On the other hand, in the story’s actual unfolding, Lucía Jerez violently tears apart the amorous and familial bonds that the text’s numerous didactic asides place at the origins of social and political harmony. Not surprisingly, moreover, the misogyny that we found barely hidden in Martí’s chronicle in honor of Marx now comes to the foreground in the evaluation of Lucía’s potential attraction to Sol. Lesbianism indeed appears as the ultimate threat to Martí’s peculiar moralization of politics: the epitome of women’s autonomy from the constraints of family, reproduction, and heterosexuality. This is why the ultimate example of a “baneful friendship” within the fictive universe of Amistad funesta, as Lucía Jerez was first known, can be said to lie in the fatal attraction between two women or, even more forcefully, in the unrequited and ultimately murderous love of one woman for another. It is also why Lucía’s friendship seems to be driven by such a strong sense of the destructive potential of love, as even some of the earliest commentators were quick to point out.38
Finally, aside from causing major critics such as the Cuban Cintio Vitier to speak of a “case” in the clinical-pathological sense, Lucía’s desire is also a slap in the face of would-be organic intellectuals such as Juan Jerez, who is thus reduced to a state of utter inaction in which even the ideal of personal abnegation appears merely as a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to disguise powerlessness under the cloak of high-minded morality. Whence the peculiar combination of boastful martyrdom and self-sacrificing Quixotry:
There was in him a strange and violent need for martyrdom, and if, because of the superiority of his soul, he had great difficulty finding friends who would esteem and stimulate his mind, he who felt more of a need to give himself—since deep down he did not love himself at all and saw himself more as a property to others that he kept in deposit—gave himself over as a slave to anyone who seemed to love him or understood his delicate nature and wished nothing but good upon him.39
Whatever the reader makes of this strangely hysterical staging of desire in Lucía Jerez, the fact remains that the ideals of harmonious development are here allowed completely and unabashedly to fall apart. In spite of the deep reluctance about the genre to which he publicly confesses and which probably explains why he signs his “bad little novel” or noveluca under a female pseudonym, Martí almost seems to welcome the narrative constraints of the melodramatic format as a space in which he can work against the pressures put on him everywhere else by the strict normativity of his moral and political outlook.
As we will see in the following chapters, this melodramatic orientation will have great repercussions for the imagination of the political Left in Latin America throughout much of the twentieth century. In fact, together with the detective novel, melodrama seems to be one of the most tempting and recurrent forms for thinking politics today. In order to understand this, the traditional argument, according to which the melodramatic struggle over good and evil provided much-needed moral anchorage in the midst of the great social and political upheaval that shook Western Europe after the French Revolution, will have to be extended and transposed onto those more recent times of ours that are post-revolutionary in the much more radical sense of having lived through the decline and fall of the very idea of the revolution itself. “Even literature confronts the theme of the institutional revolution (for many the revolution betrayed) through melodrama or mythification,” as Carlos Monsiváis writes in an important essay, “Mexico 1890–1976: High Contrast, Still Life,” included in Mexican Postcards: “In melodrama dominant morality is extenuated and strengthened, governed by a convulsive, shuddering faith in the values of poetry.”40 On the other hand, in the pre-revolutionary context of Martí’s Lucía Jerez, as Marx and Engels also keenly intuited in their commentary from The Holy Family on The Mysteries of Paris by one of the subgenre’s most celebrated founders, Eugène Sue, and as Althusser would confirm much later in a central text in For Marx, melodrama provides an ideal speculative space in which to elaborate and experiment with the multiple effects of uneven development as the logic of the missed encounter—whereby the latter can be read not only as the result of Marx’s defective knowledge about Latin America, nor only as the tactical and strategic error for which Martí selectively yet also consistently reproaches Marx, but rather as the very structure of the capitalist mode of production.
Through a melodrama complete with a violently unhappy ending in the form of a murderous passage à l’acte, we thus arrive at the negation of all the regulative ideals of natural and harmonious development modeled upon the family or the hacienda. We could even take this argument one step further by arguing that in his only novel Martí, too, begins to catch a glimpse of the logic of the violently uneven development of modernity, just as Marx did a few years earlier in his writings on Ireland, India, or Russia. Thus, in light of Lucía Jerez, we would have to conclude that for Martí—in the realm of narrative experimentation perhaps no less than for a radical reading of Marx that could find inspiration in Freud’s and Lacan’s psychoanalysis—there is not, nor can there be in the current circumstances, any correspondence or adaptation between base and superstructure, or between the social relations of production and the economic distribution of fortunes and productive forces.
This is also, incidentally, the conclusion arrived at by someone like Slavoj Žižek, in his foundational book The Sublime Object of Ideology:
How do we define, exactly, the moment—albeit only an ideal one—at which the capitalist relation[s] of production become an obstacle to the further development of the productive forces? Or the obverse of the same question: When can we speak of an accordance between productive forces and relation[s] of production in the capitalist mode of production? Strict analysis leads to only one possible answer: never.41
A strict interpretation of psychoanalysis thus would turn a historical obstacle into an inherent one that can never be overcome. In all the hitherto existing history of humankind, then, there would be no agreement except in disagreement, no harmony except in conflict, and no encounter except in a missed encounter.
In fact, a similar conclusion had already been reached in For Marx by Althusser, for whom “the great law of unevenness suffers no exceptions,” for the simple reason that it appears to be a universal law of the development of any social formation whatsoever:
This unevenness suffers no exceptions because it is not itself an exception: not a derivative law, produced by peculiar conditions (imperialism, for example) or intervening in the interference between the developments of distinct social formations (the unevenness of economic development, for example, between “advanced” and “backward” countries, between colonizers and colonized, etc.). Quite the contrary, it is a primitive law, with priority over these peculiar cases and able to account for them precisely in so far as it does not derive from their existence.42
This primitive or originary fact of unevenness would help explain why the discoveries of Marx and Freud, even more so than with Columbus’s, have been compared with the upheavals caused by the Copernican revolution. Just as Marxism shows that “the human subject, the economic, political or philosophical ego, is not the ‘center’ of history,” so does strict analysis show that “the human subject is decentered, constituted by a structure that, too, has a ‘center’ solely in the imaginary misprision of the ‘ego,’ that is, in the ideological formations in which it ‘recognizes’ itself.”43 And yet, when the decentering effects of unevenness are thus posited as insuperable facts, as primitive laws, or as quasi-ontological conditions of being as such, do we not also lose out on the potential for change that would seem to be the outcome of uneven development for Marx and Martí? Does this potential for radical change, including a change in the mechanism of the whole existing social structure itself, necessarily depend on the positing of an ideal of natural harmony and organicity to be established or restored—with everything that such a restorative ideal entails, for example, in terms of the exorcism of violence, including domestic violence, which then always threatens to come back with a vengeance, as in Martí? Alternatively, does the potential for change depend on a humanist appeal to subjective freedom, allegedly disavowed in the structuralist account of uneven development? Is the humanism of the young Marx then necessarily