Muses and the Gazette: Andrés Bello’s Poetics of Revolutionary News
In a sonnet titled, “May God Keep Me in Glory” (Dios me tenga en gloria) (ca. 1818),
Venezuelan intellectual Andrés Bello responds to the inaccurate trickle of
revolutionary news that arrives in London
from the Spanish American battlefields. Telling the story of an independence
leader who safely escapes from South America to London only to learn that the “official
gazette” of the Spanish government lists him as having been killed in battle
along with all of his soldiers, the poem takes a sarcastic slant. The leader
reads breathlessly the news of his own demise before finally exclaiming “May
God keep me in glory” in an ironic self-epitaph.
Here it is the newspaper, that vehicle of the imagined
community so central to Habermas and Anderson’s
concepts of nationhood that proves an unreliable source of truth. Where
journalism (and with it the Aristotelian concept of the historian) proves
unable to deliver factual truth, the poet steps in, not to give an idealized
version of history, but rather the real facts that the gazette prefers to
avoid. The sonnet also carries the seeds of an argument for the implicit virtue
of the revolutionary ethos, contrasting its own frankness with the deception
practiced by colonial newspapers. Later, in “Frangments
of a Poem Titled America” (Fragmentos
de un poema titulado América), Bello asks the
muses to leave Europe behind and take up
residence in the Western hemisphere. For Bello,
I will argue, the muses are needed to help with the revolutionary task of
putting out a version of events designed to counter those offered by the
colonialist press. Well acquainted with the generic hierarchy in which the poet
occupies an elevated location as the deliverer of news whose truth claims are
transcendent, Bello creates a powerful vision of the revolutionary
poet as an inspired instrument more elevated and virtuous than the politically
tainted gazette. Thus, the meta-poem in which the speaker describes the
inadequacy of press coverage and the muses’ natural tendency to follow the
revolutionary perspective puts the poem’s cultural capital to work as an
argument for the virtue of the independence movement against the
small-mindedness of its adversaries.