ELASHPOINTS The series solicits books thar considorlieraruze beyond ststly national and disci ay frameworks, distinguished bath by their historical grounding and thee theoretical tnd conoeprualstength, We sek studs thar engage dhory wichoutlosgg couch Witt history, and work historically without fling ito encriscal positivist, Haan wil aim for a broad audience within che humanities and the socialsciences concerned with tmoments of altura emergence and transformation. In Benjaminian mode, FlaskPoints is interested in how literature coneriburas to foxming new constellations of culate and Istory, and in how such formations function cially ancl polity in the preset Avalable onlin at hepfcpositores caibora/sepress Series Ftos: Ali Beda (Comparative Literature and Enis, UCLA Judit Baler {Rhetoric and Comparative Literatu, UC Berkley, Founding Editors Ear Direcnberg (Fm &c Media Studies, UC levine), Coordinator, Catherine Gallagher (opis, UC Berkeley), Fouling tor Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Crue Sosa Gilman Literaare, UC Santa Cruz) Richard Terdiman (iterate, UC Santa Crs) 1. On Pain of Speech: Bantascs ofthe Firs Order and the Literary Rant, by Dina AlKassim 2. Moses and Malticuualiem, by Barbra Jonson, witha focewo by Barbara Rietveld 43. The Gosmic Time of Empire: Modom Britain and World Literatur, by Adam Barrows Poetry im Dice 1 Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, by Michelle Clayeon Poetry in Pieces César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity Michelle Clayton QB UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley + Los Angele + Londonx 1 Acknowledgments swe then sa he would have sped she yes reading reams of writing on a Peruvian poet, not to mention stat learning Spanish himsel. is enthusiasm fr farang reaches of iteratre, mea lan and art has taken this book and my thinking Hess unexpected art has y in countess unexpected directions, With his warmth and his wit, Stuart will always be the reat st spur £0 writing, and the loveliest distraction from it. {ntroduction “The Whole, the Part!” ‘Ove might. maintain thar modernity is indeed marked by ‘the wil toward toraization as moch as iris metaphorized by the fragment. “= tinda Nochlia, The Body a Pieces We have grown accustomed to conceptualizing the divide between jmodernisms and avant-gardes as one between recollection and rup- ‘ure, epitomized in the ways in which their iconic works deal with in- creasingly uncontainable contents: a shoring-up of fragments against tains, in T.S, Eliot's classic formulation, or a willful scattering of ref ‘erences across the sueface of what no longer pretends to hold together, as in Dado sound poetry. On the one hand, a vertical aesthetic, which finds meaning for modernity in its recapitulation of the past; om the other, a horizontal one, which severs itself from the past and recon stitutes the present as a man-made constellation. These apparently ‘opposed aesthetics have in turn divided scholars, requicing them to declare their allegiance to one mode or another and to declare their mode the dominant." But as Tom Gunning has recently argued (“Modernity”), the two nodes—dispersal and containment—necessarily coexisted and played off one another in early-rwentieth-century aesthetics, as disciplines ad- justed themselves to the proximity of new media and the connected reshaping of the modern sensorium. Artworks, in other words, could choose either to open or to close themselves to the effects of modernity on bodies and language. Or, occasionally, to have it both ways at once, a8 Linda Nochlin argued in her now-classic study of modern are history, ‘The Body in Pieces, which begins by placing its accent on an inconsol-2. | Introduction able nostalgia for the past and a modern dwelling amidst fragments, only to uncover hidden drives toward recuperation in the very works that scemed t0 most resist it For those writers working in two or more cultural zones, it becomes more difficult to delineate their place within modernist or avant-garde aesthetics, for a number of reasons. First, the relationship to the past in a postcolonial setting is more than an issue of simple recuperation, as it is for European writers. Second), both the fragment and ies orga nizational oppose, the museum, signify quite differently in metropoli- tan and colonial contexts, involving in the lattcr not a violent shaping of a cultural heritage but a mode of precarious knowledge (Aguilar; Rosenberg). And third, the very fact of operating across cultural spheres means that a poet’s language potentially changes its meaning in differ- ent contexts, whether through the poet’s active choosing or the reader's interpretive paradigms, What comes into play, then, in our reading of moder postcolonial writers is the question of feames: deliberately sm- posed ones that may crop and contort, as in Nochlin’s discussion, of delicately superimposed and juxtaposed frames that add nuance to our notion of multiple contexts. In the study that follows, [explore the writing of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, whose writing was almost symmetrically divided be- ‘ween Peru and Paris—with two collections of poetry composed in each, place—and whose poctry may seem to be split between avant-garde experiment and political commitment. As I argue throughout this book, these two modes are two sides of the same coin, and increasingly so in his Patis years, Although what may come to appear uppermost is the political charge of his later work, itis nowhere entirely free from 4 formal violence ot fragmentation that mediates and mirrors the po- etry’s contents, And as | demonstrate over the course of the book's six chapters, the coherence of Vallejo’s poetics les in his deployment ‘of what I call “body language”—a conjoined scmiotics of word and gesture that develops and takes different forms over the course of his work, but which always foregrounds the activity of bodies attempting to articulate themselves in a shattered context. This often takes unex: pected forms: his early Peruvian poetry, for instance, repeatedly stages the performance of a poet already expelled from local traditions, who reaches of calls out to others without managing to make his expressions. hit home. And in the poetry he composed in Paris, Vallejo proves him self increasingly aware of the suffering bodies of others, of the violence being done to chem by an official language that usurps their speech, but “The Whole, the Pace!” 13 also of his lack of authorization to speak for them, Where he attempts toad a ground of commonality is precisely in the body: the sharing of basic physical processes of suffering and enjoyment, the investment in the possibility of a kinaesthetic empathy, but also the knowledge that see experience our own bodies and the bodies of others only in pieces. ‘What Vallejo proposes in his poetry, 1 suggest, is an ethics of the frasment: not a celebration of che fragment on avant-garde terms, but Epuion of fs comalico modes of modern subject and col Ictivism., Poetry in pieces, in other words, asthe most responsible mode of lyric modernity PROVINCIAL OF THE WORLD “Todos somos provaciano, don Juli, Provincanos de las naciones eovincianos del sopeanacionel We ae ll provincial, Dow Julio. Provincial of nations and provi: ofthe wpranatancl Jost Marla Arguedas! open this study with a retrospective gaze to set the stage for different feamings of Latin American writing, Inthe late 19608 a polemic erupted between the Argentinean Julio Cortézar and the Peruvian José Maria ‘Arguedas over the question of how to represent Latin America in litera- ture. The exchange took place in a moment that seemed to promise an cffective intertwining of local aesthetics and global politics: the spread if international socialism in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, coupled with the growing visibility of Latin American writing through the international success of the formally experimental Boom novel- fats (Gabricl Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fnentes, Matio Vargas Llosa, Cortézar himself), This critically timed exchange, between two of the continent's most prominent writers, offers a remarkable condensation ‘of polemics over relations between the local and the international, im- ‘mediacy and mediation, aesthetics and politics, which cluster around postcolonial writing in the twentieth century and which provide the backdrop and often the texture ofthis book ‘The opening salvo was Corcizar’s response to Casa de las Américas director, Roberto Fernéndez Retamar, who had asked for an essay on the “situation of the Latin American intellectual,” clearly hoping for a statement that would underline the nexus between the Cuban Revolu- ‘ion and continental literary experiments. Cortézar responded not with an essay but with an open letter, which allowed him—he insisted—to4 Iotroduction tative type or authoritative voice. Ia ehis nuanced document, Cortézar ‘explicitly resisted speaking as a “Latin American intellectual,” empha. sizing not only the separation of his aesthetic writings from his politcal beliefs, but his physical distance from events on the ground, given that he had been living in France since 95x. That distance, Cortizae sue gested polemically, had allowed him to develop a more textured view of Latin America, through his greater access toa broad range of sources con what was happening in the world and at home and because in Paris he had come into contact with forms of international socialism, Writing and thinking at a distance from Latin America, he claimed, allowed him to avoid che consuming “challenge-and-response” of local events and to develop a more “planetary” view of the continent, withoue thereby ‘moving in the direction of “diffuse and theoretical universalisms,” Paris, in other words, had given him sufficient distance to see Latin America in its complexity withoue becoming bogged down in its details and, in the process, to develop a personal aesthetic that reached beyond local Ar: ‘gentinean literary concerns to encompass a more broadly international and humanist-inflected socialism, Arguedas encountered the letter as he was about to begin writing his most ambitious novel to date, Elzorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below). His earlier novels had charted a progressively swelling terran, from small towns in the Pe nuvian sierra through larger provinces to an all-encompassing vision of national tensions in the 1965 novel, Todas las sangres (All the Bloods). His latest project aimed to take on a categorically new space: the fishery boomtown of Chimbore, where rapid modernization was being carried ‘out by local bodies and foreign capital, whose conflicting interests were resulting in unpredictable clashes.* Attempting to capture this event in its unfolding not only entailed rethinking ehe ethnic makeup and local segre- gations of the nation as they re-presented themselves in this new coastal city but also prompted Anguedas to rethink the relationship becween his work as an ethnographer and his practice as a novelist This new novel, written haltingly, is divided between two alterna ing parts: on the one hand, a fictional nareative involving vatious ep- resentative types as they settle into precarious arrangements and new conflicts in Chimbote, pressured by the demands of industry, ethnic and class antagonisms, local polities, and! neocolonial entanglements; ‘on the other, a personal diary, which not only presents an agonizing self-critique but also assesses the work of contemporary Latin American ‘make his statements as a particular individual rather than as a represen: “Ve Whole, the Part!” | 5 ovelsts It is in this context that Arguedas broaches the topic of his i I discrepancy with Cortazar. His first diary counters Cort- _gediate and geographically limited issues but also involved an engage- ent with che world, One could be a provincial of the nation, Arguedas sagassted, without ceasing to be a provincial of the supranational, and ‘gpolitcal-aesthctic commentary on the most narrowly circumscribed ‘vents in the age of neocolonialism was necessarily a contribution to aay understanding of global politics and aesthetics. ‘This confrontation between Cortazar and Arguedas evokes Walter Berami'sdstinsonberween wo ieconciable kind of oreler svho remains at home to pass on existing traditions and comment a transformations, and one who travels abroad in order to send back reports on foreign affairs, pointing to their importance for under- standing developing local events (“Storyteller”). Notably, in this discus- sion of point-of-view framing and articulation, poetry is afforded very Title place, which suggests that in the 2960s—just as today—the aes- + thetic of lyric poetry was thought to have litte to say about or contrib- ute co political discourse.” However, it does make an oblique appear- lance in Arguedas’s last diary, where he glosses an observation on the closing of a literary cycle in Peru with the elliptical statement “Vallejo cera el principio y el fin” (Vallejo was the beginning and the end) (246). ‘What Vallejo appears to represent for Arguedas, here and in comments elsewhere, is the fullest articulation of a critical and historicized local identity at a particularly strained moment, giving voice to a Peru being pushed into modernity while struggling 0 reconnect with its precolo- ial pas. ‘Arguedas’s reading of Vallejo has had many echoes among later crit- ics, who have understood Vallejo’s poetry to be the voice of the local as it enters into tense contact with international modernity, Yet I will bbe arguing throughout this book, in what may itself be a polemical vein, that Vallejo occupies a position equidistant from both Cortazar's somewhat airy cosmopolitanism and Arguedas’s agonizing localism. Vallejo’s critical and self-critical perspectives on both the local and the tlobal are far less consistent than one might expect, and they deter- ‘minedly work against che articulation of a fixed and constrained view- point. Rather than aligning himself with cither Peru or the West, his commitment is to multiple and constantly shifting attachments, which are those of his reading and experiential horizons—diasporic Peruvian-6 1 Introduction ism, the international avant-xardes, Soviet politics, Harlem Renaissance aesthetics, Spanish antifascism, to name just a few. In a gloss on Argue- das’s retort to Cortazar-—cited as the epigeaph to this scction—I will be proposing that we consider Vallejo asa “provincial of the world,” tech ered neither to the local (speaking exclusively to, of, and from Peru) nor to a denationalized universalism (as in Casanova’s reading of Beckett [2006]) but rather tied to the world (“atado al globo,” as he puts it in the early poem “Huaco”), about and to which ie speaks from a local- ized position which is nonetheless constantly on the move. Born im 1892, Vallejo was raised as a Spanish speaker in the small ndean town of Santiago de Chuco,! He studied literature and then law in the coastal city of Trujillo and in the capital city of Lima, taking up work as a schoolteacher in both cities, eking out an existence among their local bohemias; he famously spent three months in jail for alleg- edly instigating a skirmish that took place during, a visit to his home town.? During this period, he published two collections of poetty—Los beraldos negros (The Black Heralds) (1919) and Trilee (1922)—which ‘went almost completely ignored, eliciting little more than a few jibes from the cultural establishment. Inthe face of this apparent failure and chased by a lingering arrest warrant, Vallejo set sail for Paris in 1923, where he lived—with a short period of exile in Madrid in 1932 due to his polticatactivities—unil his death in 1938, never returning to Peru, despite sporadic attempts to do so. Through the late r920s he earned a meager living as Paris correspondent for various Peruvian newspa- pers—for which he was rarely paid-—while supplementing his income bby means of a law scholarship, occasional translations, and work as tutor to the children of visiting dignitaries, His connection to Peru re- asserted itself momentarily in the mid-r9205, when he found himself alluded to in two intersecting debates at home: the indigenism polemic, ‘which focused on the proper forms of local representation (Aquézolo Castro), and a polemic over the avant-garde, split between politics and aesthetics, involving a broader international dimension (Lauer, Polémica}. Nonetheless, he resisted inscription in either one, rarning his attention instead to artistic debates taking place in Paris, to broader commentaries on modernity and xeopolities, and to a developing inter- cst in Marxism, beginning in the late 19208 and persisting—or fluctuat- {ng—through to the Spanish Civil War in 1936-38, until his death from a still-unidentfied illness.” ‘Vallejo published only five poems during his Paris years, although wwe know that he composed at least forty-seven undated poems between “The Whole, the Part!” 17 yg2a and 1936, A final burst of poetry under the impact ofthe Spanish Gil War in late 1937 produced sixty-seven more poems, almost all of them carefully dated by month and day. Fifteen of these were shaped by ‘he poet into the collection Esparia, aparta de mi este edz (Spain, Take ‘This Cup from Me), published by Republican soldiers in 1939. The re- ‘mainder were organized and published posthumously by subsequent ed ‘tors under several controversial titles, with Poemas bumanos (Human Poems) being the first (Paris, x939; ed. Georgette Philippart de Vallejo and Rail Porras Barrenechea) and the most durable. During his Paris years, Valle also produced a novel, El Tungsteno (Tungsten) (#93); ‘commissioned novella, Paco Yunque, rejected as being “too sad”; two | ncan’ stories published in Spanish magazines; a series of reports on his visits co the Soviet Union, some of which were published—to great success—as Rusia en 1931, while others remained unpublished under the title Rusia ante el segundo plan quinguenal (Russia before the Sec ‘ad Five-Year Plan); two notebooks containing jottings on aesthetics, Gontra el secreto profesional (Against the Professional Secret) atd El arte y la revolucion (Art and Revolotion); a series of never-staged playss ‘and two screenplays, also never produced. [My focus in this book is restricted to Vallejo’s lyric and journalistic swritings, treating the latter as a hinge hetween his earlier and later po- try. As Iwill argue, Vallsjo’s poetry and journalism both offer an ago- riingly tense but also exhilarating performance of an ongoing strugle with the central and the marginal questions of modernity, influenced by bis readings and eventually his cesidence in two markedly different contexts: Peru and Paris. The diverse makeup of the different towns and tics in which Vallejo lived in Peru, the time it took for texts to artive - from absoad, and his ongoing fraught relationships with contemporary writers and critics of conservative, avantgarde, and indigenist stripes mean that to read his poetry and prose in a Peruvian context already “imposes a prismatic frame. Similarly, Vallejo’s residence in Paris in the 29205 and 19308—heyday of international modernism in its passage from aesthetic experiment to political commitment—must be measured Against more familiar narratives of writers lives in the capital of literary modernity. Vallejo moved to Paris only to take up a marginal position at the center: writing poetry that went unpublished and chronicles for Peruvian newspapers that he feared were going largely unread, about experiences that were most likely secondhand, derived from his own readings of Parisian newspapers and his eavesdropping in cafés, inthis | sense, as both poct and journalist, he was folded into metropolitan mo:8 1 Introduction dernity while remaining invisible within it, Attending to that inside-out. side position, which is paradigmatic for many modern write, allows tus to expose the gaps in usual narratives of international modernism while adding nuance to readings of those writers who operate—to fol: low Pascale Casanova’s valuable point (“Literature” 81)—in two dif- ferent cultural panoramas at once. One of the driving forces behind this book is my conviction that Vallejo deserves to be—indced must be—read in relation to the multiple contexts in which he lived, read, thought, and wrotes contexts that place important constraints on his writing bur that also give it its peculiar and volatile texture, Vallejo’s sense of being out of place both at home and abroad, of appealing to different and potentially indifferent audiences, sometimes produces uncomfortable—even discomforting-—shifts in hig ‘writing. But rather than smoothing these out to provide a cohesive nar- rative of ideological or aesthetic consistency, we should ask what they ‘might mean for broader theoretical questions about the relation be- tween politics and aesthetics, between history and literary genres, in the modernist period." In Vallejo’s case, as Tope will become clear, it is helpful to think about affiliations rather than filiations (Said, World 174-75), paying attention to what he connects his own writing to rather than what it directly descends from, and tracing the tensions that these affiliations entail. We also need to recognize the debates in which he re- sisted participating—in other words, listen to the silences as well as the sounds of his writing. ‘The writer and modern subject, a5 Vallejo inti- ‘mates throughout his poetry and prose, camnot simply adopt a position or take one as a given—with an unquestioned grounding in ethnicity, heritage, gender, class, and so on—but rather works and lives in sits. ated conditions of self-critique and self-correction. This commitment to momentary yet full-bodied attachment renders the writer’s position precarious but also productive: it may be difficult to speak of a program in Vallejo’s poetry, yer its lack of a coherent agenda is, paradoxically, a sig ofits sustained commitment to critical thought. [ will be arguing that Vallejo’s poetry is most theoretically, politically, and aesthetically challenging at the moments when it seems most intransigent, when it slips our—and sometimes its own—srasp. Oceasionally, coherence is to be found where we least expect it: In the late 1920s Vallejo produced three separate articles that appear to be on unconnected, even incompatible topics: the avant-gardes (“Poesia nueva” [New Poetry], 1926; ACC I: 300-301), indigen: ism (“Los escollos de siempre” [The Usual Stumbling Blocks}, +927; The Whole, the Part?” 19 ~¢ ind socialism (“Ejecutoria del arte socialista” [Final ACEI 495-96) eat iain” [Fn at on Sovialist Art}, 19285 ACC Th 652-53), All dhrce of these Fae acca sound she te ral oe: seaness of the body to historical experience and the production of eee sonsive gesturcs through a sensorium subjected to constant retrain- eather than rejecting modecnty—as the *new poetry” article in particular has been read—Vallejo offers images for its incorporation; Prodern subjectivity and self positioning are here less a question of lip envice than of bodily processing. This is at once a physiological and a ‘radically historicist argument, and it implies a continuity between all = three concerns-—indigenism, socialism, the avant-garde—in Vallejo’s seriting: a selfpositioning that entails an alignment of body and mind, Tpaeathvs and pote of full-bodied adhesion, within an enfolding ‘panorama of contemporary urgencies, dictates, and constraints. As I sail! argue throughout this book, Vallejo’s concern is to give poetr ‘and politics back their bodies, and thereby to extend the sense and ch of the lyri. Fe te pcs moore coespond tothe the rames hoa ‘which Vallejo's poctry tends to be read, often mapped onto the three distinct blocks of his lyric writing: indigenism and Los heraldos negros Uepagh the avantgarde and Trike (x922), soon andthe post ime readers mous poetry (composed between 1923 and 1938). Firs may associate Vallejo in advance with avant-garde experimentation, hia been she fas of some davai clone readings (Coynés Pol (Ortega: others likely have a sense of his idcologica} connection to either a or international Marxism. The interest in reading Vallejo as 4 localist or indigenist poet, which began with his contemporaries (Or- ego; Maristegui), has proven markedly resilient; in recent years it has led to highly nuanced commentaries on his relation to Peruvian history (Comejo Polar, Mazzorti). More recently still, Vallejo’s iconicity as a Marxist poet has gained particular traction with his international read- 1s, as a new exemplar for political poetry in the fraught moment of the 1930s (Lambie; Dawes). Both of these latter readings have great power and merit, but both occasionally run the risk of oversimplify- ing Vallejo's own historically shifting positions—which, moreover, take markedly different forms in his poetry and prose—not to mention side-stepping the deliberate difficulty of his poetry. 1 will be arguing, that Vallejo offers a more complicated take on the writer’ relation to history—local and international—and on the Iyric’s relation to polities than cither of these perspectives allow.re | Invvoduction Z “The Whole the Part?” 1 T wane to tease out this question from the outset by looking ata 4 Joshueloretornar cuando la tera poem that ostensibly weaves the two concerns together. “Telérica y = fpopiera con a técnica del ciclo! rmagnética” (Tellucic and Magnetic) is one of a series of poems that § ——__ PMolsala exabrapto! ;Atomo tersot Vallejo wrote in the early 1930s, at the apex of his commitment a {0h campos humanos! Marxism, Those poems focus on what we might call “local univer slr yates ase dea a, sals*—figures linked to specific geopolitical economies, presented as ati nic deco! exemplars for a new transnational historical ageney—and they eme = _ Ohta eons deo dlr, blematize Valleo’s faith in the capacity of the working classes to seize —prretgton, con campo, con pases hold of their own destiny and set off a revolutionary chain reaction FPaguidermos en prosa cuando pasan of revolution, “con efecto mundial de vela que se enciende” (with the yen yero cuando prance! universal effect of a candle that catches fire), as he puts it in “Gleba® { jRaedores que mitan con senimiento judicial en tomo! (Glebe). Among these figures were—unsurprisingly—Bolsheviks but i fre aos de ml vi alto industrial and agricaleucal wotkers of indeternnate navonalige es fee ont the uncmployed (physically located in Europe but abandoned by their Gh tz que dist apenas un espejo de la sombra, national systems}, and miners, linked to the neocolonial sites of ex- = ype eda con el punto y, con a linea, polvo traction with which Vallejo was familiar from Peru." Although all ‘ae por eso neato, subiendo por la idea e mi osamencal of these figures are related to labor and hence to the body, the po: @ ——_Siegaenépoca det cilatado moll ems in which they appear restore an immense and immediate power “del fatol que colgarondelasien to speech~but not, significantly, to the specch of the poet. AS Jean ype que descolgaron de la barzeaexpléndidat Franco noted inher ploneting wy of Valeo (Dialectic 172), the ee encoul ‘ ees por un descuido del eres poct’s own words in these poems are halting, self questioning, sel& Be can comedies tae ironizings conversely, the laboring figures he apostrophizes “hablan EEScl tivo rocoto de los empes! como les vienen las palabras” (speak as the words come; “Gleba), @ —__(gCéndores?;Mefregar los condores!) suggesting that unmediated access to language comes through the SF (Eko cisianos en gracia body, ina rehearsal of the ongoing debate about the vireves of manual § —_ glwreaco flay a allo competence! over intellectual labor.” | _ Panilia de os iqueoes, Jn 4951 of 19sa—after his third rp tothe Soviee Union—Vallgn Been omacin basics auev0 began work on “Telirica y magnética,” which explicitly conjins FS cumdethtan papel Marxism and Peru and, a a partial corollary, theory and practice, Here — ehaceuetones nc tesigo is the poem" “ar salvar al robe yhundislo en buena ley! {Cucsas in infagant iguénidos llozosos, almas mia! ra de mi Pers, Pen del mundo, {Pend al pe del orb; yo me adi ‘Estellas matutinas ss aromo quemando hoja de coca en ese créneo Festiales, si destapo, ei slo sombetazo, mis diez tomplost _iaazo de siembra, bijace, ya pie de opuesos natalicios, A Bova a base del medosia, tos igo por los pics emo se akan, bajo el techo de was donde muerde iMecinica sincera y peruanisima fa del cerro colorado! ‘Suelo we6rio y préctico! {Surcos intligentes; ejemplo: el monolito y su corto iapales, cebadaes, alfafares, cosa buenal {Culkivos que integra una asombeosa jerarquia de tiles ¥ que integran con viento los mojidos, fas aguas con su sorda antigiedad! ;Cuacernarios mai12 | Terroduction la infatigable altura y la t6rtola comta en tres su tino! Rotacién de ardes modemnas ¥ finas madrugadas arqueologicas! ‘Indio después del hombre y antes de tt iLo entiendo todo en dos flautas y.me doy a entender en una quenat IY fo demés, me la pelant with Marxism, an attempt to deal poetically with abstract questions of theory and praxis by applying them to rural labor (the original ttle was to be “Meditacién ag revisited the poem, most likely in 1937, he reworked and radically ex: panded it to include Peruvian elements, which has led ro its consecra- tion as one of the most explicit meditations in his work on Peru.'s Not locally circumscribed, however, bue connected to the world—"Pers del ‘mundo, / y Peri al pie del orbe” (Peru of the world, / and Peru at the foot of the globe}—and to which the poet significantly declares his al- legiance instead of taking or presenting it as a given, In its final form, the poem offers a catalog of elements populating or constituting the Peruvian soil and national senses its constant exclamta- tions (a total of thirty-four that make up the poem’s sixty-theee lines) create an effect of celebration, directly mimicking the modes of nine teenth-century neoclassical poems, which listed che contents of Latin wch as Andrés Bello’s 1826 America for locals and foreigners alike, “Silva a la ricultura de la zona t6rrida” (Silva to the Agriculture of the Torrid Zone). ‘The only line that deviates from this grammatical jon encased in a parenthesis halfway through the structure isa que poem: (*,Céndores? jMe friegan los cGndores!” [Condors? Serew the condors!})."*But why the parenthesis? To whom is the speaker impl itly responding? And why would his interlocutor have questioned the absence of condors? This sudden and parenthetical self-interruption shifts the poem in a direction other than that of simple celebration: instead, it points to the pressure to prosuce recognizable stereotypes, whether for a local or a foreign eye, and this almost imperceptibly tums the poem into a kind of anti-Baedeker, frustrating the expectations of tourise and nationalist alte.” We may therefore be tempted to read these unfurling exclamations as underwritten by irony. Yer as this pocm suggests, there ae differing degrees of irony, and “Tehirica y magnética” is filled with many mo- AAs Franco notes (173), this poem originally began as a lyric engagement — la,” “Agricultural Meditation”). When Vallejo. “The Whole, the Part” 123 ‘ments that look utterly sincere: declaring allegiance to both Peru and the world, proffering the indigenous native as universal man, These, in fam, are either undercut or intensified by moments of humor, whether > gender (accompanying ideological systems with ducklings) or vulgar | crew the condors!”). At the same time, the poet’s position in the poem is peculiar, to say the lest if he appears in the exclamations “Fhenselves as the source that underwrites their effect, he also presents “fpmself in contingent relation to the Peruvian emblems he celebrates— “whether linked to them through a kind of heraldry (patriotic asses and “Vicaias) ot through his own respectful inclination toward them. By the | gailof the poem, what seems uppermost is not the poet's ability co rep- esent local elements for a reader, but to understand them himself, and 1g qurn that understanding into expression: an expression that is itself decidedly unlocatable—using both national and international instru- spents—and that, stranger still, feigns an utter nonchalance as to how boil be recived: jo entiendo todo en dos flauas ‘ye doy a entender en una quenat Yo demas, me las pelan! .. “Tsmderstand it all on two flutes, and I make myself understood om a quenat “As for the rest, they car jerk me off! ~ As part of this by turns feckless and focused lyric treatise on the local- _plobal, the poem works together lists of recognizable words from political discourse and from Peruvian scenery, blending clevated tones and terms th bathetic emotions and language, inflecting Romantic discourses on ‘he sublime with some of the buzzwords of contemporary discussion (“ove “anc feeling” is taken from Freud’s 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents, But racer than enfolding the reader in a harmonic performance of Peru's _ nsonance with the world and poetry's consonance with political impera- Byes, these dissonances send the reader lurching through a sequence of ashing chords, What at frse sight seemed like a successful meshing, of _ Marxism and indigenism becomes a much more unstable performance of | ameditation on the local and the poet's responsibilty toi, involving ten ‘ons not only between the individual elements of its catalog but also be- fyeen those elements and the poem's overarching tone. If we pay sufficient ‘heed to the charge of those exclamations, they end up ironizing themselves and exhausting our attention; but if we bypass the question of tone, we _ iiss the complications of the poem's “statements.”24 | Invyeduetion Q The Whole, the Part!” 1x5 ‘This quandary, I will suggest, is emblematic of Valleo’s poetry. Hig public. Vallejo alluded to this implicit dialogue through his evision writing requires that we pay inordinate attention not only to the cone — i felirica y magnética.” In its frst version, the ine *Paquidermos en tents of poems but also to their form and tone, and to the possible dis: Seoxa cuando pasan” (Pachyderms in prose when passing) stood alone, harmonies between them; and these disharmonies offer a much richer icite ve sion adds “y en verso cuando paranse” (and in po- and more demanding image of the relation between the poet, his sub- ‘aywhen standing still; my trans.). If prose walks alongside history, jects and objects, and history. Vallejo’s poems, as I argue throughout poetey attempts C0 interrupt it—resisting the march of history, yet stil this book, never cease to reach toward their surrounding situations, but toagciously inscribed within it. at the same time they incessantly question the reach of poetry, and they § —_-Wallejo wrote throughout his career from a position of marginaity resist offering compensatory aesthetic images to counterbalance the Wie “rst in a Peruvian context that tended to sideline poetry in favor of more lence of their social environments; his poems are always more attentive esesive prose and later 26 a Latin American in Paris, writing newspa- to parts than to wholes, to broken metonymies than to integrative meta “per chronicles in Spanish with three different audiences in mind—Pero: pphors. While this might seem a primarily aesthetic question, itis related tian readers at home, his avant-garde contemporaries in Paris, and the ‘© much larger questions of political representation. In his early poetey, jan on the steet. This triptych performance, coupled with the radical as [ argue in chapters 2 and 3, Vallejo relentlessly breaks discourses and the figure of Charlie Chaplin Buropean and Latin American practices of fragmented representations _— My fifth chapter, “Literature Under Pressure,” studies Vallejo’s displaying no nostalgia for wholeness, Trilce proposes a peculiar poet — wide-ranging journalistic articles, written from Paris for newspapers in ies of matter that condenses a new kind of lyric investment in history era between 1923 and 1930. These articles offer critical reflections on as well as an oblique inscription of history inthe lyric, The connection ‘modernity and its explanatory discourses, unveiling the breakdown of to history appears on one level through the representation of even the physical and linguistic communication across classes, races, cultures, most humdrum or grotesque of bodily activities, which finds important and nations within a rapidly transforming geopolitical scene. Lacking20 | Inteodverion “The Whole, the Partl™ | 28 the means and the language skils to participate fully in cosmopotig, culeuee, Vallejo inhabited Paris as an anti-flaneur, using his chronic to foreground the material bases of cultural and political praxis thag fe wha laie 1937. If Vallejo’s prose insisted on taking note of the denied a variety of potential participants—himsef incladed—full acca Se underpinnings and exclusions of culture, his poetry seat to modernity; his prose writings thus expose the underbelly of what we. Hos economics to subjectivity, emphatically focusing on the place of tend to think of as the apotheosis of transnational modernism in ine e ndividual within collectivities. Itthereby offers a eritique of modern war Paris, demanding that we consider its submerged layers alongside. Gcal modes but also of systems of civil discourse, which attempted its surface floucishes. Finding himself excluded from the Parisian feays, organize individuals into productive politcal bodies while canceling Vallejo produces parodic ethnographic reports on international modes: ridual needs and desires, And while parodying these nonlyric nity, revealing the pressures placed on both bodies and languages by ¢s, Vallejo undercuts the presumptions of poetry itself, resisting interwar geopolitics and by cultural and social station Teinpraton to offer facile representations of modernity’s mass sub- This chapter charts the ways in which Vallejo shifs from speak Eoin artempting to make room for the bodies and voices of his as a Peruvian and/or Latin American viewing Paris and broader inter low modern men, Vallejo also registers his anxiety over the potential national culture and politics from the outside, to a series of temporary sure of the lyric voices this late poetry offers a relentlessly self-critical affiliations with oppositional models of culeure: black theater in Parl ysis ofthe possibilities of lyric engagement, without entirely cancel- Soviee experiments, and the common passerby or transerint, [trace ing out the category or possibilities of poetry. And it does al chis with ‘igeagging commentary on the semiotics of modernity and its structus $= yemnackably light but also formally complex touch, in the interminable ing discourses, a commentary that provides a crucial counterpart ta © gad chaotic lists that tend to structure these late pocms, which are more writings by the Frankfurt school and by the surrealists; Vallejo’s refle terogencous and often flat-out funnier than critics have sugested. tions on fashion, sport, scence, cheater, and film cut theit way through Walleo's model in this respect, I argue, was not contemporary poetry international modern culture from outside and from below. His en fim, and his teeming, haywire poems draw insistently on the latter’ tigue, T atgue, takes place not juse through content but also through: ual techniques of montage and slapstick. form. Parodically mimicking the journalistic modes of the period “Folded into Poemas bumanos isthe self-contained Spanish Civil War which knitted together all aspects of the modem to provide an image & sequence Espaa, aparta de mi este elie, written in the last three months of interlocking coherence, Vallejo's chronicles press the jagedness of 4 gfa37 its composition alternated with tha of poems which remained montage into the service of ironic contrast; his virwally filmic writings § past of the larger volume. Poemas humantos and Espatia, aparta de mi set clashing images from the modern scene alongside one another to “gate liz have always been teeated in isolation, duc to the apparent uni- reveal the divergent ways in which urban modernity is experienced by ersalism of the first and the radically historical and Jocated utterances Po 8, composed sporadicall sively titled collection Poems bumanos, composed sporadically He egacs to 1936 and completed ina final burst of poctic cir £e subjects from different classes and cultures. It is unsurprising, then, that ‘ef the second. Nonetheless, the unusually careful dating of each com- Vallejo should have found one of the only possibilities of redemption in “aston (Vallejo sometimes produced a poem for each collection on a silent fim: in the playful movements of Chaplin, and in the interplay bee ie day) signals a conscious experimentation with different forms of ‘sven different filmic techniques, he locaved glimmers of new represea- lyric nat only does Vallejo unexpectedly return to poetry in order to tational practices, with the potential to reach across classes and cultures ‘gage with contemporary historical events, but in that return, he maps to produce a critical spectator—and ultimately an actor or agent—of ‘wo critically divergent modes of poetry's engagement with history the modern 4 ‘Tiherefore consider the two collections in their interrelations, exploring Vallcjo’s exile in the capital of avantgarde culture undercut his own _§ their new configurations of bodies and voices in contingent connection avant-garde leanings, moving him toward an awareness of the need © specific historical moments, and tracing the interplay of aesthetics for communication, critique, empathy, and resistance—concerns that ‘nd politics in Vallejo's evolving sense of the reach of the lyric. threw the notion of poetry's reach into crisis, My sixth chapter, “Make ‘This late poctry pushes Vallejo’s carlier contrast between metaphor ing Poetry History,” examines Vallejo’s posthumously published and and metonymy into a reflection on politics and the material bases of| Inzodaction modern collective life; his play with fragmented bodies issues into large-scale commentary on the stration of the body politic, and on strivings of language within it to articulate new possibilities of indy i vidual and collective utterance. At the same time, Expafta, aparta de my | hyderms in Poetry and Prose este caliz sets the utterances of the poet against both the incommenstirgs bility of a critical geopolitical juncture and the popular articulations gf struggling bodies in the Spanish Civil War, implicitly repeating Fried ‘en prosa cuando pasan, rich Holderlin’s question, “what are poets for in a time of dearth eerie ‘This question, I suggest, subtends Vallejo’s entire body of work, and jpg. varying, articulations—organized around the place of bodies and | guage in poctcy—makes him a crucial addition to our understanding a the modern lyri. terms im prose when passing by, verse when standing silt erRAITS OF THE ARTIST jo’s poetry, from the earliest to the latest, contains unflinching ts of an artist struggling with his own body and language, with esponsibility to the figures and landscapes that surround him, with the history of poetry. Yer for all this self-iguration, we have Fy litle sense of what Vallejo the man was like. There i, as yet, no tative biography." Accounts by Juan Espejo Asturrizaga and sr Orrego focus only on Vallejo’s Peruvian years (1892-1925) Domingo Cordoba Vargas, Emesto More, and Armando Bazin glimpses of Vallejo during their short associations with him in 5 but their nacratives suffer from the blindnesses of hindsight, they feequently contradict one another as regards dates. Vallejo’s fow Georgette’s voluble account of his later years in Paris—writ- # expressly to underline his political commitment but more covertly eoitradict other versions—is riddled with errors, overstatement, ‘omissions. And Vallejo rarely appears in memoirs by or about s-kinown figures he associated with in France and Spain, such as Neruda, Rafael Alberti, or Federico Garcfa Lorca. Meanwhile, alljo's own utterances in poetry and prose are so shifty and frag f) a8 to give us only very momentary glimpses of biographical eis behind the writing—intermittent references to real names and , often attached to unlikely details (such as the claim, in Trilee