Surrealism in Latin American Literature Searching for Breton’S Ghost
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 Surrealism in Latin American Literature Searching for Breton’s Ghost Melanie Nicholson Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 surrealism in latin american literature Copyright © Melanie Nicholson, 2013. All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 28779- 3 Xavier Villaurrutia, “Nocturne: The Statue,” in Nostalgia for Death: Poetry by Xavier Viallaurrutia & Hieroglyphs of Desire: A Critical Study of Villaurrutia by Octavio Paz. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpres.org. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Nicholson, Melanie, 1955– Surrealism in Latin American literature: searching for Breton’s ghost / Melanie Nicholson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 1- 137- 28779- 3 (alk. paper) 1. Literature, Experimental— Latin America. 2. Surrealism (Literature)— Latin America. 3. Spanish American literature— 20th century— History and criticism. 4. Breton, André, 1896– 1966— Influence. 5. Avant- garde (Aesthetics)— Latin America. I. Title. PQ7082.E97N53 2013 860.9’980904— dc23 2012029347 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: January 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Part I: Contexts and Contours 1 Surrealism Is Dead, ¡Viva el Surrealismo! 15 2 The Latin American Connection 31 Part II: The Emergence of Surrealism in Latin American Literature, 1928–1950 3 Argentina’s Pioneer Surrealists 47 4 Neruda and Anti- Neruda: Chile’s Mandrágora Poets 59 5 Peru: The Surrealist Space between Mariátegui and Vallejo 77 6 The Two Faces of Early Surrealism in Mexico 103 Part III: A Surrealism of One’s Own, 1950– 1980 7 The Argentine Surrealist Journals 135 8 “Another Ship Must Be Launched”: Surrealism in Argentine Poetry, 1950– 1970 151 9 Chile: The Avatars and the Antagonists of La Mandrágora 175 10 Octavio Paz: Surrealism’s Favorite Son 203 Conclusion: “Like a River” 227 Notes 235 Works Cited 245 Index 257 Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 Introduction n 1964, Roger Shattuck wrote in his introduction to Maurice Nadeau’s now- classic history of surrealism, “I happen to believe that real importance Iattaches to the estimate we now make of surrealism. Like progressive educa- tion and pacifism, it lies close to the center of our immediate heritage; we ignore these matters at our own peril” (12). Yet in the years following this pronounce- ment, surrealism was variously ignored, regarded as a historical oddity, or at best celebrated for its contributions to culture. Recently, however, surrealism has reemerged as a nexus of tremendous scholarly interest, both in literature and in the visual arts. As one prominent art critic claims, “surrealism has returned with a vengeance” (Foster xi). This revival is evidenced in such publications as Sidra Stich’s Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art (1990), Hal Foster’s Compulsive Beauty (1993), Martica Sawin’s Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (1997), Whitney Chadwick’s edited volume Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self- Representation (1998), Mary Ann Caws’s Surrealist Painters and Poets (2001), Gérard Durozoi’s monumental tome History of the Surrealist Movement (reedited in 2002), and Johanna Malt’s Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics (2004), to name only a few. In 2001, Lon- don’s Tate Gallery organized an extensive collection of surrealist works called “Surrealism: Desire Unbound,” representing both the visual and the written arts; this exhibition was moved to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001.1 Although these studies and exhibitions take the Continental surrealist movement of the 1920s as their point of departure, they also document trends in later art and literature that demonstrate significant surrealist influence in many countries and across many artistic and literary genres. There has been a growing recognition, in other words, that the end of the historical surrealist movement by no means signified the end of surrealist- inspired expression. I felt compelled to write Breton’s Ghost because, as Michael Benedikt suggests, “per- haps what Surrealism accomplished was to do more than merely persist, existing finally— as all literary movements must truly exist to survive— in terms of its impact on subsequent literature everywhere” (xxviii). Fundamental to any contemporary appraisal of surrealism is the fact that the French movement of the 1920s bore seeds before it died, and that those Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 2 ● Surrealism in Latin American Literature seeds were carried aloft by many winds. Wallace Fowlie wrote in 1960 that “an historical study of surrealism makes it out to be anti- literary and anti- poetical. Yet today it seems to us the founder of a new literature and a new poetry. Born in Paris and nurtured by approximately ten men, it spread in all directions and has influenced men everywhere directly or indirectly” (202). There was some- thing about surrealism’s nondualistic conception of the world, about its radical rebellion against rigidities of many kinds, about its call to revive the collective as well as the individual imagination that could still excite artists and poets late into the twentieth century. I suspect that this is not a simple question of the persistence of a body of aes- thetic principles, but rather one of surrealism’s adaptability to developments in contemporary Western thought and popular culture. The points of convergence are numerous. In attempting to map those points, we might begin with René de Costa’s observation (a propos of Pablo Neruda’s poetry) that “surrealism has left us with an appreciation for the suggestive power of discontinuous discourse” (Poetry 4). This mode of discontinuous discourse (approached in related but distinct ways by Anglo- American modernist writers) is now commonplace not only in literature but in photography, film, painting, and aspects of popular culture such as advertising. From there, we could recall James Clifford’s definition of surrealism as “an aesthetic that values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions— that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domain of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious” (118). Clifford’s essay on what he terms “ethnographic surrealism” stresses the surrealist princi- ple of defamiliarization—that is, of making the familiar strange— as one of the foundational elements of twentieth-century anthropology. He goes as far as to suggest that surrealism, in its practice of “taking culture seriously, as a contested reality,” in fact set the stage for what has become the modern French scholarly tradition (121). Finally, Clifford posits a connection between surrealism and Third World modernism, a theoretical thread that leads from 1920s France into the anticolonial or postcolonial discourse of figures such as Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Octavio Paz (Mexico), and Alejo Carpentier (Cuba) (127). To follow this thread even further, arguments can be made for surrealism as a precursor to postmodernism. The postmodern fascination with hybridity, for example, is prefigured in the principle of the juxtaposition of unrelated elements, popularized by the surrealist practice of montage or collage. The art historian Robert Bolton observes that “surrealism, having not long ago been dismissed as a decadent, self- indulgent art, has recently been undergoing a reevaluation”; he goes on to claim that the movement’s experimentation with defamiliarization “is now considered by some to be a forerunner of the postmodernist mentality, particularly as it addresses questions of linguistic shifts, figurative language, and Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 Copyrighted material – 9781137287793 Introduction ● 3 the like” (51). Matei Calinescu argues that the Continental avant-garde, and particularly Dada and surrealism, prefigures several “postmodernist notes,” including antielitism, antiauthoritarianism, gratuitousness, anarchy, nihilism, and the idea of chance (143). European theorists from Foucault to Kristeva to Derrida and Lacan have all drawn at some point from the deep well of surreal- ist thought: according to Margaret Cohen, “High surrealism must be included as an intellectual pressure to which the French theoretical avant- garde [of the 1960s and 1970s] responded” (12).2 Taking all these “traces” into account, we can surmise that surrealism’s survival in varied guises late into the twen- tieth century has much to do with its very adaptability— its ability