This work consists of a number of articles that the author published as far back as the mid-1950s over the course of his fertile career as an explorer in the history of ideas and culture of Ibero-America. Richard Morse is, in many ways, an odd bird among Latin Americanists of today. He is, above all, a comparativist, perhaps the only true comparativist among us. He has the advantage in his trans-Atlantic frames of reference of a solid training in medieval and early modern European history. And he is among the few historians of ideas in the field. This volume is enriched with added dashes of musings on the subject of Latin American culture and its study, particularly in the last entry, “McLuhanaíma: The Solid Gold Hero.” Here he promises us that, after an assiduous career attending scientific congresses, including the International Congress of Americanists and those of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of the Sciences and the Latin American Studies Association, he “made a creative composite of their speechways, choosing only those lexical items that are bereft of any recognizable denotation. The result is a ‘modern’ scholarly monograph composed centuries before its time” (p. 233). It is also terribly—and soon predictably—tongue-in-cheek.
The more serious chapters deal with the idea of language not only as a purveyor of culture but as a construct through which to investigate the notions of self-realization on the part of the Latin American intelligentsia and political elites. Another chapter compares four modernist poets: William Carlos Williams, Oswald de Andrade, T. S. Eliot, and Mário de Andrade. Once again, the media of understanding are the usages of language and their cultural contents, English and Portuguese.
The chapter entitled “Puerto Rico: Eternal Crossroads” is a revised and updated version of a work that appeared in 1960. Morse is enamored of the island, where he spent many years at the University of Puerto Rico. In this essay, with its sometimes pungent and sharp jabs at those who criticize Puerto Rican culture for its “lack of civilized ideals,” he singles out Raymond Carr for his limited, if dispassionate, understanding of the island. Morse entreats the Puerto Rican people and leadership to shape their own political and national image rather than to continue bowing to the more powerful winds of the mainland.
A reading of this volume is a journey into Richard Morse’s iconoclastic but ample mind over the course of several decades that spanned the development of Latin American studies from the infancy of the field to its more scientific, which is to say more empirically based, present.
