No experience has probed more deeply than psychoanalysis into that equivalence to which we are alerted by the pathetic call of Love; it is to you yourself at whom you are striking out, and the cold deduction of the Spirit; it is therefore in the fight to the death for pure prestige that man makes himself recognized by man.

                                                                                               -- Jacques Lacan Ecrits

Prestige is elusive because it is illusory; in order to access the notion I look to the proximal idea and corresponding aesthetic movement of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is close kin to prestige in the late nineteenth century literary culture of the Americas and Europe as the overt sign of (high) culture, refinement and worldly sophistication. Both terms share connotations that have fallen into critical disrepute: effete, elite, pretentious, affected, pompous, flamboyant and unregeneratively decadent. For this paper, I locate one instance of the struggle between sides for pure prestige as a battle over who gets to articulate the engineering mission of pan-American national identity, a battle partly fought by critics over the text of Ariel (1900) by Enrique Rodó. Ariel suffers a dissection by critics offended by its effete cosmopolitan ethos. The text is trimmed to a better read, its major ideological diversions are cropped by the critics who bond over the mutilation of Ariel.

With Ariel, Rodó makes a scandalous proposition in erecting Ariel of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the symbol of the Americas. The Tempest is set on an island in the Caribbean where Prospero, the magically empowered Duke of Milan, and his daughter Miranda are shipwrecked. With a superiority that is ideologically smooth and invisible, Prospero and his company colonize the island and claim its inhabitant, Caliban, as their charge and slave, teaching him their language that he might better serve them. Prospero has one more charge beyond that of his daughter and Caliban, he is master of Ariel, an airy spirit in the shape of a man. Ariel performs Prospero’s will and his invisibility is his substance as a spirit and a force. It is this sense of Ariel as spirit that Rodó draws upon as the symbolic basis of the plan for Spanish American cultural sovereignty; “Shakespeare’s ethereal Ariel symbolizes the noble, soaring aspect of the human spirit. He represents the superiority of reason and feeling over the base impulses of irrationality. He is generous enthusiasm, elevated and unselfish motivation in all actions, spirituality in culture, vivacity and grace in intelligence.” Ariel is criticized for an elitist cosmopolitanism that reaches to universalistic and Enlightenment values—reason, spirit, intellect—toward an exclusion of the non-elite. While this is not untrue, the language of the critics tend to elide elite with effete to perform their own special kind of exclusion. Carlos Fuentes and José Retamar Fernandez dismiss Ariel as a demagogic and perniciously cosmopolitan, effete and colonial text.

Roberto Fernández Retamar’s critique of Ariel is tacitly cast in an essay, “Caliban,” that displaces Ariel with Prospero’s other charge, Caliban. The essay begins with this dismissal; “Nuestro símbolo no es pues Ariel, como pensó Rodó, sino Calibán” [“Our symbol, then, is not Ariel, as Rodó thought, but Caliban”]. For Fernández Retamar the only salvageable portion of the text is the exhortation against North American cultural imperialism and its complementary Spanish American nordomania, all else is in excess of this political line. Each critic will use the same language of editing and excision of the most “unfocused,” or confused and misguided aspects of Ariel, efforts that retain only the necessary or salvageable portions of the narrative. Ariel, it is suggested, is a narrative of excess, one that contains too much and is heavy with detail, burdened by the weight of style, overfull and desperately in need of a cut-back.

Fernández Retamar begins with a merciless cut, retaining only a small piece and fragment of the text because of its inherent “limitations” and because the whole is too unwieldy; “Rodó’s limitations, of which this is not the moment to elucidate, are responsible for that which he did not see or saw in an unclear manner. But, in his case, those that are worthy of being marked are those that he did see, and that still have a certain force and even a certain virulence.” Fernández Retamar retains only the things that he considers worthy of ‘being seen’ by the next readers of this text while casting shade on the unseen or off-scene aspects. The full impact of these incisions are evident in the language he uses to indict another critic of Ariel, Rodríquez Monegal, who attempts, in quite another kind of cut, to “emasculate” the text through improper revelation; “El hecho de que un servidor del imperialismo como Rodríguez Monegal, aquejado de la ‘nordomanía’ que en 1900 denunció Rodó, trate de emascular tan burdamente su obra, sólo prueba que, en efecto, ella conserva cierta virulencia en su planteo, aunque hoy lo haríamos a partir de otras perspectivas y con otro instrumental” [“The fact that a servant of imperialism like Rodríguez Monegal, suffering from the nordomania that Rodó denounced in 1900, tries so vulgarly to emasculate his work, only proves that, in effect, it retains a certain virulence in its foundation; even though today we read it from another point of departure and with other aims”]. This critical reading is meant to elicit anxiety about an emasculated and castrated text trying to perform the macho labor of nation-building.

The prologue of Ariel by critic-novelist Carlos Fuentes locates the rhetorical topos of fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism as the primary object of criticism and first in line for dismissal; “Rodó belonged to the modernista movement, which sought a cosmopolitan atmosphere for Latin American poetry, cultivated art for art’s sake, and affected an accompanying languor, elegantly settled into the semirecumbent position of turn-of-the-century ennui.” The critical dismissal of Rodó’s cosmopolitanism is not apparent until he is tacitly compared to ’golden-boy’ Rubén Darío.

The greatest of the modernista poets—the herald and hero of the movement—was the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, of whom it was said that he had sent the galleons back to Spain. Darío could affect the greatest preciosity, but also concentrate on the starkest poetic statement, as in “Lo fatal,” one of the clearest and most beautiful poems ever written in Latin America, or soar away into political bravura, as in his poems on Theodore Roosevelt, Walt Whitman, and the Spanish language.

This gesture is a negation of the subject at hand, instead of Rodó we get the favored and ideal partner of Fuentes, Darío. Rodó only “belonged to the modernista movement” whereas, Darío is “the greatest of the modernista poets.“ Fuentes chimes in on a competition between the two inititated in Prosas profanas where Rodó challenges Darío by saying that though technically competent, Darío does not rise to the status of poet of the Americas. Fuentes has the final word on this struggle for recognition and discursive mastery as we are led to understand that Darío, the favorite, is all that Rodó is not. That is, Darío is capable of combining the “greatest preciosity” with “political bravura” in a gendered range, from feminine to masculine, that signals balance. Darío does not fall too heavily on one side of this generic divide or the other. Rodó, on the other hand, “is not a poet and his range is not Darío’s”. His crime is “insufferable” excess and a limited range, codes for femininity, which has been nicely and conveniently edited away to the privilege of the English reader, who is unambiguously male; “The English-language reader, let me hasten to say, is privileged. He is reading Margaret Sayers Peden’s superb translation, which, while being perfectly faithful, simply finds more neutral equivalents to some of Rodó’s excesses.” Sayers Peden “eliminates long sentences and subordinate clauses in favor of shorter phrases that say exactly the same things written by Rodó, and, in general immerses the text in a kind of Erasmian serenity that contains a hint of Rodó’s madness but denies it the pitfall of rhetorical madness.” The madness, for Fuentes, is transformed by the neutralization of its excess, made butch by the elimination of fluff and frill, and becomes meaningful with “the folly of urgent communication.”

Fuentes’ own revisionary tactics, consolidated by the neutering moves of the translator, are meant to create blindspots to Greece. He affirms Rodó only in recasting Greece as a stepping stone to Nietzsche and not as the basis and stuff of the dialogue. It is the name of Nietzsche that reforms and saves the text.

But if from Greece Rodó, a reader of The Origin of Tragedy, leads us to Nietzsche, well and good: the reading of Nietzsche gives Ariel, I think, its huskier moments; there is sometimes a lyrical-philosophical tone derived from Zarathustra and Rodó, on occasion, can rise to the excellent phrase, as in, “If we could cast the spirit of charity in the mold of Greek elegance, we would know perfection”.

Nietzsche, for Fuentes, is the sign of masculinity, raising Greece from a state of being un-husky. Nietzsche’s bad reputation for an expulsion of women and femininity from the scene of philosophy, is pitted against Rodó’s equally bad reputation for textual effeminacy. Fuentes praises Rodó only in praising Nietzsche, yet Rodó nonetheless fails by approaching but not being Nietzschean enough. Rodó has failed more generally by not outcompeting either opponent in the oratory contest conducted by Fuentes, each winner, Darío and Nietzsche, wins by virtue of a greater proximity to masculinity. Ariel’s failure is its lack, the reader is now faced, post-prologue, with a text that is transgendered, not up to the masculine task of oration of manly persuasion, while listlessly and leisurely enjoying the excesses of narrative.

The critical editing of Ariel is motivated by an anxiety about dandified language as the language of cultural and national identity. The aim of each critic is evinced in the excursion of the edit, the journey of a cutting down and back, of tossing away accoutrement, excess, and in working out to reduce the text to a more efficient political body. The editorial cuts analogize the violent effects of ideological formations, of nation-building and the constitution of collectivities, that is, the political corpus constituted by murderous exclusions, deposings, denouncements and disappearances. Though Ariel is hardly a model or exemplary text that transcends the problems of nationalism with cosmopolitanism, the negative force and rhetoric of the criticism of Ariel offer some insight into the ideologies of late nineteenth century nationalism.