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Notes
1 A preliminary version of this work, under the title “Modernismo nómada y últimas gestas de Rubén Darío,” was presented at the conference La sutura de los mundos, held in Buenos Aires in March 2016. A version of this article is forthcoming in Revista Ístmica.
2 For example, see the study by Erick Blandón, Discursos transversales: la recepción de Rubén Darío en Nicaragua (2011), and by the same author the chapter “Rubén Darío: mutilación y monumentalización,” 104-126. From another perspective, I have made reference to this in “Retrato de un proceso profano: Rubén Darío y la agonía del poeta moderno,” 82-103, where I consider the last photographic images made of the poet, the final prologue he wrote to his own work, and also his presentation of the poem “Pax” in New York as his final public act. These essays are part of the collection edited by Jeffrey Browitt and Werner Mackenbach, Rubén Darío: cosmopolita arraigado (2010).
3 Besides implying an initial ambiguity with regard to origin and/or gender identity, Braidotti explains that nomadic subjectivity is an “analytic tool and as a creative project intended to qualify the change of consciousness that corresponds to the spirit of our times.” Nomadic Subjects, 11. At the risk of falling into anachronisms, in this case Darío incarnates a nomadic subjectivity in his time.
4 According to this idea, biopower is a general outline of biopolitics and refers to forms historically rooted in the institutionalization of social control in order to discipline bodies, individual as well as collective. Control over sexuality and bodies exemplifies how biopolitics has manifested itself since the eighteenth century. Michel Foucault elaborates upon this in “Right of Death and Power of Life,” the fifth section of History of Sexuality: An Introduction, I:135-159.
5 According to Foucault, in History of Sexuality, 147, in the feudal era biopower is seen through the value and symbolic function of blood, as a measure of sacrifice, lineage, alliances, descendancy, and more. Whereas, in the twentieth century and liberal era, it revolves around the uses of sexuality as a political matter, tangled up in the discipline of the body and the life of the species, Ibid., 145.
6 Francisco Contreras explains in his biography of Darío: “There was a violent altercation, with the result that the coveted brain was driven to Police Headquarters to await the government’s decision. But what sentiments moved these people who dared to imprison the noblest part of the greatest poet in America?” Rubén Darío: su vida y su obra, 178. Scientific positivism, along with the supposed rights of property, incited the dispute over the writer’s grey matter.
7 The allegedly final letter addressed from Guatemala to his companion Francisca Sánchez bears the date of August 1915. Here he makes reference to his first son with his wife Rafaela Contreras in a dismissive way, “Rubén Trigueros was here. He went away. He’s a scoundrel,” Cartas desconocidas de Rubén Darío, 402. I cite this reference to highlight the question of biopolitics and dis/affection.
8 Nonetheless, his questioning of the national paradigm is seen, for example, when he served as editor for La Unión Centroamericana in 1884. In 1889 as well, he promotes his unionist cause when he brings out a pamphlet entitled La Unión, as an organ for unification of the isthmus. That year, a Pact of Central American Union was signed in El Salvador. I discuss the unionist posture of this document in my article “Vestíbulos del hombre público: prólogos desconocidos de Rubén Darío,” 133-136.
9 According to Ángel Rama in “Naturaleza: la selva Sagrada,” for Darío nature is dealt with only as an “intellectual diagram,” Rubén Darío y el modernism, 109. Following these terms, here we might propose rather that it constituted the emotional or vital diagram of the poet.
10 This is a term developed by Ursula K. Heise in her book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 61, 205-209. White deals with this theme in two sections of the chapter on Rubén Darío in his book Arando en el aire, in the sections “Atisbos del pensamiento ecocrítico,” 55-65, and “¿Una figura precursora del eco-cosmopolitismo?,” 85-95.
11 Following Aníbal Quijano’s suggestion, Erick Blandón refers to colonial rationality and the colonialism of power at work in Darío, Discursos transversales, 13, 22-23. For his part, Ángel Rama shows us that Julio Saavedra first “equipped Modernismo with liberalism, establishing a tight parallel between literary schools and political orientations,” Rubén Darío y el Modernismo, 30-31. Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, in turn, explains that Modernismo is an expression of capitalism’s expansion, “the ‘universalization’ of literature that goes hand in hand with the unification of the world,” Modernismo, supuestos históricos y culturales, 16.
12 In their notes, Browitt and Mackenbach cite the definitions offered by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and by Christopher Lorey and John Plews to insist that queering “can refer to any destabilization of normative and authoritarian regimes,” Rubén Darío: cosmpolita arraigado, 15.
13 In reference to Alberto Acereda’s article “Nuestro más profundo y sublime secreto: Los amores transgresores entre Rubén Darío y Amado Nervo,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 89:6 (2012), 895-924. This article is based on some letters found in the archives of Arizona State University, whose validity has been refuted by Nicaraguan experts. The polemic about the place of these missives in Rubén Darío’s archive remains in force.
14 Here it’s worth considering the word “open” in its literal sense, as well as in its philosophical and ontological scope discussed by Giorgio Agamben in Lo abierto: El hombre y el animal, 75-82. I am utilizing this term instead of stock words such as “nature,” following the compelling arguments made by Bruno Latour in Políticas de la naturaleza: Por una democracia de las ciencias, 55; and Timothy Morton in Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, 14-26.
15 Blandón reminds us that Rubén Darío wanted to be buried in Buenos Aires (2010, 111).
16 Taking the word to mark the occasion and toasting it with an almost dis-colonial spin, the text was published on 28 September 1892.
17 This text was published in August 1915, six months before he died.
18 I make no reference to the poem he felt obliged to publish in Guatemala in favor of Estrada because the theme of patronage and dependence is all too evident. For example, Francisco Contreras points explicitly to this: “[ . . . ] fearful of losing his favor [Manuel EstradaCabrera], our poet gave in at last and he who smiled at the ‘minervine propaganda’ composed an ode, ‘Pallas Athena,’ to be declaimed at the famous festivals of Minerva. But his illness delivered him from the shame of reading that work torn out of his misery and his lack of character,” 168.
19 Foucault connects themes of health to the social vitality that involves power over sexuality and to sexuality, 147. In this sense, that transition from blood to sexuality as power values finds its inflection point here.
20 This chronicle echoes a previous one of his entitled “La enfermedad del diario” (1897; The Illness of the Newspaper), which Susana Zanetti remarks as “alluding to the field of the corporal in relation to journalism: ‘ . . . —our flesh and blood, workers in those factories!—director, manager, administrator, editor, collaborator, reporter’” (7, 126).
21 It was published in the Diario de Centro-América, 10 May 1915, during his short stay in the country as Cabrera Estrada’s guest, on his route through Nicaragua shortly before his death. The same text was published in La Nación on 5 June 1914.
22 For a detailed study of the story, see Carmen de Mora Valcárcel’s text “‘Huitzilopoxtli’: Un cuento fantástico de Darío,” En Breve: Estudios sobre el cuento hispanoamericano contemporáneo, 2nd Ed. (Universidad de Sevilla, 2000), 15-32. The author points out that a definitive edition of the story does not exist, as exemplified by the last line of the story, retracing once again the precariousness of the archive of Darío’s work.
23 In the story he makes reference to an altar to “Teoyaomiqui, goddess of death. Upon that stone wriggled live serpents.” The statue of Coatlicue was wrongly identified as Teoyaomiqui, according to the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2014647495/, probably by Don Antonio De León y Gama. Huitzilopochtli and Teoyaomiqui are paired deities.
24 Corroborating the instability and uncertainty of Darío’s archive, not all editions that have been published of the story include this last sentence.
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Julia M. Medina
Julia M. Medina is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of San Diego. She has published articles that deal with political manifestoes, prologues, travel narratives, chronicles, testimonio, photographic images, cartoons, and public monuments. Her current research considers the intersection between visual culture, non-fiction, resistance, intellectual representations, and ecocriticism in Central America.