to do good,” and who “saw in everything what he bore within: rebellion, the high road, combat,” Juan Jerez, too, seems destined for a higher moral mission: “Juan Jerez’s was one of those unhappy souls that can only do what is grand and love what is pure.”34 And yet, in the end, his obsession with righting the wrongs of the whole universe, his nostalgia for the heroic grandeur of epic deeds, and his well-nigh masochistic sense of duty lead him to an attitude of the “beautiful soul” whose only proof of moral integrity is that it is inversely proportionate to the sordidness of the world in which, despite everything, he is forced to circulate. “Everything on this earth, in these dark times, tends to degrade the soul: everything from books and paintings to business and affects,” to the point of provoking “the luminous illness of the great souls, reduced to petty chores by their current duties or the impositions of chance.”35
Melodrama’s genre and gender conventions thus are put into play as the experimental ground for testing and interrogating the brusque alteration of social relations produced in Latin America by the newfound political liberties and the vulgarization of knowledge for which there has not been any corresponding change in the economical distribution of fortunes. “Melodrama links the crisis of modernity to desire and to the body, aside from facilitating an investigation into the processes of representation,” as Francine Masiello writes in a groundbreaking study, using Martí’s Lucía Jerez as one of her examples. “To put this still more radically, I propose that it is impossible to narrate the chaos of the fin de siècle in Latin America without melodrama.”36 The typical family romances such as Amalia by the Argentine José Mármol or María by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs that had served as “foundational fictions” for the joint construction of nation and narration in Latin America thus begin to come apart at the seams in the violent dislocations that give Lucía Jerez its melodramatic structure.
On the one hand, Martí’s novel renders explicit the presuppositions behind the shift from politics to morals, which we saw was implicitly at work in his chronicle about Marx. Using a regionally inflected metaphor for a view that we otherwise would associate with vulgar Marxism, the narrator in yet another didactic digression tells us how, just as the mind’s well-being depends on the health of the stomach, so too the secret to a happy and well-ordered nation-state is to be found in the economy of the hacienda:
A well-ordered hacienda is the base of universal happiness. In nations or in homes, it is in love—even the most unblemished and secure—that we must search for the cause of the many upheavals and disruptions that project darkness or ugliness upon them, when they are not the cause of separation, or even death, which is another form of separation: the hacienda is the stomach of happiness. Husbands, lovers, persons who still have to live and who desire to prosper: put some order in your hacienda!37
On the other hand, in the story’s actual unfolding, Lucía Jerez violently tears apart the amorous and familial bonds that the text’s numerous didactic asides place at the origins of social and political harmony. Not surprisingly, moreover, the misogyny that we found barely hidden in Martí’s chronicle in honor of Marx now comes to the foreground in the evaluation of Lucía’s potential attraction to Sol. Lesbianism indeed appears as the ultimate threat to Martí’s peculiar moralization of politics: the epitome of women’s autonomy from the constraints of family, reproduction, and heterosexuality. This is why the ultimate example of a “baneful friendship” within the fictive universe of Amistad funesta, as Lucía Jerez was first known, can be said to lie in the fatal attraction between two women or, even more forcefully, in the unrequited and ultimately murderous love of one woman for another. It is also why Lucía’s friendship seems to be driven by such a strong sense of the destructive potential of love, as even some of the earliest commentators were quick to point out.38
Finally, aside from causing major critics such as the Cuban Cintio Vitier to speak of a “case” in the clinical-pathological sense, Lucía’s desire is also a slap in the face of would-be organic intellectuals such as Juan Jerez, who is thus reduced to a state of utter inaction in which even the ideal of personal abnegation appears merely as a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to disguise powerlessness under the cloak of high-minded morality. Whence the peculiar combination of boastful martyrdom and self-sacrificing Quixotry:
There was in him a strange and violent need for martyrdom, and if, because of the superiority of his soul, he had great difficulty finding friends who would esteem and stimulate his mind, he who felt more of a need to give himself—since deep down he did not love himself at all and saw himself more as a property to others that he kept in deposit—gave himself over as a slave to anyone who seemed to love him or understood his delicate nature and wished nothing but good upon him.39
Whatever the reader makes of this strangely hysterical staging of desire in Lucía Jerez, the fact remains that the ideals of harmonious development are here allowed completely and unabashedly to fall apart. In spite of the deep reluctance about the genre to which he publicly confesses and which probably explains why he signs his “bad little novel” or noveluca under a female pseudonym, Martí almost seems to welcome the narrative constraints of the melodramatic format as a space in which he can work against the pressures put on him everywhere else by the strict normativity of his moral and political outlook.
As we will see in the following chapters, this melodramatic orientation will have great repercussions for the imagination of the political Left in Latin America throughout much of the twentieth century. In fact, together with the detective novel, melodrama seems to be one of the most tempting and recurrent forms for thinking politics today. In order to understand this, the traditional argument, according to which the melodramatic struggle over good and evil provided much-needed moral anchorage in the midst of the great social and political upheaval that shook Western Europe after the French Revolution, will have to be extended and transposed onto those more recent times of ours that are post-revolutionary in the much more radical sense of having lived through the decline and fall of the very idea of the revolution itself. “Even literature confronts the theme of the institutional revolution (for many the revolution betrayed) through melodrama or mythification,” as Carlos Monsiváis writes in an important essay, “Mexico 1890–1976: High Contrast, Still Life,” included in Mexican Postcards: “In melodrama dominant morality is extenuated and strengthened, governed by a convulsive, shuddering faith in the values of poetry.”40 On the other hand, in the pre-revolutionary context of Martí’s Lucía Jerez, as Marx and Engels also keenly intuited in their commentary from The Holy Family on The Mysteries of Paris by one of the subgenre’s most celebrated founders, Eugène Sue, and as Althusser would confirm much later in a central text in For Marx, melodrama provides an ideal speculative space in which to elaborate and experiment with the multiple effects of uneven development as the logic of the missed encounter—whereby the latter can be read not only as the result of Marx’s defective knowledge about Latin America, nor only as the tactical and strategic error for which Martí selectively yet also consistently reproaches Marx, but rather as the very structure of the capitalist mode of production.
Through a melodrama complete with a violently unhappy ending in the form of a murderous passage à l’acte, we thus arrive at the negation of all the regulative ideals of natural and harmonious development modeled upon the family or the hacienda. We could even take this argument one step further by arguing that in his only novel Martí, too, begins to catch a glimpse of the logic of the violently uneven development of modernity, just as Marx did a few years earlier in his writings on Ireland, India, or Russia. Thus, in light of Lucía Jerez, we would have to conclude that for Martí—in the realm of narrative experimentation perhaps no less than for a radical reading of Marx that could find inspiration in Freud’s and Lacan’s psychoanalysis—there is not, nor can there be in the current circumstances, any correspondence or adaptation between base and superstructure, or between the social relations of production and the economic distribution of fortunes and productive forces.
This is also, incidentally, the conclusion arrived at by someone like Slavoj Žižek, in his foundational book The Sublime Object of Ideology:
How do we define, exactly, the
