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Handout: Calib ] Lecture on Ariel (1900) and Calibn (1971) Rod Marsh, University of Cambridge

1.1 To begin a discussion of the figures of Ariel and Calibn in the work of Jo s Enrique Rod and Roberto Fernndez Retamar, we need to return to the kinds of issue s we were discussing at the very beginning of term: the links between questions about nations and questions about narration, because I think that it is impossib le without first thinking about the specificities of the experience of the natio nal in Latin America.

1.2 When we think about the nation in Latin America we are faced with an init ial difficulty highlighted by Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities; a d ifficulty that is not at all specific to the Americas. What exactly is a nation? Answering this question with reference to geography, discussing borders, area, capitals, states and provinces may describe the nation but does not help us unde rstand what this modern political entity might actually be. Andersons solution to what has become a conundrum of modern political philosophy is in an anthropolog ical vein, he defines the nation as an imagined political community. Imagined becaus e no matter how small the nation, none of the individual members will ever meet or know all of the others, and so therefore the existence of some form of commun ion between a particular group of people must be imagined. A community because no matter what the actual inequalities that exist within the nation it is at base c onceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. 1.3 A central way in which the nation is imagined for its citizens is through n arrative; through tales of origin and identity narrated through time; through th e narration of particular events and their employment within an overall biography of the nation. We could say, then, that the modern nation is, in this sense, na rrated into being. As Ernst Gellner puts it Nationalism is not the awakening of n ations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist. But what tropes structure this narration? One of the most important in Latin Ame rica is that of the movement from barbarism to civilisation. Now beside the fact that nations often create for themselves a glorious antiquity, the nation itsel f is an extremely modern phenomenon and as such many of the legitimating narrati ves of the nation are tied to ideas of civilisation, progress, development, mode rnity. In the national narratives of Latin American nations it has been extremel y important to emphasise the modernity of the nation, to catalogue and emphasise the specificities and the qualities of its civilisation and to narrate the defe at of barbarism, as we have seen. The importance of this particular trope become s obvious when we understand that nationalism seeks to represent itself in the i mage of reason, of the enlightenment, yet reason and enlightenment in the assert ion of their universal sovereignty require their Other. And that other has often been America. European nations can be secure in their claims for progress, civi lisation and reason, for it is from Europe that the definitions of such concepts has come. America was always the brute, savage, unformed, amorphous Other to Eu ropes rationality and refinement. The history of America, for Sarmiento, for exam ple, is that of toldos de razas abyectas, of un gran continente abandonado a los sa lvajes incapaces de progreso. For such a vision, the act of governing, of creatin g a nation is one of destruction and conquest. To govern is to subject the suppo sedly barbarous elements of America to the rule of a civilisation defined solely on European terms. And this is exactly the logic we follow when we speak of the Third World or of underdeveloped nations.

1.4 Nationalism and the founding of nations has therefore been primarily a cr iollo concern (remember the criollos are Europeans born on American soil). Some exceptions aside it is not really until the Mexican Revolution that we see the p rominent political involvement of indigenous and mestizo America and its non-Eur opean concerns in the forging of the nation. Even where an indigenous past is ce lebrated, such as that of the Aztecs in 19th century Mexico, its primary purpose has been to provide an equivalent to the civilised antiquity of Europes Greece a nd Rome, civilisation still being understood on European terms. For a criollo ru ling elite, as we shall see with Rods writing in a moment, the threat of engulfmen t by an autochthonous American barbarism appears ever present. Civilisation rema ins something implanted with difficulty on this other world, and lives a potential ly tenuous existence in the cities and on the margins of a still savage continen t. 1.5 The perspective of these criollo elites reveals an essential ambivalence in the quest for cultural and national identity in Latin America. As both Ernst Gellner and Benedict Anderson point out, the nation-state suffers the contradic tory desire to both affirm its modernity while at the same time attesting to an authenticity grounded in a distant autochthonous past. In America this contradi ction is amplified as the civilised Latin American nation, as part of the process of self-legitimation, must somehow risk locating its foundations in precisely th ose barbaric elements it has previously expelled in the process of becoming a nati on. Yet the consequent attempt to dominate the wild aspects of these autochthonou s elements can only leave the nation struggling to conceal the rupture that divo rces it from its own putative essence. 1.6 Thus the fundamental problem for both Rod and Fernndez Retamar is narrating and constructing the American nations identity. They both attempt to resolve in very different ways the question of what is an American nation, what are the id eals such a nation should be moving towards. Can a civilised nation be created on a barbarous continent? What is the relationship between the nation and modernity a nd progress in America. Can you have an authentic American nation modelled on Eu ropean ideals of civilisation, modernity, and progress? These questions remain p roblematic, especially for Rod, hence his desperate attempts and ultimate failure to resolve the opposition between the civilised and the barbarous, the foreign (European) and the autochthonous, and as we shall see, Ariel and Calibn.

So who or what are Ariel and Calibn for these two American authors? We shall begin with Rods Ariel. This essay, published in 1900 and dedicated to la juv entud de Amrica takes the form of an end of year lecture by a venerable old teache r Prospero to his departing students. It is through this valetudinarian conceit th at Rod expounds his particular solution to the protracted Latin American search f or identity and Ariel and Caliban are described on the first pages: Ariel, genio del aire, representa, en el simbolismo de la obra de Shakespeare, la parte noble y alada del espritu. Ariel es el imperio de la razn y el sentimiento sobre los bajos estmulos de la irracionalidad; es el entusiamo generoso, el mvil a lto y desinteresado en la accin, la espiritualidad de la cultura, la vivacidad y la gracia de la inteligencia, el trmino ideal a que asciende la seleccin humana, r ectificando en el hombre superior los tenaces vestigios de Calibn, smbolo de sensu alidad y de torpeza, con el cincel perseverante de la vida.(22 / Q13 page refs wi th Q in front refer to edition used for the handout, so you can locate the quota tions easily on it) 2.2 For Rod, writing at the beginning of the 20th century the great danger fac ing the Latin American nation is the seductive influence of a form of barbarity disguised as civilisation: this is UTILITARIANISM, where material development be

comes an end in itself and spiritual values are lost . For Rod the rise of utilit arianism to a place of influenceto the detriment of the truly civilised values of aestheticism and idealismis due to two causes. The first is to do with the disco veries of the natural sciences, that destroy idealism at its base (this cause Ro d leaves aside and does not discuss). The second cause that he identifies is the universal diffusion and triumph of democratic ideas which has lead humankind tow ards beatifying utilitarianism and in the process establishing a norm of mediocr ity. The question immediately at stake for Rod is the struggle between utilitaria n democracy (which he denotes as Calibn) and truly spiritual values that can only be apprehended by a select few (represented by Ariel). And it is this question that returns us to the original problematic of the Latin American nation: civili zacin y barbarie. In the dnouement of Ernst Renans 19th century Caliban, continuacin de La tempestad, a play of perhaps greater influence on Rod than Shakespeares, Ar iel, the symbol of elite spiritual culture, abandons the world to become a spirit of the universe, leaving Prospero at the mercy of the victorious Calibn, the dema gogic symbol of what Renan and Rod saw as the vulgar masses. Although Rod is highl y suspicious of democracy he believes that it is impossible to ignore. He feels a great disgust at the thought of an amorphous, undirected democracy choosing eve rything on a majority basis, blinded by brute utilitarianism to beauty and any p ossible meaning in life, and by its very nature stifling every breath of individ ual excellence.(Carlos Fuentes) 2.3 Rods response to this problem is to suggest that within a democracy a princip le of natural selection should be allowed to operate. With the superior members of a society being allowed to rise to the top. A kind of meritocratic hierarchy would exist within society in which the stultifying static solution of an heredi tary aristocratic model would be avoided. And here we can approach Prosperos spee ch as a call to action, a call to the youth of America, or rather the educated youth of the governing classes, to become an especie proftica, whose energa viril coul d bring about a newly renovated civilised society rejecting utilitarian values i n favour of spiritual ones. For the influence of Ariel to be truly felt, the yo uth of America (Rod/Prosperos audience) would need to expend great force, in a bat tle for souls and minds, a battle against barbarity they would need to re-conque r America with the same esfuerzo viril that had subjected these once new, unknown wo rlds to Spanish rule. 2.4 It is as if for Rod, the supposed barbarity of Americas past leaves it more susceptible to the seductions of utilitarianisms production of great material we alth. Material wealth serves only one purpose for Rod: to provide the material ba sis for the lives dedicated to the higher values of the privileged few (89). Rods advice to the young is therefore to resist the allure of utilitarianism and to f ocus on developing the [rasgos] of true civilisation. Rod attempts to provide his readers with a path from which the Latin American nation could emerge as a para gon of civilisation close to his ideal of the ancient Greek polis. Abandoning th e barbarous past of America altogether Rods ideal Latin American nation is connected directly to a European antiquity; to a Latin American spirit deriving from the Greeks and Romans through the Italian Renaissance and the French Enlightenment. This is what Rod is referring to when he states tenemoslos americanos latinosuna her encia de raza, una gran tradicin tnica que mantener, un vnculo sagrado que nos une a inmortales pginas de la historia, confiando a nuestro honor su continuacin en lo futuro(72 / Q66) Rods Latin America will avoid the taint of barbarity by locating its true spiritual origins not in Spain, nor in the indigenous civilisations of the Americas, but in the European epitome of civilisation, an idealised ancient G reece. 2.5 It is from this position that we must examine the fifth and most commente d upon section of Prosperos speech: the examination of the United States. Within the context of the entire work Rods comments on the US cannot be seen as simply an indictment of the county to the north. Ariel is not the Latin countries to the south, nor is Calibn the United States. Rod is certainly concerned to demonstrate

that the United States represents a radically distinct cultural reality from tha t found further South, and to outline the specific nature of the difference. In doing so he is also attempting to provide a cultural bulwark against US hegemony by affirming a unique Latin American identity. But Ariel and Calibn are qualitie s present in both societies. Ariel provides the symbol, for Rod, of all that Lati n American societies should strive towards; Calibn, all that they should reject and suppress in themselves. In this section of the essay, the United States simp ly provides examples of the Calibnesque, utilitarian tendencies that Latin Americ an nations should strive to avoid. However, Ariel has sometimes been read as a m anifesto of yankeephobia, and this reading of the essay has more to do with the po litical climate in which it was published. By 1900 when Ariel was published Lati n American opinion of the US had shifted from the admiration found in Sarmientos Facundo of a young nation that had successfully rebelled against a colonial oppr essor, to an awareness of the danger posed by the ambitions of a powerful, aggre ssive nation seeking not only to wield influence throughout the entire Western h emisphere, but also to forge an empire of its own. In 1847 the US expressed thes e ambitions, invading Mexico and during the war that followed annexed the area t hat now comprises Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, California, and parts of Utah and Oregon. By 1898 the US had successfully gone to war with Spain and as a result the Philippines and Puerto Rico had become North American colon ies, Cuba a subject state. Within such a climate Rods discussion of the US became famous as a manifesto of anti-North American sentiment, and encouraged the view that the barbarous Calibn of the essay was the United States. Rod divorces himsel f from this reading. 2.6 In discussing the United States Rod states, aunque no les amo, les admiro(76 ). Far from simply rejecting the U.S. his criticisms are paralleled by an enumer ation of North American successes. Rods criticism of the United States centres ar ound his perception of the centrality of the doctrine of utilitarianism to North American society. For Rod Los Estados Unidios pueden ser considerados la encarnac in del verbo utilitario.(69 / Q64) While he recognises the great successes of a ut ilitarian north, Rods fear is that such success will prove seductive for the young nations of the south and that their quest for national identity will be abandon ed for slavish imitation. He states, La poderosa federacin va realizando entre nos otros una suerte de conquista moral [] (Q64) and he fears, la visin de una Amrica des latinizada por propia voluntad, sin la extorsin de la conquista, y regenerada lue go a imagen y semejanza del arquetipo del Norte, [que] flota ya sobre los sueos d e muchos sinceros interesados por nuestro porvenir(69 / Q64). Thus it is the reac tion of Latin Americas governing elites to the utilitarian successes of the Unite d States, rather than its imperialistic designs that is the crux of Rods arguments . He is concerned to reject the nordomana of some of his contemporaries, not sole ly because he viewed the United States as representing a form of mistaken social development, but more importantly because the possibility of servile imitation would vitiate the possibility of the nations of the south remaining true to thei r national personalities or reaching the true potential of their herencia de raza( 72). He says, no veo la gloria, ni en el propsito de desnaturalizar el carcter de los pueblos,su genio personal,para imponerles la identificacin con un modelo extrao al que ellos sacrifiquen la originalidad irreemplazable de su espritu [] El cuidad o de la independencia interior, la de la personalidad, la del criterio, es una pri ncipalsima forma del respeto propio.(70-1) Therefore, Rod declares that Latin Ameri can nations should not follow the model of the United States, but instead should remain true to their authentic national personalities as a form of national selfrespect.Latin American nations should follow their own authentic racial heritage t hat elite European lineage that moves from Greece, to Rome through the Renaissan ce and the French Enlightenment into the fertile soil of the Americas. 2.7 It is in this section that the fundamental ambivalence of Rods work is most obvious: he both wishes to reject and emulate the foreign. He rejects the Unite d States as a model on the grounds that slavish imitation is a betrayal of the n ations true personality, only to construct a fantasy based in a series of idealised

19th century French values. Latin America can only become itself by becoming Eur opean(Fuentes). The authenticity of its racial heritage is not grounded in the in digenous or the mestizo, peoples hardly mentioned by Rod, but in the connection o f an immigrant criollo elite to an idealised European past. Rod is ultimately far more interested in attempting to suppress the barbarity of his Americaas viewed from Europethan keeping that from outside at bay. For Rod Latin America must (misq uoting Fanon): become European or disappear (71). Civilisation, modernity and th e nation are all defined by Europe, not only is Ariel the spirit of Europe, l es e l hroe epnimo en la epopeya de la especie; l es el inmortal protagonista [] sus alas aviv la hoguera sagrada que el arya primitivo, progenitor de los pueblos civiliz adores, amigo de la luz [] encenda [] para forjar con su fuego divino el cetro de l a majestad humana, hasta que, dentro ya de las razas superiores, se cierne, deslu mbrante sobre las almas que han extra limitado las cimas naturales de la humanid ad.(100-101 / Q95) If Ariel is the spirit of the Aryan peoples, the progenitors o f civilisation in this view, then it can again be seen that the indomable rebelin de Calibn(101 / Q96), the dangers of la barbarie vencedora(101 / Q96), the eterno est ercolero de Job(101 / Q96) can only be the original, autochthonous state of the A mericas. Rods search for national authenticity, the authenticity of race is a atte mpt to impose the cultural dominance of a white, criollo elite newly arrived in th e Americas. His fear of las fuerzas ciegas del mal y la barbarie(101), is a fear o f America, fear of the barbarity he believes to be inherent in a continent so fa r removed from Europe. At the same time, given that civilisation and the nation find their being in Europe, for Rods paternalistic Prospero, America will only hav e a future, will only be able to join the ranks of the civilised, first, world by the successful implementation of a criollo racial heritage and the suppression o r the destruction of unformed, savage, barbarous America. The process of conques t in America must continue, now led by a youthful, modern elite inspired by the spirit of Ariel and las crnica heroicas de los conquistadores(24). 2.8 For Rod, Latin America can only become itself by becoming European(Carlos Fu entes). Yet, although it might seem to be stating the obvious, Latin America is not Europe. This is the great flaw at the base of Rods project. In his desperate a ttempts to fulfil a European ideality, Rods Latin America will always be incomplete, a copy that fails to truly conform to the European norm. It will always remain in a state of tutelage or apprenticeship it will always be a rough draft, a poor copy of a European bourgeois culture (Fernndez Retamar). Rods America can never be true to its genio personal, its identity will always be desnaturalizado. In his slavish worship of a European Ariel, Rod sacrifices the originalidad irreemplazable of Amer ica that he claims to uphold; he denies American nations the respeto propio that h e claims arises from el cuidado de la independencia interior. For, as Rod himself c ontinually states, there can be no independence or authenticity in a nation that is but a mere copy, nothing to be gained from la creencia ingenua de que eso pue da obtenerse alguna vez por procedimientos artificiales e improvisados de imitac in.(70)

3.1 With this understanding of Rods writing we are now able to approach Roberto Fernndez Retamars Calibn, written not in 1900, but in 1971, not from the supposedl y white Uruguay of Rod, but from a revolutionary Cuba that had become Latin Americas symbol of liberation from colonial and neo-colonial rule. Rods vision of culture in the Americas legitimates the question that Fernndez Retamar rejects existe una c ultura latinoamericana?. Rods position, despite his own protests, denies Latin Amer ica the possibility of its own, autochthonous culture and identity, any civilized culture in the Americas worthy of the name arises, for Rod, from a European herit age. Ariel, the spirit of Rods ideals is European. So who is Calibn? Calibn, as we h ave discussed is Rods negative principle, all that Rod wishes to exclude. He is the utilitarianism that threatens the spiritual; he is the vulgar masses; he is the mediocrity of uncontrolled democracy and the savagery of an undiscovered, uncon quered America. Fernndez Retamar is not content to accept Rods definition. He seeks

his own and begins the search with the etymological origins of the name Caliban. He returns to Shakespeare. Calibn is, of course, Shakespeares savage and deformed s lave, the original inhabitant of the island that Prospero now rules. Calibn is Shake speares anagram of cannibal, and cannibal derives from the Spanish deformation of cari b the original, warlike and supposedly anthropophagus inhabitants of parts of th e West Indies. A people extinguished by Spanish genocide. For Fernndez Retamar t here is no doubt that The Tempest refers to America, that its island is one of A mericas, and that Calibn is Americas Carib. To a certain extent then Fernndez Retam ar concurs with Rods conception of Calibn. Like Rod, and his model Renan, Calibn is i dentified with the people, the suffering masses; but unlike Rod and Renan there is no elitist rejection of Calibn for an idealised, European Ariel. Calibn is truly A merica; indigenous and mestiza, no longer the provenance of a criollo elite. He quotes Simn Bolvar: nuestro pueblo no es el europeo, ni el americano del norte, que ms bien es un compuesto de frica y de Amrica que una emanacin de Europa(10) Concurri ng with Bolvar Fernndez Retamar states: Nuestro smbolo no es pues Ariel, como pens Ro d, sino Calibn [] Prspero invadi las islas, mat a nuestros ancestros, esclaviz a Calib y le ense su idioma para poder entenderse con l: qu otra cosa puede hacer Calibn sino utilizar ese mismo idiomahoy no tiene otropara maldecirlo, para desear que caiga s obre l la roja plaga? No conozco otra metfora ms acertada de nuestra situacin cultural , de nuestra realidad [..Q]u es nuestra cultura, sino la historia, sino la cultura de Calibn? (30).

3.2 But as Fernndez Retamar continues, even in proposing Calibn as Americas symb ol it is impossible to escape European formulations in favour of local, autochth onous ones, Calibn is an alien elaboration. The very language that narrates the Lat in American nation into existence is European: Y es que en la raz misma est la confusin, porque descendientes de numerosas comunida des indgenas, africanas, europeas, tenemos, para entendernos, unas pocas lenguas: las de los colonizadores. Mientras otros coloniales o excoloniales, en medio de metropolitanos, se ponen a hablar entre s en su lengua, nosotros, los latinoamer icanos, seguimos con nuestros idiomas de colonizadores [] Ahora misnmo, que estam os discutiendo, que esto discutiendo con esos colonizadores, de qu otra manera pue do hacerlo sino en una de sus lenguas, que es ya tambin nuestra lengua, y con tan tos de sus instrumentos conceptuales, que tambin son ya nuestros instrumentos con ceptuales? (11-12) The lack, absence and incompleteness, we discussed with reference to Rods Arielist conception of Europe remains. In a culture expressed (in the main, at least) in the language of the colonizer the Latin American nation cannot abandon Europe i n order to discover its autochthonous truth. Its history and its being are artic ulated in the languages of Europe, Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical sub ject of this nation and its history. There is a peculiar and insidious way in wh ich all these other histories and nations tend to become variations on a Europea n master narrative. In this sense, Latin American national identity itself is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate subaltern subject positions in the name of this identity, named by Europe. Latin American states, in affirm ing their national identity, must constantly refer to models provided by Europe. The nation-state is ultimately a European construction, its language, its theor ies, its questions are all formulated within a European context and then transpl anted elsewhere. As such, even in the most dedicated Americanist hands, the sear ch for a Latin American identity, an authentic national personality, remains a m imicry of a certain modern European model and is bound to represent a sad figure of lack and failure. 3.3 To understand Fernndez Retamars point here we must read him with the idea o f language as a medium intertwined with power. Despite Latin American independenc e the languages of the nation remain inextricably bound to the workings of Europe

an (and North American) power. New voices are neither liberated, nor discovered, but rather subsumed into the continuing narrative of the West. The claim to hav e discovered the nation itself is unjustifiable. The post-colonial nation cannot be narrated without the use of the languages of the coloniser. Prospero, taught his language to Calibn and gave him his name. But does he have a true name, one other than that imposed by Prospero? Not according to Fidel Castro, whom Retamar quotes from his 10th anniversary speech of the victory at Playa Girn (Bay of Pig s): Todava, con toda precisin, no tenemos siquiera un nombre, todava no tenemos un nombr e, estamos prcticamente sin bautizar: que si latinoamericanos, que si iberoameric anos, que si indoamericanos. Para los imperialistas no somos ms que pueblos despr eciados y despreciables [] Ser criollo, ser mestizo, ser negro, ser, sencillament e, latinoamericano, es para ellos desprecio. (35) Yet the remainder of Fernndez Retamars essay reminds us that the dominance of the colonisers language is not total. Indeed it may be possible that, as Foucault poi nts out, effective emancipatory strategies may not involve the overthrowing of t he dominance of a colonising Europe, or the discovery of a true and authentic Am erica behind or beneath the assorted debris left behind by the colonizer, but ra ther that, The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them , invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially impose d them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules. If we understand language as power, as the rules of the above paragraph, and retur n to the language of Shakespeare this means taking up Prosperos language and his power of naming in order to wield it against him. This is, of course, the point of Calibans curse: You taught me your language, and my profit ont / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / for learning me your language!(1.2.362-64) 3.4 The work of Homi Bhabha, a contemporary post-colonial theorist, some of w hose ideas we looked at in the first lecture of this term, provides a useful glo ss here. The languages in which Latin American nations are narrated may well be those of European colonisers. However, Bhabha highlights the possibilities of ut ilising the colonisers language as a tool of liberation because of what he terms the ambivalence of dominant discourses. This ambivalence fractures the attempts of colonisers, or criollo elites to create a totally hegemonic national discourse. According to Bhabha, the colonial construction of a colonised identity (the nami ng of Caliban) is never complete, and the very process of constructing a subalter n, colonial identity is grounded in an essential contradiction within the discou rse of the coloniser: the colonised subject is not simply imagined as a rough or incomplete copy of the European, civilised subject, but, contradictorily this co py is imagined as simultaneously resembling the coloniser (mimicry: a difference almost the same but not quite) and remaining radically different (a menace in a difference that is almost total, but not quite). Here we can see a parallel to t he ambivalent and unresolved trope of civilisation and barbarity. Bhabhas point, however, is that this ambivalence contaminates the discourse of the coloniser, o r the criollo elite, establishing the potential for resistance in the very attem pt to impose a hegemonic identity. For Bhabha, resistance is born, not so much i n the discovery or invention of an essentialised oppositional identity (an authenti c America) but rather in the high-jacking of colonial discourse, in exploiting th is problematic of colonial representation in order to allow other denied knowledg es to enter into the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority.

3.5 By rejecting, or attempting to reject long established European models of civilisation we do not arrive at a vision that more accurately represents Ameri cas authentic autochthonous reality. What Fernandez Retamar provides is an analysis that demonstrates the ways in which no dominant discourse is totally hegemonic. He provides a means of at least thinking what Bhabha refers to as the provincial isation of Europe. Or as Fernndez Retamar states in the realm of eduction, referri ng to a speech of Che Guevaras to the professors and students of the University o f Las Villas, Es decir, el Che le propuso a la universidad europea, como hubiera di cho Mart, que cediera ante la universidad americana; le propuso a Ariel, con su pro pio ejemplo luminoso y areo si los ha habido, que pidiera a Calibn el privilegio d u un puesto en sus filas revueltas y gloriosas. 3.6 It is thus in a resistance that works through the interstices of colonial discourse that America begins to exist, and it is here that Rod and Fernandez Re tamar, despite the radical differences in their work, strangely, coincide. Like Rod, Fernandez Retamar also rejects any attempt simply to imitate a more powerful cultural and national order. As he says La pretensin de englobarnos en el mundo li brenombre regocijado que se dan hoy a s mismos los pases capitalistas, y de paso reg alan a sus oprimidas colonias y neocolonias es la versin moderna de la pretensin de cimonnica de las clases criollas explotadoras de someternos a la supuesta civiliza cin; y esta ltima pretensin, a su vez, retoma los propsitos de los conquistadores eur opeos. En todos estos casos, con ligeras variantes, es claro que la Amrica Latina no existe sino, a los ms, como una resistencia que es menester vencer para impla ntar sobre ella la verdadera cultura, la de los pueblos modernos que se gratifica n a ellos mismos con el epteto de civilizados. The difference between these two au thors is that Fernandez Retamar realises that there is no gloriously authentic p ast to be resurrected in the creation of the liberated Latin American nation - w hether that past be European or American. Rods mistake, his great act of ingenuous ness, is that in his desperate attempt not to locate an authentic America in imi tation, he does just that. In avoiding one model, he adopts another. Fernndez Ret amar realises that Americas authenticity is to be found in the act of rebellion and resistance, Con los oprimidos haba que hacer cause comn, para afianzar el sistema opuesto a los intereses y hbitos de los opresores. Americas authenticity consists i n turning the colonisers languages against them, and in learning like Caliban, to curse. Rod Marsh, 1998