The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 26, 1994 by David Martin

By Claudio Veliz (California, 267 pp., $35)

THERE and a half centuries ago, the English-speaking settlers of the New World clung to the scraggy margins of the American Northeast while the Spaniards explored everywhere, creating an imposing civilization from Santiago to California. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the balance of power and wealth had been decisively reversed and since then the situation has hardly changed at all. There is a world of difference between El Paso and Tijuana. Claudio Veliz sets out to show why.

His argument is that the Spanish and British have been the two really serious empires of recent centuries, at least in terms of what they left behind. What remains of the former is a continent dotted with a multitude of magnificent churches and plazas, while what remains of the latter is a world language and a multitude of signifiers deriving from the Industrial Revolution and pluralism. These signifiers have proved attractive far beyond the bounds of English-speaking settlement.

What is crucial is adaptability and the capacity to devise what other people want. With a nice sense of provocation, Mr. Veliz claims that whatever their differences, all the English-speaking countries "are islands off the coast of Kent; the cliffs of Dover can be seen as clearly from Cincinnati as from Edmonton, Wellington, and Ballarat." He then says that these various English-speaking countries share more with one another than any of them shares with any other cultural tradition and goes on to specify what the shared traits are.

English speakers dislike regulation from the center and bureaucracy in general; they enjoy volunteering; they are passionate about nature and pseudo-rural suburbs; they are enthusiasts for every variety of hobby from gardening to bush trekking, from cat fancying to bird watching. A summary focus of all this would be the Common Law tradition and the fact that the English language is unregulated by any regal academy. The Hispanic world with its centralized tradition of Civil Law and its Spanish Academy is something completely different. To these summary differences must be added voluntarism versus inclusiveness in religion and fragmented oligarchy versus monarchical absolutism.

Mr. Veliz expounds two corollaries of his thesis: the supreme importance of language as the stream that bears along the various signifiers, and the importance of where these signifiers originated. The second of these is not going to be popular, and he will need all the adventitious gain of being a Chilean to avoid ending up an academic Saint Sebastian. It is simply not done to celebrate white European origins, to suppose that empires weave the web of vast civilizations, to assume that civilizations are such a web, or to use the word "civilization" with unabashed aplomb. Above all, Mr. Veliz commits a crime of first-degree political incorrectness by blaming the condition of Latin America largely on its culture rather than on North American economic predation.

But, as John Donne said of sin, "I have more." Not only is Veliz one of those cosmopolitan polyglots who exploit a boundless confidence in the rhetorical possibilities of standard English, but he does so to celebrate the infinite variety of the demotic. As for all his references to Male, Panofsky, Wolfflin, and the rest, they decorate the proposition that however well based a cultural superiority may be it avails you nothing in the marketplace. Unamuno can stay high on his plinth while the vulgar English-speakers go about devising what others want--from soccer to tourism, from rock music to the VCR and McDonald's.

I predict that ill-natured reviewers will pretend not to understand Veliz's use of metaphor, in spite of his careful deflections and erudite footnotes. He makes effective use of Isaiah Berlin's distinction between the hedgehogs, who know one thing, and the foxes, who know many, assigning the former role to the Spanish-speakers and the latter to the English-speakers. But then Mr. Veliz is seduced by the idea of using the Baroque, especially the figure of the unified, all-encompassing dome, as an architectural metaphor of the Counter-Reformation. So far, fairly good, because he is able to argue--just a little bit inconsistently--that whatever the Italian origins of the Baroque, much of the essential energy of the Counter-Reformation was provided by the Spanish, especially the Jesuits.

But the double metaphor of a Baroque hedgehog now requires a duplex alternative: the Gothic fox. This allows the reader to indulge any number of art-historical objections when what Mr. Veliz really has in mind is a cultural translation of Pevsner's comments on the additive, dispersed quality of English late Gothic, and Ruskin's meditations on the moral implications of the Gothic: individuality, changeability, nonchalance, unorganized redundancy, delight in the ludicrous, and so on. To this Veliz adds a contrast between an English Romantic delight in nature and the haughty urbanity of the Hispanic Baroque. By this time I suspect the Baroque hedgehog may still be safely immobile but the Gothic fox will be pursued by a critical hue and cry. Yes, there is an astonishing Romantic attachment to the Gothic and to nature in Anglo-American civilization, but the ill-natured critic is bound to ask about "Gothic" Romanticism in Germany and Palladian classicism in Anglo-America.