Literature and Revolution
			  -by Fernando Alegria-
			 translated by D. Ohmans
			   (c) copyright 1997

       Text imprint - Mexico City, Fondo de Cultura Economica, (c1970)

                           Table of Contents

       I.    Literature and Revolution
       II.   Portrait and Self portrait:
             The Hispano-american Novel Confronted with Society
       III.  "Der Zauberberg" in the Literature of Latin America
       IV.   Miguel Angel Asturias, Novelist of the Old and the
             New Worlds
       V.    Alejo Carpentier: Magic Realism
       VI.   Rayuela: or, Order out of Chaos
       VII.  Cesar Vallejo: The Mestizo Masks
       VIII. Parra anti Parra
       IX.   Anti-literature
       X.    Antipoetry

Chapter 1 - Literature and Revolution

     Each time with greater insistence, and suggesting a certain aggressiveness
of tone, I have heard at university forums and in meetings of writers,
questions that seek to establish the authenticity of experimentation,
innovation and the revolutionary dynamism of existing Hispano-american
narrative. Of these questions I remain with the simplest and, for me, most
directly revelatory: who among the vanguard novelists of today are those who
open roads, who are genuinely revolutionary and representative of a new style?
This question, to my way of thinking, assumes a series of key premises already
present, directly or indirectly, in the taste of those students and critics who
are reluctant to entertain cats as tigers. Such premises are:
     1) During a period of our social history in which profound revolutionary
changes are imposed with axiomatic necessity, we have seen that some forms of
artistic expression, in a process of reaction when confronted by bourgeois
reality, entered into crisis when they attempted to create the image of a new
reality.
     2) The exponents of these forms to which I refer used with abundance,
efficiency and boldness, technical instruments already tested, in the
conviction that if they had been useful in the midst of a social crisis fifty
years ago, they could be so again if astutely manipulated.
     3) It is evident that, by themselves, the technical instruments of the
great cultural renovation at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of
the 20th do not suffice to create a revolutionary art after 1950.
     4) It is entirely possible for a writer to appear today bearing advanced
techniques and be a retrained, decadent reactionary.
     5) Revolutionary techniques in art are the product of a revolutionary
conception of the world. They exist and prove their worth solely in the measure
that they affect and change society and the artist in their most intimate and
authentic reality.
     Naturally, I depart from the premise that the writers alluded to in my
initial question are revolutionaries in political terms who believe in
depicting in some manner our era of social changes through their literary work.
If one of them were to confess himself interested exclusively in the interior
play of his aesthetic adventure, to the exclusion of all social connotation,
kept in orbit by the ingenuity of its own mechanism and the equilibrium of its
air currents, our discussion would not touch him and he could look at us very
remotely with the silent and obscure comfort that the infinite space offers. On
the other hand, a writer who lives the revolution from inside will not be able
to avoid, if he is sincere, asking himself how his work operates in the new
social organization and what is expected from him within the dynamism of the
revolution.
     And now, if this writer represents an old art in the service of the
revolution I imagine that he puts his work beneath a searchlight and examines
it carefully; he dismantles notebooks, detaches pages, isolates sentences; he
strikes words and makes them ring like coins; he looks at his hands; he remains
a long time silent; he shows his anguish, now that no one observes it. He asks,
what have I created? Then, the searchlight turns into a mirror and, in front of
it, the writer begins to undress. It is a cruel "strip-tease." It will be part
of a public chronicle. Because our hero has stepped onto the stage. One sees
the inner tubes of lard that hang from his chest like three or four large
rings, vast, buoyant, expanding from the navel and surmounting, like a soft
informal coat, some loose and insecure legs. He raises his arms in a gesture of
modesty, but his arms have forgotten this gesture and, instead, blot the sky
with a dense and grotesque gelatin. He turns with authority. He makes a full
turn on his little axis of white feet, without callouses. A glance at his back
reminds one of an ancient photo of some tropical volcano among the clouds. He
has been a dance step of another era; now he is rigid, graceless, sick.
Nevertheless, in its bottomless fattiness that the mirror reflects, this body
unfolds, or multiplies; at no point is it nothing or limited, nor is it
composed solely of forms - in addition, colors and sounds are added, such that,
in an instant, the image takes control of its own disordered liberty, dominates
it and easily breaks from the orbit that would have contained it. The writer
then takes his notebook and performs a thorough self-criticism, a splendid,
turbulent and bloody operation that serves to redeem a generation, a bath in
the good liquid for the baptism of bullets. In this self-questioning he feels
and knows that he is not alone; in novels, essays, poems and theatre pieces he
and his companions wash themselves, refresh themselves, fumigate themselves,
burn their clothing and expose their flesh to the waiting examination of the
absolutists and impatients who constitute their public.
     Traditional impressionist criticism retires ashamed and disconcerted
before this process of self-recrimination. It does not understand the
superimposed images, the multiple expositions, the from the confessional
echoes of voices that emerge. It yields to a deviation from that structuralism
which, to get to the root of the passions, separates, orders, classifies,
focuses and projects the constitutive elements of the mechanical apparatus of
the literary work, in the hope that the author, like God, will be present in
each part of his creation and, if he will not allow being photographed, at
least will allow his breath to be felt among the fingers of the critic.
     For a work closed into its own particularistic system of images, symbols
and voices, nothing is better than a custodial manipulator of keys, but not of
fantasies, a wise night watchman who patrols familiar corridors, upstairs and
down, jealously noting the hour so as to prove that, despite all the
provocations, he never left the building, always respected his contract.
     Thus, a work that attains to no other reality than that of its content,
that activates itself of itself and for itself, finds acceptance in a critique
that is aware of its alienation as an essential condition of the work's
existence and, perhaps, of its future existence. Nor does it presume
originality, either. On the contrary, it hopes to represent in an historical
development the layered planes of Kafka, shall we say for example, or the
hermetic current of Joyce, the simultaneity of Faulkner, and on to the chaotic
particularism of Gombrowicz. Not to do these things would be its perdition. To
do them in excess clarifies the road. And from there to the affection of this
critical system for the authors who handle literature like a barrage of
combining forces, hitherto invisible.
     Another type of creator, one who through the translucence of his work
wants to see how he has touched the world, will view these observations with
sadness. He will consider the effort to discover the programming of a novel
with one's disdain towards an adult who insists on participating in the play of
a child. But he will abandon this pampered insanity without remorse. Rejecting
it, he himself will look for his own keys, or will wait for another creator to
illuminate them. Therefore when structuralism bears critical fruit in Latin
American literature it will be because it has come to a halt, by its own weight
and according to its own flight, at the hands of novelists or poets.
     The super-technicians of the existing Hispano-american novel are seen to be
each time more aligned with an advanced critique, aggressive and implacable,
that recognizes no sanctity in the play of rhetoric. They are obliged to defend
themselves and this they do with brilliance in their labyrinthine plaza of
combat; throwing on the scales the extent to which literature has served in
past confrontations between decadence and revolution; emptying the mausoleums
of their classical antiquity and recharging their batteries from the statues;
pasturing with gluttony at the mangers of the medieval stable, of Victorian
realism, of the leafleteers and Gothic romanticism; sacking with a passion now
Melville, now Joyce, now Kafka, now Faulkner, now Hesse, now Gombrowicz, now
Camus, now Lowry, now Nabokov, now Grass and, when the reserves are used up,
Mailer and Burroughs. In this desperate attempt to swallow everything for
self-actualization the fibers tighten and, literally speaking, forces of
laziness are expelled; they fill their receptacles, load their catapults, amass
silver and defiantly resist the frontal attack that is already on its way.
Nevertheless, the contest is unequal. The receptacle is a dish of sand; the
catapult is a boomerang; the silver is only paper money. Their days are
counted.
     But we see another case: that of the artist who in his work has defined a
style of life and, socially, has identified with it; for whom the act of
creation is a transmutation of life to the transcendent order of aesthetic
reality, and who in this act tries to give an image of the decisive conflict
which has been his confrontation with the world. He knows that recourse to
technique, and the overall richness of tradition, are no more than tools and
marvelous keys with which he goes along opening doors known and unknown, and
when these keys no longer work he forges others in keeping with his anxiety and
urgency of discovery. This man puts his artist's destiny on the balance which
will weigh the greatness of his adventure in the world which wishes to judge,
change, dissolve; in the splendor of the unique image where there burns,
perhaps, the tragic nobility of his fiasco. Confronting society this man
reflects, fights, creates. Suddenly, in a university salon a voice is raised
and, unmistakably, shouts to him:

     "The revolution isn't made with poems."

     Neruda, for example, answers saying that Commander Guevara, making the
revolution in Bolivia, in addition to rifle, bullets, machete, medicine and
technical books, carried with him some poems from Canto General which he had
copied by hand, and other original poems of his own.
     I have thought about this reply, in its deceptive simplicity, in the
complex of personal factors that it hides. One could believe that it redeems
Guevara, but does not justify Neruda; nevertheless, in 1970, at age 66, when
all the world venerates him and heap honors at his feet, and his "Isla Negra"
softens and settles and shines with the effulgence of a monument, Neruda does
not hesitate to accept the mandate of his party, the Communist, that proclaims
him the candidate for the Presidency of the Republic; he leaves on campaign,
traverses Chile, enters political battle with vigor, in a disciplined and total
presentation. Yes, I already know, an election struggle is not the same as a
guerrilla. But then, the shout at the university was badly conceived and
expressed. It should have stated: "Revolution is not made with elections."
Because with poetry, it is accomplished. Neruda, among others, proves this.
What is essential are not the activities of devotion or protest, but the
undeniable fact that those activities are the immediate and obvious expression
of a genuinely revolutionary poetry. A poem such as that which Neruda dedicates
to the United Fruit Company, for example, is not an exclamation, it is an
integral element of a work of art that, through the years, has gone stripping
man, moving barriers, discovering cities, reshaping history, lighting secret
passages, uncovering bodies, dethroning myths, disinterring, arming,
approaching, causing to touch, wound and conceal unities which, at last, give
us a sense of who we were, are and can be in our american reality.
     Neruda's poetry functions within a revolutionary conception of the world;
that is why it responds to political circumstance with the same fire and the
same power as to a supreme historical occasion; the exclamation is, in truth, a
vision, in which the elements of a philosophical conception and of an aesthetic
expression, are unified, realized and harmonized.
     Otherwise, I think upon the political activities of writers such as Bosch,
Sabato, Roa Bastos, Vinas and Revueltas, and think that they represent very
much the value as exclamation of an aesthetic position. The importance of their
action should be underlined according to its two motives: first, because if we
were to believe the criticisms fruitlessly associated with the narrative
movement of the last years, there does not exist a revolutionary tradition (in
the sense of experimental, innovative, transcendent) in the Latin American
novel; second, because if we accept the relevance of this tradition already in
the generations of the twenties and of the forties the position of the writers
of today who do represent a true change in our literature, not only is
insufficient to return them to their ascendancy, but also enriches and
debilitates them. Let us try, then, to respond to the basic question of this
essay interesting ourselves in that of essence and permanence that the Latin
American novel shows in its revolutionary suggestions, clarifying from the
beginning that we are not considering an ascendant movement, nor do we posit a
criterion of "super-effect," but attempting simply to test the ebb and flow
within the reality of a world in crisis and the literary forms that attempt to
express it.
     On an immediate plane the differences between a novelist of regionalism of
the first half of the 20th century and a novelist of mid-century are evident.
Nevertheless, beyond the initial impression, those differences begin to lose in
significance. Fine points aside, the student should be warned that many factors
have changed in name, but not intent; their function, at bottom, is the same,
even if the mobility of the real environment imposes upon them a continual
adaptation, it is worth adding, of useful diversification. Which could be,
then, the distinctive factors for establishing with some precision the line of
creatively revolutionary development in the Latin American novel of the 20th
century? I refer to factors that, at first sight, differentiate but which,
judged thoroughly, unite. Among various I choose three: technique, language and
stance of the narrator.
     To consider the first of these factors let us focus upon the work of two
novelists separated by more than forty years of age: Romulo Gallegos and Mario
Vargas Llosa. If anyone tells us with a certain truth that it is impossible to
conceive the plains and the city of Vargas Llosa without the plains and the
city of Gallegos, we could express our agreement, but adding immediately: they
are the same, and they are not. Obviously, Gallegos' realism (that of his
generation) is direct and descriptive; it is formulative. Its expression
acquires historical grandeur in the perfection of a pictorial technique: that
of tile fresco mural. The realism of Vargas Llosa (and that of his generation
as well) is indirect: with him one approaches reality by its interstices, not
by its panoramic surface; one looks for the sense and the aesthetic order
throughout the chaos that surrounds us. To the reality through the action,
could be the motto of a technique such as that of Vargas Llosa. I have here a
novelist who eliminates the motivation of the word and the explicative
transition; he uses, instead, a technique that is characteristic of the film.
But, while the film traditionally validated itself with clever symbols to
allude to reality (the leaves of a calendar fly off indicating the passage of
time; a train is used and goes through diverse cities to suggest space), in the
technique of Vargas Llosa, whose antecedents are found in Joyce and Faulkner,
one scene is not followed by another; the scenes are simultaneous, the product
of a photo montage, of double, triple and multiple exposition.
     The reality of a novelist like Gallegos stands in front of the reader;
that of Vargas Llosa unfolds. The difference is not one of authenticity, but or
technique in their presentation. The documentary worth of both is equally
incontestable.
     It is necessary to add the following to the novelists of the Mexican
Revolution, as to those of the Russian Revolution or the Spanish Civil War (and
didn't the same occur to the chroniclers of the Conquest?) the urgency of
testifying impelled them to a technique that applies today to the documentary-
novel, that is to say and following the cinematographic terminology, they used
the form of the "documentary of large horizon." Their reality, to not be
episodic ceases to be specific, personal, novelistic. Of interest to note is
that the direct forerunners of Gallegos, and those of Azuela, had efficacy as
much literary as social precisely because of their indifference to
demonstration.
     From a literary point of view, it is even more fascinating to consider how
techniques such as simultaneity of scenes with its verbal counterpart, the
interior monologue, were already used in novels such as El satiro by Vicente
Huidobro and, some years later in narratives by Onetti, Asturias and
Carpentier. These and other novelists of the decades of the twenties and the
thirties developed what is called the open novel which in Spain, furthermore
had its proponents in Azorin and Baroja.
     If by examining the use of techniques one can ascertain an evolutionary
line, accepting some instances as non-characteristic anticipations, by
examining language, the second distinctive factor, this line is difficult to
identify. There is no room for doubt that the use of language is the factor
most profoundly specific to the contemporary Latin American narrative: the act
of creation has again become a magical use of the word; to name, not to
describe, once again constitutes the power that gives life.
     The language of realism of the 19th century and of regionalism of the 20th
fulfilled its function to the extent that it reconstructed in the literary work
a world that it offered through typical forms, of concrete, immediate
signification and of predicted duration. The cities in this realism had,
additionally, an animating meaning and a social connotation over and above the
overall human relation of the passive individual. Neither the man nor the part
of the world was what gave significance to a novel of Naturalism, for example,
but rather the total problematic and its characteristic social mark. Between
the language, the problematic and that milieu there existed a geometrical
dependence. Certain passions demanded certain words, just like certain kinds of
passages required certain kinds of exclamations; in Latin America the result
was an eloquent rhetoric of the country and of the city, a type of realistic
epic of high graphic power, but of scant interior dynamism; a very limited
viaduct for torrents of uncontrollable force.
     For another thing, this essentially descriptive language was paradoxically
the basic condition of a serious distortion of reality: because words such as
prairie, mountain, river, plain, acquired a fixed conceptual value within a
rhetoric which, backhandedly, assigned them a human meaning in accord with what
they considered the Latin American problem. Such that, for years, one could see
in those syllables nothing but forces of a supernatural machine inimical to
man; or spaces where hibernated images of a tradition which should have
recanted for social ends. A use of language destined to show us a real world,
ended in covering and mooting this world beneath an unreal decoration.
     The spoken language of the regionalist novel at once converted --perhaps
at its inception--into a literary recourse that was to function harmoniously
with the descriptive rhetoric: it was necessary to establish categories and
cause the cleric, the owner, the "campesino," the indian and the worker to
speak in typical, pure idioms that were the phonetic remedy of a speech whose
reality no longer is supplied in fixed molds and whose essence is change. The
primary mission of the anti-rhetorical narrator was, then, to try to re-create
the living language, to re-discover the primary usages and meanings, to
drastically reduce the slackness of this language that, as Cortazar says in
Rayuela (1), arrives to us already falsified and ruined by its ignoble coupling
with a reality which is also false; it was to search out this intimate,
unmanageable relation, with the world that surrounds us, as Vallejo had already
done, completely, arduously, tragically, in his poetry of brief affirmations.
To call things by their name so that they return to life and again have the
sense of our reality.(2)
     When language was given over into this basic condition of truth an
unawaited effect was produced: what was real vibrated poetically, a new tension
appeared in the Latin American novel, set intrinsically in the language; a
tension that we had been used to recognizing in certain poetry (Huidobro,
Neruda, Vallejo, De Rokha, Paz) but not in prose; high tension that expands in
power to a narrative torrent and maintains the pressure in its tumultuous
movement; a tension which conditions the pellucid, "Brief on the Blind" of
Ernesto Sabato, and is the key to the mythologizing in the stories end novels
of Rulfo and Arguedas, and that transmutes into magic the class consciousness
and objectivity of Garcia Marquez.
     Nevertheless, one who tries to simulate this tension by filling his
language with metaphors and lyrical explosions, runs an enormous danger;
because it is not the result of an outside pressure, but of an intimate,
indivisible unity, in which language and action exchange their dynamic power,
in their upsetting movement beneath the deceiving surface. There is a poetic
density which seems to be an essential condition of the tension to which I
refer and which is not a product of the voice only, but also of the meaning in
it and its genius of communication.
     However in the most specific functional plane--that of concretion--,
narrative speech changed its orientation, its structure and its power of
symbolic progression. Since then, it applies to reality neither as a mold which
should condition it to make it recognizable, nor as a metaphoric charge which
must artificially move reality from outside. The language, like reality itself,
exists within the action. It does not try to pursue a story by loading it with
the meanings that traditionally functioned in accord with a preconceived
chronology; nor does it try to bring in this story marginally. Act and word, in
whatever plane of time they occur, co-exist in all the simultaneity, the
imprecision, the anachronistic quality, the visionary revelation, of our
knowledge and our experience of reality. This is the kind of language that
already in Huidobro (El satiro, Tres inmensas novelas, Cagliostro), Asturias
(Hombres de maiz), Carpentier (Los pasos perdidos, El reino de este mundo, El
acoso), established a complex of multiple meanings within the most objective
reality, inducing the critic to speak of a Latin American magic realism. It is
the liberated language that allows Lezama Lima to create a baroque personal
world on the inside of another baroque historical world, It is the language of
the psychological ambiguity laden with passion of Onetti; the language of
measured, bourgeois absurdism of Juan Emar; that of the national amalgam and
metaphysical contrast of Marechal; that of the existential crisis and the
romantic vision of Sabato.
     In no other Latin American narrative work does that language perform a
miracle of communication so subtle yet, at the same time, so complex, as in
that of Rulfo and Garcia Marquez. In one case, that of Rulfo, the most simple,
precise and ordinary language, without dilation nor obvious transitions, nor a
visible transmutation, transports reality, with all its beings and all its
things, to a level of absolute mystery. In the other, that of Garcia Marquez,
the magical unreality of an historical vision is identified to such a degree
with the classical form of narrative discourse, that madness and fantasy
become filled with order while order shines with the lights of chaos. Their use
of language has made of Rulfo and Garcia Marquez supreme creators of myths.
     It remains to be said, in conclusion, that while it is difficult to
ascertain a precise line of evolution in the new narrative language, for this
line sometimes advances by leaps, that poetic tension was already present in
Huidobro, as was mythic power in Asturias and Carpentier, and creative
dissolution in Juan Emar. Furthermore, tragic prophecy is the counterpart of
the objectification in Onetti, and action as a symbol of the last and desperate
effort at communication, is the true expression of Sabato.
     We will examine, finally, the activity of the narrator. The attention of
the readers, particularly if they are young and militant, is called to the
apoliticism that is signaled in the narrative of authors like Cortazar, Garcia
Marquez or Vargas Llosa. Confronted with the strong and obvious social realism
of the writers of the thirties and the forties--I am thinking of Icaza,
Aguilera Malta, Nicomedes Guzman, Jose Revueltas--, in the new novel one notes
a resistance to politically allusive literature, a shrinking before its
programs, a mistrust of accusations and messages. By contrast, then, the
present narrative seems aesthetic, where the other was political; transcendent,
and the other episodic. In this impression there is, we would say, a simple
optical illusion. Neither was the realism of the thirties and forties
superficial and ephemeral, nor is today's novel marginal to the social. Beneath
the symbolic structure of the indianist novel, for example, hides a genuine
human drama, a silent and bitter struggle; its unfolding is the classic assault
on the barriers which delimit man within a society stripped of supernatural
attributes.
     The narrative of today breaks the barriers; by examining them, the
novelist goes deeper: he violates the social structure, observes the fall of
ethical values of individuals who act beneath the weight of an existential
anguish; he does not judge, but inquires; he leaves a testimony laden with
sentiments of piety and toughness; or well enough, in the face of desperation,
closes his own door. He re-activates the omniscience of the ancient narrator,
but without assuming the role of a mirror which reflects all men and the entire
reality. On the contrary, he knows that he is one mirror among infinite
mirrors. The image that he seeks is hidden in his own stupor.
     The novelist multiplies his person, not only his point of view. He has no
need to coincide with the narrator, nor is it necessary that he make his own
the rational material of his story. He is not a manipulator of personages
orchestrated to express his ideas; he is an individual among innumerable beings
and things that ask something of him. He imagines them, then, to give them
form, inserted in them, suspecting that in the process he also gives form to
himself and that the sense of this form, is the sense of his life and of his
comprehension of reality. Thus the contradictions of Sabato are explained and
the negotiations of Borges, the distance of Garcia Marquez and the tragic
alienation of Arguedas are to be understood.
     For another part, perhaps there is no message in contemporary Latin
American literature of greater social significance than the narrative without
time, without slogans, without programs, of Juan Rulfo. In his work, like in
that of Roa Bastos and that of the above Arguedas, a profound social conscience
manifests itself beyond the poor divisions invented by the political
efficients. They see man among men, and identify him with nature in its
historical pilgrimage. They never fall into the trap of easy abstraction: the
more real, plain and direct the image of those men of Mexico, of Paraguay or of
Peru, the more profound and complex is the resulting symbolic projection of
their drama.
     We return to our original assumptions and draw some conclusions.
     In the first place, I think it is absurd to deny the existence of an
evolutionary line in the Latin American novel, even considering those of its
elements most characteristic of the periods of experimentation. The great
novelists of regionalism and of neo-regionalism skilfully used the
techniques that certain criticism pretends to "discover" in the work of recent
narrators.
     Secondly, it is evident that the use of such techniques has validity and
aesthetic transcendence only when it responds to a genuine individual
expressive need. The novel that depends for its existence totally upon its
technical apparatus commits a fundamental mistake; it appears already muted in
its organs of creation, its inhumanity makes it sterile, its brilliance is a
reflection of itself only and, in this isolation, it will not tarry in
extinguishing itself.
     Thirdly, I insist that certain forms of expression perfectly valid in the
anti-rhetorical and anti-bourgeois movement of the 192O's, are less trenchant
now and, far from being useful to the Latin American narrative, vitiate it and
tend to enclose it as one would a precious dry cow; it is not by artificial
respiration applied to Surrealism, nor by a forced restoration of the baroque,
nor with shots of English to american Spanish, nor by the adaptation of the
cinematographic libretto to the novel, that our prose narrative has begun to
put its mark on contemporary literature. Writers such as Arguedas, Rulfo,
Arreola, Sabato, Roa Bastos, Garcia Marquez and others attest to the fact that
with a language which is tense, direct, magical, of a popular root and
aggressively anti-rhetorical, plus the ideological field of the period of
crisis that we live, and with the desperate action of the individual looking or
among statues, shadows, affidavits and obvious ruins the image which could have
been his and that they took from him, patiently repeating the tale in a
continual process of error and correction, with partial identification and
intending a total vision, while the "criollo" bourgeoisie move our people on
the narrow concourse of sub-development with the illusion, the harmonic and the
compass of the advanced powers, and we surprise the world with our intense and
fulsome march around our own selves, open or closed, with laughter or at pains,
pacified or wild, white, indian or mixed, argument aside, it is possible to
write new narrative and move and occupy a humanity disconcerted by our long
silence.
     In the fourth place, we should respond with sincerity to the direct
questions that are asked the writer about his function in the Latin American
revolution. It does not suffice to turn one's shoulders from the impatient
activists who affirm, "the writer will have to leave his pen and take up the
rifle." We shall have to record for them, for example that Commander Guevara
leaves testimony in his diary of having expelled from the guerrillas those whom
he saw as not soldier material, but did feel would serve the revolution on
other fronts. Does not the writer create the revolution when he writes, if he
lives in the world he conceives? Should he also participate as a militant in
the daily political activities? Is it possible that the revolution would have
to put art and science temporarily in suspense while the years of armed combat
occur? No, undoubtedly not. These questions are from a puerile absolutism, as
are too the exertions of fanatic activism. We all know the ongoing value to the
Cuban revolution that the loyalties of Sartre, Genet, Graham Green, Matta, Jean
Luc Godard, Susan Sontag and Cortazar has had. This does not treat individuals
who have abandoned art for the guerrillas. In each one of them one appreciates
an act of conscience, the public acceptance of a political responsibility,
without diminishment whatever of the aesthetic integrity of their creative
work, The revolution benefits more from the greatness of their works than from
all the declarations, manifestos and proclamations of the functionaries of
propaganda.
     Up to now we refer to cases which do not admit argument; this deals with
writers and artists of firm and clear revolutionary activity. Different is the
problem of the intimate relation which exists between a writer's revolutionary
work and his position, apolitical or frankly bourgeois or even conservatively
reactionary. We discard the case of those who changed strategically throughout
the years: a John dos Passos or a John Steinbeck in the United States. Nor are
there further mysteries in the rightism of a Borges who dedicates the first
sample of his translation of Whitman to Richard Nixon and writes a poem to
celebrate Texan patriotism at "El Alamo"; neither in his great work nor in his
pathetic life does he forget for an instant the fundamental unreality of his
place in the world. The problem is aggravated if one tries to understand the
duality of writers who have been blessed souls in an upper or middle class
purgatory and in their work were sowers of anarchism, inspirers of violence,
inciters to open revolt in the dominion of art. I already mentioned two
illustrious visionaries in the renovation of the Spanish novel: Baroja, the
quiet, rugged, wintry shepherd or baker, and Azorin, wax and porcelain
old-timer among the flowers of his Iberian villa. They and Valle-Inclan plant
their incredible time-bomb and do not even await the result; it suffices them
to know that there is in the future earth a hot springs for them to warm their
feet. What is to be done with then, the revolutionary analyst will ask? What is
to be done with the landlord poets, the minister-and ambassador-novelists, and
the extremist clerks who guarantee the literature of barbarism and of
imperialism?
     Can one write the revolution while he lives the status quo?
Unquestionably, one can live very well and write very badly. Is not this,
rather the contrary: to live very badly and write very well; to live a
contradiction, a renunciation, a moral and material misery, according to custom
and, in some secret manner which intrigues and perhaps offends, to venture
afloat in works where not only the individual is redeemed, although burdened,
but also too humanity. It is possible that Genet is repugnant to certain
people, yet they do not resist the temptation to touch him, forgetting that the
admonition of Whitman (He who touches this book, touches me) had a symbolic
sense only. So then, if we speak of styles of literature which are, in truth,
styles of life, we would do well to realize that, the more a life is identified
with a creative work, the greater will be the possibility that both will
reflect something limited about man: his ambition to know and to do, and the
tragic awareness of his finiteness; his inexplicable grandeur in the midst of
his paltry insignificance.
     The ideological coincidence of a vital activity end an aesthetic creation
always will be an object of admiration, perhaps because of the dramatic
difficulties that it entails. In the United States there is actually a strange,
mute, end bloody civil war being fought. I think that the literature of the
patriarchs of the Beat generation, Kerouac and Ginsberg especially, like that
of the Black militants, Le Roy Jones and Eldridge Cleaver, and that of Chicano
youth such as Victor Hernandez Cruz, expresses this civil war in its political
and racial problematic and, conferring artistic beauty upon it, is the
authentic literature of a revolution. What can we in Latin America offer as an
expression of the existing social crisis? In its militant aspect and with an
aesthetic significance still to be determined, it could be the new anti-poetry
which explodes--one cannot use another term for it--today in El Salvador and
tomorrow in Argentina or Peru or Colombia or Chile; it could be a form of total
narrative which centers in Mexico, Cuba or Venezuela or an essay form in which
criticism is managed within a violently autobiographic sense, or university
theatre ferocious against the bourgeois and absurd with brilliance. Whatever it
be, it is of full importance not to sustain that literature only as an
enchanted lantern in hand; behind, above, and beneath its shadows and its
lights, are manifested other shadows and other lights. To recognize them is a
decisive act for obtaining the true local composition of contemporary Latin
American literature.
     We say, therefore, that the genuine revolutionary writers seem united atop
schools and literary epochs due to a condition common to them: they all have
given an image or transcendent vision in their works of the reality they knew
and that touched them, not a mere fragment of it, and in that image or in that
appearance resides their concept of the world as much as testimony of their
intent to affect that reality in turn. This their condition, to my judgment,
assists in discerning the true and the false among revolutionary literature; at
last it permits discarding the bold but sterile technical wizardry, aids in
recognizing the pathetic archivist of an old art that turns circles in the air
knowing it is destined for loss, and finally guides us upon an art of the
harmonization activity of use of necessary technique, the instrument of
language expressed in action and the creative function that promises the, for
him, supreme use of the word. In that task of distinguishing I see little part
for the engines of militancy, authentic as they are. They shall have their
denotation in the social conduct of the writer, yet do not have the truth of
his work's attainments.
     The writer whom interests us makes his own revolution and he does this in
his artwork, with his work, i.e. with his life.(3)

Notes
1 Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1963, p.500.
2 Cf. Posdata, Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1970, where Octavlo Paz says: Whenever a
society corrodes, the first to become infected is the language. The critique
of society, in consequence, commences with grammar and with the re-establishment
of meanings. The new literature, poetry as much as the novel, began with being
simultaneously a reflection upon the language and an attempt to invent another
language: A system of transparencies to provoke the appearance of reality. To
realize this proposition it was indispensable to clean the language and
extirpate the accretion of official rhetoric... (pp. 76 + 77).
3 Cortazar says: "one of the most acute Latin American problems is that more
than ever we are in need of the Che Guevaras of the language, the
revolutionaries of literature, more than the literati of the revolution."
("Nuevos aires" 2, 1970, p.36).


Chapter 2 - Portrait and Self portrait:The Hispano-american Novel
Confronted with Society

Sir Jose Joaquin Hernandez de Lizardi (1776-1827)(1) put down one of the
root marks that for many years has served to define the Hispano-american
novelistic creation when, not allowed to attack the colonial government of
Mexico in columns and leaflets, he felt obligated to fall back on the
picaresque and endearing of her, as self-defense against censure. So say,
then, that his novelistic work filled a social function. Lizardi took in his
hands the novel as one takes a gauntlet, and gave out pointers with knuckles,
enthusiasm, tact and pedagogy. It may seem curious to some that, in
criticizing that which the Saxons call the establishment, i.e. the ordering
circle that would not open its doors to him, or more properly closed them on
his fingers, on their nerves, Lizardi should not think of the theatre, nor of
poetry nor of fantasy. These modes of expression would have seemed to him
direct allusions, and he looked for defenses and allegories. And what defenses
could the novel lend him in the beginning years of the 19th century? Let us
say first that if he had chosen the theatre the scene would have been filled
for him by functionaries and female functionaries with masks whereupon, on
removing them, they proceed to discover their skeletal role; if he had found
himself a poet, no one's hearing might have reached him, which is why the poets
of the Independence shouted and with such a babel of voices - until
their listeners preferred to have them in cages.
     Lizardi, then, used the picaresque and attempted to base himself upon his
new patent; he assumed what to him seemed to be a legitimate function. He
wanted to orient the society of his epoch corralling them with the help of his
fictitious chronologies. The aesthetic matters are on a secondary plane; he is
resigned not to entertain so much as educate. And it worked for him as
picaresque vehicle of social criticism because it was an established and
appreciated form; it had come along the roads of Salamanca, and Flanders,
Coimbra, Lisbon, Asuncion and Mexico City, with side trips in France and
England,(2) voice of moralists who corrected and denounced the bad ways,
laughing, lacking the moral for salvation but censuring kings, princes,
prelates, friends and teachers with their wrath and divine grace, predicting
their ruin when the water already reached their necks, calling to their swan
song those who already had their requests.
     A double game, perhaps, politically inoffensive, socially unclear.
Although it appears interesting, it is nevertheless not the political
deviation that concerns me in this case, but instead the lack of social focus,
because there one can recognize another characteristic root mark of an
important phase of the Hispano-american novel. In that in his picaresque
Lizardi translates a Spanish decadence to a Mexican ambit, and with his magic
lantern projects the brotherhood and servants of the peninsular court onto the
streets of Mexico, and the illusion is so good that those streets and those
towns and those universities and bazaars and the prisons and the barber shops
seem Spanish until the colonial authority shatters the resemblance but fills
the panorama with repugnance. There begins a novelistic period in which one
social reality lands atop of another and our cities begin a buried life beneath
other more exotic cities, and the people who read of it, like those who thought
of it, become confused.
     I refer, as I say, to a visual phenomenon: to the point of view which a
novelist adopts when he spends his time in one place but in reality lives
somewhere essentially distinct. The realists and naturalists according to the
19th century could prove the existence of certain social complexes in the
examination and evaluation of which they enjoyed defining themselves,
manipulating formulas apparently valid for Europe and Americas. Social
structure is the insignia of a government as of a family or a lost one;
display, the high banks, the military, commerce, the Church, embryonic
industry, the teller, accountant, the housewife; the painfulness is in the
convent, in the hallway, the cabana, the hospital and the school. This life
that proceeds badly, this decadence that surrounds the body with the obstinacy
and the satiety of system, has its milestones marked. Change the names of the
streets from "Santa," "Fruto vedado" or "La Bolsa," and if you give them French
names the people in them will not display major differences.
     It could be said that not every Hispano-american novel of the 19th
century conveys a social image which is a reflection of Europe. This may be
true. As well as there being novelists who could change souls like clothes,
there was also the one-suited writer, he who went or did not go to Europe, and
whether or not he went would not change his god-given apparel an item; he
would go on being indian or mestizo in Paris, Madrid, London, or anywhere.
Such a one wrote, "La Rumba".(3) With such as them, the literary formula never
transformed into a condition of life. In their works they may change the
names, but not the parameters and not the social crux. The servant described
by "Micros" has only one place in the world; he could look like another or be
the product of adjacent things, but if you transfer him he leaves off working;
this is no merry-go-round, but is the arena invented by we Hispano-americans at
a moment in our history to confuse ourselves mutually. Those who wish to
re-unite us at the full lode are welcomed. There are sites for each.
Nontransferable.(4)
     The phenomenon I suggest means in either case that the novelist clarifies
his epoch, describes its peculiarities, recognizes in it his own locales in the
world, and presents it as he can: narrating, detailing, positing
conversations, predicating, inventing a little, mimicking or individualizing.
With or without formulas there is the attempt to secure a niche in the
contemporary world. Which does not surprise us entirely because it takes the
lead and loses us. The two are prettily tied, as the song says: me and the
society, me and the ills of society, me and the characters in my society, with
colors, odors and sounds; and a good romance. Always two: something
confronting another something. Gamboa and prostitution, Micros and the purse,
Blest Gana and the uprooted, Carrasquilla and those who never go, Orrego Luco
and the conjugal scandal.
     But things change and the moment arrives in which this duality loses its
rights and the door turns into a single page and, like the faces of those who
enter and those who exit, what hides and what is excluded become confused. I
refer to the fact that in the urgency and the drama of the social
disorganization of Latin America the novelist begins to delineate his world
from an unforeseen angle and to verify that those things that confront him in
disorder are, seemingly, his image and resemblance and, therefore, he
understands that when Sarmiento and other writers spoke of malevolent forces
which stalked the earth provoking the intellectuals, what bothered them was the
malevolence within, that which the nation was putting on their faces from
looking so much at them, the writer-ministers. This discomfited the most
serious, but still left the aesthetes indifferent.
     It will be understood that I am not trying to say that the modernists, for
example, now in the 20th century with its wars, its revolutions and its bombs,
went on living in the Pension Francesa or climbing up and down the Mirador and
the Tower of Sighs. I have always thought, and I continue to believe, that in
certain books basic to Modernism the acute observer of social phenomena can
find very useful keys for understanding that sense of perdition which the Latin
American faces between 1900 and 1930 at the sudden coming undone of the
spiritualism- materialism equilibrium. They are books in which someone becomes
conscious of the economic and social crises that contradict that reality.
Books such as where there still gallops a "gaucho" in fields with neither
tractors nor agrarian reform, in which priests doubt, not near disposal
machines nor provocation experiments, instead at a being who wants to condemn
and identify another, books in which the image aloft on wings of confusion
approaches over-zealously the divine reaches. Heavy books: handsome, pure,
strong, where above all we guess that the affairs of the stomach are not going
well either and perhaps are going worse than the affairs of the soul, but books
in which on looks awe-struck to one side or upwards, and to us that profile of
renouncement of our reality leaves the illustrious portrait of a renunciation.
Books, as would be said in academic language, in which a reality is stylized,
or rather, in which one sees according to the measurements of the glasses we
use to correct our vision.(5)
     Instead, to narrate, describe and make dialogue become for the novelist
almost necessities of effectuating reality and of organizing it and even
creating it, not jokingly as with the constructionists and the ultra-radicals,
but seriously as with the novelists of the Mexican Revolution, the indianists
of Ecuador and of Peru, the sociologists of the prairies and the plains.
Mariano Azuela, for example, is a people's doctor who sees and knows the great
wound of his country; the picture that he paints of the society of his time
has the solidity, the hardness, the contrast of white and black by which the
medical workers record the sicknesses of the slum. He is not carried away by
enthusiasm; one treats, disinfects, transmits, cuts in a minimum of time. Let
others mix and stir. They explode; the account is drawn up afterwards. And
when that is not enough, Jorge Icaza throws himself against his students,
sacrifices with the will to convince, his condition. They are two extreme
instances.(6)
     In those years, when the managers throw themselves through skyscraper
windows in New York and the Depression echoes in Latin American like a cry to
our face, and Steinbeck denounces the exploitation of the Oakies and Richard
Wright that of the Blacks and James Farrel that of whites in the U.S., and
Andre Gide returns to the Soviet Union and Henry Barbusse and Romain Rolland
emerge, and when the novel of the masses, that of Gladkov and of Sokolov, is
discussed, and the proletarian novel and the socialist realist, among ourselves
Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes produces novels with nameless characters and sees
society as an historical abstraction following the strict movements of the
time; Jose E. Rivera initiates a probe to uncover the conditions of the
laborers, a probe that is transmuted into epic novel; Ciro Alegria describes an
exodus of indians that becomes an instance of communal property; Miguel Angel
Asturias unfolds an exalted prose to denounce the cliques of the Central
American dictators and the initiatives of the low clowns of United Fruit. And
Carlos Luis Fallas, and Jose Revueltas, and Gil Gilbert and Mario Monteforte
Toledo....(7)
     For 20 years--a generation and a half--the novelist is an aerial
photograph of that violent lie which passes for social institution. He
pictures the misery and the illnesses in the cities and the country, accuses
the bargained and bargaining politician, criticizes the church, asks for a
redistribution of wealth and the expulsion of the imperialist. Denounces,
leaves his testimony: an epic human document. What is serious is that the
more he insists upon the injustice and the chaos of the capitalist system, the
less are the errors and the contradictions corrected. The society of
inequality hears but does not listen, as they get so far as to decorate its
accusers. What does all this mean? Irresponsibility, blindness, fear,
compromise? No, not entirely. It reflects, more properly, a situation
accepted as an axiom within the Hispano-american social organism: the novelist
may be a leader, but a leader from whom action and solutions are not expected.
Only seedlings, more or less clear or confused, stimuli, provocations in
short.(8) It is said that the student of our economic and social problems
learns more concerning the syndicalist movement's history, and political
thought, and of the imperialist invasion and its appropriation of the
sub-surface, the fields and the industry, in the novels of the decades of the
thirties and of the forties than from monographs or historical essays by
academic specialists. It should be added that the basis of that lesson (why
does it happen and how do they think and why do they begin to doubt and when
does the process transform into a revolutionary act) should be sought between
the lines and with assists from outside: with statistics, slogans, and
documentaries of the violence.
     The novelists of the thirties and forties, then, accumulate historical
detail and revive the rationale for a social revolution. Generalizations annoy
me, especially if they are unjust and arbitrary. To deny that when some of the
great novelists of that period handed over their image of Latin American
society they also included an anxiety-ridden examination of conscience would be
absurd. Still, we read and admire the regionalist epic and respect the
oldsters who fell with weapons in hand.(9)
     Those narrators who gave a geographic image and often, a social one to our
Continent in the first half of the 20th century accepted the role of
commentator or reporter not without suffering an intellectual debasement that
conducted the novel toward essay forms. They argued and speculated about
a society that was weak in its foundations. As a group they narrated the
corruption of the public power as much as the crisis in the family. The saga
of the great agricultural family of America was perpetuated in cyclical novels
which examine its progressive disintegration and its re-adaptation as
cooperativism and "business"; the surgery against the indigenous community; the
exodus of the worker from the country to the city; and finally, the ruin of the
oligarchic clan, the loss of its social and economic identity and its gradual
incorporation into the middle class, first as disgrace, then in a conscious and
deliberate manner. The narrator would feel compromised not by the crisis of
conscience, but in programmed causes. From there to the acceptance of a social
function and, in certain cases, of a militant vocation. For all this the
novelist ascertained his direct ties with the earth, affirming with his feet
his proclamation of a speculative nationalism more intense and exclusivist the
less secure the bases supporting it. The intellectual downfall became
passionate and the novelist looked for national essences in the conduct of the
native, in the caste tradition, to oppose to the metaphysical terror of
deracination. The profound meaning of this speculation is more graphic,
extensive and dense in the Chilean and Argentinean novel, for example, than in
the Mexican, Guatemalan or Venezuelan.(10)
     But it occurs that the process of the Latin American social revolution
accelerates and the fields are defined, the role that is to be played by the
intellectual turns precise. The novelist rebels against the limitations of the
social photograph, and chides them; he discards as false the point of view
toward pure objectives. Given that in the realty of bourgeois life he finds
falsities, hypocrisies, irremediable renouncements, as a contrast he searches
in the literary testimony for the imprints, the direct, anti-rhetorical and
legitimate imprints, of the extant reality. And such reality turns its back.
The schemes do not seem to work. The things are not governed by any principle.
The frontiers are portable. The men to a man lost the clock and wrecked the
calendars. They also lost the rock of the law and there are commandments that,
well looked at, turn out to be ambiguous. The fantasy imposes its inventions
and the myths establish themselves and they move with ease making do with their
native and original condition. The mirror that used to walk by the highways,
gilded, sure, omnipresent, walks now put upon, shaped, dirt-bespattered,
picaresque and distortionist.
     To simplify my thesis I would say that, as a novelistic form, the portrait
lost sense and cogency and that what we see today in a splendid chaos and in
magnificent simultaneity and relativity, is a self- portrait of
Hispano-american society on the respective plane, the face of the novelist.
Face of dryness, reeling abyss, burned rostrum, mask of elastic. Self-
portrait. There are those who would cut off an ear for a self-portrait and who
see their face as in a muddy well, or on a bubble of tar, or in a cup, or in a
festival-mirror or at a cut; or who portray selves with one's head put in a
nylon stocking, or covered with flies.
     I mean to say, hypothetically, that not only were the distances between
observer and society shortened: they were annulled, they disappeared. There
is neither an observer nor a narrator clearly defined, nor a precise object of
narration. The novel is a thing inside another thing inside another thing. In
movement. I think, therefore, that Miguel Angel Asturias' works are
bottomless. Scratch them yourself and there emerges, not "Popol-Vuh" which is
a book, but the dead emerge from their lake, the coyotes from their dead, the
rabbits from their coyotes, the witches out of their caucuses. Without saying
anything about the pine cones from their hyenas and the hyenas from their
foreigners. Look too at Juan de Rulfo. And at Gabriel Garcia Marquez! And at
Jose Maria Arguedas and at Augusto Roa Bastos! From afar Carpentier, surprised
at what is happening himself, speaks of spirits, of that magic that is active
part of the secretive life of our peoples. Ernesto Sabato practices it with a
fury. His novels demonstrate the profundity and the complexity insofar as
offered in the visages of those who portray themselves: society's face, swept
up these days in a process of plastic surgery.(11)
     Explicating a little more: identified with a society in a state of
revolution, the novelists revolt. "The primordial duty of every revolutionary
is creating the revolution." Agreed. Their revolution. The novelist makes
his revolution and the painter his and the musician his and the scientist his.
And if you yet cannot make your revolution, become for the moment a guerrilla,
as Matta said. Unpalatable and inevitable act.
     If the novelist succeeds at his revolution the perspectives that it opens
are marvelous: they are the perspectives of the living Latin American novel.
Revolution does not mean patchwork or sleight of hand. It is a direct,
absolute and basic confrontation with our conscience, which is the being
conscious of the point of origin and the final destination, and the evaluation
of the means which carry us there. I think that great novels that are written
today in Latin America represent a crisis of conscience. That explains the
lack of limits, the slightly vertiginous vastness in which they move, their
rigor and their power. Unities of time do not exist in that examination and
the spaces are open. The story is of the men without names who do not quit
living and want peace, those who talk and answer without very precise personal
pronouns, with the living's round despair and the dead's wailing wall.
     Who narrates? Who is that talking? And that protagonist? The professor
passing his gaze over the conscience of humanity
asks. Why does that outlaw live in Paris or in London or in Madrid or in San
Francisco and in New York? The witches make echo and ask: why in Buenos Aires
or in Lima and in Mexico City? Why not in Havana? The immediate, easy
conclusion: the novelist lives anywhere, literally; that society which is his
is with him, it seems, in whatever place, and binds him the same, like knots in
the string with which he ties his pants. So then, the world entered the Latin
American novel, the one that always had been inside of the novelists. It
remained to bring it afloat, with a very wide net, as Mario Vargas Llosa puts
it, while thinking of novels of elegance; from everywhere, from every time, so
that there will come into the netting the fat fish who knows us and,
eventually, greets us. And the novelist would have established his truth.
     Consequently, these novels, magical, real, vast, whether they advocate
armament or disarmament, and that Cortazar writes in Paris, and Sabato in
Buenos Aires and Arguedas around Cuzco and Garcia Marquez in Barcelona and
other members of the chorus in as many other capitals and courts of the world,
self-portray a society that is the same for all in its critical, operative,
changing and decisive aspects, and they portray it with the eye that knows how
to see, the crucial one that suffers and marvels, that which is closed to
terror and defeat, that which shall be looking for some years without
flinching.

Notes
1 There are three novels by Lizardi that interest us in
this respect: "El Periquillo Sarniento" (1816), "La Quijotita y su Prima"
(1818, 1819), and "Don Catrin de la Fachenda" (1819).
2 A line of descent exists as evident in the passage of the picaresque to the
Americas and in this line one begins with "El Lazarillo de Tormes" and from
the Spanish
picaresque, and through the picaresque of Lesage, Voltaire, Defoe, Fielding,
Smollet.
3 A short novel by Angel de Campo (1868-1908), a Mexican writer who used the
pseudonym, "Micros."
4 Nor should the historical testimonies be forgotten in which the terrain and
the atmosphere represent a distinct revolutionary ideology, such as "El
Matadero" by Esteban Echeverria (1803-1851) and "Tomochic!" by Heriberto Frias
(1870-1925). The Hispano-american novel form has dealt directly with political
and economic problems derived from the imperialist expansion in basic zones
such as petroleum, minerals, public services, agriculture, banking, and so on,
as well as with the resultant social problems. For names of authors, and
titles, consult my "Historia de la Novela Hispanoamericana", 3rd ed., Ediciones
De Andrea, Mexico City, 1966.
5 Some titles appropriate to remember in this regard: "Don Segundo Sombra" by
Ricardo Guiraldes (1886-1927); "El Hermano Asno" by Eduardo Barrios
(1884-1963); "Alsino" by Pedro Prado (1886-1952).
6 Other characteristic names: Martin Luis Guzman, Jose Ruben Romero, Jose
Mancisidor, Rafael F. Munoz, Mauricio Magdaleno, in Mexico; Demetrio Aguilera
Malta and Alfredo Pareja in the Ecuadorian; Enrique Amorin in Uruguay; Ciro
Alegria in Peru.
7 By Lopez y Fuentes see "Los Peregrinos Inmoviles"; by Rivera, "La Voragine";
by Asturias, "El Senor Presidente"; by Alegria, "El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno";
by Fallas, "Mamita Yunai"; by Revueltas, "El Luto Humano"; by Gilbert,
"Nuestro Pan"; by Monteforte, "Una Manera de Morir".
8 Consider the destiny of those novelists who, upon becoming politically active
eventually become Presidents: Romulo Gallegos and Juan Bosch. Arturo Uslar
Pietri, not having reached a presidency, has avoided that fate....
9 We do not forget about Romulo Gallegos, Martin Luis Guzman and Manuel Rojas,
among others.
10 See the cycle written by Eduardo Mallea comprising: "Las Aguilas" to "La
Torre", and "Gran Senor y Rajadiablos" by Eduardo Barrios.
11 Some of the key novels for the putting-together of this self-portrait of
contemporary Hispano-american society, in my judgment, are: "Los Pasos
Perdidos" by Alejo Carpentier; "Al Filo del Agua" by Augustin Yanez; "El
Senor Presidente" by Asturias; "Hijo de Ladron" by Manuel Rojas; "El
Astillero" by Onetti; "Pedro Paramo" by Juan Rulfo; "Sobre Heroes y Tumbas"
by Sabato; "Rayuela" by Julio Cortazar; "Hijo de Hombre" by Augusto Roa Bastos;
"Los Rios Profundos" by Jose Maria Arguedas; "La Muerte de Artemio Cruz" by
Carlos Fuentes; "La Casa Verde" by Mario Vargas Llosa.


Chapter 3 - "Der Zauberberg" in the Literature of Latin America

     It is not my intention in this essay to follow like a detective the
influence of an author or of a work upon the body of Latin American narrative.
My objective is more modest and, for that reason, more precise. With reference
to a particular problem of comparative literature I would wish to sketch the
development of a theme which, turned into a myth by a master of German
neo-romanticism, rigorous and firmly distinct, like an aesthetic mold, passes
to other authors and other works picking up the essence of varied philosophies.
The theme to which I allude is the integration of man, nature and time in the
symbol of the magic mountain. Thus understood, the mountain ceases to be mere
surrounding to become an active agent of ideas and passions; it intervenes in
the destiny of man; it approves or it denies him, it provokes him, it saves or
it condemns him, from the heights it witnesses his crises, his efforts and
anguish, disintegrating his ongoing misery in the ashes of time. "Der
Zauberberg": this Thomas Mann called it.
     The "magic mountain" as aesthetic symbol has existed throughout history
mysteriously expressing revelations of diverse peoples and cultures. There were
magic mountains in the biblical literature of the Sinai, from whose flanks the
law of the Hebrew people emerged in letters of fire, and the Ararat which arose
from the depths of the divine ire so that humanity would disembark, in terror,
from the Universal Flood. A magic mountain was the classical Olympus and also
the circles, the levels and terraces of the metaphysical promontory of Dante.
The Himalayas were and continue to be magic mountains, as with the volcanic
summits of the Mayan "Popol-Vuh." "Der Zauberberg," as a literary, novelistic,
philosophical, religious or poetic formula, appears and re-appears in the
golden ages of western literature, in romanticism and in modern realism. In the
20th century and from the American hemisphere it is seen under the guises of
Kilimanjaro and of Machu-Picchu.
     The mountain comes to symbolize a conception of the world through
experiences in which the intellectual passion and the erotic secretly combine,
physical heroism with metaphysical terror, social conscience with the dark
currents of instinct. The initiate will easily recognize this symbolization in
nature. Whoever has had supreme revelation reduces the vital experience to
certain basic concepts and a small number of hallucinatory intuitions that
permit him to define his own condition in terms as much physical as spiritual.
In "Der Zauberberg" these ideas and intuitions refer essentially to a concept
of Time and, on a second plane, to the conflict between humanism and
materialism. The magic mountain permits one to confer upon the experiences of
the hero a transcendental sense: the adaptation to the schedule of the Swiss
sanatorium becomes a subjectivist theory of Time, the triumph over sickness a
sensualist doctrine of behavior and intimate nature of matter, and the loving
embrace to a practical exaltation of the temporal in the face of the
metaphysical.
     Before assuming a mythological power in our modern literature, the Latin
American mountain was an instrument of destruction. In the regionalist novel,
the mountain-- like the plains and the ocean--dominates man and hits him with
an individual sorrow. That is to say, it becomes personified not to integrate
itself into the progressive dynamism of a civilization, but instead to unite
with the diabolic power that threatens and destroys it. The mountain of an
eminent writer of the past century, for example, the Colombian Tomas
Carrasquilla, is never separate from the land; it is true that its roots are
confused with those of man, but they fuse at the surface of daily life or at
the bottom of a pedestrian nostalgia. The mountain there fills an aesthetic
function in the measure that it complements the immediate action of man, not
his creative activity on a universal plane. The mountain of the Chilean Mariano
Latorre, like that of Ricardo Leon or Jose Maria Pereda, is a synthesis of
concrete values projected in a local tradition. These are mountains without
summit; more properly, they are roads on the mountain. They belong to a
literary tradition that resonates in the agricultural, in the social and in the
historical. One cannot say that tradition has completely disappeared, but it is
possible to affirm that at the middle of the 20th century our mountain, as an
aesthetic factor, already corresponded to mythic symbols of contemporary
humanity. Examples abound in the novel and poetry. Works such as El Mundo es
Ancho y Ajeno by Ciro Alegria, Los Peregrinos Inmoviles by Gregorio Lopez y
Fuentes, Hombres de Maiz by Miguel Angel Asturias, Los Rios Profundos by Jose
Pilaria Arguedas, Hijo de Ladron by Manuel Rojas, are essentially narratives in
which the mountain exercises magical powers.
     It will be surprising to mention Manuel Rojas in this respect, but Aniceto
Hevia, the protagonist in "Hijo de Ladron," traverses the ranges to discover in
the common man and in the worker's task the seeds of fraternity; in the alpine
steppe and lowlands, in the frozen tents of the nomadic encampment, in the
market place and in the train station, in the Andean shelter as much as upon
the open road, in the soldiers' barracks and on the banks of the Rio Blanco and
the Aconcagua, there hides a simple and lyrical apparatus of symbols, like the
lights of a starry illumination. From the emotion of tenderness, of solidarity
and respect toward man, Rojas extracts a norm of life and a definition of the
human condition. That his mountain range is also a magical power is proved, in
part, by his theory of the invisible wound, set down in Hijo de Ladron and
directly related to the idea of illness characteristic of Thomas Mann and of
German romantic literature.(1)
     In the novel of Lopez y Fuentes the indian moves the length of the river
and onto the highlands re-living and recreating the history of man and that
Mexican plateau that had been a road for porters or revolutionaries soon
becomes a pathway of symbols and myths. The route is laid out since ancient
times; the questions allude to cosmogonies and religions, to ethical values, to
roots that weigh upon man like chains. The marks of time are disfigured. The
indian goes to the mountain where his experience will unite the primordial to
the final causes. It deals with revelations beneath a lyric splendor: the man
faces the reality of his impotence and abandonment, fashions a stone god and
carries it with him, begins to get answers from it, but the god weighs greatly
and circles with its creator among the passes. The tribe penetrates the
mountain and discovers the anti-pilgrimage of its pilgrimage. Nothing has
moved; in the newly won freedom hides treason, war, another slavery. The bell
that sounds the alarm, safeguard from the avalanche, is no more than a deceit.
While the young heroes prepare for the wedding, the unmoving pilgrims once
again ready their lances, their shields, their stone knives and the mountain
offers its high ledges so that the sacrifice will begin again.(2)
     "El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno" is a book that shows marked ideological
concomitants with Der Zauberberg. The Peruvian sierra conceived as a world
apart in which the tragedy of the indian becomes a symbol of the injustice, of
the solitude and of the physical and moral anguish of modern humanity, Ciro
Alegria puts it to work around a unique axis, from which the themes of social
inequality, Peasant solidarity, heroic sacrifice, disorganization and
fatality, turn like minor mechanisms. This axis, as in the work of Thomas Mann,
is that of time. It is obvious that Ciro Alegria paraphrases Mann in his
speculations about the nature of time. In them we are led to understand that he
arrived at the magic concept of the Andean mountain through a wise and deep
consideration of the nature of memories and of their adaptation to a slow
rhythm, a rhythm that corresponds to the technique used by Mann in his novel.
That technique is a direct consequence of a subjectivist doctrine of time; Ciro
Alegria also thus understands it and interprets it in this way. These
concomitants should be examined without a desire to give disproportionate
importance to the establishment of a case of literary influence, but better to
indicate how a philosophical idea which gives birth to an aesthetic formula in
European literature serves a Latin American writer for expressing a
characteristic experience of his land and his epoch.
     Ciro Alegria is a novelist who works fundamentally from the ground of
memories. His works are evocations in the strictest sense of the word and
function on the strength of stimulating one resurrection after another which,
cumulatively, produce a deceptive effect or movement. Essentially, they are
static. Within them, time does not pass: it is an abstraction composed of the
spiritual experience that is comprised of beings, objects and pieces. In the
foreword of The Magic Mountain one reads things like these:

     This story, we say, belongs to the long ago; is already, so to speak,
covered with historic mold, and unquestionably to be presented in the tense
best suited to a narrative out of the depth of the past. That should be no
drawback to a story, but rather the reverse. Since histories must be in the
past, then the more past the better, it would seem for them in their character
as histories, and for him, the teller of them, rounding wizard of times gone
by. With this story, moreover, it stands as it does to-day with human beings,
not least among them writers of tales; it is far older than its years; its age
may not be measured by length or days, nor the weight of time on its head
reckoned, by the rising or setting of suns. In a word, the degree of its
antiquity has noways to do with the passage of time in which statement the
author intentionally touches upon the strange and questionable double nature of
that riddling element.(3)

     Compare those words with these others by Ciro Alegria in "El Mundo es
Ancho y Ajeno":

     Days pass, new days come....

     We admire the natural wisdom of those popular story tellers who, to
separate events, between one item and another in their narrative, interpolate
the grand and spacious words: days pass, new days come.... That is what is
time.
     Time acquires much meaning when it passes over a deed prosperous or
unprosperous, in any case noteworthy. There accumulate at the side or, better,
in front of the occurrence, tasks and problems, projects and dreams, nothings
that are the fabric of the minutes, fortunes and misfortunes, in sum: days.
Days that have passed, days yet to come. Then the prosperous or unprosperous
deed, faced with time, which is to say, with the daily reality of life,
assumes its true significance, but it always remains behind, always further
behind, in the hard grip of the past. And if it is true that life often turns
one's eyes back toward the past, bespeaking a natural impulse of the heart
toward what it had loved, and in order to extract a useful lesson from the
experience of humanity or to heighten its glory with what was noble, it is also
true that the same life is affirmed in the present and is 'nurtured by the hope
of its prolongation, or rather, in the projected unfolding of its destiny.
     After the demise of Pascuala, then, time advanced. And we too shall say:
days pass, new days come....(4)
     It is not merely a coincidence in tone that we point to here. It is
something deeper. The Peruvian writer, like Thomas Mann, captured the sense of
universality of his story in its sense of permanence, that is to say, he
integrated space and time. The chronological imprecision which characterizes El
Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno is an aesthetic element. Throughout a speculation about
time and of the fusion of man with the mountain as a symbol of immutability,
Ciro Alegria, the same as Thomas Mann, projects the drama of his characters
upon an image of humanity. His story grows, then, from an individual conception
of eternity until it arrives at the limits of the collective experience. This
phenomenon of sublimation occurs in consequence of the liberating action that
the mountain exercises upon the spirit of man. The indians of this novel are
surprising in their spirituality; it is because they live within the superior
influence of a magic mountain. The coldness of the moon has touched them, just
as Hans Castorp was transformed by the assault of the snow. The story of the
exodus from Rumi is the story of man's eternal exodus: the world being alien
and not being owner of one's own self, man keeps moving in a perpetual exile
and remains alone in the continuity or his downfall. Thus too move the indians
of Lopez y Fuentes. Thus the young warriors of Thomas Mann are uprooted. But in
the attitude with which the writer contemplates that departure rests the
crucial difference that exists between the message of Thomas Mann and that of
Ciro Alegria and other Latin American novelists. Not to call attention to that
difference would be lamentable. Thomas Mann leaves his hero without bitterness,
perhaps with a little piety, but in no way shamefully. He disassociates from
him.(5) Ciro Alegria, on the other hand, identifies with the indigenous
community of his narrative and shares in its persecution and its exile. Thomas
Mann has manipulated his symbols with the key of his irony; the Peruvian, with
the key of his genuine sentimentalism. Thomas Mann, in possession or his role
as magician and interpreter of the mysteries of the mountain, is present
throughout the entire story, commenting in the first person upon the actions of
his characters, the development of the plot, even the technique of his novel.
Like the Spanish novelists of the picaresque and the English Victorians, he
requires a role for his own voice and he fulfills it with gusto and without
hesitation. Ciro Alegria follows him in part.(6) But irony is not the device
which suits him, nor is it the authentic tonality of his voice. A lyric poet,
it does not embarrass him to empathize with his little heroes; on the contrary,
it overflows at each step; he dreams with his shepherds, sings with his flute
and string players, he rebels and suffers with his peons. Whereas Mann breaks,
in the end, the spell of the mountain and remains untouched beside the
apparatus of his transcendent spectacle the Peruvian novelist never can
liberate himself from his fable, and goes on making impact with the desolation
of his people, decrepit and defeated on the vast icy plateau.
     A biographical note could be offered here to accentuate this difference of
attitudes. I do not know in what circumstances Thomas Mann conceived his
grandiose epic. In a personal letter that I guard like a relic, he spoke of his
novel as a super-romantic work of his youth.(7) I thought I could still detect
irony in such an affirmation. He was an experimenter and as such did not fail
to deal with the conflicts that agitated his characters. From the margin of his
work he manipulated the strings like an illusionist of the Renaissance.
     Ciro Alegria, for his part, conceived and wrote El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno
in very peculiar circumstances not a little dramatic. Romantic, Thomas Mann
would have said. Between the years 1935 and 1940 Ciro Alegria was confined to
the sanitarium El Peral, in the vicinity of Santiago. He suffered from
tuberculosis and had submitted to a rest cure. La Montana Magica was then a
best seller. It was read and discussed in all the intellectual circles. I can
imagine Ciro Alegria, to whom his friends Manuel Rojas, Enrique Espinoza,
Gonzalez Vera, Cesar Cecchi brought books, horizontal and still, reading and
assimilating the prose of Thomas Mann, identifying with the characters of the
Swiss sanatorium, living--and in this case the word need not be taken
metaphorically--the great experience of Time as it bore on his particular case.
The routine of Hens and Joachim is his own, precisely; like them, he gets up,
he rests, he takes his temperature, reads, eats, then rests.... The faces of
doctors and nurses blur like astral forms in the midst of X-rays, injections
and blankets. He eats and he rests; reclines and reads. His life takes on the
slow rhythm that the leader directs with a thermometer. In the evening he
lingers like Castorp, alone beneath the stars, savoring the shadows that come
to him from the mountains; the airy figures of the Chilean poplars disappear,
the mountain winds breathe and the transfiguration effortlessly takes place. We
have here the Peruvian plains, the solitude, the rocky Peaks where the pastoral
family learns of its damnation; there are the thatched huts, the lake
surrounded by rocks, the caves that shelter the voice of the fugitive and the
council of the thief. Above it all one sees the myth of a village advancing
from the fog and, little by little, acquiring humanity. They are the indigenous
commoners who he knew in his adolescence and to whose tragic destiny he already
alluded in "Los Perros Hambrientos." The fable takes shape: it shall be a
message of re-vindication of the indian, a gigantic work, dense, solid, epic,
with a rich treasure of customs and folkloric legends, with an idea of liberty
sounding at the base by way of a single hapless unfortunate. This novel already
had its style, that is, its form and its mythological apparatus: it was the
style of Der Zauberberg. Ciro Alegria, already an inhabitant of the high
altitudes, had only to enter the magic circle and his indians, breathing the
rarefied air of an eternal present, affixed the statuary of myth upon the
pedestal of the sierra.
     Miguel Angel Asturias, exploring the mysteries of Hispano-american
experience, concerned with reconstructing the Mayan-Quechuan cosmogonies
through poetic images and later applying them, like transparencies, to the
existing reality of Guatemala, often refers to the magical, defining and
resolving sense of the mountain. The most impressive example of this search and
of the literary rendition he gives it is to be found in two episodes, the
fourth and the fifth, of his novel, Hombres de Maiz. Let us say here that
Asturias does not center upon symbols and allegories, like Lopez y Fuentes, nor
on anecdotes and philosophic commentaries, like Ciro Alegria. To know, Asturias
returns to pre-historic myths; to define reality, he accepts the pre-logical
relations of the magical and, to project his knowledge, he uses images,
principally auditory--repetition, incantation, basic values of nouns-that will
create a resonant ambit where the Guatemalan of the 20th century can seek the
reflection of his own soul. The episodes to which I refer are those of Blind
Goyo Yic and Maria Tecun, and of Correo-Coyote.
     In the first of these episodes is presented the case of the woman who
abandons her man, flees into the mountains, is changed into stone and weighs
down her lover, who chases her, to the end. The mountain exercises a double
power: it punishes the betrayal, but in the punishment it gives the punished
the permanence of myth, which is the perfect and eternal function of her crime.
Elsewhere, it returns the man's sight to him, it opens his eyes for him to
discover his abyss and fall into it under the weight of his secret. The second
episode is of a more essential kind: in the search for the woman, Niche Aquino
discovers his demon, unites with it in the flesh, and in the body of a coyote
finds the road to Xibalba, the subterranean world where man learns the secrets
of the beyond. The Pass in the mountain is here the key to final knowledge, a
true gateway, a magical power that touches man in an instant and converts him
into light so that he will go to occupy his place among the shadows. Whoever
doubts the existence of this gateway should go to Peten, search in Tikal and
identify in the rocks the women and the men who lost and found their way.
     Asturias' novel makes me think of another, by Jose Maria Arguedas, Los
Rios Profundos, whose leitmotif is the secret mythological life of the Cuzco
highlands. The mountain of Arguedas is a witch. His is a most delicate
operation in which the myths do not have direct effects but rather remain
hidden like human forms in the shadows, and talk or simply dream inside the
rocks, in the walls, in the bells, in the rivers and the animals. A child
listens to them. It is not a miracle of communication, nor the vision seen in a
campfire. The action of the mountain is now slow and cumulative: phenomenon of
atmospheres, of instants and contacts. One could say that if a revelation is
produced, it is the effect of ecstatic contemplation or of meditation; but, on
the whole, the secret is also revealed in the pass from one Andean region to
another, in one plaza or another, at the churches, the markets, the shortcuts,
upon the lunar plateaus, sometimes on the run, because the idea of the journey
requires swiftness: to learn to live when the little hero detaches from his
father's side. I shall cite some sentences I wrote some time ago about this
novel to give a clearer base to this idea:

     ...that which could be a catalogue of churches, of town squares, of
decorated walls and ruins, comes to live independently; the stones speak, the
patios tremble, the ancient kitchens of Cuzco glow with gold, the bells call
from mountain to mountain across the shimmering valleys and rivers, the men
kneel, the women cry, and a child--the child that Arguedas was and whom he
carries in his shadows--embraces his father and sweetly suffers with the
native fantasies that eternally surround evening in the mountains....
     Arguedas first spoke Quiches and later, already grown, he learned
Spanish. Something strange, fascinating in its complex aesthetic and linguistic
significance, occurred in the process: as if, his Spanish idiom came to him
filled with living sounds, with quick spirits who, upon touching the words,
awaken all kinds of magic reverberations. Arguedas says 'muro,' says 'aguila,'
says 'piedras,' says 'angeles' and what we hear is a material world in
unexpected action, reaching out toward us, as if wishing to tell us of a secret
soul, imprisoned, pained, anxious to be rescued.(8)

     A brief example will suffice to illustrate how the young hero searches
in the mountain for the source of essential powers. Challenged to fight by a
fearsome enemy in the school, he senses that his will slackens, he knows that
he will be badly treated by the pack who consider him a "foreigner," so then he
goes to the god of the mountain requesting valor and strength. His invocation
is abrupt, irrational in the circumstances, but fatally assured:

     At night, at rosary, I wished to confess myself and I could not. Shame
tied my tongue and thoughts.
     Then, while I trembled with shame, the image of Apu K'arwarasu came to my
memory like lightning. I spoke to him, the way the scholars of my native
region prayed, when they had to battle or compete in races and in tests of
bravery.
     -Only you, Apu and the Markask'a!, I told him. Apu K'arwarasu, to you I
shall dedicate my fight! Send me your emissary to watch over me, to cheer me
from on high. So by kicks, swine, to the rear, to your hungry dog ribs, to
your violin neck! Whatever! I am an indian, an indian miner! Nakak!
     I began to take spirit, to lift my courage, directing myself to the great
mountain in the same way that the indians of my region worshiped it, before
throwing themselves into the plaza against the brave bulls, condors overhead.
     K'arwarasu is the Apu, the regional god of my native territory. It has
three snow-covered summits that rise above a mountain chain of black rock.
Various lakes surround them in which live herons with pink plumage. The falcon
is the symbol of K'arwarasu. The indians say that in the days before Easter a
bird of fire emerges from the highest summit and hunts the condors, that it
breaks their backs, makes them moan and humiliates them. In brilliant flight,
it flashes over the fields, past the livestock farms, and then disappears into
the snow.
     The indians invoke K'arwarasu only in the greatest dangers. They need only
pronounce his name and the fear of dying vanishes.(9)

And the boy goes to the fight. The child who hears words in the walls of
Cuzco, who cries in silence glued to doors and columns and looks for signs of
the golden bell in the frozen skies of the plateau, is transformed: he has
become a man in the dialogue with the mountain and, tranquil and unafraid, he
awaits the decisive tests.
     A similar idea of metamorphosis in the mountains but this time not among
myths, but rather in the realm of Catholic symbology, appears in the poetic
work of Gabriela Mistral and, more particularly, in the poem entitled, "The
Flight." I shall quote two stanzas:

     O Mother, in a dream
     I traverse tarnished landscapes:
     a black mountain turning endlessly
     to reach the other mountain;
     and in the next you seem to be,
     but always another round mountain
     is there, to obstruct the way
     to the mountain of your joy and my joy.

     And sometimes not hills ahead,
     not inner thoughts, nor breath can find you:
     you have fled with the mountain snow
     you have submitted to the black rocks.
     And you send me sarcastic voices
     from three points, and I break in pain,
     for my body is one, which you gave me,
     and you are the water with a hundred eyes,
     and are the landscape of a thousand arms,
     never again what lovers are:
     a living breast upon a living breast,
     bronze figures softening with cries.(10)

     The mother-mountain-mother chain has a secret meaning. In "The Flight,"
Gabriela Mistral expresses a fundamental idea: she carries and always will
carry the mother within her, like a fatal affliction. It will be a weight
within her that is tender and painful at the same time. These two sentiments do
not achieve integration. The image of the mother keeps escaping, calling her,
moving away. Upon following it, she thinks that she will cross one mountain to
find another and another until infinity. In one moment she sees her dissolve
like snow on the mountain and, then, the mother appears transformed into a
symbol of that identity--of the person and the native land--which Gabriela
Mistral tortuously pursues throughout her entire life.(11)
     The magic here is essentially lyrical and the mountain is its form: a
superimposed symbol to suggest the transience and the permanence of life in
circles that call to us, lose us, accelerate and overwhelm us in the divine
persecution.
     If in El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno, a symphonic novel, the Zauberberg is an
extended, spacious, intermittent theme, in the hands of a poet it can gain the
force of immediate revelation, the tone of a sudden exaltation, the sense of a
transcendental vision: this is the case with the poem, "Heights of Machu
Picchu" by Pablo Neruda.
     At first sight it could be thought that we are confronted with a
traditional theme of romanticism: the poet in exile with his melancholy burden
of national memories and his defeated judgment in the name of a lost liberty;
we think of Heredia singing to Niagara with voices evoking other sublime
terrors, those of Byron, or Schiller, of Goethe. But gradually we recognize in
Neruda's poem the light which by now is familiar to us: the splendor of the
magical revelation when it comes from the heart of the mountain. An essentially
lyric poet, for whom knowledge should derive from a subconscious immersion in
reality and the terms of its definition are a leading chain of images, a
descriptive and baroque poet, who when not imperative and visionary becomes
dialectical again, he uncovers his images, grouping and arranging them, and
with thorough lucidity proceeds to clearly define certain basic keys for the
destiny of man in his tragic movement through history.
     The mountain has, then, for Neruda the same power of supreme revelation
that it had for Mann, in equal transcendent tone, but without the doomed
imminence which is prolonged in The Magic Mountain, turning it into a mortal
trance. Neruda, inspired as by a slow fever, close to the lights of the summit,
feeling, not knowing, the mysterious propulsion of the mystical experience,
reflects upon man's destiny:

     What was man? Where in his ongoing conversation
     among the stores and the whistles,
     in which of his metallic movements
     could be found indestructible, imperishable
     life?(12)

     Neruda examines the torsion springs of history, and his conclusions,
beyond his bedazzlement by nature, affirm an immediate reality and his
intuition of an inflexible physical order.
     The tone of the poem is anguished at first; obsessed by the memory of
political persecution, Neruda insists upon reproducing his agitation in the
static forms that surround him. In what follows, he gives himself over to a
metaphysical sadness, to a consciousness of his solitude and an examination of
mortality. What is fatality in the routine of man? A wreath of daily dyings,
the leaves that the tree loses in no order:

     The self like corn stores itself in the bottomless
     granary of lost deeds, of miserable events, from one
     to seven, and to eight, and not one fatality, yet
     instead many deaths came to each, every day a
     little demise, powder, worm, lamp that is
     extinguished in the suburban mud, a small dying with
     thick wings...(13)

     I could not love in each being a tree
     with its little autumn on one's back (the extinction
     of a thousand leaves)
     all the false deaths and the resurrections
     without homeland, without abyss...(14)

     The initial discomfort resolves into a dynamic confrontation with life.
The poet is in front of Machu-Picchu, the stone fortress, indestructible crown
of the Inca. He contemplates the ruins and on a plane combining classic
nostalgia with the firmness of his implacable materialism, he reviews the
Carpe Diem theme, and adds:

     Today the empty air no longer cries,
     no longer knows your feet of clay,
     has forgotten your vessels that filtered the sky...

     You no longer exist, hands of spider, frail
     strands, tangled cloth;
     what you were has fallen: customs, syllables
     spent, masks of brilliant light.
     Only a permanence of stone and word;
     the city like a cup was lifted in the hands
     of all, living and not, the silenced, sustained
     by the silent, a wall, from brimming life to impact
     of stone petals, the permanent rose, the mooring:
     this Andean reef of glacial colonies.(15)

     He discharges his lyrical dynamism and describes mystically, that is to
say, by naming. More than eighty lyrical epithets comprise the ninth section of
the poem, his litany to Machu-Picchu. The fundamental question can be seen
approaching, probing between the lines, ritualistically leading to the root of
the matter. What was this man who inhabited that rock in the sky? What became
of him?

     Stone within stone, the man, where was he?
     Air within air, the man, where was he?
     Time within time, the man, where was he?

     ...I ask you, salt of the roadway,
     show me your implements, let me, structures,
     trace with a twig the network of stone,
     mount all the stairways of the air into the emptiness,
     scrape inner organs until the man is touched.(16)

     Then there emerges an apocalyptic vision: that was an empire built on
blood, hunger, punishment. The solitude is suddenly filled with phantastic
forms, the river with voices, the hills with archers, the roads with moving
shapes.

     Machu-Picchu, you put
     stones on the stone, and at the base, rags?
     Coal upon coal, and at the bottom tears?
     Fire in the gold, and within, the red trembling
     portion of blood?
     Return to me the slave you buried! (17)

     He implores that slave to arise from his granite tomb and to be incarnated
in his poet's voice and magician's blood.

     Juan Stonecutter, son of Wiracocha,
     Juan Coldfood, son of the green star,
     Juan the Barefoot, grandson of turquoise,
     rise to be born with me, brother.(18)

     The Andean Zauberberg has yielded its secret. It had been a fleeting
vision. The poet quickly re-integrates with the militant ranks, hurriedly, as
if descending from heights where the air became impossible to breathe; he takes
the weapons that are his, his armor, his dialectic. The resolution of the poem,
nevertheless, has clearly left its comet's mark in the sky: the legacy to
history is a lesson written in rock and its custodians can lift up one more
time and renew their destiny of struggle without end.

Notes
1 Cf. F. Alegria, "Manuel Rojas: trascendantalismo en la novels chilena," in
Literatura Chilena del Siglo XX, Zig-Zag, Santiago, 1967, pp.205-32.
2 The student will find a more detailed analysis of Los Peregrinos Inmoviles
in my Historia de la Novels Hispanoamericana, 3d ed., Ediciones De
Andrea, Mexico City, 1966, pp.165-67.
3 The Magic Mountain, Lowe-Porter translation, Knopf, New York, 1968, p. v.
4 El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno, Diana, Mexico City, 1949, p.53. See also pp. 3
and 391, and compare then with the speculations of Thomas Mann concerning time
in Der Zauberberg, Berlin, 1924, pp. 80, 89, 90, 91, 452, 713 and 714.
5 La Montana Magica, 2d ed., Diana, Mexico City, 1957, pp.843-44.
6 El Mundo es Ancho y Ajeno, op. cit., pp. 30-31, 42-43, 245.
7 Thomas Mann says to me in his letter: "My impression of your book (Ensayo
sobre Cinco Temas de Thomas Mann, Funes, El Salvador, 1949) is that of an
unusually fine analysis of the chief motives of my novel - this arch-romantic
book that is, at the same time, a sort of farewell to romanticism, although
its irony makes this moral renunciation of the romantic a little doubtful
again."
8 Historia de la Novela Hispanoamericana, op. cit., p. 273.
9 Los Rios Profundos, Ed. Losada, 1958, p.88.
10 Tala, Ed. Losada, 1947, pp.11-12.
11 Cf. F. Alegria, Genio y Figura de Gabriela Mistral, Eudeba, Buenos Aires,
pp. 105-06.
12 Canto General, Ediciones Oceano, Mexico City, 1950, pp. 41-42.
13 Ibid., p.42.
14 Ibid., p.43.
15 Ibid., pp.46-47.
16 Ibid., pp.51-52.
17 Ibid., p.52.
18 Ibid., p.54.


Chapter 4 - Miguel Angel Asturias, Novelist of the Old and the New Worlds

     It is a strange city in which Miguel Angel Asturias forges the material of
his stories and poetry: a city which glows like a network about his head, a
band of mountains and, above, a halo of celestial air, pure and vibrant. Nailed
to a wall of stone is an incandescent plaque, engraved with his name; and at
his feet, a valley submerged in tremors, in labor, and in blue and crimson
plumage.
     Asturias wrote in "Leyendas de Guatemala":

     It is a city consisting of superimposed buried
     cities, like the floors of a building. Story upon
     story. City upon city.... Within this towering city
     the ancient cities are preserved intact. Through the
     stairwells dream images rise without leaving tracks,
     soundlessly. Behind one door or another the
     centuries differ. Memory gains the stairway that
     leads to the Spanish cities. Every so often above
     the stairs there is an opening, in the narrowest
     part of the spiral; windows hidden in the shade, or
     passageways formed from the substance of the walls,
     like those that connect to the chapels in the
     Catholic churches. The passageways allow one to see
     other cities. Memory is a blind woman groping to
     find the road. We go up the stairs to a city of the
     heights: Xibalba, Tulan, mythological cities,
     distant, dressed in snow. Iximache, on whose emblem
     the captive eagle crowns the sign of
     the Cakchiquelean gentry. Utatlan, city of fiefs.
     And Atitlan, balcony enclosed in a rock over a blue
     lake.(1)

     Ascending and descending, from floor to floor, from city to city, from era
to era, in the wide dark suit of the Guatemalan man, hands extended, dispensing
herbs and partitioning the vital mummies of gods turned to trees, his face
plain and decisive like a machete blade, sculpted nose, Asturias for years has
sought the umbilical cord which explains that phantastic edifice. Lost, at
times, in the subterranean penumbra, he advances along the stone corridor that
leads to the funereal lake of the Mayas and finds himself in the midst of
loquacious princes and priests, warriors and maidens, dancers and poets, foxes
and sculptors, jaguars and engineers, musicians and rams, boars and painters,
all crowded into his realm, and he observes and comments upon the evolution of
the static world toward its supernatural activity. With his foot he uncovers
the ears, the noses, the fingers and hearts of distinguished Spanish noblemen,
quartered in afternoons, notices the signs on the walls, distinguishes between
the code of Amatle and its spurious colonial translation. He recovers the
statistics of the Office of Commerce from the fiscal coffers to arrive,
finally, at the equation between bananas, the railroad, the jeep and the
hundred-year lease.
     He began his task around 1930, in other words, at the age of 31. He
started with the last level of the buried cities, without imagining, perhaps,
that over the years his literary work would come to constitute an ascent from
the subterranean Mayas and the primitive subconscious, to the conscious
validation of his nation's destiny in the modern epoch. His first book,
Leyendas de Guatemala, is a lovely and balanced poetic exercise evoking a
characteristic region of Central America. In the prologue to a French
translation, Paul Valery said of the legends:

     To me this work had the effect of a filter, for it
     is something that one drinks more than reads. It was
     also for me like a tropical nightmare, experienced
     with a singular delight.(2)

     The cities, "sonorous like open seas," are: Guatemala City, Palenque,
Copan, Quiricua, Tikal, Antigua; and the legends: that of the Volcano, that of
the Cadejan, that of Tatuana, that of the Sombreron and that of a Treasure
Among the Flowers. In this book there is a controlled purity of tropical
fantasy. Asturias works like a goldsmith educated in Spanish and French
academies, for whom the indigenous content, without being entirely exotic is
still, not intimate. From his fingers flows a fine filigree, always on the
point of breaking into a tangle, but subject to time, arranged in a brilliant
design, with cursory touches of provincialism, which however do not destroy the
magic of the rustic filter to which Valery alluded. Improvisationally, the
purposive voice is interrupted and from the lowered eyes of the poet the
surroundings fall like ripe fruit:

     Clouds, sky, plum trees.... Not a soul in the
     languor of the road. From time to time, the quick
     passage of flights of Sunday parakeets moderating
     the silence. The day was exhaled from the nostrils
     of the steers, pale, hot, perfumed.(3)

     In this tranquil and luminous book is foreshadowed, nevertheless, a clash
of cultures that, later, will cause a conflagration. The region itself is,
sometimes, the nostalgic vocation of the student of Central America suspended
in the courts of Europe: a thing of magnolias in bloom, of mangoes and gourds,
of mother-cacao and of yucca. A smooth tropical provincialism, yet urbane as
well as lyrical. A sort of Azorin with a Quetzal icon upon his shoulder. On
another page, a Chateaubriand-like romanticism is expressed with torpid
sensuality:

     The tropical air removes the leaves of the
     undefinable felicity of love's kisses. Balsams which
     liquefy. Steamy mouths, wide against temperance.
     Warm waters where slumber the lizards over their
     virgin females.(4)

     And elsewhere Asturias is a modernist, weighed down by weight of gold and
silver coins of exotic Ruben's decadence:

     In the city of Copan the king changes his livestock
     from leather to silver in the palace gardens. The
     royal shoulder exhibits the displayed feather of a
     peacock. Against his chest bags hold magic shells,
     knit in with gold threads. His wrists show
     bracelets of polished cane competitive with first
     class marble. His bandanna crown has for insignia
     the loose feather of a hawk. In romantic awareness
     the king smokes his tobacco in a bamboo hut.(5)

     The reader of these legends has a presentiment of an incomplete
elaboration. Asturias is satisfied neither with the folkloric mystification
pertaining to his land, nor with the symbolist manipulations in fashion in
France. He fluctuates between the two currents without yet discovering the
orientation that is to guide him later in his re-conquest of the Mayan world.
He has read Popol-Vuh, naturally, and he knows best of all the work by Georges
Raynaud, "The Gods, the Heroes and the Men of Guatemala" which he himself
translated into Spanish in collaboration with J. M. Gonzalez of Mendoza. He has
studied the indigenous religions and myths of the Americas at the Sorbonne,
between the years 1923 and 1926; and there, surely, he consolidated his
knowledge of the historical literature of the Conquest and the Colonization.
His explication of narcissism in the glossary of "Leyendas de Guatemala" is
taken from the Tratado de las Supersticiones de los Naturales de Nueva Espana
by Ruiz de Alarcon, a work dating from 1629; and in this glossary he also cites
the "Recordacion Florida" or the captain Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzman
(Discurso Historico, Natural, Material, Militar y Politico del
Reyno de Goathemala, 1690).
     Of all these sources, the Popol-Vuh is certainly the  most important. From
the sacred book of the Quiches' Asturias is inspired, for example, to write the
speech inserted in his chapter, "Ahora que Me Acuerdo" (now that I remember),
in which the first men, upon seeing the sunrise, plead to the gods for a fecund
line of descent. Asturias' paraphrase is, in reality, a synthesis of two
Traditions from Popol-Vuh: the seventh and the eleventh. The legend of the tree
that grows indefinitely with humans in its branches--parent of Jack and the
beanstalk--is found in the fourth Tradition of the Popol-Vuh, and Asturias
alludes to it in his story of the tree that walks (p.167). It is the same with
the trees that bleed (p.55), the dance of delights (p.56), the four roads that
"cross before Xibalba" (p.58), the rebellion of the rocks, the waters and the
air (p.82), which all are allusions to the mythology of the Popol-Vuh.
     The poetic imagination of Asturias operates with a happy appreciation of
its powers, with a consciousness of itself which, at its height, makes us think
of a snake about to bite its own tail. It should not be forgotten that in his
elaboration of this mythological material Asturias still accepts a schedule of
conventional values. Only a poet like Valery could sense the presence of a
frenetically primitive world at the bottom of the legends. The reader
accustomed to exotic modernism--the heir of romantic pseudo-indianism--could
well see in Asturias' legends a picturesque and inoffensive evocation of inert
material. The perception of Valery as much as the optical illusion of the
reader are both the result of real phenomena, and, partially explain the
contradiction in which Asturias is moved to write his Leyendas de Guatemala.
     Between the publication of this firstborn work and his novel "El Senor
Presidente" there is a lapse of 16 years. But the dates, it is clear, are
deceptive, because judging from Asturias' own testimony, the novel appeared 15
years after having been written. In any case, if not on a temporal plane, at
least in a literary sense, a profound upheaval has taken place in Asturias, an
upheaval that ends finally his lyrical celebration of Mayan motifs and his
refined stylization of Central American regions. A heavy hand all at once
overthrows the altar to the gods and fouls the Guatemalan morning with the
steam of blood and waste. Asturias returned from Europe to Guatemala in 1937.
He who had lived his infancy under the tyranny of Estrada Cabrera returns to
the dictatorship of Ubico. "El Senor Presidente" is already written. Nothing
remains but to re-enact the fable. Ubico will fall; once again the writer will
return to his country, will be honored by the democratic government of Arevalo
and Arbenz and his People will acclaim him with the old accent of the legends
and the new voice of liberty; and he will depart again into exile because the
fable insists on repeating itself. "El Senor Presidente" could have been
written in any of these three conditions. It developed in the characteristic
ambiance of the Hispano-american tyrannies, and was nurtured with anecdotes,
rebellions, uprootings, bitter injustices, impotence and hope, but, above all,
with an emotion that, as the leitmotif of the novel, is new to Latin American
literature: that of fear. Despotic cruelty and ignorance was given us by
Sarmiento in his Facundo; political ferocity bordering on the bestial,
Echeverria in El Matadero; thrusts of cape and sword, Marmol in Amalia;
Asturias creates in "El Senor Presidente" the epic of fear and impotence, the
X-ray of the Spanish nation caught on the cross of treason, of hypocrisy and of
opportunism. Let us hear him explain the origin of his novel:

     More than a written novel, "El Senor Presidente" was
     a spoken novel. In Paris we would gather a group of
     Central American friends to relate anecdotes about
     our respective homes, which in that era lived
     beneath similar dictatorships. Each would contribute
     from his own experience or that of an acquaintance.
     For my part I recited my own time of infancy under
     the dictatorship of Estrada Cabrera. The fear that
     it communicates to a child passed to the book. This
     not as a literary formula, but as something
     psychological. The novel is not in fact, as many
     have thought, a biography of Estrada Cabrera, but
     the symbol of any dictator, common to all the
     nations. The illness was the same, but the ill
     varied. Thereby, "El Senor Presidente" has application
     to all of the Latin American countries. It is a sort
     of compendium ... of a dictator.(6)

     In an interview published by the "Repertorio Americano" he adds other,
equally significant details:

     The novel was written without a pre-determined
     literary plan. The chapters emerged one following
     after the other, as if they were tied in obedience
     to an internal world of which I was the mere
     expositor. When I finished it I saw that I had
     brought to the book--not by means of known literary
     methods, of those that can be didactically
     expressed, but rather by that obedience to the
     impositions of an internal world, as I said
     before--the realism of an Hispano-american nation,
     in this case my own, as if submission to it was
     like that to the will of a man....
     During the age of the dictatorship to which the book
     refers I was a kid, an adolescent and during it I
     reached the first youth. That is why I think that,
     without having taken part in any of the events,
     there filtered through my skin the sense of fear, of
     insecurity, of earthly panic that breathes through
     the work.(7)

     In these declarations Asturias suggests certain elements of a literary
creed that explains, not only "El Senor Presidente," but also the novelistic
trilogy about exploitation in bananas that was to begin publication in 1949
with Viento Fuerte. We shall let Asturias define his own points of view:

     In a work to be realized in Latin America, say, the
     writer should look for, out of preference, the Latin
     American theme and bring it to his literary work
     with local language. This language is not simply
     the use of dialect. It is the interpretation that
     the people of the street make of the living reality,
     from their traditions to their popular aspirations.

     Confronted with a Europeanized literature, the
     hemispheric writer, of poetry or prose, must take
     an attitude in favor of the growth of an indigenous
     literature. Such a literature has been
     systematically negated, but that negation has no
     value now that the Latin American influence has long
     tended toward those works from the native tradition
     as much as the Hispanic of the colonial epoch.

     The Hispano-american themes should be extrapolated
     to the universal. But only that can be
     universalized which has a deep root in the land
     itself....

     I divide, to distinguish values, writers into those
     we would call precious, who form one group, and
     those who have a marked tendency toward the social.
     The latter originated a literature of the Americas
     that slapped back the lyrical to place ahead of it
     the problems of the Continent. Representatives are
     well known: Martin Luis Guzman, Mariano Azuela,
     Romulo Gallegos, Jose Eustasio Rivera, Jorge Icaza.

     This social literature, it should be clearly
     understood, is very essentially Latin American. Its
     appearance in this century is no more than the
     re-appearance of a current that stems from long ago.
     The indians, to whom the friars taught the Latin
     characters, wrote their first works with a markedly
     social cast, denouncing in them the fact that they
     were victimized by the Conquistadores. Among these
     works can be cited the books named the Chilan-Balam
     which appeared in different sites of the Mayan
     geographical area, and in which there sounds the
     complaint of the primitive, trampled and oppressed
     by the imperialism that forces him to a slave's
     condition. Many works of this literature
     disappeared, but its remaining vestiges demonstrate
     that, as a reaction of the indigenous wise man to
     the barbarism of the conquest, there was born a
     sub-American literature of a social tendency.

     The centuries pass; the literature of the Colonies
     runs in Spanish American channels, but from then on
     examples of that native literature appear that are
     concerned with problems of social order. And when
     new imperialist forms dominate the sources of South
     America's riches, democratically enslaving the farm
     laborer and the worker, there emerge the books so
     scandalous for their crudity....

     Nevertheless, it must be noted that this new
     literature that denounces deeds and reveals injuries
     does not lead to hopelessness, nor participates at
     all in pessimism. On the contrary; throughout these
     heroic works one can see the hope for the Americas
     to be more autonomous, and, to that extent,
     better.(8)

     These declarations, made in 1950, are re-affirmed in
1954:

     The writer today has returned to a consciousness of
     his Latin America, like in the years between 1800
     and 1830, when the pen and the sword became weapons
     of liberty. Now the combat is about economic
     liberty. And the Latin American writer is there,
     singing and telling as with the great poetry of
     other times. From the rhapsodies of the Popol-Vuh to
     the lyrics of the patriotic hymns, the authentic
     poets of Latin America tell more than sing (Neruda
     in his Cuento General, which he calls Canto) and
     the novelists find themes in the gum
     exploitation,the pit of the mine, the exploitation
     of the indian, the plantations of rubber, bananas,
     sugar, the usurers, the quacks, the oil fields. And
     once again, as in the days of the political
     emancipation, the indian, the mestizo, the black,
     the mulatto, the cripple, facing this way and that,
     appear in the pages of this struggle in the midst of
     Latin America's night, because in much of the
     Americas it is still night-time.(9)

     Asturias has preferred not to attempt a strict definition of the aesthetic
phenomenon to which his concept of South-Americanism alludes. His social
realism, considering his declarations, is not optimist. This is perhaps
due to the fact that in his novels, in El Senor Presidente in particular, he
does not transcend the limits of an objective representation of a bad politics;
nor does he offer a definition of this ill itself and, for that matter,
proposes no solution whatsoever that could energize his work from a
revolutionary dynamism. Furthermore, this analytical position saves him from
the defects that are common in purely propagandistic literature. "El Senor
Presidente" is not a libel; it could have been one and its literary merit, a
distinct naturalness, would not have been less. Its significance rests in the
artistic elaboration that the author should have carried to its conclusion to
incarnate a symbol supported by a reality in itself no more than local
phenomenon. That the model for the anti-hero should have been Estrada Cabrera
carries an importance from a literary point of view. The book is a deed that
the historian and the sociologist record, but in the terrain of art it is only
tangential. The critic is detained, sometimes, in the biographic game and I
suppose that he will not lack keys to identify characters such as the General,
Channels, Angel Face, the Auditor of War and some others. I think one can
agree that those characters live on three planes: they can represent true
figures of the politics of a time, they can be considered prototypes, and
finally they can assume the complex and mysterious sense of archetypes which do
not lose, at root, their dramatic humanity. They only interest me in this last
aspect.
     The creatures of Asturias move laboriously toward obtaining a destiny that
they cannot carry out except by means of the mythological transfiguration. In
life, they are tormented by the diabolical fatality of the lost souls of
Dostoevsky. The good, that is to say, the victims, are touched with the divine
grace, also Dostoevskian, that walks with the poor in spirit. The victims have
the auras of saints, be it in the form of a bloody crown or in the form of a
noose, the rope of the Mayan hanging which leads from the tree to paradise.
People like the idiot named Pelele, like Mazacuata, Angel Face, Vazquez and
the numerous prostitutes and chain gang laborers, are beings primitive to a
degree that Asturias seems to see essential and basic, the indispensable
condition of salvation in a metaphysical sense. On this plane his terrors, his
angers, his shortcomings and his animal cruelty are explained and resolved.
     How can one ever forget sir Benito Perez Galdos before that bunch of foul
beggars at the portals of the Guatemalan cathedral? The same spiritual lack
consumes the souls of the abandoned ones in Asturias and of the sad hobos in a
story like Misericordia, for example. But if neither Perez Galdos nor
Dostoevsky were those major saints, hidden between shadows and vulgar altars,
even if Asturias, alone and surprised in the court of miracles of his homeland,
should seem to discover a Christian wound in Guatemala's indian body, his
literary world and the feeling that it generates are, at this stage of his
work, a Latin American flowering of the dense revolutionary awakening of a
Europe torn by economic contradictions and the immense political errors which
de-railed the second half of the 19th century.
     In this fact lies much of the universal significance of a novel like "El
Senor Presidente." Our Americas represent in such a case a kind of caricature
of European social organization and disorganization. The details become
enormous; despotism turns into sadism, the wear on public conveniences to
vandalism, the misery of the lower classes to virulent physical and moral
degeneration. The gilded table of values of the bourgeois society suffers a
grotesque distortion. The fine things are confused with the discards, a false
aristocracy pretends to erect rich walls at the sides of the privileged city,
but in each wall a huge hole opens where the rat lurks with disease on his
teeth. Society loses the notion of its rights and duties. Controlled by terror,
men cease to recognize their family ties and flee from social responsibility.
"El Senor Presidente" becomes a rat dressed in black, with banded hat, gloves
and baton, a messianic rat, decorated, entertained, deified, perpetuated in
names of cities, in effigies on coins, in monuments and buildings; a rat who
nibbles with impunity at the morale of homes as much as the honor of
international conventions. The man, buried alive in an underground cave,
perishes slowly to the odor of his body's disintegration while delivering his
soul to the minor demons.
     Overflowing with words, melodramatic, at times ingenuous, with the
ingenuousness of Dickens in certain strange coincidences, Asturias produces a
human document that is also one of the novels of the greatest artistic
integrity that has been written in Central America. Rafael Arevalo Martinez
prepared the road for him alone, that track of unchecked fantasy and
nightmarish realism that the author feels like a wound in his own flesh, with
the perspective of a European culture and the intuition of a Mayan eye.
Asturias found one further element, which the modernists seem to disdain: the
consciousness of nationality and a revolutionary political conscience.
     In his next work, this consciousness of nationality will become
identification with the mythological world of the Mayas and political duty, his
denunciation of imperialism. Firmly rooted in this historical duality--the
pre-Columbian and the present-day Guatemalan--Asturias enters the fascinating
world of the "Hombres de Maiz" (1949). This novel is, to my judgment, his most
ambitious work, although not the best realized; a story or, better said,
symphonic prose poem, of complex structure, difficult style, laden with
symbols, subject to varied and contradictory interpretations. No one that I
know of had submitted this book to a critical and systematic analysis before
1957.(10) My interpretation, then, was based upon a logical and chronological
re-organization of the principal elements of the plot and on an explication of
the most important legends. Asturias himself has defined the fundamental theme
of Hombres de Maiz:

     Its inspiration, it was said, is the sustained
     struggle between the indian of the country who
     understands that corn should be planted only for
     food, and the half-breed who plants it for business,
     burning precious stands of woods and impoverishing
     the earth to enrich himself.(11)

     That statement, so simple and so clear, was picked up with enthusiasm by
the editors who reproduced it on the book jacket and from there the critics
took it and repeated it to exhaustion. Unfortunately, the statement does not
disentangle the mystery of "Hombres de Maiz" and it points to only one aspect
among many that Asturias handles in his novel.
     In the chronological scheme of the novel the reader finds five central
occurrences and a sort of epilogue. Around these occurrences Asturias builds
the argument of his story without apparent logic, nearing their orbit and
distancing himself from it, this being in harmonious circles or in daring
evocations and visions. Such occurrences and the circumstantial world that
surrounds them are like dolls within other dolls. They must be peeled like a
banana before the other can approach their ironical smile. Here is a summary of
those episodes:
     1) The tale of Gaspar Ilom and the battle between the indians and the
professional growers. Gaspar, the leader, is victim of an attempt on his life,
and is miraculously saved, cured by the river waters. His success is ephemeral:
surrounded by traitors, like Cow Manuela Machojon and her husband, and by the
police riding at the request of colonel Chalo Godoy, he sees his forces
liquidated and plunges into the river to drown. The details of this occurrence
are sporadically given throughout the novel.(12) Certain details indicate to us
that this part of the work occurs at the beginnings of this century.
     2) The legend of Machojon, the Macho or sir Macho, son of sir Tomes
Machojon, the traitor, and stepson of Cow Manuela. Machojon goes in search of
his darling and disappears on the road wrapped in a blanket of lights, a
metaphor that in the esoteric language of Asturias seems to indicate corncob
lanterns on a llama. The rumor circulates that Machojon has been converted to
a spirit that, resplendent from head to toe, emerges when the corncobs are
ignited. Sir Tomes tries to verify the legend and goes out one night to burn
the dry cobs. He ends hanging among the llamas, like a re-incarnation of the
ghost of his son. The conflagration is uncontrollable. In the midst of a
bestial fight the growers fall.
     3) Legend of the Tecunes and their vengeance against the Zacaton family.
This revenge is narrated from a mythological point of view and involves several
metamorphoses. The Tecunes do away too with colonel Godoy, whose fate at the
firing squad was pre-destined. There are two elaborations of the same event in
the novel; the second, two years after the occurrences took place.(13)
     4) The legend of the Blind Goyo Yic and his woman, Maria Tecun, who
abandons him. Similarly, this story is turned into myth.(14) To search for his
wife, Goyo submits to a drastic operation by means of which he regains his
sight. The cure serves him poorly, because, how is he to recognize Maria Tecun
if he has never seen her? Looking for the voice or the touch of the woman he
moves along the roads like a walking merchant. He associates with Mingo Revolt
to smuggle alcohol. On the trip they sell each other all the merchandise and,
drunk, come to a stop at the jail.
     5) The legend of Correo-Coyote: a sort of variant of the legend of Maria
Tecun and the clearest example in the novel of animistic metamorphosis. Now it
is Nicho Aquino, the courier, who loses his lady. During the search in the
mountain and the approaches, they run across Hilario Sacayon, who the people of
the town are looking for, but they believe that he can be found in the form of
a coyote, his projection. This same Hilario brings another legend to mind: that
of the cares of Miguelita de Acatan with the gringo O'Neill, a time in which
Asturias draws the North-American dramatist Eugene O'Neill in the see of his
travels about Latin America as a sales agent of the sewing machine company,
Singer.(15) Pursuing the adventures of Nicho Aquino we arrive at Xibalba, the
subterranean world of the Popol-Vuh, where all the moments of history are
explained as in a sort of final synthesis.
     The epilogue could be the occurrence of the Castle of the Port, a prison
in which there is occurring a reunion of the principal characters who stayed to
add up the account and tie down the loose ends that still could intrigue the
reader. It is therein where Goyo Yic finally finds Maria Tecun.
     This structure does not affect anything, we suppose, except the anecdotal
meanings of Asturias' book. On a deeper plane, "Hombres de Maiz" represents a
classic attempt to give artistic form to that magic world of the Popol-Vuh
which yet lives in the subconscious of the field population of Guatemala. In
this novel Asturias has discarded the system of intellectual defense that is
the principal organizer of "Leyendas de Guatemala" and he enters the
mythological world of his forebears looking for his own identity. He
writes from a collective subconscious and consciousness to relate myth
literally, and to testify against social injustice with the shout of protest of
the abandoned, without making use of theorizing.
     Thus do the great themes of his work emerge: animistic narcissism, the
sacred corn rituals, vengeance, affection and mortality. I have already said:
his creatures are nothing except in the mythological metamorphosis; and in the
final transformation of their extinction they realize their destiny. That
explains the fatality that the story in "Hombres de Maiz" is never resolved
until Xibalba. Every being, incarnated in his imagery, understands, in the end,
the superior design of his actions. Sprung from corn--seventh Tradition of
Popol-Vuh--he defends with his blood the sacred concept of its culture.
Obsessed by the religious impulse to avenge the fall of the chief, they
assassinate, unloosing a chain of men and transmogrifications. When the witch
doctor in the first episode falls, his double the ram also does; and when the
coyote perishes so does Nicho Aquino. The man loses the corn simultaneous with
his abandonment by the woman; and the woman, in turn, changes to stone, like
the gods were turned to stone when the sun was born (seventh Tradition of the
Popol-Vuh). Asturias seems to be saying, with D. H. Lawrence, that no man is
complete until he finds harmony with nature and woman. No legend better
illustrates the truth hidden in the mythological world to which Asturias refers
than that of Maria Tecun: the one who loses her is blind, who upon regaining
sight lives searching for something that he could only see without eyes.
     Asturias does not hide the keys that will aid comprehension of his book.
To illustrate the mythological process he says:

     The gods disappeared, but the legends remained, and
     they, like them, require sacrifices; gone are the
     obsidian knives to tear the heart from the chest of
     the sacrificed, but there remain the knives of
     absence that wound and madden.(16)

     And elsewhere he adds:

     One of ten thinks he has invented what others have
     forgotten. When one tells such a story, he says, I
     invented it, it is mine, this is mine. But what one
     is really doing is remembering - you remembered in
     your drunkenness what the memories of your ancestors
     left in your blood, because take into account that
     you form a part not only of Hilario Sacayon, but
     rather of all the Sacayons that have existed, and on
     the side of your maternal lady, the Arriazas,
     people who were in all of these places.... In your
     background was the history of Miguelita de Acatan,
     just like in a book, and there your eyes read of it,
     and you went repeating it with the clapper of your
     drunken tongue, and if it had not been you, it
     would have been another, but someone would have told
     of it so it would not be forgotten, be completely
     lost, because its existence, fictitious or real,
     forms part of life and nature of these parts, and
     life cannot be lost, an eternal risk, but eternally
     it is not lost.(17)

     A careful reader of the Popol-Vuh will uncover new keys that assist in the
interpretation of major and minor symbols, from animism to the use of names
such as, for example, that of the Tacunes which, according to the eleventh
Tradition of Popol-Vuh, occurs in the ancestry of the ninth generation of the
Caguek-Quiches. This peculiarity of the language of Asturias, its multiple and
mono-tonal repetitions, his metaphoric obsession, his apparently rhetorical
figures in which the animal, the plant, the tree and the man are mixed, all
have their root in the sacred Quiches literature.(18)
     Must one accept, then, this book by Asturias as a folkloric document, a
modern flowering of the old Maya civilization? I do not think so. Asturias'
novel is the resultant of a curious pattern of vertical cultures. The
specialists in architecture and baroque sculpture of the Americas can easily
distinguish between two apparently equal themes, but one stemming from the
indian hand and the other by the European hand. Something similar happens with
the baroque of "Hombres de Maiz"; it is a hybrid opulence, of its balance,
pretty but monstrous. Because in all the extension of this poem in prose,
something is left over, poetry is left over, metaphors are, exclamations,
allegories. This dis-economy of ornamentation and content is, nevertheless,
something new in the authentically indianist Latin American literature and in
that is the root of its situation.
     The concept of political duty and national consciousness, basic pillars in
the literary creed of Asturias, have conferred upon his later novels a marked
propagandistic tone. There is no ambiguity whatsoever regarding the social
function that they propose to realize: his trilogy about exploitation in
bananas in Central America has as its object the denunciation of the abuses end
contradictions of a semi-colonial economic organization, and the inspiration
of the Central american republics with a revolutionary dynamism, with political
responsibility and a thorough understanding of a democracy that would produce,
as capstone, their complete liberation from foreign imperialism and from the
opportunism and venality of their local politics. The trilogy consists of:
Viento Fuerte (Guatemala City, 1949), El Papa Verde (Buenos Aires, 1954), and
Los Ojos de los Enterrados (Buenos Aires, 1960).(19) Asturias states:

     The action in the first of these novels, Viento
     Fuerte, concerns the penetration by the fruit
     companies of our Pacific coasts and relates the
     conflict between the small banana planters and the
     huge company that will not buy his products. In El
     Papa Verde, the characters are set on the Atlantic
     coast, amidst the first incursion of United Fruit in
     Guatemala, The conclusion alludes to the company's
     attempt to provoke a dispute between Honduras and
     Guatemala over a question of boundaries that had
     been resolved by arbitration. Los Ojos de los
     Enterrados pursues the same theme, always upon a
     foundation of true events, but with fictional
     characters.(20)

     Asturias concentrates his anti-imperialist attack on a North American
company that soon becomes a symbol for all foreign economic penetration in
Latin America. He follows its steps from its appearance in the Caribbean zone
up to its political and economic consolidation in today's banana producing
republics. During the era to which Asturias refers in El Papa Verde the company
begins the growth process of its political and economic empire. The hero of the
novel, Geo. Maker Thompson, could depict the captain Lawrence D. Baker, who in
1870 initiated banana traffic between the Caribbean zone and the United States
with a squalid 85-ton freighter. 15 years later he and nine others formed a
consortium with two thousand dollars from each as their capital. After five
years of activity, that is, in 1890, the consortium incorporated and its
capital of 20,000 dollars had increased to 531,000 dollars.
     In 1871, and in another, part of Central America, the brothers Keith,
Henry and Minor Cooper constructed a railroad that cost eight million dollars
and four thousand lives. That railroad was the first line in a complex net of
transport and banana companies that covered the Caribbean like a dense and
tightened spider's web. In 1900 two of the most powerful banana producing
groups joined to form the famous United Fruit Co. At the zenith they
controlled 80 percent of the commerce in fruit. United paid more than five
million dollars to the Boston Fruit Co. for its holdings and around four
million dollars to Keith brothers for theirs. Soon it came to own 112 miles of
railways and more than two hundred thousand acres of land. In 1906 the company
entered Guatemala and in 1912, Honduras. In 1900 its capital was more than 11
million dollars, in 1930 it arrived at about 200 million dollars and by
mid-century it rose to 560 million.
     In the banana trilogy, Asturias describes the problem of the peasant
owners who refuse to sell their lands to the company; the latter refuses to
meet with them and places their demands in government's hands. The drama from
there is matter for tale, of legends; the prose, of statistics. These, the
statistics, show that, in compliance with certain franchises, the government
exchanged between 250 and 500 acres for each five-eighths mile of railroad
constructed by the foreign enterprise. In 1927 Guatemala leased to United Fruit
all the vacant land that it might want along 60 miles of the valley of the
river, Moncagua for a yearly rent of 14,000 dollars. Some of the contracts
signed by the Central American nations with the fruit processing company are
now pieces for the anthology of the history of international right; as for
example the Soto-Keith contract signed 21 April, 1884 in Costa Rica, and the
contracts of 1904, 1930 and 1936 signed by Estrada Cabrera and Ubico in
Guatemala.(21)
     Let us look more closely at the novels of bananas. None of them precludes
a strict literary analysis. The theme is ambitious and could have originated a
major anti-imperialist novel. Asturias presents the problem from the Latin
American point of view and, with use of three or four characters, he also
reveals the ideas of an important sector of the financier's world in the United
States. Let us leave the realization that Tropical Platanera, Inc., is a
conventional symbol of all imperialist companies. Let the men who take part in
the drama be considered.
     Lester, the protagonist in Viento Fuerte, is a North American vagabond,
eccentric, visionary, who gathers a group of Guatemalan natives to form a
company that is to compete with the great international consortium. Wherever
Lester and his companions sell the fruit, the Company gives it away. If they
want to transport it there is no railway which will accept it. Lester hurriedly
leaves paying fabulous bonuses with coins of unknown origin. He is a similar
spendthrift in his personal quirks; on a given occasion he pays five thousand
dollars to a ballerina from Iberia whom he disdains. Soon Lester makes a trip
to the U.S. and the author reveals the actual identity of his character: he is
dealing with a millionaire member of the Tropical, who has wished on his own
account to make an investigation of the stealth of the company. So incredible
is the literary effect that the novel, from that viewpoint, loses all
consistency. Lester is the North American caricature. The problem, real and
dramatic as it is, becomes trivialized.
     In the book, El Papa Verde, Asturias attempts a related theme, but from a
new point of view. He brings back the role of the mysterious investigator, now
embodied in the character of the youth Ray Salcedo, whom he makes do as an
archaeologist who is the seducer of the daughter of the American adventurer
Geo. Maker Thompson. He is not more than a variant of Lester. The company is
the same, but now the invasion of Guatemala is beginning there. Its methods are
already familiar ones: rights are violated, the native population is dispersed,
favor is gained with the half-blood opportunists and their terror can triumph.
Geo. Maker symbolizes the power of the imperialist trainer. Asturias shows him
over various epochs, jumping from the anonymity to the fame, from poverty to
good fortune, ruler of prairies and cities, invincible with a machete or with a
contract dollar. To add a new plane to his personality, Asturias delves into
his personal life giving special attention to the character of daughter
Aurelia. The success of the novel depended on the extent to which Asturias
could transform Geo. Maker into a symbolic representation of the sinister
imperialist company without leeching him of his consistency as human. If he
does not achieve this, it is due in fact to a phenomenon of the language: in
none of his anti-imperialist novels does Asturias write in the style that
corresponds to his theme. These novels resemble brilliant easels of a work he
is about to write. Asturias still must use in them the lyrical prose of Hombres
de Maiz. Without the Mayan myths that prose shrinks and ends in verbal
luxuriance. Certain customs are repeated, such that the reader recognizes them
and loses interest in them; for example, to mention an especially dramatic
instance, Asturias feels it necessary to first establish a nebula of metaphor
approximating the matter with indirections and suggestions that, at length and
because of the romantic vocabulary in which he wraps them, lose their effect.
Asturias does not seem to realize that lyric language and the technique of a
magical realism that in "Hombres de Maiz" intensify the profoundest aspects of
history, in his trilogy concerning bananas are dysfunctional. The metaphors
stand by themselves, shorn from the violence from which the metaphors stem.
     Ask why Asturias did not interpret the social movement of his people in
the modern world for the efficacy of his artistic re-creation of the Quiche
world? It was necessary that there be a decisive change in his language, a
change as radical as that which separates "Leyendas de Guatemala" from "El
Senor Presidente." His ideology appeared to be formed, his position was clear;
no one knew the details of the social and economic drama of Central America
better than he did. I think that Asturias, the animus of a Mayan-quiche rite,
worked his miracle where he could stray in the lyrical ambit of a history
nurtured by memories, visions and intuitions, that which Valery called
"filters," and while he moved in regions of the tropics disoriented and
bewitched by his props whose flats came in the weights of a reality
incomprehensible but active, a re-actualized cosmogony.
     His poetic expression--a Surrealism adapted to a regional vision--was
fragmented upon joining contact with the social crisis that had occurred at
mid-century: he bid farewell to several fountains of generosity, those which
awarded him the Nobel Prize in 1967, but had gone on to lose sympathy with him,
remaining stripped amidst his baroque opulence, becoming exotic, when his
destiny was revolutionary being. Possibly, Asturias was closing an oval: he
left in years when the post-modernist retinue was releasing itself from Ruben
and venturing into flight alone, skimming over the land. Something never
dropped from his wings, a tendency to crash, to gild, to shine or, which is the
same, to burn beneath a sun that cares not whether the leather is living, or
not.

Notes
1 "Leyendas de Guatemala," Madrid, 1930, pp. 17-18, 31-32.
2 Cf. "Leyendas de Guatemala," Buenos Aires: Pleamar, 1948.
3 "Leyendas de Guatemala," op.cit., p.135.
4 Ibid., p.25.
5 Ibid., p. 23.
6 Interview conducted for the magazine, "Ercilla," Santiago, Chile, on 5
October, 1954.
7 RA, vol.XXX, no.6, 1 March, 1950.
8 "Reps Ame." pp. 82-83.
9 "Ercilla," op. cit.
10 The statement refers to the date on which I presented views on this work:
Eighth Congress of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana,
August, 1957, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
11 "Reps Ame." op. cit., p.83.
12 Cf. "Hombres de Maiz," Ed. Losada (Lima?) 1949 and in particular the pages
54, 61, 72, 80 and 258.
13 Ibid., pp.210-.
14 Ibid., pp. 148, 191, 153.
15 Ibid., pp.168-170.
16 Ibid., p.184.
17 Ibid., p.188.
18 The bibliography on the Popol-Vuh is extensive; for the student of
literature the book by Raphael Girard will suffice, Le Popol-Vuh, histoire
culturelle des Maya-Quiches, Payot, Paris, 1954.
19 Asturias has announced a fourth volume of the banana cycle: El Bastardo or
Dos Veces Bastardo.
20 "Ercilla," op. cit.
21 Details about these contracts and, incidents to which Asturias refers in
Viento Fuerte and El Papa Verde appear in the work by Ch. Kepner Jr. and J. H.
Soothill, El Imperio del Banano (Mexico City, 1949). One chapter of this book,
especially, that entitled "Los Apuros de los Agricultores Particulares" (the
worries...), constitutes an indispensable reference for the comprehension owed
to these novels. Asturias' point of view with regard to United Fruit Co. had
been taken too by Luis Cardoza y Aragon in La Revolucion Guatemalteca (Mexico
City, 1955).


Chapter 5 - Alejo Carpentier: Magic Realism

     I should confess that, before the year 1950, the name, Alejo Carpentier
stimulated in me a humorous remembrance of certain intense literary encounters
during my university years in Chile. Down there around 1934 or 1935 we received
his novel, "Ecue-Yamba-O, Historia afrocubana" and, momentarily, it illuminated
us. Resembling a gust of passionate folkloric currents, with something of
popular emotion and almost, almost revolutionary, his work brought dragging
along all that was crass and false in a Cuban pseudo-tradition after the
Spanish gypsies that had been indifferently sustained by critics who, confusing
literature with the couplet, still considered that the Cuban black was a
character out of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Of course, even in those years, we could
see that Carpentier narrated his objects with a certain erudite perspective not
a guarantee for the accuracy of his folk world--with some of the detachment of
the hermaphrodites of Uruguayan folkloric pseudo-poetry or that of the
Caribbean rumba dancers--but his experiment turned in commotion, progressing
like a tractor which opens roads in mountains, plains, plantations and villages
to which the Cuban novel had seldom dared approach. The exoticism of
"Ecue-Yamba-O," the primitive mixed with the societal and embellished with an
attractive constructionist imagery is what seduced us. In that generation we
read Claude MacKay's Black Cocktail and, The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill;
we never completed the discovery of jazz in all its aspects and geographic
variants, but we followed it from New Orleans to Chicago and looked for it too
in Afro-Spanish Harlem.
     Without furthering this literary impression, sensing perhaps but without
clearly distinguishing the aesthetic-social factor contained in "Ecue-Yamba-O"
that would later be expanded and deepened in interpretations of the hemispheric
mythology, Carpentier therefore appeared to us like a precursor, slightly
strange and a little alien in his own country.
     I did not read anything else of his until 1958. I read Los Pasos
Perdidos: the first page with interest, the following, up to the beginning of
the voyage to South America, with indifference; from there until the end with
the unforgettable emotion of having discovered a decisive work, and I say
"discovered" because I learned only after finishing reading it that the book
had achieved an amazing success in France, England and the United States. I
found his other tales and the impression was verified; it seemed incredible
that over years of theorizing about the decadence of the descriptive
super-regionalism of the hemispheric novel and about the advent of a new
novelistic form consisting of essential realities, of universal communion in
the social and philosophical drama of contemporary man, set in the meaningful,
sometimes subterranean, sometimes supernatural realm of the old indian
mythology, the black and white of our peoples, I would not have known the work
of this Cuban, of his power to give form to the passing, solid and splendid
structures in a baroque style only comparable in Latin American literature to
that of Miguel Angel Asturias in prose, and to that of Pablo Neruda, in poetry.
     I then followed the track with greater care. I know of his life through an
essay by his compatriot Salvador Bueno.(1) Carpentier was born in Havana in
1904, the son of a French architect and of a language teacher, of Russian
origin, inclined "toward letters." With his parents he traveled in France,
Austria, Belgium and Russia. After completing his secondary studies in the
Janson de Sailly school, he specialized in musical theory and architecture. He
returned to Havana from France with the intention of obtaining a university
degree, but before long he went back. Music attracted him especially, as much
in its creative aspect as its historical.(2) Carpentier struggled to generate
an autochthonous movement that would supersede the mechanical imitation of the
European vanguard. He wrote four "scenarios" to works by the composer Amadeo
Roldan: "La Rebambaramba" (1928), a ballet in two acts, "El Milagro de
Anaquille" (1929), "Mata-Cangrejo" and "Azucar," choreographic poems.
     In 1927, Carpentier was jailed for his participation in revolutionary
political activities. In prison he wrote the first draft of his novel
"Ecue-Yamba-O," edited in Madrid in 1933. Free from persecutions, he traveled
anew to Europe in 1928. France called to him, to the point where in Cuba many
consider him an expatriate but, as Bueno says:

     ...this expatriate will find his sources of
     nourishment in a variety of cultures: the Western
     European, the Hispanic and the African, in a rich
     blend of their environmental circumstances. In his
     home study the dialogues and the books will bring
     along echoes of those old European cultures, the
     British and the Slavic in fruitful conjunction.
     Outside, in the street, in the city, among the
     friends he meets, among the people he talks to in
     passing, he incorporates the Spanish colonial with
     the African transplant which, in the last analysis,
     form what is essentially Cuban.(3)

     In Paris he devotes himself to radio broadcasting in collaboration with
Louis Barrault, Artaud and Desnos. He also writes the text and prepares the
montage and the synchronization of a documentary film titled, "Le Vaudou."(4)
     In 1944 he publishes a short story, "Viaje a la Semilla." He visits Haiti
in the company of the French actor Louis Jouvet, and the product of this trip
is his novel "El Reino de este Mundo," edited in Mexico City in 1949. He
locates, later, in Caracas where he played a role in a publicity firm. There
he writes "Los Pasos Perdidos" which, translated into French, receives the
"Prix du Meilleiur Livre Etranger" in 1956. Following, Carpentier has published
the short novel "El Acoso" (Buenos Aires, 1957), "Guerra del Tiempo" (Mexico
City, 1958)(5) and in 1962, "El Siglo de las Luces."
     One can see in Carpentier's work a certain evolutionary development that
is relatively easy to identify. From "Ecue-Yamba-O" to "El Acoso" he moves in a
survey--vertical and horizontal--of the mythological hemispheric roots, to
confront them with his urge to understand the secret signs that divide his
creative faculty and his social conscience. Fundamentally, the idea of
exceeding the limits of time obsesses him, of transcending them and achieving a
monumental historical synthesis in which man changes in circumstances but not
in essence and, at root, repeats an eternal fable whose design it is possible
to capture and hold in the work of art. From a literary viewpoint his evolution
proceeds from the scientific exoticism of "Ecue-Yamba-O" up to the
neo-symbolist abstraction of "El Acoso." We shall examine the details of the
process.
     "Ecue-Yamba-O" is a semi-documentary novel about the magic primitive world
of a sector of the black population in Cuba. An important part is played in it
by religious rites, initiation ceremonies, formulas for enchantment, the occult
substratum of peoples who live in an see of collective, pre-logical and
mystical representation, even in the midst of a modern civilization. Referring
to the scientific aspect of the novel, Salvador Bueno says:

     Apparently the work has a documentary character. The
     wish is to reveal the mysteries of the Afro-Cuban
     religions. Therefore the written text is accompanied
     by photographs of occult symbols, of ritual objects
     such as drums for chants. The folkloric is
     predominately Afro-Cuban in nature. Nevertheless, an
     essential note in this novel is the stylization of
     the Cuban life in which it appears. The customs, the
     language, the physical and human scenery are
     artistically elaborated.(6)

     A characteristic product of the African tradition that believes in the
life of one's ancestors, Menegildo Cue, the hero, represents in his passion and
downfall the destiny of his race. Menegildo goes from exaltation to ruin, from
the expressive play of picks, voices and guitars, to the abyss illumined by the
myths which he consecrates with his blood. The sex, the violence, the magic
chant, prepare him for martyrdom. In thrall to Longina, a Negress who lives
unmarried with a Haitian, in a jealous fever he looks for the occasion of
combat with his rival. He kills him with blows and goes to stay in the jail.

     It could have been five in the afternoon when the
     pair of rural guards arrested Menegildo. They did
     not accuse him--fortunately--of making communist
     propaganda nor of threatening the security of the
     State. It was simply that the Haitian, Napoleon, had
     been found on a shoulder of the highway, losing
     blood, with a thigh opened by a knife thrust....(7)

     Menegildo accused of communism? Menegildo has seen how a yankee
enterprise usurp. the lands of the Cuban peasants, including those of his
father. The blacks lose their sugar cane farms before the unlimited power of
the company which advances with its apparatus of latest model technical
material. The grandparents received a certain compensation in exchange for the
lands; their descendants, however, came to be peons and, very soon, slaves.
Menegildo sees the theft of which his father is victim and senses, at the same
time, that his own son, whom he shall never know, would have to inherit the
unwritten slavery that is his patrimony, thus perpetuating in an interminable
chain of Menegildos the foreign domination over the deposits of the national
wealth.

     Perhaps a black was worth less than an American? At
     least the blacks did not exploit anyone or go around
     stealing lands from the poor, obliging them to sell
     for two cents. The Americans? Sanamanbiche! As
     against them he came to take genuine pride in
     his primitive life, full of small complications and
     magical subtleties that the men of the north would
     never know.

     ...what good was the War for Independence, which
     the political orators spoke of so much, if one was
     continually uprooted by those sons of the great
     dog...? It was such that, at last and finally, only
     the yankees, friends of the Central, succeeded in
     benefiting from the ill-won profits of those
     ruinous plantations!

     And the Cuban workers and peasants, exploited by the
     ingenious yankee, defeated by the hiring of scabs at
     low wages, deceived by all the world, betrayed by
     the authorities, bursting with misery, ate--when
     they ate--what they could harvest in the narrow
     alleys between the walls of the buildings.(8)

     Carpentier does not avoid economic and social conflict. He examines it
frankly and responds with aggressiveness, without falling into the excesses of
propagandistic literature. Social injustice is one more ingredient in the
bloody routine that consumes Menegildo. From politics he proceeds, without
transition, to occult rites and in the frenzy of these currents that pulse with
mystical visions, as prisoner of ancestral forces that, without the richness
nor the prestige of ancient myth, churn today in the background of the village,
beneath the light of old street lamps, to the rhythm of sweaty drums and in
the confusion of cheap liquor, Menegildo falls with the jugular cut by a blade
during a mortal duel between the initiates of the "People's Physique Sextet"
and those of "Tropical Soul."
     Still at his back are the consortiums filling with money; the capitalist
patriots hide in the shadows of their sumptuous mansions; the blacks pray, sing
and procreate on the brown and green earth; they expire in miserable shacks;
while in the fathering of the city the eternal rumba persists, the sacrifice of
beaten and possessed women, of betrayed terrorists, of wise perverted shoeshine
boys, of hermaphroditic convicts, all delivering themselves orgiastically to a
black god and a white devil who insist on their demand for secret and fallen
blood.
     Like a luxurious and tender shadow, in soft relief, strong in her
primitive passion and in her silence, the negress Longina appears to represent
the only agreeable symbol in the story: somehow one senses that, perhaps, in
the generosity of her giving and in the heroism, tenacity and vigor hidden in
her faith in Menegildo, there is an essence from the land that refuses to
recognize the destruction imposed from outside and that affirms, that tightens
within herself and, with irresistible energy, releases a new and victorious
beginning. This woman-shadow in whose presence one detects a single message,
shall become a splendid type of woman symbol in Los Pasos Perdidos.
     Juan Marinello, considering Carpentier "as anxious about primitivisms as a
slave of refinements," censured his lack of political definition in
"Ecue-Yamba-O." Marinello said:

     Neither our black nor our community achieve their
     reality in "Ecue-Yamba-O." Menegildo, without losing
     his profile, could have communicated to us his great
     anguish of the trapped man, and the poor of "San
     Lucio" the pain of their hopelessness. The novel,
     despite its realized beauties, remains a book of
     effects, when it could have been a book of
     essences.(9)

     Marinello refers, pointedly, to a marginal condition that, even in the
most impassioned moments of the tale, applies to Carpentier: the condition of
the technical and erudite observer, the ingenious artisan who with refined
instinct can combine the types of the Afro-Cuban world, who paints with blood,
who releases sexual odors and fumes from secret initiations at artistically
measured intervals, and who arranges his myths in series of undeniably
surrealist order to extract from them their transcendent moment. So graphic is
his world of standing madness, so real seem his baroque ornaments of wax,
marble and emeralds, that Carpentier soon seems to us a prodigious "meteur en
scene," a master interior and exterior decorator. The truth is that in
"Ecue-Yamba-O" he does not yet demonstrate the road of his own re-integration
into Latin America, nor his explorations beyond time in search of the myths
which, revealing the circular channel between the plains and civilization, will
unite the halves of his creative personality. Such is to be the message of "El
Reino de este Mundo" and "Los Pasos Perdidos." For the moment he toured the
black nation desirous of finding the sense of the visions of his infancy,
accumulated and absorbed, but not comprehended. He photographed its nightmares,
documented its premonitions, and gave order and meaning to its affections; he
did not identify with this world because it was not fully his. He touched it
intimately, could even engage it, but not change it in the sense of definite
salvation or perdition.
"El Reino de este Mundo" is a novel of fabulous adventures based upon
true incidents in the history of Haiti. Carpentier's attempt in this story is
to demonstrate that the phantastic world of the damned poet, in the tradition
of the English Gothic, of black surrealism--I use the word in its literal
sense, as with its meaning in esoteric literature--is a reality in Latin
America. In the prologue Carpentier declares:

     This was made particularly evident to me during my
     stay in Haiti, upon finding myself in covert contact
     with something that we could call the marvelous
     actual. I walked in a land where thousands of men
     striving for liberty believed in the parapsychic
     powers of Mackandal, to the point where this
     collective faith would produce a miracle the day of
     his execution. I already knew the phantastic story of
     Bouckman, the Jamaican initiate. I had been in the
     La Ferriere fortress, a work without architectural
     antecedents, uniquely foreshadowed by the Prisiones
     Imaginarias of el Piranese. I had breathed the
     atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, ruler of
     incredible designs, much more surprising than all
     the cruel kings invented by the surrealists, very
     prone to tyrannies imaginary although not regretted.
     At each step there was the marvelous actual. But I
     thought, furthermore, that that presence and
     relevance of the marvelous actual was not the
     privilege of Haiti alone, but rather, patrimony of
     the entire hemisphere, where the development of
     cosmogonies, for example, had still not ceased being
     established. The marvelous actual is found at each
     step in the lives of men who inscribed dates in the
     history of the Continent and left surnames still
     remembered: from those who searched for the Fountain
     of Eternal Youth, or the golden city of Manoa, to
     various rebels from the first hour or various modern
     heroes of our wars for independence of such
     mythological stature as the colonel Juana de
     Azurduy....

     And it is so that, because of the virginity of the
     region, because of its constitution and its
     ontology, because of the conjoint presence of the
     indian and the black, because of the Revelation that
     its recent discovery was, because of the fertile
     cross-breedings that it propagated, Latin America is
     very far from having drained its kettle of
     mythologies.

     Without having intended it in a systematic way, the
     text which follows is a response to these kinds of
     concerns. In it a succession of extraordinary deeds
     are narrated, that happened on the island of Santo
     Domingo, in a specific epoch beyond the span of a
     human life, wherein the marvelous flows freely from
     a reality followed strictly in all its details.(10)

     With the years, this description of his aesthetic attitude will become a
declaration of principles and will sound above, below, and on the sides of the
new Hispano-american novel, particularly in the case of "Cien Años de
Soledad."
     The magic realism of Carpentier is affirmed, then, in an authenticity
which is, simultaneously, ideological and material. That which, at first sight,
could seem inoffensive, contains--as will be seen later in "Los Pasos
Perdidos"--a profound rift in a cultural complex that up to now has
compromised the hemispheric artistic expression.
     Carpentier writes like the Spanish chroniclers of the Conquest, for a
European public. He is dominated by the obsession to convince peoples who now
subsist in the quintessence of artifice, that in the Americas there exists an
active deposit of mythological forces--sometimes latent beneath a lid of
superficial Westernism--whose workings, in the area of art, give reality to an
entire system of symbols that the European culture conceives only on a static,
abstract plane. What in the surrealist tradition is organized chaos, in his
work is a natural and irrational chaos; the artifice is reality, and the exotic
becomes the authentically primitive.
     From the European imagination Carpentier is particularly interested in
French Romantic pseudo-primitivism. On first impression, the Cuban novelist
could impress one as a man of culture, a westerner attracted by Latin American
exoticism, a creator who, before producing his fable, proceeds to study it with
the minuteness of an archaeologist, from this
point of view, his work could seem to be an idealization of the Americas'
mythological world. The references to Atala and to Paul et Virginie are many in
"El Reino de este Mundo" and "Los Pasos Perdidos." The basic idea of this
latter novel--the man corrupted by supercivilization, who discovers in the
steppes his true self' and the perfect surrounding for creating his masterwork,
who is born to a sane, pure, primitive life, crystallizing his creative
vitality into art and in a rustic passion and earthly idyll--thus described,
superficially, could be identified as an outgrowth of French Romantic
encyclopaedism. It is possible that his European readers--Sitwell has called
him "one of the greatest writers of our age"--look to his works for the drop of
that barbaric elixir that Montaigne and Voltaire liked in La Araucana,
following in fascination the process of a second discovery of America, of a
hemisphere in which the mythology is preserved and exalted to provide new blood
to the parched remainder of a culture surfeited with itself. Against poisonous
artifice, we have here the myth in flesh and bone. Carpentier's message is
transformed as follows into an admonition directed against the idealizers:
Leave go the tricks of the salon, come to live the delirious reality of the
magic Americas, come to submerge yourselves in the new black saving legend.
     All this falls short, however, because there is something else to
consider, something of fundamental importance: Carpentier wishes to meld
himself in body and soul to this mythological organism in which his literary
work functions. Soon he will give testimony of this dependent essence of his
creative genius and of the venture in which he tries to define his conception
of art and life beyond the limits of time: that testimony and that venture
constitute the core of "Los Pasos Perdidos." Carpentier is not alone in the
attempt. The same year in which "El Reino de este Mundo" appears, "Hombres de
Maiz" by Miguel Angel Asturias is published in Buenos Aires. Both, Carpentier
and Asturias, return from an erudite and analytic Europe to the totemic,
magical, baroque and tropical world of certain zones of Latin America. Both
studied the mythological net they were going to penetrate, not completely
enveloped in artifice and in rhetoric, to search out the soul in an active
animistic ritual, spiced with exorcisms and revolutions. Both come with the
acclaim of sheepskins and diplomas to test the reality of a vision discussed in
French conference rooms.
     In the magical realism of Carpentier and Asturias, nevertheless, there is
no idealization whatsoever of romantic origin; on the contrary, that realism
stems from the facts of historical deeds that become legendary in the popular
imagination and operate, later, as myths out or a collective subconscious. This
ethnological and social root is the distinctive mark of the work of Carpentier
and Asturias.
     Without the anti-rhetorical auto da fe of the prologue, "El Reino de este
Mundo" could be considered as a small masterpiece of Gothic literature, a
surrealist flowering loaded with black elements, rich in self ornamentation,
luxurious in its organic density and in the vivid tone of its sensualism. But,
as was said, each character, each event--the age, the surroundings, the
region--all have an essential historical reality. Art (could one say,
trickery?) consists of the arrangement of the elements and in the focus with
which they are presented to the reader. Thus for example, from the initial
scene we hold the image of a barbershop display where wax combed heads are
exhibited, next to a window where a butcher shows heads of slaughtered animals.
In one scene rich in suggestion the novelist deliberately emphasizes those
heads and achieves the desired extravagant effect. Selecting the occurrence,
presenting his characters--Mackandal, Bouckman, Henri Christophe, Paulina
Bonaparte--at a culminating moment of their incredible adventures, arranging
the objects and the region from an angle which sharpens the incongruity and the
poetic absurdity, in Carpentier's hands the story acquires a frenzy of
movement, a richness of association that as soon touches the feelings as the
intellect.
     The world of violence, of bloody tyranny, of violations, assassinations,
that is the island described by Carpentier, schematically emerges, direct,
hallucinatory. He lives in a language of such vibrant symbols, both in their
spare hardness and in the suspension of time in which the author places them
among lights and shadows, that the tale is removed from history and we remain
watching with all the faces of his multiple reality. Such a feat of symbolism
of the essence of the history of the hemisphere has not, that I know of, more
than one antecedent: "El Matadero" by Esteban Echeverria and, perhaps, one
parallel: "El Senor Presidente" by Asturias.
"Los Pasos Perdidos" is the highest expression of what traditionally was
called the artistic novel in Latin America. The fine current of modernism with
its search for the exotic and the phantastic, the renewal of hemispheric
indianism in its complex relation with the Spanish Renaissance spirit, ideas
and forms of literature that surpass romanticism and the tradition of Dario,
are harmonized in the work of Carpentier and, taking on the luminosity of an
allegory shaped from a careful aesthetic viewpoint, also acquire the depth and
the transcendence of an adventure of the spirit which directly affects
contemporary man.
Carpentier's hero is a man consumed in the spiritual vacuum and the awful
psychological pressure that generates the great modern city. His habits consist
in maintaining the efficacy of worry, in giving solid respectability to
cynicism, in elaborating lies and dissimulation, in crowning the collective and
individual corruption with a halo of serene bourgeois superiority. At bottom,
the threads which support his performance are on the point of breaking, the
worry is already desperation, the vacuum is almost madness. Postponing the
culmination he goes from the bed of his wife to the bed of his girlfriend
stopping along the way to replenish his strength in a bar. His woman
conscientiously plays the role of the wreck in the costume of prosperous
respectability. During the week she is the main actress in a play whose events
occur in the south of the United States. On Sunday she celebrates sexual rites
with her husband. The girlfriend, dedicated to astrology and other similar
sciences, is the exquisite stimulant of the spirit and supports the sensual
heat of her body with arrangements of lights, music, paintings and various
aspects of interior decoration.
     On the verge of definitely succumbing, the hero departs for an area of the
Latin American wilderness--the Orinoco, according to the explanation in the
epilogue to the story--with the intention of discovering some primitive musical
instruments that will allow him to test his thesis concerning the origin of
music. His girlfriend accompanies him. First the Hispano-american city, where
they observe a violent revolution, and later the wilds, act like an acid which
upon coming into contact with humanity tired of the couple, produces a sudden
reaction. It accentuates "her lifelessness": without the interior decor,
exposed to the implacable light of the tropics, she falls apart like a wax
mannequin, the knots are loosened, the sensuality becomes flabby and ends,
dragging, impotent, consumed by malarial fever, rejected by the man and by the
woman--the temptation of lust had also affected another peasant woman--who
seeks refuge in the original shelter of her existential home.
     The man, on the other hand, breaks the vacuum bell and enters the world
that ancestrally he brought pulsing in his blood. We have here the path of his
salvation. Faced with two cultures--one which runs in the blood and the other
in books--and silenced by years of dissimulation and upright unconsciousness in
the midst of a common pit where only instinct sustains one, he gradually begins
to know his place of origin, to understand his reason for living, to search for
the final integrity. He must flee from the indecent sterility of the native
artist attached to a foreign culture, like a snail that absorbs the mask of
colors of dissonances and abstractions, resolved to parody a decadence that
still seems excessive. He discovers, en route, among primitive shades, the
expressiveness of harps, flutes and bongos that open the track towards a zone
of the hemispheric world where he is to capture the genuine image of himself,
transfigured in the mirrors of the prairies.
     Referring to his own work in an interview with Salvador Bueno, Carpentier
has said:

     In that book the plot has only one function of a
     structural kind, the factor of unity. In "Los Pasos
     Perdidos" one idea predominates: that of a
     possible evasion within time.

     In said novel a crisis of conscience, suffered by
     the central character who speaks in the first
     person, causes him to confront a mode of evasion
     that leads him beyond everything imaginable.

     (And where does that evasion lead him?)

     Once that supreme independence before Time, before
     the Era, is discovered, the protagonist should
     discover, within the same achieved evasion, the
     reasons which would make him undo what is
     done, returning to the point of departure.(11)

     And in a letter directed to the same critic, Carpentier specifies even
further:

     All this speaks of my present concern to
     universalize the Latin American scenario, to open
     it, amplify it, extend it.... Now one must orient
     himself to a more ecumenical concept of the
     hemispheric.(12)

     His pilgrimage in the wilderness is a parabola. As in the novel of Jose
Eustasio Rivera, "La Voragine,"(13) the discovery of the plains occurs in a
journey of the protagonist, man of the city, who goes hurried by intense
emotions of a sensual and aesthetic sort, toward a lyrically intuited terminus.
Arturo Cove as well as Carpentier's anonymous hero are fugitives from
decadence; both have, like a Kantian category, a clear-cut artistic conception
in which to place the unfamiliar primitive world, but it flattens them like a
supernatural power. Each is accompanied by a woman who represents what,
subconsciously they desire to destroy. They and the women reveal their most
secret essence in the contact with the mythological presence of nature and with
brutally fascinating beings that the wilderness diabolically uses for their
perdition. But, one should not confuse the fundamental movement of one work and
the other. The wilderness of Rivers is seen through the refined vocabulary of
Romantic modernism and the social conscience developed from the crisis of
capitalism that followed the first European war. Carpentier's wilderness,
without constituting a literary idealization, like that of Hudson, for
instance, is a mythological world interpreted above history and described in a
language full of symbols of surrealist ascent but at base concrete,
contemporary, autochthonous. Both novelists, the Colombian and the Cuban,
express the tropical hemispheric mythology, in the same sense that also Miguel
Angel Asturias and Eugene O'Neill express it, but the romantic-social root of
Rivers becomes a romantic-aesthetic root in the work of Carpentier.
In "Los Pasos Perdidos" the hero marches with a Scout, a friar and a
woman, like the Spanish colonizer of the past. Just like during the Conquest,
there are some to search for gold, some the Fountain of Youth, some to found
missions and some to populate them. But also traveling
with them is a Greek who reads the Odyssey. The truth is that, while on one
plane the expedition repeats the exploits of the Conquest--in the actual 20th
century--and discovers the secret of- the fabulous union of two cultures, on
another plane, of deeper meaning, the hero duplicates the adventure of Ulysses
and the dream of every visionary who would search our Continent for the
Promised Land, call it El Dorado, The City of the Caesars, Cibola or Santa
Monica of the Flock. He finds the source of happiness but, beneath the
implacable divine eye, he abandons it, believing that he has to return, without
guessing that leaving it, even momentarily he has renounced it, for it cannot
exist except in the miraculous instant of possession.
     The two adventures are engrossing. We participate in the founding of the
city in the wilderness, wish to remain with the hero and establish our farm in
the slowly growing township, want to warn him of his mistake when he boards the
airplane of the explorers who come to rescue him. Later--when like the hero in
"Lost Horizons", the novel by James Hilton--he fights to return, wanders the
roads of the plains, to the lengths of the currents of the Orinoco, risking all
to find the secret way through the disorder and the pathway which must lead him
to the hidden city, and we are moved by the dramatic fervor of his exploit and
suffer with him the effects of deception.
     On another plane, that of spiritual endeavor, Carpentier also proceeds
without subterfuge. The process of discovery of the world of his ancestry is
authentic in all its complexity. The language is the first serious obstacle.
The first pages of his tale, written in an idiom in which the verbal ornaments
do not yet hide a certain grammatical stammer, contain sentences like these:

     I knew that the new President of the Republic lived
     there and that, for a few days, I had failed to
     attend the popular festivities....

     Not a magazine remained, not a mystery novel, not a
     distracting lecture....

     Whoever opened a door, all of a sudden would have
     provoked flights of termites still unable to live in
     wood.(14)

     This same Carpentier has his moments of syntactical extravagance:

     This is, then, the idiom that I spoke in my
     childhood; the idiom in which I learned to read and
     to recite; the idiom rusted in my mind by disuse,
     left to the side like a useless tool, in a country
     where it could little serve me.(15)

     Much later, nevertheless, the grammar and its tiny traps disappear like a
small boat in the tumultuous current of the Latin American baroque and we stop
noticing the incongruities and the errors, do not take account when a term is
invented, translated from French or disinterred from the splendid treasures of
classical Spanish. Carpentier's language rises like a cathedral in the plains,
it rests or soars, it illuminates or it darkens, its jewels are blinding, it
contorts and is stylized, resonates with infinite cadences, explodes in colors,
or exhibits the patina of an antique painting. It is, finally, a magical
instrument.
     Mariano Ticon Sales, affected by the style of El Reino de este Mundo, has
said:

     Only some of the best designs of Valle-Inclan could
     compare in the Hispanic prose of our time with the
     almost pointedly plastic style in which it is
     written. A style that by strength of mastery gives
     alternatively not only the color or the half-tint,
     but even offers--when it is necessary--that luxury
     of the masters which is called shading. A style
     that when required to, can constitute its own
     perfection.(16)

     The language of Carpentier is not an accumulation of sounds produced in a
hollow and resonant horn, in the fashion of the verbal refinement of the turn
of the century which has traditionally been called tropicalism. The "tropical"
in the language is like a vegetative growth that appears on the surface of
words: a spot of fungus, or a tight bouquet of blossoms of transient stability;
it is a positing of the voice and a translation of the gesture into sounds. The
work of Carpentier does not show this vegetal invasion of the structure of the
language. The frenzy of his extensive and minute descriptions is rational; at
base, it encloses a dominion of exaltation.
     It is not difficult to find similarities in his work with that of Miguel
Angel Asturias. Carpentier seems to follow Asturias when he tries to suggest
one's transition from his human condition to his mythical condition. For
example, Carpentier says in "Los Pasos Perdidos":

     Already near the dwelling, summoned by
     Montsalvatje, were appearing the medics who closed
     wounds reciting the spell of Bogota, the giant Queen
     Cicanocohora, the amphibious men who to sleep would
     go to the bottom of lakes, and those whose
     nourishment was the mere fragrance of flowers. He
     already accepted the Carbuncle Kids who wore a
     sparkling stone between their eyes, and the hydra
     seen by the people of Federmann, and the Bezar Rock,
     of prodigious qualities, found in the entrails of
     sheep, and the tatunachas, beneath whose ears up to
     five persons could hide, and those other savages
     whose legs were crippled into the talons of
     poultry....

     The Amazons had existed: they were the women of the
     men lost to the primitives, in their mysterious
     migration toward the Maize Empire. From the wilds of
     the Mayas surged stairways, piers, monuments,
     temples full of portentous paintings, representing
     rites of priest-fish and of priest-locusts....(17)

     This language which evinces the intention to transcendentalize by means of
word-symbols is common in a certain area of the contemporary Latin American
novel; it is employed by writers desirous of creating powerful and deep
syntheses, amalgams of men and surroundings, of visions that surpass the
circumstantial and the ordinary. This frequently imbalanced linguistic
ambition, or heavy or arid, always difficult, holds no relation to what is
usually called "tropicalism." If "tropicalism" is untying, the language to
which I refer is uniting; if "tropicalism" means to cover the void with a dense
fabric of lyric frenzy, the style of Carpentier and Asturias is to denude the
deep spiritual vein to define it in a rigid poetic structure.
     Nevertheless, the word "tropicalism" properly understood should be in this
case as valid as the word "baroque," except to the extent that it refers to the
style of Carpentier and Asturias which represents the adaptation of a European
artistic form to the native idiosyncrasy of the Americas, or to be more exact,
of tropical America. Let us revise, in consequence, the meaning of the term:
those who speak of political "tropicalism" to refer to the rule of Central
America, in fact refer to a type of excess not foreign to the rest of the
hispanic world; similarly those who speak of "tropicalism" when they allude to
an easy and puerile sensuality, or when they censure an exuberance in the
customs, in the manner of dress, or of speaking, a lack of reserve, an
inconsequential enthusiasm, in truth recognize a mixed tendency in the peoples
called "white" of South America, but they transfer it to those who carry it,
accidentally, more to the surface of the skin.
     We shall consider then legitimate the use of the term, tropical, to
designate the variety of the baroque that constitutes the language of
Carpentier. Tropicalism in his work--like in that of Asturias-- is the name
for an artistic expression in which the magical basis of the primitive cultures
of the Americas joins with the formal beauty of the European baroque tradition
in an attempt to interpret the spirit and the sort of reality of the man of the
Caribbean and of Central America. No other idiom serves for such an enterprise:
not that of the old traditionalist norms, not that of crude branched
regionalism, nor that of modernist impressionism. An instrument is needed to
create myths, or to rescue them from the pre-Columbian past, to bring to life
the resident and the region in the essential unity that artistic creation
requires, to take the magic of the indigenous hemisphere to the fatigued
intellectualism of Europe. Exactly that which makes Carpentier "strange" and
Asturias "difficult" in Latin American literature, and distances them from
the official critique, is precisely that which they communicate to us with the
aesthetic thinking universally projected. Not otherwise can we interpret the
eulogies of Paul Valery upon the "Leyendas de Guatemala" by Asturias and those
of Edith Sitwell about the novels of Carpentier.
     On the linguistic plane Carpentier awakens mysterious resonances that
promptly invade the worlds of the sensations and ideas. From the words matter
is released which touches the hero and changes him. To the extent that he
confines himself to the selva he proceeds losing one soul and having another
emerge, like a serpent that changes skin. We see him advance in the Tierras del
Caballo:

     Upon entering a town where there was much talk of
     tail-lash and hoof-covers, I knew that we had
     arrived in the Lands of the Horse. It was, before
     anything else, that smell of the circus ring, of
     equine sweat, that walked the earth for so long,
     announcing the culture with the whinny. It was that
     flat hammering sound that announced to me I was near
     the blacksmith, still toiling upon his anvil and
     bellows, painted in shadows, with his leather apron,
     before the light of the furnace. It was the
     horseshoes heated to red put out in cold water, and
     the song tapped by the quarter-horse shod with new
     iron, still timid about sliding on the stones, and
     the bucking and snapping, held bridled, before the
     youth by the window, a ribbon displayed in her hair.
     With the horse had re-appeared the saddle shop,
     Perfumed of leather, fresh with hides, with its
     operatives laboring beneath hangings of cinches,
     cowhand stirrups, embossed leather covers and
     bridles for Sundays with silver disks on the
     frontispieces. In the Lands of the Horse it seemed
     that man was more manly. He returned to being master
     of ancient techniques which put his hands in direct
     contact with iron and hair, it taught him the arts
     of breaking and riding, developing physical
     dexterities to flaunt on festival days, in front of
     the admiring women who knew so well how to squeeze
     with their legs, who knew so much what to do with
     their arms. Reborn were the male games of taming the
     plaintive mules and jumping and tossing the bull,
     the ancient beast, causing his arrogance
     to roll in the dust. A mysterious solidarity has
     established between the animal of well placed
     testicles, who entered his cows more deeply than any
     other, and the man, who had for symbols of universal
     courage that which the sculptors of equestrian
     statues had to model or forge in bronze, or shape in
     marble, so that the steed would properly convey the
     hero upon his mount, casting a fine shadow over the
     lovers who strolled past in the municipal parks.
     There was a grand reunion of men in the houses where
     many horses nuzzled in the driveway; but where only
     one horse waited through the night, half hidden
     among the threats, the resident must have removed
     his spurs to go more quietly into the house where
     the shadows awaited. It seemed to me interesting to
     now observe that, after having been the greatest
     fortune of the man of Europe, his machine of war,
     his vehicle, his messenger, the pedestal for his
     personages, the ornament of his monuments and
     triumphal arches, the horse extended its great
     history in the hemisphere, and in the New World
     continued to fulfill, generously and on an enormous
     scale, its secular offices.(18)

     We see how the hero moves into the Tierras del Perro (pp. 147-48); we view
with some amazement the slow and steady knotting of two worlds-- now, not the
Spanish and the indian of the 15th century, but the European and the mestizo of
the 20th century--both crossed with magical and cabalistic strains: sometimes
scientific, psychological and philosophical, sometimes religious and sexual.
One of them, that of the European decadence, chases the other with a sensual
voracity. It saw the latter in the distance, and imitates it wearing
ritualistic masks upon its factions of blonde and brunette being. In moments of
aesthetic paroxysm a cult has been dedicated extravagantly mixing the east and
the west, magic, superstition and the dramatic apparatus. From that cult we
have Negroid masks hanging in luxury departments on the banks of the Seine, we
have ceramics, leathers, woodwork and opals in fashionable stores, we have
piano chords, and saxophone wails and rhythms of drums in little obscure
boites.
     "Los Pasos Perdidos" are lost steps which lead Carpentier's hero to
discover the truth behind this parody and in his words to revive the life that
ended in useful but artificial concepts of primitive art and in the automatic
approximations of surrealism. What could have been a surrealist picture hanging
at a Parisian exposition is here an environment of impeccable reality:

     The matter taken care of, with a magisterial
     handling of finances and another choice of pathways
     made, I found myself that noonday in a prodigious
     city in ruins. It was long deserted streets, of
     uninhabited houses, with rotted doors, down to the
     jambs or the plaster, whose ivied tiling collapsed
     at times merely in the center, following the break
     of a master beam, shortened by termites, discolored
     by exposure. There remained the columns of an
     entranceway burdened with the remnants of a cornice,
     broken by the roots of a fig tree. There were
     stairways without beginning or end, as if suspended
     in emptiness, and flimsy balconies, attached to a
     window frame opening on the sky. The layers of
     bluebells simulated the lightness of curtains in the
     space of rooms that still retained their slotted
     tiles, and there were old treasures of aromas,
     captured in poinsettia in obscure corners, and armed
     cacti in a lamp that trembled in the corridor, in
     the path of air currents, like uplifted hands of
     invisible servants. There were mushrooms behind the
     doors and vines in the chimneys. The trees struggled
     the length of the walkways, claws grasping the
     crevices of the masonry, and of a burned down church
     there remained a few buttresses and decorations and
     a monumental arch, ready to fall, on whose bell
     tower one could still detect, in vague outline, the
     figures of a celestial concert, with angels who
     played the woodwind, the horn, the composite organ,
     strings and maracas. This last left me so admiring
     that I wanted to go back to the boat in search of
     paper and pencil, to show the Caretaker, by means of
     some sketches, this rare reference to the organ. But
     at that instant there was the sound of drums and
     sharp flutes and various demons appeared on a corner
     of the square, pointing to a miserable Church, of
     plaster and tile, situated in front of the burned
     out cathedral.(19)

     In France they have dreamed of a surrealist Latin America and Africa, like
Chateaubriand imagined the Americas romantic. The Atala crowned in feathers and
icons has had her counterpart in a nocturnal Atala, totemic, laden with
diamonds or grounded on planes of Mexican sun, open and wounded by the
accumulation of phallic symbols that the poet-ethnologists fire there during
impassioned trances. Carpentier recognizes the deceptive duality, and through
the intermediary of a character, alludes to the poison of that puerile
idealization, or of the superimposed symbol that could discredit the
authenticity of the hero's adventure. Because this hero, although apparently
motivated by an old Romantic utopia, although in moments of sexual laxity
confuses the clarity of the wilderness with the wilderness itself and thinks he
sees it in the woman who follows him, prepares, he enjoys and develops, a kind
of earthly allegory, something like an upside-down war drum, soon shaken by the
impact of the elemental realities. As soon as he leaves the hidden city, his
Atala joins with another colonist, thus, as the Greek of the novel expresses
it:

     " She no Penelope. Young woman, strong, beautiful,
     needs husband. She no Penelope. Nature that woman
     here needs man....(20)

     The roads to the hidden city close and when they re-open they lead
nowhere, so the protagonist, although he conquers time, does not discover the
secret of his own inner liberation, but only exterior recourses, probes,
signals, aids of an inconclusive sort. He does discover the road for a resigned
return to the usual world.
     As already stated, in 1958 under the title of "Guerra del Tiempo"
Carpentier brought together three brief, stories--"El Camino de Santiago,"
"Viaje a la Semilla" and "Semejante a la Noche"--and his short novel: "El
Acoso."(21) Carpentier experiments in these works with an idea which seems to
have long obsessed him: that of breaking the artificially solid margins of time
and of integrating the past, the present and what is to come in one duration,
simultaneously stable and volatile, whose locus can be a person, an event or an
entire life. That this idea is not completely original could go without saying;
antecedents of Carpentier in this respect are: the Romantic comedy of John
Balderston, Berkeley Square, and the lyric novel of Virginia Wolf, Orlando.
Just as a tap of the finger changes the planes of a kaleidoscope, the stories
by Carpentier willfully situate themselves beyond the conventional unities of
time until they establish in their nobility, throughout "years" and even
"centuries," a harmonious flux in which the root of the human destiny is
identified with hallucinatory clarity.
     A supreme moment of crisis in "Semejante a la Noche" concerns the fortune
of a man before the imminence of war, and the will to live. The Greek soldier
who observes the loading of the ship in which he shall sail to Troy and
approaching the community to bid farewell to his parents becomes, without
transition, the Explorer who marches to the Americas and, during his meeting
with his girlfriend, is transformed into a colonist who emigrates across the
Gulf of Mexico, to conclude anew as a Greek soldier in the moral downfall and
the shame of his impotence, that soldier is man, from the beginnings of history
in a mortal trance, corroded by the acid that, beneath the heroic adventure,
peels off layer after layer, the solitude, the emptiness, defeat and the tragic
cynicism of those who manipulate him from the shadows and who make ready to cut
the threads that suspend him in the abyss.
     The pilgrim who goes to Santiago de Compostela--"El Camino de
Santiago"--is a man who undergoes, through the experience of another man, that
which he himself- should have later tried. That which is going to happen later
is already lived in this and other tales of Carpentier's. We have here, basic
intrigue and the surprising effect of its story line. Fighting against time,
plotting to dismantle it like a clock, piece by piece, and re-assemble it
arbitrarily, in "Viaje a la Semilla" Carpentier recounts the life of his
character in reverse. He leaves a house being disassembled and, like in a film
in which the action regresses thanks to a trick of the projector, the house is
reconstructed, the hero returns to dwell in it, he is rejuvenated, once more he
reaches adolescence, infancy, he joins his mother, is unborn, installs himself
in the womb and ends in the uterine darkness re-integrated to the original
seeds.
     "El Acoso" is a synthesis of these experiments with the notion of time and
an application of Carpentier's theories to the technique of literary narration.
The equilibrium between the diverse occurrences that continue accumulating like
a dramatic charge around the characters is the result of a tension that
Carpentier maintains until the last instant of the story. Everything in this
drama of the terrorist pursued by his persecutors seems to depend upon a
diabolical will that lets the minutes fall like grains of sand in an hourglass
and with each one the fateful execution approaches. The scenes, the words, the
gestures, constantly seek their respective places in the puzzle until, with the
integration of the final image, the resolution is produced and the entire story
is shown in essential complexity. The ethical substratum of the drama is, as in
the allegories of Kafka, gathered in the atmosphere of the tale, intense like a
presentiment or like an echo of something that still must be said. Nothing has
a meaning in itself--not even in the classic perfection of the detail--but
rather in the final and total concatenation where the secret significances are
defined, where time, detained for an instant, or better 46 minutes, the length
of Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony, resumes its circular progress inciting us to
begin again to read the story, assimilating ourselves to that lapse of time
which reflects the pace of life.
     The scheme of the tale--if we organize it chronologically and in the
abstract--is of a deceptive simplicity; it begins with Beethoven's "Eroica"
symphony in a concert hall; an individual arrives in haste, throws currency
between the bars of the box office, and enters the theater; two men follow him,
and without losing sight of him, they take seats in a back row. The ticket man,
who cannot identify who has given him the currency without awaiting the change,
leaves during the performance of the Symphony in search of a woman. She tells
him that the currency is counterfeit; he returns to the theater, hears the last
moments of the concert. The music terminates. Applause. The public leaves. The
two men that arrived behind go to a box where the one with the counterfeit
hides and they blast him with bullets. Let the reader compare this plot with
the organization that is given to the events in the tale. Carpentier narrates
the story in an interior monologue extending from the two central characters:
the persecuted terrorist and the ticket man of the concert hall. From within
them is spun the spider's fabric in which move the assassins, the old negress
of the Mirador, Estrella, the prostitute, the revolutionaries, the spies. A
world of portentous dramatic intensity emanates from the condemned man, it
leaves him like blood, a trickle first, a spot and then an overflow. True
happenings from the modern history of Cuba--the subplot in the cemetery to
overcome the authorities, the shooting of the debtor--are interlaced with the
chronic nightmare of the terrors of the hunted, with the details of his
confinement starving of hunger, and the chase through the streets of the city.
The worlds of both central characters touch at each instant in acts of
insignificant appearance but full of fatalism, they touch and are confounded,
but not essentially, instead, like two concentric circles that, floating, cross
to later separate.
     In this novel in which Carpentier--like O'Flaherty in The Informer--
reveals in the crisis of a man, pursued by the band of betrayed terrorists, the
naked and brutal basic solitude of the human condition, his talent as a
narrator culminate. Neither his previous work nor El Siglo de las Luces
surpasses this novel in artistic perfection and genuine emotion. The techniques
of the account--counterpoint, the flashback, the interior monologue and the
free association of ideas--are mechanisms of an accelerated rhythm. The
traditional baroque exuberance of Carpentier comes measured with a cold and
calculating power of aesthetic discernment, nothing is lacking here and nothing
is left over. The language does not detach from the work like an ornamental
afterthought, on the contrary, it comprises it, the one joins and integrates
the other like flesh on the bone, it painfully exposes the marrow and leaves
vibrating in its spareness echoes that are going to follow us, insistent,
pointed, like the memory of the fright of the accused.

Notes
1 Cf. Salvador Bueno, La Letra come Testigo, Havana, 1957. The essay is called,
"Alejo Carpentier, Novelists Antillano y Universal," pp.153-79.
2 Carpentier is the author of La Musica en Cuba (F.C.E., Mexico City, 1946), a
work noted for its historical and critical value.
3 Salvador Bueno, op. cit., p.157.
4 The protagonist in "Los Pasos Perdidos" (1st ed., Mexico City, 1953,
pp.34-35) similarly creates a cinematographic work.
5 This last volume includes "El Acoso" and the stories, "El Camino de
Santiago," "Viaje a la Semilla" and "Semejante a la Noche."
6 Salvador Bueno, op. cit., p.163.
7 "Ecue-Yamba-O," Alejo Carpentier.
8 Ibid.
9 Cf. Juan Marinello, Literatura Hispanoamericana, Mexico City, 1937, p. 175.
10 "El Reino de este Mundo," pp.12-16.
11 Cited by Bueno, pp.169-70.
12 Ibid., pp. 178-79.
13 Carpentier--through the intermediary of his central character-makes a
curious reference to a South American novel that could very well be "La
Voragine" by Rivera: "I have in my bag a famous novel, by a South American
 writer, in which are given the names of animals, of trees, references to
indigenous legends, ancient occurrences, and all what is necessary to give a
ring of veracity to my tale" (Los Pasos Perdidos, p. 293).
14 "Los Pasos Perdidos," pp. 52, 54, 68, 70.
15 Ibid., p.53.
16 Cited by Bueno, pp.169-170.
17 "Los Pasos Perdidos," pp.174-75.
18 Ibid., pp.139-417.
19 Ibid., pp.141-42.
20 Ibid., p. 331.
21 "El Camino de Santiago" is based upon a sentence taken from Carpentier's
book, La Musica en Cuba: "In 1557, Havana had no more of a musician than one
Juan de Amberes who played on the drum when there was a ship in sight...."
"Viaje a la Semilla" was published previously in Havana in 1944 and was
included in the Antologia del Cuento Cubano of S. Bueno.


Chapter 6 - Rayuela: or, Order Out of Chaos

     Julio Cortazar says in the "Table of directions" that he placed at the
beginning of "Rayuela"(1): "This book is many books, but, mostly, it is two
books." One, to follow his instructions, may be read straightaway from Chapter
one to 56, while the other is read combining chapters according to the "Table"
and in the process losing Chapter 55.
     This introduction will put unprepared readers on their guard. A novel for
professors, they immediately say. Look again at those words and fill in:
structuralist professors. In this there need be neither an insult to majesty
nor a spurning of the author. We deal with a natural reaction. Put in your
hands a book of more than 600 pages that must be read with a plan and a
guide.... Your hands themselves will tremble.
     On the surface, Cortazar's literary play brings to mind Cervantes, for its
intermission detours and dialogues with the reader.(2) Similarly, Lawrence
Stern, the author of "Tristram Shandy," has been mentioned, and the most
imaginative think of James Joyce. A professor runs them all through his
mind.(3)
     I set myself to reading nevertheless, and left the door open just in case.
At 100 pages, more or less, Cortazar closed it without my noticing. I knew
that I was captive and did nothing to escape. Two reasons: one, the
devastating reflection that our world, with humanity on board, is going
straight downhill. As much on the philosophic plane as on the ethical, and
that most subtle plane, of the revolutionary writer who alludes to existing man
with an assassin's clarity and terrorist erudition. The other is by reason of
humanity, in that I understand the affinity between Horacio and Maggie, am
literally moved to tears by their rotten romance, by their pain as of clowns
being beaten--like Cesar Vallejo-- having done nothing, that is, nothing more
than complete the trip to the cemetery, loving and destroying. As it should
be.
     The book becomes a companion, then, greedy and turbulent. We forgive it
even the sermons and internal disquisitions, as we forgive our dearest ones
their criminal deviations when they recount for the thousandth time how it was
that the powder was discovered. We laugh aloud at the Stern-apparatus and the
barbarisms of the language. We advance rapidly to Ronald-Babs, to linotype
figures, to Perico, the Spaniard by force, as completely incandescent.... We
remain in the family, held by the short hairs by poor Maggie, to Pola Paris and
its youngsters. Ah, what memories of so marvelous a dusty barrio, of the
beautiful children, the other side of the Horacio medallion and Maggie's
complement, of the sublime lunatics.... Then, we have begun to read the book
by Cortazar. Not the two books mentioned in the preface: the book. And there
is only: the one fable of an incredibly tragic love (consciousness of
"life-chaos" versus tacit acceptance of chaos as order) whose action occurs in
"Paris," a metaphor, first, and in Buenos Aires, another metaphor, next.
Perhaps the same metaphor in both cases, but the second is the boomerang of the
first.
     The narrator is, at times, a discursive Horacio, dialectical,
metaphysical, thirsty, bitter, self- inquisitor and real inquisitor, but one
with tears in his eyes, virile in an unkempt way, desolate and noble, with a
chest full of Gauloise smoke and tenderness. At other times, the narrator is
omniscient, a subject with a cruel eye, satirical, erudite, rejecting, an
active third person empowered to push Horacio into the pit. Novelist. Add to
these two individuals a third, Morelli, who expounds the theory of the novel
and the language which underlies "Rayuela." A sort of Ezra Pound, making
meanings, or a badly dressed Cortazar, that is to say, slightly out of focus.
Finally, consider it a court presided over by Traveler and his inevitable
reveries.
     The professor John Loveluck, thinking about form and
 content, has said in reference to "Rayuela": "The main thrust
of the book is the fusion of its form, or non- form, with the variety of the
represented world, the world as change, the world as kaleidoscope."(4)
     Open form. We agree. However, the Rayuela game has always had a definite
form ("to go to Heaven, you need to...") and, we propose, this Rayuela has and
does not have that form. It has it between Chapters one and 56 if read straight
through. After the 56th a wing opens revealing as if from a sack a genial
assortment of "interchangeable chapters." From a trapeze it evolves into an
arena and, all of a sudden, the arena becomes a sand clock. We could imagine
the form of this novel to be that of a pendulum or balance: moving between two
extremes over an abyss, it keeps rising and lowering, exiting and entering
eternally from Chapter 58 to 131, from 131 to 58, upon an indefinable axis. To
comprehend this form in constant movement it is necessary to analyze its
premises and judge how they contribute to the balance. I propose the following
scheme: 1. The philosophical problem: theory of knowledge. Ontological
speculation. Metaphysical projections. Symbolic personages: Horacio, Maggie,
Traveler, Talita, Morelli. Improbable characters: at the Club. 2. The aesthetic
problem: theory of language and theory of the novel. Cortazar-Morelli.
Application to "Rayuela." Linguistic exercises. 3. Identification of names and
literary sources for the notes to an academic edition. 4. And, lastly, if
anyone possesses the destructive instinct in the measure of a Minister of
Health, as Ceferino Piriz would say, it would include a study of Cortazar's
satire against the traditional Spanish and Hispano-american novel, without
forgetting the veiled allusions to Eduardo Mallea and the open ones to Jorge
Luis Borges, and the reason why no allusion is made to Ernesto Sabato. These
would be remarks in the manner of Julian Marias. Personally, I am attracted to
only the first two points of this scheme.
     We shall examine the first of the problems set by Cortazar between
Chapters one and 56..., and continued in the form of a philosophic dialogue in
Chapter 99.
     From the speculations of Horacio, the inquisitor, it is deduced that man
left his path by following the mandates of "reason," for it, in reality, leads
down the road of lies, hypocrisy, renunciation, and the absurd: error disguised
as order.(5) To rebel against this--the violent lie of our civilization--
signifies not necessarily to discover the opposite road, given that in the act
of rebellion we arrive at an order which, at bottom, cannot be that, but the
other side of disorder or, to use a metaphor, the blind side of the mirror.
From there, desperation. From there, the urgency of action, and because he who
acts is a desperado nothing is achieved except to wound and destroy what is
loved; the being who, by natural impulse and condition of innocence, resolved
the tragedy by living it. Who lives? Maggie. Who lives is, in truth, who
founders, agonizes and perishes in the madness that is our fate, who gives
without asking anything, in an act of love. Who perishes? Maggie, because we do
not live for free and the price must be paid and the price goes with the
knowledge that we have come alone to watch the synopsis of a cheap drama. The
play rises in value when we comprehend that we are in the middle of the scene.
There is, then, no other path for the authentic outcast than to tear at his
clothing, the inner and the outer, crying with love for the world which
vanishes with a puff or a leap. Horacio.
     We insist on some of these ideas in connection with the demise of
Rocamadour, one of the great chapters of "Rayuela" (the other two culminating
chapters, in my judgment, are 56, the dialogue of Traveler and Horacio, and 41,
with Talita in the foreground: in these Cortazar appears with all his knives
sharpened and batteries charged, attacking, here, in the plenitude of his
powers). Composition of place: Maggie's room. Rocamadour, her son, whom she
cares for and watches with the tender slowness of total devotion, expires while
she converses with Horacio. She does not notice. Horacio notes the happening
and is silent. The dialogue is transformed into a conversation to the degree
that other people arrive and, at dawn, it becomes a philosophical seminar.
Theme: the theory of knowledge and related problems, reality, the order in
chaos, the place of man, in the grave or among the living.
     Everything occurs darkly in the atmosphere both static and hushed, a sort
of Platonic cave. The lighting shifts, a match is lit and at once illuminates
the body at the foot of the room; an image is created that will live for a
moment until another replaces it, as one picture supersedes another at a
painting exhibit.
     The discussion is brilliant, interminable, interrupted (assaulted, you
could say), by an oldster who lives upstairs and who, like God, beats his cane
upon the world to protest what happens beneath his feet. Taking part: Ronald,
North American, defending a notion of immediate reality (we suppose); Etienne
and Gregorovius, as an official chorus; Horacio, whose premise is defined as
follows - existence is lived from crisis to crisis and reason presides over a
false order. Gregorovius reverts to a metaphor: "In reality, we are as in a
comedy when one arrives at the theater during the second act. Everything is
very beautiful but nothing is understood. The actors speak and act without our
knowing why or because of what. We project on them our own ignorance, and they
seem like lunatics who enter and exit too decisively. Shakespeare already said
it, anyway, and if he did not he should have."(6)
     The debate produces an echo in Etienne and another in Horacio and another,
in turn, in Cortazar. It is understood: it is the same person changing masks
in the darkness. Or four people looking into the same turbid pond of
water and being reflected together.
     The world has become absurd, says the tango, and perhaps it is because in
an oversight we handed it over to Reason. Great possibilities here. The
absurd dressed in costumes and ornaments that we learn to venerate until we
forget the ruse and we accept the disguise as true reality. We shall take it
apart piece by piece, entirely. We shall start again. How? For what? Then
the problem begins again.
     Maggie discovers that the child has perished. God keeps banging his cane
on the floor above. The seminar concludes. A brief sequence of French cinema,
and Horacio disappears.
     The impression remains that Cortazar, like Camus in "The Plague" and
Sartre in "No Exit," has written a morality play: a sermon in dialogue,
profound, disturbing, pathetic. Ah! says the reader, we have here another
Argentine essayist who needs the novel to express himself. Nevertheless, it is
evident that Cortazar is not an essayist in the manner of Mallea, for example.
The truth is that in writing his essay in the form of a novel Cortazar denudes
and exposes himself: a bleeding strip-tease, pinned to the cross.
     The theory of knowledge becomes, to that extent, a visceral problem. Sex,
humor, love, violence, passion, humiliation, anger, agony, desperation - all
are conditions of a man who looks at contemporary society and discovers in it,
without much surprise, his own visage. In the negative of this self-portrait
lies its humanity. I think that Cortazar "feels" the tragic purity of
disorder, the smoothly violent despair at betrayal, the intrinsic heroism of
the human fiasco, more than the Argentine existentialists, and reproduces it
with a more liberated art, at once more angelic and more sinister.
Cortazar has the knack of flight, the valor that cuts off the supporting
branch, the black humor...that sets traps in the meadows, in a word, the
ferocious stance which differentiates condemned artists from worried
philosophers. I may not have explained myself. Camus or Sartre convince and
intrigue me. Cortazar in Chapter 56 of "Rayuela" moves me. I feel here a
human dimension that is not only part of a brilliant structure, but basically a
greatness for suffering, love and compassion, a clear sign of knowing how to
shoulder his cross and, therefore, of carrying it always.
     The philosophical basis of this desperate attitude is summarized in
another seminar: Chapter 99. Horacio utters the key phrases: "I would say to
begin that this technological reality which men of science and readers of
France-Soir accept today, this world of cortisone, gamma rays and plutonium
fission, has as little to do with reality as The Tale of the Rose.... Man,
after having expected everything from intelligence and spirit, feels as if
betrayed, obscurely conscious that his arms have turned against him, that the
culture, the 'civilitas,' has brought him to this dead-end where the barbarism
of science is no more than a comprehensible reaction.Pardon the
language."(7)
     Horacio asks pardon for the language but not for the metaphor: "The
admiration of certain types for an electron microscope seems to me no more
fecund than that of the guides toward the miracles of Lourdes. To believe in
what is called matter, to believe in what is called spirit, to exist in
Emmanuel or pursue courses in Zen, to view human destiny as an economy problem
or as pure absurdity, the list is long, the selection multiple. But the mere
fact that there may be selection and that the list is long suffices to
demonstrate that we are in pre-history and pre-humanity."(8)
     To seek the truth is a collective act, not an individual one: "...I feel
that my salvation, supposing that I could attain it, must be also the salvation
of all, to the last of men."(9)
     However, that salvation which seems possible in the realm...of speculation
and upon the metaphysical scale, is pierced like a window receiving the first
rays of sunlight in the morning: "I awoke and saw the dawning light in the
slats of the blinds. It emerged from so within the night that I had an upsurge
within myself, the shock of approaching a new day with its same presentations,
its mechanical indifference each time - consciousness, sensation of light,
opening the eyes, the blinds, the alcove.
     "In that second, with the omniscience of the sleepwalker, I measured the
horror of all that so astounds and enchants the religions: the eternal
perfection of the cosmos, the incalculable revolution of the globe upon its
axis. Nausea, insupportable sensation of involvement. I am obliged to
tolerate the sun rising every day! It is monstrous. It is inhuman."(10)
     It is understood that for characters like Horacio, Maggie, Traveler and
Talita to say things like these is to assume a symbolic attitude and meaning.
It is irony that approaches the humoristic. The anti-rhetoric which creates
the rhetoric.
     Horacio is the man of thought, the supreme witness who observes, reflects
in a loud voice, judges and condemns. Self-inquisitor. Maggie defines him in
one phrase: each and everyone "exists" and "is" somewhere, while only Horacio
"is not a fixture." Still, it would be an error to consider him uninvolved
with the ruin that he comprises. We do not forget that he provokes it and know
that he provokes it. Horacio is the only one of the group who recognizes it
and flees. His double, Traveler, behaves like Maggie: allowing existence to
flow through his veins. The questions are superfluous. Why think up answers?
     The contrast between Horacio and Maggie, that personal duel that arcs over
the philosophic conflict, or to put it in Horacio's words, the quarrel against
the world, is capsulized in a brief dialogue in Chapter 20. Maggie and Horacio
present it simply: "My dangers are only metaphysical," said (Horacio)
Oliveira. "Believe me, they won't take me from the water with hooks. I shall
burst from an intestinal occlusion, from an Asian virus or in a Peugeot 403."
     "I don't know," said Maggie. "I think at times of suicide but see that I
won't do it. Don't think it is only for Rocamadour, before him it was the
same. The idea of killing myself always makes me well. But you, who don't
think of it... Why do you say: metaphysical dangers? There are also
metaphysical rivers, Horacio. You'll throw yourself into one of those
rivers."(11)
     We all know that, in accord with the rules of the game, Horacio is the
thinker and, therefore, will not suicide. Maggie, on the other hand... What
is curious is that she too rationalizes in her pathetic letter to Rocamadour
and filters the world in accordance with certain categories. They emerge
despite herself: "I no longer cry, I'm content, but it is so difficult to
understand things, I need so much time to understand a little that which
Horacio and the others understand at once, but they who understand everything
so well cannot understand you and me...
     "...because the world doesn't matter if one has no strength to keep
choosing something true, if one arranges it like a chest of drawers and puts
you on one side, Sunday on the other, mothers' love, the Montparnasse station,
the train, the visit that must be made. I don't feel like leaving."(12)
     Maggie chooses something true. We have here the difference between her
and Horacio. She neither vacillates in recognizing it nor doubts in choosing.
Horacio will be tempted to choose until the end and his indecision will be that
of the player who awaits with one foot in the air his entrance into the Rayuela
game.
     In the second part of the novel the conflict which seemed to revolve upon
a single axis begins to make unforeseen turns. Maggie moves towards a partial
transfiguration of her fantasy, while Horacio joins a Passion trinity.
Traveler appears as the half of Horacio that is saved by tacitly
accepting the rules of the trap: "...at bottom Traveler was that which he
should have been with a little less of cursed imagination, a man of the
territory..., precariously false, and how much beauty was in those eyes when
they had filled with tears..., how much love in that arm reaching around the
waist of a woman. Oliveira thought while responding to the friendly gestures
of Dr. Ovajero de Ferraguto (with somewhat less friendship), probably the only
possible way of escaping the territory was by entering it up to the
elbows."(13)
     Horacio, in Traveler's place, would think of sabotaging the trap from
within, diagnosed as a citizen and good neighbor, but that function, with what
it entails of compromise and renunciation, would be unacceptable: "...nothing
can be denounced if it is done within the system to which the denounced
belong."(14)
     Talita, for whom Horacio cannot stop seeing Maggie, is the balance of the
scale, but a balance arm that unexpectedly and capricious tilts to one extreme.
Horacio has installed himself with Traveler and Talita and, thereby, involves
Maggie too. Given, then, is the pathos of violence. The relation between Talita
and Traveler is clarified: they are united by a deep love for...Horacio. They
feel that they may fall apart due to him; Horacio himself asks to be ejected.
It is impossible: the trinity exists as a function of the forces that try to
break it.
     The parabola used by Cortazar to define this drama is a good demonstration
of his implacable virtuosity. It consists of a circus act performed in the
street, Talita on horseback in a ring, between two windows of neighboring
buildings, with an audience of children who curiously watch the somersaults,
and two men at opposite ends, feeling that when she moves, the world also is
moved. The living, as Horacio would say. Talita is persistently alienated
from her husband and approaches the lover's arms, but the "force of destiny"
detains her and moves her towards Traveler who, with an upset voice, receives
her exclaiming "You're back!" in a sanguine parody of the spell which does away
with them.
     From the circus, logically, the lovers pass to the asylum. There cannot
be any other place for the unfolding to this penny-toss. The scene of the
crime, so to say.
     The terms of the madness are fully delineated by the narrator. Horacio,
from his cell of jealousy, sees how Maggie endeavors to enter the Rayuela
heaven and how she fails. Talita leaves Traveler's bed and goes in search of
Horacio, which leads her to the asylum morgue (a place where the beer and
flakes of humanity congregate) and there they kiss. But, foreseeing that his
hours are numbered because Traveler would kill him, he returns to his room and,
helped by a patient, arranges a system of defenses with strings and traps. He
places himself precariously on the window sill, and waits. Traveler arrives.
Horacio receives him behind his web of threads. Below, in the patio,
authorities, guards and lunatics witness the duel, fascinated. Moreover, it is
a combat consummated not in a sacrifice, but instead in a dialogue.
     Horacio, shaken, seeking desperately what he destroyed while thinking to
create it, is disarmed before the eyes of his friend who observes him crying.
In that call and in Traveler's tenderness he is defended against the true
approaching enemy. Horacio comprehends the reality of his double: he is the
one saved by living the error, within the error, or in a truth no longer his.
Horacio's desperation, the insupportable moral suffering, the real presence of
Maggie who fills him with smoke and sorrow, the conviction that he destroyed
the living while he sought to understand it, Traveler's emotion in recognizing
that impotence, are not the contents of an essay nor the curve of a parabola,
but are factors for profound recreation in the drama of contemporary humanity.
     Just as some of the "jazzistas" at the Club seem to be literary
projections of a polemic that Cortazar exercises against himself, so those
gentlemen of the circus and the asylum appear to be autonomous desperates. I
feel that Horacio's anguish and Traveler's compassion enclose the lesson of
humanity of this book.
     Summarizing: the fundamental conflict posed by Cortazar is that of the
mid-century man who tries to reason out in multiple plane, registers and tones,
the unreason of the human condition. For those who identify today with that
problematic, "Rayuela" exerts a cathartic power, something like the defining
function that "The Magic Mountain" had around 1930. The presentation of the
ideological conflict is in both novels polarizing, dialectical, ironic,
brilliant. Yet Rayuela is a game that resembles Russian roulette, Magic
Mountain a game of solitaire. Thomas Mann defends a humanist position joking
against it. Cortazar recognizes existential truth as a capital sentence.
Furthermore, it must be made very clear that, in the person of his narrator,
Cortazar is committed and if we wish to accompany him it must be militantly.
We have here a satire of the grand style: if we are to play, we play with
fire, in the supreme circus with clowns wearing real nooses and the human
cannon being charged with dynamite.
     We now consider the aesthetic problem, the theory of language and of the
novel. Cortazar recognizes the presence of a magical eye which analyzes,
regulates and determines from within the form of "Rayuela." He says: "It is
inevitable that part of your work would be a reflection upon the problem of
writing it."(15) The reference is to Morelli, the old, broken, moribund writer,
whose "manuscripts" fall into the hands of Oliveira and company. The existence
of Morelli as a character in the novel allows Cortazar self-criticism with
subtlety and irony ("He was telling Perico that Morelli's theories were not
exactly original").(16)
     The position of Cortazar-Morelli with respect to the language may be
synthesized as follows: just as reality already gives to man a lifestyle, that
is, a form that he must accept without protest, a fixed path, a coercion, so
also man receives language ready-made, falsified by all types of ethical and
aesthetic subterfuges. It is necessary, then, to return to language its rights,
to purge it, discipline it, as a hygienic measure.
     "Morelli understands that mere aesthetic writing is an evasion and a lie,
which results in reviving the bovine scholar, the type who wants no problems
without solutions, or invokes false problems that permit him to suffer
comfortably in his armchair, without involvement in the drama that also should
be his own."(17)
     The task consists in reconquering the primordial and elemental meanings,
in destroying all precious rhetoric in the literature, disarming its traps,
delivering fragments as existence delivers them, giving a complex of facets for
the ready to absorb, re-creating, as Unamuno says, and conferring some meaning
upon them. Referring to the genre of the novel, Horacio says: "Morelli is an
artist who has a special idea of art, consisting more than anything in casting
down the usual forms, current practice for all good artists. For example, he
explodes the fairy tale novel. The book that is read from beginning to end like
a good boy. You already will have seen that he cares less and less about the
connection of the part, that by which one word brings forth the next...."(18)
     The reader must be an accomplice who hears murmurs beneath the surface and
to whom esoteric rhythms emerge. The result will be a Rayuela: "To provoke,
to create a text without a lineage..., minutely anti-novelistic (although not
anti-novel). Without avoiding the grand effects of the genre when the
situation requires it, but remembering the counsel of Gide, 'ne jamais profiter
de l'elan acquis.' Like all the formal creations of the West, the novel
contents itself with a closed order. Resolutely in opposition, to search here
too for the opening and thereby to cut at the root all systematic constructions
of character and situation. Method - irony, incessant self-criticism,
incongruity, imagination in the service of no one."(19)
     Required is a narrative that "catalyzes the confused and badly understood
notions" for the reader who is the novelist's traveling companion. Irony, the
use of material in gestation and living immediacy gives origin to the "comic
novel" (and what is Ulysses?) that transpires "like those dreams in which at
the margin of a trivial occurrence we sense a more serious charge that we
cannot always succeed in disentangling."(20)
     Inevitably we are given the norms, the sense, the parts and the structure
of the novel as an expression of reality and simultaneously, the theory is put
into practice.(21) And, as if they were insignificant, the key citations of
Morelli are considered by Oliveira as "pedantic." The circle closes and left,
in passing, are the sources of the miracle: Gide, Joyce, Gombrowicz and from
there, like apparitions at the wrong seance, Pound and Kafka.
     The circle to which I refer is that which integrates a novel with its
anti-novel, a circle of a dialectical nature whose force, to that extent,
derives from contrary poles. I do not wish to suggest any necessity in the
process. Cortazar is sincere and efficient in his intent to destroy from
within, his anti-novel attacking the first 56 chapters of "Rayuela" from
multiple angles with time bombs and hand grenades. Nevertheless, the ordinary
reader (I think not of the bovine reader nor the macho reader, but of the men
and women who read) may leave the interchangeable chapters as food for critics
and professors, and not deal with the open novel--which Cortazar offers--
preferring the closed novel: the story of Maggie and Horacio that unfolds a
little in the manner of a fairy tale. This is the "Rayuela" commented upon in
public. In the other grow abundant roots of a courtly rhetoric. From time to
time Cortazar speaks from the heart, removing his hat, competing favorably with
the singers and the traditional Argentine and Spanish novel....
     I do not think that "Rayuela" terminates any novelistic form that is not
already closed. Nor do I think that Cortazar has invented any new form. That
is obvious. Proust, Tolstoy, Gide, as we have said, are undeniable antecedents
of his experiment. Furthermore, Cortazar does not propose these endeavors. He
leaves them, instead, to Morelli.
     But there is another "Rayuela" that interests me, perhaps, more than any:
I refer to the book which, planted in the human condition of Horacio and his
people, responds with mortal clarity and suicidal honesty to the basic
questions of the given generation in rebellion against the bourgeois
Establishment and its rotten social norms and formulas. There is something of
Guevara, of Eldridge Cleaver, in the language of Cortazar when he speaks of a
generation that refuses to accept a manufactured and prepared and digested
existence, a criminal coercion, and renounces an undisguised future of setting
the blinds and traps of the Matadero. Cortazar speaks of action out of
desperation, of protest beyond order, of no compromise, of authenticity in all
styles. This is not, then, a Rayuela exclusively for hippies, beats, zens,
dropouts, and turned-ons. It is a Rayuela game that all may play: innocents
and condemned, without exception.
     A hard book, mild, bleeding, sad, sweet and anguished, "Rayuela" responds
to a generation who lose giving noble combat to erase the lies of contemporary
society and, in the process, erasing all the familiar masks. If this sounds
too serious and not literary enough, and in its severity could betray
Cortazar's intentions, we shall conclude repeating the words of Morelli's
master, the Polish anti-novelist Withold Gombrowicz (22):
     "These then, are the fundamental, prime and philosophical reasons that
induce me to build the work upon a base of loose parts--conceiving the work as
a particle of the work--and treating as means a fusion of physical parts and
parts of the soul - while Humanity as a whole I treat as a mixture of parts.
But if anyone were to make this objection: that this partial conception of
main is not, in truth, any conception, but instead a muddle, confusion, ruse
and deception, and that I, instead of subjecting myself to the severe rules and
canons of Art, am trying to mock them by means of irresponsible inventions,
diversions and devices, I would answer yes, it is true, just those are my
propositions. And, I swear--I do not hesitate to confess it--I wish to deviate
as far from your art, sirs, as from you yourselves. For I cannot bear to be
together with that art, with your conceptions, your artistic activity and with
all your artistic medium!"(23)

Notes
1 My citations are to "Rayuela" (Buenos Aires, Sudamerica, 1963).
2 Cf. Ana Maria Barrenchea, "Rayuela, una busqueda a partir de cero" ("Sur,"
Buenos Aires, v.288, 1964).
3 Cf. Manuel Pedro Gonzalez, "Coloquio de la novel hispano-americana" (Mexico
City, Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1967).
4 "Aproximacion a Rayuela," Revista Iberoamericana, LXV, Jan.-Apr. 1968,
pp.82-93.
5 Cf. Ernesto Sabato, "El escritor y sus fantasmas," chap. "Las letras y las
artes en la crisis de nuestro tiempo" (Buenos Aires, Aguilar, 1963, pp.56-89)
where this idea is expounded with a philosophic and historical basis.
6 "Rayuela," op.cit., p.191.
7 Ibid., pp.506-507.
8 Ibid., p.507.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p.426.
11 Ibid., p.109
12 Ibid., pp.222-223.
13 Ibid., p.402.
14 Ibid., p.509.
15 Ibid., p.501.
16 Ibid., p.502.
17 Ibid., p.500.
18 Ibid., p.505.
19 Ibid., p.452.
20 Ibid., p.454.
21 I would also say that if the "interchangeable chapters" serve any function,
it is to expound this theory of the novel through Morelli and the commentaries
of Oliveira. Look for this in all its extension and variety in Chapters 79,
82, 84, 94, 97, 112, 115, 116, 145, and 154.
22 Gombrowicz lived in Argentina, the author of Ferdydurke, Diario Argentino
(1968) and La Seduccion.
23 Ibid., p.614.


Chapter 7 - Cesar Vallejo: the Mestizo Masks

     Tell me who you walk with...
     I walk with Cesar Vallejo for no exact reason, except a certain anxiety to
return home and the foreboding that the house has been erased and now I cannot
find it like the tourists find theirs.
     Mestizo, sorrowful mestizo, intimately wounded, Vallejo comes to the
Peruvian poetry of the Centennial like Dario arrived in the Romanticism of the
1800's: to cover the native skin with exotic ointments. This is the first
impression that the book of the young Vallejo, "The Black Heralds" (1918)
produces. Captive in a golden cage, he, rare bird of Santiago de Chuco. His
poetic language is, in large part, of mountain ascendancy, precious, searching,
and is so because his vision of the world suffers the characteristic locus of
the great mestizo Hispano-american rhetoric of the 1900's: of a hard reality,
painful, complex and crude, which is covered with a decoration of buildings,
institutions, academies and furnishings, as if things, large things, being
bigger, help more in giving us a sense of and the key to a civilization that we
do not understand, that is strange to us and even hostile.
     Ruben Dario goes from one country to another country, from one continent
to another, thick, slow, brown, in thongs, chaps, vest and gloves, like a more
or less living piece of some Atlantis, reciting monstrous perfections in
vestibules of royal hotels, moving past luxurious trays of desserts, receiving
flowers and administering a dense and heavy cognac which, upon falling into the
soul, stirs it like a stone in a well. And stirs the entire Hispano-american
literary world: the drunkenness of words in general.
     But, in those years there arrive also an army of rare hunters: precocious
in garb, faces of imperfect beauty, damned subjects whose mission consists of
depositing in the modernist nest the egg of a bad line that shall grow
destroying its betters. Without going further, Jose Asuncion Silva causes the
Emperor and Empress of China to adulterate in the same sonnet, as is said, in
the same bed with a pair of fools named Jules. Lopez Velarde beautifully
confounds the afternoon with a cow, with the priest, with the parish, with the
nation. The Chilean Pezoa Veliz sets his green, crossed eye against the tumult
that Dario leaves and, turning it around, takes from it a smell of misery, of
dull labor, of liquor. The master Onis shall say that ugliness, like a growth,
has located itself in the entrails of modernism. At the edge of literature,
what happens is that the poets feel in the stomach the decomposition of the old
art, the incongruity of the golden standard that does not reach the heights in
its exercise, feel the Peruvian shawl on their necks, the voice not their own
and, in consequence, without an echo, see the Western frontier distant, closed
and state their resentment, their anguish and their anger. And Vallejo, de
Rokha, de Greiff appear, and others.
     Vallejo, who was speaking like Dario, like Gutierrez Najera or Lugones,
comes to notice that his voice breaks and what emerges ceases to be melodic and
changes to abruptness, then a groan, then a howl. "Medialuz," for example, is a
strange poem: it hatches from the incubator, but it is not the form of emerging
which surprises, it is Vallejo's interior imagination, the morbid
hallucination, that ominous trait of throwing ourselves to the winds, from
behind the Romantic mask, with a cruelty and a violence that soon returns upon
the poet himself. Vallejo departs with artful nudges from the company of
Najera, Lugones, Dario; he proceeds to become Gothic, brutal, bloody, funereal,
begins to throw stones at God, without turning his face if they fall back on
him on not hitting the bull's eye; he cultivates horror with an ambiguous
intention; he recognizes desertion but, in his abandonment, warns that there
are other mestizos as unhappy as himself; he looks with uncertainty behind him;
they are expelling him from Lima; he cripples the body; he begins to make his
poems with hands of an indian; invents, mixes, exaggerates, shortens, like a
village mason gathering dirt, straw, stone; he carefully notes the anonymous,
the prosaic and insignificantly vulgar and there finds occasion for the poetic
symbol; a spider suffices, some drink, old clothing, wrinkles, the odor of
time, to evoke a true sadness in living, to create the image of a small
dying.(1) He feels romantic, yet love turns into fury: man, woman, dying, sex,
the graveyard are muddled. It is not his fault. He is a most confused
Christian. He wishes not to offend God, but feels that God treats him badly,
and treats worse other subjects in other lands, in other ages. He dwells upon
things of them and feels sorry for them. Everything is going wrong. Amidst
ivory, the duchesses, the gardens of France, indian in a shawl! Existence is a
miserable supper, a Last Supper in which the "bitter human essence" is eaten
with a black, wooden spoon. Dario is a gravedigger, Dario and the other dark,
chanting witches, given that already there is talk of God's suicide.(2)
     Vallejo says, "Old Osiris! I have arrived to the forward walls of
existence." A ready-made phrase is enough, a colloquial formula, idiom of the
neighborhood, the store, the tavern; the gods are put in their lowly place,
next to man. Furthermore, it rains everywhere, in every direction, in all
tones, sad, soft, wildly: rain of tears and tombs. And esoteric numbers that
seem to condense in their abstract unity some truths which the mestizo now
wishes not to pronounce. Unity and totality, the superlative and the damned,
like the two ancient angels.
     The home is more and more left behind, and man alienated, losing his own,
all of his own, like one who throws away his clothing and walks naked,
suffering more. Left is the priest in the wake, the burros, the pathways, the
patio, the sermons, the bells. Brothers are now like small llamas in the
Andean twilight and shall soon disappear. Some echoes remain, random things
that follow you, striking, disintegrating. The world is a curious place,
wrecked. It is insufficient to leave.

     "I was born one day when God was ill."(3)

     That is "The Black Heralds."
     Now then, "Trilce" (1922) is a harsh book. For once, Vallejo transfers
from the tone of sweet sadness of the old familiar poets. In "Trilce" is
dissonance, its composition contradictory, its procedure basic: to reduce to
the absurd.
     He flees from beauty, the modernist conception of beauty, as if it were
the devil himself. Upon the face of perfect classical equilibrium he discovers
a slight deviation in one eye; at times, in moments of anguish, a cry on the
lips, and other times, when everything fails and it is essential to insult
human hypocrisy, he simply places a housefly, a dirty insect, on the mouth.
The general effect is ugly, of an ugliness that splits the soul, accumulated
ugliness so as to denounce a too vulnerable personal goodness, to make bitter
that is discharged like maternal milk before human suffering.
     Only the academic critic can attempt a logical analysis of the poems of
"Trilce." To seek a reason for living, for experiencing, that can be done. To
speculate upon occult purposes also is possible, always if one remembers that
he plays with fire and that Vallejo's givens are targeted and always are of
human bone. It is necessary, then, to play "his" game, according to his rules,
the first of which seems to be:

"Keep symmetry under lock and key..."(4)

     In those days, those of "Trilce," Vallejo had burned down the alters of
modernism. From Dario there remained not even the ashes. But that breaking with
precious modernism does not mean a return to reality, but instead a step from
Darian abstraction to another abstraction; from the rationally manipulated
symbol, Vallejo passes to a world of insignificant and violent myths that sting
the head like fleas. His is a free association of tiny myths, a system of
absurdity: at times ironic, at times the product of a nervous watchfulness and
a furious sadness. Does this mean that "Trilce" represents Vallejo's vanguard
epoch? In the extent to which he seems to have assimilated certain techniques
of dehumanization: the manipulation of a type of image that eliminates the
comparative term, the use of graphic keys, some cosmic remove, this or that
grammatical prank. Nothing more. Vallejo, like Neruda, overleaped his radical
period, and his neo-symbolism of regional and erotic root acquired in his
solitude an existential sediment of agonic nature. From there is the abyss
which separates this poet from the witty, spontaneous, brilliant company of the
Spanish and Hispano-american extremists of the 1920's.
     This leap to an irrational mythology of Andean pain Vallejo realizes
without losing, on the contrary, his conversational, informal attitude towards
the poetic act. Only that now the conversational format is treated as a
"leitmotif," that is, as an auditory recourse as well as a suggestive factor.
It is a formula for enchantment.... As likewise number, any number out of its
usual context, can be. We have here the road towards an essential reality,
towards a unitary, lineal image of man before the processes of living and
dying.(5) Vallejo examines the concepts of trinity, duality and unity as if he
were speaking of two beings who seek the infinite in an act of accumulation, of
abstraction, in the outcome of physical power....
     The three dimensions of time are an extensive trap which man invents to
create an illusion of change and final permanence. In truth, time is
suffering: the present--"stalled noon"--, like the past--"was was was was"--,
and the future - "the still warm refuge of being." The unities of time are
different names for the same negation. Everything is determined in a cataclysm
without beginning or end....
     Of course, living and dying are not always seen through a mirror: there
will be moments when the duality seems actual. Vallejo, then, establishes a
genuine separation between the domestic figures departed forever and their
image above a bed in Paris. We shall feel that something that breathes within
time may be the illusion of true being of the past: a casual encounter, the
exact dimensions of a space; both things, the departed and the reborn
affection, for example, immobile, negated, like parts of himself yet definitely
foreign, are to be forms of anguish, familiar poison in one instance and, in
the other, longing for a peace necessary in nature:(6)

     I think of your sex.
     The heart simplified, I think of your sex,
     before the ripe outcome of the day.
     I touch that button, in its season.
     And an ancient sentiment fails
     ruined in the brain.
     I think of your sex, furrow more prolific
     and harmonious than the belly of the shadow,
     which yet conceives and perishes
     of the eternal.
     O, conscience,
     I think, yes, of the brute freedom
     which enjoys where it wishes, where it may.

     In such a state the lovers seek a union that cannot be resolved, except as
the illusory contact of two hinges of a door in the act of opening, which
nevertheless, are intertwined, but in an equivocal manner, like water in a
vessel. In the position of surface against surface (7) a power of divination
reverberates: a light, lightning that discharges from the exerted energy of
the already finite combat, as if the bodies had to perish so as to reveal their
power and their beauty, their eternity.
     Vallejo, like Whitman, is astonished that the woman can be the door to
everything, but while Whitman preaches it, Vallejo says it with bitterness and
something of cruelty:

     The bleeding sex of the beloved which complains
     sweetly, of supporting so much
     on such a foolish point.

     And so the idea of the mother-world is also a sign of alienation and,
furthermore, of remorseful impotence. The sought unity hides in the symbol of
zero: frightened face, dark meanings, black clothing, much dust on his shoes,
in those years in which Vallejo lost his mother, he spent several months in
jail, suffered miseries and scorn and left Peru for good.
Time-mother-sex-dying are the stations of his poor year, anguish the tone of
voice, ugliness the face of his beauty, hermeticism the sense of his journey.
     In Spain, in France, Vallejo fought off poverty writing articles and
publishing a generous travel chronicle: "Russia in 1931." He dedicated
himself, as he said, to perishing "from living not from time," drinking misery
to the dregs, the bitter dregs that would slowly corrode him. Until the end of
his days he released a torrent of poetry: that which his wife and his friends
collected in "Poemas Humanos."(8) Through those poems he bled, like one
stabbed in the street.
     His European years contained revelations on the plane of social ideology;
he seemed to discover a doctrine, an orientation to rationally translate his
rebel half-breed's anger. He embraced, in a certain form, Marxism. He
embraced it as it embraced him: breaking buttons, shirts, buckles and bones in
the embrace. His revolutionary fervor is lucid.(9) He censures the
intellectualism of the surrealists, the indifference of the modernist
generation and the defeatism of his own generation, candidly seeks human
solidarity through fugitive interviews in a Moscow that he hardly saw. This
entire basis of journalistic socialism does not fit with the horrible agony of
"Poemas Humanos."
     With a flag in hand Vallejo went crying, consoling, seeking the outcast
beings who needed his Franciscan vocation, avidly dying from within, falling
inward, towards an anguish that overflowed his chest and dripped upon and stung
his companions.
     Nevertheless, there are critics who find in this book a basis of "militant
solidarity," a sort of Christian socialism that might redeem Vallejo in the
midst of his pessimism. Solidarity does exist in the work, but how can a clear
hope be seen, a socially redemptive attitude in "Poemas Humanos" without
seeing, at the same time, a well of anguish, of spiritual self- destruction, of
well preserved dying within a living where all the flags disappear?
     Vallejo's solidarity is neither epic nor proletarian in the revolutionary
sense of the word: it is compassionate, a cruel and wounded reflex of human
misery that, suddenly, appears as not simply his, yet instead as the burden of
his neighbors. The exaltation is directed not to the powers of rebellion, but
to the organs of suffering. In his elegy to the miners he says:

     Praise to the ancient play of nature,
     to her sleepless organs to her rustic juices!
     Tune, to edges and points, her eyelashes!
     Praise to her golden nature,
     to her magic lantern,
     to her cubes and diamonds, to her fluid shapes,
     to her eyes of six optic nerves....

     The human condition that earns his complaints is not of a social
character, but instead a condition of individual anguish, a basis of shock
before the incomprehensible punishment which man received daily, accumulated,
like the blows that are given to a dog. The dog does not reason, nor the man.
Both look askance, wounded, with the tail between the legs, cowed.

     Cesar Vallejo has perished, struck
     by all to whom he did nothing;
     they hit him hard with a stick and hard
     also with a rope....

     Pain is the key word in Vallejo, neither rebellion nor anger, except if
the anger is directed against himself. Pain on every conceivable level, pain
which often appears to us in the ambiguous form of an uncontrollable
misfortune, as if our luck were to suffer so as to deserve the consciousness
that separates us from the animal.
     Vallejo proceeds fatalistically complaining, feeling beset by a bad
destiny: thus it is with the man on the burro in the Andean sierra, thus the
tender of llamas, thus the miner changed into a tin statue and thus the man of
dark clothing, of poor health, of little food who seeks refuge in obscure
European flats. The man suffers and joins his suffering to that of other men,
makes of it a hope like a great loop. Furthermore without having illusions of
grandeur. Not for suffering shall we cease to be "comrades in small amounts."

     Forget me and support me by the chest,
     donkey that you rein up to embrace me;
     doubt a few seconds your excretion,
     observe how the air begins to be the lifting sky,
     little man,
     fine man,
     man of the taco, care for me, accompany me...(10)

     Vallejo must seek the root of this pain so insupportably concrete: the
surprised encounter, shocked, first in his body.

     I suffer counting the years with corn,
     brushing my clothes to the sound of a corpse...
     or seated drunk in my pall...(11)

     The organs of the man are a constant mirror of his end, but also are
attributes of horror, as if man carried his corpse encased in his own body:

     I shall close my baptismal tower, this window,
     this fright with breasts,
     this steeple of a finger,
     earnestly united to my skeleton.
     These are my sacred writings,
     these are my alarmed companions.
     This must be
     my navel in which I killed my natal fleas,
     this my trembling thing.
     There shall come the day, hold
     strongly to your lower intestine...(12)

     This man, with so much suffering and such sublime capacity to assimilate
punishment, is, nevertheless, an ordinary thing, of little grandeur, most
varied and emotional, infinitely pitiable.

     Beloved are the ears of Sanchez,
     beloved the unknown one and his woman,
     the stranger with sleeves, collar and eyes!
     Beloved be the one with blisters,
     he who walks beneath the rain,
     who adorns the body with bread and two candles,
     who catches a finger in a door,
     who has no birthdays,
     who lost his shadow in a fire,
     the animal, who resembles a parrot,
     who resembles a man, a little rich,
     the purely miserable, the poor poor! (13)

     The customary man in his anxiety, accustomed to encasing his penury in
little compartments that he calls home, country, wife, children, office,
hotels, churches, rooms, soon to fill them with more bitter and acid sorrows
like filling the drawers of a dresser, such that to a man, to Vallejo, it hurts
down to the chaps, the socks, the hat, to say nothing of the shoes and soon it
will hurt in the utensils, the spoons, the forks, the buttons. From the man
emerge threads of pain: they are connected by wires, as in an open art, to
fatal discharges. Living is a thorn that has entered the foot. How it screws!
And there are those who respond by turning the other cheek. There is no
justice. Vallejo is enraged by the dissimulator, who does not call pain by its
name and does not seem to recognize in his existence the irremediable pact
already signed, the trap in which man breaks.

     You, poor fellow, live; do not deny it,
     if not; do not deny it,
     if you perish of your age, O, and of your epoch.
     And, although you cry, drink,
     and, although you bleed you feed your hybrid tooth,
     and your candle of sorrow and your organs.
     You suffer, you pity and you return to horribly suffer,
     disgraced monkey
     offspring of Darwin,
     something that you scrutinize, atrocious microbe.
     And you know at what point,
     which you ignore, is giving in to crying.
     You, then, were born: that too is visible from afar,
     unhappy one and be quiet,
     and support the road that favored you
     down to the appetitive navel: Where? How?
     My friend, you are completely,
     down to the hairs, in the thirty-eighth year,
     Nicholas or Santiago, or whoever,
     is with you or with your failure or with me
     and captive in your enormous liberty,
     flattened by your Herculean autonomy...
     But if you can count on your fingers to two,
     it is worse; do not deny it, little brother.
     Or no? Or yes, but why no?
     Poor monkey! Give me your paw! No. The hand, I said:
     Cheers! And suffer! (14)

     Is the human condition this, how to have face to invent a sense of
profound, consequent, creative finality, out of desperation? Yet, does man go
about erecting his little ovens, his little bombs, administering his
complicated rockets, his lovers' beds, his psychiatric couches, his museums of
oily sweat, his bald sculptures, his presumptuous eternity, his constricted
glandular delight? If he goes somewhere it gives, in truth, fright to imagine
where. Vallejo opposes with sad sarcasm the two masks of man in this transit.
On one side, the man who goes with bread on his shoulder, who scratches and
removes a flea from his pelvis, who enters your soul with a stick in his hand,
who coughs, spits blood, who seeks bones and shells in the mud, who robs, lies
and solitarily cleans a rifle in the kitchen. On the other side, the man who
writes, who speaks of psychoanalysis, of Surrealism, of the deep I, of the
infinite, of the academies, of the beyond. Clever trap set to catch the
unprepared. How does he conclude, "to speak of the not-self without uttering a
cry?"(15)
     That cry is of fundamental importance in Vallejo's poetry. It derives
from a long experience by which things became independent so as to attack man;
returning the man within to his primal animal, to jump upon other men with
bloody jaws, and returning him again to within his skeleton, "seated drunk in
his bier," so as to put living and dying in their place - the point, trap or
tomb, which they deserve; releasing the words and the numbers, loosening the
grey threads by which they still hang, and setting to essay a play of symbols
in which everything has its consequences: desolation, bitterness, fiasco; it
overthrows the content and the sense of nostalgia,
since the victim cannot be missed without cutting the definitive bonds, without
him warning that when we are missed it is because we are already defunct and so
they remember us, the poor departed, those whom we killed.
     And if this experience was so decisive, how will it not end in a cry? It
could be called a measured cry, the voice of the hanged who, in the last
instant, seems to have said something we do not understand. Friend Vallejo
"speaks," but in reality he is shouting. "In the end I cannot express my
living except by dying,"(16) he says, and adds: Dying is not good, Sir, if in
living nothing is left and in dying nothing is possible except what is left
from living."(17)
     Something must be left from living, then, something like the features of
our suffering, the face beneath the mask, the tracks of blood on the cloth,
something that attests to our passing and gives sense and reality to our dying.
So that we shall not be stale and corrupted bodies. So that our dying be a
true individual dying, nourished by that portion of horror that we imbibe daily
as we give over our skeleton to the gleaming teeth of our neighbors. There is
no more glorious dying than the live nagging, hungry, virulent, ragged one, who
made his path with humility, tenderness and hatred among men. Because he
learned of what dying consists and because man amasses between his fingers what
others call their eternity.
     We have here the ethical lesson presented by a great Mestizo poet like
Cesar Vallejo: we violently attempt to love existence, we recognize that the
reality of dying only can be accepted as a bitter and stirring reminder that
accompanies us in living, a double exposure, in the language of photography, a
mirror that spins around oneself and, in turning, dizzies us a little, gives us
a little vertigo that we may call eternity.

     "Probably I am another; walking at dawn, another
     who marches to the beat of a long record..."(18)

     No, Vallejo, not another, the same, the same and no more. The same hat,
the same coat, the same pants, the same shoes, the same floor, the same
anguished foreboding, the same countenance that is being erased, damn, and the
same faces that we begin to forget and which go onto other people. The same.
Not a double nor another distinct person. Why should it be? Is help needed to
fiasco?

     "To be born so as to live our dying!"(19)

     This is what I call love of living: to proceed towards dying without
hurry, to feel it tranquil and active in the belly, to nourish it, protect it,
fill it with loving, with anguish, with solitude, with forgetfulness, so that
it has to ruminate for however many years you have at your disposal. Look long
at man: observe him in handkerchiefs, seated, wet, admire his natural sense of
pomp, of envy, of expectation, his sense of order in the massacres, his
respectability and transcendence in his cannibal activities, his power that
surpasses the bestial in the execution of the crime and the metaphysical
loneliness with which he produces his golden artifacts; consider his hunger,
his fleas, his rodents, his architectonic instinct for surrounding himself with
tombs and monuments, weep at his agreeable little deprivations, at his love
sorrows, crying, holding up his pants, feel how we have been alone while
extinguishing other species of poisonous predators, all this and, at the same
shout:

     "I would like to live forever, so said the
     stomach."(20)

     To eloquently conclude:

     Considering also
     that man is actually an animal
     and, nevertheless, his sadness gets to my head...
     Examining, finally,
     his secret rooms, his toilet,
     his desperation, at the end of his bad day, erasing it...
     Understanding
     that he knows that I like him,
     that I dislike him
     intensely, and he is to me, overall, indifferent...
     Considering his general documents
     and viewing with spectacles that certificate
     that proves he was born very small...
     I make him a sign,
     come,
     and I give you an "abrazo," moved,
     What else to give!
     Moved... Moved... (21)

     This is love of existence: what makes the art of an individual a lesson
for humanity, a call to recognize and accept the arm on our shoulders, the arm
of all men upon our shoulders, and a hand in the funeral of all persons.
     Vallejo's pain, his tenderness, his piety, his luminous cohesion to the
living, we have here the existential position which gives light to all his
poetry.
     Not given in Vallejo are the most obvious conditions of the epic poet:
that sonority, that liking for dust, that smell of leather, the rumor of
excited crowds and those echoes of the plaza with shouts, flags and bombs,
those proclamations of the individual against social evil and the processes of
mortality, that are elements of heroic poetry. Nor did he have, properly
speaking, the language of fire, the cruel eye of the classic insulters who need
those things too to waste the enemy.
     Nevertheless, he sang of the popular glory of Spain in the supreme
sacrifice of the battle against fascism. In "Espana, Aparta de Mi este Caliz"
(1940), he sang with a human voice: elevated, lyric, wounded, triumphant, with
his own voice, without borrowing accents from anyone, neither from Quevedo nor
from Unamuno nor from Machado nor from Neruda. Attacking as one, discoursing
as another, entering into the soul of the people as a third, exalted,
surrealist, magician, as the last.
     His language of war is the same as that of peace: desperate, anguished,
in solidarity, defeated and victorious at the same time. He views the militia
a little incredulously, he sees them fall and his eyes fill with tears, he sees
the people moving quickly, he wishes to follow them, he knows not how. But he
too goes, as he can, to place his bomb, to light its fuse, to move among the
fallen beneath a dense, all-powerful dust, that begins to fill the world,
helping one body "to perish" and another body to fill with humanity and another
to arise and embrace men and another to kiss his bleeding limbs, showing how
the pariahs of Europe and the Americas are becoming potential warriors, walking
among the casualties, dividing up fallen weapons, speaking with women and
ancients, covering himself too with dust and mortality, the shock of so much
suffering and of so much cruelty, something like the bearded Whitman in the
North American Civil War, male nurse, yet more violent, with more blood, tears
and cries, tried by the destiny of that absurd people who mean so well and who
give so well of their lives to punish the foreign meaning; martyr community,
treacherous, heroic. "Battles? No! Passions!... The world exclaims: A
Spanish affair! And truly it is, we suppose..."(22) A people--a god become
man, Pedro Rojas--or Ramon Collar, desolated, but victorious, at last, over
mortality....
     Vallejo becomes a bard, a voice of the people, a prophet of blue sky, he,
whom shortly before "they all hit him... they hit him hard with a stick" and
who perishes shouting to man, "Poor monkey! Give me your paw!"
     What has happened? The Spanish Civil War, the tremendous, incommensurate
Spanish Civil War that, like a sealed and bloody envelope, still encloses the
key to the war cataclysm of the 20th century. As in the case of Neruda, the
Civil War awakened in Vallejo a well of the sorrowful, complex and desperate
Spaniard--tinted, no doubt, by the black ointment of the Conquest, of the
colonies, of the half-breed night--, and he responded with a poetry of chaste
fury and spirituality, setting to combat the two angels, the khaki of war, and
the red of liberty. Limping, falling, dusty, near to the end, Vallejo took the
rifle of Spain and set off all his love for humanity. Afterwards, he kept
silent.

     I want to write, but froth emerges,
     I want to say much and am dumb;
     there is no spoken symbol that is not a sum,
     there is no written pyramid, without a gallows.
     I want to write, but I feel blank;
     I want laurels, but am stricken.
     There is no spoken voice that does not become mist,
     there is no God nor type of god, without development.
     Let us go then, therefore, to eat herbs,
     meat of the lamb, fruit of the garden,
     our melancholic soul in preservation.
     Let us go! Let us go! I am wounded;
     let us drink the already drunk,
     let us go, cow, to birth your calf.(23)

     This is the self-portrait of Cesar Vallejo in the act of creation. His
poetic art.
     Weary, rough, wounded, seeking the height, the essence, obsessed by the
number as symbol of supreme abstraction and perfection, melancholy and tearful,
honored but stricken, giving up to the tremendous connection that will
perpetuate the cycle, Vallejo possesses a clear consciousness of his art: of
the internal impetus as much as the fleeting surface of the aesthetic form. He
struggles with forms so as to arrive at the Form; in "The Black Heralds" he
walks equipped with luminescent jewels and some false ones; incongruous,
pathetic, insecure, but already angry. In "Trilce" those worldly offerings
have been removed, he has thrown them to the ground, attacked with sticks the
paper ornaments of a modernism covered with flyspecks and he begins to attempt
symbols that are not distinguished with any clarity, codes which confuse and
are confused; he touches clothing and skeleton, murmurs, vocalizes, but his
sounds are harsh, ugly, melancholic, associations of unfreedom, a structure
halfway tied, like an old suitcase from which intimate things and some strange
things keep falling.
     The form that he sought is fully given in the "Poemas Humanos." Their
technique consists, in part, in using repetitions of a conversational
phraseology, or, purely rhythmic. When it is rhythmic, the phrase becomes a
"leitmotif," not the ingenious, melodic repetition of Modernism or of
extremism, but instead the magical formula which, by repeating, creates a
fatalistic sense. Or better, he proceeds to decompose traditional syntax so as
to evoke subconscious processes. Or he invents words beginning, at times, from
popular sounds and, at times, creating adverbial meanings upon a base of his
own noun forms.
     He will tend, likewise, to adopt a fixed design, a synthetic or conceptual
mold, within which he plays capriciously so as to suggest, at last, a little of
the style of the old poetry of Provenza, whose play of contrasts, for example,
seem models for some of those "Poemas Humanos," or of the surrealist manner by
which the "leitmotif" is a key to subconscious processes.
     And contrast, not only as a rhetorical recourse, but as an aesthetic
principle becomes an essential part of his poetic creation; it is the key to
his method of self- destruction, of the final negation of bourgeois values, is
his form of placing against his poetry his Anti-Poetry, the daily conversation
of the desperate, the sarcastic, brutal expression of his humanism at the base
of which his anguish at daily existence is toiling as if yoked.
     Contrasts of the essential and the accessory (24), of idealist propaganda
and the human, brutal, contemptible deed ("C'est Paris reine du monde! It is
as if she were urinated upon." "These are my sacred writings, my frightened
companions"), the contrast of Christ on the cross who is seen with tremendous
laughter; the contrast of the tender anticipation and the ugly descent (..."me
rising and sweating/ and causing the infinite between your muscles"), final
contrast: "In sum, I have no way to express my living, except in my dying."
     Cesar Vallejo is the poet who gave the low blow to
Romantic-Modernist-Hispano-American rhetoric, to middle- brow sensuality and
sentimentality; Vallejo is the true owl in the sonnet of Gonzalez Martinez, or
better said, is the clipped condor who waited beside the bier of Dario, on foot
beside the american dump, examining its miseries; the anti-poet
conversationalist who deflated by jabs the radicals' globe, heroic parent of a
revolutionary surrealism that already was proclaimed by shouts in other places.
Vallejo, very "mestizo" and unable to cease being stoic, kept returning to our
poetry the humanity that had been delicately castrated from it by the blue
magicians of metaphor.
     He was a man who lived his existence in the Court without essentially
changing the image that he brought from his Andean province, and to explain the
absurdities which killed him he did not adopt what he could learn in the
European academies. His eye and his thought continued to be "mestizo," he
never concealed them, nor negated them; with them he went to the wall. And
with them was revived.

Notes
1 Cf. "Absoluta," "La Piedra," "Desnudo en Barro," "Huaco," "Terceto
Autoctono," "La Arana." The citations are from "Poesias Completas," 1918-1938,
Buenos Aires, Editorial Losada, 1949.
2 Cf. "Retablo."
3 Cf. "Espergesia."
4 "Poesias Completas," op.cit., p.112.
5 Poem V which begins: "Decennial group. Opening/ in the rocks, hints of
trinity" and concludes: "So say not 1, that echoes to infinity/ and say not 0
that silences so/ until waking at the feet of 1/ 0 doubled group." A personal
relation. See also the poem XXXII in which, through number, he endeavors to
express the idea of physical power.
6 Poem XIII.
7 Poem XXX.
8 Paris,
1939.
9 "Fabla Salvaje," novel (1923). "El Tungsteno," Madrid, 1931. "Rusia en 1931,"
Madrid, 1931.
10 "Poesias Completas," op.cit., p.183.
11 Ibid., p.223.
12 Ibid., pp.156,156,209.
13 "Trespass Between Two Stars," pp.186-187.
14 "The Soul that Suffered of Being Your Body," pp.198- 199.
15 "Poesias Completas," op.cit., pp.199-200.
16 Ibid., p.224.
17 Ibid., p.237.
18 Ibid., p.220.
19 Ibid., p.218.
20 Ibid., p.169.
21 Ibid., p.180.
22 Ibid., p.252.
23 Ibid., p.171.
24 Ibid,, p.153.


Chapter 8 - Parra anti Parra

     Nicanor Parra is the Chilean poet of greatest influence of the so-called
Generation of 1938. He lives in the hills of the Andean mountain range, in a
place neighboring Santiago called La Reina. There, he has placed a
prefabricated house, full of a number of lamps of dubious functioning. There
are pictures on the walls of rustic scenes, and also a wind-up horn phonograph,
and a guitar or two. For reasons a little inexplicable, the house still had
neither water nor electric light when I visited him. For water, the neighbors
provided it; as for light, he made it himself burning, not far from the door,
huge branches of bramble bush, whose signals could be clearly seen from
Santiago. His nearest neighbor, Arturo Edwards, had insured the house for him
against fires.
     Very relaxed, carefully dressed, with curly hair, balding, the eyes
deep-set and face creased with thick wrinkles, Nicanor Parra travels daily from
La Reina to the University of Chile, where he gives mathematics classes.
Occasionally he calls conferences about interplanetary travel and celestial
phenomena. In general, however, he writes poems on all types of paper, which
later he meticulously copies; in moments of leisure he dances the "Cueca" or
discourses with his numerous friends. When he is not in Chile he travels
through Switzerland, China, England or the United States. He reads and speaks
English; on the other hand, he neither smokes nor drinks. That is to say, he
might partake one or two bottles of wine so as not to lose the thread of a
conversation, just as he may also imbibe regular glasses of fermented
"aguardiente" so as to survive any earthquake. But in reality he does not
drink. He only accompanies those who drink.
     Among the Chilean writers of the Generation of '38, Parra is the only one
who has formed a school. Those who imitate him are young poets of clear
statement, of eccentric imagery within their regional tone, sarcastic and
bitter, acid critics of the daily routine in which they evolve wittily yet
always over-crowded. Beneath the humorous bitterness they hide powerful
weapons with which they break the facade of the bourgeois institutions'
condemnation and arrive at the creation of a poetic atmosphere of lucidity and
dynamic disorder. Nicanor receives them like a rooster with his chicks. He
serves them spice in hand, so to speak; animates them, defends them, to release
them, later, with the newest anti-poem upon their lips. This personal
ascendancy is so much the more unexpected given that Nicanor seems more like an
individual retiring and sparse in his publications. To his name he had only:
"Cancionero sin Nombre" (1937); "Poemas y Antipoemas" (1954), "La Cueca Larga"
(1957), "Versos de Salon" (1962) and "Canciones Rusas" (1966).(1)
Nevertheless, his books provoke movement, his pronouncements raise dust and his
very presence awakens curious reactions of sympathy and even of passionate
devotion. Numerous are the poetesses, schoolgirls and schoolmarms who follow
and pursue him with suicidal fervor. He has married with several of them, of
distinct nationalities.
     Describing his literary beginnings and the evolution of his aesthetic
ideology, Parra says this:

     "Politically we were in general apolitical, more exactly, non-militant
leftists. In religious matters we were not Catholics; theology had us
casually, although not much. I inclined towards oriental philosophy, which
made me suspicious before my most intimate companions: Oyarzun and Millas.
For his part, Oyarzun believed in the cyclops, as in dreams, and Millas,
despite his solid academic formation, allowed himself to be dazzled by a
passing philosophy of the Fifth Column, which affirmed that man should take
inspiration from the domestic animals in matters of personal manners: from the
rooster he should learn pride, and from the horse, chivalry...
     "Five years after the anthology of the creationist, free-verse, hermetic,
ironic, priestly poets, we represented a type of spontaneous, natural poet,
within reach of the ordinary public... Of course we brought nothing new to
Chilean poetry. We signified, in general, a step backwards, with the
exceptions of Millas and of Oyarzun, who, according to my way of seeing, were
already totally vertebrate poets.
     "But our initial weakness, as I really think of it, was a legitimate point
of departure for our final evolution. In it resided that strength that later
has given us the right to live. Fundamentally, I think we were right to
declare ourselves tacitly, at least, exponents of clarity and naturalness in
the expressive media. At the least, in this direction the body of Chilean
aesthetic ideas has subsequently moved. Tomas Lago...becomes in 1942 the
representative of the new doctrine, whose content he synthesized with the
phrase, Light in Poetry, title of the preface to his "Tres Poetas Chilenos."...
This title of that preface was not arbitrary: in those same days, the writer
had announced a book called La Luz del Dia. That book never saw the light of
day, but, augmented and diminished, it later came to form a part of "Poemas y
Antipoemas."
     "There is to say further that we constituted the reverse of the surrealist
stamp.
     "Events have served to show that at least 50 percent of our principles had
not been badly taken. The other 50 percent...were with the surrealists, who in
that epoch represented, rigorously, the next step from creationism and
Nerudism: the immersion in the profundities of the collective subconscious.
     "The anti-poem which, finally, is nothing other than the traditional poem
enriched with the surrealist sap-- native surrealism or whatever you wish--
should still be the result from a psychological and social point of view of the
country and continent to which we belong, in order to be considered as a true
poetic ideal. It ought to be shown that the child of the marriage of day and
night, celebrated in the ambit of the anti-poem, is no new form of twilight,
but instead a new type of poetic dawning."(2)

     In the beginnings of his literary career and, later, in moments of
diversion, Nicanor Parra cultivated certain forms of popular poetry. He was
attracted to a wide zone of Chile and to Chileans: a zone of Romantic
dedication to the epic values of the guitar and of wine. In "La Cueca
Larga" the improvising grace of the old procurer and the thick sensuality of
singers and dancers are appreciated. There are the native names where
nationality is sanctified in consonants and vowels of solid prestige, the
casual jests of the country and the ambiguous, urbane and acid humor of the
Chilean city. Parra says:

     I am not from Coihueco
     I'm from Niblinto
     where the oxen squeeze
     the red wine.
     I was born in Portezuelo
     was raised in Nanco
     where the ducks swim
     in white wine.
     I'll fail in the meadows
     of San Vicente
     where the monks float
     on aguardiente...

     Above the commotion or, better said, off apart in a fresh corner of
willows and eucalyptus, the poet devoted himself also to the holy office of
transmuting the human to the divine. "I toast to the celestial/ and I toast to
the profane," exclaims Nicanor while he works with a potter from Quinchamali so
as to remove from surrealism its European decadence. He puts wings where the
poncho goes. The liquor expenditures are furnished by angels. Taps with heel
and toe and, in his counterpoint, crowns the Romance meter with spurs of modern
discord:

     With my mausoleum face
     and my old butterflies
     I too make my presence
     at this solemn festival...

     In this poem, composed to be sung and danced (3), the minstrel tradition
is kept living. Across plazas, courtyards and countryside, its verse has
gained the mastery of rhythms which impose the epic enthusiasm of the people;
has given a vehicle to hide the flower of evil and certain duplicities of
sensuality; it arms itself with hard shapes, with virile accents, with
aggressive lyricism. The popular poetry of Nicanor Parra is red and
palpitating like a fighting cock crowing in the ring. I have had occasion to
hear this poetry in Donihue and Quilicura, surrounded by shouts, laughter and
bottles; I have seen it gravitate to the head of the table and sustain its
battle of wits against the wisdom of the age upon the rough earth; and I saw it
emerge victorious beneath the weight of the jingles, the images and the toasts
allotted to it.... But let us put light in the corners. What function does
the anti-poet play in "La Cueca Larga"? We shall eliminate the colors of the
poncho and the brilliant silver of the spurs; we shall hear the calling of the
singers and individualize the words; we are left with the turbulence that
maintains the fire of the "Cueca" dancer behind the pallid front, the lock of
black hair and the killing eye. Nicanor Parra, as he himself would say in
"Poemas y Antipoemas," carries together the angel and the beast which are the
characteristics of the Chilean earth. There is some dissimulation behind the
breezy joke and the malicious ingenuity, some fox-like trickiness. The
dominance of the belly. When Nicanor Parra triumphs with "La Cueca Larga" in
the groves, beneath the willows, by the culvert and the train line, it is
because the common people have considered him one of theirs; they have
recognized and appreciated his cynicism, his gastronomic appetite, his
aggressive belittlement of the woman and his ability to keep her subservient,
his noisy bitterness and his bloody parodies of bourgeois institutions, his
indirect manner of exalting the stoicism of those he describes as rotting
amidst the decadence.
     If we judge him, again, upon "Cancionero Sin Nombre" and on the first
compositions of "Poemas y Antipoemas," Nicanor Parra moves us especially when
he writes of the nostalgic sentiment that man discovers in his possession of
things in that secret sense which only their mortality deposits in them:

     My God, yes indeed! no one knows
     how to appreciate a true word,
     when we imagine it most distant
     just when it is closest.
     Oh me, oh me! something tells me
     that living is no more than a chimera;
     an illusion, a dream without boundaries,
     a small passing cloud.
     Let's take it easy, I don't know what I'm saying,
     emotion is rising to my head.
     Since it was already the hour of silence
     when I started my singular assignment,
     one behind the other, in dumb procession
     to the empty stable the sheep returned.
     I greeted each personally
     and when I was near the grove
     which sharpens the traveler's hearing
     with its ineffable secret music,
     I remembered the sea and reviewed the pages
     in homage to my lost sisters.
     Very well. I continued my voyage
     like one who expects nothing from living...
     How much time has passed since then
     I could not say with certainty;
     everything is the same, surely,
     the wine and the nightingale upon the table,
     at this time my younger brothers
     should return home from school;
     Just that time has erased everything
     like a white storm of sand! (4)

     Nostalgia follows him like a dog, sucking at him, biting him, lacerating
the smooth skin of his memories. The sweeter the hour evoked, the more
painful. On a summer afternoon, smelling of oranges and jasmine, thick with
warm country dust, open like a sky without clouds, dying hurts more.... Parra
responds to the nostalgia with a poetry that grows in liturgical waves. He
himself has said that in his poetry he does what God creates ceaselessly from
wave to wave. Only that he does his in ten-syllable verses. I do not say this
facetiously. Parra watches over the exigencies of meter with an airy but
arithmetic eye. As if for a party he seeks pentameter's polished stirrups, as
if for the show he utilizes the resonant, joking, medieval and blasphemous
romance. To be a modernist, that is, when it occurs to him to replace the swan
of Dario and the owl of Gonzalez Martinez with a fruit fly, he reaches into some
syllabic corners cut with a scissors from the garlands and doves of a glossy
magazine. I refer to his poem "San Antonio." On the other hand, for his
self-portrait and for his epitaph he prefers the "silva," which permits him to
revel in the long phrases and the short phrases. In 11 syllables there is
respect and in seven a lack of respect, at free intervals. The nostalgia,
nevertheless, is decasyllabic. Parra presents it like a slow consummation of
the wise, mature man, who knows his place and maintains it without deviations.
     The great work of Nicanor Parra is not, contrary to what might be thought,
in the poems of nostalgia, but instead in "The Vices of the Modern World," "The
Viper," "The Tablets" and "Soliloquy of the Individual," all poems of
desperation. "The modern world is a great sewer," Parra says in one of these
poems. Further we need not take his pronouncement letter for letter. The
world for him is a trap. It is important to note that Parra judges a world in
which he finds neither order nor sense. Without himself bringing a sense of
form--ethical or aesthetic--either, so as to create an order where there is
none, the beings and the objects are charged with violence and seem constantly
capable of leaping onto the neck. In "Rompecabezas" Parra says:

     I give no one the right.
     I worship an old rag.
     Transfer the graves.
     Transfer the graves.
     I give no one the right.
     I am a ridiculous type
     under the sun,
     soda fountain cowboy,
     perishing of insanity.
     I have no choice,
     my very hairs accuse me.
     On the altar of the day
     the machines don't pardon.
     I laugh behind a chair,
     my face covers with flies.
     I am the badly expressed,
     expressed in view of what.
     I the stammerer,
     with my foot I touch dirt.
     What are stomachs for?
     Who made this mess?
     Best is to make an indian.
     I call one thing another.(5)

     His vision of the world comprises a deliberate simplification, a synthesis
specific to an directed at the modern decadence. To dismantle all in order to
attack certain gestures, certain acts, certain ideas, and exhibit them in their
senselessness. His is a world of equivocations. A tragic absurdity that
begins by being a trait of genius. What is clarity? To see clearly how rotten
is the world, how impotent and toothless and timid is man. That is to say,
clarity so as to see the crossroads behind the sombrero. His form of
expression is conventional. The flourishes of conversation attract him and
allow him to affirm himself, as with Cesar Vallejo. The images of Parra are
concrete, but not precisely logical, yet instead absurd and full of
consciousness of sin, of failure, of the emptiness that soon is transformed
into a cold bitterness and, particularly, into a strange wrath, a fury which,
in general, explodes in attitudes and words of self-destruction. Here is his
"Self-portrait":

     Consider, boys,
     this eaten-away tongue:
     I teach in an obscure school,
     I've lost my voice giving classes.
     (After all or nothing
     I put in 40 hours a week.)
     How do you like my ragged face?
     Truly to see me inspires sadness!
     And what do you say of this nose rotting
     from the dust of the flaking chalk.
     On the question of eyes, at three meters
     I don't recognize my own mother.
     What will follow me? Nothing!
     I have ruined myself giving classes:
     The bad light, the sun,
     the miserable poisonous moon.
     To gain some unforgivable bread,
     hard like the face of the bourgeois
     and with the smell and taste of blood.
     Why were we born as men
     if we must perish like animals!
     From overwork, at times
     I see strange shapes in the air,
     I hear crazy voices,
     laughter, criminal conversations.
     Observe these hands
     and these nails white as a ghost,
     these few hairs that remain,
     these infernal black wrinkles!
     Nevertheless I was just like you,
     young, full of beautiful ideals,
     I slept mining the copper
     and polishing the faces of the diamond;
     Today they have me here
     behind this uncomfortable podium,
     brutalized by the monotony
     of the 500 hours per week.(6)

     Disorganized and violent, the world provokes man and induces him to
destroy himself. Suicide adopts circumspect forms until becoming a slow,
progressive and fruitful onanism. The fundamental brutality to which the
anti-poet refers as one of the characteristic traits is also the central theme
of "The Tablets." Man, solitary and infuriated, without hopes of an apocalyptic
ice, heats up burning for God and striking his mother. The woman persists and
there is left the legend of love. The anti-poet does not hesitate to destroy
them in a poem that is a true compendium of his macabre vision of the modern
world. Love is debased to a routine and everyday condition, its problems
deriving from hunger: sexual hunger and nutritional hunger. The obstinate and
tenacious woman seeks the money, the good, the gratification and the abuse of
the man. He, for his part, defends himself to the measure of his strength:
copulates when he may, more than he might in order to save the money from his
beloved. Little by little it is she who exhausts her rival and submits him to a
sexual and economic slavery. She encloses him in a round room through whose
only window enter the rodents from a neighboring cemetery. The man begins to
turn indifferent. She tries to seduce him with the bait of a property she
possesses near the stockyards. He refuses. The enchantment has been broken: old
and weak, the man cannot copulate any more, his children grown, his true wife
perhaps appearing at any time to ruin him. Used up, he says:

     I cannot work any more for you,
     everything has ended between us.(7)

     In this poem, like in "The Vices of the Modern World," Parra confronts a
world that has lost the key to its most essential mechanisms. Perhaps sensing
that in the loss is involved an act of voluntary condemnation, he does not try
to recover that key, but instead insists upon the spiritual deformation that
originates the attitude of renunciation. With cold beauty Parra isolates the
niches in which man hides to perish and disappear without witnesses. These
niches are the symbols and myths of a bourgeois society afflicted with an
incurable illness. His conclusion is unequivocal:

     Nevertheless, the world has always been this way.
     Truth, like beauty, is neither created nor destroyed
     and poetry resides in things or is simply a
     reflection of spirit...
     But what matters all this
     if meanwhile the best ballerina in the world
     dies young and abandoned in a small village in
     southern France
     and Spring returns to man
     some of the disappeared flowers.
     Let us try to be happy, I say, clasping the
     miserable human rib.
     We extract in it the renewing liquid,
     each in accordance with his personal inclinations.
     We affirm this divine swindle!
     Panting and trembling
     we suck those lips that craze us;
     the die is cast.
     We inhale that enervating and destroying perfume
     and follow one more day the path of the chosen;
     From his axles man extracts the necessary grease
     to anoint the face of his idols.
     And from the female sex the straw and the chaff for
     the temples.
     For all of which
     I carry a flea in my tie
     and smile at the imbeciles who lower from the trees.(7)

     The funerary establishments, the arsonist, the phallic cult, the blood of
the virgins, tobacco, movie stars, the anemic capitalists, the grease in man's
axles, the straw and the chaff of the female sex, are symbols of a dying
without metaphysical projection, symbols of the betrayal of art, symbols of
sexual aggression and of the mass murder of the sentimental symbols of the
abuse of sex and subsequent impotence, symbols of an individualism without
individuals.
     If Parra were to have an ethical form to confer order upon the world that
surrounds him, it be an Anti- Christ and not an anti-poet. The truth is that
from the criminal system he knows no system of defense. The traps approach
him. He allows himself to be imprisoned possessed of a loose but severe
madness, that constricts his body like a black suit. He multiplies the
occasions to sin. Men, objects and places become the traps. Soon we notice
that all form part of a single universal trap: humanity, art, religion,
philosophy. In each trap he discovers blood spots, hairs and finger marks that
retain the odor of the last victim. This odor is the only warning of the
danger. The anti-poet defends himself. He wishes to strike, wound, set
aflame. He imagines and believes victory present. But succumbs before the
unexpected. In combat he uses the tricks that civilization has perfected and
attains modest triumphs whenever the battle requires the use of tricks. In the
final duel, nevertheless, the anti-poet becomes disoriented and confused. He
collected scalps of the enemy which he meticulously nailed with pins to the
walls of his trophy room; he could keep accumulating scalps; but his trophy
room, in the end, would not suffice.
     The poetry of Nicanor Parra, non-decorative, concrete, direct and
turbulently narrative, hides in its most intimate crevices a profound spiritual
convulsion. I know no other antecedent for it in Latin America except the
poetry of Cesar Vallejo. His is, however, a pained expression of an
instinctive and subconscious Christianity; that of Parra is an implacable lash
against a humanity conceived frozen in its decadence. Both work with elements
of everyday reality and hide their dismay behind conversational formulas that
serve as the sign of pathetic humor. Vallejo is more transcendental in his
anguish, Parra, more stylized. Of both we may say that they shake the
intellectualism of Hispano-american poetry with a crude and brutal dissection
of the contradictions characteristic of the contemporary world.
     At 50 and some years Parra is immortalized in his "Canciones Rusas"
(1966), as if his knowledge of the world had bathed him with a timeless dust;
he seems sad, now neither violent nor enraged; nostalgic, yet wounded;
victorious yet, nevertheless, infirm; ill form something that fell little by
little upon his face and from his face went inward and drips, drips, drips to
infinity, that is, until the dawn that will find him seated beneath the stars.
I see him now a little more aged: his eyes have deepened, the wrinkles of his
face contain shadows, he has lost almost all his hair, carries on his lapel a
little Russian astronaut and in his pockets letters of a woman who left him for
another. He goes from one nation to another nation and, in reality, is not like
that. He leaves and enters the rooms of his dark house, seeks some seat in
which to sit and does not find it, goes out to the street, the Chilean people
smile at him with fraternity, goes to the place of his sister Violeta and
there, seated next to the fireplace, and me as well, with the heat burning our
hands, Rosita, Roberto, Catalina, Panchita, Chabela, Angel, The Captain,
Domino, Nicanor Parra toast a day that will never return. The violets have left
us. We all toast. Him at the foot. The penultimate.

Notes
1 "Obra Gruesa," 1969, is the edition of his complete works.
2 "Atenea," nos.380-381, Apr.-Sept., 1958, pp.46-48.
3 The music for "La Cueca Larga" was composed by the folklorist Violeta
Parra...
4 "Poemas y Antipoemas," Santiago, 1954, pp.30-32.
5 Ibid., pp.77-78.
6 Ibid., pp.55-56.
7 Ibid., p.127.
8 Ibid., pp.140-141.


Chapter 9 - Anti-Literature

     The anti-literature to which I refer is a revolt against a lie accepted
socially and venerated instead of reality. This anti-literature has to do with
modes of action and not solely with modes of writing. The creator who is seen
in the act of creation self-analyzes and self-criticizes: discards the false,
that which would bring him to perjure the true human condition. He makes a
novel and, within it, unmakes it, makes a poem that negates itself, makes drama
and does away with the theatre. That is to say, destroys the false idea which
man has made of literature. To return it to vitality, before all else language
must be re-created. The word is converted to an act. The same word that had
become a sign of artifice, a mask of daily dying.
     Consequently, anti-literature begins by demolishing forms, erasing the
frontiers between the genres and dealing sincerely with the burden of absurdity
which is our inheritance. Blasphemy, like irreverence, insult and even
obscenity, are ways of clarifying to man the mirror where his image lies. More
than means of protest, they are acts of commiseration and solidarity amidst
anguish.
     The anti-literature of the 20th century is, then, a statement against
falsification in art and an attempt to make from this a reason for surviving,
living and resolving the absurdity of the human condition, accepting it to the
core.
     Two results can be deduced from this formulation: first, anti-literature
presents an image of the contemporary world as a chaos and of man as a victim
of reason; second, the fruits of this image constitute an act of interior and
exterior violence.
     "How can one hope to find order in the chaos comprised by this infinite
and variable datum: man?"
     This question was put by Tristan Tzara in his "Dada Manifesto" of 1918, to
give voice to a dogma: chaos is the reason of existence. Such that the first
aspect of the anti-literature dichotomy acquires its accelerated movement
within a closed orbit. The Dada protest is not revolutionary. At least, it is
not so in the political sense that the "Second Surrealist Manifesto" of Andre
Breton will be. Tzara accepts chaos as a reality within which the work of art
functions without regard to its social effects. He says:

     "There is a literature that does not reach to the hungry masses. It is
the work of creators, resulting from a true necessity within the author and
produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which
the rules wither away. Each page should flower with style, poetic frenzy, the
new, the eternal, the brilliant joke, enthusiasm for principles, be it by means
of a profound and weighty seriousness, or by the way they are captured. On one
side a world swaying in escape, sweetheart to the chimes of hell, on the other:
new men. Bold, leaping, riding in arenas. Behind them an invalid world and
literary charlatans with the mania of progress. I tell you: there is no
standard and we do not tremble; we are not sentimental. We are a furious
wind, destroying the dirty traces of clouds in the ponds, preparing the grand
spectacle of the disaster, of fire and decomposition. We will do away with
mourning and replace the tears with sirens howling from one continent to
another. From pavilions of intense happiness to widows with poisonous sorrow.
Dada is the signboard of abstraction; its classifieds and business deals are
also elements of the poetry.
     "Proclamation: there is a great negative work to be completed. We must
sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual against the state of
madness, complete and aggressive madness of an abandoned world in the hands of
bandits who dismember each other and destroy generations. Without pattern or
design, without organization: indomitable madness, decomposition. Those who are
strong in words or in action survive because they are quick at defense; the
agility of their limbs and of their feelings radiates from every angle of their
flanks.
     "Morality has defined charity and piety, two clumps of grease that have
grown like elephants, like planets, which are called good. They are nothing
good. The good is the lucid, the clear and decisive, without piety for
compromise or the politic. Morality is a shot of chocolate in men's veins. It
is a chore ordained not by a supernatural force, but by a business trust of
ideas and hungry academics. Sentimentalism: seeing a group of men who were
bored by fighting, so they invented the calendar and medical wisdom. The
battle of the philosophers began with conflicting etiquettes (mercantilism,
balance, cheap and meticulous measures) and by now it is understood that piety
is a waste sentiment stemming from the disgust that destroys the health, a
preliminary stench of bodies in decomposition which darken the sun. I proclaim
the opposition of all the cosmic faculties to this disease of a corrupted sun,
which developed from the fabric of philosophical thought...." (1)

     The surrealists, for their part, give to anti-literature a theoretical
base and an analytical method. They do not destroy one art form in order to
replace it with a single other. Breton opens a compartment in the rationalist
conception of artistic creation and from this compartment emerges, with the
force of a sea flood, the contents of a collective memory and a subconscious
creator. It is important to underline this function of the Surrealist
Manifesto: they are a force for liberation; they untie the bonds of the human
globe and discard its sandbags; they free its interlocutors; they give the
language a single continuous action emancipating the powers of the night, and
they assault the institutions, that is, implanting magic in the functional
place of reality within dreams.
     So considered, the Surrealist Manifestos help to explain the later
evolution of anti-literature. One could say that if Breton took one step
toward the depths of man, anti-literature took another step towards the surface
of reality, and removed from Surrealism the ritual apparatus and its dogmatic
insistences, liberated it, in turn, and identified its tone as disorder at once
luminous and violent.
     In what does the "anti" of Brecht's theatre, of Genet's prose, or
Prevert's poetry, consist? A revolt against a manner of speaking against an
attitude and a mode of acting? The "anti" is a revolution against a type of
society that speaks in lies, that dissimulates an ethics, that kills to
survive. On a literary plane this revolution revives words, restoring their
primary meaning and their original emotive charge. But this is not truly
essential (just as dynamiting the governor's palace is not everything in a
revolution). The revolutionary artist proceeds to rip out the seams of
institutionalized art not because he must follow a program, but instead out of
personal necessity. In the process they see and they judge, save or condemn:
in their own revolution.
     Criticism which observes the aesthetic act will notice certain coordinates
and will play with them; will examine a novel conception of time and apply it
rationally as much to the development of a novelistic chronicle as to a theatre
happening; will seek symbolic projections, will return to belief in romantic
irony and will posit principles for a reinterpretation of the epic and of the
romance, as too of the comic novel; will create capricious designs of space and
time so as to explain how the tale envelops man and moves the round world. All
this gives origin to a critical superstructure which, in the best of cases,
that of the fortunate critics, appears to us like an ingenious floating mobile
upon a literature that supports its contemplation.
     This criticism lacks immediate relevance to the functioning of
anti-literature in the middle of our century. The narrative of Burroughs, let
us say, like Arrabal's theatre or Ginsberg's poetry, presents a chaotic action,
not simply a chaotic enumeration, and with a "sui generis" concept of
structure. The same could be said of Juan Emar's prose, of the theatre of
Jorge Diaz, Alexandro Jodorovski's cinema, and Parra's "artifacts."
     Latin American anti-literature, nevertheless, produces a kind of
self-critique that well could be considered to be on the edge of the phenomenon
I allude to: I refer to the literary work that carries within itself its
self-negation, its well-armed time bomb. This is the case with "Rayuela," the
anti-novel by Julio Cortazar. Of importance here is that, in addition to the
anti-literary phenomenon, we are given the theoretical speculation that defines
and justifies it. Precisely the case of "Rayuela." What does Cortazar rebel
against, what does he propose as his novelistic prototype? He rebels
fundamentally against two things: first, against a form of narrating which
corresponds to a false conception of reality...and second, against language
which, chewed and ruminated into excrement, ends by devaluing the literary
expression. Cortazar proposes an "open" novel made from fragments which, in
their simultaneity, will convey an authentic image of reality.(2) The irony in
this presentation, that which transforms "Rayuela" into a negation of its
affirmation, that is, into an anti-novel, lies in the fact that the spokesman
is not Cortazar but a character, Morelli, who submits it to close critical
scrutiny. The self-critique is, in reality, the reverse of a novel to which
Cortazar, like an eccentric malefactor, leaves clues everywhere: Gide,
Gombrowicz, Borges, in plain sight; Joyce, Kafka, Pound, in less obvious
places; Sabato, by suggestion.
     "Rayuela" satisfies as much the Spanish traditional narrative, as Latin
American regionalist or nativistic writing. We might have included as well the
"poetic" novel that, in a sense, represents the culmination of descriptive and
illusionist rhetoric. In another connection, one must notice the abyss that
separates "Rayuela," the anti-novel, from the so-called magical realism of
Carpentier and from the indigenous surrealism of Asturias. One must notice, I
say, because it helps to discriminate among the roots of the Latin American
anti- narrative. At first sight we could think that we find in Asturias and
Carpentier certain constants of the anti- novel, given that neither one nor the
other is a novelist in the traditional sense of the word.
     Alejo Carpentier, who began his fictional work as a folklorist
("Ecue-Yamba-O," 1933), later discovered a vehicle that would accommodate his
hallucinatory vision of reality: historical adventure beyond all chronology
and wrapped in baroque language. The "transcendence" and "universality" so
appealing to the novelists of mid- century, was obtained by the use of
symbolism, particularly in "Los Pasos Perdidos" and "El Siglo de las Luces."
To the extent that Carpentier departed from immediate reality, experimented
with the concept of time and dared try lyrical monologues, he seemed to
coincide with some in the vanguard of anti-literature. For example, with the
Spaniard Ramon Sender ("La Esfera"). Nevertheless, Carpentier does not
dynamite the building of his baroque structure. On the contrary, he seems to
stylize it more each time, and in stories such as "El Acoso" and "Viaje a la
Semilla" his preoccupation with creating designs of indirect yet functional
purpose increases.
     Miguel Angel Asturias, on the other hand, uses a chaotic movement in his
indigenous narrative while at the same time disdaining the "prepared"
mechanisms of the regional novel. Still, the presentation of Asturias is
"literary" and obeys an order imposed by his ritual acceptance of Mayan
mythology. There is nothing in his prose which, once set, is released; nothing
that loses its meaning within a primitivist conception of the world, and
nothing that contradicts, suddenly, his social intention.
     It is requisite, therefore, to seek other parents for Cortazar: narrators
who may have discovered the opening in a story through which time flows freely,
that is, through the pores of an amorphous reality in the process of
accumulating its disorder. I think of a Chilean narrator whom few, very few,
know: Juan Emar (he was called Pilo Yanez, but that seemed better than the
French). His books, Un ano (1934), Ayer (1935), Miltin (1935), are a
scandalous ridicule of the novel of realism and conventionalism. The
novelistic material is surrealistic, heroic and comical; the language
represents the routine mechanics of the Chilean petty bourgeoisie and their
scatological ejaculations; furthermore it is based upon the strategic use of
the "leitmotif." It adorns the language to thereupon knock it over into
itself. The story is told, but never within the plot. On the contrary, Juan
Emar speaks the way one cannot speak for a novel. The humor is insulting,
eccentric, in no way symbolic. Nevertheless, Juan Emar, so alive,
sophisticated, cruel and fearsome is, in truth, a primitive. An anti-novelist
with very little language. A swordsman without a sword. He would fight with the
pen holder and a battered piece of steel. Better endowed with words, he might
have been an heir of Stern. Juan Emar had the certainty to analyze the
aesthetic basis of his disorder and to throw himself with a thrust against the
most eminent Chilean critics of his era: Solo. He failed in that thrust. But it
is the intention to which I refer, not the act of blood he did not consummate.
     Juan Emar, with his self-destructive instinct and his anthropomorphic
sympathy for his characters, without saying anything of his cubist
approximation to the patriotic customs of his co-nationals, and his knowledge
of the world as an apple, whose frames in a universal frame (an image lucidly
interpreted in the illustrations of Gabriela Emar) preceded beautifully the
lesser chapters of "Rayuela." But he was not the only one.
     Leopoldo Marechal may have understood the play of Juan Emar and, sensing
there an insufficiency, may have set himself to reflect in the revolving mirror
of his age to obtain that simultaneity of space, time and action that is the
mark of "Adan Buenosayres" (1948). The comic novel, that is, the novel as a
mask of the man who has gotten lost in his contradictions and continually falls
into traps of his choosing, is for Marechal a pre-conceived form, while for
Juan Emar it was a way of living day to day which never stopped surprising him.
It cannot be said that Marechal breaks open the novel, nor that he puts it into
reverse (as happens in "Ayer"), but, instead, he converts it into mobile images
of a satire and a romantic epic (cf. "El banquete de Severo Arcangelo, 1965).
     The narrative of Juan Carlos Onetti, for its part, constitutes a
fascinating instance of the anti-novel because it breaks open in profundity,
not in extension, as is true of "Rayuela." The action in the novels of Onetti
are produced in intermediate space between immediate reality and an emotional
and intellectual super-reality. He prefers the invisible corridor in which the
characters know each other through divination, inclination or rebuke, although
the places where people simulate understanding also form part of the world of
his creation. If it is possible to conceive a type of novel in which the
heroes interweave without seeing each other or observing sideways, without
touching and far less confessing or displaying oneself, in which nothing is
done which, nevertheless, provokes a catastrophe with drowning in an indefinite
and irrevocable perdition, that would be the anti-novel of Onetti. It
distinguishes itself from Marechal and Cortazar in that he does not play. He
knows the rules of the game, but he prefers to involve himself in them, and
goes trampling and seeking the mortal resource that they hide, the reason of
their falsity and sinister power.
     "Paradiso" (1966) by Jose Lezama Lima also gives the impression of opening
into profundity. I believe, however, that it is only an impression. In his
hands the novel loses its bearings. It simply falls of its own weight. I do not
see in "Paradiso" a literary mechanism, nor a narrative system, nor a
linguistic arrangement. I see, instead, a slow explosion, with much dust and
things and beings in the air, something like a monumental circus tent that
begins to collapse and they cut cables, trapezes, fences and stairs, chairs
fall and magicians, animals, ropers and equestrian princesses, clowns from the
islands, familiar musicians, cooks and slave-drivers, a play of the century
and, after the slow fall, there moves beneath the amorphous tent a collective
beast, nameless, disposed to enjoy with an appetite of obscure origin this
sawdust finale. "Paradiso" is an open novel in the sense in which a ball is
open, that is, on the outside, floating in the universe that creates the words
that sound, prolong themselves and remain in the man as things of a useless and
beautiful time. A sexual time and a womb that thinks, an empty eye that reviews
the past, examines the striving of mankind to eternalize themselves in papers
and in stone, a mouth that ceaselessly consumes the skin of god and serves and
serves again the linen of the family and the rings that they are losing, the
friendships of the dance and poetry, all this, thus narrated, the anti-novel.
Sung, it would be opera.
     It can be concluded, then, and taking very much into account anti-novels
like "Three Sad Tigers" by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, "Jose Trigo" by Fernando
del Paso, "The Hook" by Vicente Lenero, and "Los Ninos se despiden de la
Miseria" by Pablo Armando Fernandez, that the Latin American anti-novel is an
attempt to disarm the narrative so that it matches the disorder of reality. It
is also a critical insight into that attempt and a heroic affirmation,
therefore comical, of the absurdity of this and all metaphysical attempts to
which mankind sets their hand.
     When that anarchy and its surrounding chaos are transformed into pure
action, with neither speculations nor justifications, nor reservations or
condescensions of any sort, with speak no longer of an anti-narrative yet
instead, as the critics say, of the theatre of the absurd, of the anti-theater,
of the "happening." I shall repeat something I said in this respect:

     In that complex world of contradictions, rebellions,
     anguish, triumph and fiascoes, in which our young
     writers move, they plant more questions than answers
     and they give as many blows as they receive. They
     attack falsity and bourgeois conventionality with
     the weapon they deserve: the absurd and the
     irrational. They respond to civil regimentation
     with the image of the ruin, of the abuse, of the
     cruel destruction of innocence, which are the marks
     of our contemporary pseudo- culture. There is a
     great lethal dance among the scenarios of the modern
     world and that dance does not wait for the final
     Judgment to merge the passed on and the living; it
     leaves the platforms, exceeds the cordons, invades
     the pit and leaves for the plazas to visit the
     shames of mankind, to make light of his false
     dignity, to reveal the secret enclaves in which the
     garments of vice, treason and hate are fashioned.
     The public is going to applaud their nightmares, to
     ask an encore of the artist who insults them; it
     doesn't mean a catharsis, but rather the
     multiplication of the anguish at the recognition of
     dishonor, that is to say, the feigned enactment of
     the end.(3)

     This it seems to me may be applied to the frontal attack that is directed
today against the armchair authors like Virgilio Pinera in Cuba, Osvaldo
Dragun, Dalmiro Saenz and Abelardo Castillo in Argentina, Menen Desleal in El
Salvador, Alexandro Jodorovski in Mexico, Jorge Diaz, Jaime Silva and Raul Ruiz
in Chile.
     This theatre is the most resistant flower of Dada. It coincides with the
anti-novel in its desire to negate forms and to directly compromise the student
or spectator. It coincides with anti-poetry in its skill at projecting
violence. We have here an art that always has been governed by rules and
formulas, directly or tacitly accepted. Today they have erased the borders
between actor and spectator. The theatre became round, it left the mother,
hung movie screens, made its people run through the orchestra, the balcony, the
gallery and the front wall; they have liquidated unities and the curious idea
of a "reality illusion"; they discarded the story, the nude came apart, the
resolution spiraled into the infinite; the directors and counselors inform
their parents that they have fallen outside of the framework. Dance, concert,
natural demise, crime, orgasm, projectiles, are the significant elements of an
action that can lead to the destruction or the regeneration of the story.
     Anti-theatre is an individual act. It is only collective if the spectator
is transmuted, is drugged and moves on the same plane as the creators who form
the company. Anti-theatre, in consequence, is a mortal combat, that is to say,
a forum without temporal limitation. Which more, which to a lesser extent,
contributes to liquidating the last vestiges of the former art which pretended
to be a copy of the living. Opera is sung anti-theatre. Anti-theatre did away
with the tragedy, the drama and the comedy, replacing them in classical
proportions with the absurd, the lowly and the violent. Anti-theatre, like the
anti-novel and anti-poetry, is comical, controls the moods by means of drugs
and plants and utilizes the backstage so that the heroes jump to their doom
through the window. Said another way, they do not control the moods, except
that they convert them to acts, incite the man to violence or, if you like, to
laughter. It has no principles nor needs special halls. The anti-theatre is the
great theatre of the world. It provokes revolutions.

Notes
1 Dada Manifesto (Paris, 1918).
2 Rayuela (Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamerica, 1963), pp.452,500.
3 Chilean Literature of the 20th Century (Santiago: Zig Zag, 2d ed.,
1967) pp.117-18.


Chapter 10 - Antipoetry

     To return to reality, renege on the exquisite, burn the hermetic treasures
of exoticism, to speak of humble criollo things, to uncover meter and
punctuation, to bring Dario off Olympus and seat him before the fireplace or
hang him from a nail in the dining room, as Fernandez Moreno did - none of this
is antipoetry. It is antimodernism. And it is what differentiates poets like
Pezoe Veliz, Lopez Velarde, Barba Jacob, Basso Maglio, postmodernists all four,
and the vanguardists like Huidobro, Borges, Novo, Carrera Andrade, among the
first Latin American antipoets; for Pablo de Rokha and Cesar Vallejo the
revolution of language in poetry in Spanish is no formal phenomenon; it tries
not to re-adapt the language to a new concept of poetry (Creationism). It
tries to be done with the poetry that agonizes drowned in words and return to
the poet the right to express oneself as a person, not as a barrel-organ nor as
a dictionary nor as an air traffic controller (in the down-to-earth manner of
the minimalists), return to them the right to conversation, the right to
confront society and confront themselves to break what is rotten and breeding
in the academies.
     The right to conversation is begun to be given to Latin American poetry,
for example, in Ramon Lopez Velarde (1882-1921), not Lugones, nor Herrera and
Reissigni Jose A. Silva, because those came down to the patio of the house,
roamed for breakfast or appeared in bed with a certain Latin spirit, classical,
popularly patrician.
     Lopez Velarde takes no part in the conflict planted by Gonzalez Martinez
in his celebrated sonnet. It is not of swans or of owls that he wishes to
speak. It refers, instead, to his first Agueda:

     Agueda appeared, resonant
     of starch, and her eyes
     of jade and her ruddy cheeks
     protected me against the awful struggle...
     I was a boy
     and knew O from the round,
     and Agueda who wove
     tame and perseverant, in the echoing
     corridor, caused me unknown shivering...
     (I believe that I even owe her the custom
     of talking heroically insane about her).(1)

First contribution of Lopez Velarde to the wellspring of the antipoets:
he narrates. He does not sing, nor does he describe. He explains with
irrational reasons, with which he produces a counterpoint, that is, his poetry
sounds like prose. The effect is deceiving. Lopez Velarde arms conversation
with art and the product is almost handicraft. Not altogether. It cannot be.
     Second contribution of Lopez Velarde to the wellspring of the antipoets:
humor. His is not sarcasm; only tender irony, if irony can be tender. Here is
how he addresses "The Gentle Country":

     Gentle Country: Your worth is in the river
     of the virtues of your womanhood.
     Your daughters go forth as in a tale,
     or distilling an invisible alcohol,
     dressed in the rays of your sunshine,
     cross like threaded bottles.
     Gentle Country: My love is not for the myth
     but for your truth of blessed bread,
     as to the girl who nears the gating
     with the blouse pulled to her ears
     and the skirt hanging on the little bone.
     Like the handsome knave, my Country,
     on a floor of metal, you live till the day
     of miracle, like the lottery.(2)

     It is not only the nation that Lopez Velarde softens: he also softens
poetry, removing the patterned mold, the crests, the cosmetics and ribbons (the
precious stones already removed by other postmodernists), he removes the shoes
and socks. He is the delicate disrupter of the turn of the century model.
Huidobro would turn it on its head. Lopez Velarde proceeds with a smile on his
lips, from afar, without compromising himself. His colloquial tone, quickness
and provincial elegance, are more than the swan song for the chorus of Latin
American poetry. After Lopez Velarde it will be relatively easy for Salvador
Novo to say: "Let the lesser ones come to you" and for Carlos Pellicer to
exclaim: "Among all the flowers, ladies and gentlemen, it is the gilded lily
that is most hallucinatory."(3)
     The starch has gone out of poetry, and it begins to open and throw off
words, like a globe that quickens. From there to fill itself with another
mission, will take years and that mission will be existential, never more
rhetorical. In Mexico, with Gorostiza, Octavio Paz, and Montes de Oca, for
example.
     Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) affirms in "Altazor" (1919):

     I am a savage angel who fell one morning
     Into your plantations of precepts
     Poet
     Antipoet...(4)

     He says it thinking of his role as royal jester who precedes, giving
blows, "the burial of poetry."

     Altazor distrusts in words
     Distrusts in ceremonious stratagems
     And of poetry
     Traps
     Traps of light (5)

     His own epitaph is simple and decisive: "Here lies Vicente, antipoet and
magician."(6)
     What Altazor was this to declare such things? A Dada warrior? An angry
standard-bearer of anti-rhetoric? A true creator of a new language? Or the
great man who strips poetry nude and exhibits it like a woman getting out of
bed? We shall try to define the role of Huidobro to see with a certain clarity
the situation of the first antipoetic wave in Latin American literature.
     Formed in the tradition of Modernism (Ruben Dario will come to say:
"between the horizon and your breast will not fit the song of a bird"),
Huidobro in his first period controlled a language of the clearest
gold-smithing, essentially ornamental, of elevated roots and romantic tone.
Nevertheless, he suddenly changed in language, moved by an integral vision of
the revolution in European art. He discovered a value in the colors, the
internal rhythms, the melancholy of a reality always suggested, never directly
expressed, the technical value of the image and the false economy of metaphor.
That is to say, he sought the shadow of symbolism to extinguish the tropical
light of Dario, cut the world into pieces and reorder it like Cubist
calligraphy and the result was the invention of a new rhetoric and a priceless
dynamic consisting now not of allusions to the surrounding environment, but of
superimpositions, collages of the reality characteristic of his epoch; from
there the airplanes, the telegraph wires, the rainbows, planets and cataclysms,
the zeppelins and kings without crowns, the silver cowboys, the dehumanization
of man.
     Huidobro came not to bury poetry, but to repair it. He was, in reality,
not an antipoet. He himself was anti-descriptive, anti-sentimental,
anti-urbanist (in the sense in which Chocano was a super-bricklayer, or Lugones
pro-peasant), anti-meter and anti-spelling, all in all; anti-academic and head
of a foursome of brilliant poets who wanted to fumigate poetry in Spanish and
kill its moths in order to replace them with mechanical butterflies. He
recognizes it himself:

     The new athlete leaps upon the magical field
     Playing with magnetic words...
     One must revive language
     With laughing sounds...(7)

     Huidobro dazzles and disconcerts the spectator of poetry. Magician. The
spectator cannot catch up with the velocity of his images. Huidobro is
concerned with "a lovely insanity in the zone of language," an "adventure with
the language." He says:

     While we live let us play
     The simple sport of naming
     From the pure word and nothing more
     Without imagery stripped of jewels...(8)

     Skilled in scenery. Because he knows that "the pure word and nothing more"
will not suffice, and from imagery he will serve a royal plate while he lives.
     Grounded in the lectures of Bergson, of Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine,
Rimbaud, Apollinaire, witness to the Armistice and to Dada, known to Picasso
and Arp, Huidobro is surely the most characteristic (at the same time, the most
brilliant) of the vanguardists of the Spanish tongue and, therefore, the
exclamations of "Altazor" are equivalent to the poetic art not only of
creationism, but also of ultra-radicalism, stridency, futurism and the other
"isms" of the year 20. But let us make a sketch of place.
     In Argentina, Lugones had offered an approach to reality that he
considered rustic. His language, nevertheless, did not correspond to that
reality and its image would seem literary, superimposed upon the complex of
classical allusions that served as his pedestal. Nor can Macedonio Fernandez
or Jorge Luis Borges undo the toil of linguistic polishing nor the use of
surprise mechanisms, the inheritance of postmodernist vanguardism. The case of
Borges is more serious because he feels an Argentine reality for which he lacks
expression; he alludes to it and it surrounds him stylistically but he never
manages to speak for it, given that the language of that reality does not
correspond to his experience. This, between parentheses, makes us think of
Cortazar who, in my judgment, suffers the drama of the searcher for real words
who knows where they are and who says them and which destinies they determine,
but upon adopting them they sound like the voices of a song. We deal with both
cases, that of Borges and that of Cortazar, of writers overfed with culture,
tragically disposed to defer to it so as to describe essential acts, the
anti-literary signs of an epoch. The inability to prevail in that task gives
them greatness. Neither Lugones, then, nor Macedonio Fernandez, nor Borges,
will be precursors of an antipoetry; only partisans of a rusticity that, in
contrast with Modernism, sounds beautifully real. One needs to read Fernandez
Moreno to feel that an antipoetic attitude is not only a literary revolt of a
vanguardist nature or a tendency to ugliness, but a proximity to an individual
non-transferable human condition.
     The anti-academic position of Vicente Huidobro, it is worth saying, the
abandonment of meter and punctuation, the use of the Bergsonian image instead
of metaphor, the tendency toward abstraction from pictorial nature and a
transcendent conception of poetry and of art in general, make of him a
precursor of a certain aspect of contemporary anti-literature. I refer to what
in him there is of formalism: Huidobro cuts to the word for the object it
represents, but without committing an essential act so that, on stripping the
language of its exterior rhetoric and returning its primordial sentiment, it is
given back its authentic reality. As a natural reaction, it is exposed that it
comes full of an anti-literary mission. The falsified signs will disappear and
the action will appear. The poets will dot their i's and unleash their
calligraphy. Huidobro invents words, exclaims beautifully, deep in the
emptiness of his riddles. He destroys no poetries. He remains in the middle
road of his rebellion. The other half was already run in those years by James
Joyce. What was going to stay at the bottom of the language of which Huidobro
and the ultra-radicals were capable was a very bitter substance. It required
not only magicians, in the style of Huidobro or Borges, to transform itself
into antipoetry, but also the Anti-Christ, in the manner of Vallejo or of
Rokha.
     In 1916 Pablo de Rokha (1895-1968) said in his poem entitled "Mood and
Form": "Even my days are parts of enormous old furniture." And he adds, by
way of conclusion: "The man and the woman have the odor of the tomb."(9)
     Speaking this way, strictly, directly, De Rokha began to beat upon poetry
with an intent that was, after all, close to Lopez Velarde, to Huidobro and his
ultra-radicals. Naming was an immediate necessity for him. The noun of
animist content, in his case a dreadful passionate content, served for de
Rokha in the place of poetic crime. Abusing the concept, proclaiming the
infallibility of the image, de Rokha entered chaos via a subconscious path and
there where Huidobro was putting up a verse as a luminous warning, he uncovered
a sack of immense proportions from which then fell dialectical stones in
between baroque explosions that blemished for always the clarities of Chilean
neo-romanticism. De Rokha, then, not only entered into Chilean reality from
above, from below and from the sides, not only represented the first Surrealist
attack in our midst, but also used a language that, suddenly, gave reality to
the antipoetic attitude of the vanguardists. De Rokha would say later that he
wrote "as a broken half-brain." In truth, he wanted to say that he destroyed
rhetoric between us with the only true weapon: the language of a broken
humanity and universe, a language not learned, that he carried with him like a
birthmark.
     "U," published in 1927, is a key book to verify what I say. A companion of
Huidobro, in the first verse of the poem de Rokha leaves a declaration of
creationist faith. Huidobro had said that the poet was a small god and that
one should not describe the rose but instead make it bloom in the poem. De
Rokha supports that as he can:

     I perceive the world coming as image, only as image
     I feel, think, and express in irremediable images...

     further, I have no conceptual sense...
     I do not know - I say,
     do not define - I name,
     adding to nature.(10)

     It is a salute to the flag. In the verses that follow, de Rokha proceeds
to leave inscriptions which represent direct violence against bourgeois society
and against the man accommodated to it. He strips the poetry of all artifice,
except one: grandiloquence. To arrive at his inscriptions it is necessary to
open the way with the machete and cut explanations, exclamations, repetitions,
oratory. What remains is astonishing: with the myth of the beautiful poem
overthrown, with the language freed, with the power of the popular idiom and
divinitory faculty recognized, not analytical, of conversational tone, with the
hybrid value of the eschatological vocabulary accepted, his humor visceral and
his social place primitive, there appears an aggressive condemnation of the
cultural apparatus in which the man has been castrated. I shall cite certain
of the sayings of Pablo de Rokha warning that I have trimmed off the
unnecessary, that eloquence in which he frequently drowned.

     They have punctured the divine tires...
     In truth, brothers, in truth
     the hour of the bald things
     is here,
     is here,
     the hour of the bald things
     say the crucified.
     Women are a problem with little hairs...
     Benedict XV ministers with fallen teats over Christendom.
     The false idiots
     wet the only walls of the asylum.
     The spider grows hair and becomes a philosopher.
     The ocean resounds like a bank filled with the public.
     Pio Baroja moves the theatre from his belly.
     The sultan of philosophy
     is three buttons and a testicle (11)

     For show, those buttons. Among them there is another language of abstract
temperament, extensive philosophical concatenations and metaphysical
apostrophes, allusions without apparent order to the great historical cycles
and religious systems. De Rokha, like Sabat Ercasty and Armando Vasseur, felt
himself to be a cosmic individual, mover of masses, poet-mountain. On that
plane he unfolds himself so as to organize his system of images and militantly
stick with them and a Marxist position; then, he quits being an antipoet and
his task is national reconstruction and revolutionary agitation. His political
impetuosity is not always equal to the lively patterns of his antipoetry. De
Rokha will continue being a great poet in proportion to the enormity of his
demolitions, not for his harangues nor his "slogans." He shall be that too to
the degree that he expresses the desolation of his last years: see his
monologues over the demise of Winnet.
     In 1918, a few years before de Rokha would say "they have punctured the
divine tires," Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938) said from atop Dario's school: "There
are hits in life, so strong... I don't know, hits like hatred from
above..."(12)
     Vallejo impersonated God, not like Rokha with a stone in his hand, but as
one neighbor to another. Vallejo's eye was strong and moved toward being
cruel. He says:

     I am the blind Sierran
     who watches through the lens of a wound.(13)

     In 1916 de Rokha had said "The man and the woman have the odor of the
tomb." In 1918, year of the Armistice, Vallejo recomposes his speech:

     The tomb is still
     of female sex and attractive to man! (14)

     Vallejo consistently initiates, systematically, a labor of the trenches
into which his life will go. His language, modernist in "The Black Heralds,"
breaks the conventional logical bonds, and adopts free association of images
and follows a bitter tone of conversing with and confronting the false face of
the world, spitting on it, hitting it, distorting it. That face, we assume, is
the image of a mask that Vallejo wears like his crown of thorns.(15) Such that
the process is, at root, self-destruction without rebellion. We have here the
difference between Vallejo and de Rokha. The latter destroys from within and
never feels sorry for himself, attacks, dynamites, shoots, like a soldier on
the ground spraying with shrapnel the area that surrounds him; furious,
cruel, de Rokha is an unleashed power, his poetry an automatic pistol from
which he emits rounds. Vallejo, on the other hand, proceeds laden with an
image of Christ suffering but pious. He goes at Christ's haunches recounting
the human miseries in plain, bald, bloodied language, showing his wounds and
those of his companion, howling in a low voice, depending on the chaos he
produces, not the reverse. Vallejo attacks from beneath, towards the inside,
knowing that man, at times, covers humanity when it lies down to die in the
open. His poetry is a reflexive act, a stone which Vallejo returns to whoever
throws it, be this god or society or man. So many stones are thrown that, at
last, they add up, not for sure aim, but as accumulation. Vallejo wraps the
commiserating tone in trivial colloquial formulas; it is one of his ways of
deflating the poetic globe. He says:

     A little more consideration
     insofar as it will be late, early...
     A little more consideration.(16)

     We'll see. That is and no more
     We'll see. It doesn't transcend itself.(17)

     Sex, mortality, the orders, friendships, the country of origin, the
family, in his poetry lose the institutional aspect and sense; they turn into
very concrete forms of his suffering, his solitude, his sickness; they are
marks on his face and body, wounds and scars. Without ornamentation. For
example:

     I think of your sex...
     touch the button of speech, ripe in season.

     That elastic holding the material in.
     Those buttocks seated high.

     Today you come I am barely up.
     The stable is divinely watered
     and fertilized by the innocent cow.

     At this my spittle drools, I
     am a beautiful person...

     Confidence in many, but not now in one;
     in the river, never in the current
     in the stockings, not in the legs
     and in you alone, in you alone, in you alone.

     From between my own teeth I emerge steaming,
     giving voice, pushing,
     lowering my pants...
     A cow my stomach, a cow my bowel,
     Misery picks me from between my own teeth,
     caught on a stick by the cuff of the shirt.
     A stone to sit on
     would there not be for me now?

     I would like to live forever, escaping the belly,
     because, as was said and I repeat,
     so much life and then never!

     Later, I have washed everything,
     proud profile, dignified;
     I have turned to see what gets dirty,
     I have scraped on what takes me near
     and have laid out the map that
     assented or cried, I don't know which.(18)

     One could add to all this, as a compendium, "The violence of time." This
is, then, the antipoetry of Vallejo: a pendulum that, to move, erases itself,
a constant negation of the deed at the moment that it strikes blows at man, a
contrast between existence and non-existence. It is Vallejo's own mode of
self-destruction: to negate the poetry affirming it, to affirm life negating
it as consummate sarcasm and bitter brutality. It is the necessary expression
of someone who has discovered the mechanisms of the trap and awaits the moment
of its springing, reluctant to betray it by hurrying.
     Nicanor Parra (1914), speaking of traps, conceives the modern world as a
monumental sewer for hunting rats and men. Before arriving at that conclusion
he says:

     I laugh behind a chair,
     my face filling with flies.

     From his axles man finds the necessary wax
     to shape the visage of his idols.
     And from the female the straw and dirt for his temples.(19)

     That gender and those temples immediately establish the line which unites
the antipoetry of Parra and of Vallejo and of de Rokha. To arrive at the
conclusion that the world is a sewer, Parra performs a prior ordering and
synthesis of vices, crimes, lies, hypocrisies, swindles. He shows everything
immobilized and pathetic as in an ancient comedy of errors. The antipoetic
line arrives at its highest tension. Parra perfects the precursors of
destruction. His talent for synthesis, unequaled in contemporary antipoetry,
permits him to define human anguish in the exact measure of our inefficacy and
impotence.
     Parra controls an everyday language mixed with pedagogical formulas and
sentences from popular parlance; it is his warhorse, the same one used by the
anonymous voice who when talking reveals desperation. His antipoetry is the
poetry of the insurance salesman, of the grade school teacher, or the traffic
cop, unionist or secretary, dentist, captain of the army, theatre attendant,
school inspector, zoo administrator, that is, the poetry of respectable and
honest people complaining naked beneath the sheets with as much right as the
bard of long ago who lamented crowned with laurel above the sheets.
     Like Breton, Parra too speaks of a violent coupling that, joining
obscurity and clarity, will produce antipoetry. Parra needs clarity to provide
a concrete image, not wholly logical, although sufficiently rational, but more
absurd and eccentric, of the human condition. That image contains hidden a
strong sense of sin, of failure and emptiness. Its expression is sarcastic,
full of a rage which does not become blows, but instead is gestures, voices,
movements, and it remains in the air, threatening yet useless. The antipoet
returns to process the disorganization that surrounds him and give form to
society with an arbitrary order. This permits him or her to reduce the world
to the absurd.
     I do not know if Parra may have foreseen that his most recriminating and
expository antipoems, with time, have become immobile and are like posters
stuck on certain wall in central homes, forums and public libraries. They
turned in the four winds and determined their deposit. They settled down.
Like good wines, these are navigated poems. I refer to "The Snake," "The
Trap," "The Vices of the Modern World," "The Tables," "Soliloquy of the
Individual." Extensive and transcendent expositions of chaos.
     Afterwards, Parra had had to take antipoetry to his extremes, converting
his speeches into axioms; key phrases that represent the direct objectification
of the philosophical absurd and of social anarchy. He has arrived, then, at a
muralistic poetry, a true mural poetry, not that subtlety that the radicals
pasted on the walls of the great city, but instead an activist poetry that
violently writes on the wall in a mood of confrontation. Our equivalent to the
wall inscriptions of the May Revolution in Paris. Parra calls them "Artifacts."
He says, for example:

     "In the United States liberty is a statue."

     It could have been written with chalk on a wall in Berkeley. If in his
antipoems Parra held to a line of sarcasm, frontal attack on the bourgeois
establishment and demolition of institutions, in his "Artifacts" he removes all
elements of eloquence, all vocal trickery, all suspicion of rhetoric and
didacticism, and is left with those phrases that represent the nude body of
poetry, those words of stone, pure, torn by the roots from the literature and
re-incorporated in the common language, that one which gives the true idea of
existence and not the idea of existence that the writer decrees and adorns so
as to fabricate their own deception and the deception of the naive and the
swindlers.
     I insist that Parra isolates and burns the bridges and fills the moats
behind himself. The circle of chalk is now a circle of fire. Within his
poetry Parra is like a frantic woodsman, hatchet in hand, cutting away and
destroying the tree of life to its last vestige. There is becoming little
left. Stumps and smoke and sticks. Scarcely. While he continues to sharpen
his hatchet blade. He had never been so alone, as when other antipoets from
all over appeared and extended their arms. "Thick Work" (1969) suggests a
beginning, a first stage in construction, but in reality it refers to the
pavement, the mix, the nails, the sticks and the cardboard that spin after the
catastrophe. The carpenter is ready, hammer in hand, to pound spikes like
heads.
     In the expository tradition of antipoetry (yes, I believe there is that
tradition), the inclined plane where humanity opens and extends like a leather
fur on the floor, they mark the holes and put on a loincloth to hold back the
blood, Nicanor Parra headed on a definite course. I think that Gonzalo Rojas,
Cesar Fernandez Moreno, Ernesto Cardenal and Roque Dalton, among others,
undoubtedly accompany him.
     Gonzalo Rojas (1917) was brought up in the Madragon's surrealism alongside
Braulio Arenas, Teofilo Cid, Jorge Caceres, Enrique Gomez Correa. Already in
1948, when his book appears, "Man's Misery," it is evident that Rojas does not
want to fight only with the white arms of Chilean surrealism: chaotic
enumeration, the disintegrative act, the cumulative process of an decorative
anguish. He attacks, instead, certain basic aspects of the human condition
with arms characteristic of antipoetry: the sudden shift, the secret phrase,
sarcasm, the formulas of dogmatic ratiocination. His parentage with Parra is
clear. Perhaps it stems from a common devotion to Vallejo. But those would be
distant parents. It treats more likely a fury and a desperation which grow
together and which are ended by separating them. Both strike at the old door
of the bourgeois home and they strike not to open it, but to throw it down.
They are ferocious destroyers of the institutional. They deal in an erotic,
essentially aggressive "machismo." Parra presents it with irony and takes it
to the limits of cruelty. Rojas wraps it in bags of seminal cargo. The
differences between Parra and Rojas are important. Parra is schematic and
possesses a cyclical sense of form; his perfection is circular; his proceeding
is always allusive and, from there, comes his brilliant consciousness of
reality; with his power of synthesis he acquires an expression that is broader
and, at the same time, more complete than that of Rojas. In Parra's antipoems
one notices a tidy conception of the world (neatly critical) and a firm
consciousness of mankind's limits. Rojas, on the other hand, does not but
outflanks his building; he overflows it. Form is not his fundamental
preoccupation, but the idea and its reverberation, like sunlight upon reality
at noon. Rojas squeezes the poetic object, concentrates it in search of the
seed and later opens it, extends it, shakes out consequences. Parra is a
social critic. Rojas is precisely lyrical and transcendent; he does not shine,
but instead illuminates continually. He is friend of definitions and in them
finds that most provocative in his antipoetry. Let us see.

     May those that know know what they can know
     and those who are asleep may they still sleep.

     Between one sheet and another or, even more quickly
     than that, in a snap, we became nude and leaped into the air
     already ugly and old, without wings, with the wrinkles of the earth.

     Dylan Thomas: the star of alcohol shines for us to see
     what we bet, and lost.

     Mortal, mortal error
     for anyone to do this being born; we are hunger.

     One is here without knowing they are not,
     causing them to laugh at having entered that
     delirious game.

     God is no good for me. Nothing for me
     is any good for anything.

     They speak of a god or they speak of history. I laugh
     at having to go so far for an explanation of the hunger
     which devours me.

     I am, then, the dog that divines the future: I profess.

     Take out the deceased. It is time to take away the body
     that grew beneath the skin like a wounding vice!(20)

     Rojas is narrative, exclamatory, irreverent, close to women upon a mortal
floor, following the path of a fly and chaining his thoughts in a series with
muralistic impact. Examples:

     Now in the light and in the speed,
     and their soul is a fly that buzzes in the ears
     of the newly born.

     Cosmonauts, advise us
     if that star is real, or is also a line
     in the farce.

     Not to confound the grubs with the stars:
     Oh the old record player of the sophists.
     They kill, kill poets to study them.
     They eat, continue eating through bibliography.

     Books and books, books unto the clouds,
     but poetry is written alone.
     It is written with the teeth, with the danger,
     with the terrible truth of each thing.(21)

     A poem like "Why Should We Lie?" is already a decisive proclamation to
surround Rojas' final intention. Just as in Parra's "Vices of the Modern
World," who covers and researches the deeds of mankind and is left for dessert
with a spot on the tie, so Rojas views humanity with an incessant, heavy,
bleeding, sad headlong fall toward the coffin, a sort of silent cinema,
accelerated, infinitely repeated. To say it with anguished sonority, with
defiant sarcasm, is the mark of his antipoetry.
     Rojas witnesses the act of his destruction as an individual being; he does
not destroy with his own hand. There is in his poetry a permanence that is not
the effect of the words, yet instead of the movement that he gives them around
his desperation and his solitude.
     The antipoetry of Cesar Fernandez Moreno (1919) contrasts with the sacred
and blasphemous oratory that is continued from Pablo de Rokha to Gonzalo Rojas.
Fernandez Moreno, although rendering homage to his father and to Vallejo,
fires, avoids everything that could demoralize him: reflection as much as
pronouncements. He speaks with extreme velocity in a sort of agitated
monologue of one who recounts the film and, recounting it, contradicts it, gets
it wrong, reversed, advanced with flying commentaries. To be the antipoet that
he is, Fernandez Moreno had to change his biography and the history of his
nation. When he lost respect for Argentina (with love, man, with love) he
gave it to himself. He says:

     You have seen how many great-great-grandmothers one has -
     I accuse seven Spaniards, six natives and three French,
     the match will end thus
     Hispano-argentine combination, 13, French, three.(22)

     From Paris, that is to say, from where come the well-born children hanging
from their carriages, Fernandez Moreno leaps with nonchalance:

     Because neither my brothers nor Buenos Aires
     were here they brought me from Europe,
     they brought me in pieces.(23)

     Thus I am in any case
     Spanish French Indian who knows
     soldier peasant merchant poet "quizas"
     rich poor of every and no class
     and yet am Argentine.(24)

     Fernandez Moreno in search of a place of origin. Hurriedly. Because
Argentina unites and divides. "Hey, of what Argentina do you tell me?"
Of the limits:

     our limits already ceased to be limits
     they are questions of limits
     to the west the question of the Chileans
     a type of Argentine furious with themselves.(25)

     To the east the question started with Brazil
     who took the colony who took from you the colony
     a question of a haircut.(26)

     About Patagonia:

     The only sure thing is that Patagonia sounds like "pata."(27)

     ...from Patagonia only the gas matters
     an endless eruption of gas that Buenos Aires turns pure.(28)

     Of the Mar del Plata river:

     nevertheless they call it silver
     as often the silver sea as the silver river
     just as with this so Argentine republic
     what a metallic obsession, my lord (29)

     From the Atlantic that bathes us:

     70,000 kilometers of coast and no restaurant
     with a view of the sea.(30)

     Of our human quality:

     somehow we always lose the final
     against the most developed rivals
     god is native but the arbiters are foreign (31)

     Fernandez Moreno describes the place before the tourist takes the
photograph and the military geographers print the maps, in his domestic portion
of chaos, beyond the monuments and boulevards, beyond stadiums and beaches,
beyond casinos and quarters. Add Gardel, put down tangos and soccer and meat,
mountain range, prairies and Argentinians forever. His roll of film is always
accelerated and is never over. He snarls it, jumps scenes, swats it, but it
continues--how can it continue--with the voice of the neighborhoods, the
retinue at the beck and call of the travelers, the Frenchified and the
cineasts, the commanding voices of the generals and the subordinates (as he
himself says), the slow solitude of the truckers and the final wreck of the
cyclists. His antipoetry is a bazaar. It is also a pianola and a biography of
the barrio. Sired close to the novelists; with Sabato and Cortazar. How he
endeavors to change the sound of the language:

     forgive if I speak to you disoriented thus
     the ice ices my tongue
     yet I keep on uttering that
     the Malvinos are Argentine
     as they taught me in school (32)

     let us sing in the world's jails
     the Falklands are British (33)

     Just as Sabato is always in the track, the hearing ready to hear pulses
the breadth and the length of the country which still does not awaken.
Fernandez Moreno fights this. The political line runs through his antipoetry
like a subterranean train that, in moments of crisis, departs and blows its
horn in the open stations. Nothing of formulas nor of passwords. Only
exclamations, one like another propaganda mural, remembrances of the Spanish
Civil War, of Peronism and vague plans for the moment of truth. But always a
voice, a tone throughout the poems and antipoems, a pair, firm, remembering
certain anniversaries of long ago, some names and the hands of the people in
the process of lifting itself. This voice never grandstands, on the contrary,
when most serious, least eloquent, when most emotional, most terse, hard and
abrupt. Fernandez Moreno thinks within the chaos that he goes creating. That
could situate him on the less exposed wing of antipoetry. But his penitences
carry force and point. He says:

     I want to marry a young lady
     with legs crossed in a perfect cross
     where I remain trapped
     between two stockings that soon end.(34)

     This young lady multiplies geographically and erotically. Antipoetry
remembers her in cafes, in taxis, in theaters, restaurants and multifaceted
beds. Not frantically, but instead in cubist foldings, where to each image
there corresponds a hat, a glove, a purse, a stocking, but always the same
belly and the same rubber ring that opens and closes unhurriedly, with
authority and dominion. He says:

     I walked along the main road
     mixing in with the princesses of my youth
     pot-bellied drunks.(35)

     It turns me toward suicide
     every wrinkle on that grown woman (36)

     The Argentine antipoetry, as with other Latin American countries, quickens
the pace in recent years seeking the vanguard where it will carry out its final
attack. From the "cinema" of Fernandez Moreno there remains, at times, the
speed, but not the control of the voice. The verses fall now like bricks into
the water. The anguish is more immediate: it comes from a very real
incarceration, very much at hand, of a miserable village or a disaster, of an
obligatory exile. The revolt is neither announced nor analyzed: it is produced.
The language of solitude is the same as that of the indebted family, the
prisoner, the striker, the wounded on Public Assistance; we do not have a
literature that is transformed into memory; it is immediate reportage, with
hair and expression. What is curious is that the voice sounds like a chorus
from one side of the earth to the other. The demolition noise is universal and
the dust still floating covers the sun. The walls of the Paris May appear in
Mexico. The writing is unmistakable. They also write on the ground.
     From outside it one can follow this movement through key publications:
"The Gold Bug" in Argentina, "The Feathered Horn" in Mexico, "G. B." in
Sausalito, "Kayak" in San Francisco, "The Painted Bird" in San Salvador, "The
Belly of the Whale" in Venezuela, "Fire" in London.
     In 1965, awarding the work "Mortal Hearsay," by Victor Garcia Robles,
winner the the House of the Americas Contest, Nicanor Parra said the following:

     Opening the envelope it was seen with astonishment
     that the author is an almost adolescent youth,
     apparently unpublished in his own country,
     Argentina. And recalling that the other two favored
     poets, Jitrik and Szpunberg, are also youths of the
     same nationality we should recognize that something
     important is happening in the new Argentine poetry,
     whose immediate objectives would seem to consist of
     the synthesis of the popular and the erudite, the
     native and the foreign, the personal and the
     collective.(37)

     Parra, between the lines, sees a prolongation of his antipoetic line. In
reality, Jitrik, Szpunberg and Garcia Robles share the tendency towards
newsreel, but they add to it the destructive system of Parra and, as such, put
a hole in the boat wherein they sail. The fury comes like the shells of
barreled wine: immobile, impure, absorbing, mortal. No unnecessary expenditure
on munitions. The rope is only long enough to reach the hanged. The antipoets
come directly from the disorder or from the outskirts. The fierce mark is not a
tattoo, was left there by infancy, perfected by adolescence. It was a gift from
the father and the mother to hang up the whole family. When one thinks of
Cortazar and appreciates the humor he lends to the popular language, and thinks
of Borges, who lends it everything, one sees that these youths provide nothing:
they say something and the noise of teeth and of tongues has the same
sharpness, the ferocious sarcasm and the beaten tenderness of the language of
the house in which they were born. See this self-portrait of Garcia Robles, for
example:

     I never got off cheap:
     the clothing
     full of shadows
     the coins
     dusty.
     Never a drop for me;
     the time
     sold to the devil,
     laughter
     pawned in a thousand terrible jokes.
     It was always my part to dance
     with the most painted monkey:
     the tenderness won at blows,
     the heart eaten by dogs.
     Yes, it seems a lie:
     the more I look,
     the more darkness I find.
     The more I descend
     through the deep days,
     the more stones I have.
     It is not something to joke about...(38)

     There is something that sounds like Vallejo, not coincidentally; it is
wheat from the same field, plea presented to the same god, body broken in the
same joints. Garcia Robles hits. He strikes hard.

     If some pain overwhelms,
     dizzies you, take
     crying the burning of your bones,
     cloud over,
     seasonally rain,
     thunder,
     but do not forget
     that the pain no is no
     more than pain
     out of season,
     that one storm
     does not make a summer, here
     or anywhere else.(39)

     Then I saw the bourgeois arrive:
     -O, old friend, you belong to us,
     we have given you food year after year and educated
     with care your evanescent culture, and with respect
     we have ironed the implacable lapels of your suit,
     we the happy ones,
     happiest of parties
     we party
     seated with a plastic napkin on the ass,
     ten rings and the deadly foxtrot
     one finger short of the void,
     we sing like buttery eunuchs
     celebrating ashes,
     we sing celebrating our contemptible
     lucha for vida.(40)

     The light that Garcia Robles seeks he finds slicing to shreds the great
sacred shadows of his neighborhood. He sticks to the everyday pattern where
the neighbors come together to pick over the bones of the student. But where
he strikes true longings and draws responses is in his poem, "Know what happens
with live tears and bad words." The title is an exact summary of the poem: a
counterpoint of tears and insults. It gives me a sense of how the new
generation feels when it runs throwing accusations in front of embassies and
imperialist companies, tearing trees and stands from the plazas, breaking
lampposts, crying and stinging from the tear gas, to end in a police barracks
beneath a rain of clubs. The race through the city streets is called
impotence. The discourse before the newsstand draws tears. The sentry of
order listens with a club in his hand. Does the country cause you pain, young
man? This blow should hurt you more. With little bombs for us? So says the
oilman, the broker, the importer, the wheat lord and the cold lumberman. Take
this little taste of napalm under consideration. You could. The young
antipoet then says:

     Yesterday while I wrote another poem
     tears fell from my eyes
     you know, they fell like a quarrel,
     I heard inside my head the soccer ball kicks,
     the shouts of the ardent fans,
     even while I was writing a poem
     I put my hands in my pockets
     looking for the last peso,
     the tears fell which hurt me,
     while I thought of the railway strike,
     the mobilization, the rise of the dollar...(41)

     but the radio tells us: -Agrarian reform was approved-,
     and the radio gives the names of the political prisoners,
     the radio tells us who killed Satanowsky and Ingalinella,
     the radio tells us a load,
     sticks in boleros and questions and answers,
     the papers are the same,
     what the heck good are the papers,
     they focus on the east,
     they focus on the west.
     the magazines distract us with various old tales.(42)

     They name what they must: the miserable villages, and Loeb, Shell,
Standard Oil, the aircraft carriers, the liberating Revolution and draw their
conclusions. What is happening, they say, is that they are "butchering" the
country:

     They are so many sons of a great whore
     who laugh at the son and at the earth,
     at loves,
     at happiness,
     at the black depths of the plowed fields,
     at the necessary wheat, for bread and barbecues,
     they do not care about the hands
     of the women and the infants,
     the babies, for shame!
     nor the dark hands of work...
     They are so many suits who love no one,
     who have not blood,
     who will be repaid one of these days.(43)

     "Atenti Springtime" clearly establishes the orbit of this antipoetry;
Garcia Robles does not accept being alone, does not shut himself off to snip at
his patterned stitching nor to prepare a hole nor search for lime. On the
contrary, his antipoetry grows like a plant in a great neighborhood garden. It
needs a springtime without disasters, without downpours, selective,
revolutionary; not just any that "exposes both the victim and the executioner,"
that arrives by Cadillac to the meticulous picnic. It will be the people's
springtime, a "Sunday that lasts for months":

     Fertile proletariat,
     you have to be
     our lovely word,
     you have to be
     our best smile,
     you have to be,
     sister, companion,
     our best grounds for happiness! (44)

     As a result, it seems that in this case antipoetry strips away poetry to
describe a new way of speaking to man of justice and of caring, the way that
the virtuosos had seduced, undressed, violated and buried; not a new way,
therefore, yet instead the only true one, reborn.
     This makes me think of the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal (1925), who
work is one of the most direct and violently anti-rhetorical expressions that I
know. Cardenal not only has disarmed the precious idiom of the modernist and
post-modernist Central Americans, he also did away with the myth of the
creative image, unearthed metaphor, incorporated the popular way of speaking.
His symbols arch like a dark curve seeking the indigenous past. On the
immediate level one could believe that those symbols function in his antipoetry
like the Mayan allusions of Asturias. Error. Asturias' references are
mythological and occult; the asseverations of Cardenal are contemporary, social
and political. Not even in his master poem, "Dubious Straits" (Madrid:
Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1966), where the historical and the geographical
are interwoven at times in surrealist trances and where there are frequent
mystical lapses and brief visions, like light signals upon a lake, Cardenal
loses sight of the immediate mood stretching like a trap at his feet. Jose
Coronel Urtecho, presenting this book, says:

     Leaving aside the allusions and the symbols relating
     to realities mentioned there, especially the
     symbolic opposition of earth and water in the road
     or way to Cathay and province of Mango, where we
     find the Heavenly City--the poetry of Ernesto
     Cardenal is voluntarily opposed to all types of
     symbolism, true with austerity to the immediate
     exterior reality, or as he himself likes to say, an
     exteriorist poetry.(45)

     Coronel Urtecho leaves it without saying something of most importance:
that "exteriorism" is never decorative, nor even is pictorial (as an objective
image or reality), serves not to place each thing in its place, but instead
totally the contrary: its dynamism derives from the disorder which carries the
real world, from the absurd and the anger that serves as its ground and, above
all, from the essential love of life and of man which comprise his transcendent
trap.
     Cardenal is a harsh and dissonant antipoet who tries to ignite the prosaic
with an internal call in order to provoke other fires around him; he is a namer
of things and beings, confounder of history, transmuter, revolver. He acts with
impetuous revolutionary force. His best lines are barbs directed at those who
accost him and dirty the life on his solitary island; imperialism, fascist
barbarism, military dictatorship, the Coca-Cola and the face adorned with
knives and beads. He has the bitter hardness of Brother Antoninus, the Beat
North American priest, but whereas he insists on doing God's writing through
trances and twists his expression in search of a violent beauty, Cardenal
discovers a truth in the material that will not necessarily be beautiful but
which is transcendent beneath the breath of the common man. That is the root of
his antipoetry.
     Cardenal, therefore, like the Argentinian, Colombian (I refer to nihilists
like J. Mario--see his poem "Mr. T. S. Eliot has died, etc." in "The Feathered
Horn," no.17, Jan. 1966, p.47), Venezuelan, Salvadorean, and Cuban, combat on
the plane of the social revolution with weapons conquered in the anti-literary
revolution; they use antipoetry to unmask, attack, purify. Thence the
importance attained by poems in his work like "Mouse from a Cartoon" and,
particularly, "Kayanerenhkowa."(46) In the first of these he says:

     The singing men are dispersed.
     The jaguars have been decorated.
     Military Juntas on mountains of skulls
     and buzzards eating eyes
     The sacrifice-by-removing-human-hearts dictator
     Miss Guatemala assassinated
     by the "White Hand"
     And I came to address United Fruit Co., came to address
     the little man, the widow, the miserable.
     They have eaten Quetzal, have eaten him fried.
     Have not we been disgraced enough yet?
     We govern to return the money to the people so they said
     And do you know perhaps of our holidays, of the stars?
     the Calendar
     like refuse.

     In "Kayenerenhkowa," the allusion is less direct, but his social intention
is unequivocal:

     The cormorant comes from Michigan
     to Solentiname
     here they call it pig-duck.
     Yes, like the airplanes.
     The plane from New York above these solitudes.
     Perhaps viewing a film in color
     ME AND THEM IN PARIS with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh
     above Solentiname.
     And they keep
     flying in a V
     the Canadian ducks
     Will they come from Lake Ontario?

     Stay. The lake calm. Of the soul. And an autumn moon.
     Sept. 25th. The first pelicans, three, near La Venada
     flying close to the water.
     Tanagers from Ohio. From Kentucky.
     Like the letter from Merton on Tuesday.
     And the Kennedy Airport so close to Solentiname.
     A radio on an island in the Caribbean Indies.
     (Saba brought me oranges)
     We all shall eat from the same plate
     a local meat.
     Suddenly in the woods a bonfire, loads shifting
     between the fire and the shadow, and the shadows shifting
     tan-tan, tan-tan, red tattoos
     redder now that the constellation rises, om.
     also children and dogs jumping
     girls with shells, with
     wampum. Ah om. The blaze extinguishes.
     They left. And were never seen again in history.

     Antipoetry in the service of the revolution: in this enterprise,
alongside Cardenal, is Roque Dalton, the Salvadorean who has done the greater
part of his work in Mexico and in Cuba. In his first books Dalton moves among
surrealist roots searching for luminosities and rhythms in familiar, regional,
everyday allusions. The tone of voice possesses a noble, tragic quality. The
image disarms, sets countries, persons, schools, churches spinning; a youthful
tenderness seeks the abuse, as in the antipoetry of Vallejo, and receives it so
as to continue offering itself. Dalton's ascent awakens echoes of other poetic
worlds in which the adolescent seeks his nocturnal sunlight. It reminds me of
the early poetry of the Chilean Enrique Lihn. In any event, Dalto later adopts
the imagist net, Gothic, and he covers it--not destroys it--with a social
indictment as strong and aggressive as that of Cardenal. His revolutionary
student experience, his prisoners and exiles, his young women who shared the
clandestine movement in the Americas and Europe, the familiar ground, the faces
of colonels and cops, the green banana Mafia, the siege of imperialist rifles
in Santo Domingo, are mingled in his antipoetry and what it Mexico would be a
plain youthful ballad (47) is at once converted to an imprecation, cry,
expectation of a great battle that approaches. From Cuba, Dalton combines
nationhood with choleric voices:

     Dispersed nation: you fall
     like a poison wafer into my hours.
     Who are you, full of loves
     like the dog who scratches on the same trees
     where he pees? Who carried your symbols,
     your gestures of service smelling of mahogany,
     knowing you demolished by drunken babble?

     He recounts history as a polluted well:

     Hernan Cortes was an irritable syphilitic
     stinking of raw leather in his moments of leisure
     avenger of his thugs
     in each Mayan astronomer whose eyes he ordered out.
     A man dressed in loose fatigues
     and odors of the fine outcome of the bitter wine...(48)

     History is a well
     full of marginal types
     who came like earthquakes
     or orangutans with torches
     to be included next to the big blue lakes
     with lung disease spas
     and block the shapes of the statuary
     and the background mountains
     of little wise, intriguing prostitutes
     who make one forget the prairie heartbreaks
     the demise of quiet woods
     of dusty and dull towns
     that hide in their scent
     the presence of the sea.(49)

     He addresses his god with the cynical, tired, compassionate voice of the
antipoets:

     Of course that is the way it is, buddy. My god
     created man in his image and in his resemblance.
     But He created him on Saturday, reeling from
     impotent drunkenness and when his image took on an
     excessive aspect. That is why we have tears, a
     propensity to hate and other tracks for thirst and
     love. Which is humbling, buddy, humbling.(50)

     Dalton focuses on the buzzing, worships Vallejo and crucifies him in an
implacable self-portrait pierced by an arrow next to the bloody visages of his
parents.(51)
     Reading Dalton, Cardenal, Garcia Robles, Fernandez Moreno, Rojas, Parra,
thinking of de Rokha and Vallejo, one begins to draw their conclusions:
antipoetry, which has been an anarchic activity, an anti-rhetorical mantle,
appeared with a direct and violent language and began to return mankind to the
reality it had lost, not piecemeal, like market theft, but instead all at once.
The internal violence became an attack on and punishment of contemporary
society, the anguished metaphysic of a confrontation between neighbor and
neighbor, as they say "vis a vis," with a god who they consider preoccupied,
enclosed, on the point of perishing beneath the assault along with subjects and
objects in revolt; the father has returned seeking the son's wife, who hides
her; the woman closed as a tomb, toiling in a pile of certificates and
testaments. The fly buzzes around the scene of the crime.
     These are, then, the keys to antipoetry in its first phases, its coat of
arms. God on one side of the shield, whose work is reviewed in light of the
familiar defeats, without any decoration, alone in the scene, friendly and
feeling distraught, as when speaking to a drunken friend; on the other side,
the Mosca that already did away with the angels and the swans.
     So then, the most recent antipoetry, that which follows the Cuban
Revolution, introduces certain operational changes into the system of
violence: the fly does not disappear, but is a sign of the bourgeois
pestilence and of international flight; the duty of every revolutionary is to
make revolution; the divine comes down from the cross and gets on his
motorcycle and sings, smokes the good herb gilded in Acapulco,
amuses his girlfriends, confronts the police. The violence is turned against
the imperialist establishment, against the local thieves, against the
neo-Fascist cartel, against the embargo on conscience, and for agrarian reform.
The Third World has been born.
     From the surrealist dawn antipoetry has come carrying tools and the
components of a time bomb. Meanwhile the time of Molotov cocktails augmented.
The antipoets end by negating their own selves, they become emblems of one
country or another, they take the crossbar off the door; along the street is
coming their revolution.

Notes
1 Citation from "La Poesia Hispanoamicana" by E. Florit and J. O. Jimenez, New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968, pp.190-91.
2 Ibid, p.194.
3 Ibid. p.334.
4 "Altazor," Santiago Chile: Cruz del Sur Press, 1949, p.31. All the citations
are from the same edition.
5 Ibid., p.40.
6 Ibid., p.72.
7 Ibid., p.57.
8 Ibid., p.58.
9 Cite from "Antologia, 1916-1953," Santiago, Chile: Multitud, 1954, p.9.
10 "U," 1927: p.62.
11 Ibid., pp.63-65,67-68,71,75.
12 Quote from "Complete Poems, 1918-1938, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 2d
ed., 1949, p.23.
13 Ibid., p.50.
14 Ibid., p.61.
15 To Vallejo Borges' poem, "Self-portrait" applies well.
16 Ibid., p.85.
17 Ibid., p.88.
18 Ibid., pp.94,98,99,107,153,158,161,169.
19 "Poems and Antipoems," Santiago Chile: Nascimento, 1954, pp.78,141.
20 "Against Mortality," Santiago Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1964,
pp.14,15,16,17,25,26,32,34. The title of this work that absorbs the essence of
Rojas' first book, "Man's Misery," shows that the poet remains true to his
roots: "Against Mortality" is a subtitle of Andre Breton's in the first
"Surrealist Manifesto" (1924); and Vallejo, in "Spain remove from
me this chalice" says: Only mortality with perish! Volunteers--for the
good, for the living. Defeat defeat!
21 Ibid., pp.23,47,51,53.
22 My citations from "Argentina to the End" are from: "Line Anthology of
Argentine Poetry," Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1968, p.361.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., p.364.
25 C. F. M., "The Airports," Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1967,
p.130.
26 Ibid., p.131.
27 Ibid., p.133.
28 Ibid., p.158.
29 Ibid., p.135.
30 Ibid., p.136.
31 Ibid., p.156.
32 Ibid., p.133.
33 Ibid., p.134.
34 Ibid., p.23.
35 Ibid., p.30.
36 Ibid., p.63.
37 Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1965.
38 Ibid., p.41.
39 Ibid., p.37.
40 Ibid., p.171-2.
41 Ibid., p.135.
42 Ibid., p.137.
43 Ibid., p.142-3.
44 Ibid., p.194.
45 Ibid., p.25.
46 "The Feathered Horn," nos.24 and 28, Oct. 1967, Oct. 1968, pp. 26 and 96.
47 "The window in the face," 1961.
48 Ibid., p.85.
49 Ibid., p.92.
50 Ibid., p.121.
51 See pp.90, 99, 116, 166.