Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America
CHAPTER 5
Forms of Historic Imagination: Visual Culture, Historiography, and the Tropes of War in Nineteenth-Century Venezuela[1]
Beatriz González-Stephan
‘Making history’ is a practice… If it is true that the organization of history is relative to a place and a time, this is first of all because of its techniques of production. Generally speaking, every society thinks of itself ‘historically,’ with the instruments that pertain to it… history is mediated by technique.
--Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History[1]
Clio’s Closet
The relationships between the written word and visual culture throughout the nineteenth century were complex. They shared symbolic spaces, mobilized didactic forces, sought to delineate their respective domains, and fought over clientele. And both print and image competed ferociously to get ahead and achieve—each in its own way—the goals of the project of enlightened modernity. Of course, each embraced different meanings of this “enlightenment.”[2] Nevertheless, written and visual cultures complemented and mutually contaminated each other. In most cases, words found support in images, on and off the printed page (see chapter 1 in this volume).
I would like to draw attention to the levels of complexity of the interactions between words and images, especially the porosity of the sphere of letters (relating specifically to historical genres and historiographical practices pertaining to the realm of high culture), through a series of enormously popular manifestations that belonged to the world of the visual spectacle. These manifestations include expressions and representations for popular classes and the public at large and had little in common with elite preferences. After all, nineteenth-century Latin America was profoundly marked by a visual rhetoric, a rhetoric of the image, that required the world of letters to develop a form of textuality that made its references more “visible,” that worked to elaborate a more “realist” codification, and that, in sum, painted with words.[3]
The circuits of the written word and visual culture established lines of communication that were not exactly fluid or obvious, but that allowed for epistemic matrices to cross. Limiting oneself to the horizon of literary production, at least for the nineteenth century, while important, has impoverished potential meanings of numerous cultural practices, including but not limited to the production of historical fiction.[4] In the words of Michel de Certeau, the practice of history occurs in a specific place at a specific moment, conditioned by other cultural practices and activities. For now, what is important to keep in mind is this larger context of other cultural practices (that could pertain to the realm of popular culture and scopic rituals, for example), and that the specificity of the practice of history is situated locally (obeying the logic of production determined by a given place’s traditions).[5]
Cultural phenomena are complex, so it can payoff to engage what has been called “cultural criticism,” a methodology that attempts to shed light on lineages and connections that traditional disciplinary approaches have ignored in favor of establishing discreet and discontinuous entities of knowledge. Reestablishing some of these nexuses could seem imprudent, but the benefits outweigh the risks. They permit us to rethink cultural phenomena from other vantage points and understand better their legacies.
I would like to invert the order, so to say, of the premises of our analysis of the interrelation and circulation of diverse cultural forms of the nineteenth century, avoiding from the beginning the question of the place of letters, and focusing instead on the complex mediations of visual and material culture (panoramas, the daguerreotype, the stereoscope) and the universe of the written word (scenes of customs—cuadros de costumbres—serial novels, galleries of illustrious men, poetic albums, historiographical panoramas). Studying these mediations means asking about the dialogues between different modes of popular culture, public festivals and celebrations, fairs and exhibitions, the advent of a culture of technology, daily consumption of decorative styles, as well as the emergence of literary genres that enjoyed large reading publics. What is the genealogy that controlled historiographical production, or the mechanism for producing a sense of the past, in a society trained to read visual formats? In a society that read narratives based on images—from the engravings appearing on loose-leaves and “live” paintings to parades and dioramas—how was it possible to build a lettered repertoire capable of interacting with a visually-inclined public? It is no surprise that newspapers and magazines incorporated rapidly the new technologies allowing them to reproduce images that would illustrate their pages and thus convert them into exhibitionary showcases. Progress was also measured through the reproduction of images of progress, challenging ocular competency. At stake was the issue of learning to see.
Let us begin by observing this process, which requires me to modify many of the reflections on historiography I have made in past years. Throughout the nineteenth century dioramas and panoramas were enormously popular venues among a growing urban public used to watching (and often participating in) all sorts of scopic spectacles, including fairs, circuses, parades, varieties of fireworks shows, allegorical paintings, and a host of street performances. Many of these spectacles had roots in older traditions that filled the public sphere in colonial Latin America. Visual communication was key to these types of spectacles both in the colonial period and more so following independence. Thus, playing with the effects of representation, producing illusions of what was real, substituting the appearance of an object for the object itself, exposure, illustration, and so on, were all new techniques of seeing. These techniques accompanied technological innovations like the daguerreotype, photographic cameras, microscopes and telescopes, and electric light, all of which revived a collective sensitivity to new modes of seeing and the devices that made this possible.[6] Taking into account other activities of cultural production invites us to establish bridges between lettered culture and popular culture. [Figure 6.1 about here]
Up until now we have drawn attention to the most common modality through which historical imagination materializes, namely written historiography (since tradition equates history with writing), and its possible exchanges with certain forms of visual culture. Nevertheless, Clio’s (the muse of history) closet is extremely varied, and her outfits are made of cloths whose different textures do not necessarily obey the written text or the image that the text reproduces. The regime of historical imagination follows the logic of a specific time and place determined by a complex matrix of factors in which historical writing is only one outcome. The written word and iconic practices live in this matrix along with other expressions, like architectonic ones or ones related to decorative arts, for example, or scopic rituals, such as exhibitions and museums, that regulate the grammar of cultural politics and styles. The work of Hayden White and Michel de Certeau provide fruitful reflections on this point, but their analyses are limited by conceiving the historiographical event as bound to writing. I prefer the term “practices of historical imagination,” defined broadly as the body of rules that regulates cultural production of all sorts and that informs what a society perceives in a determined moment as historical memory, to refer to the same cultural phenomena. These rules controlled the range of themes, as well as the rhetorical and stylistic repertoires, of expressive modalities of both high culture and popular culture, in painting as much as in literature, of public parties and celebrations and decorative arts.
In what remains of this chapter we will consider a key phenomenon in late nineteenth-century Venezuela: the context surrounding the first National Fair, organized on the model of the World’s Fairs. This first Fair gave way to the ordering and coining of culture according to a historicist fiction, and it was a space where manifestations of visual culture exercised a predominant role in the construction of an historical imaginary.
Learning to See
One of the “charms” of Venezuelan novelist Tomás Michelena’s novel Débora (1884) is the sadomasochist mode of punishment the protagonist’s husband, Adriano de Soussa, doles out to friends who happen to be his wife’s lovers (Felipe Latorre and Alberto Cassard) once he discovers their treachery and her double adultery. With her constant flirtation, Débora inflames the passions of her husband’s friends and generates a triangular homoerotic tension that permeates the entire text. One of the scenes of punishment takes place in the style of a porno show. The husband forces Felipe Latorre, one of his wife’s lovers, to look through that “magic eye” that was a skylight and watch the naked bodies of Débora and Cassard, the other lover. These two have been locked in a cellar and exposed to the excited eyes of the voyeurs above who enjoy, though not without some pain, the erotic spectacle going on below.
What is important to note from this narrative plot are the mechanisms that transformed seeing into a pleasure, and the act of continuing to see into a permanent desire to see. In the case of the novel, the words attempted to take the place of the camera in order to present a striptease composed of images and the staging of reality. With the erotic images in view, at least for the reader and the two men peering through the skylight, the novel appealed to the new sensory pleasure that engaged cultural practices not necessarily regulated by the grammar of the written word. In reality, there was no torturous punishment for the insulted husband or for the lovers, for all enjoyed the exhibitionary game of watching and being watched. [Figure 6.2 about here]
There is no doubt that during the nineteenth century the written word competed with a disadvantage against a wide range of forms of communication whose consumption was linked to seeing. In this sense it is worth pointing out the different meanings of the term ilustrado throughout the 1800s. First, it referred to a person of great reason and knowledge—an enlightened person—or, with a more teleological end, the light that instructs and makes illustrious this person. Ilustrado was also used to speak of print media illustrated with plates or engravings, as well as the act of projecting light and making visible and intelligible an idea through an image. These meanings were intertwined—the one linked to rationality, the other closer to making ideas visible, the first born of a Cartesian and abstract conception of reality, and the second tied to a visual tradition of knowledge—and they shared in the production of cultural forms. So, for example, the images appearing in print media “illustrated” the word and amplified its projection (in terms of both meaning and public).[7] There was, nevertheless, a complex tension between word and image that revealed conflicts in the constitution of a “realm of letters” and the differences between high and low cultures. Likewise, this tension was made clear when it came to the reading public that, although more familiar with visual forms of cultural expression, was now faced with developing literary competency. These tensions led to the gentrification of certain fields of production, to the contrary of the general tendency throughout the century of preferring scopic modalities that undoubtedly prolonged a “phantasmagoria of equality.”[8]
The poet Rubén Darío dedicated several chronicles to manifestations of visual culture, in particular productions of technological reproduction like posters and post cards. His many lady friends showered him with hundreds of the “little cards” that were spread over his writing desk, “post cards from Spain and Latin America,” explained Darío, “sent with the hope of me writing them something in return, even if it’s just an autograph.” Darío took pleasure in untangling the psychological relationship between the illustration on the post card and the character of its sender. “To be in style,” he noted, “they send the first post card they have at hand: a statue, a view, a panorama, or a building from their home city.”[9]
For his part, José Martí, during the many years he lived in the U.S. (1881-1895) developed a fondness for technological innovations. He was especially fascinated by mechanical and electrical gadgets, which he reviewed meticulously after seeing them on display at the grand exhibitions and fairs. These fairs of material culture pushed him to make adjustments in his projection of the “republic of letters.” Martí appreciated the pedagogical advances achieved by these more democratic learning spaces, for by helping one to learn to see, fairs and exhibits could make education more effective and efficient for the masses. He insisted that “exhibitions and fairs are no longer just places to take a stroll. They are announcements; they are great, silent lessons; they are schools… No book or collection of books can show teachers of agriculture what they can see with their own eyes at the fair ground.”[10] Martí was not speaking about learning to read the written word, but rather learning to see and read images, about a semiotics of things and about making practical inferences that would be useful in life.
Despite his interest in photos in motion, the photographs Muybridge and Richard Jahr took of the moon, and following closely the developments of color photography, in various chronicles Martí wrote of the popularity that panoramas enjoyed at the end of the century, especially those dealing with historical themes. For this particular moment panoramas constituted the closest modality to what would later be documentary film. Martí had a feeling that this form of “spectacular” entertainment, often dealing with war, that captured the attention of urban masses could, for a low cost, have an impact on the events rocking the world at the turn of the century, anticipating the advent of film: