The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde Ultraísmo

The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde <UN> Avant-Garde Critical Studies Founding Editors Ferd Drijkoningen† Klaus Beekman Series Editors Hubert van den Berg Günter Berghaus Sascha Bru Geert Buelens International Advisory Board Henri Béhar – Sophie Berrebi – Ralf Grüttemeier – Hilde Heynen – Leigh Landy – Ben Rebel – Jan de Vries – Willem G. Weststeijn volume 37 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/agcs <UN> The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde Ultraísmo & Estridentismo, 1918–1927 Claudio Palomares-Salas leiden | boston <UN> Cover illustration: Madrid, Spain, 1910, reproduced with kind permission of Harvard Map Collection, Harvard College Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Palomares-Salas, Claudio, author. Title: The spatiality of the Hispanic avant-garde : ultraísmo & estridentismo, 1918-1927 / Claudio Palomares-Salas. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2020] | Series: Avant-garde critical studies, 1387-3008 ; volume 37 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020009942 (print) | LCCN 2020009943 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004406766 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004406773 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Spanish poetry--20th century--History and criticism. | Latin American poetry--20th century--History and criticism. | Space and time in art. | Space and time in literature. | Ultraism (Literary movement) | Estridentismo (Art movement) | Estridentismo (Literary movement) | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)--Spain--History--20th century. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)--Latin America--History--20th century. Classification: LCC PQ6085 P277 2020 (print) | LCC PQ6085 (ebook) | DDC 861/.609--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009942 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009943 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1387-3008 ISBN 978-90-04-40676-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-40677-3 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. <UN> Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Illustrations xi Introduction: Spatiality and the Hispanic Avant-Garde 1 1 Space, Place, and the Avant-Garde 3 2 The Perspective of Experience 7 3 Representing Space 10 4 The Hispanic Transatlantic Avant-Garde 14 5 Transatlantic Scholarship 23 6 Itinerary 28 1 Cities 30 1 Madrid 33 2 Mexico City 40 3 Skyscrapers 49 4 The Eiffel Tower 55 5 The Viaduct 62 6 Electrical Wiring 70 2 Cafés 75 1 El Colonial and Pombo 77 2 Café de Nadie 81 3 Doors 86 4 Windows 89 5 Tables 93 6 Mirrors 100 3 Mobile Spaces 106 1 Trams 106 2 Automobiles 113 3 Airplanes 120 4 Pilots 124 5 Ships 128 4 The Ultraísta Sea 136 1 Borges’s Sea 140 2 Adriano del Valle’s Foam 142 <UN> viii Contents 3 Humberto Rivas’s Ocean 146 4 Guillermo de Torre’s High Tide 150 5 Harbours 153 6 Cathedrals 156 Conclusion 162 Bibliography 165 Index 189 <UN> Introduction Spatiality and the Hispanic Avant-Garde In his long war-poem “Ecuatorial” (Equatorial, 1918), a tour of multiple spaces and times, Vicente Huidobro wrote: “To leave / And then from far away / To watch the windows burning /And the shadows crossing the mirrors.”1 The drive of the Hispanic avant-garde to leave aimed to reconfigure European and Latin American geographies. The late 1910s and early 1920s was a period in which both Latin American nations and Spain were desperately trying to map themselves. National discourses constrained their complex spatial and historical realities through social, cultural, and aesthetic agendas that aimed to build both a local and a cosmopolitan identity. The Hispanic vanguards appeared at a moment in which Latin American writers and artists wanted, apparently, to avoid any as- sociation with the former colonizer and in which their Spanish counterparts were, with some exceptions, mostly ignoring the former colonies. The result was a sense of disjunction, a tension resulting from trying to belong to an imag- ined modern space produced in Paris or New York while submitting to the increasing aesthetic obligations of localism. All this, while simultaneously trying to represent a personal and intimate experience of space that had nothing to do with political agendas. This tension is best exemplified in Manuel Maples Arce’s “Prisma” (Prism, 1922), the poem that opens the collection Andamios interiores (Interior Scaffoldings, 1922), the first collection of avant-garde poetry produced in Mexico, which for many in the Hispanic world was the first glimpse of Estri- dentismo. The well-known first lines are a powerful declaration that in a way summarizes the Hispanic vanguard’s new spatiality: “I am a dead point in the middle of the hour/ equidistant to the castaway scream of a star.”2 “Prisma” cre- ates a floating geography that does not relate to any precise location other than “the city.” A typical Estridentista case, the poem mixes amorous and social themes with modern spaces and objects producing an ambiguity that makes the reader hesitate between a desire to dwell (in the city, in the lover, in the 1 “Partir / Y de allá lejos / Mirar las ventanas encendidas / Y las sombras que cruzan los espejos.” El espejo de agua y Ecuatorial. Santiago: Pequeño Dios Editores, 2011: 34. Translation by David M. Guss, The Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro. Ed. David M. Guss (New York: New Direc- tions Pub. Corp, 1981): 31. 2 “Yo soy un punto muerto en medio de la hora / equidistante al grito náufrago de una estrella.” Andamios interiores. Poemas radiográficos (México: Editorial Cultura, 1922: n.p.). Reprinted in Las semillas del tiempo: Obra poética 1919–1980 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981): 35. My translation. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, �� | doi:10.1163/9789004406773_00� <UN> 2 Introduction land) and a desire to leave. The central idea of those first lines suggests fixity, “I am a dead point,” and a temporal location, “in the middle of the hour.” We even receive some spatial coordinates “equidistant to the castaway scream of a star.” The lines provide the elements of space, but they do not help to orient us—on the contrary, they confuse us and create an increasing feeling of being lost. The poem, nonetheless, provides a sense of place precisely through its fractured spatiality. Broken spaces, it could be argued, were the place of the Hispanic vanguards, their unstable comfort zone, which allowed them to get a sense of con- nection in an increasingly dislocated territory. While reading a poem like “Pris- ma,” thus, we know we are entering a familiar location, that of the fragmented territories of modernity. To cross or not to cross? That was the question Ultraístas and Estridentistas grappled with in the late 1910s and early 1920s in cities like Madrid and Mexico City. This book explores the changing spatial realities that members of the His- panic avant-garde inhabited and their artistic and literary responses to them. Their real and imaginary cities, cafés, trams, automobiles, planes, and transatlantic ships trace a creative journey caught between the cosmopolitan desire to innovate and the provincial pull to remain still. Ultraístas and Estridentistas crossed and did not cross; they produced a body of work full of unresolvable tensions between place (the nation, the town, love, tradition, attachment, localism, and familiarity) and space (freedom, cosmopolitanism, and experi- mentation). This tension situates the Hispanic avant-garde within ambiguous geographical and aesthetic grounds; it was both central and marginal in rela- tion to modernity. Poets and painters crossed the ocean and paradoxically also remained anchored in the harbour, looking at themselves in plural mirrors, joining tertulias in the café, and seeing the transatlantic ships go by. Key to understanding the tensions and contradictions present in the works studied here is their transatlantic nature. If the transatlantic spatial perspective has gained force in the past decades, it is because a new generation of scholars has refused the idea of the exceptionality of Europe or Latin America and has rather accepted the self-evident fact of their unavoidable historical transculturations. With one foot in each continent, the Spanish-speaking vanguards (carrying their readings, manifestos, images, aesthetic ideals, and artistic expectations) covered and aestheticized an immense territory defined by the Atlantic. The spatial perspective is a useful critical tool that can shed new light on the study of modernity, not as a site-specific phenomenon, but as a transnational and transatlantic one. Using the theoretical framework of spatiality, this study reveals the extent to which transatlantic cultural exchange shaped the Hispanic avant-garde. Hopefully, it

Load more