In Search of Elysium: Spanish Poetry of Difference at the Dawn of the 21St

In Search of Elysium: Spanish Poetry of Difference at the Dawn of the 21st Century David Gómez-Cambronero Madrid April 2016 MA of Arts in Spanish, The Ohio State Univeristy June 2010. A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Comittee Chair: Maria Paz Moreno, Ph.D. 2016 i Abstract This work both reconstructs and demystifies Spain’s poetic literary field at the dawn of the 21st century, during which a cultural conflict brewed between the centralized and hegemonic “poets of experience” and the marginalized and counter-hegemonic “poets of difference”. Surging quickly to national notoriety and canonicity after the publication of their 1982 manifesto, the immense literary and social influence of the poets of experience began to fall out of favor by the early 1990s. This cultural ebbing allowed for the emergence of a new group, the poets of difference, who sought for an innovative, individualistic, aesthetic and their own place in the rich lineage of Spanish poetry. By employing the sociocultural theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Itamar Even-Zohar, this work examines the social discourses and mechanisms of this particular ethos in order to bring light to the heterodox poets of difference as portrayed through the works of Federico Gallego Ripoll and Juan Carlos Mestre. ii iii Abstract 0. A Renaissance of Differences: Counter Hegemony in Late 20th Century Spanish Poetry……1 1. Bourdieu and Even-Zohar: A Dualistic Approach to Sociocultural Theory…………………..17 1.1. Bourdieu’s Field Theory: Thinking Tools………………………………………...…….21 1.2. Even-Zohar: Polysystem………………………………………...……………………....34 1.3. Ancillary Theories...…………………………………………………..………...………43 2. Poetry of Experience: Rise to Literary Hegemony……………………………………………48 2.1 From La otra sentimentalidad to Cultural Prominence………………………………….48 2.2 Legitimation, Symbolic Violence and the appearance of the other……………………...62 3. Poetry of Difference: Emergence and Dissonance……………………………………………73 3.1. Of Différance and Difference………………………………………………………….. 73 3.2. Democratic Transition and New Poetic Discourses…………………………………......77 3.3. The Poetry of Experience and its dominance during the 1980s and 1990s……………..85 3.4. A Revolution of diferencia……………………………………………………………...88 3.5. The Aftermath of Difference…………………………………………………………..100 3.6. The Poetry of the New Millenium……………………………………………………..109 4. Federico Gallego Ripoll and the Invisible Poet: From Darkness to Light…………………..117 4.1. Formation, Insularity, Disillusionment, Exile and Rebellion………………………….117 4.2. Verses from Barcelona or the Labyrinth of Identity…………………………………...134 4.3. Silence and poetry beside the sea………………………………………………………141 4.4. Embracing the poetic invisibility; conclusions………………………………………...150 5. The difference of Juan Carlos Mestre or Heterodoxy in Orthodoxy………………………...156 5.1. Beginnings and marginality……………………………………………………………156 iv 5.2. The formative years: The familiar and the fantastic…………………………………...169 5.3. Chile and revolution……………………………………………………………………173 5.4. Social awakening: Rome, La tumba de Keats and the 1990s………………………….177 5.5. Prominence, liberty and crisis in the new millennium…………………………………182 5.6. From marginal heterodoxy to marginal orthodoxy…………………………………….194 6. Conclusion: The Fate of the Avant-garde in Contemporary Spanish Poetics……………….198 7. Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………210 v 0. A Renaissance of Differences: Counter Hegemony in Late 20th Century Spanish Poetry Our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation. – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Thus begins this tale, one of struggles and strife between the old and the new, a battle within the immanent transcendental geist of time, space, society and culture, and whose only possible resolution is, precisely, synthetic (r)evolution. In lieu of other possible introductions, accept then this Archimedean point of reference: the problem being documented is one of cultural disparity in the Spanish poetic literary field at the twilight of the 20th century, more specifically the polemic between the centralized hegemonic group known as the poets of experience and the marginalized counter-hegemonic rhyzomatic grouping, the poets of difference. This dialectic has its nascence as early as the public dissemination of the poets of experience’s manifesto titled La otra sentimentalidad (The other sentimentality) in 1982, after which its members consciously and willingly tailored their group’s ideological and aesthetic tendencies to align themselves with key political and cultural systems during the Spanish democratic transition period (post-1975). Under the leadership of the (in)famous Spanish poet Luis García Montero, the poets of experience grew to command a supreme and almost inexorable presence in the poetic fields of the 1980s and early 1990s, due to their manipulation of national prize awards and literary venues of publication, and also during this time securing considerable symbolic and economic support from institutions such as the Spanish government and university systems. 1 Thus poetry and the field of Spanish poetics throughout this period would be dominated by the traditional and realist aesthetic of these “poets of experience” –set up as the canonical hegemony– who suppressed and silenced those poets who were not in line with their literary current. This continued until a resistance movement in opposition to their hegemony and centralized position would elicit the birth of a counter hegemonic and marginal movement in the mid-1990s that one could identify as a poetry of independent differences. Although anti- systemic and experimental poetry (that which sustained avant-garde sensibilities) had been practiced on a reduced, latent and local scale throughout the zenith period of the poets of experience, it was not until 1994 that a group of poets rallied as a single voice in direct opposition to what they saw as an oppressive literary hegemony that had been purposely stifling new poetic tendencies in order to retain control over the systems of power and symbolic capital. Ratifying their own manifesto called the Manifiesto de Granada (Manifesto of Granada), these poets publicly denounced the poetry of experience and its members, labeling them as conservative, non-progressive, corrupt, manipulative and clone-like. They marshaled instead for a different aesthetic, one that had no clear center or fixed signifiers, where each poet was free to express themselves as they wished and, moreover, that this lack of adherence to any fixed group and an inherent “otherness” would not mean the automatic devaluation of their poetic works (as had previously been the case). Although, at the time, their efforts received strong backlash from critics and public alike, their message –poetic difference from the status quo of the poets of experience– would soon resonate and be upheld throughout the Spanish nation and its numerous literary and poetic circles, prompting an aesthetic and ideological “underground” renaissance and resistance in what would become known as the década de la diferencia (decade of difference). It was therefore during the late 1990s and early 2 2000s that an ideological clash for hierarchal power occurred between the mostly homogenized and canonized poets of experience and the culturally marginalized and fragmented poets of difference, as each of its members fought for the liberty of their own voice, individual mode of expression and, moreover, heterogeneity within the contemporary field of poetry. Even while the poets of difference labored for artistic freedom from the literary margins, the poets of experience would not yield their hold on power until well into the early- mid 2000s. Therefore, the tale of the trials and tribulations of the poets of difference and their search for individualistic expression is one that has unfortunately still received only a modicum of critical attention and documentation (alongside accordingly little mind given to understanding their difference as a fractured gestalt), and even less so in languages and institutions outside of Spain. This is where this investigation hopes to intervene and lay bare the mechanisms of the poetic fields of this contemporary era in question and demonstrate the influence that the “poets of difference” had in shaping the literary and poetic history of contemporary Spain, despite their marginalized positions and disparate poetics. To achieve this end, two specific poets have been selected to function as iconic exemplars of the many diverse and dencentralized streams of “difference” and how they formed part of and were influenced by this literary clash; these are Federico Gallego Ripoll and Juan Carlos Mestre. The selection of these two particular poets of difference mainly revolves around the following points, which they generally share in common: 1. their inclusion in literary fields that are understood to be divergent from the centers of power, 2. diversity of geographic locations which aid in identifying multiple poetic nexuses of difference, 3. hosting unique and invididual aesthetic styles which break from canonical tradition, 4. inclusion in anthologies which are known to be counter-hegemonic, 5. respectably

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