Love and Country: An Allegorical Speculation

I t is worth asking why the national novels of Latin America—the ones that governments institutionalized in the schools and that are by now indistinguishable from patriotic histories—are all love stories. An easy answer, of course, is that nineteenth-century novels were all love stories in Latin America; but it just begs the question of what love has to do with the requirements of civic education. The novels weren’t immediately taught in public schools, except perhaps in the Dominican Republic, where Enriquillo appeared rather late and where the number of students may have been limited enough for an adequate production of books. ¹ In other cases, serialized or sentimental novels were at first hardly academic or even proper literature, to judge by their exclusion from the first national literary histories. Written at the same mid-century moment as the novels and with largely the same legitimating impulse, authors of literary histories had comparable political credentials but more classical criteria than the novelists. Literary historians selected a kind of elite prehistory for the “progressive conservative” consolidations that were stabilizing the new states, ² but they omitted perhaps the most useful renderings of those oxymoronic consolidations: the romances that celebrated or predicted an identification between the nation and its state. ³ The programmatic centrality of novels came generations later; precisely when and under which particular circumstances in each country are questions that merit a different study. ⁴ But in general, one can surmise that after renewed internal oppositions pulled the image of an ideal nation away from the existing state, like a mask pulled from the masquerader, after nationalism could be understood as a political movement against the state, ⁵ nineteenth-century novels apparently promised the ministries of education a way of covering over the gap between power and desire. The books, so immediately seductive for elite readers whose private desires overlapped with public institutions, might reinscribe for each future citizen the (natural and irresistible) foundational desires for/of the government in power.