of fruits without a market, like excrescences of the earth that weigh down on it and disturb it, and not as its natural flourishing, it so happens that those who possess intelligence, which is sterile among us due to its ill guidance, finding themselves in need of making it fertile so as simply to subsist, devote it with exclusive excess to the political battles, in the noblest of cases, thus producing an imbalance between the scarce country and the political surfeit; or else, pressured by the urgencies of life, they serve the strong man in power who pays and corrupts them, or they strive to topple him when, bothered by needy newcomers, the same strong man withdraws his abundant payment for their baneful services.27
Thus, the very “baneful” or “ill-fated” nature of the mysterious “friendship” alluded to in the novel’s original title, Amistad funesta, would somehow be related to the disastrously imbalanced outcomes of uneven development. Indeed, the only other two references in the novel to the element of lo funesto also allude to the effects of a structural maladjustment. Juan Jerez is thus said to “have given in, in his life filled with books and abstractions, to the sweet necessity, which is so often baneful, of squeezing against his heart a little pale hand, this one or that one, it mattered little to him; he saw in womanhood the symbol of ideal beauties more so than a real being.”28 And about Pedro, the dandyish figure whose physical attractiveness is matched only by his arrogance, we are told that he “saw in his own beauty, the baneful beauty of a lazy and ordinary man, a natural title, that of a lion, over all earthly goods, including the greatest among them, which are its beautiful creatures.”29 But, for the narrator, this is only another example of “that rich beauty of a man, graceful and firm, with which nature clothes a scarce soul.”30 Friendship and love, among other phenomena, become baneful or fatal in Martí’s novel precisely due to such maladjustments between the ideal and the real, between physical beauty and moral scarcity, between the life of the mind and the life of the heart, or between the paucity of bourgeois-civil society and the surfeit of politics.
Some of the fragments quoted above, in particular the first one, obviously recall the famous Preface to the 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in which Marx sums up the theoretical and methodological presuppositions of his work in preparation for Capital. Though famous to the point of saturation, this passage deserves to be quoted at length once more, if for no other reason than to highlight the striking terminological proximities and no less striking discrepancies when compared to Martí:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.31
A similar passage about methodology can already be found in The Communist Manifesto, which Martí may or may not have been able to read, or at least hear about, during his years in New York City:
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.32
Finally, toward the end of Extracts from The Capital by Karl Marx, the forty-two-page pamphlet that Martí may have read in Weydemeyer’s translation, this logic of radical social change is applied to the fate of capitalism itself:
The privileges of capital now become fetters to the mode of production which has risen with them and through them. The contradiction of the means of production and the socialization of labor arrive at a point where they become incompatible with their capitalistic frame. It will be burst. The death-knell of the capitalistic private property is sounded. The appropriators of strange property will be expropriated. Thus the individual property will be re-instated, but on the basis of the acquisition of the modern mode of production. There will arise an amalgamation of free labor, which will collectively own the earth and the means of production created by labor.33
If we limit ourselves to this conceptual juxtaposition without bringing up questions of form, there are already two important points of disagreement that immediately catch the eye. For Martí, first of all, there is no linear relation of causality between what, in light of the fragments from Marx, has come to be known as the base and the superstructure. On the contrary, political freedom and the democratization of knowledge, for example, can also come about prior to—or without—a corresponding transformation at the level of bourgeois-civil society or political economy. In fact, this is precisely the problem that besets the newly emergent nations in Latin America, where formal or political independence has not been matched by economic, social, or ideological independence. But there also appears to be a second, as yet understated or implicit disagreement in Martí’s phrasing, the consequences of which are, if possible, even more portentous for the interpretation of Marxism. This second disagreement has to do with the presupposition, which Marx and Martí at first sight would appear to share in common, that normally there exists an underlying harmony or correspondence between base and superstructure, or between the productive forces and the social relations of production with their legal, political, religious, and ideological superstructure: a correspondence interrupted only during times of revolutionary upheaval, but otherwise firmly asserted—or so it seems—as a regulative ideal by both Marx and Martí. And yet, contrary to the initial appearance of a shared presupposition, no sooner do we take a closer look at the peculiar literary-aesthetic formulation of this ideal in Lucía Jerez, as opposed to Martí’s more famous statements such as his prologue to Pérez Bonalde’s Poem of Niagara, than we have to come to the conclusion that all such presuppositions of harmony or correspondence turn out to be inoperative, if not for the capitalist world in general then at least in the specific context of Latin America.
What I wish to underscore in relation to Martí’s novel is not just the surprising proximity to certain phrasings from Marx’s canonical texts so much as the literary form and generic structure adopted therein. Lucía Jerez, or Amistad funesta, in fact constitutes a sentimental romance that ends in nothing less than the violent destruction of all the ideals of natural or harmonious development for which Martí, in his chronicle about the death of Marx, thought he could still count on the support of the feminine soul. The melodrama of ill-fated friendship and unrequited love thus ends with the brutal assassination of Sol—the adolescent orphan whose physical beauty at the same time is supposed to embody the moral ideal as well—at the hands of her friend and potential rival or lover Lucía Jerez. Juan Jerez, on the other hand, never manages to fulfill his historical role as the story’s organic intellectual, his dream of becoming a man of letters—more specifically, a lawyer—at the
