of the poor and oppressed of the world. As a tear and cut from house and home, exile is wounding and heavy-handed, born of history’s cruel passages. Our own age is reeling from the effects of exile, and there is no greater evidence of this than the desperate exoduses of millions of migrants throughout the world. Whether forced or voluntary, the passage of migrants in our times is the clearest manifestation of our unsettled and unhoused age. Homi Bhabha calls these facts the defining features of our postmodern condition:
If the jargon of our times—postmodernity, postcoloniality, postfeminism—has any meaning at all, it does not lie in the popular use of the “post” to indicate sequentiality. . . . For instance, if the interest in postmodernism is limited to a celebration of the fragmentation of the “grand narratives” of postenlightenment rationalism then, for all its intellectual excitement, it remains a profoundly parochial enterprise. . . . For the demography of the new internationalism is the history of postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora, the major social displacements of peasant and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, the grim prose of political and economic refugees.13
As much as my book is concerned with the portrait of wonder in the New World, then, a central concern is with these great migrations and displacements, past and present. As a Mexican American myself, born close to the U.S.-Mexico border in Tucson, I can testify to the stream, or better, river of migrants walking through the vast and perilous deserts of border territories, dying to live, desperately wanting the opportunity to live and blossom in a context that provides the body and soul oxygen to breathe. Every year, hundreds do not make it so far and end their long sojourns in the middle of the desert, to die, like Moses, before ever making it to the Promised Land. When I speak of exile in this study, even through the lens of older voices and laments, I have in mind the scorched lives of these immigrants and refugees.
Though my study is unabashedly academic and theoretical, I hope that it is also the desert space in which a poetics of wonder encounters a poetics of exile, and each are changed as a result, wonder now mindful of the suffering and trials of history, on the one hand, and exile gaining in imagination. In this case, my book argues that wonder turns ominous and menacing, even grotesque, when the force of exile is felt the most, as in prophetic and apocalyptic literatures. As I read them, these texts are haunting examples of how profoundly wonder is changed under the most disjointed and oppressive conditions of history. Latin American history is a case in point and its classic texts, whether theological or literary, often resemble the apocalyptic imagination with its brood of eccentric wonders.14 I hope that my study proves this case by exploring some of these classic texts in which wonder and curiosity (a “Baroque curiosity” in the words of José Lezama Lima) coexist with a wrenching bewilderment at the horrors of history.15
To return to Melville’s Ishmael, we might see in him an allegory of these themes of wonder and exile. Melville tells us that life at sea generates the most astonishing and wildest of all marvels, as if travel on the remotest waters, to the farthest ends of the earth, in such latitudes and longitudes, produces an imagination like no other, one bursting with energy and pregnant with the “wonderfullest” of all fancies.16 Ishmael, no doubt, is tantalized by these marvels, by the anarchic pleasure of sailing forbidden seas and landing on barbarous coasts, but he soon becomes acquainted with another facet of the sea. The sea is freedom for Ishmael, but it is also terror (Melville is a Calvinist after all). Ishmael may want to drown in the sea of wonder, but his name, too, conjures memories of his ancient ancestor, the biblical Ishmael who is exiled from the Promised Land (with his mother, the slave woman Hagar). So, Melville writes of the marvels of life, but with the warning noted in the epilogue of this introduction: that there are dangerous, destructive wonders that lead to barren mazes and leave us overwhelmed, ones that carry us into the maelstroms of history and leave us capsized and lost, exiles in the abyss.
At the end of Moby Dick, when Ishmael’s ship (the Pequod, piloted by the mad Ahab) is destroyed, Melville invokes another biblical figure, mother Rachel weeping for her exiled and dispossessed children: “By her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children because they were not.”17 And Rachel weeps for other American children as well, “because they were not.” Much of the literature of the New World exhibits the same tears as mother Rachel, the same hardships as Hagar and Ishmael, the same capacity for wonder as Melville and the other American artists that are the subjects of my story in this book.
WONDER AND EXILE
Mystical and Prophetic Perspectives
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colonel Aureliano Buendía is born with his eyes wide open, as the author himself, Gabriel García Márquez, was reported to have come forth from the womb.1 This image of a wide-eyed child—eyes swollen and enlarged, looking like a full moon—will serve us nicely in considering the theme of wonder in the New World. From the time of the Discovery through the twentieth century, representations of this previously unknown continent would resemble these bulging eyes, pregnant with an extraordinary capacity for wonder. Wonder was on the tongue of explorers and writers of these lands to the point of excess, and they would use its language with Baroque-like extravagance and with a frequency rivaled only by appeals to exile. One Hundred Years of Solitude has remained something like scripture in Latin American literature because it captured these wide-ranging moments of life in the New World, wonder and exile alike.
As I see it, then, representations of the New World are often close to the spirit of this great novel, somewhere on the border between wonder and exile, sometimes with one more than the other, but more commonly, with an ambiguous and messy mixture of both. Whatever the case, the language of both wonder and exile is as common to the Americas as the experience of dispossession; in fact, they are one with dispossession, different manifestations of it. In the course of my study, I examine this claim thoroughly, that wonder is an experience of dispossession in the order of knowledge, while exile means dispossession in place and location. Though wonder and exile are universal experiences, my study argues that they reach a point of saturation in the momentous events surrounding the Discovery of the New World and in the bewildering events that follow. The New World, thus, gives us an intense case to study, one that is as profuse and extravagant with its wonders as it is with its agonies.
The focus of the book is with poets and writers of the New World and, more specifically, with their theological inclinations. When exploring these figures, then, my attention will turn to the mystical and prophetic trajectories of these writers to see what they can teach us about the language of wonder and exile. At times, my concentration will be on the space between wonder and exile (e.g., the shared experience of dispossession) and, at other times, my concern is with the distinct accents of wonder and exile, mysticism and prophecy. In this regard, I claim that the mystics have a special fluency when it comes to the language of wonder, and the prophets, an unmistakable and tortured familiarity with exile—and both of them, a proficiency with the strange and wondrous concept of God. As unbelievable or impossible as the idea of God is to some moderns, I find it equally impossible to neglect the question in a study devoted to the wonders of the New World. I am following the lead of Jorge Luis Borges when he insisted that any anthology of fantastic literature must include the theologians: “I compiled at one time an anthology of fantastic literature. I have to admit that the book is one of the few that a second Noah should save from a second flood, but denounce the guilty omission of the major and unexpected masters of the genre: Parmenides, Plato, John Scotus Eriugena, Albertus Magnus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Francis Bradley. In fact, to what do the prodigies of Wells or Edgar Allan Poe amount . . . confronted by the creation of God?”2
The book before the reader owes much to a claim
