For the greater part of the nineteenth century Latin America was not only unable to render an ideal society, it struggled to muster a stable one. The republics may have won their independence but their victories came at the cost of ‘perennial instability’
(Williamson, 1992: 234).1 Latin America was increasingly identifi ed as the one place where man could fi nd refuge from the imperative to principled action. For British readers the chaos in Latin America offered a fantasy world of liberation. If, as Lord Curzon observed, the Empire provided an escape from ‘the sordid controversies and…depressing gloom of our insular existence’, how much more did Latin America offer (quoted in Bennett, 1953:
356–7)? Here, free from moral anxiety or legal restraint, personal and collective fantasies of power and fulfi lment might be indulged and enjoyed. As a consequence, for the greater portion of the British public, by the late nineteenth century Latin America had all but ceased to exist as a substantive geographical entity – if it had ever ‘existed’ for them in the fi rst place. A massive continent, peopled by millions, with a complex and extended history of sophisticated civilisation, Latin America had come to signify little more than moral regression, endemic political instability and the promise of adventure and escape.
In A Man of Mark (1885), Anthony Hope demonstrates that by the late 1880s these assumptions about Latin America were so deeply entrenched in Britain and the United States that subtle manipulations of their standard forms could be relied upon for comic effect and the articulation of sophisticated social critique.2 The narrator is coy about the precise location of the novel’s
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setting, the republic of Aureataland, conceding only that it lies somewhere ‘on the coast of South America, rather to the north – I mustn’t be more defi nite’ (Hope, 1885: 1). As it is his intention to map a moral and not a geographical landscape, Hope has no need to be more defi nite. His purpose in A Man of Mark is less to recount events than to critique the convictions that underlie their motive forces – the belief, pervasive by this time in Britain and the United States, that provenance is the key determinant of character and behaviour, that those who live in Latin America are inevitably contaminated by it. In appearing to endorse these views, Hope satirises the ways in which such received thinking has been used by westerners to excuse their own unconscionable behaviour, revealing thereby how Latin America has come to function as an alibi for western cupidity.
The principal attraction of Latin America for Hope’s protagonists is that while the traditional decencies of polite society hold fi rm, the restraints on public and private behaviour that they imply do not. The veneer of civility is a sham, barely concealing a society where, for the westerners who occupy its principal posts, anything goes. As long as they uphold their public role in the pantomime of social respectability each is free to indulge his or her most intimate desires. While the President, Marcus W. Whittingham, an American, affi rms his determination to transform Aureataland into ‘a truly modern state, instinct with the progressive spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race’ it is the pursuit of his own instinct for personal enrichment that occupies him, plundering the treasury to line his pockets (Hope, 1885: 2). He is enthusiastically abetted in his malfeasance by the other pillars of Aureataland society, the narrator, Martin, an English banker; McGregor, a Scot, second-in-command of the national army and the leader of the political opposition; and the woman they are all hungrily pursuing: the mysterious Signorina, also putatively of English extraction. Each upholds the ethics of business, the honour of the military and the decency of polite society by, respectively, embezzling, bullying and fucking their way to riches, power and prestige. Yet their single-minded pursuit of self-interest fails to satisfy them and as their plans go awry they turn on one another and plot their rivals’
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downfall. They seek to effect this not like men (or women) of honour, but by recourse to archetypally South American methods.
Presenting their private desires as public needs, they summon the mob to advance their interests by means of insurrection.3 Revolution in Aureataland, Hope thus demonstrates, is less a symptom of native immoderation or the expression of an irresistible will to anarchy than a means by which unscrupulous westerners might enrich themselves.
The novel’s comic functioning rests on the assumption that the moral incontinence of the protagonists can be explained by their environment, that while one might expect treachery, lies and violence from the locals, such behaviour from the Anglo Saxons is a measure of how the country has contaminated them. This view of Latin America underpins a complacent confi dence in the social and moral superiority of the west and it is Hope’s aim to expose this racist posturing by laying bare the lust and venality that lurk beneath the surface, ‘instinct with the progressive spirit of the Anglo Saxon race’. When Martin refl ects on the lies and threats that his fi nancial and political ventures have engendered, ruefully conceding that ‘these things are incidental to revolutions – a point of resemblance between them and commercial life’, Hope’s point is clear (Hope, 1885: 108). Aureataland may magnify the moral degeneracy of its leading citizens, but it does not explain it; it may provide a context for their excesses, but it does not cause them.
Accordingly Hope demonstrates that it might be more appropriate to regard Latin America as a mirror for the west’s failings and not an alibi for them, that it is less an ethical no man’s land than a detailed chart of our own moral vacuity.
In Savrola (1957/1897) Winston Churchill saw Latin America as a fantasy land of proleptic fulfi lment. Ostensibly concerned with events in the mythical republic of Laurania where ‘a liberal leader’, the eponymous Savrola, deposes ‘an arbitrary government only to be swallowed up by a socialist revolution’, it is the setting which lends signifi cance to this otherwise unremarkable tale.
Indeed whether Savrola can be regarded as a ‘South American’
novel at all is a moot point. The text makes a number of references to Laurania’s geographical position in relation to Europe, Africa
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and the Mediterranean, but, as in A Man of Mark, its specifi c location remains imprecise. Why it was so diffi cult to put Laurania on the map was explained in Churchill’s autobiography, My Early Life (1930), where, looking back on his composition of the novel 30 years earlier during his time as a subaltern in India, he
Figure 4 Winston Churchill’s Savrola (1958 edition)
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remembered having set it ‘in some imaginary Balkan or South American republic’ (Churchill, 1930: 161). South America and the Balkans may be geographically distant, but by the late nineteenth century when Churchill wrote the novel, no less than the early 1930s when he recollected the experience, it is clear that they were in political, social and moral terms scarcely distinguishable from one another – each a byword for Machiavellian politics, tribal antagonism and perpetual revolution.4 Laurania represents less a state than a state of mind. In this regard Churchill is typical of other British writers of his day: South America furnished him not with a precise geographical locus for events but an enabling narrative landscape within which his fantasies of political and personal fulfi lment might be realised.
In pursuit of his political ends Savrola aims to make the Lauranian public the servants of his will. His success in doing so is described in terms of a sexual conquest, with oratory the medium of their intercourse, the political platform the place of its consummation and Savrola’s voice and intelligence the emblems of his virility.5 Having roused the crowd with his opening sallies, Savrola asserts his command by denying his audience the immediate fulfi lment they crave, withholding from them ‘the outburst of fury and enthusiasm they desired’ (Churchill, 1957:
103). The test of his potency lies in his capacity, by pure power of speech, to bring the masses to the point where they identify his desires as the expression of their own most intimate needs and gratefully surrender themselves to his will:
He had held their enthusiasm back for an hour by the clock. The steam had been rising all this time. All were searching in their minds for something to relieve their feelings, to give expression to the individual determination each man had made. There was only one mind throughout the hall. His passions, his emotions, his very soul appeared to be communicated to the seven thousand people who heard his words. (Churchill, 1957: 104) Only at this point does he grant the people their collective release, as, ‘resonant, powerful, penetrating…he let them go’, each of the short verbal thrusts marking the climax of his speech
‘followed by wild cheering’, as the ‘excitement of the audience
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became indescribable’ and the ‘inevitable conclusion’ was ‘greeted with thunderous assent’ (Churchill, 1957: 104). Yes! Yes! Yes!
Savrola’s own response to this heroic feat of service is no less orgasmic. ‘The strain had been terrifi c. He was convulsed by his own emotions; every pulse in his body was throbbing, every nerve quivering, he streamed with perspiration and almost gasped for breath’ (Churchill, 1957: 104). The relationship, however, is an exploitative one and neither party respects the other in the morning. Savrola may pretend to serve the people but he is driven by a calculating assessment of what it is they can do for him (see Churchill, 1957: 37). When the people realise this, the socialist agitator Kreutze turns them into a marauding mob and it all ends in tears.
Yet even at this juncture the Lauranian public continue to serve Savrola’s quest for personal fulfi lment. Savrola’s discussions about the army’s African campaign with the dashing young cavalry offi cer, Lieutenant Tiro, have awakened in him a feeling of inadequacy for which no amount of political power can compensate:
Savrola felt as if he had looked into a new world, a world of ardent, reckless, warlike youth. He was himself young enough to feel a certain jealousy. This boy had seen what he had not; he possessed an experience which taught him lessons Savrola had never learned. Their lives had been different;
but one day perhaps he would open this strange book of war, and by the vivid light of personal danger read the lessons it contained. (Churchill, 1957: 74)
The fateful day comes sooner than Savrola had anticipated, when, having engineered the downfall of the dictator, the people turn against him and the republic slides towards chaos. Savrola fi ghts his way to the presidential palace in an effort to avert the massacre of his former political foes. The people who had so recently served to objectify his mastery now, through violent resistance to his advance on the palace, afford him the thrill of battle and the masculine fulfi lment this brings.
Churchill employs a neat inversion to dramatise this process of self-realisation and in doing so makes an important autobio-graphical point. He fi rst saw action, and proved his valour, as
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a young cavalryman in the mid 1890s in skirmishes along the Mamund Valley in the North West Frontier (Churchill, 1930:
141–54). Soon after returning from these manoeuvres, bored by the deadening routines of garrison life and dreaming of a brilliant future, he wrote the novel. Clearly, the Churchill of 1897 has far more in common with Lieutenant Tiro than he does with Savrola. If Tiro is the man that Churchill was in 1897, then Savrola is an ideal projected self. Yet there would be little narrative purchase, and less scope for romance or adventure, in detailing Tiro’s attainment of a position of high political offi ce.
Hence, Churchill inverts the sense of incompleteness that he feels – it is not military but political distinction he really pines for – projects this sense of inadequacy on to Savrola, and then has him attain private fulfi lment in the Lauranian civil war. His success thus comprises both a parable and a proleptic fulfi lment of Churchill’s vision of combining personal courage with public fame. However, for a junior cavalry offi cer in the British Empire of the late nineteenth century, even one as impeccably connected as Churchill, the opportunities to combine military distinction with political pre-eminence, to cut a swathe on the fi eld of war whilst also carving a path of infl uence through the corridors of power, were virtually non-existent. Hence his recourse to a South American setting, where the unlikely elements of this unique exercise in autobiography might fi nd plausible consummation.