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![20 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION
for. In reference to a corpus of critical interventions aligned with García
Canclini’s, George Yúdice writes: “New interventions that challenge both
right and [Todd] Gitlin-
like left positions on multiculturalism and iden-
tity suggest that consumercapitalism has much todowith the ongoing re-
definition of citizenship, a contradictory process that, though not a cause
for celebration, is not to be lamented either.”68
García Canclini ballasts his argument on the premise of a rationality
proper to consumption, a rebuttal of the idea that consumption is driven
by the manipulation of mindless wishes for consumer goods. This intel-
lectual embrace of consumption fits into what Juliet B. Schor defines as
a wave of studies published in the last quarter of the twentieth century,
studies generally positioned against the more classic critiques of con-
sumption that shaped discussions on consumer culture from the middle
of the twentieth century onward (critiques by Thorstein Veblen, Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Jean Baudrillard,
Herbert Marcuse, etc.). Schor refers to frameworks of interpretation such
as that offered by Veblen as status models and notes that these models
fell out of vogue and were subject to widespread dismissal and critique in
more recent approaches to consumerculture—the kind ofapproaches that
posit an active, informed viewer, the kind that advocate for, among other
things, consumption as a site for identity construction. The recent wave
of scholarship grouped together by Schor focuses on the interpretation of
consumer behavior and consumer attitude, rather than on the more sys-
temic critiques of the logic and the political economy of consumer society.
The shift in focus, grosso modo, has rendered the figure of the consumer as
a more active, rational, and informed subject, in opposition to the figure
of a passive, coerced consumer that is often articulated in or assumed by
the studies on consumption published toward the middle of the twenti-
eth century. Schor argues for a qualified return to these earlier, systemic
critiques of consumption, submitting that the latter turn toward the re-
demption of the figure of the consumer lacks critical perspective vis-
à-
vis
consumption and consumerculture—the kind of perspective that, among
other things, can shed light on the political and ethical consequences of
the social dynamics that vector into and out of consumer culture.
Schor places her own analysis of consumption somewhere between the
mid-twentieth-century structural critiques of consumer society and what
she refers to as “micro-
level, interpretive studies that are often depoliti-
cized and lack a critical approach to the subject matter.”69 Intriguingly, she
makes the point that the defense of consumer rationality and consumer](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25963014-250514095755-575a34e3/75/Delirious-Consumption-Aesthetics-And-Consumer-Capitalism-In-Mexico-And-Brazil-Sergio-Delgado-Moya-38-2048.jpg)
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- 5.
- 6. Border Hispanisms Jon Beasley- Murray,Alberto Moreiras, and Gareth Williams, series editors
- 7. Delirious Consumption Aesthetics andConsumer Capitalism in Mexico and Brazil University of Texas Press Austin SERGIO DELGADO MOYA
- 8. Copyright © 2017by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2017 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713- 7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Delgado Moya, Sergio, author. Title: Delirious consumption : aesthetics and consumer capitalism in Mexico and Brazil / Sergio Delgado Moya. Other titles: Border Hispanisms. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017. | Series: Border Hispanisms | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017010837| ISBN 978- 1- 4773- 1434- 0 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978- 1- 4773- 1435- 7 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1436-4 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1437-1 (nonlibrary e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Avant- garde (Aesthetics)—Mexico—20th century. | Avant- garde (Aesthetics)—Brazil—20th century. | Art and literature— Mexico—20th century. | Art and literature—Brazil—20th century. | Consumption (Economics) in art. Classification: LCC BH301.A94 D45 2017 | DDC 111/.850972—dc23 LC record available at https:/ /lccn.loc.gov/2017010837 doi:10.7560/314340
- 9. Para Estela ypara Ángel, para Angélica, René y Wendy, por tanto amor
- 10. SOMEONE DIVIDES MANKINDINTO BUYERS AND SELLERS AND FOR- GETS THAT BUYERS ARE SELLERS TOO. IF I REMIND HIM OF THIS IS HIS GRAMMAR CHANGED?? LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, CULTURE AND VALUE
- 11. Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction:Aesthetics in the Age of Consumer Culture—Some Terms 1 ONE Attention and Distraction: The Billboard as Mural Form 44 TWO Fascination; or, Enlightenment in the Age of Neon Light 83 THREE Poetry, Replication, Late Capitalism: Octavio Paz as Concrete Poet 119 FOUR Lygia Clark, at Home with Objects 153 Conclusion 193 Notes 195 Bibliography 251 Index 269
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- 13. ix Acknowledgments Friends, family, andcolleagues have given me invaluable support in the years leading up to the publication of this book. Luis Moreno- Caballud, Jeffrey Lawrence, Dylon Robbins, Rachel Galvin, Dora Zhang, Laura Gan- dolfi, Enea Zaramella, Ana Sabau, and Ingrid Robyn all provided brilliant and joyous dialogue during the early stages of this project. Special grati- tude goes to Cecilia Palmeiro and to Luis Othoniel Rosa (a.k.a. roommate), hermanxs del alma. Your friendship, knowledge, and extraordinary kind- ness sustain me, lovingly. Kassaundra Gutierrez- Thompson and Héctor Corral have been unwavering in their love and support at every stage of this project. In São Paulo, Grazielly Basso, caçula, made me feel right at home. Patricia Méndez Obregón opened the doors of her home to me dur- ing my first research trip to Mexico City, and I remain grateful for my time there and for our friendship. From afar, my siblings René and Wendy have been models of hard work and diligence. Their light and love are shining examples that have nourished me in ways I can’t thank them enough for. At home in Tijuana, on the phone everywhere, in person in most every city where I’ve set up shop over the past decade, my sister Angélica, mi héroa, has been there for me: lovingly, joyfully, generously. For three de- cades plus of encouragement, for a lifetime of sisterly love, for the model of humanity she has always been to me, I thank her. José Rabasa and Jesús R. Velasco patiently guided me to the scholarly path, as did, most especially, Natalia Brizuela. Her brightness, her guiding wisdom, her unwavering kindness, and the friendship that unites us have shaped the better part of my academic career.Gracias, de corazón. Jussara Menezes Quadros, Antonio Monegal, Marina Brownlee, Ángel Loureiro, Claudio Brodsky, Rubén Gallo, Michael Wood, Devin Fore, Germán Labra- dor, Pedro Meira- Monteiro, Bruno Carvalho, and Rachel Price all contrib- uted generously to the foundations on which this work is based. At Prince- ton and again at Harvard, Karen Jackson-Weaver has been tremendous in her support and untiring in her advocacy. Gabriela Nouzeilles’s attentive,
- 14. x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS incisive commentaryandher extraordinaryability to bring forth the most critical aspects of intellectual work got this project off the ground. Much of what is good about this book owes its merit to her exceptional prowess as a scholar and mentor. Gracias mil, siempre. The earliest phase of this investigation began in Mexico City at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, where Mónica Montes Flores received me warmly, guided me expertly, and gave the archival part of this research the best start it could have had. Conversations with Itala Schmelz and Irene Herner made that early research all the more productive. Generous sup- port from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Har- vard and the William F. Milton Fund made possible long research stays in Brazil and in Mexico. In São Paulo, a research grant generously provided by the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros at the Universidade de São Paulo made possible a term as visiting researcher at USP. At Harvard, Diana Sorensen’s brilliant vision for an expanded place for the arts in higher education provided the framework for exhibitions and courses related to this research. Marcela Ramos, my brilliant collaborator, was instrumental in organizing cultural programming born of this book. In Brazil, the staff of the DRCLAS Regional Office in São Paulo shared their office with me and made my research there all the more productive. Spe- cial thanks to Jason Dyett for the expert local guidance and the friendli- est of company. Elisabete Marin Ribas at IEB USP guided me to the most relevant sources for my work. Augusto de Campos has been tremendously generous since my years in graduate school. This book began as an effort to better understand his extraordinary legacy as poet, and I thank him for the support he’s given me in every facet of this project. In Rio de Janeiro, the staff at O Mundo de Lygia Clark, Sonia Menezes and Fabiane Moraes in particular, provided generous support and expert advice. In Los Ange- les, the staff at the Getty Research Institute acceded gracefully to my insis- tence on seeing all their holdings on Siqueiros.While working at the Getty Institute, my dearest friend Paul Luelmo welcomed me at his home in LA. Opportunities to share findings related to this book have been fun- damental. Thank you, Amanda Anderson, David Russell, Patrick Mullen, Adela Pineda, Florencia Garramuño, Gonzalo Aguilar,Timothy Hampton, Miryam Sas, Natalia Brizuela, Sebastián Vidal, Gerardo Pulido, Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni, Robert Kaufman,Graciela Montaldo, Jesús R.Velasco, Carlos J. Alonso, Estelle Tarica, Candace Slater, Ignacio Navarrete, Dora Zhang, Judith Butler, Ivonne del Valle, Daylet Dominguez, Alexandra Saum- Pascual, Francine Masiello, and Frances Hagopian, for the invigo-
- 15. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi rating dialogue.Doris Sommer, Esther Gabara, David Russell, Luis Otho- niel Rosa, and Ingrid Robyn read drafts, and I’m grateful for their gener- osity and constructive criticism. Natalie Ramirez, my research assistant, copyedited the manuscript and provided invaluable support. At Harvard, the sources of brilliance and inspiration have been plenty. Students with whom I’ve had the pleasure of discussing materials herein analyzed, students of my seminar on consumer culture in Latin America, have improved this book tremendously with pointed questions and ani- mated discussion. I’m grateful for the warmth and the encouragement of my colleagues Virginie Green, Diana Sorensen, Mary Gaylord, Doris Sommer, Sylvaine Guyot, Joe Blackmore, Luis Girón- Negrón, Francesco Ersparmer, Kathy Richman, Jeffrey Schnapp, Tom Conley, Alice Jardine, Tom Cummins, Christie McDonald, Clémence Jouët- Pastré, María Luisa Parra, and the late Nicolau Sevcenko. A graduate seminarand undergradu- ate class cotaught with José Rabasa provided a year’s worth of opportuni- ties to improve the corpus of this book. Most especially, I’m thankful for the friendship, the collaboration, and the brilliant conversation of Brad Epps during my first years at Harvard. Mariano Siskind, Lorgia García Peña, and Paola Ibarra have been tireless in their support and encourage- ment. I treasure their friendship and thank them for the time they spend making the place we work for a better place to live in. This book would not have materialized without the support of the edi- tors of the Border Hispanisms series at University of Texas Press: Jon Beasley- Murray, Alberto Moreiras, and Gareth Williams. They, along with the anonymous readers working for the press, provided extremely valu- able feedback. I’m indebted to their remarkable intellectual generosity. The attentiveness and support of Kerry Webb and Angelica Lopez- Torres at University of Texas Press were fundamental in the last stages of pub- lication of this book. Thank you. Sandra Spicher’s copyediting and sharp eye for crucial revisions made this book so much better. Every error and mistake herein contained is no one’s fault but my own. With force and fearlessness, with dignity and a great deal of courage, my parents Estela y Ángel blazed forth the life that I live today. My deep- est gratitude and greatest admiration are and always will be with them. Lastly and firstly, I thank the Thiagos: Alberto Thiago and Thiago Alberto. Thank you for making a life with me, for grounding me and soar- ing with me, for all the fun and all the love, for the time we share and for the place we call home.
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- 19. 1 Introduction Aesthetics in theAge of Consumer Culture—Some Terms “A power in the realm of consciousness” How does something become “a power in the realm of consciousness”?1 The expression comes from the early Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and it refers to the rise of labor and production as fundamental principles for the organization of societies. In reference to the “enlightened political economy, which has discovered—within pri- vate property—the subjective essence of wealth,” Marx states: “this exter- nal, mindless objectivity of wealth is done away with, with private property being incorporated in man himself and with man himself being recog- nised as its essence.”2 Two realities hitherto thought apart—the life of the mind and the world of objects—are shown by Marx in mutual determina- tion. The world looks different when property and the productive forces that make the accumulation of property possible are seen in this light. Consciousness itself transforms through this insight—it moves into the world, becoming part of what it thought to be objectively distanced from it. And Marx insists on this point, hammering it home with references to the selfhood, the personhood, the subjective essence of private property. A tradition of puritanism in scholarly discourse; a distinctly intellectu- alist contempt for the material conditions of everyday life; a woefully re- ductive understanding of the passive and the introjective (of the part that consumes, of the “accursed share” in Georges Bataille’s formulation) as against the active and the productive: these things keep us from regarding consumption the way Marx regarded production. Not that anyone doubts the powers wielded by consumption. Marx himself points to an incipient theory of a “movement” between production and consumption.3 We know consumer culture has colonized our bodies, our beliefs, and the institu- tions that shape our bodies and beliefs into more or less cohesive social structures. We know it has fundamentally changed the way the world ap- pears to us.4 We need a set of terms that can help us interpret a regime
- 20. 2 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION ofthe sensible shaped first by mass culture, then by the culture industry, and more recently by the transnational network of practices and institu- tions that sustain and are themselves sustained by consumption and the logic of the market. This book sets out to elucidate a few such terms, terms aligned directly with questions of aesthetics—questions of how we perceive the world, how we place ourselves in it, and how we make sense of it by means of perception and emotion. The book works through four categories that capture important features of the social constitution of subjects and the mode of presentation of objects in the age of consumer culture: distrac- tion, fascination, replication, and homemaking. These categories, I argue, condense—in ambiguous terms—both a sequence of regressions and a set of actual potentials. These categories recur with some frequency in critical writings on consumer culture and the culture industry. They en- capsulate a set of structural mechanisms as well as a range of possible ac- tions within the order determined by consumer capitalism.Crucially, they also shape works of literature and works of art produced in the three de- cades afterWorld War II, a period when consumer society as we now know it expands and consolidates. It is against the background of the large social, political, and economic changes that take place in this period—rapid urban growth; shifts in de- velopment policy5; explosive growth in communications and media; re- purposing of war industries and technologies forcivilian markets; import- substitution industrialization; expansion of domestic markets and the ascendance of the consumer as paradigm of social organization—it is against this background that a new wave of modernist aesthetics began to take shape in major cities throughout the Americas. This book brings together Mexican and Brazilian artists and writers active during this period, pairing each of the book’s key terms with readings of works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark.6 The artists and poets whose work is studied in this book em- brace and resist the spirit of development and progress that defines the consumer moment in the history of late capitalism. I see in the work of these writers a provocative positioning vis- à- vis urban commodity capi- talism, a constitutive ambiguity in the sense that José Bleger conferred to the term—ambiguity not as confusion but as “primitive undifferen- tiation”; not as indecision but as a stage prior to contradiction.7 I want to emphasize what I take to be an ambivalent position in the work of these artists, an assured but adjustable stance against commodification, alien-
- 21. INTRODUCTION 3 ation, andthe politics of domination and inequality that define consumer capitalism.8 These poets and artists appeal to uselessness, nonutility, and noncommunication—the markers of difference of the aesthetic—while drawing on terms proper to a world of consumption and consumerculture. The artworks and poems studied in this book set a tone for the study of consumption and commodity capitalism. They model an approach keenly attuned to imitation as an incisive, at times subversive response to capi- talist modes of signification—what Michael Taussig calls “capitalist mi- metics.”9 The reference to delirium in the book’s title conveys the sense of derangement, of going out of order, that this book proposes as a contribu- tion to the studyof the rationalized processes subtending both production and consumption. Delirium is here understood as a form of daydreaming, as an open- eyed distraction from the waking order of market capitalism, and as an expansion of desire. Delirium, viewed against the background of a capitalist order, should not (at least not necessarily) be understood as an affirmation of, or a blind complicity with, market forces and commodity capitalism. This is how Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark’s closest collaborator, conceived of his own practice of delirium and daydreaming, his delirium ambulatorium, a defiant embrace of both the purposeless errancy of vaga- bond walking and of the “silly things” peppering the urban landscape.10 Among political economists as among cultural critics, consumption can hardly be said to have risen to the level of prominence that labor and production have attained since Marx first placed these terms at the foreground of our conceptual repertoire. This says less about the power consumption exerts on us than it does about our willingness as scholars to come to terms with it, with consumption as power. Consumption is power: it is coercion and control, but it is also, sometimes, resistance. At times, inasmuch as it mediates our inner lives and the world that makes us, consumption may serve as a road to freedom; it may even look like a promise of happiness. Like fear and like desire, consumption lurks in the background of our actions and our thoughts, acknowledged with fre- quency but rarely engaged with the seriousness we adopt when we reflect on the productive forces that cross our lives. This is not to suggest that consumption has been neglected as a subject of study. On the contrary, since Karl Marx’s Manuscripts, since the publication of Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899, and in subsequent works by Wal- ter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau, Néstor García Canclini, George Yúdice, Michael Taussig, Daniel Miller, Juliet Schor, Steven B. Bunker, John Sinclair, Anna Cristina Per-
- 22. 4 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION tierra,Arlene Dávila, Graciela Montaldo, and others, consumption has been studied as a fundamental aspect of modern culture. A common thread runs through most of these critical works, varied as they are in their disciplinary approaches. To different extents, these works touch on certain, often gendered connotations of consumption (passivity, submis- sion, mindlessness) that tend to keep consumption at some distance from what is considered essential about social structures and structures of thought. This book works through these connotations guided by the four categories I submit as critical for understanding aesthetics in the age of consumer culture: distraction, fascination, replication, and homemaking. Some Terms for an Aesthetics of Consumer Culture Consumption functions in much the same way as private property and commodification do. These deeply imbricated threads of the social weave serve a crucial role as instruments of domination and as foils for emanci- patory projects defined negatively in contrast to them. Considered jointly with private property and commodification, consumption opens up a series of questions that can and have been formulated in relation to pri- vate property and commodification. At what point did the market and consumption become naturalized as points of resistance for cultural prac- tices and critiques of culture defined as contestatory? Under what condi- tions does consumption become a principal reference of artists, writers, activists, and intellectuals who construct their work from a position of resistance? How does one position oneself against what seems to be the paradigm of our times without acknowledging at least some complicity, at least some embedment? And how does our understanding of aesthet- ics, both as a discourse directly responsive to developments in the sphere of art and as the broader inquiry into the workings of sense perception, change vis- à- vis the growing importance of consumption and consumer culture? A deliberate ambiguity characterizes the terms I propose as terms for an aesthetics of consumer culture. Each term can serve and has served to construct conflicting ways of interpreting consumer culture. Distraction is a case in point. Much like Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin makes an intriguing case for distraction as a form of social behavior opposed to bourgeois contemplation and rife with possibilities for transformation. In a letter dated March 1936,Theodor Adornoquickly rebukes Benjamin: “de- spite its shock- like seduction I do not find your theory of distraction con-
- 23. INTRODUCTION 5 vincing—if onlyfor the simple reason that in a communist society work will be organized in such a way that people will no longer be so tired and so stultified that they need distraction.”11 Leaving aside for the moment Adorno’s stark, perhaps unwarranted vision of work under the communist ideal, thedisagreement between Adorno and Benjamin rests less on differ- ent interpretations of Marxist doctrine than on a crucial misunderstand- ing. When Benjamin writes “distraction,” Adorno reads “entertainment,” and entertainment is not what Benjamin has in mind when he writes about distraction, at least not in the essayon mechanical reproducibility.12 Dispersion gets closer to what Benjamin attempts to impress upon the reader when he makes the following distinction: “A person who concen- trates before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work, just as, according to legend, a Chinese painter entered his completed painting while beholding it. By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves. Their waves lap around it; they encompass it with their tide.”13 The language here is a language of dissolution: an image of liquid masses taking in the work of art, as if by engulfment. The sense of dispersion—dispersion of attention, dispersion of consciousness— implicit in this language is much stronger and much more complicated than the captivation, the holding of attention that entertainment entails. The equivocalness of the terms Benjamin chose is crucial to his account of distraction. Later in his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno would arrive at a vision similar to Benjamin’s. Grappling with the place of happiness in the experience of art (“What popular consciousness and a complaisant aesthetics regard as the taking pleasure in art, modeled on real enjoyment, probably does not exist”), fiercely skeptical of the role of joy (“Whoever concretely enjoys artworks is a philistine; he is convicted by expressions like ‘a feast for the ears’”), and struggling mightily to account for pleasure in the aesthetic ex- perience (“Yet if the last traces of pleasure were extirpated, the question of what artworks are for would be an embarrassment”), Adorno writes the following of the “traditional attitude to the work of art”: “The relation to art was not that of its physical devouring; on the contrary, the beholder disappeared into the material.”14 This image of the viewer going into the artwork recurs elsewhere in Adorno’s AestheticTheory, and its meaning re- mains more or less stable.15 It captures an experience of art that remains powerfully, shockingly immediate, so much so as to make beholders “lose their footing.”16 But to what effect? What’s the significance of the capacity of art to make beholders “lose their footing”? And what do we make of
- 24. 6 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION thefact that this and other effects that were traditionally attributed to the arts have been increasingly colonized by the culture industry and the business of consumer culture? What kind of subject is revealed in disper- sion, distraction, fascination, replication, and homemaking? What kind of subjects, aesthetic and political, “lose their footing”? The conceptual model of distraction at work in the writings of Benja min—distraction as both false consciousness and as emancipation—has been expanded by more recent scholarship that draws on Foucauldian ideas of coercion and control to explain what Paul Virilio refers to as “the advent of the logistics of perception.”17 Virilio points to the parsing and routing of sense perception at work in technologies of vision to denounce what he calls “a eugenics of sight, a pre- emptive abortion of the diversity of mental images.”18 Virilio dates this subjection of perception to the be- ginning of the twentieth century and links it to the dissemination of “cer- tain signs, representations and logotypes that were to proliferate over the next twenty, thirty, sixty years . . . the logical outcome,” Virilio contends, “of a system of message- intensification which has, for several centuries, assigned a primordial role to the techniques of visual and oral communi- cation.”19 Implicit in the last part of Virilio’s argument is the growing ap- peal to bodily registers in printed language, the same registers engaged by “techniques of visual and oral communication.” Jonathan Crary takes this point further by arguing that the very subjection of perception to mechanisms of control is underwritten by the rise of an embodied notion of sense perception. In Suspensions of Perception (1999), where he sets out “to demonstrate how within modernity vision is only one layer of a body that could be cap- tured, shaped, or controlled by a range of external techniques,”20 Crary writes: “the relocation of perception (as well as processes and functions previously assumed to be ‘mental’) in the thickness of the body was a pre- condition for the instrumentalizing of human vision as a component of machinic arrangements.”21 Most interesting about this idea is the ambi- guity with which it is rendered. For Crary, the embodied subject is “both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance.”22 A question arises regarding the possibility that the repressive aspects of consumer society (aspects that, as Jean Baudrillard has argued, are analo- gous to those of the logic of productivity and its constitutive forces: ab- straction, division, alienation, etc.) can be explored and suspended from within (for observation and diversion, for purposes other than produc- tivity, or what Baudrillard calls consummativity). That is to say, they can
- 25. INTRODUCTION 7 be suspendedfrom the very movement of consumption and consumer society, using and appealing to the techniques and forces driving con- sumer society, forces that are immanent to the system and that provide— because of their overt immanence, because they work at the surface— a way other than (although never completely out of) efficiency. Fascination is one such force, together with its stand- ins: attraction, captivation, enthrallment, enchantment, and mesmerization, theorized in the build- up to the industrial revolution by Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer’s enormously popular theses on human susceptibility to mag- netic forces (forces operating beyond reason, emanating from objects) are but a moment in the continuum where the power of fascination belongs.23 The power to mesmerize marks a rift in the persistent ideology of Enlight- enment as modern science and reason.What Mesmer’s writings on animal magnetism reveal is the extent to which enlightened society can be com- mitted to reason all the while remaining subject to the powers of enchant- ment. The dialectic of reason and fascination appears in full force under the guise of the commodity both in its material charms, crossed as they are by a furious logic of utility and function, and in the forces of attraction radiating from the commodity world. Even before they set out to contest commodity capitalism and the po- litical regimes that sustain it, the Brazilian concrete poets broke through the spell of the culture industry byembracing fascination, incorporating it homeopathically. Imitation of neon light is what gives Brazilian concrete poetry its initial thrust in the poems Augusto de Campos wrote for Poeta- menos (1953). Imitation (of newspapers, magazines, logos, and slogans) is also what sustains its lyric flight during the latter phase of its production, in the wake of military dictatorship and in a social and economic reality otherwise defined by underdevelopment and other such tools of colonial integration to a globalized whole. Brazilian concrete poetry’s earnest con- jugation of neon light and the lyric, of advertisements and—after its so- called salto participante—social critique, compels us to revise engrained, relatively unexamined views regarding the function of enchantment, at- traction, and fascination in the greater social dynamic and in consumer culture in particular. At certain moments in the writings of Adorno and Fredric Jameson, this revision seems worthy, even crucial. Both acknowledge the irresist- ible force of attraction operating at the heart of film, advertising, and the culture industry.24 But Jameson moves swiftly past mesmerization to focus on what really matters, fascination’s end result: manipulation. And
- 26. 8 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION yet,Jameson writes, “even the most implacable theoryof manipulation in mass culture . . . must somehow acknowledge the experiential moment in the mesmerization of the masses before the television set; if only then to dismiss it as the fix, addiction, false pleasure, or whatever.”25 The Adorno of Prisms moves less swiftly past “the experiential moment in the mesmerization of the masses,” dwelling on it at some length in his critique of Veblen’s failure to account for the dialectics of production and consumption, of utility and waste, in the latter’s writings on conspicu- ous consumption. “As the reflection of truth,” Adorno writes, “appear- ances are dialectical; to reject all appearance is to fall completely under its sway, since truth is abandoned with the rubble without which it cannot appear.”26 This rubble without which truth does not appear takes many shapes; our failure to reduce these shapes to forms of the useful is what they share in common. Rubble, in Adorno’s reading, endures, and it resists the logic of utility. Inasmuch as there remains in every concrete material circumstance, in moments of production as well as in moments of con- sumption, a residue of waste impervious toeven the most furious displays of functionalism, rubble rises as a general aspect of social life and not as one of its compartments, as Veblen and others would have it. Not rubble but the pretension of absolute efficiency, not waste but transparency of purpose are revealed as what is deceptive, what stands in the wayof truth. So much is revealed in one of Augusto de Campos’s most seductive poems, Luxo (1965; fig. 0.1), a feast of font and ornament businesslike in its de- nouncement of luxury (waste as the building block of luxury, and luxury the more wretched for it). The poem is revelatory precisely to the extent that it exceeds this message, performing (typo)graphical squander when restrained accusation would have sufficed. Fascination, much like luxury in Adorno’s reading, mediates desire in a world dominated by the logic of commodity capitalism.27 It takes the form Figure 0.1. Augusto de Campos, “Luxo” (1965). © Augusto de Campos; courtesy, Augusto de Campos.
- 27. INTRODUCTION 9 of manipulationbut is also, like distraction, a mode of deviation: devia- tion from utility, in the first instance. In Brazilian concrete poetry, fas- cination is what makes us deviate from what is useful in language, from its pretense of clear and transparent communication. Poetry has always been, in the first instance, excessive, and enchanting for that very reason: there is chant to it, song, canto. Concrete poetry vindicates the capacity of language to signify densely, concretely. It is excessive in its material making, exuberant in its sensorial dimensions. Color, visual form, and texture all play central roles in concrete poetry’s ways of making sense, at- tracting readers in a way that mimics but isn’t quite reducible to the logic of consumer capitalism. Lyric poetry and the language of consumer cul- ture, conjugated as they are in concrete poetry, differ in substance and in- tent but not always in theirapproach to language as constitutive material. Octavio Paz also proceeds ambivalently in his dealings with consumer culture. In typical aphoristic style, Paz writes that poetry has been moder- nity’s antidote as well as its replica.This double stance vis-à-vis modernity finds its way to a series of visual poems Paz completed toward the end of the 1960s during the most experimental phase of his career. It was dur- ing this time that Paz incorporated into his poems forms and materials from mass and consumer culture. Replication and the multiple meanings of its Spanish translation (réplica: copy, response, aftershock) emerge as key features of the relationship between poetry and society in Paz’s work. Replication is studied by Nicolas Bourriaud in The Radicant (2009), where he devotes a section to what he calls the aesthetics of the replica, iden- tifying it as a key concept for our understanding of postmodern art and linking it to what he theorizes as a strategy for resisting the fetish aspect of the artwork. But while Bourriaud focuses on artists who copy or repli- cate the work of other artists, my focus will remain on the mimicking or reproduction of forms from consumer culture as practiced by Paz and as analyzed elsewhere in this book. Homemaking, as I hope to demonstrate, is loaded with the same de- gree of ambivalence, the same contestatory power, and the same loaded contrariety of the other terms chosen as key concepts of this book. But its presence is elusive in most cultural criticism on mass and consumer culture. Home is the subject of some discussion in social studies on con- sumption. The space of the home is privileged by John Sinclair and Anna Cristina Pertierra, editors of Consumer Culture in Latin America (2012), which includes a section of essays titled “Domestic Practice” and is dedi- cated, in the editors’ own words, to demonstrating “how across different
- 28. 10 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION LatinAmerican places and times, the material products of everyday life in and around the home form a primary site for the incorporation, innova- tion and maintenance of consumer practice.”28 The gendered figure of the housewife, however—both “quintessence of power in the modern world” and “global dictator,” in the curious characterization by Daniel Miller29— remains overlooked and relatively understudied in the extant bibliogra- phy, perhaps because of unexamined overtones of passivity and coercion associated with the homemaker. My reading of Lygia Clark’s return to the space of the home in the last phase of her trajectory (the period coextensive with her work on the Estruturação do self ) and of her decades- long research into what she calls relational objects will serve as grounds for a new look into the idea of homemaking. Precedent exists for the convergence of homemaking and experimental art: Dada artists familiar with the arts and crafts and pro- lific in the production of textiles and weaves, Bauhaus women and Bau- haus men, the many and fascinating inroads Soviet constructivists made into the world of domestic space. In a monograph on Bauhaus women, Ulrike Müller points out that the National Socialist myth of “heimkultur— ‘homemaking’—the bourgeois cliché of the modest housewife, who rules the home and never rests,” was preceded in Germany by women artists who had “begun to rearrange things, to let light and air into the house, to look critically at lamps, furniture, dishes, all the furnishings, and all the rooms.”30 Sophie Taeuber, on her part, brought the Dada movement in Berlin a key critical inflection that was informed in large part by formal training in the arts and crafts. Periodizing Consumption Hemispheric geopolitics largely responsible for the cycles of growth and crisis in consumer societies of the Americas forms the basic context for the historical period that I grapple with—the three decades after the end of World War II. The arguments pursued over the course of this book ad- dress questions of aesthetics, politics, and consumption. To the extent that these arguments are posed against the background of events that took place in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the book stands as a timely re- vision of the narratives we tend to appeal to when understanding the po- litical economyof Latin America afterWorld War II, a period that is usually understood as defined by import-substitution industrialization.The point here is not to understress the role of import- substitution industrializa-
- 29. INTRODUCTION 11 tion somuch as it is to emphasize the importance of domestic market development as a fundamental element of this form of industrialization. Consumption is the broader background this book assumes as context for the understanding of society and culture. To better trace the contours of a period in history defined principally by consumption, I draw on a few related terms (industry, technology, advertising) that serve as neces- sary points of reference in the construction of a rising but still relatively undertheorized object of research. Defining consumption as context for the understanding of society and culture pre sents an intrinsic challenge. Consumption seems to be—in practice and in theory—dispersed and dif- fused, at least in relation to the more centralized and more extensively researched activities subsumed under the category of production. Indeed, it seems like the demand for a precisely defined context of consumption is a demand more fitting to the notion of production, ballasted as it is with a more centralizing, better defined repertoire of figures (the work, the author, etc.). Consumption as cultural paradigm31 resonates with a number of re- cent studies by scholars interested in the Latin American region and in Mexico and Brazil in particular. For Steven B. Bunker, the “history of con- sumption is a cultural history of modernization at its most imperial.”32 Consumption makes for a rather strange form of imperial power, a queer form of empire. It is everywhere, acknowledged byeveryone, yet its power is thought to be phony, superficial, ersatz. Consumption is powerful but it isn’t the real site of power. It is too vacuous, too dispersed, too banal to be consequent. We have learned to see production as the true source of power, the field of forces where power is actually contested. A focus on consumption and consumer society allows for a new take on the history of modernization, one that displaces the state as the sole site of power. This is what Bunker reveals to us when he pictures “modernization as a phenomenon that arose from the bottom as much as it descended from above,” when he sets out “to examine consumption as a measure of the popular and participatory nature of the Mexican modernizing process. . . . A history of consumption,” Bunker concludes, “is, therefore, a history of everyday life.”33 Bunker argues that citizens of late nineteenth- century Mexico, anticipating a judgment nowadays all too naturalized, equated inclusion in the world of consumption with a sense of social development and well- being. “While historians,” writes Bunker, “have been slow to rec- ognize the centralityof consumption in the production of meaning in Por- firian society, Porfirians themselves made abundantly clear in their writ-
- 30. 12 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION ingsthat nothing indicated individual and national progress better than changes in consumption and material culture.”34 The period of experimentation that gave rise to 1920s avant- garde movements like Mexican muralism and Estridentismo in Mexico and the Semana de Arte Moderna in Brazil coincided with a marked growth of the economies of the region, a growth spurred in large part by the end of the First World War and, in the case of Mexico, by the end of the revo- lution of 1910–1920. Postwar conditions of growth for the economies of Latin America were also determining factors for the emergence of the lit- erary, artistic, and cultural practices studied in this book.35 The 1950s and 1960s in Mexico and Brazil are defined by fraught feelings of optimism and economic stability, a stability defended vigorously by the Mexican government in the mid-1950s.36 In both countries, the idea of an economic “miracle” was widely disseminated during this period,37 a “miracle” teth- ered largely to the promise of growth by way of import- substitution in- dustrialization. An aura of prosperity, the rising importance of the con- sumer, and a “miraculous” leap toward development were crucial aspects of the political and economic outlook in Mexico and in Brazil in the de- cades after World War II. During the war and in the decades after it, Mexico and Brazil—the first an immediate neighbor to the United States, a gateway to the rest of the continent; the second the largest nation in Latin America, with the poten- tial to become the biggest economy in the region—became the subjects of interventionist policies that sought to implement a model of economic development friendly to the imperial interests of the United States. This, together with the sheer size of the Mexican and Brazilian culture indus- tries, is what makes the comparative study of aesthetics and consumer culture in Mexico and Brazil so compelling. Both countries turned toward the United States, culturally and economically, earlier than other states in the region. And both became objects of sustained economic and politi- cal interest in the United States in the years leading up to World War II. Both Mexico and Brazil participated early in the expansion of what came to be known as the US brand of consumer democracy.38 Sears, Roebuck and Company opened its first store in Mexico City on February 28, 1947,39 a mere two years after the war ended, marking the beginning of what Julio Moreno characterizes, citing a Harper’s magazine article published at the time, as a consumer revolution in Mexico.40 The term captures the enormous weight, real and symbolic, of this major turn in the history of
- 31. INTRODUCTION 13 Mexico, aperverse realization of the ideals of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920. In Mexico, the growth or “miracle” that took place after the end of World War II was largely due to policies dating back to the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) and its development of the na- tional economy through protectionist trade policies and the nationaliza- tion of natural resources, oil foremost among them.The economic growth experienced in Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s came with a series of public works championed by presidential administrations eager to maintain a façade of prosperity and progress even in the face of impending economic disaster. This series of major investments benefited, at least in principle, the popular segments of civil society.41 Beginning with Conjunto Urbano Presidente Alemán (a massive housing project designed by Mario Pani), Mexico City saw its urban fabric transformed by a series of major infra- structural changes that included the transfer of the Universidad Autó- noma de México—the largest higher education institution in the coun- try—from its historic quarters in the city center to Ciudad Universitaria, a newly constructed and much- vaunted campus in the southern part of the Mexican capital. Large museums (the Museo Nacional de Antropo- logía, the Museo de Arte Moderno), a new metro system, luxury and mass housing developments (Jardines del Pedregal, Ciudad Satélite, Conjunto Urbano Nonoalco- Tlatelolco), and the rise of Zona Rosa as a point of con- centration for private and commercial galleries (emerging spaces of artis- tic and cultural brokerage and harbingers of the privatized and commer- cialized future of culture) were the major features of a Mexican capital transformed—culturally, infrastructurally, and recreationally—within the span of a few decades.42 Dissent from the developmentalist policies instituted in Mexico in the decades after World War II began to register almost as soon as these poli- cies were enacted.43 Dissent in culture also gained a voice in the 1950s, and it had a proper name: la ruptura. Octavio Paz coined the term in an essay on Rufino Tamayo,44 where the poet reads the painter’s expressionist, ab- stract style as a stark departure from the aesthetics of social realism and nationalist myth- making that the Mexican muralists had been defend- ing for more than three decades. By 1968, with the publication of Juan García Ponce’s Nueve pintores mexicanos, la ruptura acquired the spirit of a movement, a definitive generational break with the nationalist, figura- tive, social- realist art associated with Mexican muralism.What is intrigu-
- 32. 14 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION ing,from my point of view, is the absence of clarity, the lack of defini- tion at the origins of this break, at the heart of this rupture. Prescriptive notions of proper subject matter for art and literature (nationalist in a limited, mostly celebratory, sense) and a limited repertoire of styles sanc- tioned by the dominant segments of the visual arts (muralism and the so- called Mexican School) constitute the obvious targets of dissent for those who identified themselves with the ruptura. An opening—of institutional access, of aesthetic repertoires—was the driving force behind it. But in terms of the developmentalist policies that defined the period, artists and writers on both sides of the debate—artists for rupture and artists consecrated by the regime—found themselves defending positions criti- cal of the government’s push for development as often as they embraced forms and platforms closely aligned with consumption and market devel- opment. Paz is a case in point, as is José Luis Cuevas. In 1967, while stay- ing on Madison Avenue in New York City, Cuevas imagines the possibility of reproducing one of his drawings in the billboards of Times Square. His vision materializes later that year, not in New York but in what was then the gallery- filled Zona Rosa neighborhood of Mexico City.45 As Werner Baer and Claudio Paiva note, the 1950s and 1960s were de- cades of high growth and modernization for the Brazilian economy.46 Dur- ing those years and until 1980, industry became the fastest growing sec- tor of the Brazilian economy, “the main determinant of the economy’s dynamism, triggering both the upturns and the downturns of the growth cycles.”47 The transformation of São Paulo into an industrial hub began to take place since at least the 1940s and largely, though not exclusively, as a response to the demands made by World War II on global industry. Brazil at War, a 1943 film produced and sponsored by Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter- American Affairs (OCIAA), works hard to draw similarities and suggest political and ideological allegiances be- tween the United States and Brazil. A 1944 film titled São Paulo, also pro- duced and distributed by the OCIAA, puts the spotlight on the Paulista capital, “the fastest growing city in the Americas,” a city thriving under an industrial boom. In the film, São Paulo’s factories appear as enterprising suppliers for the Allied Forces, producing trucks, tires, dynamite, medical supplies, and shell casings, “each casing . . . earmarked for the Axis.” “The war,” the film’s voice-over tells us, “has imposed heavy responsibilities on Brazilian industry.The Paulista has not been found wanting.” In 1945, one year after the film was produced, World War II was over and industrial production, in Brazil as elsewhere, faced the task of repurposing facto-
- 33. INTRODUCTION 15 ries nolonger servicing the global armed conflict. A transnational indus- trial apparatus built for war provided the infrastructure necessary for the consumer-goods bonanza that defined the two decades following the war. A widespread, globalizing desire to live like the Americans, the winners of the war—an ardent wish to live out the American dream—was essential for the far- reaching transformation the world was about to begin. Fast- paced economic growth in Brazil in the 1950s was spurred by the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961) and his ambitious Pro- grama de Metas, the crowning achievement of which was the construction of Brasília, a national capital built from scratch in the centrally located Brazilian planoalto and inaugurated in April 1960. From the 1940s onward and over the course of several presidencies, decisive government mea- sures favoring development and industrialization48 were implemented alongside private- sector efforts to consolidate the business of mass com- munication. With the massive infrastructural efforts to revamp Brazilian industryand its economycame what sociologist Nelson doValle Silva calls a gradual “modernisation of values,”49 a process that, while not concerted, was just as deliberate and no less fundamental to the modernization of Brazil. During and well after Kubitschek’s term, and with the rise of the militarydictatorship in 1964,50 the transport and communications sectors experienced explosive levels of growth. Mass media consolidated under business magnates such as Assis Chateaubriand, who owned the maga- zine O Cruzeiro, a popular and influential publication with an average print run of five hundred thousand weekly copies in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1950,Chateaubriand established TV Tupi, the first television broadcast- ing station in Brazil and elsewhere in South America.51 Chateaubriand’s role in the development of modern mass media in Brazil goes well be- yond the founding of O Cruzeiro and TV Tupi. In the first half of the twen- tieth century, Chateaubriand amassed the largest and strongest holding of communications outlets in Brazil, Diários Associados, which included newspapers and a news agency, a radio station, and an advertising agency. He secured large shares of advertising for his newspapers, revolutionizing the way newspapers were financed in his day. His role in the rise of Getúlio Vargas is well known, as are his own ventures into politics.52 The years after World War II in Brazil mark the birth of what would eventually be- come one of the largest culture industries in the world, an industry robust enough to spawn TV Globo, which by the 1990s had become the fourth- largest television broadcasting company in the world (after US television companies CBS, NBc, and ABC).53
- 34. 16 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION Advertising,a principal source of financing for mass media, played a crucial role in the growth of the communications sector, and this in turn sustained a growing belief in the modernization of Brazil. Radio and tele- vision, of course, do not bring about modernization on their own, but they do enact a process as transformative as any major upheaval in the national infrastructure. As Silva notes, “the importance of exposure to these means of communication rests in the fact that it creates a mecha- nism for positive feedback, with greater exposure leading to higher levels of absorption of ‘modern’ and consumerist values and attitudes, which in turn leads to a greater tendency to mobility and higher aspirations for consumption.”54 Of course, the social function of television in Mexico and in Brazil in the decades after World War II went beyond the general pur- poses of development and modernization. In these countries and in other countries of the region, mass media in general and television in particu- lar played a more dismal role. The ability to screen—for mass audiences, in the intimacy of their living rooms—fantasies of optimism in the face of devastating crisis and unspeakable oppression is a crucial condition for the rise and the endurance of dictatorial regimes in the region. Development and construction of cultural institutions in Brazil kept abreast with the general growth of industry and mass communications. The Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro, founded in the 1940s, began its programming in earnest in the 1950s under the director- ship of Niomar Moniz Sodré.55 In 1948 Chateaubriand, the media mag- nate, helped inaugurate the MASP, to this day an emblem of the fine arts in the Paulista capital. Three years later in 1951, the first São Paulo Bien- nial opened its doors, supported largely by the efforts of the industrialist Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho and his wife Yolanda Penteado. As Ferreira Gullar wrote in 1960, it was the São Paulo Biennial (specifically, the strong Swiss- German delegations present in the first three biennials) that first consolidated the language of abstraction and of concrete aesthetics pres- ent in Brazilian poetry and art movements from the 1950s.56 Significantly for the comparative framework that this book offers, the São Paulo Bien- nial was also the first major presentation of Mexican muralism in Brazil. More than forty etchings by the muralists were featured in 1955, a high- light of the third biennial. Development of art institutions in Brazil in the middle of the twentieth century coincided with an increase in the formal- ization of its art criticism through the efforts of critics like Mário Pedrosa and Sérgio Milliet. It was upon his return from exile in 1945 that Pedrosa began to emerge as the foremost critic of art in Brazil. “Until this time,”
- 35. INTRODUCTION 17 writes GlóriaFerreira in a recently published English- language anthology of Pedrosa’s writings, “it had been mostly poets who practiced—a gener- ally impressionistic— criticism in newspapers and magazines.”57 By 1955, the biennial moved to buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer in the recently inaugurated Parque Ibirapuera.The construction of Parque Ibirapuera was comparable in breadth and impact to the construction of Ciudad Universitaria in Mexico City as well as other ciudades universita- rias throughout Latin America in the late 1940s and early 1950s. All are examples of large-scale urbanization and art synthesis, with artists, archi- tects, and urbanists aspiring to work in conjunction. In 1956 construction began on Brasília, the new federal capital of Brazil, crown jewel of the country’s development aspirations of the mid- twentieth century. These and other modernization projects in Brazil have turned the country into a recurrent reference for utopian visions of modernity in the twentieth century. But as Aleca Le Blanc argues, the sheer number of large- scale building projects either active or completed in the 1950s made Brazil not a model of a modern nation but “a nation in the midst of a complicated transition and underactual construction,”58 less a culmination than a bea- con (a sign, a celebration, a warning) of modernity. In Brazil and elsewhere, the 1950s were crucial for the growth and pro- fessionalization of design, marketing, and advertising.59 The year 1950 marks the opening of the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing, the first institution of higher education in Brazil dedicated to the academic study of marketing and advertising. It was founded, tellingly, under the institutional auspices of the MASP, the largest and most well-regarded in- stitution of fine arts in Brazil. A year later in 1951 and again under the um- brella of the MASP, Pietro Maria and Lina Bo Bardi (the latter is the archi- tect responsible for the iconic building that houses the MASP) opened the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea do Museu de Arte de São Paulo (IAC/ MASP), part of a larger, diffused effort to professionalize design in Brazil. This was followed by the opening of a number of Brazilian design firms throughout the 1950s and 1960s, many led by artists associated with the concrete movement. Design operates in the shifting middle ground between art and profit- driven enterprise. The tensest and most charged contradictions about the work of art in the age of consumer culture rest squarely at the heart of design as discipline. Design, together with advertising and market- ing, consolidated as a major industry in the decades after World War II, in tandem with the growth of the private sector and the expansion of
- 36. 18 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION transnationalcorporations. In Brazil, perhaps more than anywhere else in Latin America, design was embraced by significant segments of culture and the economy, with artists, designers, and poets working as heads of marketing projects from logotype creation to brand identity to merchan- dising strategy and visual programming.60 Some Notes toward a Dialectics of Consumption At the heart of this project rests a desire as well as a conviction.The desire is to explore forms of perception and forms of cognition that operate fre- quently, although not exclusively, in experiences associated with con- sumers and consumption, the same forms of cognition evoked by the categories privileged in this study as categories for an aesthetics of con- sumption.The conviction is that there is value to these forms of cognition, and that this value, while neither unknown nor understudied, deserves further exploration.This is the same conviction that animates García Can- clini’s study of the link between consumption and citizenship, Consumers and Citizens (2001; first published in Spanish in 1995). García Canclini’s central hypothesis is that the transnational networks that sustain and are themselves sustained by consumption and consumerism provide alterna- tive stages for imagining the figure of the citizen beyond the conceptual parameters of the nation- state. Consumption, García Canclini argues, is “good for thinking”—it sustains analysis and reflection beyond the “moral and intellectual disqualification” at work in prevailing discussions about consumption, ballasted, as they are, on “commonplaces regarding the omnipotence of the mass media, which presumably incite the masses to gorge themselves unthinkingly with commodities.”61 García Canclini sets out to define the terms needed to recognize some- thing like a logic in consumption, “the rationality—for producers and consumers—of an incessant expansion and renewal of consumption.”62 This rationality, García Canclini argues, is economic, but not exclusively macroeconomic. It rests in the myriad forms of adaptation and nego- tiation created by individuals in their capacity as consumers, as well as in the institutions that regulate production and consumption in free- market economies. Citing the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Arjun Appadurai, and Stuart Ewen, García Canclini appeals to “the logic that drives the ap- propriation of commodities as objects of distinction”; he appeals to other facets of consumption, “the symbolic and aesthetic aspects of the rationality of consumption.”63 Beyond distinction,García Canclini insists, the symbolic
- 37. INTRODUCTION 19 aspect ofconsumption is grounds for what he calls “the integrative and communicative rationality of a society.”64 This, García Canclini argues, is the unifying force that binds together transnational consumer communities, spaces of social division and integration that cut across the convention- ally defined territories of identity formation. It is on the basis of a con- sumer reason or rationality that García Canclini can postulate the possi- bility of political associations that rest neither on the macro structures of the state nor on identitarian bonds of social attachment. Subtending the riseof this new understanding of citizenship and society—an understand- ing fundamentally embedded in transnational geographies and global- ized consumer worlds—is a longer hemispheric history neatly summa- rized by Gareth Williams as a march “from the heyday of state- promoted national and regional ethnic identities—in Mexico, for example, from the construction of the corporatist Nation- State and its systematic incorpo- ration of regional processes of population- fabrication—through to the postmodern crisis of the Nation-State and the dismantling of its previous projects of national socialization (a.k.a. the ‘Mexican miracle’).”65 García Canclini views consumption affirmatively, as a horizon toward which new forms of citizenship and social participation can be pitched in a moment marked by the dissolution of centralized, liberal nation- states. But Williams, like Francine Masiello in The Art of Transition: Latin Ameri- can Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (2001), questions García Canclini’s under- lying assumption regarding the possibility that the terrain of social ac- tions and operations staged by consumer capitalism can, in fact, as García Canclini argues, operate as a platform for political praxis. “The political, of course,” Williams writes, “does not primarily consist in the composi- tion and dynamic nor in the regulation of predominantly external corpo- rate or transnational powers, which is ultimately how it appears in Can- clini’s treatise on peripheral consumption—fabrication and management. It could be argued that the political is the opening of a space that is in- augural, initial, and emergent as an action, a praxis of singularity itself (Nancy) or a means of establishing immediate tensions with the stan- dardizing drives of the postnational world.”66 Williams is right to call into question the extent to which consumption and its attendant theater of social and political operations can sustain new formulations of the politi- cal. The principal gesture of García Canclini’s formulation of the political vis- à- vis consumption, though, merits more reflection, to the extent that it can compel us to establish immanently the “immediate tensions with the standardizing drives of the postnational world”67 that Williams calls
- 38. 20 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION for.In reference to a corpus of critical interventions aligned with García Canclini’s, George Yúdice writes: “New interventions that challenge both right and [Todd] Gitlin- like left positions on multiculturalism and iden- tity suggest that consumercapitalism has much todowith the ongoing re- definition of citizenship, a contradictory process that, though not a cause for celebration, is not to be lamented either.”68 García Canclini ballasts his argument on the premise of a rationality proper to consumption, a rebuttal of the idea that consumption is driven by the manipulation of mindless wishes for consumer goods. This intel- lectual embrace of consumption fits into what Juliet B. Schor defines as a wave of studies published in the last quarter of the twentieth century, studies generally positioned against the more classic critiques of con- sumption that shaped discussions on consumer culture from the middle of the twentieth century onward (critiques by Thorstein Veblen, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Jean Baudrillard, Herbert Marcuse, etc.). Schor refers to frameworks of interpretation such as that offered by Veblen as status models and notes that these models fell out of vogue and were subject to widespread dismissal and critique in more recent approaches to consumerculture—the kind ofapproaches that posit an active, informed viewer, the kind that advocate for, among other things, consumption as a site for identity construction. The recent wave of scholarship grouped together by Schor focuses on the interpretation of consumer behavior and consumer attitude, rather than on the more sys- temic critiques of the logic and the political economy of consumer society. The shift in focus, grosso modo, has rendered the figure of the consumer as a more active, rational, and informed subject, in opposition to the figure of a passive, coerced consumer that is often articulated in or assumed by the studies on consumption published toward the middle of the twenti- eth century. Schor argues for a qualified return to these earlier, systemic critiques of consumption, submitting that the latter turn toward the re- demption of the figure of the consumer lacks critical perspective vis- à- vis consumption and consumerculture—the kind of perspective that, among other things, can shed light on the political and ethical consequences of the social dynamics that vector into and out of consumer culture. Schor places her own analysis of consumption somewhere between the mid-twentieth-century structural critiques of consumer society and what she refers to as “micro- level, interpretive studies that are often depoliti- cized and lack a critical approach to the subject matter.”69 Intriguingly, she makes the point that the defense of consumer rationality and consumer
- 39. INTRODUCTION 21 agency (thekind of defense performed by critics like García Canclini) may not be entirely incompatible with the more structural, politically inflected critique of the culture industry (a term Schor reads as coextensive with consumer culture). Schor objects to what she describes as the “so- called totalized and functionalist vision without contradiction or possibility for resistance” (“the model cannot account for the fact that consumer resis- tance is always present in the marketplace”) in Adorno and Horkheimer’s writings on the culture industry.70 Her larger point is to recognize the im- portance of the so- called agential interpretations of the figure of the con- sumer while attending to the critical acuity of earlier, structural analy ses of consumer culture. “The point,” Schor writes, “about the project of self- creation in consumer society is also undoubtedly right, but it does not re- quire that that process occurs in a vacuum with respect to social inequality and status.”71 Schor also emphasizes the “inclusion of both the production and the consumption side in the analysis”72 as a crucial and underappre- ciated component of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique. Indeed, it seems that many of the most compelling approaches to the study of consump- tion (and production, for that matter) are those that conceptualize their objects of study not as paradigms of social organization but rather as dis- tinct but related moments in a larger social dynamic that includes, per force, a dialectical counterpoint. Few critics have undertaken as lucid and as sustained a defense of the social figure of the user (a stand- in for the figure of the consumer) as Michel de Certeau did inThe Practiceof Everyday Life (1984).Certeau stakes his claims in the very first line of his book, where he defines his inquiry as “a continuing investigation of the ways in which users—commonly as- sumed to be passive and guided by established rules—operate.”73 Eager to highlight the agency exercised in the “operational logics” of everyday consumption, Certeau insists that the status of users and consumers as “the dominated element in society . . . does not mean that they are either passive or docile.”74 In so doing, he shows the kind of anxiety that often keeps us from regarding consumption with the deference we reserve for production. “Everyday life,” Certeau argues, “invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”75 But how can we account for poaching without coming to terms with its constitutive duplicity, the poking out and taking in, the shoving in and emptying out that poaching implies? What is it about the passive and docile that makes it inconsis- tent with the “models of action” Certeau reads in the uses of everyday life? Evident in Certeau’s effort to square out the passive and the agential
- 40. 22 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION isthe more generalized lack of dialectical constructs of passivity, which remains—in Certeau’s text as well as in the functionalist, productivist accounts against which he positions his argument—among the least understood and most egregiously gendered loci of human operations.The absence of the figure of the homemaker in the functionalist analyses of consumption by Adorno and Horkheimer is telling in this regard, given the fact that it was the homemaker who was at the center of the efforts to transform the domestic space into a space of consumption. For Cer- teau use and, by extension, consumption hold the possibility of creative appropriation. While it is certainly true that creative appropriation can be performed with the forcefulness and bravado championed by, for in- stance, Oswald de Andrade and like- minded proponents of consumption- as- antropofagia,76 there are other ways to conceive of the links between people and objects beyond use and appropriation. In the chapter dedi- cated to Lygia Clark, I will have occasion to discuss at length Clark’s pro- posals (particularly her Estruturação do self ) for counterintuitive, poten- tially transformative relationships between subjects and objects. These relationships are premised on the idea that certain things—the relational objects Clark builds especially for her propositions—are alive with vitality and privileged in their capacity to disturb, by means of touch and texture, the boundaries within which we confine ourselves as embodied subjects. At the heart of this latter phase of Clark’s work is a notion of animated thinghood that calls to mind Marx’s seminal theorization of commodity fetishism (as the projection of value and life from the producing subject to the object of production), but only to revert to an earlier Marx, to the Marx of the Manuscripts. Densely contradictory subjects, subjects that are active in their sensorial participation but passive to the transformations brought about by relational objects, are at the center of Clark’s radical re- conceptualization of the object and thinghood in the age of commodity capitalism.The people who take part in Clark’s proposals make themselves available to a sensorial, affective engagement with the world and open themselves up to transformations that come from this engagement. Both consumption and production sustain this vision of a subject standing in passive relationship to the objects with which it interacts, either by virtue of being transformed by those veryobjects in the process of making them, or by virtue of using objects, consuming them, taking them into its own being. Passivity can qualify production as well as it can qualify the mo- ment of consumption. Early on in his book, Certeau makes a crucial qualification to the scope
- 41. INTRODUCTION 23 of hisargument, which, he tells us, centers not on consumers proper but on “an operational logic whose models may go as far back as the age- old ruses of fishes and insects that disguise or transform themselves in order to survive, and which has in any case been concealed by the form of ratio- nality current under Western culture.”77 There is a link here between, on the one hand, the “operational logic” of use and consumption and, on the other hand, the mimetic forms of disguise and adaptation that Taussig theorizes in an incisive reading of Benjamin, discussed at some length in the chapter on Brazilian concrete poetry. David Alfaro Siqueiros appeals to this regression as a fundamental aspect of our engagement with build- ings, with architecture, and, by extension, with painting on a mural scale. Octavio Paz and the concrete poets stage this regression into the sensorial by means of a mimetic appropriation of the language of advertising. Lygia Clark, on her part, structures regression on the basis of what she calls re- lational objects. Regression for Clark, the kind of regression she stages using her relational objects, is constructivist, belonging to a well- defined art- historical genealogy, and constructive. It allows for a turn away from the discursive logic of language and toward constructions of the sensorial, all the while revealing new insights into the commodity form. This mimetic operational logic is an important reference as we try to make sense of the tactical, tactile regressions staged by Siqueiros, by the Brazilian concrete poets, by Paz, and by Lygia Clark, all of whom appeal to a return to nondiscursive, nonlinear, preverbal registers of language and meaning. In the context of consumer culture, regression as I read it in the work of these poets and artists serves as a way of bracketing the enlight- ened, hierarchical idea of the subject as an essentially thinking being, in- vested with sensorial, embodied capacities but not fundamentallydefined by them. Regression as I understand it in the works analyzed in this book marks a strong commitment to materialism and to ideas of cognition and subjectification corollary to materialism. Something like a dialectics of production and consumption emerges from the writings of one of the Brazilian concrete poets, Décio Pignatari, who coined a revealing portmanteau (one of many that pepper the lan- guage of concrete poetry): produssumo. Produssumo names what Haroldo de Campos later characterizes as “the poetics of invention within mass consumption, beyond Adornian skepticism.”78 Produssumo mashes to‑ gether the Portuguese words for “production” and “consumption” to des- ignate both the productive and agential possibilities inherent in acts of consumption, possibilities very much in line with the new wave of cri-
- 42. 24 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION tiquesof consumption summarized above. Produssumo also highlights, in keeping with the critical tradition of antropofagia, the processes (implicit and explicit, mindless as well as voluntary) of absorption, ingestion, and citation that buttress even the most original of productions. The term has a more historically specific meaning intended to ad- dress an aspect of culture that both Pignatari and Augusto de Campos argued was in ascendance in the 1960s, something that slips through the cracks of a cultural system defined dualistically as a rigid opposition be- tween high and low culture, between authentic and replicate cultures, between serious and banal cultures, between cultures with complex pro- duction values demanding an active engagement from their publics and cultures that assume pliant, passive audiences ready to receive artworks mindlessly, without critical or intellectual involvement. The significance of produssumo would rest on its capacity to stake out a place beyond “the apparently inevitable option between production (erudite) artists and consumption (popular) artists,” a place occupied emblematically by the Beatles and John Cage, and most of all by theTropicália movement in Bra- zil.79 Even if we subscribed to the view of mass culture as false conscious- ness (an increasingly unpopular position among contemporary critics of culture80), we still have to grapple with the fact that many of the proce- dures by which mass culture is said to function are the same procedures that are envisioned as ways out of false consciousness and into social, political, and historical awakeness. A basis for a dialectical account of consumption can be drawn from Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Money, labor, private property, and wealth are the principal objects of study of the essays com- piled in these manuscripts.The movement, the conflict, the contradiction between inner human lives and the objects, institutions, discourses, and physical entities that give structure to these lives are the principal sub- ject matter of these essays. An insistent and much- commented humanist horizon makes itself present often in Marx’s Manuscripts, in the “premise of positively annulled private property,” wherein “man produces man— himself and the other man,” wherein “the object, being the direct mani- festation of his individuality, is simultaneously his own existence for the other man, the existence of the other man, and that existence for him.”81 This complex notion of a humanized object, an object that, without reify- ing human existence, stands for something human on account of they who made it, resonates in later formulations of the gift (by Marcel Mauss, Taussig, and others) as an object of exchange constituted within a social
- 43. INTRODUCTION 25 dynamic thatexceeds the reifying logic of exchange- value. “To recapitu- late,” writes Marx, driving the point home while noting its limitations, “man is not lost in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when the object be- comes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for him in this object.”82 Jonathan Dettman reminds us of the care with which Marx constructs the antinomic relationship between consumption and production. “In the Grundrisse,” Dettman writes, “Marx takes pains to establish that the re- lationship between production and consumption is not simply a unity of opposites, a direct identity of production and consumption which he says economists call ‘productive consumption,’ but one in which they mediate one another reciprocally.”83 Along with the oppositional logic underpin- ning these two terms, another, less manifest and ultimately more funda- mental link exists between them: “a mediating movement takes place be- tween the two,” notes Dettman, citing the Grundrisse.84 And beyond the more obvious sense of “consumption” denoting a complementary move- ment or antinomic character (“consumption” as something that feeds into production, each one of these terms providing the conditions that make the other necessary in an endless sequence of movements), Marx draws out, as a more negative sense of consumption, a consumption proper de- scribed by the German philosopher as “the destructive antithesis to pro- duction.”85 This destructive moment of consumption, mysterious and con- ceptually compelling, opens up a series of questions regarding the place of consumption and the way meaning and signification are formulated in societies organized bycommoditycapitalism.What kinds of powers are un- leashed by a dialectical rendering of consumption? How does this change our understanding of power? If, according to Marx, the “enlightened politi- cal economy” shows that those “who look upon private property only as an objective substance confronting men, seem therefore to be idolaters, fetish- ists, Catholics,”86 what would this political economy make of those who see consumption only as subjective desire, as something entirely within the sphere of human will and thus subject to complete coercion and control? Recent scholarship furnishes us with concepts supple enough to ap- proach these questions. Kojin Karatani’s understanding of capitalism as a function of exchange is exemplary in this regard, as is his corollary rela- tivization of the paradigm of production.87 Closer to the specificities of the Latin American region,Verónica Gago argues for a richer understand- ing of neoliberalism as both the “series of macropolitics designed by im-
- 44. 26 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION perialistcenters”88 and the micropolitics of subjectification established at the level of everyday knowledges and practices, beyond the total con- trol of institutionalized powers. As its title indicates,Gago’s book grapples with what she sharply defines as neoliberal reason or “neoliberalism as rationality, in the sense Foucault used the term: as the very constitution of governmentality, but also as a counterpoint to the ways in which that same rationality is appropriated, ruined, relaunched, and altered by those presumed to be victims and victims only.”89 Part of the appeal of Gago’s framing is the idea that if neoliberalism is more than a macropolitical regime, if, indeed, as Gago argues, neoliberalism must also be understood as a force of social and affective organization driven by people and forces working at the personal level, then it follows that resistance toor the over- coming of neoliberalism cannot be conceived in exclusively macropoliti- cal terms. Understanding neoliberalism, then, understanding the period afterWorld War II when the structural bases for neoliberalism were estab- lished, entails an expansion of what we understand to be the logics of both consumption and neoliberalism, a repositioning that takes seriously the modes of operation of subjects traditionally conceived to be completely under the coercion of institutionalized structures of power. The present inquiry, which looks at a moment in the history of Mexico and Brazil posterior to the consolidation of the nation- state in the Latin American region but prior to the dominance of neoliberal regimes, sub- scribes to this vision of an expanded rationality, a consumer reason ex- plored in depth by scholars like García Canclini and further complicated by the categories I here propose as categories for an aesthetics of con- sumption. My intention is twofold. On the one hand, I want to reveal and make manifest the aesthetic operation at the heart of commodity capi- talism. On the other hand, I seek to understand this operation as a logic of contrarity, not just as the result of a series of structural interventions coming from above (either from the state or from an increasingly private initiative) but also and crucially as a complex of subjective dispositions that feed into the logic of consumption without losing their capacity to disarm it or dissolve it. Antecedents: Consumer Culture and the Avant- gardes The book focuses on the two largest cultural economies in the region: Mexico and Brazil. It grapples with the workof artists and writers working out of these countries and active during the decades after World War II:
- 45. INTRODUCTION 27 David AlfaroSiqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark. These are some of the most celebrated artists and writers of twentieth- century Latin America, and this book casts a new light on their legacy. In chapters dedicated to their respective trajectories, this book analyzes how each of them arrived at forms of aesthetic produc- tion drawn taut between high modernism and consumer culture. That some of these poets and artists showed a serious and sustained inter- est in consumption and consumer culture holds the promise of a vision into the commodity form beyond the reach of critical writings that broach the subject of commoditycapitalism without taking into consideration its forms of making sense, its ways of meaning. In One-Way Street, Benjamin writes of a true vision, a real gaze, “the most real, mercantile gaze into the heart of things”: the advertisement.90 What gives the advertisement, this “mercantile gaze,” its measure of reality is a brash proximity to the ob- jects of its representations.This is the key to the sense of reality Benjamin reads in advertisements. Perhaps the most obvious link between consumption, consumer cul- ture, and art is to be found in the long historyof intersections between ad- vertising and the avant-gardes.Their first significant rapport took place in the dawn of the twentieth century, in the work of writers and artists inti- mately tied to the rise of radical art movements in Europe and elsewhere. Not long after the publication of The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism in February 1909, a number of contemporaries of Filippo Marinetti, the movement’s founder, began to remark on the distinctly commercial—the distinctly Americanized—approach Marinetti took to the promotion of Italian futurism.91 Blaise Cendrars referred to advertising as “the flower of contemporary life,”92 and he looked to advertisements when composing his La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913). The simultaneist vein in Cendrars’s poem, the composition of which draws the eye to the watercolors and brush strokes by Sonia Delaunay- Terk as much as it does to its words and phrases, led Guillaume Apollinaire to suggest that the poem was an effort “to train the eye to read with one glance . . . as one reads with a single glance the plastic elements printed on a poster.”93 Apollinaire’s characterization of Cendrars’s poem is inter- esting insofar as it hints at both a shift in reading habits brought about by posters and at the capacity of Cendrars’s poem to accustom readers to this shift. James Joyce’s Bloom, the protagonist of his Ulysses (1922), was an ad man, a newspaper publicity agent. Both Ulysses and advertisements can be described as affronts to logic, to the communicative and discursive
- 46. 28 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION functionsof language. And both participate in what Benjamin calls the “brutal heteronomies of economic chaos.”94 From Marinetti to Joyce runs a recurring theme of language and liberation, a freeing of words from the tyranny of syntax.95 And throughout, advertisements play a fundamental role as models of what this liberation can look like and what this liberation says regarding the order from which language is freed: the orderof syntax, of narrowly rational thought. Many of the most compelling insights on the commodity form and on the ways in which commodity capitalism structures our way of conceiving ourselves and the world around us come from artists, writers, and think- ers who deliberately choose to work with consumption and consumer cul- ture. This is the case with many of the Soviet artists active in Russia dur- ing the period described by Christina Kiaer as “the relatively peaceful and semicapitalist period in Soviet history known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP (1921– c. 1928).”96 Aleksandr Rodchenko, Vladimir Mayakovsky, El Lissitzky, Gustav Klutsis, and others either incorporated forms character- istic of advertising into their artworks—for instance, the logotypes Lis- sitzkydesigned fora 1923 bookwith poems by Mayakovsky, Dlia golosa97— or else worked directly in merchandising and advertising. The work of the Russian constructivists was well known to the Latin American poets and artists grouped together in this book, and I’ll have occasion todiscuss con- crete points of contact between these seemingly disparate figures of the avant- garde in the chapters that follow. A continuum is drawn in the work of artists active during the NEP period between the art object and the house item, between works of art and the objects of everyday life. So much is evident in the manifestoof the journal Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet, organized by Lissitzky and Ilya Ehren- burg in Berlin in 1922, where art is described as “the creation of new ob- jects” and objects, in turn, are defined as more than “objects of everyday use.” “Naturally,” the manifesto goes on to note, “in factory-made utilitar- ian objects, in the aeroplane or car, we see genuine art. But we do not wish to limit the production of artists to utilitarian objects. Every organised work—a house, a poem or a painting—is an expedient object, not leading people away from life, but helping to organise it.”98 For artists associated with constructivism during this markedly experimental period, commit- ment to socialism was expressed in the everyday, utilitarian objects they conceived as artists, as well as in the advertising produced for the sale and distribution of these kinds of objects. Lissitzky wrote at some length on home furnishings and furniture in his 1928 treatise “The Artistic Pre-
- 47. INTRODUCTION 29 Requisites forthe Standardisation of Furniture.” A chair of his design was produced for the Russian pavilion at the International Fur Trade Exhibi- tion in Leipzig in 1930 and incorporated into houses he designed around that time.99 A vision of objects and of a way of relating to objects alternative to the one cultivated by commodity capitalism came to Rodchenko during a visit to Paris in 1925. The circumstances of the trip made for a revelatory experience. Far from the Soviet Union, in the heart of a society increas- ingly defined by consumption and consumer goods, Rodchenko imagines the promise of emancipation at the heart of socialism in terms not just of work, not just of the conditions of production, but also in terms of possible relationships to “our things,” the objects of our everyday life. In a letter to his wife written during his stay in Paris, he writes: “the light from the East is not only the liberation of workers, the light from the East is in the new relation to the person, to woman, to things. Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades, and not these black and mournful slaves, as they are here.”100 “Here” for Rodchenko, his point of enuncia- tion, is Paris, a privileged place to recognize and study the extraordinary capacity of the commodity to organize desire. For Rodchenko the revolu- tionary possibility he envisions in Paris—radical association, true collec- tiveness—begins with a renewed sense of the relationship between men and women but also between humans and objects. “Things take on mean- ing, become friends and comrades of the person, and the person learns how to laugh and be happy and converse with things.”101 Kiaer’s analysis of Rodchenko’s letters from Paris insistently points to the complex force field of affect that is organized by the commodity form, a site of displaced desires (at times errant, at times captured) that Rod- chenko confronts head- on with a new vision of the socialist object. The object theorized by Rodchenko during his visit to Paris and his “encounter with Parisian consumer culture in 1925” constitutes, in Kiaer’s reading, “an especially vivid articulation of the Constructivist theory of a social- ist object that encompasses, rather than represses, the desires organized by the Western commodity fetish, even as its goal is to construct new, transparent relations between subject and object that will lead to the col- lective ideal of social utopia illuminated by ‘the light from the East.’”102 What Kiaer wants to shed light on with the example of Rodchenko’s visit to Paris is a productive compromise between the ideal constructivist ob- ject and the conditions of exchange and desire operating in 1920s Pari- sian commodity culture. This compromise, Kiaer argues, yields an object
- 48. 30 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION thatmoves away from ideology and dogma to become “an actor in the actual material, historical, and bodily circumstances of NEP Russia”; “the utilitarian Constructivist object,” Kiaer writes, “loses its perfection, and a good bit of its transparency, but it gains in its potential ability to orga- nize the object- desires of modernity as an alternative to the commodity form.”103 “The socialist object of Russian Constructivism,” Kiaer argues, “offers an alternative model of how commodity desire can become com- prehensible to us, and available for social transformation, as we try to imagine a response to our own overloaded object world at the beginning of the twenty- first century.”104 Rodchenko was far from the only figure of the Soviet avant- garde to embrace this duplicitous vision of what Susan Buck- Morss describes as “‘socialist’ commodities that, as intersubjective partners, were to provide alternatives to objects of consumption in their reified, capitalist form.”105 Kiaer cites Hubertus Gassner, who imagines a “constructivist universe” where “objects exist solely as organs of human activity.”106 Kiaer also ex- amines the figure of Boris Arvatov, fascinating for the complexity with which he approached that moment in Soviet history suspended between the pressing necessity for trade and market capitalism, on the one hand, and socialist ideology on the other. Arvatov, Kiaer argues, “mordantly op- posed to capitalism and vehemently Marxist in his training and sympa- thies . . . recognized the affective power of the mass- produced objects of modernity.”107 Earlier in the twentieth century, during the first years of Dada in Zurich, the space and stage of the cabaret was revised and reinterpreted by Emmy Hennings, Hugo Ball, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, and other members of the movement. Soon after its opening in 1916, the Cabaret Voltaire became a space of irreverence in the face of bourgeois propriety, a space where contestation against the horrors of World War I took inven- tive and unexpected forms directly informed by the theater of variety.108 It is striking that the cabaret, a precursor of modern forms of entertain- ment, beloved by publics and derided by a significant swath of the intelli- gentsia,109 could be used so powerfully as a platform of dissent.The artists who collaborated in the Cabaret Voltaire embraced amusement and enter- tainment values, caustically revising them to perform what Leah Dicker- man has described as “an exuberant infantilism that undercut any pose of high seriousness.”110 Furthermore, these artists envisioned a curative dimension to theircabaret work, a shock-like remedy for spirits both shat- tered and inured by the atrocities of mechanized war.Their conjugation of
- 49. INTRODUCTION 31 the aestheticand the therapeutic and their appeal to primordial states of consciousness through exercises in regression anticipated (with different means and under very different conditions) the kind of work Lygia Clark set out to do in the 1970s in the space of her home with Estruturação do self. Sophie Taeuber’s language of abstraction, informed by her training in the arts and crafts as well as by her expertise in the applied arts (her works were on view at the third São Paulo Biennal in 1955), provides further points of contrast and comparison for the kind of homework Clark set out to do in the last phase of her trajectory. Furthermore, in the early 1920s, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp picked up on the tactics of Dada artists in Europe through their New York Dada magazine, a platform for parodic, subversive appropriations of advertisements of the kind later performed by the concrete poets in Brazil. In Mexico, Estridentismo, the first avant- garde movement constituted as such, embraced the language and braggadocio of Italian futurism and commercial propaganda. The movement’s inaugural manifesto was pub- lished in Mexico City in 1921 and shared with most other manifestos a rhetoric of advertising.Titled “Actual no. 1” and written by Manuel Maples Arce, the movement’s leader, the manifesto was printed as a broadsheet and plastered on walls facing the street, with care taken to target city blocks housing university buildings. Like Marinetti, Maples Arce strove to magnify the polemics he hoped to spark with his manifesto. But whereas Marinetti called for the burning of libraries and museums, Maples Arce tagged names onto his attacks on cultural institutions, leading a charge first against Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, “El Cura Hidalgo,” founding figure of the Mexican nation, and later against Frédéric Chopin, condemned by Maples Arce to death by electric chair. Maples Arce was keenly aware of the impact that this type of sensa- tionalist quip could have on his desired audience. His attention to pub- licity value comes to the fore several times throughout the manifesto, and under several guises. The manifesto’s subtitle pre sents it as a compri- mido estridentista, a pill for the ailments of a society at pains to be mod- ern, at least in the eye of the manifesto’s author. Marinetti himself was known for coloring his pronouncements with a medical or surgical tone. He signed many of his early essays and programmatic writings as “Dr F. T. Marinetti.”111 Maples Arce, too, plays out the desire to bridge the gap be- tween art and life in pharmaceutical terms. Facing a world transformed by modern technologies, he lays out a program for a literary movement modeled as a fast- and- furious treatment: a pill for the maladies of back-
- 50. 32 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION wardness.This twist, another clever marketing ploy by a poet hungry for public notice, is telling of a larger sociocultural context in Mexico in the 1920s, where the urban landscape was being transformed by new tech- nologies as much as it was being redrawn by a burgeoning advertising in- dustry banked by the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries, the latter a key source of corporate support for the Estridentista movement.112 The use of large, bold typeface for the title and headline and the strate- gic placing of Maples Arce’s photograph on the front of the broadsheet en- sured that “Actual no. 1” would get its fair share of attention amid the plas- ter of posters where it made its public debut. In the course of laying out his literary platform, Maples Arce makes a point to emphasize his “pas- sion for the literature of commercial advertisements.”113 Further down the manifesto, in its sixth point (among the most intriguing, for its imagery and for the craft of its language), Maples Arce gives voice to the exhilarat- ing experience of riding a car across some of Mexico City’s thoroughfares, weaving together architectural landmarks, advertisements, and visions of automobile parts in a stream- of- consciousness account of his experience. For Maples Arce, the modernity that he so feverishly extols breaks down to three key elements: buildings, communications, and advertisements. The language of poets and the craft of artists, he argues throughout the manifesto, should feed from and be in line with the aesthetic (the artis- tic, perceptual, and emotional) experiences afforded by these elements of urban life. Examples of Brazilian poetry in dialogue with advertising can be found throughout the twentieth century. Flora Süssekind looks into this dia- logue in “Poesia & media,” an essay included in her Papéis colados (1993) and later republished in the compilation of her works entitled Vidrieras astilladas (2003). This title suggests a breaking of the putative incompati- bility between, on the one hand, contestatory postures against dictator- ship and violent developmentalism and, on the other hand, the platforms and discourses (the window displays and slogans) of market capitalism. Early- twentieth- century works by Brazilian poets employed in advertis- ing, Süssekind notes, resulted in forms of rhymed propaganda.114 “Adver- tising as a profession,” Süssekind writes in Cinematograph of Words (1997), “attracted . . . many of the best- known men of letters in the twentieth century, who did not think twice before accepting the role of the sand- wich man,”115 a derogatory term designating men of letters working with or in advertising and evocative of the laborers who earn wages by wear- ing signs quite literally over their shoulders. She names several Brazilian
- 51. INTRODUCTION 33 poets workingin advertising at the time—including Olavo Bilac, the most revered of the Parnassian poets in Brazil, who worked with Confeitaria Colombo, and Emílio de Menezes, who collaborated with a Bromil cough syrup publicity campaign in 1917.116 By the 1960s and in the face of vicious repression, everything, argues Süssekind, even those experiments with language that seem most dis- tanced from (or even incompatible with) the pressing realities of life under authoritarianism, “can be explained in terms of the engine of op- pression of the authoritarian state.”117 Süssekind’s approach, remarkable for its plasticity and for its sophisticated take on the intersection of cul- ture, capitalism, and politics, is among the first in Latin America to sub- stitute the rigid dichotomy of subversion- or- integration for a spectrum of responses that differ not in their engagement with or their failure to engage authoritarianism and its violently complicit expansion of mar- ket capitalism, but in the play of irony, parody, and referentiality that distinct genres and styles can afford. “Whether it’s a preference for par- ables,” writes Süssekind, “or for a literature focused on autobiographical reveries, the key lies either in the stylistic detour or in individual delirium as indirect responses to the impossibilityof artistic expression beyond the gripof censorship.”118 As Süssekind argues, censorshipwas hardly the only measure of control deployed by the repressive governments, dictatorial and pseudo- democratic, that exercised power in Latin America in the de- cades after World War II. Repression, cooptation, and the regime of spec- tacle functioned then, as they function now, as the more effective tools of domination of capitalism at its most expansive.119 In Brazil in the 1950s and early 1960s, constructivism was by and large the most important reference for avant- garde poets and artists. The em- brace of constructivist principles in Brazil coincided with periods of accel- erated economic growth and industrialization (the 1920s and 1950s),120 an unsurprising fact given constructivism’s complex articulation of aesthetic experiments with utilitarian production. Constructivism was a particu- larly formative influence for the Brazilian artists and poets whose work is analyzed in depth over the course of this book. Constructivism was also, along with the Bauhaus and the Ulm School of Design, one of the princi- pal referents for the professional organizations and academic programs of study dedicated to design that opened in Brazil in the decades after World War II. A 2008 exhibition curated by Daniela Name and titled Diálogo con- creto: design e construtivismo no Brasil focused on the many convergences between constructivist aesthetics, industrial design, and graphic design
- 52. 34 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION inBrazil, shedding light on facets of artistic production—advertising and merchandising work, graphic design, industrial design, furniture produc- tion—fundamental for the development of a canon of constructivist art in Brazil. An early, interesting, and perhaps surprising instance of serious schol- arly interest in Brazilian advertising comes from Gilberto Freyre, in his pioneering analysis of classified ads in the newspapers of imperial Brazil. In 1961, as Brazil left behind the developmentalist frenzy that gave rise to the construction of Brasília to enter into one of the grimmest moments of its modern history, Freyre inaugurates what he refers to as the Brazil- ian branch of anunciologia, a science dedicated to the study of advertise- ments. Notices of runaway slaves published throughout the nineteenth century are the principal source of analysis in Freyre’s groundbreaking book- length study titled O escravo nos anúncios de jornais brasileiros do século XIX (1963), where Freyre insists on the significance of advertise- ments as documents for the study of society. Freyre goes as far as assert- ing that the value of advertisements as sources for historical, anthropo- logical, and sociological accounts of slavery in Brazil is higher than that of the other sections of the newspapers. Corpus Why studyconsumption and consumer society in relation to societies that seem at the fringe of commodity capitalism, outside the consecrated cen- ters of this form of capitalism (Paris, New York, Los Angeles, etc.)? The matter of developmental mismatch—the desencuentro between, on the one hand, the political economy of consumption forcefully implemented in much of the Latin American region from the 1950s onward and, on the other hand, the precapitalist, preconsumerist conditions of develop- ment that held (and still hold) in much of the region—is a compelling reason to study consumer culture from the margins. In his analysis of the proletarianization of peasant communities in Colombia and Bolivia, Taussig argues that “societies on the threshold of capitalist development necessarily interpret that development in terms of precapitalist beliefs and practices.”121 Something like a “precapitalist” or, more precisely, a pre- consumerist attitude to the products of the culture industry characterizes the approach of the artists and writers here convened. “Preconsumerist” should be here understood not chronologically, as that which comes be- fore consumerism, much less teleologically. Rather, what this term reveals
- 53. INTRODUCTION 35 is adisposition that seems regressive relative to the ideology of consum- erism—and revelatory for that very reason. A sideways view, the look into commodity capitalism from a place both abstruse and external to its center, is well positioned to confront contra- rieties and ambiguities that are easy to conceal or neglect. Despite, or per- haps precisely because of, a relative lag in the development of industry, consumer capitalism took deep roots in Latin American countries primed for “development” bya North American neighbor eager to align the region to its own strategic and economic interests and eager to ward off the in- fluence of the Axis powers during World War II (and of the Soviet Union after that, during the Cold War). The ground was prepared, so to speak, by extensive US spending both private and public on advertising in Latin America during and after the war, even during moments when the flow of US manufactured consumer goods diminished. This book pre sents a contradiction. It is premised on the study of con- sumption but structured around studies of particular artists and poets, particular authors—producers, in short. Even though the book is an- nounced as a book on consumption, more often than not it ends up com- menting on conditions of production, on the ways in which artists and poets go about their work in the age of consumer culture. The apparent contrarity between the book’s subject matter and the readings that make up its chapters reflects the dialectical understanding of consumption that emerges both from the work of the artists and poets analyzed in this book and from the ways in which these artists and poets consciously and delib- erately integrate into their work the perspective of publics conceived as participants, clients, or consumers. The basic idea here is that the pro- ducers (poets and artists) chosen for this book operate with categories responsive to the position of consumers. In doing so they help us under- stand something about how art is produced in the age of consumer cul- ture—and also something about how consumption itself works, how it produces. What is distinctive about these poets and artists is not so much that they concern themselves with their publics, or that they research and en- gage with the perspective and the experience of their publics, but that they conceive of these publics as consumer publics. The difference is im- portant. It is partly what allows the poets and artists brought together in this book to concern themselves with subjective dispositions and cog- nitive faculties that are more commonly linked to consumption and less commonly associated with the production of art and poetry. In sum, the
- 54. 36 DELIRIOUS CONSUMPTION focusof this book will lie not on consumers, nor on consumption as a dis- tinct and separate moment in the social dynamic, but rather on condi- tions of production of art and poetry in societies structured as societies of consumption, and on consumption as productive force, as “a power in the realm of consciousness.” Siqueiros’s decades- long investigation into mural painting and condi- tions of spectatorship is a case in point.The “subversive dialectic” he flags in the title of his first essay on the use of mechanical tools and industrial materials refers to the real and effective material and ideological trans- formation that his methods of production underwent after incorporating into his productive process considerations emerging from the perspec- tive of the consumer. The Brazilian concrete poets’ interest in the reading posture of the consumer (the leitor de manchetes) and the changes in the creation of poetry they envision vis- à- vis this posture is also telling, as is Lygia Clark’s insistent investigation into the notion of participation as a constitutive element of the aesthetic experience. All of the artists and poets here convened occupy prominent places in the history of Latin American art and literature. Siqueiros is one of the three “great ones” of Mexican muralism. Octavio Paz is a Nobel laureate and a cultural institution in his own right.The Brazilian concrete poets are synonymous with a watershed moment in the history of Brazilian poetry, and their legacycontinues todivide Brazilian poets, critics, and scholars to this day. Lygia Clark is among the most criticallyacclaimed artists in Latin America. Jointly, this group stakes out a wide spectrum of creative choices and literary and artistic insertions in the wider social spectrum. Siquei- ros is among the most visible representatives of muralism and the larger, regional wave of figurative art with strong, though not entirely determi- nant, links to social realism. Clark, by contrast, is a leading practitioner of abstraction, with direct filiations to a tradition of constructivism. Each of them represent different sides of a Latin American cultural sphere cleft in the mid-twentieth century by the Communist Party’s embrace of social realism and the concurrent resistance of artists who practiced abstraction without abdicating art’s possibility for social insertion.122 In critical accounts of the work of these artists published during the time in which they were active, the localized contrast between the re- spective positions they occupy in a wider constellation of modern art is too blinding, too critical, too strategic to allow for a comparative analy- sis of their respective tactics. In Brazil, the rise of abstraction and con- cretism as the dominant tendencies of advanced art was premised on the
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- 56. Paula, seated onone of the steps of the stair, cast a furtive glance at Adrian Ducie, who had followed Floyd-Rosney from the inner apartments. His face was grave, absorbed, pondering. Doubtless he was thinking of the persistence of this tradition to endure, unaided, unfostered for forty years. It must have had certainly some foundation in fact. “Perhaps the vagrants discovered it and carried it off,” suggested the up- to-date man. “Not in the chimney-places,” fretted Floyd-Rosney, “which makes it all the more aggravating. The solid stone hearths are laid on solid masonry, each is constructed in the same way, and you couldn’t hide a hair-pin in one of them. Why did they tear them all up?” But fires were finally started in two of the rooms on the ground floor where the hearths were found intact. They were comparatively dry, barring an occasional dash of the rain through the broken glass of one of the windows, the ceilings being protected from leakage by the floor of the upper story. Floyd-Rosney began to feel that this was sufficient accommodation for the party under the peculiar difficulties that beset them. The scarcity of wood rendered the impairment of the fire-places elsewhere of less moment. The sojourners were fain to follow the example of the lawless intruders hitherto, who tore up the flooring of the rear verandas, the sills of the windows, the Venetian blinds for fuel. This vandalism, however, in the present instance, was limited, for its exercise required muscle, and this was not superabundant. True, the Captain’s forethought had furnished them with an axe, and also a cook, in the person of one of the table waiters, understood to be gifted in both walks of life. There was present, too, the Major’s negro servant, who, although sixty years of age, was still stalwart, active and of unusual size. But neither of these worthies had hired out to cut wood. The crisis was acute. Floyd-Rosney offered handsome financial inducements in vain and then sought such urgency as lay in miscellaneous swearing. His language was as lurid as any flames that had ever flared up the great chimney, but ineffective. The group stood in a large apartment in the rear, apparently a kitchen, of which nearly half the floor was already gone, exhaled in smoke up this massive chimney. It occupied nearly one side of the room, and still a crane hung within its recesses and hooks for pots. There was also a brick oven, very quaint, and other ancient
- 57. appurtenances of theculinary art, hardly understood by either of the modern claimants of ownership, but of special interest to the up-to-date man who had followed them out to admire the things of yore, so fashionable anew. “Naw, sir,” said the Major’s retainer. “I can’t cut wood. I ain’t done no work since me an’ de Major fought de war, ’cept jes’ tend on him. Naw, sir, I ain’t cut no wood since I built de Major’s las’ bivouac fire.” He was perfectly respectful, but calm, and firm, and impenetrable to argument. The other darkey, a languid person with an evident inclination to high fashion, perceived in the demand an effort at imposition. With his spruce white jacket and apron, he lounged in the doorway leaning against its frame in a most negative attitude. His voice in objection took on the plaint of a high falsetto. “The Cap’n nuver mentioned nare word to me ’bout cuttin’ wood. I’ll sure cook, if I have got a fire to cook with.” “You black rascal, do you expect me to build your fire?” sputtered Floyd-Rosney. “The Cap’n nuver treated me right,” the provisional cook evaded the direct appeal. “He nuver tole me that I was gwine to be axed to cut wood.” “How were you going to cook without a fire?” demanded Ducie. “I ’spected you gemmen had a fire somewhere.” “In my coat-pocket?” asked Floyd-Rosney. The waiter would not essay the retort direct. He, too, was perfectly polite. “I ain’t gwine to cut wood,” he murmured plaintively. “I wish we had kept one of those roustabouts to cut wood instead of letting them all go with the yawl back to the Cherokee Rose,” said Floyd- Rosney, in great annoyance. “They are worth a hundred of these saloon darkies.” “Don’t name me ’mongst dat triflin’ gang, Mr. Floyd-Rosney,” the Major’s retainer said, in dignified remonstrance. “But I jes’ come along to wait on de Major, an’ cuttin’ wood is a business I ain’t in no wise used to. Naw, sir.” “I never was expectin’ to cut wood,” plained the high falsetto of the saloon darkey. “Pshaw!” exclaimed Ducie. “If this keeps up I’ll split some fool’s head open.”
- 58. He threw offhis coat, seized the axe, heaved it up and struck a blow that splintered a plank in the middle. Floyd-Rosney, his coat also on the floor, inserted the blade of a hatchet edgewise beneath it and pried it up, then began to chop vigorously while Ducie prepared to rive another plank. The two negroes looked on with sulky indifference. Suddenly the Major’s servant grinned genially, without rhyme or reason. “You two gemmen git out of yere. Make yerselfs skeerce. You think I’m gwine to stand yere an’ let you chop wood. I know de quality. I have always worked for de quality. I’m gwine to l’arn dis yere little coon, dat dunno nuthin’ but runnin’ de river, how to behave hisself before de quality. Take up dat hatchet, boy, an’ mind yer manners.” Floyd-Rosney surrendered the implement readily and with all the grace of good-will, but Ducie continued to deal the stanch old floor some tremendous blows and at last laid the axe down as if he did not half care. “We had best run as few fires as possible,” Ducie commented as they left the room, “change of heart might not last.” Thus it was that only two of the many spacious apartments were put into commission. One, the walls of which betokened in the scheme of their decoration its former uses as a music-room, was filled with the effects of the ladies of the party, while the gentlemen were glad to pull off their shoes and exchange for dry hose and slippers before the fire of an old-time smoking-room, that must have been a cozy den in its day. The house had long ago been stripped of all portables in decoration as well as furnishing. A few mirrors still hung on the walls, too heavy or too fragile to be safely removed, wantonly shattered by the vandal hands of its occasional and itinerant inmates. Several of these had been a portion of the original construction, built into the walls, and in lieu of frames were surrounded by heavy mouldings of stucco-work, and this, too, had given opportunity to the propensity of destruction rife throughout the piteous wreck of a palace. In the smoking-room, the haunt of good-fellowship and joviality, Bacchus seemed doubly drunk, riding a goat of three legs and one horn, at the summit of the mirror, and really, but that the figure in half relief was too high to be conveniently reached all semblance of the design might have been shattered. Only here and there was it possible to follow the rest of the rout of satyrs and fauns, the tracery of bowls and beakers and gourds, and bunches of grapes, the redundant festoons of tobacco leaves and replicas of
- 59. many varieties ofpipes, all environed with the fantastic wreathing of smoke, and the ingenious symbolism in which the interior decorator had expended a wealth of sub-suggestion. There was only a “shake-down” on the floor for the men, and two or three were already disposed upon it at length, since this was a restful position and there were no chairs available. Floyd-Rosney stood with his back to the fire, his hands behind him, his head a trifle bent, his eyes dull and ruminative. He had much of which to think. Adrian Ducie sat sidewise on the sill of a window and looked out through the grimy panes at the ceaseless fall of the rain amidst the glossy leaves of the magnolias which his grandmother,—or was it his great-grandmother?—had planted here in the years agone. Was that the site of her flower-garden, he wondered, seeing at a distance the flaunting of a yellow chrysanthemum. How odd it was that he should sit here in his great-grandfather’s den, smoking a cigar, practically a stranger, a guest, an intruder in the home of his ancestors. He and his brother, the lawful heirs of all this shattered magnificence, these baronial tracts of fertile lands, were constrained to work sedulously for a bare living. He, himself, was an exile, doomed to wander the earth over, with never a home of his own, never a perch for his world-weary wings. His brother’s fate was to juggle with all those vicissitudes that curse the man who strives to wrest a subsistence from the soil, to pay a price of purchase for the rich products of the land which his forbears had owned since the extinction of the tribal titles of the Indians. A yellow chrysanthemum,—a chrysanthemum swaying in the wind! There had begun to be strong hopes of dinner astir in this masculine coterie, and when the door opened every head was turned toward it. But melancholy reigned on the face of the cook, and it was a dispirited cadence of his falsetto voice that made known his lack. “Mr. Floyd-Rosney,” he plained, “I can’t dress canned lobster salad without tarragon vinegar. This yere cruet has got nuthin’ in it in dis world but apple vinegar. The Cap’n nuver done me right.” “God A’mighty, man, ‘lobster!’ I could eat the can,” cried one of the recumbents, springing up with such alacrity that his bounce awakened Colonel Kenwynton, who had been able to forget his fatigue and hunger in a doze.
- 60. “Get that dinneron the table, or I’ll be the death of you,” cried Floyd- Rosney. “We are hungry. It is nearly five o’clock and we have had nothing since breakfast.” The door closed slowly on the disaffected cook, who was evidently a devotee to art for art’s sake, for he presently reappeared in his capacity of table servant, as if he had been rebuked in an altogether different identity as cook. He drooped languidly between the door and the frame and once more in his high falsetto plaint he upbraided the Captain. “The Cap’n nuver done me right. He oughter have let me pack that box, instead of the steward. There ain’t no fruit napkins, Mr. Floyd-Rosney. Jes’ white doilies,” he was not far from tears, “white doilies to serve with o’anges!” The mere mention was an appetizer. “Let me get at ’em, whether they are served with doilies or bath-towels!” cried the recumbent figure, recumbent no longer. “Call the ladies. Ho, for the festive board. If you don’t want scraps only, you had better not let me get there first. Notify the ladies. Does this vast mansion possess nothing that is like a dinner-bell, or a gong, or a whistle, that may make a cheerful sound of summons. Ha, ha, ha!” “It compromises on something like the crackling of thorns under a pot,” said Floyd-Rosney, sourly. Then with gracious urbanity, “Major, let me give you my arm, perhaps our presence at the festive board may hasten matters.” The ladies had already surged out into the great, bare, echoing hall, Hildegarde Dean, freshly arrayed in an Empire gown, as blue as her eyes, protesting that she was as hungry as a hunter. Ducie offered his arm ceremoniously to her mother, and Floyd-Rosney, who had intended his attention to the old blind Major as a bid for his wife’s notice and approval, was not pleased to see the procession, stately and suggestive, by reason of the lordly expansiveness of the place, headed by the heir of the old owners in the guise of host. It was an idea that never entered Ducie’s mind, not even when whetting the carving knife on the steel in anticipation of dispensing shares of the saddle of mutton from his end of the table. At this table, in truth, his grandfather had sat, and his great-grandfather also, and dispensed its bounty. So heavy it was, so burdensome for removal, that in the various disasters that had ravaged the old house, war and financial ruin, marauders and tramps, wind and rain, lightning and overflow, it had
- 61. endured throughout. Mahoganywas not earlier the rage as now, and the enthusiasm of the up-to-date man could scarcely be restrained. There were no chairs; planks from the flooring elsewhere had been hastily stretched benchwise on the boxes that had held the provisions and bedding, but even this grotesque make-shift did not detract from his keen discernment of the admirable in the entourage. The size and shape of the room, the old- fashioned bow-window, the ornate mantel-piece, the cabinets built into the walls for the silver and choice show of old china, now without even a shelf or a diamond-shaped pane of glass, the design of the paper, the stucco ornaments about the chandelier, or rather the rod which had once supported it, for the pendants had been dismembered in wanton spoliation and now lay in fragments on the lawn without, the pantry, the china-closet, the storeroom contiguous all came in for his commendation, and much he bewailed the grinning laths looking down from the gaps in the fallen plaster, the smoke-grimed walls, the destroyed hearth, half torn out from the chimney-place. The stream of his talk was only stemmed by the reappearance of the cook, now with his white jacket and apron in the rôle of waiter. Every eye was turned apprehensively toward him lest he was moved to say that the Cap’n had ordered no dinner to be put into the box. He dolorously drooped over Ducie’s shoulder in the place of host, and at once disclosed the melancholy worst. “Dere ain’t no soup, sir. While I was speakin’ to you gemmen in de—de—in de library, sir, de soup scorched. I had set dat ole superannuated mule of de Major’s ter watch de pot an’ he didn’t know enough to set it off de fire when it took to smokin’. Hit was ’p’tage Bec’mul, sir.” Ducie laughed and called for the roast, and the company, as soon as the functionary had disappeared, addressed their wits to the translation of the waiter’s French to discover what manner of soup they had lost. Paula was not sorry to see Adrian Ducie in his hereditary place; somehow it would have revolted her that she and hers should sit in the seat of the usurper. Accident had willed it thus, and it was better so. She had noted the quick glance of gauging the effect which her husband had cast at her as he made much ado of settling the old Major at the table. Even without this self-betrayal she would have recognized the demonstration as one of special design. How should she now be so discerning, she asked herself. She knew him, she discriminated his motives, she read his thoughts as though they were set forth on the page of an open book. And of this he
- 62. was so unconscious,so assured, so confident of her attitude as hitherto toward him, that she had the heart to pity while she despised him, while she revolted at the thought of him. She wished to risk not even a word aside with him. She was eager to get away from the table, although the dinner that the Captain had ordered to be packed made ample amends for the delay. It had its defects, doubtless, as one might easily discern from the disconsolate and well-nigh inconsolable port of the waiter at intervals, but these were scarcely apparent to the palates of the company. It was, of course, inferior to the menus of the far- famed dinners of the steamboats of the olden times, but there is no likelihood of famishing on the Mississippi even at the present day, and the hospitable Captain Disnett had no mind that these voluntary cast-a-ways should suffer for their precipitancy. It was still a cheerful group about that storied board as Paula slipped from the end of the bench and quietly through the door. If her withdrawal were noted it would doubtless be ascribed to her anxiety concerning little Ned, and thus her absence would leave no field for speculation. She did not, however, return to the room devoted to the use of the feminine passengers of the Cherokee Rose, where the child now lay asleep. She walked slowly up and down the great hall, absorbed in thought. She was continually surprised at herself, analyzing her own unwonted mental processes. She could not understand her calmness, in this signal significant discovery in her life, that she did not love her husband. She would not rehearse his faults, retrace in her recollection a thousand incidents confirmatory of the revelation of his character that had been elicited on this unhappy voyage. How long, she wondered, would the illusion have continued otherwise,—to her life’s end? Somehow she could not look forward, and she felt a sort of stupefaction in this, although she realized that her faculties were roused by her perception of the truth. The spirit-breaking process, of which she had been sub-acutely aware, was ended. She could not be so subjugated save by love, the sedulous wish to please, the tender fear of disapproval, the ardent hope of placating. Suddenly she was aware that she was laughing, the fool, to have felt all this for a man who could strike her, cruelly, painfully, artfully, on the sly that none might know. But even while she laughed her eyes were full of tears, so did she compassionate the self she ridiculed with scorn as if it were some other woman whom she pitied.
- 63. She felt asif she must be alone. All the day since that crisis the presence of people had intruded clamorously upon her consciousness. She would fain take counsel within herself, her own soul. Above all, she wished to avoid the sight of her husband, the thought of him. Whenever the sound of voices in the dining-room broke on her absorption as she neared the door in her pacing back and forth, she paused, looking over her shoulder, tense, poised, as if for flight. And at last, as the clamor of quitting the table heralded the approach of the company, with scarcely a realized intention, the instinct of escape took possession of her, and she sped lightly up the great staircase, as elusive, as unperceived as the essence of the echoes which she had fancied might thence descend. She hesitated, gasping and out of breath, at the head of the flight, looking about aghast at the gaunt aspect of the wrecked mansion. The hall was a replica of the one below, save that there were three great windows opening on a balcony instead of the front door. The glass was broken out, the Venetian blinds were torn away, and from where she stood she could see the massive Corinthian columns of the portico rising to the floor of the story still above. A number of large apartments opened on this hall, their proportions and ornate mantel-pieces all visible, for the doors, either swung ajar or wrenched from their hinges, lay upon the floors. Paula did not note, or perhaps she forgot, that the wreck expressed forty years of neglect, of license and rapine and was the wicked work of generations of marauders. She felt that the destruction was actuated by a sort of fiendish malice. It had required both time and strength, as well as wanton enmity, a class hatred, one might suppose, bitter and unreasoning, the wrath of the poor against the rich, even though unmindful and indifferent to the injury. It seemed so strange to her that the house should be left thus by its owners, despite its inutilities in the changed conditions of the world. It had a dignity, as of the ruin of princes, in its vestiges of beauty and splendor, and the savor of old days that were now historic and should hold a sort of sanctity. Even the insensate walls, in the rifts of their shattered plaster, their besmirched spoliation, expressed a subtle reproach, such as one might behold in some old human face buffeted and reviled without a cause. She had a swift illumination how it would have rejoiced the Ducies to have set up here their staff of rest in the home hallowed as the harbor of their ancestors. They were receptive to all the finer illusions of life. They cherished their personal pride; they revered their ancient name; they
- 64. honored this spotas the cradle of their forefathers, and although they were poor in the world’s opinion, they held in their own consciousness that treasure of a love of lineage, that obligation to conform to a high standard which imposed a rule of conduct and elevated them in their own esteem. Their standpoint was all drearily out of fashion, funny and forlorn, but she could have wept for them. And why, since the place had no prosaic value, had not Fate left it to those whom it would have so subtly enriched. Here in seemly guise, in well-ordered decorum, in seclusion from the sordid world, the brothers who so dearly loved each other would have dwelt in peace together, would have taken unto themselves wives; children of the name and blood of the old heritage would have been reared here as in an eagle’s nest, with all the high traditions that have been long disregarded and forgotten. It seemed so ignoble, so painful, so unjust, that the place should be thus neglected, despised, cast aside, and yet withheld from its rightful owners. She caught herself suddenly at the word. Her husband, her son, were the rightful owners now, and it was their predecessor who did not care. As she stood gazing blankly forward the three windows of the upper hall suddenly flamed with a saffron glow, for they faced a great expanse of the southwestern sky, which, for one brief moment, was full of glory. The waters of the Mississippi were a rippling flood of molten gold; the dun- tinted, leafless forests on either bank accentuated in somber contrast this splendid apotheosis of the waning day. The magnolia trees about the house shone with every glossy leaf, an emerald for richness of hue, and all at once, far beyond, Paula beheld the solution of the mystery that had baffled her, the answer to her question, the Duciehurst cotton fields, as white as snow, as level as a floor, as visibly wealth-laden as if the rich yield of the soil were already coined into gold. Here was the interest of the sordid proprietors; the home was no home of theirs; they had been absentees from the first of their tenure. The glimmering marble cross, the lofty granite shaft that showed when the wind shifted among the gloomy boughs of the weeping willows in the family graveyard, marked the resting place of none of their kindred. Their bones were none of these bones, their flesh sprung from none of these dead ashes. The Duciehurst lands made cotton, and cotton made money, and the old house, built under other conditions, was suited to no needs that they could create in the exigencies of a new day. Therefore, it was left to shelter the owl, the gopher, the river-pirate, the
- 65. shanty-boater, the moonin its revolutions, and when the nights were wild the wind seemed to issue thence as from a lair of mysteries. Paula suddenly turned from the revelation, and gathering the lustrous white skirt of her crêpe dress, freshly donned, in one jewelled hand with a care unconsciously dainty, as was her habit, she noiselessly slipped up the great dusty spiral of the stair leading to the third story, lest curiosity induced some exploring intrusive foot thus far, ere she had thought out her perplexity to its final satisfaction. She was aware that the day dulled and darkened suddenly; she heard the wind burst into gusty sobs; the clouds had fallen to weeping anew, and the night was close at hand. She was curiously incongruous with the place as she stood looking upward, the light upon her face, at a great rift in the roof. The rain-drops dripped monotonously from smaller crevices down upon the floor with a sort of emphasis, as if the number were registered and it kept a tally. There were doubtless divisions and partitions further to the rear, but this apartment was spacious above the square portion of the mansion, and the ceiling had a high pitch. She thought for a moment that they might have danced here in the old times, so fine were the proportions of the place. Then she remembered that third-story ball-rooms were not formerly in vogue, and that she had heard that the one at Duciehurst was situated in the west wing on the ground floor. This commodious apartment must have been a place of bestowal. The walls betokened the remnants of presses, and she could almost fancy that she could see the array of trunks, of chests, of discarded furniture, more old- fashioned than that below, the bags of simples, of hyacinth bulbs which were uprooted every second year to be planted anew. There was an intensification of the spirit of spoil manifested elsewhere as if the search for the hidden treasure here had been more desperate and radical. The chimneys seemed to have been special subjects of suspicion, for several showed that the solid masonry had been gouged out, leaving great hollows. As she stood amidst the gray shadows in her lustrous white crêpe gown with the shimmer of satin from its garniture, she was a poetic presentment, even while engrossed in making the prosaic deduction that here was the reason these chimneys smoked when fires were kindled below. The solitude was intense, the silence an awesome stillness, her thoughts, recurring to her own sorry fate, were strenuous and troublous, and thus even her strong, elastic young physique was beginning to feel very definitely the stress of fatigue, and excitement, and fear, that had filled the day as well as
- 66. the effects ofthe emotional crisis which she had endured. She found that she could scarcely stand; indeed, she tottered with a sense of feebleness, of faintness, as she looked about for some support, something on which she might lean, or better still, something that might serve as a seat. Suddenly she started forward toward the window near the outer corner of the room. The low sill was broad and massive in conformity with the general design of the house, and she sank down here in comfort, resting her head against the heavy moulding of the frame. Her eyes turned without, and she noted with a certain interest the great foliated ornaments, the carved acanthus leaves of the capitals of the Corinthian columns, one of which was so close at hand that she might almost have touched it, for the roof of the portico here, which had been nearly on a level with the window, was now in great part torn away, giving a full view of the stone floor below. This column was the pilaster, half the bulk of the others, being buttressed against the wall. The size of the columns was far greater than she had supposed, looking at them from below, the capitals were finished with a fine attention to detail. The portico was indeed an admirable example of this sort of adapted architecture which is usually distinguished rather by its license than its success. But she had scant heart to mark its values or effect. Her reflections were introspective. She looked out drearily on the wan wastes of the skies, and the somber night closing in, and bethought herself of the woeful change in the atmosphere of her soul since the skies last darkened. She said to herself that illusions were made for women, who were not fitted to cope with facts, and that it was better to be a loving fool, gulled into the fancy that she, too, is beloved, than to see clearly, and judge justly, and harbor an empty aching heart. For there was no recourse for her. It was not in her power to frame her future. Her husband had, and he knew he had, the most complete impunity, and doubtless this gave him an assurance in domineering that he would not otherwise have dared to exert. He was cognizant of her delicate pride, the odium in which she would hold the idea of publicity in conjugal dissension. She would never have permitted, save under some extreme stress like that of the single instance of the morning, others to look in upon a difference between them, yet there had been from the first much to bear from his self-absorbed and imperious temper, and she had borne it to the extent of self-immolation, of self-extinction. In fact, she was not, she had not been for years, herself. She could not say, indeed, when her old identity had asserted itself before to-day. It was the aspect of
- 67. the Ducie face,the associations of the past that had recalled her real self to life, that had relumed the spark of pride which had once been her dominant trait, that had given her courage to revolt at rebuke in Adrian’s presence, to hold up her head, to speak from her own individuality, to be an influence to be reckoned with. But of what avail? Life must go on as heretofore, the old semblance of submission, of adulation, the adjustment of every word, every idea, every desire, to the mould of her husband’s thought, his preference. She wondered how she would be enabled to maintain the farce of her love, that had hitherto seemed capable of infinite endurance, of limitless pardoning power, and the coercive admiration for him that she had felt throughout all these five years. He was aware, and this fact was so certain that she was sure he had never given the matter even a casual, careless thought, that for the sake of their son, his precious presence, his comfort and care, his future standing before the world, no recourse was possible for her, no separation, no divorce. Floyd-Rosney might beat her with a stick if he would, instead of that deft, crafty little blow he had dealt on her wrist with his knuckles, and she would hide the wales for her child’s sweet sake. No law was ever framed comprehensive enough to shield her. She was beyond the pale and the protection of the law. And as she realized this she held down her head and began to shed some miserable tears. Perhaps it was this relaxation that overpowered her nerves, this cessation of resistance and repining. When she opened her eyes after an interval of unconsciousness her first thought was of the detail of the Scriptures touching the young man who slept in a high window through the apostle’s preaching and “fell down from the third loft.” She had never imagined that she should do so reckless, so wild a thing. Her methods were all precautionary, her mental attitude quiet and composed. She still sat in the window, looking out for a little space longer, for she was indisposed to exertion; her muscles were stiff, and her very bones seemed to ache with fatigue. The sky had cleared while she slept; only a few white, fleecy lines, near the horizon, betokened the passing of the clouds. It had that delicate ethereal blue peculiar to a night of lunar light, for the stars were faint, barring the luster of one splendid planet, the moon being near the full and high in the sky. The beams fell in broad skeins diagonally through the front windows, while the one at the side gave upon the dark summits of the great magnolias, where the radiance lingered, enriching the gloss of their sempervirent foliage. The weeping willows in their leafless state were all a
- 68. fibrous glister likesilver fountains, and in their midst she could see glimpses in the moonlight of the white gleam of the marble cross, the draped funereal urn, the granite shaft where those who had once rested secure beneath this kindly roof of home now slept more securely still within the shadow of its ruin. A broken roof it now was, and through the rift overhead the moonlight poured in a suffusive flood, illuminating all the space beneath. She heard the plaintive drip, drip, drip, from some pool among the shingles where the rain had found a lodgment. The river flashed in myriad ripples, as steadily, ceaselessly it swept on its surging way to the Gulf. She was familiar with its absolute silence, concomitant with its great depth, save, of course, in the cataclysmal crisis of a crevasse, and as she heard the unmistakable sound of a dash of water, she bent a startled intentness of gaze on the surface to perceive a rowboat steadily, but slowly, pulling up the current. She wondered at her own surprise, yet so secluded was the solitude here that any sight or sound of man seemed abnormal, an intrusion. She knew that a boat was as accustomed an incident of a riverside locality as a carriage or a motor in a street. It betokened some planter, perhaps, returning late, because of the storm, from a neighboring store or a friend’s house. Any waterside errand might duplicate the traffic of the highway. How late was it, she wondered, for her interest in the boat had dwindled as it passed out of sight beneath the high bank. The idea that perhaps she alone was waking in this great, ruinous house gave her a vague chill of fear. She began to question how she could nerve herself, with this overwhelming sense of solitude, to attempt the exit through the labyrinth of sinister shadows and solemn, silent, moonlit spaces among the unfamiliar passages and rooms to the ground floor. She remembered that the railing of the spiral staircase had shaken, here and there, beneath her hand as she had ascended, the wood of the supporting balusters having rotted in the rain that had fallen for years through the shattered skylight. Her progress had been made in the daylight, and she had now only the glimmer of the moon, from distant windows and the rift in the roof. She began to think of calling for assistance; this great empty space would echo like a drum, she knew, but unfamiliar with the plan of the house she could not determine the location of the rooms occupied by the party from the Cherokee Rose. If the hour were late, as she felt it must be, and their inmates all asleep, she might fail to make herself heard. And then she felt she would die of solitary terror.
- 69. Paula could notsufficiently rebuke her own folly that she should have lingered so long apart from the party, that she should have carried so far her explorations,—nay, it was an instinct of flight that had led her feet. She dreaded her husband’s indignant and scornful surprise and his trenchant rebuke. She realized why she had not been already missed by him as well as by the others. Doubtless the ladies who were to occupy the music-room as a dormitory had retired early, spent with fatigue and excitement. Perhaps Hildegarde Dean might have sat for a time in the bow-window of the dining-room and talked to Adrian Ducie, and Colonel Kenwynton, and Major Lacey, as they ranged themselves on one of the benches by the dining-table and smoked in the light of a kerosene lamp which the Captain had furnished forth, and watched the moon rise over the magnolias, and the melancholy weeping willows, and the marble memorials glimmering in the slanting light. But even Hildegarde could not flirt all day and all night, too. Paula could imagine that when she came into the music-room, silent and on tip-toe, she stepped out of her blue toggery with all commendable dispatch, only lighted by the moon, gave her dense black hair but a toss and piled it on her head and slipped into bed without disturbing the lightest sleeper, unconscious that the cot where little Ned should slumber in his mother’s bosom was empty, but for his own chubby form. The men, too, as they lay in a row on the shake-down in the smoking-room with their feet to the fire, might have chatted for a little while, but doubtless they soon succumbed to drowsiness, and slumbered heavily in the effects of their drenchings and exhaustion, and it would require vigorous poundings on their door to rouse them in the morning. Obviously there was no recourse. Paula perceived that she must compass her own retreat unaided. She rose with the determination to attempt the descent of the stairs. Then, trembling from head to foot, she sank down on the broad sill of the window. A sudden raucous voice broke upon the spectral silence, the still midnight.
- 70. CHAPTER IX Paula lookeddown through the broken roof of the portico supported by the massive Corinthian columns. A group of men stood on the stone floor below, men of slouching, ill-favored aspect. She could not for one moment confuse them with the inmates of the house, now silent and asleep, although her first hopeful thought was that some nocturnal alarm had brought forth the refugees of the Cherokee Rose. The newcomers made no effort at repression or secrecy. They could have had no idea that the house was occupied. Evidently they felt as alone, as secluded, as secure from observation, as if in a desert. They were not even in haste to exploit their design. A great brawny, workman-like man was taking to task a fellow in top-boots and riding-breeches. “Why did you go off an’ leave Cap’n Treherne?” he asked severely. The ex-jockey seemed somewhat under the influence of liquor, not now absolutely drunk, although hiccoughing occasionally—in that dolorous stage known as “sobering up.” “If you expected me to stay here all that time, with no feed at all, you were clear out of the running,” he protested. “I lit out before the blow came, an’ after the storm was over I knowed you fellers couldn’t row back here against the current with the water goin’ that gait. So I took my time as you took yourn.” The next speaker was of a curiously soaked aspect, as if overlaid with the ooze, and slime, and decay of the riverside, like some rotting log or a lurking snag, worthless in itself, without a use on either land or water, neither afloat nor ashore, its only mission of submerged malice to drive its tooth into the hull of some stanch steamer and drag it down, with its living freight, and its wealth of cargo, and its destroyed machinery, to a grave among the lifeless roots. His voice seemed water-logged, too, and came up in a sort of gurgle, so defective was his articulation. “You-all run off an’ lef’ me las’ night, but Jessy Jane put me wise this mornin’, an’ I was away before the wind had riz. I stopped by here to see if you was about, but I declar’ if I had knowed that you had lef’ Cap’n Treherne in thar tied up like a chicken, I’m durned if I wouldn’t hey set him
- 71. loose, to payyou back for the trick you played me. But I met up with Colty,” nodding at the jockey, “an’ we come back just now together.” Binnhart’s brow darkened balefully as he listened to this ineffective threat while old Berridge chuckled. Another man with a sailor-like roll in his walk was leaning on an axe. Suddenly he cast his eyes up at the pilaster. Paula on the shadowy side of the window sat quite still, not daring to move, hoping for invisibility, although her heart beat so loud that she thought they might hear its pulsations even at the distance. “Durned if I got much sense out of that fool builder’s talk to you, Jasper,” he said. “I think you paid out too much line,—never held him to the p’int. You let him talk sixteen ter the dozen ’bout things we warn’t consarned with, pediments, an’ plinths, an’ architraves, an’ entablatures, an’, shucks, I dunno now what half of ’em mean.” “I had to do that to keep him from suspicionin’ what we were after,” Binnhart justified his policy. “All I wanted to know was just what a ‘pilaster’ might be.” “An’ this half column ag’in the wall is the ‘pilaster’ the Crazy talked about?” And once more the shanty-boater cast up a speculative eye. “But I ain’t sensed yit what he meant by his mention of a capital.” “Why, Jackson, capital of Miss’ippi, ye fool you, fines’ city in the Union,” exclaimed a younger replica of the old water-rat, coming up from the shrubbery with a lot of tools in a smith’s shoeing-box, from which, as he still held it, Binnhart began with a careful hand to select the implements that were needed for the work. “How do you know the plunder is in the ‘pilaster’?” asked Connover, the dejected phase of the “after effects” clouding his optimism. “Why, he talked about it in his sleep. He may be crazy when he is awake, but he talks as straight as a string in his sleep. Fust chance, as I gathered, that he has ever had to be sane enough to make a try for the swag,” explained Berridge. “But I dunno why you pick out this partic’lar pilaster,” and he, too, gazed up at its lofty height. “By the way he looked at it when we was fetchin’ him in from the skiff, that’s why, you shrimp,” exclaimed the shanty-boater. “I don’t call that a straight tip,” said Connover, discontentedly.
- 72. “Why, man, thisTreherne was with Archie Ducie when they hid the plunder. This is the column he says in his sleep they put it in, an’, by God, I’ll bring the whole thing to the ground but what I s’arches it, from top to bottom. I’ll bust it wide open.” With the words the shanty-boater heaved up the axe and smote the column so strong a blow that Paula felt the vibrations through the wall to the window where she sat. “What are ye goin’ to do with Crazy?” demanded old Berridge with a malicious leer. “Better bring Cap’n Crazy out right now an’ make him tell, willy nilly, exactly where the stuff is hid,” urged the disaffected Connover. “Oh, he’ll tell, fas’ enough,” rejoined old Berridge. He began to dwell gleefully on the coercive effects of burning the ends of the fingers and the soles of the feet with lighted matches. “Lime is better,” declared his son, entering heartily into the scheme. “Put lime in his eyes, ef he refuses to talk, an’ he won’t hold out. Lime is the ticket. Plenty lime here handy in the plaster.” “Slaked, you fool, you!” commented Binnhart. Then, “I ain’t expectin’ to git the secret out’n Cap’n Treherne now, I b’lieve he’d die fust!” “He would,” said the shanty-boater, with conviction. “I know the cut of the jib.” “We had to keep him here handy, though, or he might tell it to somebody else. But, Jorrocks, can’t you see with half an eye that there has never been an entrance made in that pillar. Them soldier fellows were not practiced in the use of tools. The most they could have done was to rip off the washboard of the room, flush with the pilaster. They must have sot the box on the top of the stone base inside the column. This base is solid.” He was measuring with a foot-rule the distance from the pilaster to the nearest window. It opened down to the floor of the portico and was without either sash or glass. As the group of clumsy, lurching figures disappeared within, Paula, with a sudden wild illumination and a breathless gasp of excitement, sprang to her feet. The capital, said they? The pilaster! She fell upon the significance of these words. The treasure, long sought, was here, under her very hand. She caught up a heavy iron rod that she had noticed among the rubbish of broken plaster and fallen laths on the floor. It had been a portion of a chandelier, and it might serve both as lever and wedge.
- 73. The rats hadgnawed the washboard in the corner, she trembled for the integrity of the storied knapsack, but the gaping cavity gave entrance to the rod. As she began to prize against the board with all her might she remembered with a sinking heart that they builded well in the old days, but it was creaking—it was giving way. It had been thrust from the wall ere this. She, too, took heed of the fact that it was the clumsy work of soldier boys which had replaced the solid walnut, no mechanic’s trained hands, and the thought gave her hope. She thrust her dainty foot within the aperture, and kept it open with the heel of her Oxford tie, as more and more the washboard yielded to the pressure of the iron rod, which, like a lever, she worked to and fro with both arms. In the silence of the benighted place through the floor she heard now and then a dull thud, but as yet no sound of riving wood. The washboard there— or was it wainscot?—had never been removed, and the task of the marauders was more difficult than hers. She was devoured by a turbulent accession of haste. They would make their water-haul presently, and then would repair hither to essay the capital of the pilaster. Was that a step on the stair? In a wild frenzy of exertion she put forth an effort of which she would not have believed herself capable. The board gave way so abruptly that she almost fell upon the floor. The next moment she was on the verge of fainting. Before her was naught but the brickwork of the wall. Yet, stay, here the bricks had been removed for a little space and relaid without mortar. She gouged them out again after the fashion of the marauder, and behind them saw into the interior of the pilaster. The cavity was flush with the floor. She thrust in her hand, nothing! Still further with like result. She flung herself down upon the floor and ran her arm in to its extreme length. She touched a fluffy, disintegrated mass, sere leaves it might have been, feathers or fur. Her dainty fingers tingled with repulsion as they closed upon it. She steadily pulled it forward, and, oh, joy, she felt a weight, a heavy weight. She thrust in both arms and drew toward her slowly, carefully—a footfall on the stair, was it? Still slowly, carefully, the tattered remnants of an old knapsack, and a box, around which it had been wrapped. A metal box it was, of the style formerly used, inclosed in leather as jewel-cases, locked, bound with steel bands, studded with brass rivets, intact and weighty. Paula sprang up with a bound. For one moment she paused with the burden in her arms, doubting whether she should conceal the chest anew or
- 74. dare the stairs.The next, as silent as a moonbeam, as fleet as the gust that tossed her skirts, she sped around the twists of the spiral turns and reached the second story. She looked over the balustrade, no light, save the moonbeams falling through the great doorless portal, no sign of life; no sound. But hark, the gnawing of a patient chisel, and presently the fibrous rasping of riving wood came from the empty apartments on the left. Still at work were the marauders, and still she was safe. She continued her descent, silently and successfully gaining the entresol, but as she turned to essay the flight to the lower hall she lost the self-control so long maintained, so strained. Still at full speed she came, silent no longer, screaming like a banshee. Her voice filled the weird old house with shrill horror, resounding, echoing, waking every creature that slept to a frenzied panic, and bringing into the hall all the men of the steamboat’s party, half dressed, as behooves a “shake-down.” The women, less presentable, held their door fast and clamored out alternate inquiry and terror. “I have found it! I have found it!” she managed to articulate, wild-eyed, laughing and screaming together, and rushing with the box to the astonished Ducie, she placed it in his hands. “And, oh, the house is full of robbers!” The disheveled group stood as if petrified for a moment, the moonbeams falling through the open doorway, giving the only illumination. But the light, although pale and silvery, was distinct; it revealed the intent half- dressed figures, the starting eyes, the alert attitudes, and elicited a steely glimmer from more than one tense grasp, for this is preëminently the land of the pistol-pocket. The fact was of great deterrent effect in this instance, for if the vistas of shadow and sheen within the empty suites of apartments gave upon this picture of the coterie, wrought in gray and purple tones and pearly gleams, it was of so sinister a suggestion as to rouse prudential motives. There were ten stalwart men of the steamboat’s passengers here, and the marauders numbered but five. A sudden scream from the ladies’ dormitory broke the momentary pause. A man, nay, three or four men, had rushed past the windows on the portico. “I hear them now!” cried Hildegarde Dean; “they are crashing through the shrubbery.” “Nonsense,” Floyd-Rosney brusquely exclaimed. “There are no robbers here.” Then to his wife, “Is this hysteria, Paula, or are you spoiling for a sensation?”
- 75. She did notanswer. She did not heed. She still stood in the attitude of putting the heavy box into Adrian Ducie’s grasp and while he mechanically held it she looked at him, her eyes wild and dilated, shining full of moonlight, still exclaiming half in sobs, half in screams, “I have found it! I have found it!—the Duciehurst treasure.” Floyd-Rosney cast upon the casket one glance of undisciplined curiosity. Then his proclivity for the first place, the title rôle, asserted itself. He did not understand his wife. He did not believe that she had found aught of value, or, indeed, that there was aught of value to find. Beyond and above his revolt of credulity was his amazement at his wife’s insurgent spirit, so signally, so unprecedentedly manifested on this trip. He connected it with the presence of Adrian Ducie, which in point of facial association was the presence of his twin brother, her former lover. The mere surmise filled him with absolute rage. His tyrannous impulse burned at a white heat. A wiser man, not to say a better man, would have realized the transient character of the incident, her natural instinct to assert herself, to be solicitous of the judgment of the Ducies on her position, to seem no subservient parasite of the rich man, but to hold herself high. Thus she had resented too late the absolute dominion her husband had taken over her, and she felt none the lack of the manner of consideration, even though fictitious, which was her due as his wife. He took her arm that was as tense as steel in every muscle. “You are overwrought, Paula,—and this disturbance is highly unseemly.” Then, lowering his voice and with his frequent trick of speaking from between his set teeth, “you should be with the other ladies, instead of the only one among this gang of men.” “Why not?” she flared out at full voice, “we don’t live in Turkey.” “By your leave I will ask Mrs. Floyd-Rosney to witness the opening of this box, which she has discovered,” said Ducie gravely, “and you also in view of your position in regard to the title of the property.” “Certainly I will,” said Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, defiantly forestalling her husband’s reply, “by his leave, or without it. I am no bond-slave.” Her eyes were flashing, her bosom heaved, she was on the brink of tears. “Beg pardon,” stammered Ducie. “It was a mere phrase.” “Foolish fellow! He thought you had promised to love, honor and obey!” said Floyd-Rosney, ill-advised and out of countenance.
- 76. “Foolish fellow!” sheechoed. “He thought you had promised to love, honor and cherish.” But she was dominated by the excitement of the discovery. She ran to the door of the ladies’ dormitory. “No danger! No danger!” she cried, as it was cautiously set ajar on her summons. “The robbers are gone. We have more than twice as many men here, and the Duciehurst treasure is found. Come out, Hildegarde, and give me that lamp. They are going to open the box. Oh, oh, oh!” She was shrilling aloud in mingled delight and agitation as she came running down the hall in the midst of the silvery moonlight and the dusky shadows, the wind tossing her white skirt, the lamp in her hand glowing yellow, and flaring redly out of the chimney in her speed, to its imminent danger of fracture, sending a long coil of smoke floating after it and a suffocating odor of petroleum. Paula placed the lamp on the table in the dining-room, where the box already stood. Around it the men were grouped on the boards which had hitherto served as benches. Several were shivering in shirt-sleeves, the suspenders of their trousers swinging in festoons on either side, or hanging sash-wise to their heels. Others, more provident, with the conviction that the sensation was not so ephemeral as to preclude some attention to comfort, left the scene long enough to secure their coats, and came back with distorted necks and craned chins, buttoning on collars. Hildegarde obviously had no vague intention of matching her conduct to the standards of Turkey, for she joined the party precipitately, her blue eyes shining, her cheeks flushed with recent sleep, her hair still piled high on her head and her light blue crêpe dress hastily donned. The elderly ladies, mindful of the jeopardy of neuralgia in the draughty spaces without, had betaken themselves again to bed. The Duciehurst treasure had no possibilities for their betterment and they did not even affect the general altruistic interest. There was ample time for the assembling of the party for no key among them would fit or turn the rusted lock. The box on the table held its secret as securely within arm’s length as when hidden for more than forty years in the capital of the pilaster. Hildegarde suggested a button-hook, which, intended seriously, was passed as an ill-timed jest. Mr. Floyd-Rosney had a strong clasp-knife, with a file, but the lock resisted and the lid was of such a shape that the implement could not be brought to bear.
- 77. “The robbers wereworking with a lot of tools,” said Paula, suddenly. “Perhaps they left their tools.” The gentleman who was testing his craft with the lock looked up at her with a significant, doubtful inquiry. “The robbers?” he drawled, slightingly. They possibly number thousands in this wicked world. Their deeds have filled many court records, and their reluctant carcasses many a prison. But the man does not live who credits their proximity on the faith of a woman’s statement. “The robbers?” he drew in his lower lip humorously. “Where do you think they were working?” “Come, I can show you exactly.” Paula sprang up with alacrity. He rose without hesitation, but he took his revolver from the table and thrust it into his pistol-pocket. While he did not believe her, perhaps he thought that stranger things have happened. They did not carry the lamp. The moon’s radiance poured through all the shattered windows of the great ruin with a splendor that seemed a mockery of the imposing proportions, the despoiled decorations, the lavish designs of the fresco, the poor travesties of chandeliers, making shift here and there to return a crystal reflection where once light had glowed refulgent. Floyd-Rosney had sat silent for a moment, as if dumfounded. Then he slowly and uncertainly threw his legs athwart the bench and rose as if to follow. But the two had returned before he could leave the room, the “doubting Thomas” of an explorer with his hands full of tools and an expression of blank amazement on his face. “Somebody has been working at that wall,” he announced, as if he could scarcely constrain his own acceptance of the fact. “The wainscot has been freshly ripped out, but there is nothing at all in the hollow of the pilaster. Mrs. Floyd-Rosney examined it herself.” “You were looking for another find, eh?—like a cat watching a hole where she has just caught a mouse,” said Floyd-Rosney to his wife with his misfit jocularity. No one sought to reply. Every eye was on Adrian Ducie, who had found a cold chisel among the tools and was working now at the hinges and now at the lock, wherever there seemed best promise of entrance. The hinges were forced apart finally, the lock was broken, and once more the box was opened here where it was packed forty-odd years ago. A covering of chamois lay over the top, and as Adrian Ducie put it aside with trembling
- 78. fingers the lamplightgloated down on a responsive glitter of gold and silver, with a glint here and there, as of a precious stone. There was obviously insufficient room in the box for the vanished table service of the family silver, but several odd pieces of such usage were crowded in, of special antiquity of aspect, probably heirlooms, and thus saved at all hazards. The method of packing had utilized the space within to the fraction of an inch. Adrian drew out a massive gold goblet filled with a medley of smaller articles, a rare cameo bracelet, an emerald ring, an old seal quaintly mounted, a child’s sleeve-bracelets, a simple ornament set with turquoise, and a diamond necklace, fit for a princess. None of these were in cases, even the protection of a wrapping would have required more space than could be spared. “You know that face?” Ducie demanded, holding a miniature out to Floyd-Rosney, catching the lamplight upon it. “Can’t say I do,” Floyd-Rosney responded, cavalierly and with apparent indifference. “Perhaps Colonel Kenwynton will recognize it,” said Ducie, with composure. “Eh, what? Why certainly—a likeness of your grandfather, George Blewitt Ducie,—an excellent likeness! And this,” reaching for a small oval portrait set with pearls, “is his wife—what a beauty she was! Here, too,” handling a gold frame of more antiquated aspect, “is your great grandfather —yes, yes!—in his prime. I never saw him except as an old man, but he held his own—he held his own!” The miniatures thus identified and his right to the contents of the box established, Ducie continued to lift out the jammed and wedged treasures as fast as they could be disengaged from their artful arrangement. An old silver porringer contained incongruities of value, a silver mug of christening suggestions, a lady’s watch and chain with a bunch of jeweled jangling “charms,” a filagree pouncet-box, a gold thimble, a string of fine and perfect pearls with a ruby clasp, a gold snuff-box with an enameled lid. The up-to-date man thrust his monocle in his eye to better observe, with a sort of æsthetic rapture, the shepherds dancing in the dainty workmanship. There was an array of spoons of many sorts and uses, soup ladles, salt ladles, cream ladles, and several gold and silver platters. These had kept in place one of the old-fashioned silver coasters, which held contents of value that
- 79. the least æstheticcould appreciate. It was nearly half full of gold coin, worth many times its face value in the days when thus hidden away from the guerrilla and the bushwhacker. Every man’s eyes glittered at the sight except only those of Ducie. He was intent upon the search for the papers, the release of the mortgage that he had believed all his life was stowed away here. To every man the knowledge that he has been befooled, whether by foible or fate, is of vital importance. In many ways he has been influenced to his hurt by the obsession. His actions have been rooted in his mistaken persuasions. His mental processes issue from false premises. He is not the man he would otherwise have been. All his life Adrian Ducie had raged against the injustice that had involved in absolute oblivion the release of the mortgage, that had wrested from his father both the full satisfaction of the debt and the pledged estate as well. Otherwise he would have inherited wealth, opportunity, the means of advancement, luxury, pleasure. He was asking himself now had he made less of himself, the actual good the gods had doled out, because he had bemoaned fictitious values in case there had never been a release and the lands had gone the facile ways of foreclosure, the imminent, obvious, almost invariable sequence of mortgage. Ah, at last a paper!—carefully folded, indorsed. His grandfather’s will, regularly executed, but worthless now, by reason of the lapse of time. An administrator had distributed the estate as that of an intestate, and defended the action of foreclosure. The incident was closed, and the sere and yellow paper had not more possibility of revivification than the sere and yellow leaves that now and again came with sibilant edge against the windowpane, or winged their way on an errant gust within the room through a rift in the shattered glass. As Ducie flung the paper aside he chanced to dislodge one of the gold pieces, a sovereign, the money being all of English coinage. It rolled swiftly along the table, slipped off its beveled edge, and was heard spinning somewhere in the shadows of the great dusky room. More than one of the gentlemen rose to recover it, and Paula, with unbecoming officiousness, her husband thought, joined in the search. It was she who secured it, and as she restored the coin she laid a glittering trifle before the box, as if it, too, had fallen from the table. “Here is one of the Ducie jewels,” she said. “Why, it is a key, how cute,” cried Hildegarde.
- 80. Ducie had paused,the papers motionless in his hand. He was looking at Paula, sternly, rebukingly. Perhaps his expression disconcerted her in her moment of triumph, for her voice was a little shrill, her smile both feigned and false, her manner nervous and abashed, yet determined. “Oh, it is a thing of mystic powers,” she declared. “It commands the doors of promotion and pleasure, it can open the heart and lock it, too; it is the keynote of happiness.” She laughed without relish at the pun while the up-to-date man thrust his monocle in his eye and reached out for the bauble. There was a moment of silence as it was subjected to his searching scrutiny. “A thing of legend, is it?” he commented. “Well, I must say that it does not justify its reputation—it has a most flimsy and modern aspect, nothing whatever in conformity with those exquisite examples of old bijouterie.” He waved his hand toward the Ducie jewels blazing in rainbow hues, now laid together in a heap on the table. “Its value, why I should say it could not be much, though this is a good white diamond, and the rubies are fair, but quite small; it is not worth more than two hundred dollars or two hundred and fifty at the utmost.” Adrian Ducie had finally remitted his steady and upbraiding gaze, but Paula was made aware that he still resented unalterably and deeply her conduct to his brother. It was Randal’s option to forgive, if he would,— Adrian Ducie held himself aloof; he would not interfere. His hands were occupied in opening a paper as the up-to-date man tendered him the jeweled key, and this gave him the opportunity to decline to receive it without exciting curiosity. His words were significant only to Paula when he said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, perhaps, will kindly take charge of this article.” With unabated composure, with extreme deliberation, he opened this, the last paper in the box, which held an enclosure. The yellow glow of the lamp at one end of the table was a rayonnant focus of light amidst the gloom of the great, lofty apartment, and showed the variant expressions of the faces grouped about it. Floyd-Rosney, seated with one side toward the table, resting an elbow on its surface, had an air of tolerant ennui, his handsome face, fair, florid, and impressive, was imposed with its wonted fine effect against the dun, dull shadows which the lamplight could not dissipate, so definite that they seemed an opaque haze, a dense veil of smoke. The countenances of the others, less conscious, less adjusted to observation,
- 81. wore different degreesof intelligent interest. Hildegarde’s disheveled beauty shone like a star from the dark background of the big bow-window where she sat—through the shattered glass came now and then a glittering shimmer when the magnolia leaves, dripping and lustrous in the moonlight, tossed in some vagrant gust. Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s aspect was of a conventional contrast, as point-device as if she sat at table at some ordinary function. The sheen of her golden hair, the gleam of her white dress, her carmine cheeks, her elated and brilliant eyes, her attentive observation of the events as they deployed, were all noted in turn by her domestic tyrant, with a view to future reference. “I’ll have it out with Paula when we get away from here, if ever,” he said grimly within his own consciousness. The next moment he had incentive for other thoughts. Ducie scanned the caption of the paper in his hand, turned the page to observe its signature, then lifted his head. His voice, although clear, trembled. “Here is the release of the mortgage, duly executed and with the original deed of trust inclosed.” There was a moment of tense silence. Then ensued a hearty clapping of hands about the table. Floyd-Rosney satirically inclined his head to this outburst of involuntary congratulation. “Thank you, very much,” he said with an ironical smile. The group seemed somewhat disconcerted, and several attempted justification. “Always gratifying that the lost should be found,” said one. “Nothing personal to you, however.” “I am sure you, too, would wish the right to prevail,” said a priggish gentleman, who looked as if he might be a Sunday-school superintendent. “Well, I hate to see an old family kept out of its own on a legal quibble,” said one fat gentleman uncompromisingly; he knew better how to order a dinner acceptably than his discourse. “It will be difficult to prove an ouster after forty years of adverse possession,” said Floyd-Rosney, “even if the release or quit-claim, or whatever the paper is, shall prove to be entirely regular.” “You surely will not plead the prescription in bar of the right,” the broker seemed to remonstrate.
- 82. “Of the remedy,you mean,” Floyd-Rosney corrected with his suave, unsmiling smile. “I should, like any other man of affairs, act under the advice of counsel.” “Why, yes, of course,” assented the broker, accessible to this kind of commercial logic. However, the situation was so contrary to the general run of business that it seemed iniquitous somehow that the discovery of the papers restoring the title of this great estate to its rightful owners, after forty years of deprivation of its values, should be at last nullified and set at naught by a decree of a court on the application of the doctrine of the statute of limitations. There was a pervasive apprehension of baffled justice even before the paper was examined. Ducie was disposed to incur no further Floyd-Rosney’s supercilious speculations as to the contents of the paper. Instead, he spread it before Colonel Kenwynton. “Read it, Colonel,” he said, moving the lamp to the old gentleman’s elbow. It seemed that Colonel Kenwynton in his excitement could never get his pince-nez adjusted, and when this was fairly accomplished that he would be balked at last by an inopportune frog in his throat. But finally the reading was under way, and each of the listeners lent ear not only with the effort to discriminate and assimilate the intendment of the instrument, but to appraise its effect on a possible court of equity. For it particularized in very elaborate and comprehensive phrase the reasons for the manner, time, and place of its execution. It recited the facts that the promissory notes secured by the mortgage were in bank deposit in the city of Nashville, State of Tennessee, that the said city and State were in the occupation of the Federal army, that since the said notes could not be forwarded within the Confederate lines, by reason of the lack of mail facilities or other means of communication, the said promissory notes were herein particularly described, released and surrendered, the several sums for which they were made having been paid in full by George Blewitt Ducie in gold, the receipt of the full amount being hereby acknowledged, together with a quit-claim to the property on which they had been secured. For the same reason of the existence of a state of war, and the suspension of all courts of justice in the county in which the mortgage was recorded, and the absence of their officials, this release could not at that time be duly registered nor the
- 83. original paper markedsatisfied. Therefore the party of the first part hereunto appeared before a local notary-public and acknowledged the execution of this paper for the purposes therein contained, the reasons for its non-registration, and the lack of the return of the promissory notes. Colonel Kenwynton took careful heed of the notarial seal affixed, and the names of five witnesses who subscribed for added security. “Every man of them dead these forty-odd years and both the principals,” he commented, lugubriously. “Great period for mortality, the late unpleasantness,” jeered Floyd- Rosney. With a debonair manner he was lighting a cigar, and he held it up with an inquiring smile at the tousled Hildegarde on the sill of the bow- window, her dilated blue eyes absorbed and expressive as she listened. She gave him a hasty and transient glance of permission to smoke in her presence and once more lapsed into deep gravity and brooding attention. The incident was an apt example of the power of Fate. With the best mutual faith, with one mind and intention on the part of both principals in the procedure, with every precaution that the circumstances would admit, with the return of the original deed of trust, with a multiplicity of witnesses to the execution of the quit-claim and release, which would seem to preclude the possibility of misadventure, the whole was nullified by the perverse sequence of events. The papers were lost, and not one human being participating in the transaction remained to tell the tale. The solemn farce of the processes of the courts was enacted, as if the debt was still unsatisfied, and the rightful owner was ejected from the lands of his ancestors. “But for the casual recollection of your father, Julian Ducie, who was a child at the time his mother quitted Duciehurst, and this box of valuables was hidden here to await her return, there would not have been so much as a tradition of the satisfaction of this mortgage,” Colonel Kenwynton remarked in a sort of dismay. “I have often heard my father describe the events of that night, the examination of my grandfather’s desk by my Uncle Archie and Captain Treherne, and their discussion of the relative importance of the papers and valuables they selected and packed in this box; one of the papers they declared was in effect the title to the whole property. He was a little fellow at the time, and watched and listened with all a child’s curiosity. But he did
- 84. not know wherethey hid the box at last, although he was aware of their purpose of concealment, and, indeed, he was not certain that it was not carried off with the party finally to Arkansas, his uncle, Archie, and Captain Hugh Treherne rowing the skiff in which he and his mother crossed to the other side.” “Ah-h, Captain Hugh Treherne”—Colonel Kenwynton echoed the name with a bated voice and a strange emphasis. He had a fleeting vision of that wild night on the sand-bar, all a confused effect of mighty motion, the rush of the wind, the rout of the stormy clouds, the race of the surging river, and overhead a swift skulking moon, a fugitive, furtive thing, behind the shattered cumulose densities of the sky. He started to speak, then desisted. It was strange to be conjured so earnestly to right this wrong, to find this treasure, to visit this spot, and within forty-eight hours in the jugglery of chance to be transported hither and the discovery accomplished through no agency of his, no revelation of the secret he had promised to keep. “Yes, Captain Hugh Treherne,” assented Ducie. “He was known to have been severely wounded toward the end of the war, and as he could never afterward be located it is supposed he died of his injuries. Every effort to find him was made to secure his testimony in the action for the foreclosure of the mortgage.” “But he was not dead,” said Paula, unexpectedly. “ ‘Captain Treherne,’ that’s the very name.” “Why, Paula,” exclaimed Floyd-Rosney, astounded. “What do you mean? You know absolutely nothing of the matter.” “The robbers spoke of him,” she said, confusedly. “I overheard them.” Then with more assurance: “They derived their information from him as to the hiding-place. That’s how I found it out. Not that he disclosed it intentionally. They spoke as if—as if he were not altogether sane. They said that he could not remember. But in his sleep he talked ‘as straight as a string.’ ” “Oh, stuff and nonsense! You heard no such thing!” exclaimed Floyd- Rosney. “You are as crazy as he can possibly be.” The ridicule stimulated self-justification, even while it abashed her, for every eye was fixed upon her. Colonel Kenwynton looked at once eager, anxious, yet wincing, as one who shrinks from a knife.
- 85. “They did notunderstand the meaning of his sleeping words,” Paula persisted. “He spoke of pillar and base and pilaster and capital——” “Oh, oh,” exclaimed Floyd-Rosney, in derision. Paula had the concentrated look of seeking to shake off this embarrassment of her mental progress and to keep straight upon a definite trend. “They spoke, indeed, as if they had Captain Treherne in reach somewhere,—I wish I had remembered to mention this earlier,—as if he were to be forced to further disclosures if they should fail to find the treasure.” “Oh, this is too preposterous,” cried Floyd-Rosney, rising. He threw away the stump of his cigar into the old and broken fireplace. “I must beg of you, Paula, for my credit if not your own, to desist from making a spectacle of yourself.” Colonel Kenwynton lifted a wrinkled and trembling hand in protest. “I ask your pardon; Mrs. Floyd-Rosney will do no one discredit. I must hear what she has to say of this. The gentleman is my dear, dear friend. I had lost sight of him for years.” Then turning toward Paula: “Did I understand you to say, madam, that they spoke as if he were in their power?” The old man was gasping and his agitation frightened Paula. Her face had grown ghastly pale. Her eyes were wide and startled. “I wonder that I did not think of it earlier,” she said, contritely. “But it did not impress me as real, as the actual fact, I was so excited and alarmed. I remember now that they said they had gagged him,—I don’t know where he was, but they spoke as if he were near and they could produce him and force him to point out the spot. They had ‘brought him down,’—that was their expression,— for this purpose. Did they mean,—do you suppose,—he could have been near, in this house?” Colonel Kenwynton rose, the picture of despair. “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed, holding up his hands and wringing them hard. “That man saved my life at the risk of his own. And if, by blindness and folly, I have failed him at his utmost need, may God do as much to me and more when I call from out of the deep. The lamp! The lamp! Bring the lamp! Search the house—the grounds!” Captain Treherne had endured many hours of duress, of the torture of bonds and constraint, of dread, of cold, of hunger, but the terror of ultimate doom filled his heart when he heard the approach of roving footsteps, the
- 86. sound of voicesunnaturally loud and resonant, echoing through the bare rooms, when he saw a flickering glimmer of yellow light wavering on the ceiling but lost presently in gloom as the party wandered hither and thither through the vacant place. The miscreants who had overpowered and bound him were returning, he thought. In the impaired mental condition from which he had so long suffered, one of his great sorrows lay in his incapacity at times to differentiate the fact from hallucination. He could not be sure that the whole scene of ghastly violence through which he had passed was not one of the pitiable illusions of his mania, and he lay here bound and gagged and famished as treatment designed to mend his mental health. He sought to recall the aspect of the men who, as perhaps he fancied had brought him here,—his flesh crept with repulsion at the thought of them. One had the rolling walk of a sailor. Another was garbed like a jockey,— some brain-cell had perchance retained this image from the old half- forgotten associations of the race course. So much of the jargon of pathology he had picked up in his melancholy immurement in the sanatorium. But these impressions were so definite, so lifelike that if they should prove illusory and this experience another seizure of his malady it was worse than those that had beset him hitherto, when he had often had a lurking doubt of their reality, even while he had acted as if they were demonstrable fact. It was a terrible thing to harbor such strange discordant fancies. He remembered that during the day, he could not be sure of the time, he awoke from a sleep or swoon to find himself here (or, perchance, he had dreamed), bound and gagged, and the great rough figure of a gigantic negro standing in the doorway of the room gazing upon him with an expression of stupid dismay, and then of horrified fright. The negro disappeared suddenly,—many of the images present to the diseased brain of Captain Treherne were subject to these abrupt withdrawals. Afterward he saw, or, as he stipulated within himself, he thought he saw, through an open door, this swart apparition again, chasing and beating with a boat-hook a large white owl. Now and then, throughout the afternoon, he imagined he heard sounds, faint, distant; footsteps, voices and again silence. Deep into the weary night the hapless prisoner watched the moonlight trace the outline of the leafless vines outside upon the ceiling and wall. This was the only impression of which he was certain. He could not be sure what this seeming approach might mean; whether a fact, direful and dangerous, to which the
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