Frontierwhorlroamer: Eugene Jolas’s Cosmopoetics

It is essentially the story of a Man from Babel who seeks, through linguistic, psychological and philosophical struggles, an occidental unity within himself and the world around him; who believes finally that the Occident is One, and that the Columbian reality represents the hope for a new dynamic synthesis of races and languages. Eugene Jolas, Synopsis for an Autobiography [1] The article analyzes Eugene Jolas’ two multilingual poems “Frontier-Poem” (1935) and “America Mystica” (1937) in the transnational context of European Union and hemispheric conceptualizations of the Americas to show how Jolas worked towards a new paradigm and terminology to name the transnational identities created through mass migrations and unstable boundaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With poetic sensibility forged at the confluence of the utilitarian jargon of journalism and the irrepressible plurality of the collective unconscious, Jolas’s cosmopoetics offered the universal language of Atlantica, which, paradoxically, was to be both all-inclusive (consisting of essences of all idioms in the world) and universally spoken. Only such a language promised literary expression for the “frontierwhorlroamer”, whose poetics grew out of linguistic mixtures of transcontinental wandering.

Cosmopoetics, translingualism, genre, code switching