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Vallejo: The Poetics of Dissent NICOLA MILLER University College, London
no está en manos de nadie ni en las mías propias, el controlar los alcances políticos que pueden ocultarse en mis poemas. (César Vallejo [1892-1938]) 1
The elliptical and often obscure poems of César Vallejo have provoked two broad types of critical response. This article argues that both approaches are flawed because they are based upon false assumptions. Some critics, mostly British or North American, treat Vallejo’s poetry as an exotic example of Modernist alienation, and regard its political content as secondary to his concern with the absurdity of man’s existential plight. The premise underlying this interpretation is that Vallejo’s work should be understood in the context of the Western literary tradition. Other critics, most of them Peruvian, reverse the emphasis: they cast Vallejo in the role of national redeemer, and play down any images of individual suffering which intrude upon what they claim to be his expression of the collective soul of Peru. For them, Vallejo voices a specifically non-Western, Indo-American identity. This basic distinction between Vallejo as either a depoliticized poet or as a poet-propagandist is a persistent feature of most criticism of his poetry, however much the debates may have shifted their ground. Whereas in the 1940s existentialists disputed with Communists for Vallejo’s soul, in the 1990s post-Modernists are pursuing the project of depoliticization to its limits whilst nationalists too have become more extreme in their claims. As Pierre Bourdieu and others have shown, the idea that poetry is separate from politics is in itself a European one, originating with the early Romantics, who saw poetry as the highest expression of individual consciousness in opposition to society. But Vallejo wrote his first two collections of poetry (which, ironically enough, are often referred to as his ‘pre-political’ verse) in Peru, where culture and politics have been intertwined since colonial days. The European assumption that poetry can 1 Vallejo, ‘Literatura proletaria’ [1928], in La cultura peruana (Crónicas), ed. Enrique Ballon Aguirre (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1987), 127-30, at p. 128.
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be (and, the implication often is, should be) an apolitical genre is an inappropriate starting point for interpreting the work of a Peruvian. Spanish-American critics have recently offered convincing evidence that the Spanish-American avant-garde was not simply the result of imitation of the European movements, but emerged independently in response to the distorted process of modernization in the region.2 Vallejo may have absorbed European poetic influences, but his poetry cannot be understood solely within a European framework. As a poet, Vallejo cannot be depoliticized. But this does not mean that cultural production can be reduced to historical circumstance, as Marxist critics argue. Post-Modernists have demonstrated how complex and elusive language can be. By now, we are all aware that language moves in mysterious ways. But unreconstructed post-Modernists err when they discard history to convert language itself into a god. History cannot simply be finessed out of existence. Likewise, supporters of historical determinism should take on board the insights of post-Modernism about the complexity of the ways in which people read literary texts. In this light, the image of Vallejo as poet-propagandist is evidently quite false too. As Vallejo himself acknowledged (the epigraph to this article), no poet can control the political ramifications of his poetry. Both history and language must be taken into account when reading Vallejo. Like many of his contemporaries, Vallejo introduced references to Marxism, Christianity and nation into his poetry. This article focuses on why Vallejo, a Peruvian, did this, and suggests why some critics have sought to deny the significance of some or all of these references. It also explores a theme which preoccupied Vallejo throughout his four collections of poetry and which helps to explain some of the tensions therein: namely, the role of the poet. ‘From the Vatican to the Kremlin’3: Vallejo and Marxism The received wisdom amongst critics is that Vallejo’s poetry falls into two discrete periods. Firstly, there is the so-called ‘pre-political’ poetry, Los heraldos negros (1919) and Trilce (1922), published before he left Peru for Europe in 1923 and before his conversion to Marxism in the late 1920s. Secondly, there are two collections of ‘political’ verse, written during the 1930s, Poemas humanos (1939) and the Spanish Civil War poems, España, aparta de mí este caliz (1940). One of the reasons behind disputes about 2 See, for example, Saul Yúrkievich, A través de la trama (Barcelona: Muchnik Editores, 1984); and Hugo Verani, Las vanguardias literarias en Hispanoamérica (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1986). 3 This is an article title that Vallejo had jotted down in a notebook. See Georgette Vallejo, Allá ellos, allá ellos, allá ellos (Lima: Editorial Zalvac, 1978), 71.
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the role of politics in Vallejo’s poetry is that the last two works were published posthumously. The manuscripts were unclear about when some of the poems were written, in what order they were to be published, or what the collections were to be called. The dating of these poems is particularly controversial because critics have focused on this issue, even though it cannot be resolved, in order to draw different conclusions about the relationship between Vallejo’s politics and his poetry. If certain poems were written at certain times, so the argument runs, then Vallejo could not possibly have believed that art could serve the revolution.4 The argument is fallacious. It is used to dismiss Vallejo’s political engagement on the grounds that this was patchy at best. But it offers only an extremely limited definition of political commitment and assumes that only the most overt and sustained (party) political activity matters. Vallejo was converted to Marxism in 1928 and joined the Spanish Communist Party in 1931, but his activism lapsed from 1932 until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He then became involved in writing and fund-raising for the Parisian Committee for the Defence of the Republic, and attended the International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers in July 1937. The French Communist Party sent an official representative to address his funeral. There is not much dispute about any of this. Even the Spanish poet, Juan Larrea, who, in the 1950s, led a crusade to free Vallejo from what Larrea saw as the taint of Marxism, acknowledged that ‘Racionalmente, Vallejo era un marxista más que convencido’.5 The most important word in that quotation is the first one: rationally, Vallejo was a Marxist. But, Larrea argued, there were many parts of a poet that Marxism could not reach. Marxism might have offered solutions to material questions, but it could not help to resolve the metaphysical issues wherein genuine poetry lay.6 This is the central point around which the disputes revolve: what was the impact of Vallejo’s Marxism on his poetry? Vallejo did not write ‘progammatic’ poems glorifying tractors or intoning the inevitable triumph of the revolutionary forces. Attempts by orthodox Communists to claim him as a poet who wrote to serve the Marxist-Leninist cause do not convince.7 Even so, in Poemas humanos and España, aparta de mí este caliz, the many references to proletarians and Bolsheviks cannot be 4 See, especially, Juan Larrea, ‘Los poemas póstumos de César Vallejo a la luz de su edición facsimilar’, Aula Vallejo (Revista del Instituto del Nuevo Mundo, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina), V (1974), Nos. 11-13, 55-172. Stephen Hart discusses the dating of the poems in detail in his book, Religión, política y ciencia en la obra de César Vallejo (London: Tamesis, 1987). 5 Juan Larrea, ‘Diálogo de la primera conferencia’, Aula Vallejo, VI, Nos. 8-10, 44. 6 Ibid. 7 See, for example, Luis Hernán Ramírez, El Marxismo-Leninismo en la poesía de César Vallejo (Peru: Editorial Eco del Buho, 1985).
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ignored, and Marx himself is mentioned twice.8 The texts themselves force the reader to confront Marxism, which undermines the arguments of those who assert that Vallejo’s Marxism was something which did not significantly affect his poetry. Larrea’s way round this problem was to claim that Vallejo’s commitment to Marxism involved him in the adoption of a false personality which cut him off from his true poetic voice. Larrea asserted that Vallejo wrote no poetry, only prose, during his years of Communist activism, but that, ultimately, truth found its outlet: ‘en septiembre de 1937 la genialidad reprimida en él por su personaje sociológico—autor de páginas bastantes inferiores—explotó exabrupto y por fin’.9 Larrea claimed that Vallejo then wrote España, aparta de mí este caliz and most of the Poemas humanos in a burst of frenetic creativity. This assumes that the dates (October-November 1937) on the manuscript copies of Poemas humanos indicate their original drafting. But Vallejo’s widow, Georgette, is adamant that the dates indicate revision of earlier drafts, and that Vallejo wrote poetry throughout his period of Communist militancy. Larrea flatly denied that ‘el fenómeno de César Vallejo’ could be understood ‘dentro del dominio de la sociología’, and insisted upon the ‘autenticidad metafísica de nuestro poeta sudamericano’.10 The first word to notice here is ‘nuestro’. Larrea was Spanish-born, and did not adopt Argentina as his homeland until 1956. The inflexibility of his position may have been a consequence of the fact that he was fighting for an adopted cause—Hispanoamericanismo, which was perhaps overlaid with a certain residual guilt for a Spaniard such as he. Larrea saw the Spanish Conquest through orthodox Eurocentric eyes, that is, as the historic opportunity for Europeans to purge themselves of original sin in the pure, virgin lands of the New World.11 In this scenario, Vallejo was given the role of a SpanishAmerican messiah (prophet and witness), who redeems the sins of the conquerors by sacrificing himself on the cross of the European-imposed Word of God (Logos) which stifles the creative potential of America. In the light of his mystical vision of Vallejo as a redemptive force for Spanish America and even for all humankind, it is not hard to see why Larrea found his Peruvian protégé’s interest in Marxism-Leninsm somewhat inconvenient. It is also important to remember that Larrea was writing in the mid8 See ‘En el momento en que el tenista ...’ and ‘Y no me digan nada ...’, in Obra poética completa (Madrid: Alianza, 1989 [4th ed.]), pp. 196, 248. References for all poems cited are from this edition, hereafter OPC, which is based on the 1968 Moncloa version compiled by Georgette Vallejo. 9 Larrea, César Vallejo o Hispanoamérica en la cruz de su razón (Córdoba, Argentina: Univ. Nacional de Córdoba, 1957), 48. 10 Ibid., 31. 11 Ibid., 52.
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1950s, at the height of the Cold War, when there was a tendency on both sides of the ideological divide to see any expression of interest in MarxismLeninism as an absolute commitment to Communism. Today, in the postMarxist 1990s, it is easier to acknowledge the simple facts that Vallejo became enthused by Marxism for a while, let his activism lapse, and then was galvanized anew by the battle for Spain. None of this was unusual for an intellectual of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly one living in Paris and Madrid. The Marxism-Leninism of the 1930s had not yet acquired the historical legitimacy gained by the Soviet Union’s role in the defeat of Fascism in the Second World War, the 1949 Revolution in China and the post-war extension of Communism into Eastern Europe. But neither was it beleaguered by the doubts and disillusionment aroused by later revelations of Stalinist terror. As Europe in the 1930s rapidly fell prey to nationalism and demagoguery, many intellectuals were persuaded that the Soviet Union was building a new and more worthwhile society. Events in Spain presented intellectuals with a stark ideological choice. It was Fascism or Socialism: if you were against the murder of Lorca,12 effectively you were with the Republic. Many intellectuals whose privileged European backgrounds gave them far less reason to promote revolution than a pettybourgeois poet from an underdeveloped Catholic country made the same political choice as did Vallejo. In addition, Vallejo came from Peru, where Marxism’s impact in the 1920s was greater than in any other Spanish-American country. He was also a lapsed Catholic. Although Marxism is an atheistic philosophy, parallels between it and Catholicism have often been remarked upon: comparable concepts of orthodoxy, heresy and dogma. For Vallejo, as for many other intellectuals who rejected Catholicism, a move towards Marxism was a logical step. Like the Church, Marxism offered an allembracing explanation of the world and a comparable outlet for the need to believe in something. Looked at in this historical and cultural context, it is easier to understand why Marxist ideas were powerful enough to find their way into some of Vallejo’s poems, even though his Communist activism was clearly neither sustained nor especially militant. ‘Once a Catholic ...’: Vallejo and Christianity Vallejo rejected Catholicism, but all four collections of his poetry contain frequent biblical references and images. Early Vallejo criticism expended considerable energies trying to determine whether or not his use of religious metaphor was indicative of a broadly Christian, albeit not specifically Catholic, commitment. But here again it is helpful to consider 12 The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca was murdered on the orders of the local Falangist militia chief in Granada in mid-August 1936.
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the historical and cultural context in which Vallejo was writing. Intellectual life in nineteenth-century Peru was dominated by the Catholic Church, which had enjoyed a virtual monopoly of education under Spanish colonial rule. In Peru, the Catholic Church did not face the strong post-Independence challenge from anti-clerical, modernizing liberals which eroded its influence in many other parts of Spanish America. Whereas in Mexico, for example, separation of Church and State was achieved in 1859, that very same year the government of Peru linked Church and State in the most fundamental way possible, decreeing that cathedral clergy were to be paid out of the national treasury.13 It was not until 1933 that a new constitution made provision for full freedom of conscience and religion in Peru. In this context it is hardly surprising that there was a strong tradition of Catholic clerical influence in Peruvian politics and education. Although all Peruvian schools, including those run by the Church, were controlled by a state curriculum, the law stipulated that all primary and junior schools should instruct in the Catholic faith. A minority (under ten per cent) of children (mostly upper-class) attended the fee-paying Catholic schools. The Church’s opponents associated it with the continuing gap between rich and poor and the prolongation of mass illiteracy. They also accused the Church of failing to disseminate a genuine spirituality. Few Peruvians entered the clergy; many of those that did were not particularly committed. Foreign priests, mostly Spaniards, were brought in, adding a nationalist dimension to the already highly politicized issue of the role of the Church in Peru. By the late nineteenth century, Peruvian intellectuals were debating the distinction between organized religion and true religiosity. Positivism was the first major intellectual rebellion against the doctrines of the Church in Peru. By the end of the First World War, it was the leading intellectual discourse at Lima’s University of San Marcos. Yet Positivism, with its assertion of scientific progress and rationality and its complete denial of religious feeling, failed to answer the spiritual needs aroused, but not fulfilled, by Church doctrines. Vallejo was not the only Peruvian intellectual of the 1910s and 1920s to reject Catholicism, embrace Marxism and then try to sustain a religiously inspired conception of revolution. We find exactly these concerns in the writings of his contemporaries, José Carlos Mariátegui (‘a revolution is always religious’)14 and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who tried to redefine the term ‘religion’ to mean a passionate belief. The Catholic Church had 13 If Vallejo had pursued his youthful ambition to become a bishop, he would have been in the pay of the Peruvian government. 14 José Carlos Mariátegui, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1955), 196.
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established for itself a monopoly over the meaning of spirituality. Anyone wishing to challenge this was obliged to produce an alternative interpretation of the Holy Scriptures and, in doing so, defy the social, political and intellectual status quo. Vallejo’s incorporation of Catholic dogma into his poetry can best be understood as an attempt to subvert Church doctrine as part of his broader rejection of a Peruvian class structure in which the Church was deeply implicated. Vallejo and Peru Just as Vallejo’s poetry cannot be read without reference to Marxism and Christianity, so his nationality has to be taken into account. Critics wishing to insert Vallejo into a European tradition have noted, with some relief, that Vallejo’s Andean upbringing rarely intrudes into his poetry: folkloric ‘local colour’ is mercifully thin on the ground. Admittedly, a few llamas and indians litter Los heraldos negros and there is a smattering of Peruvian references in Trilce. Once he had arrived in Europe, however, the more conservative Western critics find themselves dealing almost exclusively with reassuringly ‘universal’ concerns. They have tried to raise Vallejo above his native circumstances as ‘one of the few great poets to have emerged from Latin America in our century’.15 Once he has emerged from his obscure origins, they argue, his nationality can be discarded as lightly as an old raincoat; he can be clothed in the appropriately cosmopolitan garb required to take a place as an honoured guest, albeit not a full member, at the high table of Western culture. The fact that Vallejo was Peruvian can be dismissed as merely an accident of birth, with no necessary implications for an understanding of his poetry. Western critics on the Left have simply rewritten the above argument in positive terms. In the 1960s, there was a reaction against the idea that a select group of white middle-aged men in European and US universities had the right to arbitrate on what made great literature. This was the decade in which the Third World—its causes, its customs and its clothes— became fashionable among the liberal Western intelligentsia. Latin America was particularly popular because of Castro’s defiance of imperialist Uncle Sam. In this context, Vallejo’s birth in the cold, bleak Peruvian sierra leant him cachet, a mark of the authenticity that had been lost in the glitzy, consumerist West. The German poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, typified this romanticism when he asserted (contrary to most of the evidence) that, Vallejo ‘no era un cosmopolita; se llevó su Perú a cualquier exilio’; that he had undergone his period of imprisonment ‘con el profundo fatalismo de su raza’; and that his poetry was imbued with ‘el 15 Vallejo, Spain, Take this Cup from Me, bilingual edition and trans. Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia (New York: Grove Press, 1974), back cover.
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pesimismo del indio’.16 Western readers can hardly be blamed for feeling confused: should they pay attention to Vallejo because he was Peruvian, or because he was not (really)? Peruvian intellectuals who prefer to emphasize their nation’s differences from Europe try to present Vallejo as a nationalist poet. This is not easy. Neither Vallejo’s life nor his work offer much succour for those trying to appropriate them for the cause of Peruvian nationalism. Vallejo himself rejected the concept of nationalist poetry. In Paris, where he was to die, he refused to assume the role of cultural ambassador for Peru, shunned a ‘literary’ lifestyle and publicly attacked Spanish Americans living in Paris who behaved in this way.17 Attempts to claim Vallejo for the nationalist cause are therefore obliged to resort to a level of vagueness and abstraction (invoking some ill-defined but quintessential ‘Peruvian-ness’) which make them totally unconvincing. Interpretations of this sort have little to do with Vallejo or his work, and everything to do with the divisions among Peruvian intellectuals about how to define ‘Peruvian’ national and cultural identity. Should they emphasize the European or the indigenous origins of the nation? Debates about what constituted peruanidad began in the aftermath of the War of the Pacific (1879-83), when defeat by Chile plunged Peruvian intellectuals into a lengthy and anguished exploration of ‘el problema nacional’. These discussions intensified during the 1920s, when Peruvian intellectuals first began to think seriously about their nation’s place in the modern world. Augusto Leguía’s dictatorship (1919-30) was embarking on a piecemeal modernization process. The after-effects of the First World War, Peru’s tightening integration into the world economy and a rapid upsurge in US investment combined to produce real social and political changes. This period saw the emergence of a middle class, and the start of the migrations from the sierra to the coast which have transformed Peru during the course of this century. As Leguía opened the door wider to the United States, disaffected intellectuals tried to identify ‘Perú como nación’.18 Many of them were from the provincial petty bourgeoisie, and were reacting against the derivative European-style culture of an elite in Lima which despised and excluded them. One of their weapons in this battle against the Lima elite was indigenismo, the promotion of the Inca era as an elevated culture and civilization in a glorious Peruvian past. Ironically, as is so often the case 16 Enzensberger, ‘Vallejo: víctima de sus presentimientos’, originally published in Visión del Perú (July 1969), in César Vallejo, ed. Julio Ortega (Madrid: Taurus, 1974), 65-74. 17 Vallejo, ‘Una gran reunión latinoamericana’ [1927], in La cultura peruana, ed. Ballon, 88-90. 18 See Charles Walker, ‘Lima de Mariátegui: los intelectuales y la Capital durante el oncenio’, Socialismo y Participación (Lima), XXXV (Sept. 1986), 71-88.
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when the past is idealized,19 the image of the Inca empire as an extensive Andean community is largely false and itself the creation of Europeans.20 As one Peruvian historian recently suggested, ‘Lo indígena era lo histórico, lo prehispánico, lo milenario, lo tradicional. Cuando estos términos no coincidían se recurría a la “invención” ’.21 Indigenista intellectuals have made much of Vallejo’s Indian blood. Mariátegui, a major voice in the indigenista movement, insisted on emphasizing the ‘nota india’ in Vallejo’s work. He asserted that ‘Vallejo es el poeta de una estirpe, de una raza. En Vallejo se encuentra, por primera vez en nuestra literatura, sentimiento indígena virginalmente expresado’.22 In fact, Vallejo was of mixed race (mestizo or, as it is usually called in Peru, cholo): his Spanish grandfathers had both married Indian women. The small Andean village where he grew up was almost exclusively mestizo, and was particularly noted for speaking only Spanish, not the indigenous Quechua. Even Mariátegui had to acknowledge that Vallejo was no indigenista: ‘El sentimiento indígena obra en su arte quizá sin que él lo sepa ni lo quiera’.23 But Mariátegui was campaigning against the idea that a process of mestizaje could solve Peru’s problems, and was therefore reluctant to acknowledge that Peru’s leading poet was a mestizo. For the critic, Luis Alberto Sánchez, who was convinced that mestizaje did offer a way forward for Peru, the author of Trilce was ‘el cholo Vallejo’.24 The question of Vallejo’s ‘indigenous’ credentials re-emerged in the 1980s, when the guerrillas of the Sendero Luminoso movement were threatening to make pre-Columbian life a contemporary reality in Peru. A series of articles appeared once more trying to insert Vallejo into an indigenous tradition. He was hailed as the founding father of Peruvian culture, the voice of his race and, in one particularly ingenious interpretation, the modern expression of the spirit of pre-Columbian civilization.25 This identification of Vallejo with the pre-conquest peoples 19 See The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1992 [canto ed.]). 20 Alberto Flores Galindo, ‘Demonios y degolladores: el discurso de los colonizados’, Márgenes (Lima), III (Dec. 1989), Nos. 5-6, 121-33. 21 Manuel Burga, ‘Desconocidos inventores de tradiciones’, Márgenes (Lima), I (March 1987), No. 1, 174-82, at p. 181. 22 Mariátegui, Siete ensayos, pp. 234, 231. 23 Ibid., 232. 24 Luis Alberto Sánchez, La literatura peruana, cited in Horst Nitschack, ‘El indigenismo como condición para una literatura nacional’, Lexis (Lima), XIV (1990), No. 2, 221-39, at p. 235. 25 Miguel Paz Varias, Vallejo: formas ancestrales en su poesía (Lima: Editorial Marimba, 1989). See also Enrique Ballon Aguirre, ‘Literatura y política en el pensamiento de César Vallejo’, Socialismo y Participación, XX (Dec. 1982), 43-59; and Edgar Montiel, ‘César Vallejo: la prosa matinal de un poeta “atenido a las vísperas eternas de un día mejor” ’, Socialismo y Participación, XLII (June 1988), 1-12.
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is a way of rejecting the impact of European colonization of Peru. The idea of a return to the Incas and the attribution of all Peru’s ills to Spanish conquest was a prominent feature of Peruvian politics in the runup to the quincentenary in 1992. Once again Vallejo became a pawn in the game. A telling example of this was the publishing history of Vallejo’s journalism. In 1987 two collections appeared in Peru, their titles illustrating the fault line (Europe versus Indo-America) in discussions about Peruvian identity. One was called Desde Europa: crónicas y artículos (1923-1938); the other La cultura peruana (Crónicas).26 Ironically, La cultura peruana included an article in which Vallejo categorically denied that any such thing existed. In his journalism, Vallejo was consistently critical of both Peruvian and Spanish-American culture, arguing that it could only suffer from comparison with the European canon. Spanish America, he argued, lacked ‘no sólo de personalidad literaria, sino de mayor edad intelectual’.27 For Vallejo, this failure to achieve cultural independence was precisely the reason not to seek refuge in European cultural influences and not to seek ‘success’ in European terms. He was under no illusions about the true attitude of the European cultural elite towards Latin America. Soon after his arrival in Paris, reporting on a fiesta de peruanidad held at Théâtre Chaméléon in Paris, he had railed against European contempt for, and misunderstanding of, Latin America: ¿Solidaridad? ¿Comprensión? No existe nada de esto en Europa respecto a la América Latina. Nosotros, en frente de Europa, levantamos y ofrecemos un corazón abierto a todos los nódulos de amor, y de Europa se nos responde con el silencio y con una sordez premeditada y torpe, cuando no con un insultante sentido de explotación.28 Why then, demanded Vallejo, did Spanish Americans insist on trying to imitate Europeans? One of his most famous polemics, ‘Contra el secreto profesional’ (1927),29 was written in response to Jean Cocteau’s ‘Le Secret professionel’. It is often quoted, particularly by those anxious to present Vallejo as the human face of Modernism, for its attack on the stylistic obsessions of the avant-garde: ‘Casi todos los vanguardistas lo son por 26 Desde Europa (Lima: Fuente de Cultura Peruana, 1987) was edited by Jorge Puccinelli; La cultura peruana (see footnote 1) by Enrique Ballon Aguirre. For a discussion of the controversy in Peru surrounding these two editions, see Raúl Hernández Novas, ‘Desde Europa: un libro imprescindible’, Casa de las Américas, XXVIII (1988), No. 170, 12230. 27 ‘Una gran reunión latinoamericana’, in La cultura peruana, ed. Ballon, 89-90. 28 ‘Cooperación’, originally published in El Norte (Trujillo) (26 February 1924); in La cultura peruana, ed. Ballon, 45-46. 29 In La cultura peruana, ed. Ballon, 93-95.
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cobardía o indigencia ... En la poesía seudonueva caben todas las mentiras’.30 What often goes unmentioned is that Vallejo was attacking the role of the avant-garde as a European formation in Spanish America. The article was a rhetorical blast against not only the Spanish-American obsession with European norms, but also the knee-jerk response of embracing ‘indigenous’ culture in the process of rejecting Europeanism. Vallejo argued that to assert nation, continent or race as legitimators of literary identity was to fall into precisely the same trap of defining oneself by European standards. Vallejo warned that Peruvian artists should not place limits on themselves; their work was already liable to be labelled, contained and implicitly dismissed as ‘Peruvian’ or ‘Latin American’, that is, ‘foreign’ and ‘other’. Being born a Peruvian inescapably complicated any claim to universality. In ‘Contra el secreto profesional’, Vallejo complained: Lorca es andaluz. ¿Por qué no tengo yo el derecho a ser peruano? Para que me digan que no me comprenden en España? Y yo, un austriaco o un inglés, comprendemos los giros castizos de Lorca y Co.31 Why was it, Vallejo wanted to know, that people were prepared to make the effort to understand Lorca, on the assumption that, as a Spanish poet, he would be worth understanding? Vallejo feared that if a reader could not understand Lorca, the reader would blame himself, but if he found Vallejo obscure, the reader would blame the poet. One feature common to all the varying strands of criticism of Vallejo is the way that they start from the fact that he is Peruvian and then proceed to the argument that in spite—or because—of this (it matters little which, as Vallejo himself recognized), he was a great poet. But few would argue that Rimbaud was or was not a great poet simply because he was French, or Rilke because he happened to be German. Nothing comparable in scope or obsession has been produced on T. S. Eliot’s North-American birth nor Yeats’ Irish origins. But Vallejo cannot escape being Peruvian. His country’s colonial heritage impeded any authentic expression by a Peruvian writer as a human being, rather than as ‘a Peruvian’. Peruvian minds had been colonized, their growth stunted by the dilemma between plagiarism of the Europeans on the one hand, and the parochialism of peruanidad on the other. Vallejo knew this: simply talking about condors or llamas would not, he argued, solve the problem, any more than would trying to imitate Europeans.
30 La cultura peruana, ed. Ballon, 95. 31 ‘Del carnet de 1936/37’, Contra el secreto profesional (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1973), 98.
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According to Vallejo, Spanish Americans urgently needed to acknowledge that they had created nothing authentic, as an essential prerequisite for enabling themselves to do so: Nuestro estado de espíritu exige un pesimismo activo y una terrible desesperación creadora. Pesimismo y desesperación. Tales son por ahora y para empezar, nuestros primeros actos hacia la vida.32 Vallejo’s ‘despair’ should be seen, not as the Eurocentric anguish of ‘modern-man-in-search-of-a-soul’, but as the expression of a far more politicized sense of emptiness which was the result of his origins in a postcolonial society. This context also provides a framework for assessing Vallejo’s use of language. In Peru, the role of language is deeply ambivalent and highly politicized. The official language, Spanish, is, after all, the language of the conquerors. It is an imposed language, the very use of which implies a denial of indigenous identity.33 In Peru, the Indian languages had no written culture: they were and largely still are the languages of oral societies. The Graeco-Roman tradition regards the spoken word as more authoritative than the written (because of its immediacy), but this is not the case in Spanish America, where, as the Peruvian critic, Julio Ortega, points out: ... al revés de las denuncias de Derrida, lo oral representa en América Latina no el lenguaje de la autoridad sino el de la marginalidad. La palabra escrita corresponde a la ley, y bajo su poder se establecen los códigos de la racionalidad social dominante.34 The written word became the embodiment of the law of the monarch and the law of God: the twin pillars of the Spanish colonization of America. In post-Independence Peru, the role of literature developed from the needs of different groups in an emerging society to establish their vision of what the national identity and destiny should be. The issue of national identity also became a class question as Peru’s integration into the world economy from the mid-nineteenth century onwards encouraged the formation of elites whose interests were closely tied to Europe. It is, and was, impossible for a Peruvian poet to escape the fact that the 32 ‘La juventud de América en Europa’ [1929], in La cultura peruana, ed. Ballon, 16163. 33 The Peruvian writer, José María Arguedas, saw Vallejo as the first poet to express the conflict felt by the Andean mestizo ‘entre su mundo interior y el castellano como su idioma’ (‘Entre el Kechwa y el castellano la angustia del mestizo’, in Nosotros los maestros [Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1986], 31-33). 34 Julio Ortega, Luis Rafael Sánchez: teoría y práctica del discurso popular, Research Paper I (London: Centre for Latin American Cultural Studies, King’s College, London, 1989), 11.
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kind of poetry he writes is a political issue in itself. Is the poetry nationalist? Is it indigenista? If it is hermetic, supposedly ‘apolitical’, then it is an attempt to opt out of the prevailing discourse, a decision which has its own political implications. Peru has a very different cultural atmosphere from the developed Western cultures where art can be perceived as an apolitical activity. In his poetry, Vallejo explicitly raises these issues of the role of the poet and the act of writing, which for him had political as well as artistic implications. He introduces a litany of writers’ names, mostly poets and philosophers of the Western canon, into the texts.35 He inscribes his own name into four poems,36 forcing the reader to confront the relationship between the name in the poem and the name on the cover. For whom is he writing? What is the value of the act of writing in the context of poverty and injustice? What authority does the poet have? Is that authority based on knowledge or power?
‘Forja allí tu perdón para el poeta’: Vallejo and the Role of the Poet37 1
‘Who knows? Not me ...’: The Voice of Authority in Los heraldos negros
Vallejo obliges his reader to confront traditional assumptions about the authority of the poet on the very first page of his first collection, Los heraldos negros. The epigraph is a quotation, in Latin, from the Gospel: ‘qui potest capere capiat’ (‘Let he who can understand, understand’). The irony is that a message challenging the reader to understand is inscribed in a language that only a minority of highly educated Peruvians would know. Vallejo’s use of the Latin of the original Catholic Bible reminds his reader of the relationship between language and power in Peru. After that epigraph, it is no accident that the first and title poem of Los heraldos negros begins with the line: Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes ... ¡Yo no sé! 35 Los heraldos negros: ‘Retablo’, OPC, 104 (Darío). Trilce: XV, 128-29 (Daudet); LV, 158-59 (Samain). Poemas humanos: ‘Fue domingo en las claras orejas de mi burro’, 209-10 (Voltaire); ‘Los nueve monstruos’, 222-23 (Rousseau); ‘Me viene, hay días, una gana ubérrima, política’, 224-25 (Dante); ‘Tengo un miedo terrible de ser un animal’, 264 (Locke, Bacon); ‘Un hombre pasa con un pan al hombro’, 266-67 (Socrates, André Breton); ‘El alma que sufrió de ser su cuerpo’, 268-69 (Darwin); ‘Al revés de las aves del monte’, 272-73 (Walt Whitman). España, aparta de mí este caliz: I, 282-86 (Calderón, Cervantes, Quevedo, Teresa de Jesús). 36 Trilce: LV, OPC, 158-59; Poemas en prosa: ‘Voy a hablar de la esperanza’, 187; Poemas humanos: ‘Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca’, 233; ‘En suma, no poseo para expresar mi vida’, 249-50. 37 ‘Yeso’, Los heraldos negros, OPC, 79.
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The poet denies that he has any special knowledge which could offer a solution or even an explanation for life’s devastating blows. But the rhetorical device of the emphatic ‘Yo no sé’38 is effective precisely because of the assumption made by a reader that the poet, as a poet, possesses privileged knowledge and therefore should be in a position to enlighten. By saying that he does not know, Vallejo chooses to subvert that authority, but it is none the less an ‘authoritative’ subversion of authority. There is no escaping that position, and the tensions it creates are central to all four collections. The question of authority is the main theme of the last poem in Los heraldos negros, ‘Espergesia’, which has often been read as the anguished outpouring of a poetic soul who knows far more about the pain of life than lesser mortals. But there are arguments for reading ‘Espergesia’ as a more subtle exploration of the relationship between the poet and society. Firstly, consider the title. One critic has pointed out that ‘Espergesia’ was ‘an archaic legal term signifying the passing of a sentence’.39 The archaism immediately recalls, once again, the function of the Spanish language in Peru as the word of law. ‘Espergesia’ is not in itself a legal sentence; it is the passing of a sentence. So the question arises, who is passing this sentence? It cannot be God, for God’s powers are weakened in this poem: He is not active, He is passive, because He is ill. The poem’s refrain, ‘Yo nací un día / que Dios estuvo enfermo’ has usually been read as a version of the theme of blighted destiny. But these lines lack conviction as an existential lament. The image is slightly comical and its fivefold repetition diminishes rather than enhances its seriousness, above all when the reader arrives at the wry bathos of the final variation: ‘Yo nací un día / que Dios estuvo enfermo, / grave’. The implication is that when God’s authority has been weakened, a poet is born. Is the poet then the heir to God’s role? This idea is also strongly implied in the earlier poem, ‘Dios’, in which the poetic voice assumes the power of consecration: ‘Yo te consagro Dios’. In ‘Espergesia’, everyone knows (‘Todos saben’) that the poet exists and that he is made of flesh and blood: ‘Todos saben que vivo, / que mastico ...’. But the poet is also known to be bad: ‘Todos saben que vivo, / que soy malo’. This is a reference to the European tradition of the poète maudit, the poet cast out from society and condemned to solitary anguish, as represented most typically by Baudelaire. But the key word here is ‘saben’: it is not that everyone thinks he is bad, they know that he is. By granting his own badness the status of established fact, the poet implicitly accepts society’s judgment. Indeed, throughout Los heraldos negros, the poet is presented 38 The personal pronoun is usually omitted in Spanish. 39 James Higgins, César Vallejo: An Anthology of his Poetry (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1970), 172.
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as someone who has done wrong (‘Yo soy un mal ladrón ... ¡A dónde iré!’), is in need of forgiveness (‘¡Forja allí tu perdón para el poeta!’) and who falls short of full humanity (‘Y madrugar, poeta, nomada, / al crudísimo día de ser hombre’).40 In ‘Espergesia’, everyone (‘todos’, which Vallejo repeats three times) has access to knowledge, while the poet does not. Everyone’s knowledge is uncomplicated and direct. Ultimately, it is open-ended, as indicated by the ellipsis in the first line of the last stanza: ‘Todos saben ...’. Everyone (by implication, everyone else, apart from the poet) simply knows certain things. But not everyone knows (‘no saben’) about images, which are the preserve of the poet: ‘no saben / del diciembre de ese enero’; ‘no saben / que la Luz es tísica, / y la Sombra gorda ...’. Nor do they know ‘por que en mi verso chirrían / ... / luyidos vientos / desenroscados de la Esfinge / preguntona del Desierto’. The sphinx is one of the most clichéd Romantic images of the enigma of existence. Vallejo hardly ever uses this kind of image, even in Los heraldos negros, when he was still influenced by Spanish-American Modernismo, a movement which promoted the myth of poet-as-aristocrat-of-the-spirit, and tended to adorn its verse with swans, classical statues and other supposed manifestations of Beauty and Purity. The verb ‘chirrían’ hardly casts the sphinx image in a positive light. All the standard clichés of Modernista poetry are echoed in the lines ‘musical y triste que a distancia denuncia / el paso meridiano de las lindes a las Lindes’. But Vallejo attaches all these mellifluous phrases to a distinctly unaesthetic hump. In ‘Espergesia’, Vallejo challenges the pretensions of art-for-art’s sake poetry, and not, as is often suggested, the inability of the common herd to attain the elevated heights of Romantic intensity. The complex and ugly images in the last two verses contrast starkly with the plain language of the first part of the poem. In the central third stanza, where the poet is trying to reach out to another human being, he uses very simple words: ‘Hermano, escucha, escucha ...’. He accepts that there is no response (‘Bueno’), for why should there be? As he has already acknowledged in the previous stanza, nobody is obliged to pay attention to the poet’s concerns: ‘Hay un vacío / en mi aire metafísico / que nadie ha de palpar’ (my emphasis). Vallejo suggests that it is up to himself, as the poet, to give something positive to the world: ‘Y que no me vaya / sin llevar diciembres, / sin dejar eneros’ (‘eneros’ represent new beginnings). In these lines of the third stanza, Vallejo unravels the concentrated image of the first: ‘no saben / del diciembre de ese enero’. In this core stanza, the poet rejects an elliptic, exclusive mode of expression in favour of a more direct language of communication. 40 ‘El pan nuestro’, OPC, 96-97; ‘Yeso’, 79-80; ‘Desnudo en barro’, 99.
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Vallejo explores the wider implications of a challenging of authority in the penultimate poem of Los heraldos negros, ‘Enereida’, where he makes explicit the particular relationship between language and authority in Peru. The title, ‘Enereida’, is thought to be ‘a neologism combining enero and Eneida’,41 both symbols of renewal and rebirth. The poem is firmly rooted in Peru: there are references to ‘el cementerio de Santiago’, to ‘los años de la Gobernación’ and to ‘empanadas’. The father-figure is an image of authority, at one level the poet’s father, at another level the political authorities in Peru, at another the authority of God, the Father. It is an authority which has become extremely weak, an authority which is a thing of the past. His used to be the voice of the world and of power; now he can offer only memories and suggestions. This is specifically linked in to the changing political situation in Peru: Otras veces le hablaba a mi madre de impresiones urbanas, de política; y hoy, apoyado en su bastón ilustre que sonara mejor en los años de la Gobernación, mi padre está desconocido, frágil mi padre es una víspera. The loss of a father’s authority is partly a liberation and a cause for celebration (witness the title, also the fact that it is a ‘mañana pajarina’, a ‘Día eterno ... día ingenuo, infante / coral, oracional’). But it is also the onset of deep longing and confusion: the loss which is so yearned for previously and so much regretted subsequently. Already the poet knows that paternal authority offers no protection against a son’s loss of innocence: ‘departieron mis sílabas escolares y frescas, / mi inocencia rotunda’, and that this will leave him with a hunger which cannot be satisfied: ‘Habrá empanadas; / y yo tendré hambre’. He knows that all things stem from the father (‘sus senos de tiempo / que son dos renuncias, dos avances de amor / que se tienden y ruegan infinito’). He asks his father to leave something behind of himself: ‘jirones de tu ser’. But the Word of the Father (Vallejo’s use of ‘Verbos’ specifically invokes the religious dimension) is no longer one and indivisible (‘el Verbo’); it can only be ‘Verbos plurales’. Authority has been lost, and words have lost authoritative meaning. This is both a threat, because of the confusion and responsibility it entails, and a great promise, because it offers the chance to create new meanings, free of the burden of the law. What is the responsibility of the poet in these circumstances? In Los heraldos negros Vallejo goes no further than the posing of the question. But the syntactical and semantic breakdowns in Trilce can be read as Vallejo’s battle with the consequences of 41 Higgins, An Anthology, 172.
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challenging the authority of the Word of God, brought by the Spanish conquerors. How can a Peruvian poet give any meaning at all to his inheritance of ‘verbos plurales’? 2
‘What can I say?’: Language and Authority in Trilce
In Trilce, the issue of what the poet can or cannot say becomes far more obtrusive than it was in Los heraldos negros. In the largely nonsensical poem XXXII, for example, by far the least obscure lines are the poet’s denial of the value of his own self-expression: Mejor no digo nada. Y hasta la misma pluma con que escribo por último se troncha.42 The issue of poetic authority is even more prominent in poem LV, which is often omitted from anthologies, even though it is central to an understanding of Trilce. Vallejo opens the poem by comparing the supposedly restrained language and imagery of the French symbolist poet, Albert Samain, with his own convoluted metaphors: Samain diría el aire es quieto y de una contenida tristeza. Vallejo dice hoy la Muerte está soldando cada lindero a cada hebra de cabello perdido, desde la cubeta de un frontal, donde hay algas, toronjiles que cantan divinos almacigos en guardia, y versos antisépticos sin dueño. Samain was one generation before Vallejo, and at one level this verse can be interpreted as Vallejo’s rejection of the symbolists’ approach to poetics. But, given the content of the subsequent stanzas, this reading alone seems inadequate. A further contrast suggested by this juxtaposition of poetic styles is of one poet, ‘Samain’, who is in a position to enjoy mastery over his language, and another, ‘Vallejo’, who is not. Samain’s image of death, as imagined by Vallejo, is evocative precisely because it is understated. Such restraint and control are the prerogative of those who are the masters, as the French were the cultural masters in nineteenth-century Peru. ‘Vallejo’, on the other hand, feels forced into a proliferation of images, because he cannot enjoy a straightforward relationship with a language which was imposed upon him. He can only make it his own by doing violence to it in a subversion of its conventions. But, the poem goes on to ask, what do these linguistic struggles over 42 See also LVII, where he denies his capacity to pass judgment: ¿Puedo decir que nos han traicionado? No. ¿Qué todos fueron buenos? Tampoco.
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how to express death have to do with the real experience of the terminally ill? What is the relevance of what any poet says? The sick man in the fourth stanza wants to know what is going on in the world for he is reading a newspaper. This fourth stanza, at one level, is simply an image of death, but it is different from many poetic metaphors because it cannot be understood without reference to a world outside the poem. Vallejo’s image of a mirror of the world, a newspaper, has meaning only if the reader knows that there was a Peruvian newspaper called La Prensa. And Vallejo has inserted his own name, further complicating the fact that the poem’s meaning is not self-contained. As a Peruvian, Vallejo cannot afford the luxury of a hermetic poetic world. Even in Trilce, the least overtly political of his four collections, Vallejo’s language is inescapably politicized. 3
‘Who can say?’: Power and Knowledge in Poemas humanos
Vallejo’s exile in Europe heightened his awareness of the authority attached to European languages and culture. Many of the Poemas humanos refer to European places or writers. By contrast, references to Peru are rare, as has often been pointed out, but their significance nevertheless needs to be reconsidered. The key text on Peru, indeed the only extensive treatment of Peru in Poemas humanos, is ‘Telúrica y magnética’.43 This poem is much quoted, albeit selectively, by those who wish to cast Vallejo as a Peruvian nationalist. This is because it contains the only lines in his entire body of poetry which intone a patriotic spirit: ¡Sierra de mi Perú, Perú del mundo, y Perú al pie del orbe; yo me adhiero! Less avowedly patriotic souls should ask themselves how seriously this sentiment should be taken. Consider the following points: ‘Telúrica y magnética’ is the only poem in Poemas humanos to include an almost biblical incantation of Peruvian terms, perhaps in mockery of the nationalist temptation to turn patriotism into a religion. It is the only one in which Vallejo uses colloquial phrases of abuse, which suggests that his tone is not wholly serious. It is also the only one in which every line is punctuated by exclamation marks. These, in themselves, warn the reader not to take this poem literally. ‘Telúrica y magnética’ is not convincing as patriotic poetry. But it is rather more plausible as a satire on the style (declamatory), the symbolism (parochial) and the sentiment (chauvinistic) of the indigenista movement. Indigenista poets often used images of the Peruvian landscape to represent what they liked to believe were quintessentially Peruvian values. 43 OPC, 210-12.
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In ‘Telúrica y magnética’, Vallejo satirizes this technique with a series of increasingly absurd images: the ‘mecánica’ is ‘sincera’ and ‘peruanísima’; the soil is ‘teórico y práctico’; the furrows are ‘inteligentes’; and the fields are ‘humanos’. The rodents ‘miran con sentimiento judicial en torno’ and the donkeys are ‘patrióticos’. But they are not ‘asnos patrióticos de mi vida’; instead, they are ‘patrióticos asnos de mi vida’. The displacing of the adjective from its normal position (after the noun) opens up the possibility of a second meaning, namely that those who are ‘patrióticos’(‘patriotas’) are asses. Vallejo is sneering at the super-patriot. In his journalism, Vallejo ridiculed the idea that Peruvian poets could make themselves more authentically Peruvian or express anything significant about Peru by introducing snippets of Peruvian local colour into their verse. He argued that these images created by intellectuals reflected solely their idealizations about Peru, not Peruvian reality. This, surely, is also the implication of these lines from ‘Telúrica y magnética’: ¡Oh campo intelectual de cordillera, con religión, con campo, con patitos! The bathos of ‘patitos’ mocks the sentimentality (‘aah, sweet little ducklings’) of much indigenista writing. A few lines later, Vallejo again uses bathos, this time to satirize indigenismo’s tendency to claim that everything about Peru was marvellous: ¡Leños cristianos en gracia al tronco feliz y al tallo competente! Vallejo then introduces himself into the poem: ¡Familiar de los liquenes, especies en formación basáltica que yo respeto desde este modestísimo papel! In these lines, the voice of authority (the emphatic ‘yo’—‘I respect’) comes from the act of writing (symbolized by the piece of paper). The absurdity of this supposedly authoritative judgment clearly casts doubt upon the poet’s subsequent statement of adherence to Peru. Are lichens worthy of respect? By implication, is unthinking support for Peru an appropriate attitude for a poet? Finally, having rattled off a whole list of Peruvian flora and fauna, Vallejo introduces, and at once rudely dismisses, the most famous symbol of the Andes: (¿Condores? ¡Me friegan los condores!) He then attributes total understanding to the poetic voice (‘¡Lo entiendo todo en dos flautas!’), asserts an equally uncharacteristic confidence in his
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own capacity for expression (‘y me doy a entender en una quena! ...’), and concludes the poem with the vulgar and dismissive: ¡Y lo demás, me las pelan! ... In these concluding lines, Vallejo mocks the arrogance of the nationalist poet, who believes that he, and he alone, can express the soul of the nation. ‘Telúrica y magnética’ is not about Peru; it is about how Peru has been appropriated by Peruvian intellectuals for their own self-glorification. This poem, so often cited by intellectuals to bolster the crude certainties of nationalism, represents the exact opposite. It is a sustained critique of those Peruvian intellectuals who pursued what Vallejo saw as a simplistic identification with their country. Throughout Poemas humanos, Vallejo explicitly attacks the mythology surrounding the poet, and suggests an alternative version of the traditional relationship between power and knowledge.44 In a development of ideas hinted at in ‘Espergesia’ (Los heraldos negros) and Trilce VI, Vallejo now attributes significant knowledge to the common man, not the intellectual. In ‘Considerando en frío, imparcialmente’,45 the distinction is again made between ‘el hombre’ and the poet, but now it is the man who knows: Comprendiendo que él sabe que le quiero, que le odio con afecto y me es, en suma, indiferente ... In ‘Salutación angélica’, the Bolshevik has the certainty that the ‘yo’ of the poetic voice lacks, and the Bolshevik knows things that the ‘yo’ is silent about.46 It is Marxism which has changed Vallejo’s vision, and this is why his poetry cannot be read without taking it into account. Although he never fully resolved the issues around knowledge and power, any partial resolution he did find was dependent upon Marxist ideas. Marxism was a child of the Enlightenment and it ‘remains a sort of Cartesian philosophy, in which you have a conscious agent who is the scholar, the learned person, and the others who don’t have access to consciousness’.47 But, unlike orthodox Catholicism, Marxism argues that those who are thought of as ignorant do in fact possess their own kind of knowledge, and that the 44 The theme of knowledge is raised in ‘Los mineros salieron de la mina’, OPC, 20809; ‘Otro poco de calma, camarada’, 218-19; ‘Considerando en frío, imparcialmente ...’, 22728; ‘Parado en una piedra ...’, 230-31; ‘Quiere y no quiere su color mi pecho ...’, 255-56; and ‘El alma que sufrió de ser su cuerpo’, 268-69. 45 OPC, 227-28. 46 See also ‘Parado en una piedra ...’ and ‘Los mineros salieron de la mina’, OPC, 23031 and 208-09. 47 Pierre Bourdieu, in conversation with Terry Eagleton, New Left Review (Jan./Feb., 1992), No. 191, 111-21, at p. 113.
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political task is to make them aware of it so that they are empowered to act. In Poemas humanos, Vallejo does not yet confront the issue of how those who know from experience, as distinct from those who know from books, might be given the opportunity to express that knowledge. This collection contains more references to saying and speaking, the only means of verbal expression available to the illiterate, than any of the others. But writing remains the preserve of the poet, and a series of poems resumes Vallejo’s questioning of the role of writing in the context of the suffering of ordinary men. This culminates in ‘Un hombre pasa con un pan al hombro’,48 where Vallejo states the dilemma of all intellectuals with startling clarity: Un hombre pasa con un pan al hombro. ¿Voy a escribir, después, sobre mi doble? Otro se sienta, ráscase, extrae un piojo de su axila, mátalo. ¿Con qué valor hablar del psicoanálisis? ... Otro tiembla de frío, tose, escupe sangre. ¿Cabrá aludir jamás al Yo profundo? ...
4
‘Who writes?’: España, aparta de mí este caliz
In Vallejo’s last collection there is a proliferation of images of writing— books, papers, words and writers.49 Writing poetry about the Spanish Civil War concentrated Vallejo’s mind on the issues about the role of the poet with which he had been struggling all his life.50 In Poemas humanos, Vallejo had recognized that workers had their own kind of knowledge, but stopped short of imagining a state of affairs where they had access to reading and writing. In España, aparta de mí este caliz, he went a stage further and gave the dispossessed the means of expression historically reserved for those whose knowledge was conventionally granted authority, namely, the educated. In poem VIII, he exhorted the peasant who has turned soldier: ¡Salud, hombre de Dios, mata y escribe!51 48 OPC, 166. 49 See, especially, poems I, III, IX and XV. 50 For an interpretation which also emphasizes Vallejo’s concern with the role of the intellectual, and discusses its implications for España, aparta de mí este caliz in far more detail than is possible here, see George Lambie, ‘Poetry and Politics: The Spanish Civil War Poetry of César Vallejo’, BHS, LXIX (1992), 153-70. See also James Higgins, César Vallejo en su poesía (Peru: Seglusa Editores, 1989). 51 VIII, OPC, 297.
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In poem III, the railway-worker, Pedro Rojas, had begun to overcome his illiteracy just before he lost his life in the war: Solía escribir con su dedo grande en el aire: ‘¡Viban los compañeros! Pedro Rojas’52 Pedro Rojas’ literal words, set in quotation marks within a poem, are a metaphor for the common man’s mastery of literacy. Despite his inaccuracy, Rojas has authority: he is ‘padre’. But his authority is not divinely granted; it arises out of his humanity: he is ‘padre y hombre, / marido y hombre, ferroviario y hombre, / padre y más hombre’. Christ-like, Pedro Rojas is resurrected, and it is his writing, his capacity to express himself, which endures: Pedro Rojas, así, después de muerto se levantó, besó su catafalco ensangrentado, lloró por España y volvió a escribir con su dedo en el aire ‘¡Viban los compañeros! Pedro Rojas’. In his essay, El arte y la revolución, Vallejo wrote, ‘Hacedores de imágenes, devolved la palabra a los hombres’.53 In España, aparta de mí este caliz, his final collection of poetry, he created an image (albeit a rather clichéd one) of just this transfer of power. As a poet, he believed that he could do no more, and no less, than to create an image. Vallejo’s essays on art and politics reveal that he was convinced that poetry could be liberating, politically as well as spiritually or emotionally. But he also held that there were no short or smooth roads to freedom. Unlike the Chilean Communist and Nobel prize-winning poet, Pablo Neruda, Vallejo did not presume to speak for the common man. For Vallejo, this was not the path of the truly revolutionary poet, because it could only reinforce the authority of the poet and further limit the opportunities for ‘ordinary’ people to express themselves. Instead, he chose to rewrite the language and the images of authority, provoking the reader to question any supposedly authoritative statement, whatever its source. ‘He aquí que hoy saludo ...’, from Poemas en prosa, ends with this line: (Los lectores pueden poner el título que quieran a este poema).54 With this, Vallejo explicitly invited his readers to take what he believed to be the most revolutionary step of all: namely, to think for themselves. Throughout his four collections of verse, Vallejo tried to create a poetics of dissent which challenged oppression in all its forms: literary convention, 52 III, OPC, 290-91, at p. 291. 53 El arte y la revolución (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1973), 63. 54 ‘He aquí que hoy saludo ...’, OPC, 197.
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intellectual dogmatism, cultural imposition, political exclusion and economic exploitation. More than many writers, perhaps, CÊsar Vallejo has been the victim of intellectual hijacking—by nationalists, Communists, Christians and existentialists, among others. Neither depoliticization of his work nor its appropriation for propaganda purposes is a critical response which meets his challenge.55
55 I would like to thank Maurice Biriotti, Jason Wilson and an anonymous reader for their many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.