Wonder and Exile in the New World. Alex Nava
study, even through the lens of older voices and laments, I have in mind the scorched lives of these immigrants and refugees.
Though my study is unabashedly academic and theoretical, I hope that it is also the desert space in which a poetics of wonder encounters a poetics of exile, and each are changed as a result, wonder now mindful of the suffering and trials of history, on the one hand, and exile gaining in imagination. In this case, my book argues that wonder turns ominous and menacing, even grotesque, when the force of exile is felt the most, as in prophetic and apocalyptic literatures. As I read them, these texts are haunting examples of how profoundly wonder is changed under the most disjointed and oppressive conditions of history. Latin American history is a case in point and its classic texts, whether theological or literary, often resemble the apocalyptic imagination with its brood of eccentric wonders.14 I hope that my study proves this case by exploring some of these classic texts in which wonder and curiosity (a “Baroque curiosity” in the words of José Lezama Lima) coexist with a wrenching bewilderment at the horrors of history.15
To return to Melville’s Ishmael, we might see in him an allegory of these themes of wonder and exile. Melville tells us that life at sea generates the most astonishing and wildest of all marvels, as if travel on the remotest waters, to the farthest ends of the earth, in such latitudes and longitudes, produces an imagination like no other, one bursting with energy and pregnant with the “wonderfullest” of all fancies.16 Ishmael, no doubt, is tantalized by these marvels, by the anarchic pleasure of sailing forbidden seas and landing on barbarous coasts, but he soon becomes acquainted with another facet of the sea. The sea is freedom for Ishmael, but it is also terror (Melville is a Calvinist after all). Ishmael may want to drown in the sea of wonder, but his name, too, conjures memories of his ancient ancestor, the biblical Ishmael who is exiled from the Promised Land (with his mother, the slave woman Hagar). So, Melville writes of the marvels of life, but with the warning noted in the epilogue of this introduction: that there are dangerous, destructive wonders that lead to barren mazes and leave us overwhelmed, ones that carry us into the maelstroms of history and leave us capsized and lost, exiles in the abyss.
At the end of Moby Dick, when Ishmael’s ship (the Pequod, piloted by the mad Ahab) is destroyed, Melville invokes another biblical figure, mother Rachel weeping for her exiled and dispossessed children: “By her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children because they were not.”17 And Rachel weeps for other American children as well, “because they were not.” Much of the literature of the New World exhibits the same tears as mother Rachel, the same hardships as Hagar and Ishmael, the same capacity for wonder as Melville and the other American artists that are the subjects of my story in this book.
WONDER AND EXILE
Mystical and Prophetic Perspectives
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colonel Aureliano Buendía is born with his eyes wide open, as the author himself, Gabriel García Márquez, was reported to have come forth from the womb.1 This image of a wide-eyed child—eyes swollen and enlarged, looking like a full moon—will serve us nicely in considering the theme of wonder in the New World. From the time of the Discovery through the twentieth century, representations of this previously unknown continent would resemble these bulging eyes, pregnant with an extraordinary capacity for wonder. Wonder was on the tongue of explorers and writers of these lands to the point of excess, and they would use its language with Baroque-like extravagance and with a frequency rivaled only by appeals to exile. One Hundred Years of Solitude has remained something like scripture in Latin American literature because it captured these wide-ranging moments of life in the New World, wonder and exile alike.
As I see it, then, representations of the New World are often close to the spirit of this great novel, somewhere on the border between wonder and exile, sometimes with one more than the other, but more commonly, with an ambiguous and messy mixture of both. Whatever the case, the language of both wonder and exile is as common to the Americas as the experience of dispossession; in fact, they are one with dispossession, different manifestations of it. In the course of my study, I examine this claim thoroughly, that wonder is an experience of dispossession in the order of knowledge, while exile means dispossession in place and location. Though wonder and exile are universal experiences, my study argues that they reach a point of saturation in the momentous events surrounding the Discovery of the New World and in the bewildering events that follow. The New World, thus, gives us an intense case to study, one that is as profuse and extravagant with its wonders as it is with its agonies.
The focus of the book is with poets and writers of the New World and, more specifically, with their theological inclinations. When exploring these figures, then, my attention will turn to the mystical and prophetic trajectories of these writers to see what they can teach us about the language of wonder and exile. At times, my concentration will be on the space between wonder and exile (e.g., the shared experience of dispossession) and, at other times, my concern is with the distinct accents of wonder and exile, mysticism and prophecy. In this regard, I claim that the mystics have a special fluency when it comes to the language of wonder, and the prophets, an unmistakable and tortured familiarity with exile—and both of them, a proficiency with the strange and wondrous concept of God. As unbelievable or impossible as the idea of God is to some moderns, I find it equally impossible to neglect the question in a study devoted to the wonders of the New World. I am following the lead of Jorge Luis Borges when he insisted that any anthology of fantastic literature must include the theologians: “I compiled at one time an anthology of fantastic literature. I have to admit that the book is one of the few that a second Noah should save from a second flood, but denounce the guilty omission of the major and unexpected masters of the genre: Parmenides, Plato, John Scotus Eriugena, Albertus Magnus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Francis Bradley. In fact, to what do the prodigies of Wells or Edgar Allan Poe amount . . . confronted by the creation of God?”2
The book before the reader owes much to a claim of this kind and, for this reason, is distinct from strictly literary or cultural accounts of the themes of wonder and exile. My book, too, denounces the guilty omission of the name “God” from studies of fantastic, magical literature. There is nothing more uncanny, nothing more unsettling and fantastic than the thought of God, and to banish the theologians from the wonders of this genre equals the wrong done to the poets when Plato exiles them from his republic. So much is lost in this banishment, so many dreams and emotions—and so many wonders. Whatever else it is, wonder owes much to this strange and curious name that cannot be spoken.
Wonder and Mystical Languages of Unknowing
Wonder is a natural bedfellow of mystical language. It comes to mystics with the suddenness and burning passion of a new flame that sets one’s heart on fire and reduces the tongue and mind to silence. Like mystical speech, wonder is always a form of communication, but it reaches for what is unsayable over what can be said, for the unknown over what can be known—in theological terms, for what God is not more than what God is. Rather than leaving us self-assured, wonder disrupts our certainties and presumptions, leaving us mystified and bewildered, lacking in absolute confidences, with more questions than answers. In this way, wonder is an experience of apophasis—literally, a speech of unsaying—because it undoes and negates known and predictable suppositions. It is an experience, instead, of the indeterminate and surprising, of something so novel and strange that it overwhelms and dazzles the most familiar categories of human knowledge and understanding. It has the power to stun and shock and to leave its recipient speechless, in awe. It makes its appearance when the mind is faced with the unfathomable and ineffable. When shackled by certain horizons and foreseeable principles of knowledge, wonder cannot emerge, or if it does it is a tired and false version, an idol posing as an icon.
So, for wonder to emerge and thrive, it must disrupt and confuse any system of totality, any version of knowledge that is absolute and smugly certain. Wonder breaks through