the verse, for now the

poet has glimpsed the emergence of a wholly material rhetoric in which the voice indeed travels as light, through a complex network of cables and transmitters. It is in this sense that modern man rends the air: "el hombre, como alado, el aire hiende." The image of the

winged man-long a favorite motif of Marti-is now realized, but in an unexpected way. He indeed takes flight, not on the wings of

poetry, but rather by means of technological advances.6 Marti's attempt to think through the nature of technology in

"Amor de ciudad grande" recalls Heidegger's attempt to articulate the connections between techne and poeisis. At issue in "Amor de ciudad grande" is not simply the instrumental means by which the voice is mechanically reproduced and transmitted by telephony. Rather it is the distinctive mode of revealing of techne, which Heidegger characterizes as a particular way of "bringing-forth," which is nevertheless akin to poeisis in that it is a mode of revealing. The difference, however between the "bringing-forth" of art and the "bringing-forth" of technology is that the latter assumes the role of what Heidegger calls a "challenging [...] which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted or stored as such" (14). In the first lines of "Amor de ciudad grande" this is precisely what has happened: the voice has been transformed into an electrical

charge which is transmitted to its destination by means of a mechanical system. The voice becomes an essentially iterable object in a manner previously associated only with the technologies of writing.

Even as the first verses takes their cue from the newly emergent, openly material rhetoric implied by these technological advances, the fate of the body in the poem is, ironically enough, to become devalued to the point of obsolescence. The voice is no longer

6 A representative example of Marti's angelic imagery can be found in his "Contra el verso ret6rico y ornado," where he declares, "empieza el hombre en fuego y para en ala" (Poesia completa 121). For general reflections on the motif in Marti, see Jimenez, especially 13-19.

297



DAVID LARAWAY

constrained by the physical coordinates of the speaker's body; corre-

spondingly, the body becomes nothing but an empty shell:

[...] Si los pechos Se rompen de los hombres, y las carnes Rotas por tierra ruedan, no han de verse Dentro mas que frutillas estrujadas!

(88)

Here and in the stanzas that follow, the material body is voided of

meaning, or, more precisely, now that it is untethered from the

speaking voice it becomes a commodity which acquires value only through its capacity to be exchanged in the economic transactions of the marketplace: "Se ama de pie, en las calles, entre el polvo / De los salones y las plazas" (88). The externalization of the voice in "Amor de ciudad grande" thus corresponds to an "emptying out" of the

body, which itself becomes little more than a sort of Heideggerian "standing-reserve" (17).

Here we have a key for reading the remaining stanzas of the poem. While Marti in his journalism was able to regard new advances in instrumental technology with interest and even enthusiasm, his

appraisal of what Heidegger would call the "essential" nature of

technology is marked in his poetry by a more sober awareness that the mode of revealing of techne has come to constitute a danger in its own

right. "iMe espanta la ciudad!" exclaims the poet as the poem draws to a close:

[...] Toda esta llena De copas por vaciar, o huecas copas! iTengo miedo iay de mi! de que este vino

T6sigo sea, y en mis venas luego Cual7 duende vengador los dientes clave! [.............................................................] [...] Yo soy honrado, y tengo miedo!

(90)

What is the nature and significance of the fear that the poet expresses here? It is not just the tempestuousness of modern urban life that the

poet finds so distasteful. Neither is it the danger that so worried Darfo and Guti6rrez Najera, that technological advances might finally drive

7 Following Schulman's edition of the poem, I opt here for "cual," instead of "cuan," which is how the Poesia completa edition reads.

298



MLN

the poet into hiding. Rather, it is the danger implied in the very mode of being of technology. Heidegger describes the danger like this:

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as subject, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of

objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. (27)

The mode of revealing in which technology participates is antithetical to other modes of revealing, including that of poeisis. As Heidegger puts it, the danger we face is "the possibility that it could be denied to

[us] to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth" (28). The only truth recognized by this technological mode of inquiry is one that would make it

impossible to see human beings as anything other than "copas por vaciar, o huecas copas."

Heidegger has a story to tell about how the danger of technology is

inextricably bound up with hope. "But where the danger is, grows / The saving power also" had written H6elderlin, and here Heidegger finds the source of a possible redemption through art. Enframing- the mode of revealing peculiar to technology-"comes to pass for its

part in the granting that lets man endure-as yet unexperienced, but

perhaps more experienced in the future-that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the coming to

presence of truth" (33). The poet, for Heidegger, has a unique responsibility to safeguard art's capacity to disclose truth. By reclaim-

ing poetry as a techne-as it was known among the ancient Greeks- the hope is that poetry may yet make possible a mode of questioning that resists assimilation to the model of technology.

It is essential to Heidegger's account that poetry and technology, with their attendant dangers and saving graces, are somehow given together: "the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technol-

ogy, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes" (35). In Marti as well, the danger of technology is inextricably bound up with the

hope for a kind of redemption. Just as Heidegger had found salvation and danger to be companions, Marti finds a saving grace in that same attribute that had driven him to despair: fear. In contrast to the fear that would finally drive him to exclaim "iMe espanta la ciudad!," and

"iTengo miedo!," his poetry aims to recollect another kind of fear, which by contrast is joyfully felt:

299



DAVID LARAWAY

El goce de temer, aquel salirse Del pecho el coraz6n; el inefable Placer de merecer; el grato susto De caminar de prisa en derechura Del hogar de la amada, y a sus puertas Como un nifio feliz romper en llanto;- Y aquel mirar, de nuestro amor al fuego, Irse tifiendo de color las rosas [...].

(88-89; emphasis mine)

The peculiar exuberance that attends this fear-born of reticence, discretion, and decorum-signals a manner of revealing which aims to preserve the mysteriousness of one human being with respect to another. But no sooner is this mode of disclosure invoked than it is

immediately called into question by the pragmatism of an age that can understand truth only in terms of instrumentality: "iEa, que son

patranas! Pues dqui6n tiene / Tiempo de ser hidalgo? [...]" (89). The accusation that the "goce de temer" might only conceal falsehoods

suggests that only a particular kind of truth is to be valued now, one which is incompatible with poetry. Marti makes no attempt in "Amor de ciudad grande" to refute the claim, at least not directly. To

respond to such an accusation would be to endorse the instrumental

conception of truth that technology seeks to privilege. Rather, the mode of revealing proper to poetry is such that even as it permits us to intuit or at least hope for its realization, it immediately withdraws:

"iTengo sed,-mas de un vino que en la tierra / No se sabe beber! [...]" (90).

It would be misleading to say that Martf regarded the call of

technology and of urban modernity as nothing but a siren song to be resisted. On the contrary, as hisjournalism indicates, he regarded the

emergence of new communicative technologies with a guarded but unmistakable enthusiasm. But we must credit Marti as well with the sober recognition that the technological discourse of the age would demand a great deal of the poet: not simply in a mode of unquestion- ing acceptance or simplistic denial but as a challenge to recover for

poetry once again its saving power, in order to redeem technology for human purposes.8

Brigham Young University

8 An earlier draft of this paper was presented at a conference at the University of California, Irvine in April of 2000. I am grateful to fellow panelist Carl Good for his suggestions and encouragement.

300



MLN

WORKS CITED

Cafias, Dionisio. El poeta y la ciudad: Nueva York y los escritores hispanos. Madrid: Catedra, 1994.

Brooks, John. Telephone: The First Hundred Years. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Fay, E.A. "The Glossograph." American Annals for the Deaf 28 (1883): 67-69.

Gonzalez, Anibal. La cr6nica modernista hispanoamericana. Madrid: J.P. Turanzas, 1983.

Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto. "Marti y su 'Amor de ciudad grande': notas hacia la poetica de Versos libres." Isla a su vuelo fugitiva. Madrid: J.P. Turanzas, 1983. 27-42.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

Jimenez, Jose Olivio. La raiz y el ala: aproximaciones criticas a la obra literaria deJose Marti. Valencia: Pre-textos, 1993.

Jitrik, Noe. Las contradicciones del modernismo: productividad poetica y situaci6n sociol6gica. Mexico: Colegio de Mexico, 1978.

Marti, Jose. La gran enciclopedia martiana. Ed. Ram6n Cernuda. 14 vols. Miami: Ediciones de Cultura Cubana, 1977.

.Ismaelillo, Versos libres, Versos sencillos. Ed. Ivan A. Schulman. Madrid: Catedra, 1996.

Obras completas. La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1963-1973.

. Poesia completa: edicion critica. Ed. Cintio Vitier, Fina Garcia Marruz, and Emilio de Armas. Mexico: UNAM, 1998.

Ramos,Julio. Desencuentros de la modernidad en America Latina: literatura y politica en el siglo XIX. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 1989.

Rivera-Melendez, Blanca M. "La locomotora y la imaginaci6n tecnol6gica en Jose Marti: ansiedad y dependencia." Revista de Estudios Hispdnicos 17-18 (1990-1991): 185-95.

Rotker, Susana. The American Chronicles ofJose Marti: Journalism and Modernity in Spanish America. Hanover and London: UP of New England, 2000.

Winston, Brian. Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

301



Documents

Martí y la tecnología Amor de ciudad grande