12. See Dominick LaCapra, "Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts," in Modern European Intellectual History, Dominick LaCapra and Steven Caplan, eds. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 47-85.
13. For the reception of Hernani, see Fernande Bassan, "La reception critique d"Hernani' de Victor Hugo," in Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre 36 : l.
14. The following account is based largely on Victor Hugo's own memoirs, "Victor Hugo raconte par un témoin de sa vie," in Victor Hugo, Hernani, Ruy Blas: Suivi de la Bataille d'Hernani racontée par se témoins (Paris: Gallimard et Librairie Generale Française, 1969); hereafter abbreviated "VH."
15. La Quotidienne, quoted in "VH," 459.
16. La Gazette de France, 27 February 1830, quoted in "VH," 518.
17. According to F. W. J. Hemmings, the scandal surrounding Hernani secured financial success not only for the author but also for the Comédie Française. "'Hernani' was, financially, a badly needed shot in the arm for the company, and its members did not mind contending with unruly audiences when the res for receipts were so cheering: 12,000 francs netted from the first three performances had grown to 40,000 by the ninth and 76,000 by the nineteenth, which took place on 5 April" (Hemmings, Culture and Society in France 1789-1848 [London: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1987], 230).
18. Théophile Gautier, La Presse, 22 January 1838, quoted in "VH," 525.
19. Théophile Gautier, Histoire du romantisme (Paris: Les Introuvables, 1993), 79, 6, 83; hereafter abbreviated Hr.
20. For an exploration of a later version of the performative public spaces of modernism, see Walter Adamson, "Apollinaire's Politics: Modernism, Nationalism, and the Public Sphere in Avant-Garde Politics," 6 (September 1999): 33-56.
21. Although I use the concept of generations only implicitly in this study, it is noteworthy that the early nineteenth century saw the crystallization of cohorts of young people who were united by common cultural and ideological concerns. For the treatment of a slightly earlier phenomenon, see Alan B. Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).
22. See Delecluze, "Les Barbus d'à présent et les barbus de MDCCC," in Paris ou le livre des cent-et-un (Paris: Chez L'advocat, Librairie, 1832).
23. See Louis Maigron, Le Romantisme et la mode: D'Apres des documents inédits (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Campion, 1911).
24. See Arsène Houssaye, Man about Paris: The Confessions of Arsène Houssaye, trans. and ed. Henry Knepler (New York: Morrow, 1970), 32.
25. Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians in 1835 (London: Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, 1836), 1:14.
26. Quoted in Louis Maigron, Le Romantisme et la mode, 65.
27. Elias Regnault, "L'Homme de lettre," in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Paris: L. Curmer, 1842), 4:226.
28. Ibid.
29. Delecluze, "Les Barbus d'à présent et les barbus de MDCCC," 83, 85.
30. See Albert Joseph George, Short Fiction in France, 1800-1850 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1964); and James Smith Allen, Popular French Romanticism: Authors, Readers, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981).
31. Houssaye, Man about Paris, 32.
32. Maxime du Camp, quoted in Louis Maigron, Le Romantisme et la mode, 54.
33. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979); hereafter abbreviated S.
34. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976); John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Julia Pryzbos, L'Enterprise mélodramatique (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1987); Jean-Marie Thomasseau, Le Mélodrame (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1984); Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); Robert Bechtold Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Visions of Experience (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968); and David Bradby, Louis James, Bernard Sharratt, eds. Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television 1800-1976 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
35. MM. A!A!A!, Traité du mélodrame (Paris, 1817), 4; hereafter abbreviated Tm.
36. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 13, 14.
37. Quoted in Jean-Marie Thomasseau, Le Mélodrame, 54.
38. For traces of the melodrama in romantic aesthetic doctrine, see Victor Hugo, La Préface de Cromwell, introduction, texts, and notes, Maurice Souriau (Paris: Boivin, 1936).
39. ro, 8 February 1831.
40. Trollope, Paris and the Parisians, 64.
41. Jules Janin, The American in Paris (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1843), 211; hereafter abbreviated AP.
42. Lady Sydney Morgan, France in 1829-30 (London: Saunders and Otley, 1831), 2:68; hereafter abbreviated F.
43. See F 2:207; and Brander Matthews, French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (1881; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1901), 84.
44. The image was not published and only one copy remains in existence. See Loys Delteil, Le peintre-graveur illustré, vol. 27, no. 2719.
45. See Louis Maigron, Le Romantisme et la mode.
46. "Les Jeunes Frances," Le ro, 30 August 1831. Although the articles were published anonymously, it is almost certain that the author was the popular journalist, Leo Gozlan, who had been associated with Gautier's circle and remained a friend of Balzac's. These articles were reproduced as an addendum to Théophile Gautier, Les Jeunes-France: Romans goguenards (Paris: Editions des Autres, 1979).
47. Ibid.
48. See "Ameublement des Jeunes Frances," Le ro, 12 September 1831.
49. "Le Festin des Jeunes Frances," Le ro, 10 September 1831.
50. Théophile Gautier, "Onuphrius," in Les Jeunes-France, 69.
51. Ibid.
52. Gautier, "Celle-ci et celle-la," in Les Jeunes-France, 149.
53. Ibid., 161.
54. Beryl Schlossman, The Orient of Style: Modernist Allegories of Conversion (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 1.
55. For an account of the rise of the mass circulation newspaper, see Hemmings, Culture and Society in France; and Albert Joseph George, The Development of French Romanticism: The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on Literature (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1955). For an insightful analysis of the symbolic implications of newspaper culture in the 1830s, see Richard Terdiman, "Newspaper Culture: Institutions of Discourse; Discourse of Institutions," in Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); see also Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire.
56. Gautier's two identities were apparently so well insulated from each other that even Mme de Girardin, the wife of his editor, displayed astonishment on the occasion of the publication of Gautier's book of verses, La Comédie de la mort (The comedy of death): "What! Théophile Gautier a poet!" she supposedly exclaimed. "This prince of mockers, this master of irony, this great iconoclast, is also a dreamer of cascades, a melancholy inhabitant of the floating kingdom of clouds" (Mme de Giradin, quoted in Joanna Richardson, Théophile Gautier: His Life and Times [London: M. Reinhardt, 1958], 38).
57. Between 1851, when the definitive edition of Mademoiselle de Maupin was published, and 1877, the novel was reprinted thirteen times. In 1877, a new edition appeared, and by 1883 it had been reprinted nine times. For the fate of the novel in the late nineteenth century, see Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination 1880-1900, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 43.
58. See Henri de Latouche, Fragoletta, adapted by Noële Roubaud, preface by Jérome and Jean Tharaud (Paris: Stock, 1946).
59. See Rene Jasinski, Les Années romantiques de Th. Gautier (Paris: Librairie Vuibert, 1929), 289.
60. Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, 6:28, quoted in Jasinski, Les Années romantiques de Th. Gautier, 301. For Baudelaire's interpretation of Mademoiselle de Maupin, see Charles Baudelaire, "Théophile Gautier," L'Artiste 13 (March 1859), in Baudelaire as a Literary Critic: Selected Essays, intr. and trans. Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964). As is well-known, Baudelaire dedicated Fleurs du Mal to Gautier. Balzac's friendship with Gautier began immediately after the publication of Mademoiselle de Maupin as a direct result of Balzac's admiration of the style of Gautier's novel. For an account of the friendship, see Théophile Gautier, Portrait de Balzac précédé de portrait de Théophile Gautier par lui-même (Montpellier: L'Anabase, 1994).
61. For literary accounts of l'art pour l'art, see Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity; Gene H. Bell-Villada, Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life; and Albert Cassagne, La Théorie de l'art pour l'art en France chez les derniers romantiques et les premiers réalistes (1905; Paris: Lucien Dorbon, 1959).
62. Théophile Gautier, preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. and intr. by Joanna Richardson (New York: Penguin Classics, 1981), 39; hereafter abbreviated MM.
63. The phrase "l'art pour l'art" was first used by Benjamin Constant, who presumably had learned of the concept through conversations with Friedrich Schelling and other German philosophers. The idea, however, was popularized in France through Victor Cousin's influential lecture series, Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien, which he first gave in 1818 after his 1817 trip to Germany. As a direct result of Cousin's efforts, l'art pour l'art became an integral part of academic eclecticism and the official aesthetic philosophy of the bourgeoisie. See Cassagne, La théorie de l'art pour l'art en France.
64. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977); Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, intr. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Allegory and Representation (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Beryl Schlossman, The Orient of Style; Olaf Hansen, Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect: American Allegory in Emerson, Thoreau, Adams and James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Ralph Flores, A Study of Allegory in Its Historical Context and Relationship to Contemporary Theory (Lewiston, Queenston, Lamperer: Edwin Mellon Press, 1996).
65. Walter Benjamin, quoted in Flores, A Study of Allegory in Its Historical Context, 6.
66. Flores, A Study of Allegory, 1, 5.
67. For a still-interesting reading of Mademoiselle de Maupin, see Jacques Barzun, "Gautier the Resident Witness," in The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors Classic and Modern (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1956).
68. See Jean-Marie Roulin, "Confusion des sexes, mélange des genres et quête du sens dans Mademoiselle de Maupin," Romantisme: Revue du dix-neuvieme siècle 103 : 31-40.
69. The association between androgyny and modernism has frequently been made. See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire; Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Kari Weil, Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992). See also Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, eds., Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New York: Routledge, 1991).
70. See in particular Jeffrey S. Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Michael Fitzgerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995).
71. Albert Cassagne, La Théorie de l'art pour l'art, 28-9.
When Zora Neale Hurston published her now-celebrated novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937, a handful of critics objected to its feathery characterization of rural southern African Americans. Richard Wright was among those who urged Hurston to attempt a more "serious" and politically responsible portrayal of black life in America; and Alain Locke advised her to tone up her "surface[y]" "folklore" narratives with hard-hitting "social document" techniques. 1 It would be a stretch to suggest that Hurston turned to the Federal Writers' Project in 1938 in an effort to answer Wright's and Locke's appeals to social realism and the gritty substance of the modern document; the production of a federally subsidized tour guide can hardly have been the sort of social project that her critics had in mind. Still, it was in her position as an editor of the American Guide Series book, Florida , that Hurston first came to try her hand at documentary writing. Her contributions to the Florida guide are scant, but they are characteristically complex. The "Negro spirituals and secular tunes" that she recorded and transcribed for Florida may not be as "authentic" as they seem; and their uncertain status as documented "folk" materials suggests that, despite the progressive efforts of many who participated in the Federal Writer's Project, Hurston's conceptions of "culture" clashed with the varieties of culture fostered by the governmental documentary projects of the late 1930s.
The state and regional guides produced by the Federal Writers' Project did more than feed and clothe writers during the Depression. They also promoted new varieties of national pride during a decade rife with radical political sentiment. As the art historian and theorist John Tagg has noted, the liberal Roosevelt administration compiled its massive factual and photographic archives in an effort "to retrieve the status of Truth in [liberal governmental] discourse." This "Truth" status had been "threatened by crisis," and its "renegotiation was essential if . . . national and social identities [were to be] resecured" in a manner that served both corporatist and state interests. 2 As part of a widely praised effort to provide a documentary "roadmap for the cultural rediscovery of America from within," the 378 books and pamphlets of the American Guide Series provided more than a compilation of the "raw cultural material" of myth and fact. 3 They also functioned as the popular literary vanguard of a project that shaped radical dissent toward the imperatives of liberal reform.
The publications of the American Guide Series served both informational and commercial purposes. Richard Wright's "sociological" contributions to the Illinois project, for example, laid a groundwork for the stories that he later published in Uncle Tom's Children. The gap between the informational and commercial directives of the Federal Writers' Project can be measured in the interval between the Guide Series' Florida and Alabama projects. Hurston had traveled extensively through these contiguous states when she gathered data for her studies of rural southern African American culture in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the divergent Alabama and Florida guides therefore offer an apt index of the imperatives that bore down upon the native Floridian who later undertook government-sponsored documentary work. Although Hurston did not participate directly in the making of the 1941 Alabama guide, this book does list Hurston's Mules and Men among its bibliographical sources, and it contains a short but notable account of Cudjo Lewis, the recently deceased African slave from the Mobile area whom Hurston had interviewed for her as yet unpublished book-length study, "Barracoon." 4
Of the two southern state guides, the Alabama guide is renowned for its unsentimentalized portrayal of the Deep South's violent settlement. The Roosevelt scholar William Leuchtenburg, for example, singles out the Massachusetts and Alabama state guides for their exemplary historical analysis and writing. "Though the [Guide Series] writers labored under some constraints," Leuchtenburg claims, "their comments could be unsparing." Offering an example of such sharp commentary, he praises the Alabama guide's account of the disappearance of the state's "indigenous" peoples:
In remarking on a site where the Colonial Dames of America had placed a marker on the triumph of Civilization over Savagery, the authors of the Alabama guide observed: "Here, in 1802, was negotiated one of the series of treaties by which the United States absorbed the Choctaw lands at a price of one broken promise per square mile." 5
Not surprisingly, the guide's authors are more muted on the subject of the ongoing strife between whites and blacks in Alabama. To their credit, however, they do acknowledge that mutual racial "antagonism" had been a feature of Alabama's history; and they discuss the rise of racist groups including the Ku Klux Klan during the state's "Reconstruction" years. 6
The Florida guide, by contrast, is little remembered for its documentation of southern history. In this guide, Florida's history and culture are introduced and discussed as a kind of currency for the contemporary tourist trade. The southernmost state is a place not of anguished monuments but of simulacra: its "palm-thatched" "Indian villages" and "tribal flags" have been "hoisted" quickly in an effort to lure passing motorists. In Florida, history is written first on profligate "highway signboards." According to the guide, the doubtful "Seminole names" that adorn these signboards "are more numerous and widespread . . . than are the living members of the race. . . . The Indians themselves have made the most of one profitable name. Since they discovered that the story of Osceola is popular among tourists, that fiery war chief has acquired many descendants, and most of the present-day Osceolas display their names along the Tamiami Trail." 7 With its frank discussion of the state's self-fashioning as a tourist haven, and with a large proportion of its pages outlining tours for the modern sightseer, the Florida guide plainly functions as a subsidized lure to visitors.
The difference between the informational Alabama book and the more openly commercial Florida guide is apparent not only in the contrast between their respective treatments of regional history but also in the guides' photographic illustrations. The Alabama guide features stark photos of the state's power plants, coal miners, and white and black sharecropper families; and these pictures are attributed to the then-celebrated "social" photographers--Dorothea Lange, Marion Post, Arthur Rothstein--who took them for the Farm Security Administration in the mid- to late-1930s (. 1 and 2). The neighboring Florida guide, on the other hand, is sprinkled with mostly unattributed portraits of gardens and golf courses, well-posed Seminoles, and turtle fishermen who decorate idyllic beaches ( 3). Even the federally sponsored FSA photos that appear in the guide serve to distance Florida from nationwide political and economic concerns. Attributed to sponsoring agencies rather than to the witnesses who breathe behind governmental lenses, the Florida photos depict well-groomed laborers who seem unburdened by economic hardship and environmental corrosion (. 4 and 5). Florida may well have been a prettier place than Alabama, but in the Florida guide, the call for popular support for initiatives such as rural electrification and farm subsidies gives way to the siren call of tourism. 8
In Florida, not just history and industry but also the arts revolve around tourism. Apart from Hurston, the best-known contemporary writer to have contributed to the guide was Wallace Stevens, whose praise of lush, dewy Florida appears in a section on "Florida Literature." Stevens labored as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut, but here he qualifies as a Florida writer because, like many other "poets" who have been "aroused" by the southernmost state, he was "a regular visitor" (FL, 147). In a tribute to winter getaways, the Florida guide reprinted the following lines from Stevens's "Nomad Exquisite":
As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life, [Begin Page 476]
As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder
Beholding all these green sides
And gold sides of green sides,
And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors,
So, in me, come flinging
Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.
(FL, 147)
The tourist Stevens, we are told in the book's "Preface," graces the pages of the Florida guide courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publisher of Harmonium . No such fanfare accompanies the appearance of Hurston, whose influence as a folklorist can be felt in the series of Florida work songs that appear three pages later. Hurston's unattributed contributions to the Florida guide appear in a chapter on the "Music and Theater" of Florida, and they consist of a series of "Negro spirituals and secular tunes" (FL, 149). The first six of the seven fragments of spirituals and secular songs included in this chapter are work songs. These range from a rowing song attributed to Fernandina slaves to chain gang songs that "illustrate the Negro's relief in rhythm":
Little corn, UGH!
Yellow gal, UGH!
Little t, UGH!
Lotta time, UGH!
(FL, 150)
There is a tightly compacted narrative to many of these song fragments, but the guide's "Music and Theater" commentator is more concerned to discuss their social function and form. In apparent conformity to the directives that Sterling Brown issued as the Editor of Negro Affairs for the Federal Writer's Project, these work songs are transcribed in a manner that highlights not their phonetic divergence from "standard," or Anglo-American, forms of "English" but rather their distinctive idiomatic and musical properties. 9 Freed from the crippling imperatives of minstrelsy, these slight fragments begin to challenge traditional distinctions between "low" forms of folk expression and "higher" literary forms. The repetition of single lines and verses, for example, can convey nuanced expressive differences. In many of the work songs of the Florida Negro, the guide informs us, "contrast and embellishment are obtained by stress and accent in the tune, rather than by a change of words" (FL, 151). A song that is made up of a single phrase, with different words italicized in each of its three repetitions, illustrates such expressive embellishment. The last of the seven song fragments reads as follows:
Love ain't nothing but the EASY-GOING heart disease,
OH LOVE ain't nothing but the easy-going heart DISEASE;
LOVE ain't NOTHING but the EASY-GOING HEART DISEASE.
(FL, 151)
This excerpt is really more of a blues than a work song, and it is noteworthy not only because it exemplifies Brown's progressive call for "unmeasured" transcriptions of African-American oral material, but also because it helps us to identify Hurston as the author of the "Music and Theater" section of the guide. Moreover, there is a story behind this fragment--one that tells us something about Hurston's apparent frustration with the Federal Writer's Project and with the larger aesthetic and commercial directives that fueled the production of state guides like Florida's. (Even in their most progressive phases under relatively enlightened administrators like Sterling Brown, and also Benjamin Botkin who became the head of the FWP's Folklore division in 1938, the American Guide Series books would ultimately remain the instruments of the liberal government that produced them.) 10 As it happens, the genesis of the heart-disease lyric that caps the Negro "Music" of Florida is as questionable as the ancestry of the state's "signboard" Osceolas. This blues song may not be from Florida, and it may not even be a Negro folk song in the way that the guide presents it. By tracing the heart-disease lyric to potential urban sources that raise doubt regarding its "authenticity," however, we can use this so-called Florida folk song to understand the conceptions of racial and cultural identity that vexed and enriched Hurston's work as both a cultural anthropologist and a state documentarian.
Hurston's discomfort with her roles as both an anthropologist and a documentarian should surprise no one who is familiar with either modern anthropology or with state-sponsored documentary initiatives of the late 1930s. In America, at least, both efforts were fundamentally liberal, which is to say that they worked toward the refinement of a fundamentally racist status quo. To call the anthropologist Franz Boas, who was Hurston's teacher, a "racist" is probably something of a cheap shot. Few public intellectuals contributed as much to the repeal of blatantly racist scientific and legislative initiatives as did Boas. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, his progressive conceptions of "culture" were institutionalized in ways that Hurston quietly resisted. Boas himself used the relative "difference" of the Negro's physiognomy as a tool to combat the scientific racialist belief that Europeans could be divided into stratified races or "sub-species"; and this may have contributed to Hurston's privately expressed belief that "white people could not be trusted to collect the lore of others." 11 Despite her lavish tributes to "Papa Franz" in Mules and Men and then later in her autobiography, Hurston remained uncomfortable working under Boas's sponsorship, and she often endeavored to conceal her fieldwork in the rural South from the hands of meddlesome New York anthropologists affiliated with Boas. When she was interviewing Cudjo Lewis, the elderly Alabama farmer who claimed to be America's last surviving African slave, for example, Hurston conspired with Alain Locke and Charlotte Mason to keep the Boasian anthropologist Paul Radin from making contact with Lewis. 12 Later, in 1940, she complained to the anthropologist Jane Belo of the burden that Boas's technical crew had placed on her Sanctified Church project in Beaufort, South Carolina. "Now I went to work right away," Hurston wrote, "to lay the foundation for the white men to come in to take the sound pictures. I think we had better make them [the Church members] a present because they are not taking to it any too kindly." 13
If Hurston was less than enthusiastic as a participant in the project of cultural anthropology, however, she was by all accounts a thoroughly noncooperative member of the Federal Writers' Project. As one of the editors of the Florida state guide, Hurston is said to have spent most of her time working on her novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, and doing fieldwork for a second FWP project, The Florida Negro. 14 Modeled on The Negro in Virginia, a much-praised federal project headed by Roscoe Lewis and edited by Sterling Brown, The Florida Negro never quite coalesced as a historical or ethnographic document. Its rambling and sometimes bitterly polemical 200 manuscript pages remained unpublished until 1993, when they were recovered amid the late-century revival of interest in the literary Hurston. Importantly, however, several of the songs that made it into the Florida state guide also appear in The Florida Negro. Similarities in their formatting and in the commentary that surrounds them enable us to identify Hurston as the author of the "Music and Theater" section of the Florida guide. In The Florida Negro, for example, Hurston's distinctive voice rings clear when she discusses accent as an integral feature of "Negro blues songs."
The Negro blues songs, of which Florida has many fine examples, belong in the lyric class; that is, feelings set to strings. The oldest and most typical form of Negro blues is a line stating the mood of the singer repeated three times. The stress and variation is carried by the tune and the whole thing walks with rhythm.
Look at the "East Coast Blues" and see how:
Love ain't nothing but the easy-going heart disease;
Love ain't nothing but the easy-going heart disease;
Oh, love ain't nothing but the easy-going heart disease. 15
Here, not only the blues lyric but also the commentary that surrounds it links Hurston to the closing portions of the "Music and Theater" section of the state guide. Discussing an earlier and yet unpublished draft of the "Folklore and Music" section of The Florida Negro, one entitled, simply, "Folkore," Lynda Marion Hill quotes a portion that strongly resembles the discussion of work songs in the Florida guide:
The Negro blues songs belong in the class of moods set to strings which the ancients called lyric because they were sung to the lyre. The form is a line indicating the mood of the singer repeated three times. It betrays the mood of the singer and it walks with rhythm. Contrast and embellishment is [sic] obtained by stress and accent in the tune rather than a change of words. 16
The final sentence of this excerpt makes it clear that Hurston's contributions to the 1939 Florida guide were written in concert with, and perhaps even composed out of, early versions of her "second" FWP project, The Florida Negro.
For the "Folkore and Music" section of The Florida Negro and for the more hastily composed "Music and Theater" section of the Florida guide, Hurston collected, transcribed, and analyzed folk material as a federal documentarian. As a member of the FWP, Hurston had in fact procured a tape recorder from the government during a trip to Washington, and she began carrying it with her as she collected folk stories and work songs in Florida in the late 1930s. Hurston had traveled with recording equipment before, but when she worked as an anthropologist in the late 1920s and early 1930s, she had been inclined to gather and record her data from memory. She described her earlier song-collecting methods to the folklorist Alan Lomax in 1935:
I just get in the crowd with the people when they sing it, I listen as best I can, then I start to join in with a phrase or two and then finally I get so that I can sing a verse. Then I keep on till I learn all of the songs with verses then I sing 'em back to the people till they tell me I can sing them just like them and then I take part and try it out on different people who already know the song until they are quite satisfied that I know it, and then I carry it in my memory. 17
Now, however, with her 1939 government-issue recording device in tow, she would appear to have been participating in the more empirical documentary methods that were being championed by various government agencies under the Roosevelt administration. (In 1939, she did make a series of recordings for the Library of Congress and the Folk Arts Committee of the WPA; and these recordings can be heard today in the Library of Congress.)
It may be no accident that the federally sponsored and technologically enhanced fieldwork that Hurston performed in 1939 and 1940 more or less put an end to her work as a folklorist and anthropologist. She continued writing novels and essays after 1940, perhaps in part because novels and essays were always what she wanted to write most. None of these writings won her as much acclaim, however, as her earlier book-length anthropological studies and the so-called folklore fictions, Jonah's Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God, that she published alongside them in the 1930s. If the mainstreaming of a documentary culture in the late 1930s served to dampen Hurston's interest in fieldwork, it may have been because the social realist and commercial directives that lay beneath this aesthetic prohibited Hurston from representing Negro "culture" in the way that she imagined it.
The pithy song fragment that rounds out the Negro "Music" of Florida is a case in point. For the visitor to the southernmost state, the words "Love ain't nothing but the easy-going heart disease" are indigenous words that should issue forth like dew, releasing hymns from beholders like Wallace Stevens, who, even when vacationing in Florida, remains, by the guide's lights, "one of America's best modern poets" (FL, 147). But are these Florida lyrics? Here, Hurston seems not to have used her Folk Arts Committee tape recorder in the way that FSA photographers had used cameras to document Florida's culture of migratory farm workers, citrus packers, and bean canners. Rather, she drew these lyrics from an earlier anthropological study of rural Southern African American culture. "Love ain't nothing but the easy going heart disease" is the last stanza of a so-called social song---"East Coast Blues"--that Hurston included in an appendix to her 1935 study, Mules and Men:
Po' gal long ways from home,
Po' gal long ways from home,
Oh, I'm po' gal a long ways from home.
Don't you hear that East Coast when she blows,
Oh, don't you hear that East Coast when she blows,
Ah, don't you hear that East Coast when she blows.

I'm going where the chilly winds don't blow,
Oh, I'm going where the chilly winds don't blow,
Ah, I'm going where the chilly winds don't blow.

I love you honey but your woman got me barred,
Oh, I love you honey but your woman got me barred,
Ah, I love you honey but your woman got me barred.
Love ain't nothing but the easy going heart disease,
Oh, love ain't nothing but the easy going heart disease,
Ah, love ain't nothing but the easy going heart disease. 18
Since most of her material for Mules and Men was taken from migrant African American workers in sawmills, turpentine camps, and phosphate mines in Florida and Alabama, "East Coast Blues" may not have been the native Florida material that Hurston represented it to be in the Florida guide. (The "East Coast" in the title may well refer to Florida's Atlantic coast, but the song clearly describes an exile's wish to return to a distant home: "I'm going where the chilly winds don't blow.") But was this lyric even indigenous to the rural southern African American culture that Hurston treated in all of her Florida writings? Even this is not as clear as it would seem.
Hurston's letters to Langston Hughes indicate that the very trope that distinguishes the "East Coast Blues"--the lines that brand love a kind of "heart disease"--should have been known to Hurston before she began her first round of folklore gathering in the rural South in 1927. An urban variant of the lyrics to this so-called social song appears to have reached Langston Hughes in 1926 through the New York-based blues popularizer W. C. Handy. 19 Handy, who began collaborating with the New York- and Washington-based poet in 1926, had published words and music to a couple of blues songs that may be related not only to Hughes's poetry but also to Hurston's Florida song, "East Coast Blues." One of the two Handy songs that appear to have contributed to Hughes's poetic rendering of the bluesy heart-disease trope was "Careless Love," published in 1926.
Love, oh love, oh careless love,
Here is all that I can say,
Just like a Gypsy I'm roamin' 'round,
And just can't keep the blues away. 20
The other was "Shoeboot's Serenade" (a play on Schubert's "Serenade") from 1915. "Do say the word and give my poor heart ease, / The blues ain't nothing but the fatal heart disease." 21 In combination, these two blues songs seem to mingle in the last stanza of Hughes's poem, "Gypsy Man," published in 1927. 22 In "Gypsy Man," Hughes's speaker, an abandoned woman, complains that
Love, Oh, love is
Such a strange disease.
Love, Oh, love is
Such a strange disease.
When it hurts yo' heart you
Sho can't find no ease. 23
The striking similarities between Hughes's "Gypsy Man" of 1927 and Handy's "Careless Love" and "Shoeboot's Serenade" of 1926 and 1915 do not necessarily mean that Hughes's blues poems are derived from Handy's blues lyrics. Hurston, who knew Hughes well in 1927, in fact claimed that some of his blues poems were taken straight from the mouths of urban blues musicians themselves. 24 If this is true, it is possible that the last stanza of "Gypsy Man" represents but one of numerous variations on a trope that echoed through both the rural South and the Harlem cabarets of the 1920s. What is interesting about this particular lyric is that Hurston mentioned it in a letter written to Hughes at the outset of her first folklore expeditions in the rural South in 1927. As a Barnard-trained anthropologist, Hurston had had trouble "pass[ing]" among the workers whose culture she wished to study and record. 25 Beginning in 1927, Hurston began writing to Hughes that she was reading his poetry in order to break the ice and to gain credibility among her rural Southern subjects. She described the reception of Hughes's poetry in great detail in a letter written in the summer of 1928:
In every town I hold 1 or 2 story-telling contests, and at each I begin by telling them who you are and all, then I read poems from "Fine Clothes." [Fine Clothes to the Jew was the controversial title of Hughes's second collection of poems.] Boy! they eat it up. . . . You are being quoted in R.R. camps, phosphate mines, turpentine stills etc. I went into a house Saturday night (last) and the men were skinning--you remember my telling you about that game--and when the dealer saw his opponent was on the turn (and losing consequently) he chanted
"When hard luck overtakes you
Nothin for you to do
Grab up yo' fine clothes
An' sell em to-ooo de Jew Hah!!"
(Slaps the card down on the table).
The other fellow was visibly cast down when the dealer picked up his money.

For some reason they call it "De Party Book." They come specially to be read to & I know you could sell [your book] if you only had a supply. . . . They adore "Saturday Night" and "Evil Woman," "Bad Man," "Gypsy Man." 26
What Hurston is describing in this passage is improvisation. The Saturday night "skinners," or cardplayers, are not only quoting stanzas of Hughes's "Hard Luck" from memory, but they are also adding their own verses to the poem that yielded the title of Fine Clothes to the Jew. These rural southern workers' enjoyment of poems like "Gypsy Man" may be due to the fact that Hughes's urban blues poems derived from some of the same sources as rural songs like "East Coast Blues." In fashioning love as a kind of heart disease, Handy and Hughes had very likely drawn from the reservoirs that Hurston was now trying to tap. 27 In feeding the material of "Gypsy Man" back to the work camps, however, Hurston was "contaminating" this folk reservoir with urban African American art forms. The rural southern workers who taught her the lyrics to "East Coast Blues," then, conceivably could have improvised the closing verse to that song--"Love ain't nothing but the easy going heart disease"--in an echo to the urban influence of Hughes and Handy.
The exact genesis of the love-as-heart-disease lyric that Hurston recorded in the Florida state guide can probably never be ascertained. This is not due to Hurston's carelessness as a folklorist but rather to her understanding of what sort of work she was doing when she ventured into the field. As she stated over and over, "Negro folklore" was vibrant not because it was authentic or indigenous to any people or place but because it was "still in the making." 28 It was not something to be documented but something to be done. As they were used by anthropologists and government archivists alike, cameras and tape recorders did not play much of a role in this sort of vital activity; and the documentary aesthetics that underlay even the best FWP projects of the late 1930s were fundamentally at odds with Hurston's efforts to place process at the root of identity. The documentation of people and places signified for Hurston only if the act of documentation itself became a kind of cultural activity. This notion was lost not only on the social realist writers who objected to her "surfacey" characterization of rural southern African Americans in Their Eyes Were Watching God but also on the federal folk who, in administering a New Deal for American tourists, portrayed America's emerging culture as a dewy thing to "behold."
David Kadlec teaches English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture .
1. Richard Wright, "Between Laughter and Tears," New Masses 25 (5 October 1937): 22; Alain Locke, "Jingo, Counter-Jingo, and Us," Opportunity 16 (January 1938): 10.
2. John Tagg, introduction to The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 8-9.
3. William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 118, 110. With the latter phrase, Scott is quoting Grace Overmyer, Government and the Arts (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1939), 112.
4. See Workers of the Writers' Program of the Works Projects Administration in the State of Alabama, Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South (1941; New York: Hastings House, 1949), 421, 359.
5. William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 262.
6. See Alabama, 52-3, 417.
7. Federal Writers' Project of the Works Project Administration for the State of Florida, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (1939; New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), 5; hereafter abbreviated FL.
8. For a careful and compelling study of the relationship between government photographic projects and liberal reform initiatives during the Roosevelt years, see Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).  Farm subsidies in the rural South, for example, reached qualified white farmers at up to seven times the rate that they reached qualified black farmers . The Farm Security Administration's photographic archive played a role in the disproportionate allocation of federal funds (69-71). Through the FSA, government photographs were commissioned and displayed publicly in order to garner popular support for costly relief programs. As Natanson shows, portraits of impoverished black farmers were often omitted from public displays of FSA photographs (217, 226). Through such omissions, poverty was "raced" as a white phenomenon by the New Deal administration. To Natanson's discussion of the racial management of the FSA archive, I would add that commercial imperatives such as tourism also contributed to the erasure of black subjects, and to the attendant disproportionate allotment of federal relief, in the 1930s. Although in the final analysis commercial pressures were closely bound to liberal reformist ones, a comparison of the photographs in the touristy Florida guide with those in the more reform-oriented Alabama guide suggests that these commercial imperatives were in some cases more damaging than liberal political ones.
9. See Sterling Brown, "On Dialect Usage," in The Slave's Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 37.
10. Benjamin A. Botkin replaced John Lomax as the Folklore editor of the FWP in 1938. Although Botkin was known as an empiricist who demanded accuracy in collecting and transcribing oral histories, George Hutchinson portrays him, together with Sterling Brown, as a visionary champion of living folkloric traditions; see George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 437-8. Hutchinson's account may be true in theory, but the very activity of collecting runs counter to the idea of folklore as a living tradition.
11. Hurston to Alain Locke, 14 June 1928, Magazine, Alabama, box 164-38, folder 28, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Hurston was not actually referring to Boas but to Odum and Johnson, authors of the popular and notoriously inaccurate Negro Workaday Songs, when she made her sweeping remark about white folklorists. Boas's references to black "difference" confirm solidarity among European Americans at the expense of African Americans. See Franz Boas, "The Measurement of Differences between Variable Quantities," Quarterly Publication of the American Statistical Association 18 (December 1922): 425-45; reprinted in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture (New York: MacMillan Company, 1940), 181-95.
12. Evidence of Hurston's, Locke's, and Mason's rather underhanded efforts to keep Radin from Lewis can be found in their correspondence in boxes 164-38, 164-68, and 164-199, in the Alain Locke Papers at Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. See particularly the letters exchanged in February and March of 1928.
13. Zora Neale Hurston to Jane Belo, 2 May 1940, container 020, Margaret Mead Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
14. See Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 251-3.
15. Zora Neale Hurston, "Works-in-Progress for Florida Federal Writers' Project, The Florida Negro, 1938," in Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), 877.
16. Zora Neale Hurston, "Folklore," first version, typescript, Works Progress Administration, Florida Folklore Archives, Florida Bureau of Folklore Programs, n.d, quoted in Lynda Marion Hill Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1996), 79.
17. Zora Neale Hurston, quoted in Robert Hemenway, "The Personal Dimension in Their Eyes Were Watching God," in New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, ed. Michael Awkward (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 39. This quote is taken from the field recordings of Hurston's expedition with Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, which are in the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress (Archive of Folk Song 309-85).
18. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men , in Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoires, and Other Writings, 237-8. Hurston took possession of the "East Coast Blues" when she included it in the appendix to Mules and Men. She listed it there as belonging to the "Social Song Series" of "the Zora Neale Hurston Collection of Negro Folklore" .
19. Shortly after Hughes began publishing his first blues poems, Handy wrote to Hughes to propose collaborative work and to notify the poet of the publication of Handy's 1926 anthology, The Blues. See W. C. Handy to Langston Hughes, 8 February 1926, New York City, box 69, Langston Hughes Correspondence, James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
20. W. C. Handy, ed., Blues: An Anthology (1926; New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), 57.
21. Ibid., 174.
22. Handy's 1926 anthology contained the song "Careless Love," but "Shoeboot's Serenade" was only included in a later edition of The Blues (see Blues, 11). Since Handy had published an early version of this latter song in Memphis in 1915, it is possible that he shared it directly with Hughes during their 1926-1927 collaboration. I thank Jason Decker for showing me the lyrics to Handy's songs.
23. Langston Hughes, Fine Clothes to the Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 22.
24. See Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 66.
25. Claudia Roth Pierpont writes,
While at Barnard, [Hurston] apparently told the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, as he put it, she was "more white than Negro in her ancestry." On her first trip back South to gather evidence of her native culture she could not be understood because of her Barnard intonations. She couldn't gain people's confidence; the locals claimed to have no idea what she wanted. When Hurston returned to New York, she and Boas agreed that a white person could have discovered as much. . . . [Eventually] she learned, in effect, to pass for black [Claudia Roth Pierpont, "A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston, American Contrarian," The New Yorker, 17 February 1997, 17].
26. Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, 10 July 1928, Magazine, Alabama, box 76, Hughes Correspondence, Yale University.
27. The Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson, for example, was singing a variant of this very lyric around the time that Handy incorporated it into "Shoeboot's Serenade" in 1915.
28. Hurston first articulated her antiessentialist conception of "Negro folklore" in a series of letters to Langston Hughes. She described it as a font of "gorgeous possibilities" and as a tradition that was "still in the making" (Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, Eatonville, Florida, 8 March 1928, box 76, Hughes Correspondence, Yale University). See also Hurston to Hughes, Maitland, Florida, 12 April 1928, box 76, Hughes Correspondence, Yale University. Hurston reiterated this conception of folklore ten years later on the opening page of her manuscript for The Florida Negro: "Folklore in Florida," she wrote, "is still in the making" (Hurston, "Works-in-Progress," 875).
I adore this city
São Paulo is after my own heart
No tradition here
No prejudice
Ancient or modern
All that matters is this
furious appetite this absolute confidence this optimism this
daring this work this labor this speculation which builds ten
houses per hour in all styles ridiculous
grotesque beautiful big small northern southern
Egyptian Yankee cubist
With no other concern than to follow the statistics foresee the
future the comfort the utility the surplus value and to attract a
large immigrantpopulation
All countries
All peoples
I love that
The two or three old Portuguese houses that remain are blue
china
Blaise Cendrars, "Saint Paul" 1
Anyone entering the debate on hybridity that has transformed academic discourse over the past decade is forced to confront two conflicting but equally persuasive narratives of transcultural production. One is a rather optimistic story emphasizing the types of syncretism and productive collage that James Clifford has associated with a "poetics of process." 2 According to this story, the increasingly frequent contact between different cultures (the "syncretism" or juxtaposition of cultures that have evolved differently) is not a phenomenon to be feared: cultural cross-fertilization merely accelerates the historically consistent rhythm of contact, exchange, and influence by means of which supposedly authentic and homogeneous cultures are formed.
The second narrative exposes some of the weaknesses of this seductive view, providing a cautionary tale in which intercultural contact, while potentially a rich resource for the development of hybrid identities, tends nonetheless to fortify the domination of one culture over another. By celebrating the ongoing process of cultural cross-fertilization, the counter-argument goes, contemporary critics like Clifford risk erasing the often bloody history that leads to intercultural contact in the first place. Marianna Torgovnick, for instance, has accused advocates of postmodern syncretism of being more fashion-conscious than scholarly. To "revel in the postmodern mélange of us and them," she warns, is to risk "abjuring [our] responsibilities." 3 Modernists are guilty of irresponsible and ahistoricizing appropriations, but postmodernists, too, may be implicated on the same grounds.
As opposed as these two narratives obviously are--the first places faith in hybridity, the second is highly suspicious of hybridity's compromised pasts and contaminated futures--they nonetheless share a common plot structure. Each depends upon a chronological and evolutionary conceit that imposes a sharp break between modernism and postmodernism, that is, between a coercive modernist hybridity on the one hand, and, on the other, a liberating postmodernist syncretism. When contrasted with Bob Marley or the Aboriginal Warumpi Band, canonical modernists inevitably appear to be perpetrators of exploitative appropriations, patently lacking a political consciousness and disinterested, for the most part, in the original contexts of the "exotic" voices they introduce into circulation. For members of both critical camps, modernists unselfconsciously exploit third world artifacts, naïvely believe in cultural "authenticity," and fetishize the instinctual purity of the "primitive" (often in opposition to what they consider to be the decadence and emasculation of "advanced" European art).
There are certainly many instances of modernist appropriation that appear to confirm the arguments outlined above. But whether all modernists are equally insouciant, unselfconscious, and ahistorical is a highly debatable question. Modernist modes of appropriation are often far more complicated than they initially appear. In fact, the genealogies of cultural cross-fertilizations are lengthy and surprisingly twisted, and not all modernists are unaware of the implications--historical, political, and aesthetic--of the further twists they add to the chain. The case I consider here, that of Blaise Cendrars, a Francophone (Swiss) poet, novelist, journalist, and screen writer, is particularly enlightening in this regard. Cendrars's contacts with postcolonial Brazil produced a set of curious writings on hybridity that raise some disturbing questions about modernism's relation to cultural cross-fertilization. Anticipating the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose most significant ethnographic experience also took place in Brazil, Cendrars discovers in the former Portuguese colony an "authentic" alternative to Europe's cultural trajectory, yet views this "authentic" alternative as, paradoxically, the result of hybridization, of the commingling of heterogeneous elements occurring over several centuries of colonial conquest and genetic and cultural métissage. 4
Cendrars demonstrates a high degree of sensitivity with respect to the historical circumstances that produced the métissage of Brazil's population. For instance, he refers repeatedly to the violent intercultural contacts responsible for the palimpsestic Brazilian cultural identities he so admires. Cendrars's aesthetic investment in such contacts and their perverse and unexpected consequences is manifested throughout his prose and poetic works, but nowhere as pointedly--or as ambiguously--as in "La Métaphysique du café" (The metaphysics of coffee). By studying "La Métaphysique du café" I intend to complicate the now dominant image of modernists as Eurocentric collectors of deracinated non-Western exotica. I will also provide a sense of the irreducible strangeness and singularity of Cendrars's own role in the modern cross-fertilization of cultures. His example suggests that in certain cases modernist hybrid production participates in networks of contact and exchange that are far too complex to be encompassed by the manichean categories critics sometimes employ. 5 My intention is not to condemn or celebrate any particular modernist nor to "save" modernism, but rather to direct attention to the ways in which oppressive and liberating forces co-exist and interact in both modern and postmodern instances of aesthetic appropriation.
Cendrars's first contacts with Brazil occurred before he even set foot on the South American continent. In 1923, through his friend Fernand Léger, Cendrars met the Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral, who was in Paris studying with the French cubist constructivists, Léger, André Lhote, and Albert Gleizes. 6 Do Amaral was accompanied by her lover, Oswaldo de Andrade, a Brazilian modernist poet, later famous for his "Cannibalist Manifesto" of 1928, a provocative effort to "épater" the Brazilian intelligentsia that placed Brazil on the avant-garde map. A friendship sprang up between Cendrars and the Brazilian couple, nourished by dinner parties in do Amaral's studio where guests included both the major French modernists of the day and the rising generation of Brazilian writers, composers, and artists (Sergio Milliet, Anita Malfatti, Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Victor Brecheret). 7
According to some sources it was through Oswaldo de Andrade that Cendrars made his first contact with Paolo Prado, the grand mécène of Brazilian modernism. Prado, who had studied literature in Paris prior to World War I, met regularly with Cendrars to discuss modernism and Brazilian culture at the Librairie Chadenat, a bookstore specializing in the history of the Americas located on the Quai des Grands Augustins. It was here, in the thick atmosphere of erudition, that a bridge between Cendrars's brand of avant-garde practice and Prado's Brazilian-inflected notions of modernism was built. By the end of the year Prado had extended an invitation to Cendrars to visit Brazil that Cendrars accepted a few months later after securing assignments as a journalist from two French newspapers. After his arrival in Rio on 5 February 1924, Cendrars spent the next six months living with the Prados in São Paulo, traveling through the interior with groups of Brazilian painters and writers, and basking in the sun at his new acquaintances' coffee plantations or fazendas. 8
Before any assessment of Cendrars's Brazilian experience can be made, however, it must be understood that the Brazil that Cendrars encountered was one already colored by the primitivist imagination of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. His trip to Brazil, as well as his earliest contacts with Brazilians, took place under the sign of France's already well-developed fascination with third-world exotica, a fascination that often failed to distinguish between African, African American, and Luso-African cultures. Although Josephine Baker would not arrive in Paris until October of 1925, the rage for African art and American jazz had already reached a feverish pitch by the time Cendrars met Prado, de Andrade, and do Amaral. 9 At first, the Brazilians attracted Cendrars for the same reason that, five years earlier, African languages and jazz rhythms had interested him: all seemed to serve equally well as novelties to be thrown into the avant-garde mix.
Clearly Cendrars shared with his generation what Jean-Claude Blachère has identified as a modernist nostalgia for the archaic, a desire for renewal in the midst of a (high) European culture seen as "old, sickly, inert, and bloodless." 10 Similar in this respect to his modern contemporaries, Cendrars was also looking for "new sources of energy" and yet the specific nature of his interest in the "savage" and the "exotic" was somewhat different. 11 In contrast to authors like Tzara or Cocteau, what Cendrars appreciated most was not the "new source of energy" provided by an idealized, childlike, and "authentic" Other, but rather the energy generated by internal division and hybridity, the productive tension that he saw emerging from a clash of conflicting velocities and rhythms operating simultaneously within a single (cultural, geographic) space. He did express admiration for what he considered the "savage" aspects of Brazil--e.g., the bush and the jungle; but far more striking to him, far more revelatory as a model for both aesthetic practice and cultural organization, was contrast: bush and city, "savage" and socialite. His devotion to Brazil was consistent with his earlier aesthetics of "simultaneous contrast," an aesthetics that sought a syncretic collage of distinct elements, each of which retained, despite the juxtaposition, its visual or linguistic independence. As Salvador de Reyes has put it, "Cendrars possessed a great love for Latin America because in its spectacular scenarios he saw a new world . . . full of joie de vivre and audacity, a mixture of hyper-civilization and primitivism." 12
De Reyes's words capture well the peculiar nature of Cendrars's fascination with Brazil (as opposed to his general interest in things "primitive"). It was the hybridity and not the purity of the exotic Other that seduced him, a fact borne out by many of Cendrars's writings on Brazil, including "Saint Paul," the poem cited as an epigraph to this essay. 13 Cendrars may have expressed a desire to visit the "forêt vierge" of the "sauvage," but he also hoped to reside at the precarious point where "[p]roducts from the five corners of the world turn up in the same dish, on the same dress." 14 Faithful to the aesthetic program of simultanéité, Cendrars emulated alterity not for its own sake, but rather for the sake of the startling effects that foreign elements could create when juxtaposed with elements drawn from more familiar European fare.
Given Cendrars's marked preference for the hybrid and the métissé, it appears all the more curious that he ever took pen to paper to compose "La Métaphysique du café." This essay, first published in Rio de Janiero's "O Jornal" on 15 October 1927, 15 has been treated by critics as an unqualified celebration of coffee cultivation, a hymn to colonization, modernist standardization, and capitalist enterprise. Alexandre Eulalio, the first chronicler of Cendrars's travels through Brazil, considers "La Métaphysique" to be, without doubt, "one of the most expressive documents of the Paulist economic euphoria and the feeling of omnipotence consequent to it," 16 while Adrien Roig, without a trace of irony, calls it a "very beautiful text . . . of captivating realism and forceful inspiration. 17 Indeed, on a first reading, "La Métaphysique du café" does appear to invert Cendrars's habitual hierarchy, jettisoning diversity in favor of single-crop agriculture, the most ecologically devastating and dehumanizing form of land management that Brazil ever developed. Why Cendrars would have chosen to write what appears to be a propagandistic piece of journalism privileging monoculture over the wealth of botanical diversity he praises elsewhere is a question that none of his critics has answered adequately. 18 "La Métaphysique du café" is rarely mentioned in comprehensive studies of Cendrars's work and, if so, then only in passing--usually in the context of his fascination with famous entrepreneurs. 19
The critical neglect of "La Métaphysique du café" probably stems from the circumstantial quality of the piece, the fact that it reads somewhat like an advertisement for the industrialization of Brazil. Yet, paradoxically, while "La Métaphysique" seems to address specifically the advantages of coffee cultivation in Brazil, its first six paragraphs were in fact written for an earlier piece on economic development in the United States entitled "The Principle of Utility," published separately in 1925, then integrated into his epic on terrorist anarchism, Moravagine, the following year. The narrator who intones the hymn to monoculture in Moravagine can only with some difficulty be fused with the person of Cendrars in 1927. "La Métaphysique" is therefore far more equivocal than it first appears and should not be classified so quickly as evidence of Cendrars's fondness for large demonstrations of the will. The equivocal nature of the essay is due in large part to the tension produced between two distinct discourses, one metaphysical and the other economic. In a sense, "La Métaphysique" is itself métissé, internally non-self-identical, and structured as a kind of dialogue between an advocate of monoculture and a poet invested in difference, as a source both of diction and creative energy. The ambiguity of "La Métaphysique"'s point of view towards both monoculture and hybridity makes it significant reading material, not only for specialized scholars of Cendrars, but also for those interested in the concept of hybridity and in the important place this concept has acquired in postcolonial theory.
The best entry to the essay is perhaps provided by the subject matter itself: large-scale coffee cultivation, or what Cendrars calls "the enigma," the "force of attraction and exchange" at the root of intercultural contact. Coffee cultivation, however, is not simply a theme, it is also a symbol of the globalization of Brazil's economy and of its principal protagonist, Paulo Prado. This highly influential and powerful re was Cendrars's closest friend and constant companion during his Brazilian trips; he was also, however, the head of a coffee oligarchy and therefore part of the power structure responsible for the growth of monocultural agro-economics. "La Métaphysique du café" was obviously written in Prado's honor; it is in some sense a metaphysics of Prado himself, an attempt to understand the law that could make coffee--personified by Prado--simultaneously a force of liberation and oppression, of intercultural and monocultural standardization.
Just who was Paulo Prado and what was the nature of his hold on Cendrars? In short, Prado encapsulated in his own genealogy the entire modern history of Brazil. The Prados arrived in the São Paulo region from Portugal in the eighteenth century, entered into livestock trading, slave trading, sugar growing, politics, and finally established ascendency in the domain of coffee cultivation. When Paolo Prado went to study literature in Paris before World War I, the coffee boom, which lasted from approximately 1840 to 1900, was already on the wane. But the Prado name was still firmly associated with wide-spread coffee cultivation, a nineteenth-century phenomenon responsible for an irreversible "shift," as historian Darrell Lévi has written, "in the nation's economic center of gravity and a major sea-change in Brazil's economic history." 20
The cultivation of coffee imposed by oligarchies such as the one controlled by the Prado family resulted not only in the heightened prosperity and greater visibility of the Brazilian economy, but also in mass destruction of the Amazon jungle, the repression of an economic underclass, the solidification of a police state, and the eradication of previously isolated Amerindians and their diverse cultures. However, coffee was also an agent of cultural cross-fertilization. It permitted the Prados to travel, to establish connections with important European families such as the Rothschilds, and to collect examples of European avant-garde artworks. Finally, coffee was the indirect cause of the famous racial hybridity of the Brazilian population: during the nineteenth century, Amerindians were "domesticated," slaves were imported from Africa, and immigrants were seduced from Italy and Germany in order to supply labor power to the burgeoning coffee and sugar cane plantations on Brazilian soil. For Cendrars, then, Prado emblematized the two faces of modernity. On the one hand, he stood for economic development, the raw force of will allowing humans to intervene in the constitution of ecosystems and the migratory patterns of entire populations. On the other, he represented internationalism, the end of cultural isolation, increased possibilities for intercultural contact, and thus the most avant-garde tendencies in the arts and letters. 21
What drew Cendrars to Prado, and what underlies the strange prose of "La Métaphysique du café," is Cendrars's sense that everything valuable in modernity--the openness to the new, the desire to redefine the locus and function of art, and, perhaps most importantly, the decision to jettison originality and authenticity in favor of citation, pastiche, hybridity, and appropriation--in short, all that was dearest to his generation, was in fact predicated on a deeper principle, one that Prado's entrepreneurial spirit illustrated perfectly. For Cendrars, the dynamic responsible for modernity's richness, the impulse governing its two major manifestations--monoculture and hybridity, The Grand Hotel and the carnival--was quite simply appetite, the "furious appetite" alluded to in his poem "Saint Paul."
In order to seize the relation Cendrars sketches between hybridity and conquest, heterogeneity and the implacable domination of the same, it is necessary to return to the pages of "La Métaphysique du café." Structurally, "La Métaphysique" is presented as a kind of mise en abyme: it contains two very distinct scenarios, a frame narrative in which monoculture dominates, and an internal narrative in which increased transcultural hybridization takes center stage. By means of this framing structure, Cendrars implies the interdependence between imperialism and hybridity, between cultural hegemony and greater "choice" (the multiple "interpellations" to which, according to Jim Collins, the modern subject is exposed). 22 He begins the essay by evoking the railway, the road, and the canal, familiar late nineteenth-century symbols of expansionism, in order to suggest at once the discovery of difference and its inverse, the imposition of geometric regularity on previously immeasurable expanses of the globe:
Roads, canals, railways, ports, warehouses, stations, factories, high tension electric lines, waterways, bridges, tunnels, all these lines and curves that dominate [qui dominent] the contemporary landscape, impose [imposent] their grandiose geometry. But the most powerful agent of transformation is without contest monoculture.
In less than fifty years monoculture has transformed the visage of the world, which exploits with astonishing mastery [avec une maîtrise étonnante].Monoculture needs products, primary matter, plants, animals to grind down [à broyer], to masticate [à triturer], to transform. It dissociates [dissocie] and disintegrates [désagrege]. Without the slightest care for the nature of each region monoculture tames this climate, prescribes that plant, overwhelms whatever secular economy might be in place.
Monculture tends to transform, if not the entire planet, then at least each zone of the planet. 23
The opening paragraphs of "La Metaphysique du café" combine a tone of awe-- "maîtrise étonnante"--with a vocabulary suggesting moral repugnance--"dominer," "imposer," "exploitation," and so on. Monoculture "dissociates," "disintegrates," and "masticates." Like a huge digestive apparatus monoculture transforms "primal matter, plants, and animals" into one identical substance. It is merciless ("sans aucun souci"); it "prescribes" and "overwhelms," eventually "reducing" rather than increasing the diversity of forms of life on the planet: "In comparison to the vegetal overabundance of nature, monoculture only cultivates a very small number of judiciously selected species" .
All this activity of violent assimilation and mastication is motivated, Cendrars then explains, by man's perverse impulse to render difference uniform, his seemingly compulsive need to dominate nature's chaos through any means at his disposal: "On the part of man there is a need for simplification that tends to satisfy itself by any means whatsoever. And this artificial monotony, this monotony that increasingly takes over the world, this monotony that certain people deplore is actually the clearest sign of our grandeur" .
It could be argued, and indeed has been, that Cendrars was entirely in earnest when he wrote these words, and that, therefore, any tonal inconsistencies one might discern between expressions such as "artificial monotony" and "our grandeur"--as well as the irritating effect created by the thrice repeated "this monotony"--are simply inventions on the part of the reader. The conclusion to the essay tends to confirm this reading, for it insists upon a causal link between the violent transformation of delicate ecosystems and a "moral progression" leading to greater civic freedoms and democratic reforms:
everywhere progress, wealth, and vast material transformations are accompanied by a moral progression: the rapid evolution of society and its new conceptions of civilization, of democracy, of the citizen and of the citizen's rights.
It is in this sense that coffee can be said to be a metaphysical entity, just like other products of the earth and all the labors of man. [131]
The optimism Cendrars expresses in this conclusion now appears hallucinatory; however, at the time, two years before the Great Crash of 1929, capitalist expansion indeed seemed to promise a higher standard of living, if not for the indigenous Amerindian, then at least, as Cendrars remarks, for "the poorest colonizer." "This little coffee bean [Cette cerise de café]," Cendrars predicts, is the capital capable not only of financing the newest "skyscraper in the great city of São Paulo," but also of supplying greater comfort and luxury, "Yes, luxury, even to the poorest colonizer" . Only in his later, deeply pessimistic works such as Le Lotissement du ciel (The parceling out of the sky) does Cendrars fully admit the fallacy of the causal link he had assumed previously between monoculture and altruistic reform. 24
Yet even "La Métaphysique du café" shows signs of internal conflict; a pastiche of texts patched together, it is often self-contradictory on the levels of diction and tone. The conclusion may perhaps have been intended merely as a formal bow to the audience Cendrars was addressing. He should not be forgiven his formal bow, however; Cendrars was in fact often guilty of flirting with technocrats, industrialists, and repressive regimes of many colors, and thus of compromising his reputation as a prophet of literary and cultural freedoms. 25 At the same time, though, the destabilizing elements embedded in the essay militate in favor of a more thorough and careful reading. The essay as a whole is not reducible to the propagandistic bow with which it ends. Cendrars's discourse is never monocultural or monoglossic; it is as hybrid as the society it describes, constantly shifting its position of enunciation and undermining its own authority as autonomous, unified speech.
The beginning of what I am calling the "internal narrative" (the original part of the essay excerpted for publication in L'Intransigeant under the title "Devant les champs de café" [Before the coffee fields]) is presented as an autobiographical account of Cendrars's arrival in Brazil and his subsequent visit to a coffee-growing fazenda:
No where else have I been so struck by the manifest grandeur of today and by the immutable beauty of human labor as when disembarking for the first time, three or four years ago, on the shores of Brazil.
The wharfs of Rio and Santos spread out in rectilinear lines, littered with merchandise.
What! all this magnificent disorder, these automobile bodies, these locomotives in pieces, these dismantled wagons, these piles of scrap-iron, these machines, these statuettes of Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus that are being introduced by the thousands, these barrels of wine, these tons of gasoline, these bathtubs, roles of toilet paper, mountains of gramophones and loud-speakers, these electric gizmos, these trunks full of pretty linen and rare apparel, of fashionable perfumes and pearl necklaces, these postal sacks, books, letters, newspapers from all over the world, . . . all these things have sprung from a coffee bean [tout cela est sorti d'un grain de café]: ports, cities, men who disembark every day . . . all this is the direct product of coffee, representing its force of attraction and exchange, its palpable value, its strength, its richness. What an enigma! [128-9]
Cendrars's first snapshot of Brazil is taken on the wharfs, from the vantage point of a geographically and narratively liminal region where the bustling traffic between Brazil and the rest of the world is most in evidence. The poet's first impression of Brazil is thus not of its autonomy and isolation but rather of the permeability of its borders. Brazil's cultural identity is shown to be in flux: the country is undergoing an invasion of commodity items, all of which serve as fetishes of modernity, "statuettes of Saint Teresa" in the tabernacle of capitalism. The wharf scene is an inversion of the scene that preceded it--the spectacle of monoculture's "artificial monotony" and "grandeur"; and yet the two scenes are clearly linked by a causal connection. If monoculture is a large stomach, a machine for devouring and transforming everything into the same, monoculture is also, he discovers, a catalyst for exchange and increased intercultural contact. Objects of consumption from all over the world mingle in a chaotic mosaic: from words ("newspapers from all over the world") and apparati ("scrap-iron" and "machines") to belief systems ("statuettes of Saint Theresa"), cultural product ("gramophones"), and household items responsible for the dramatic transformation of hygenic rituals and daily life ("rolls of toilet paper," "bathtubs," "tons of gasoline"). Cendrars even implies that he is himself a kind of produit de consommation brought over from abroad to be assimilated into the "magnificent disorder" of Brazilian cultural life. The repetition of the verb "disembark" to refer both to his own arrival on Brazilian soil and to that of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who come to work on sugar and coffee plantations establishes surreptitiously a connection between the types of cultural crossings (and labor patterns) enforced by agro-capitalism and the types of cultural crossings celebrated as internationalism or the globalization of culture. Cendrars's relation to Brazil transforms him into a thing, a fetishized representative of European modernism, expected, in turn, to transport back to Europe an assimilable--and marketable--snapshot of Brazil. It is as though Cendrars had a precocious intimation that, in postmodernity, cultural hybridity would largely be a matter of consumption. 26
Upon witnessing the spectacle of commodity diversity played out on the wharfs of Rio, the narrator then takes a vow that he will seek out its hidden motor; he will "go back as quickly as possible to the source of this marvelous richness and . . . go see, see with [his] own eyes, how this source overflows with such furious energy, such furious abundance" . The next section of the narrative then describes the author's visit to the plantation of São Martinho, a visit made with the ambition of locating the "source" of "such furious abundance." The original publication of "La Métaphysique du café" was accompanied by a photograph of the main building at São Martinho, a detail lending a note of journalistic rigor to the piece. But Cendrars's written description is far less informative than it is impressionistic, drawing on a metaphysical, poetic discourse and replacing the prose structure of the earlier paragraphs with a telegraphic, paratactic style.
The passage's sudden shifts in tone, style, punctuation, and diction correspond to the nature of the experience being described. The abrupt revelation of the "source" or the "force of attraction and exchange" is staged by Cendrars as no less than a confrontation with the mathematical sublime. Indeed, all the traditional elements of the sublime aesthetic experience are in place: he and his companion "contemplate" the "colossal" expanse; the identical rows of coffee-plants are metaphorically transformed into one of Kant's privileged res for the natural sublime, the ocean and its innumerable waves ("an emerald sea, a profound ocean"); and finally, the observers of this spectacle are reduced to an anguished silence ("too much grandeur strangles, stifles, and troubles"). Descriptive prose collapses into the exclamation "What a spectacle!" In the end the viewer is left speechless, resonating in awe to the miracle of redundancy ("I couldn't find a word to say").
Once again, the reader is arrested by the problem of tone. Cendrars may delight in the spectacle of agricultural standardization but he also indicates that such standardization "silences," "stifles," and "strangles." The experience as described is thus by no means uniformly positive; the author depicts himself as transfixed on the spot, immobilized, just like a coffee plant, "les pieds plantés dans la terre rouge." He has not been energized by the spectacle of monoculture; on the contrary, he has been struck dumb by it, like the victim of an Ovidian metamorphosis dehumanized by too intense an exposure to passion. At least momentarily, the sublimity of monoculture transforms the spectator into stone: he is now reified, transformed into an object, "somber, taciturn, and as if immobilized." The author experiences a loss of his faculties, a sense that the imagination has been overcome and defeated by something it cannot encompass; only after a few moments does this experience of silencing give way to an overflow of words, the repetitive, appositive sentences found in the paragraphs that follow.
Cendrars's caffeinated sublime is an implicit commentary not on monoculture alone but rather on its relation to the Kantian sublime and to the laws of Western aesthetics in general. Just as the experience of the mathematical sublime described by Kant involves simultaneously a movement of recoil and a sensation of awe, so too Cendrars's experience of monoculture's "artificial monotony" provokes in him sensations of morbidity and vertigo as well as respect and admiration. The original title, "La Métaphysique du café," already evoked the connection between Kant's theory of Universal Taste and Brazil's discovery of the world's taste for coffee; however, in 1931, when the essay was republished as part of the collection Aujourd'hui, Cendrars solidified the connection by adding an epigraph that places Kant--or at least his ghost--in a direct relation to monocultural production. The epigraph, which I have resisted citing until now, is drawn from a French newspaper article that appeared four days after the first version of "La Métaphysique du café" was published in O Jornal. It reads:
Panama, 5 September 1927. 'The last direct descendant of the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, recently passed away in this city. Kant's last descendant was the proprietor of a coffee plantation.' 27
In a few succinct sentences, Cendrars establishes no less than a genetic relation between the great German philosopher and the owner of the coffee plantation and, as a corollary, between metaphysical principles of universal taste and the geopolitics of global monoculture. The connection Cendrars establishes is somewhat loose, however, in that Kant's sublime is that of the natural wonder, whereas the experience of the sublime he describes is one provoked by the spectacle of man's own nature, his unyielding will to impress his stamp on the disorderly productivity of the earth. The aspect of Kant that Cendrars retains intact is this: a law of human nature exists commanding man to seek experiences of immeasurable magnitudes only to search for ways to encompass these magnitudes by recasting them as reflections of the immeasurability of the human mind. According to this law, an initial feeling of repugnance or fear is followed by an intimation of what the human mind is capable of achieving: a conception of the supersensible, of that which is beyond estimation or, put differently, that which can only find its measure in the inestimable thing man's mind is. "Therefore," concludes Kant,
the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation, which we attribute to an Object of nature by a certain subreption (substitution of a respect for the Object in place of one for the idea of humanity in our own self, the Subject); and this feeling renders, as it were, intuitable the supremacy of our cognitive faculties on the rational side over the greatest faculty of sensibility. 28
In a move that will be crucial not only to the future of Western aesthetics in general but also to Cendrars's specific understanding of the monocultural sublime, Kant shifts the locus of immeasurability from the Object to the Subject, thereby, in a sense, absorbing the other, making it a re, an equivalent of the Self. The law of the mind as described by Kant turns out to be the necessity experienced by the subject to seek out equivalences, to insist upon the fungibility of the non-fungible:
in the aesthetic estimate of such an immeasurable whole, the sublime does not lie so much in the greatness of the number, as in the fact that in our onward advance we always arrive at proportionally greater units. [Critique, 105; emphasis added]
It is, in other words, "for us a law (of reason), which goes to make us what we are," Kant explains, "that we should esteem as small in comparison with ideas of reason everything which for us is great in nature as an object of sense; and that which makes us alive to the feeling of this supersensible side of our being harmonizes with that law" (Critique, 106).
In essence, then, Kant proposes that our natural instinct as humans is to resolve every sublime experience of the external Object into an experience of the sublime Subject, to elevate an experience of terror and stifling awe to the order of an epiphany, an affirmation of Reason. As victims (or beneficiaries) of this law, we transform our silence into words, our non-knowledge into knowledge, and by doing so we neutralize the threat of the radically other by incorporating the other into ourselves. It is in this respect that the sublime can be seen--by Cendrars, is seen--as productive, capitalist, even cannibalistic. Our nature, Kant seems to say, is quite simply to be hungry, to have an appetite for--to take a "negative pleasure" in--the "absolutely great" which we then succeed in assimilating to our transcendental being (Critique, 106). It is this law of human reason, and not the little "cérise de café," that proves to be the dynamic source, the generative motor that Cendrars discovers in "La Métaphysique du café."
"Then, overcome with dizziness, I began to reflect," Cendrars continues:
Men came. They set fire to the virgin forest. They cleared the ground. They tore up the time-honored roots [les souches séculaires]. They weeded. They worked the soil so that it could nurture hundreds of thousands of young coffee plants, comfortably nestled in their little twig baskets . . . They worked. [ . . . ] They planted. And the plantations spread out, spread out into the interieur, over millions and millions of square miles.
 Whose will made all this happen? [Quelle est la volonté qui a déclenché ça?] [Aujourd'hui, 130]
Here, as in "The Utility Principle," a momentary vertigo in the face of apparent infinity produces the desire to discover an underlying principle, a motor or law ("la volonté"). "What keeps men here and makes them submit themselves to this new discipline?" asks Cendrars; "Is it the brutishness brought on by work, by too much work, or is it simply the promise of profit, of reward?" . In evoking man's will to profit Cendrars seems to fall back on purely pragmatic explanations for monoculture's transformation of "each zone of the planet"; and yet his search does not end here. The answer to Cendrars's question--"Whose will made all this happen?"--seems to be located instead in a slightly earlier passage, one devoted to coffee in particular rather than to monocultural production as a whole. Finally, in this passage the full implications of the title, "La Métaphysique du café," are exposed:
And why so much coffee? Is humanity unable to resist yet a new toxin? And what exactly is this need for intoxication found among all peoples at all times? Is it just a mere vice like any other, or, on the contrary, is it an idiosyncracy peculiar to the human race, a necessity, an ineluctable need, to recuperate losses [récupérer les déperditions], to stimulate always more the mind's force, the mind's sharpness [stimuler les forces de plus en plus vives, de plus en plus aiguës du cerveau]? [130] 29
In what has become a familiar interrogative mode, Cendrars suggests that the will (or the law) governing Brazil's economic prosperity, its increasing political importance, and even its new visibility in the aesthetic domain, is related not simply to monocultural agro-economics in general, but to the obsessive cultivation of coffee in particular. The need that causes people of all ages and locales to intoxicate themselves with a stimulant is, he implies, identical to the law that requires man to experience as fully and intensely as possible the seemingly limitless force and acuity of the mind. To put this in Kantian terms, we might say that to "pass beyond the narrow confines of sensibility," to feel the full scope of the mind without, however, being able to identify its borders, is the ultimate goal towards which all this feverish activity strains (Critique, 103). Man suffers from an ineluctable need to "recuperate losses," says Cendrars, 30 just as Kant, employing a vocabulary that is, after all, arguably more economic than it is metaphysical, posits the sublime as a variety of investment, the experience of a loss that must be tolerated in order to create a surplus, an expansion of the self. For the experience of the sublime, writes Kant, provokes "a pleasure that only arises indirectly, being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful [ . . . ]; the [sublime] object lends itself to the presentation of a sublimity discoverable in the mind" (Critique, 91-2; emphasis added).
In sum, Cendrars's "metaphysics" of monoculture produces a theory of human nature as essentially appetitive, forever extending its reach to encompass what at first appears terrifyingly Other. Paradoxically, humans seek not to satisfy their appetite, but to stimulate it, for any immediate satisfaction, any cessation of longing, would place limits on what appetite, and thus on what the mind, could be. Monoculture, like Kant's Subject with a capital "S," eats up everything around it, reducing difference on its own soil but simultaneously permitting commerce with that which, up to that point, it has not been. Greedy as the mind, monoculture is destructive of the other, but infinitely re-productive of itself. Ultimately Kant belongs in Brazil because his theory of the mind harmonizes perfectly with the metaphysics of monoculture: both propose that the non-fungible can be--must be, by law--reduced to the fungible, and that, through the very process of the Other's reduction, man should be enlarged "de plus en plus."
How, then, is the reader to situate Cendrars's voice in "La Métaphysique du café"? Exactly what attitude towards monoculture is one to attribute to him? There is no doubt that Cendrars admires the force of the law of assimilation he discovers in San Martinho, but it is equally clear that he appreciates its contrary, the non-law of uncontrolled diversity--hybrid forms such as the carnival, the métissé, as well as the heteroglossic mix of languages and lifestyles he finds piled up along the quai. Most worthy of notice is his recognition that monoculture and hybridity are inextricably intertwined: intercultural contacts of all varieties--ethnographic, artistic, cultural, religious, and of course commercial--owe their existence to, and cannot take place without, economic developments of the kind motivated by the law of the caffeinated sublime. Although the two major forms of hybridity Cendrars confronts are markedly different--the racial and cultural hybridity of Brazil's past must be distinguished from the commercial hybridity of its present--both can nonetheless trace their roots back to the same Kantian ambitions of the agricultural entrepreneur. Cendrars does not want to relinquish either the entrepreneurial rigor ("the need for simplification") or the carnivalesque excess of syncretic play. The unsubstantiated premise of "La Métaphysique" is that the former will continue to engender and support the latter. Such a premise, however, will not be maintained as Cendrars, like many modernists of his generation, becomes increasingly aware of the dangers of capitalist exploitation. His attitude toward monocultural standardization and industrial development grows increasingly skeptical and "irreverent." 31 And even in 1927 he can provide only weak assurance that monoculture's suppression of botanical, zoological, and racial difference will be offset by an exponential increase in the number of hybrid ways to live, worship, and make art.
A year after "La Métaphysique du café" appeared, Oswaldo de Andrade published what would become one of the major documents of postmodern "hybridity-talk": the "Manifesto Antropófago" or "Cannibalist Manifesto." 32 Brazil's first indigenous avant-garde intervention was based on a recuperation of the previously pejorative term "cannibal" to refer to the active assimilation and transformation of foreign aesthetics by Brazilian-born Portuguese-speaking writers. Many contemporary postmodern theorists place de Andrade's aesthetics of "anthropophagy" in the same category as Rogério Sganzerla's more recent "aesthetics of garbage," Paul Leduc's "salamander" poetics, and the phenomenon of American hip-hop. 33 All these examples of postmodern and, in some cases, postcolonial hybridity are thought to manifest the single most progressive tendency operating in culture today. This tendency is one that, as Kobena Mercer describes it, "critically appropriates elements from the mastercodes of the dominant culture and 'creolises' them." 34 Cannibalism is an appropriate metaphor for this positively valenced mode of "appropriation"; it suggests the gesture of incorporation (otherwise known as pastiche, collage, grafting, or sampling) and exemplifies such an incorporation, a parodic recycling of a pejorative term that displaces the term's previous value.
No one has yet thought to resituate de Andrade's "Cannibalist Manifesto" either in the context of Cendrars's "La Métaphysique du café" or in that of Kant's Third Critique. This is hardly surprising, given that Cendrars is not a particularly well-known re in postcolonialist studies and that, further, Kant's is not the first name to pop into one's mind when speaking about cannibalism. But such a recontextualization is worth attempting, for it is reasonable to posit that de Andrade would have been familiar, if not intimate, with Cendrars's "Utility Principle," and that, moreover, he would have continued to follow Cendrars's career after 1924 and therefore would have read "La Métaphysique." Intertextuality or literary cross-fertilization is the major theme of the "Cannibalist Manifesto," and de Andrade makes no attempt to disguise the fact that his own peculiar brand of avant-garde poetics is largely a cannibalization of previous European models, including--but not limited to--that of Francis Picabia's "Manifeste Cannibale Dada" of 1920. 35 But there is further evidence to suggest that the influence of Cendrars was pertinent to the thesis of "Cannibalist Manifesto": in de Andrade's "Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry" of 1924, where the author first tests out ideas he will later develop in the more radical "Cannibalist Manifesto," he specifically mentions Cendrars as an important model. Moreover, the manifesto's typography, diction, and argument all manifest the influence of Cendrars's work, especially the 1919 volume, Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques. 36 Finally, both the dominant metaphor and the specific language in which this metaphor is articulated in the "Cannibalist Manifesto" recall "La Métaphysique." "Cannibalist Manifesto" is clearly another troping on Kant, but a troping to the second degree.
"Cannibalist Manifesto" begins with a gesture similar to the one that opens Cendrars's "Métaphysique": a matter of taste, or what we might call culinary ritual, is declared to have metaphysical implications: "Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically." 37 Critics have understood the "us" in this passage to refer to Brazilians in particular (and indeed, the subversive nature of de Andrade's transformative, appropriative gesture depends to a large extent on the particularity of the "us"). However, it soon becomes evident that cannibalism is a practice that unites not simply Brazilian writers and artists in search of a historically resonant, indigenous aesthetic; rather, cannibalism is a practice that unites the entire human race: "I am only concerned with what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the cannibal" . "Law of the cannibal" is in fact the law of the capitalist, who concerns himself only with what he does not already possess. In quest of the not-yet-possessed, or the Other, "We push onward," states de Andrade . If we wish to be good cannibals, he continues, we must transform "the equation 'Self, part of the Cosmos' into the axiom 'Cosmos, part of the Self'" . This latter axiom is, for "us," our "Law": "Subsistence. Experience. Cannibalism" .
By now, an echo of Cendrars's "Metaphysics of coffee" should be audible. Just as Cendrars discovered the "principle" behind monocultural assimilation, so de Andrade articulates a "Law of Man" or of the cannibal who incorporates every Other into the self. But behind this echo it is also possible to retrieve the even fainter reverberation of Kant's own axiomatic metaphysics. While de Andrade's cannibal inverts the pantheistic "Self, part of the Cosmos" to form the proposition "Cosmos, part of the Self," Kant's "outraged imagination" strives, in its own cannibalistic "onward advance," to incorporate the sublime Other, to assimilate it to the sublime dimensions of the mind.
In what way, then, does the cannibalist impulse of the manifesto differ from the standardizing impulse of "La Métaphysique du café"? How are de Andrade and Cendrars positioned differently vis-à-vis the devastating, exploitative program of modernist standardization? The aesthetics championed by "Cannibalist Manifesto" have generally been associated with the subversive project of détournement: the appropriation of, or troping on, an element of the hegemonic order in order to create a new hybrid, an entity situated in the "neither . . . nor" region of anti-essentialist politics. 38 In the words of de Andrade's English translator, Leslie Bary, the manifesto "challenges the dualities civilization/barbarism, modern/primitive, and original/derivative, which had informed the construction of Brazilian culture since the days of the colony"; "Oswald's anthropophagist," she concludes, "neither apes nor rejects European culture, but 'devours' it, adapting its strengths and incorporating them into the native self." 39
The difference between a cannibalist aesthetics and a monocultural economics is thus not to be located in their respective underlying metaphysics, for the Kantian "Law of Man"-- the law of devouring and appropriation--underlies them both. Rather, this difference is to be found in the positionality of the subject who exercises the Kantian "Law": Does the subject exercise it from a position of subservience or domination, in order to resist or, alternatively, to oppress, in the role of "parodic" mime or "authentic" originator? At several clearly identifiable moments, Cendrars positions himself on the side of the colonizer; "La Métaphysique du café" was, after all, intended to please his benefactor, the Europeanized intellectual and coffee plantation owner, Paulo Prado (most likely the "companion" to whom Cendrars refers in the text). Entire passages of "La Métaphysique," not to mention the full text of "The Utility Principle," read like apologies for empire, hymns to the pure will to dominate the Other. De Andrade's manifesto, in contrast, assumes the position of the colonized. Although de Andrade, like Prado, was a Europeanized Brazilian and a member of the ruling elite, he attempts to speak in "Cannibalist Manifesto" as a descendent of the Tupi, not of the Vieira, as a son of the Great Snake, not of the Bad Mother, Cornelia. 40 Ironically, it was Cendrars himself who had encouraged de Andrade to identify more fully with the indigenous tribal past of Brazil. 41 However, as a foreigner dependent for his knowledge of Brazil's interior upon the very system that was destroying it, Cendrars could hardly have assumed the position of the colonized that de Andrade, perhaps with a bit of bad faith, could. As a member of the oligarchical elite, however, he was appropriating a cannibalist identity from a race to which he did not belong.  At the same time, though, de Andrade manages to execute a more radical gesture; he cannibalizes Kant not with the intention of mobilizing him for monoculture but, rather, in order to hybridize Kant, to unveil the "primitive," cannibalistic discourse embedded in and informing Kant's own, and thus to suggest that the "law of human reason"--that which "makes us what we are"--is the law of the sublime cannibal "only concerned with what is not mine" ("Cannibalist Manifesto," 39).
Whether de Andrade would have hybridized Kant without the intervention of Cendrars is a question worth asking. By making the link between a "devouring" monoculture and a Subject in search of the sublime, Cendrars provided de Andrade with a certain form of avant-garde nourishment. Because of this debt (not to mention his debt to European modernism in general), de Andrade can only with difficulty claim to speak from the position of the indigenous Brazilian cannibal. The equivocal position in which de Andrade finds himself is not exceptional but rather typical of the predicament encountered by many cultural producers speaking from the position of the disenfranchised. As Gayatri Spivak has persuasively argued, the subaltern--the truly subaltern--rarely (if ever) gets a chance to locate himself or herself in discourse, and thus cannot lay claim to the honor of introducing new (pure) voices into circulation. 42 In this light, all cultural producers are cannibals, inevitably subject to the "Law of Man," the law that bids us find a language, a measure, for that which initially appears beyond "the narrow confines" of the hegemonic (European) self.
A close reading of "La Métaphysique du café" and its use of pronouns, diction, and citation, reveals that Cendrars's authorial voice is hybrid as well; it does not emanate from a self-identical position but is instead composed of various, and sometimes opposed discourses in what is perhaps ultimately not enough of a "critical syncretism," a poetics of simultaneity explicitly concerned with exposing power relations between heterogeneous cultural traditions or practices. But one thing Cendrars does at least acknowledge is that all forms of making, speaking, and cultivating are to some extent acts of homogenization (they suppress radical alterity) as much as they are acts of hybridization that--in the vegetal as well as the commercial world--produce consequences never entirely predictable or subject to control. By placing Kant at the heart both of homogenization and hybridity, Cendrars introduces an irony into all attempts to maintain their separation (and thus to politicize them in any simple or clear manner). Cendrars demonstrates that even an aesthetics of difference has to pass through a moment of digestive recuperation, of communication in which discourse--monoculture, the Transcendental Subject--absorbs the Other and thus risks reducing this Other to the same.
The discernably ambivalent tone of Cendrars's "La Métaphysique du café" is a bracing corrective to the kind of celebratory excesses of critics like Jim Collins, Iain Chambers, or Ulf Hannerz. According to Hannerz, for instance, multiplied contacts between first-world and third-world countries (contacts based, he does not mention, on the exploitative practices of agricultural, industrial, and chemical conglomerates) are not decreasing but rather increasing the number of cultural alternatives available to the world as a whole. "The people in my favorite Nigerian town drink Coca Cola," Hannerz writes, "but they drink buru-kutu too; and they can watch Charlie's Angels as well as Hausa drummers on the television sets which spread rapidly as soon as electricity has arrived." 43 In the same vein, Collins writes with unalloyed enthusiasm that the problem of "accessibility [has] virtually disappeared"; there is no Grand Hotel "that somehow orchestrates all cultural production and reception according to one master system." Anyone can be interpellated by anything, and thus we are subjects without boundaries, constantly able to incorporate the Other as just another version of the self. 44
There is reason to rejoice in the increased circulation of third world musics, art traditions, and hybrid practices. Still, as Robert Stam reminds us, hybridity "has never been a peaceful encounter, a tension-free theme park; it has always been deeply entangled with colonial violence." 45 And Torgovnick counsels that reveling "in the postmodern mélange of us and them" should not obscure other, less developed historical knowledge of how, precisely, these new and exotic treats came to appear on the dinner plate. 46 All forms of cultural syncretism must struggle to remain critical; the absorptive gesture is not arrested by creative re-citation; without the traumatic work of memory and productive alienation--without, that is, the very ruptures in tone that characterize Cendrars's "La Métaphysique"--such gestures can submit too easily to the law of the cannibalistic and homogenizing sublime. Resisting complete assimilation, letting the seams show (as Cendrars invariably did), is perhaps a peculiarly modernist way of registering the history that brings different cultures together and that too often tears them apart.
Carrie Noland, Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology . Her current book-length project is on graffiti, both as a practice and as a charged term in twentieth-century aesthetics, ethnography, and critical theory.
1. "Saint Paul," in Blaise Cendrars: Complete Poems, trans. Ron Padgett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 180-1; translation modified. The original reads:
J'adore cette ville
Saint-Paul est selon mon coeur
Ici nulle tradition
Aucun préjugé
Ni ancien ni moderne
Seuls comptent cet appétit furieux cette confiance
absolue cet optimisme cette audace ce travail ce
labeur cette spéculation qui font construire dix
maisons par heure de tous les styles ridicules
grotesques beaux grands petits nord sud égyptien
yankee cubiste
Sans autre préoccupation que de suivre les statistiques
prévoir l'avenir le confort l'utilité la plus-
value et d'attirer une grosse immigration
Tous les pays
Tous les peuples
J'aime ça
Les deux trois vieilles maisons portugaises qui restent
sont des faïences bleues
(Blaise Cendrars, "Saint Paul," in Au coeur du monde: Poésies complètes 1924-1929 [Paris: Gallimard, 1988], 63-4).
2. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). As globalization proceeds, Clifford's argument goes, economically and politically weaker microcultures will not necessarily die out, but will instead learn to practice "strategic accommodations," discovering "powerful, distinctive ways to live . . . not as archaic survival but as an ongoing process" of self-realization and renewal . See also Edouard Glissant on "créolité" in Le Discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981); Françoise Lionnet on "métissage" in Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Iain Chambers on "migrancy" in Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994). Homi Bhabha's treatment of "hybridity" is a special case; he transforms the noun, hybrid, into a verb, hybridize, and uses it to refer to, among other things, the process of disclosing "the struggle of identifications" within any identity and the "strategic [discursive] reversal of the process of domination through disavowal" (Bhabha, The Location of Culture [London: Routledge, 1994], 29, 112).
3. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 41. While Torgovnick provides a crucial criticism of Clifford's approach, she fails to treat his objects of investigation with the same degree of critical acuity and neglects to mention the deeper ambivalences expressed in the later chapters of The Predicament of Culture.
4. Many echos of Cendrars can be heard in Lévi-Strauss's late work, Tristes Tropiques . Lévi-Strauss even borrows the title of his second section from Cendrars's 1924 volume of poetry about Brazil, Feuilles de route. The two European intellectuals also assumed the same equivocal position in Brazilian culture, frequenting the elite Automobile Club in São Paulo while working to preserve the fragile cultures of the interior that were being debased by those who entertained Europeans so lavishly in the city.
5. For a sensitive treatment of the problems concealed by the celebration of hybridity, see Annie E. Coombes, "The Recalcitrant Object: Culture Contact and the Question of Hybridity," in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (Essex Symposia), ed. Francis Barker, Peter Humle, and Margaret Iversen (New York: Manchester University Press, 1994).
6. See Aracy Amaral, "Blaise Cendrars et Tarsila," and Adrien Roig, "Cendrars et ses 'bons amis' de São Paulo ou les réalités d'une utopie," in Brésil, L'Utopialand de Blaise Cendrars, ed. Maria Teresa de Freitas and Claude Leroy (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998). Alexandre Eulalio tells a rather different story in which it is Paulo Prado who first introduces Cendrars to the Brazilian modernists. For this version of events, see Eulalio, A Aventura Brasileira de Blaise Cendrars (São Paulo: Quiron Limitada, 1978).
7. See Benedito Nunes, "Cendrars, Oswald," in Brésil, L'Utopialand de Blaise Cendrars; and Aracy Amaral, Blaise Cendrars no Brasil e os Modernistas (Saõ Paolo: Marins, 1970).
8. Critics now believe that Cendrars did not visit Brazil eight times, as he claimed, but only stayed for three long periods: from February to September 1924; from January to June of 1926; and from September 1927 to January 1928.
9. On the négrophilie of the 1920s, see Laura Rosenstock, "Léger and 'The Creation of the World,'" in "Primitivism" in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, vol. 2, ed. William Rubin (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1985); see also Jean Laude, La Peinture française et l'art nègre (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968).
10. My translation. Jean-Claude Blachère, Le Modèle nègre: Aspects littéraires du mythe primitiviste au XXe siècle chez Apollinaire, Cendrars, Tzara (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1981), 90. While Cendrars was frequenting the contingent of Brazilian artists and intellectuals sojourning in Paris, he was also working on a "primitivist" ballet for the Ballets Suédois entitled La Création du monde (with Léger, Darius Milhaud, and Jean Börlin of the Ballets Suédois). He was probably chosen to write La Création du monde because he had just published in 1921 Antologie nègre, a compilation and translation of previously documented African myths and fables.
11. Rosenstock, "Léger and 'The Creation of the World,'" 482.
12. My translation. Salvador de Reyes, cited in Blachère, Le Modèle nègre, 79; emphasis added.
13. Many of Cendrars's prose works also celebrate heterogeneity and syncretism; see Une nuit dans la forêt , La Vie dangereuse , Le Brésil, des hommes sont venus , Trop c'est trop , and two volumes of poetry, Documentaires and Feuilles de route (1924-28).
14. Blaise Cendrars, "Profound Today" (Profond aujourd'hui), in Modernities and Other Writings, ed. and intro. Monique Chefdor, trans. Esther Allen and Monique Chefdor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 4.
15. The essay was reproduced in almost the same form in Cendrars's collection of essays, Aujourd'hui (Paris: Grasset, 1931). Further, the second half was extracted and published the following month under the title "Before the Coffee Fields" (Devant les champs de café) in the Parisian newspaper L'Intransigeant on 23 November 1927.
16. Alexandre Eulalio, A Aventura Brasileira, 38; unpublished translation by Aaron Noland.
17. Adrien Roig, "La Fazenda São Martinho d'Oswald de Andrade et de Blaise Cendrars," Quadrant : 66.
18. Eulalio has suggested that "La Métaphysique" expresses Cendrars's longing for order, a longing that was satisfied in his later life by a return to religious faith. Others have proposed that the essay confirms the growing influence of Prado over Cendrars. The essay was written during Cendrars's last trip to Brazil in 1926; by this time, his relations with other Brazilian modernists such as Oswaldo de Andrade and Mario de Andrade had become strained. Apparently, he was thinking seriously about purchasing land and becoming a developer himself.
19. An important exception is Adrien Roig's "La Fazenda São Martinho." Roig provides a generous historical background for the plantation that Cendrars visited; his reading of the re of the fazenda in the works of Oswald de Andrade and Cendrars is, however, disappointing. Roig concludes that both de Andrade and Cendrars were enchanted by the plantation's prosperity ("Prospérité" is the name of the poem de Andrade dedicated to the Fazenda São Martinho in Poésie Pau-Brasil); he does not attend either to the more equivocal aspects of Cendrars's description nor does he spend any time at all on Cendrars's use of Kant. Maria Teresa de Freitas, "Le Brésil en revue: 'Reportages' brésiliens de Blaise Cendrars," in Cendrars au pays de Jean Galmot, 209, is equally unsatisfactory; she concludes that the text was "realistic" but completely ignores its metaphysical impulse.
20. Darrell E. Lévi, The Prados of Brazil: An Elite Family and Social Change 1840-1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 66.
21. Prado provided financial support for the 1922 Semaine de l'Art Moderne in São Paulo and was known for abetting the most progressive Brazilian art movements, including Pau-Brasil (Brazilwood). He even wrote the preface for Oswaldo de Andrade's 1925 collection Brazilwood Poetry, the only Portuguese-language volume ever published in France (by the Editions Au Sans Pareil) at the instigation of Cendrars.
22. See Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1989). Collins borrows Althusser's notion of interpellation but retains none of its ominous overtones.
23. Cendrars, Aujourd'hui 1917-1929; suivi de Essais et réflexions: 1910-1916 (Paris: Denoël, 1987), 127-8. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
24. Here Cendrars treats monoculture as a "precursor of ruthless mechanization and work on an assembly line" (Blaise Cendrars, Sky: Memoirs, trans. Nina Rootes [New York: Paragon House, 1992], 162-3).
25. During the early 1920s Cendrars was listed on the masthead of Le Corbusier's purist journal, L'Esprit nouveau; he also maintained relations with the industrialist Jean Coutrot, who used his work as a model for aestheticizing modes of factory production. For an account of industry's attempts to aestheticize itself during the 1920s, see Marjorie A. Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900-1940 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
26. On the important and increasingly ominous links between hybridity and consumption, see John Hutnyk, "Adorno at Womad: South Asian Crossovers and the Limits of Hybridity-Talk," in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (London: Zed Books, 1997). Manuel Bandeira once remarked that upon returning from souvenir collecting in Europe, "Paulo Prado brought back Cendrars in his valise" (quoted in Adrien Roig, "Blaise Cendrars et ses 'Bons Amis' de São Paulo," in Brésil, l'Utopialand de Blaise Cendrars, 56).
27. The original reads: "Il vient de mourir dans cette ville le dernier descendant direct du grand philosophe allemand Emmanuel Kant. Ce dernier Kant était propriétaire d'une fazenda de café" (Aujourd'hui, 127).
28. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 106; emphasis added.
29. And why so much coffee indeed? Is it merely coincidental that in his latest Austin Powers movie, "The Spy Who Shagged Me," Mike Myers casts Powers's evil double as the sacred head of Starbuck's Coffee? Why is Starbuck's Coffee the ideal symbol (the perfect cover) for the shadowy dealings of a megalomaniac?
30. The French word "déperdition" can be used in several contexts: in a medical context, it means waste or destruction (of tissue, for instance); in a thermodynamic context, it means loss or leakage of heat or energy; and in an economic context, it means the dwindling of capital, as when an investment produces loss before it yields profit.
31. In his text for Jean Manzon's photographs of Brazil, Le Brésil, des hommes sont venus (Monaco: Les Documents d'art, 1952), xv, Cendrars admits that his attitude towards Brazil's ambitious development schemes has become "irrespectueux." He borrows the title from a line found in "La Métaphysique du café," thus implicitly linking the earlier work to the later; however, in Brésil, Cendrars's tone is far more ambivalent, even embittered. He tells a story, for instance, of walking through the Brazilian forest and coming across a sign nailed to a banana tree with the words: "AVIS: PARADIS A EXPLOITER" (WARNING: PARADISE TO EXPLOIT) (xv).
32. The "Manifesto Antropófago" first appeared in the Revista de Antropofagia in São Paulo, May 1928. It was translated into French by Benedito Nunes as "Le manifeste anthropophage," in Surréalisme périphérique, ed. Luis de Moura Sobral (Montreal: University of Montreal, 1984). I make use here of Leslie Bary's English translation, "Cannibalist Manifesto," in Latin American Literary Review 19, no. 38 : 35-47.
33. For a revisionist reading of de Andrade's Manifesto that reveals its hidden racism, see Zita Nunes, "Anthropology and Race in Brazilian Modernism," in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory.
34. Kobena Mercer, quoted in Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 25; emphasis in original.
35. "Manifeste Cannibale Dada" was first published in the small Parisian journal, Dadaphone 7 (March 1920). I quote from the reprint anthologized in Francis Picabia, Ecrits 1913-1920, ed. Olivier Revault d'Allones (Paris: Belfond, 1975). For an incomplete and sketchy rendering of Oswald de Andrade's debts to the European avant-garde, see Benedito Nunes, "Le manifeste anthropophage," in Surréalisme périphérique. Scholars of Latin American modernism, from Nunes to Robert Stam, have neglected to analyze the relation between Picabia's manifesto and de Andrade's, claiming that there is, in fact, little similarity--either in content or form--between the two. However, Picabia's "Manifeste Cannibale Dada," a testament to and criticism of the invasion of capitalist practices into the domain of art, appears to be entirely pertinent to de Andrade's notion of a carnivorous, acquisitive "Law of Man." The specular relation between cannibalism and capitalism that de Andrade implicitly establishes may be clearly identified when Picabia's and de Andrade's manifestos are placed side by side.
36. See Oswald de Andrade, "Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry," trans. Stella M. de Sá Rego, Latin American Literary Review 14, no. 27 : 186-7; first published in Correio da Manha 18 (March 1924). De Andrade calls here for "Everything [to be] assimilated. Without cultural meetings. . . . Without ontology" . He also imitates the appositive style, single-word-as-verse structure of Cendrars's Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques and borrows his slogan, "The present is all there in the newspaper" .
37. Andrade, "Cannibalist Manifesto," 38.
38. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 25.
39. Introduction to "Oswald de Andrade's 'Cannibalist Manifesto,'" Latin American Literary Review 19, no. 38 : 35-6.
40. The Tupi is "a popular and generic name for the Native Americans of Brazil"; Father Antonio Vieira was a Portuguese Jesuit "instrumental in the colonization of Brazil"; the Great Snake is a "water spirit in Amazonian mythology"; and Cornelia is the mythic mother who betrays her native people, bringing up her children "as subjects of a 'civilized' culture" (Andrade, "Cannibalist Manifesto," 44-5).
41. Until Cendrars came to Brazil, Oswaldo de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral's avant-garde aesthetic had consisted of the stream-lined cubism of Léger and the machinism of Le Corbusier. Cendrars encouraged the couple to explore Brazil's indigenous forms of cultural expression. He organized group trips into the Brazilian interior--an interior that even de Andrade and do Amaral had never seen before. It was only after the group made a trip together to Minas Gerais in April 1924 that de Andrade came up with the idea for Pau Brasil, the movement that would establish the necessity for a properly Brazilian avant-gardism and that would spawn the "Cannibalist Manifesto" three years later. (Perhaps this is why de Andrade wrote in the dedication to Pau Brasil: "To Blaise Cendrars, on the occasion of the discovery of Brazil.") Serge Milliet writes that "the influence of Cendrars on the Brazilian modernists was decisive. These rich young people could travel every year throughout Europe, but they knew nothing about their own country" (Milliet, quoted in Pierre Rivas, "Cendrars, le Nouveau Monde et l'Homme nouveau," in Europe 54, no. 566 [June 1976]: 54; my translation). Cendrars even founded a Sociéte des Amis des Monuments Historiques du Brésil whose mission it was to preserve colonial ruins and tribal artefacts from neglect, destruction, and deportation to foreign museums.
42. The obvious reference here is to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Paul Williams and I. Chrisman (Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).
43. Torgovnick, quoted in James Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 17.
44. Collins, Uncommon Cultures, 5, xiii.
45. Robert Stam, "Palimpsestic Aesthetics: A Meditation on Hybridity and Garbage," in Performing Hybridity, ed. Joseph May and Jennifer Natalya Fink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 60.
46. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 41.
Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945. Trans. Martin Chalmers. New York: Random House, 1999. Pp. 556. $29.95.
Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook. Trans. Martin Brady. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Pp. 296. $90.00.
Victor Klemperer, So sitze ich denn zwischen allen Stühlen: Tagebücher, 1945-1959. 2 vols. Ed. Walter Nowojski with Christian Löser. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1999. Pp. 1824. DM 98, 00.
Until recently, Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was remembered, when at all, as a professor of French literature. His best-known work, The Language of the Third Reich, LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook (published in 1947 as LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen) applied philological principles and interests to the study of contemporary culture, in this case to language use in Nazi Germany. As this work detailed, Klemperer himself suffered under the Nazi regime. The son of a well-known Reform rabbi (and the cousin of conductor Otto Klemperer), Klemperer moved to Berlin as a child, studied at various universities in Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy, married pianist/composer/translator Eva Schlemmer in 1906, worked for seven years as a freelance writer (publishing books of fiction and nonfiction), and served briefly as a soldier during World War I. His first academic posts were in Naples and Munich. Appointed in 1920 as a professor of Romance languages at Dresden's Technical University, he edited a philological yearbook and published numerous scholarly monographs and surveys of French literary history.
By 1933, Klemperer was well-established as an academic. Then the advent of the Third Reich and the implementation of increasingly punitive anti-Semitic laws derailed his professorial career and profoundly disrupted his personal existence. Although he had converted to Protestantism in 1903 (and was baptized anew in 1912), he was nonetheless considered Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws. His marriage to a non-Jew (who stood by her husband despite repeated Nazi bullying and admonishments to divorce him) protected Klemperer from the most lethal forms of anti-Semitic persecution; the direct threat of deportation to a concentration or death camp came only in 1945. He nonetheless spent much of the Third Reich in mortal terror, under constant threat of physical violence (and physical collapse), and cut off ever more completely from the possessions, position, and relative privilege of his former life. Forced into early retirement, he eventually lost most of his pension, his house, his entitlement to use the university library, to use public transportation, to enter a movie theater. He was compelled to wear a Star of David in public, to move with his wife into cramped quarters in a series of "Jewish houses" (each a kind of miniature ghetto, subject to brutal police searches), and eventually, despite his age and heart condition, to perform heavy manual labor in the streets and factories of Dresden. Klemperer experienced at first hand the physical and psychic sufferings of the Jewish community. Near starvation, near despair, they waited for the end, the optimists anticipating the end of the war, the realists the known death awaiting them at Auschwitz. Through all of these tribulations, Klemperer continued writing; once he lost regular access to a scholarly library, he began to focus his scholarly energies on the LTI project and on Curriculum Vitae, a memoir of his early life in Wilhelmine Germany. At the same time, he chronicled his daily life under Nazism, continuing the diary he had been keeping since the age of seventeen.
The belated appearance of these autobiographical writings has sparked the current Klemperer revival. In 1989, the posthumous publication in Germany of Klemperer's 1370 page Curriculum Vitae: Erinnerungen eines Philologen, 1881-1918 (Curriculum vitae: memories of a philogist, 1881-1918) elicited little response. When his Nazi-era diaries were published by Aufbau Verlag in 1995, however, they quickly became a publishing phenomenon. In the meantime, the Wall had fallen, Germany had been reunited, and Aufbau, like other former GDR publishers, had begun publishing revisionist documentary volumes, many based on previously inaccessible (or unpublishable) archival sources. 1 On many levels, the publication of the Klemperer diaries epitomized this kind of historical retrieval and a lifting of the GDR's previous, tacit, historical censorship. Aufbau responded to the success of Klemperer's Nazi-era journal by bringing out, in numerous volumes, early and later stretches of his diary: the two volumes covering the Weimar Republic (1882 pages), a short volume covering the period from the end of the war to the end of 1945, and finally, in two volumes (and another 1824 pp.), So sitze ich denn swischen allen Stühlen, Klemperer's full diary of life in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and the German Democratic Republic. 2 In Germany, all three diaries are also available (in abridged form) as audio books, and the Third Reich diaries are currently being made into a television miniseries, aimed at a mass audience. 3