The Narrative of Simulation in José Asunción Silva's De sobremesa

Abstract

This article examines the narrative of simulation in De sobremesa [After-Dinner Conversation] (1925) by José Asunción Silva (1865-1896). Since its publication, De sobremesa has been read as an autobiographical novel, leading to an interpretation of the protagonist’s life as Silva’s own. This article expands on such critical approaches and sees the impetus behind the novel as Silva’s desire to obliterate his real-life circumstances. Through an analysis of the central element of simulation as the articulation between life and oeuvre, I interweave the novel’s characteristic narrative of excess and Silva’s life of loss and economic scarcity. By examining the accounts of Silva’s contemporaries and reading his correspondence, I explore the way he disfigures and reconfigures his real condition and financial bankruptcy in De sobremesa to project a world defined by wealth and luxury. In so doing, he rewrites his loss and constructs himself as an artifice, a literary sign, that has its fictitious counterpart in the character of José Fernández. The article proposes a reading of De sobremesa that reveals an intricate relationship between author and character, being and appearing, writing and consuming, and writing and simulating in late nineteenth-century Latin American modernity.

Keywords:

• simulation
• articulation
• nineteenth-century Latin American literature
• Modernismo
• José Asunción Silva
• modernity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This essay is part of a wider-ranging research project entitled “Camuflajes cotidianos: la simulación en las narrativas de fines de siglo” [Everyday Camouflages: Simulation in Fin-de-Siècle Narratives].

2 Enrique Santos Molano (1997) contends that none of the seven novels Silva lost in the shipwreck was finished but that the manuscripts contained a vast universe of characters and at least seven titles (1024).

3 Erving Goffman’s (1959) seminal work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, sees social interaction as a theatrical performance in which the subject, through their behaviours, ways of speaking, and the space they inhabit, “guides” others’ impressions of them. By using the metaphor of theatre to understand social behaviours, Goffman’s work revealed how everyday acts are governed by others’ expectations and how people act to guide those expectations.

4 For Pierre Bourdieu, habitus is a subjective structure based on certain internalised structures common to all members of the same group and is “understood as a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks” (in “Structures, habitus and practices”, Bourdieu 2013, 82–83). Habitus consists of the set of experiences that determine a conception of the world.

5 Slack argues that “Relations are arbitrary in the sense that links can, under certain conditions, be broken (disarticulated) and under certain other conditions connected differently (rearticulated)” (2016, 2). They are, moreover, contingent, depending on specific conditions (2).

6 Gabriel García Márquez (1996) argues that José Fernández is Silva’s revenge and also mentions the implausibility of the richissime Américain having the generic name of José Fernández.

7 Silvia Molloy (2012) looks at the different ways Latin American writers assimilated Decadent aesthetics as a way of life. Molloy points out the text’s deviations from European decadence to locate the ideological meaning of Decadence in Latin American authors and identify their divergences from the European models. Furthermore, these processes of assimilation point to the mimetic nature of simulation.

8 Silva’s attitude is similar to Julián del Casal’s, who used to publish accounts of his visits to luxury department stores in the Cuban press. These chronicles, which we would nowadays consider short advertorials, promoted the purchase of objects from these stores. This foray into advertising circles reveals the more realistic side of modernist writers. To understand the relationship between consumption, market, and poetry, see the chapter “Consumption: Modernismo’s Import Catalogues” in Ericka Beckman (2012).

9 I have in mind the mirror neuron paradigm. In “Literary Biomesis: Mirror Neurons and the Ontological Priority of Representation”, Jenson and Iacoboni discuss the mirror neuron paradigm, whose central idea is that “one imitates the behaviour of others on a neurological level, and one’s ontological being is inseparable from that motor apprehension”. Thanks to mirror neurons, the actions and thoughts of others – including literary characters – possess a physiological substrate. The authors conclude that “Recent cognitive psychological analysis of readers’ relationship to fictional characters and their narrative focalizers suggest that (…) readers do adopt the position of a given character, who comes to represent something of an avatar for them”. As the first reader, the writer activates what Merlin Donald holds to be the cognitive centre of mimesis: the kinematic imagination or “the ability to envision our bodies in motion” (cited in Jenson and Iacoboni). Laureano García Ortiz’s words are of interest in this respect. He blames literature for the poet’s suicide: “Sometimes he not only used to read books, but, if we may put it that way, he used to live them” (García Ortiz 1994, 3).

10 In his foreword to De sobremesa, Gutiérrez Girardot points out that, when the novel was published, almost thirty years after being written, critics had no idea what to make of it: it lacked a storyline, the novel-writing mimicked a diary, and it seemed to lack a narrative backbone. For Gutiérrez Girardot, these elements make it an “artist’s novel” and establish its theme as aesthetic existence itself.

11 To understand how this concept of “props” works, we can think of children pretending to be cowboys and using brooms as horses: in their game, they believe the brooms are horses; the brooms are objects that help them create the fictional truth of being cowboys.

12 This process of elaborating oneself is related to the notion of “self-fashioning” as posited by Stephen Greenblatt (1980). For Greenblatt, “there are always selves – a sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of address to the world, a structure of bounded desires – and always some elements of deliberate shaping in the formation and expression of identity” (1). In other words, “self-fashioning” describes the process of identity formation and of the public perception of a person according to current social norms. It is related to Erving Goffman’s thesis about how people act in their social interactions to guide these expectations. Based on Greenblatt, Frederick Luciani (2004) introduces the concept of “literary self-fashioning” to draw attention to how Sor Juana “created a ‘self’ through the medium of literature, but also that she continually – even obsessively – thematicized the literary act, in reference to herself, in her works” (16). The concept of simulation in her particular manifestation relates to these processes of performance and self-construction in both life and literature. My thesis, however, focuses specifically on simulation as a strategy of concealment and exhibition in which the fiction produced – the work of art – is intimately interwoven with the author’s life.

13 Michael Taussig (1993) defines mimesis as “the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become other” (xiii). For Taussig, this human faculty becomes the capacity of the colonised to transform themself into the European Other. It is a process of identity formation in which the colonised appropriate the image of the coloniser. Mimesis, therefore, is identity and difference. Simulation differs from mimesis in that it is an intentional process stemming from the desire to be Other, not necessarily a European Other, and so embodies the “world desire” (Siskind 2014, 3).

14 Gómez Carrillo’s orientalism has been re-interpreted by Mariano Siskind. For this critic, Enrique Gómez Carillo embodies a global cosmopolitanism, even in his chronicles of the Orient, dismantling as he did the exoticist, orientalist discourse made in Europe: “Whenever he finds himself voicing an exoticist point of view, Gómez Carrillo wriggles free and assumes a different subject position. In fact, his cosmopolitanism could be defined precisely in terms of his mobility, his refusal to stand still in a fixed cultural place of enunciation, whether hegemonic or subaltern” (Siskind 2014, 164).

15 Silva the character is not so very far from the literary character Des Esseintes in J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours. For an insight into the relationship between De sobremesa and À rebours, see Orjuela (1976) and Villanueva Collado (1989).

16 Aníbal González (1997) looks at how Silva questions fin de siècle cultural recycling and at how doing so affects his practice. The novel’s desire to produce a synthesis of artistic forms of the past leads to cultural indigestion: “an artistic colic, which then leads to paralysis, to quietism, in the end perhaps to the death of the spirit” (246). For González, De sobremesa’s lack of conclusion, shunning of any kind of synthesis, and its flaunting of deliberate formal imperfection make it the first Spanish American anti-novel.

17 Molloy (2009) analyses the way Silva borrows from the diary of Bashkirtseff – herself a central myth in the male fin-de-siècle imaginary – and links the Russian’s hysteria to Fernández’s nervous disorder. For Molloy, Fernández appropriated the Russian woman’s pathology and transferred it to his own body.

18 Following Deleuze and Guattari, Alejandro Mejías-López (2007) reads Fernández’s desire not as lack but as a form of production and creation that has a destabilising quality (344–345). Fernandez’s accounts of his different travels looking for Helena become a result of a nomadic conception of life. For Mejías-López, the novel itself produces this movement for the reader (348). In this sense, both the novel and the diary form a schizophrenic text.

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Ana María Pozo de la Torre

Ana María Pozo de la Torre is a PhD candidate in the Romance Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has studied the relationship between avant-garde poetry, mysticism, and neobaroque. In her current research, she analyses turn-of-the-century literature, both nineteenth and twentieth century, in order to explore the intricate relationship between writing and simulation in Latin American modernity.