María and the Historical Temporalities of Modernity

• In Event: Modernity, Education, and Science in Late 19th Century Literature and Culture

Abstract

The aim of my paper will be to reorient the dominant readings of Jorge Isaacs’s María, not in order to refute its fundamental engagement with the Colombian nation-state, but rather to attempt to demonstrate the way in which it presents a picture of Colombia as constrained not only by internal divisions, but also by its place in a worldwide industrial capitalist order. I will draw heavily from Peter Osborne’s The Politics of Time and John Kraniauskas’s discussion of conjuncture and disjuncture as ways of understanding the temporal dynamics of modernization in “Difference Against Development.” I read Efraín’s doomed attempt to return from London in order to save María as a spatial allegorization of the impossibility of bridging the gap between Colombia’s experience of the totalizing time of modernity and that of rapidly industrializing powers like Great Britain. What is at stake in María’s central romance, in other words, is not simply the union of different national factions, but the establishment of a new hegemony around Efraín’s modernization through education, a plan initiated and diligently pursued by his benevolent father. The failure of this romance, therefore, does not constitute an incomplete or failed modernization, but rather the fundamental impossibility of a harmonious modernization that could represent the interests of all the classes of Colombia’s plantation society.

Author

• Justin Knight