Reading Max Nordau: Unspeakable Difference in Spanish American Modernism

Abstract

The articulation of national, cultural and aesthetic subjectivities in nineteenth-century America has often involved significant negotiation with ideas from abroad, whether ideological movements, artistic trends, or the figures behind these very innovations. Sylvia Molloy has explored this phenomenon of intertextual (or intera^/zorial) appropriation in Jos? Mart?'s reading of Walt Whitman, proposing the term scene of translation to characterize moments in which Latin America encounters its influential cultural others and, depending on the sense attributed to the encounter, reads itself into, or reads itself away from, those others, for specific ideological reasons (370).l While the figure of Whitman exemplifies this dynamic within the field of litera? ture (for Mart?, Dar?o, and even Federico Garc?a Lorca, writing from Spain), a second instance can be found in the American reception of the Hungarian Jewish doctor Max Nordau, a prominent participant in the debates over pathology and degeneration in fin-de-si?cle Europe. At the same time that newly independent American nations employ positivist discourse to structure and justify new projects of consolidation, Max Nordau enters into the imaginary of the American cultural elite as a figure through which both scientific and aesthetic issues can be articulated. If Whitman is translated by Mart? for a American public according to his own ideological objectives, so too is Nordau treated as a blank slate?an empty signifi? er?upon which Rub?n Dar?o, Jos? Ingenieros, and Jos? Asunci?n Silva inscribe their own intellectual concerns. By exploring the representations of Nordau in Los raros (Dar?o, 1896), Al margen de la ciencia (Ingenieros, 1908), and De sobremesa (Silva, 1925), I propose that Nordau, as a Jew and as a scientist who dabbles in both literature and politics, represents the possibility of liminal subjectivity for all three writers, who read and misread the doctor according to their respective ideological and aesthetic preoccupations. While Nordau's Jewishness is only mentioned explicitly in Ingenieros' text, I would like to suggest that it enters each work as part of a broader reference to Nordau's unsettling?and often unspoken?difference, which serves significant, albeit diverse, functions for each writer. A disciple of Jean-Martin Charcot and Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau stands out as one of the principal theorists of pathology at the turn of the century. He attracts great attention?in