Monuments of Culture and the Cult of the Monument
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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts MONUMENTS OF CULTURE AND THE CULT OF THE MONUMENT A Dissertation in Comparative Literature by Renae Mitchell © 2013 Renae L. Mitchell Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2013 DOCTORAL COMMITTEE PAGE The dissertation of Renae L. Mitchell was reviewed and approved* by the following: Djelal Kadir Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature Dissertation Adviser and Chair of Committee Thomas O. Beebee Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature and German Julia Cuervo-Hewitt Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Sean X. Goudie Associate Professor of English Caroline D. Eckhardt Professor of Comparative Literature and English Head of the Department of Comparative Literature *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. Abstract By evaluating instances of creative critiques and interrogations of the monument, this study seeks to demonstrate how commemorations of a valorized European past are constructions of an originary moment that elide the complexities of Conquest and its attendant legacy of transculturation and miscegenation in the Americas. This project explores the ways in which the American monument subverts popular resistance by embodying master narratives for a people, and focuses on the ideological manifestations of the monument through the works of writers who figure prominently, one could say, monumentally, in the Americas. I trace this phenomenon of alienating monumentalism in various cultural productions—not only books, but sculpture, earthworks, and other artifacts — examining the formation of asymmetrical cultural relations embodied by these products, especially as they continue to influence contemporary American narrative and art. The examination of certain American poets as they confront or exemplify possibilities and limitations of monuments provides a means to observe how these “culturalizations” of memory function within contemporary America. This thesis examines the role of the monument in Saint-John Perse’s Anabase (1924), Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), Octavio Paz’s Piedra de Sol (1957), and Pablo Neruda’s Canto general (1950). These writers, as international figures, present their artwork as “documents” of American reality, making them particularly apposite for this project. Each of these poets has written in a form that may be considered “monumental,” whether in the form of epic, agoric or Anacreontic (as opposed to lyrical) cantos, or by the appropriation of mythological subjects. These writers also happen to be winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, significant because such Nobel selections not infrequently prove to be monumental and monumentalizing of their laureates. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ vi Introduction: Texts and Monuments ..............................................................................1 Monumental (Mal)Functions ....................................................................................5 Monumental As Formations of National Identity .....................................................9 American Monumentalism ..................................................................................... 16 Epic Monuments ..................................................................................................... 20 An Interrogation of Monumentalism ...................................................................... 30 Chapter 1 Novel Epic Endeavors: Saint-John Perse, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Epitaphic Storyteller ...................................................... 41 Invasion of a Poet-Conqueror: An Exegesis ........................................................... 47 Genealogy and Monumental Invasion .................................................................... 50 Unearthing the Epic Poet: History, Memory, and Collective Re-cognition .......... 58 Walter Benjamin, Death, and Frozen History ........................................................ 68 Perse and a Neo-classical Tradition ........................................................................ 79 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 90 Chapter 2 American Counter-Monument: Omeros as “Counter-Epic” ........................ 92 The American Counter-monument ....................................................................... 105 “Derek” and Counter-monumental Reconstruction .............................................. 108 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 130 Chapter 3 Grand Designs: Piedra de Sol and Monumental Journey to Omphalos ...... 137 Landscape, Poetry, and the Sublime ..................................................................... 143 Civitas, Urbanity, and the Ordering of the Landscape .......................................... 149 Mexico and the Poet as Ephemeral Builder .......................................................... 153 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 169 Chapter 4: Material Memory: Pablo Neruda’s Monumental Geology......................... 176 The Forging of an Originary Moment and the Fallacy of Permanence ................ 202 Generative History and Erasure of Identity: Poet as Didact ................................. 215 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 226 Conclusion: American Monumentalism Through an Epic Lens .................................. 229 Appendix ...................................................................................................................... 236 Works Cited ................................................................................................................. 238 vi Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the contribution of my family for helping me become the person I am today. I thank my parents, Ramona del Juárez and Walter Mitchell, who helped me develop resilience to challenges in life. I am grateful to my siblings, Tracy, Julie, and Daniel Mitchell for their love and support as we grew up together. I thank my all-suffering husband, Vitaliy Gyrya, with whose tireless patience and affection this “precarious gait” has born fruit. I am immeasurably grateful to Djelal Kadir for presenting me with an intense and challenging writing schedule, which I was able to adhere to because of his support, encouragement, attention, patience, and prompt feedback. Now, two years after becoming his student, I am proud to call him my academic mentor and friend. Finally, I would like to thank all the people that made graduate life challenging and gratifying: Katherine Hume, Juana Djelal, Mich Nyawalo, Germán Campos-Muñoz, María Luján-Tubio, Dawn Taylor, Sara Marzioli, Brian Haines and the Advanced Applied Fluid Dynamics seminar, Tracey Cummings, Henry Morello, Libba Kelly, Jace Huff, and Matthew Karasek, among so many others. vii “When a famous man dies one tends to remember only the sculpture … I can recall Constantius’s monuments but not his living face, not even those great dark eyes which are to my memory blank spaces cut in marble.” – Julian, Gore Vidal 1 Introduction MONUMENT, n. A structure intended to commemorate something which either needs no commemoration or cannot be commemorated … that is to say, monuments to perpetuate the memory of those who have left no memory. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) Poems serve as powerful and productive sites in which to study the function of monuments. My interest here is centered on the unique context of the Americas, where both the poetic and sculptural monument portrays in form, style, or theme, a depiction of and connection with Native and European origins, origins from which, historically, the populace at large finds itself alienated. Efforts to impose a distinct and creolized national identity seem to aggravate concerns regarding ethnic geneses, which have impelled the scholarly and creative scrutiny of portrayals of memory and supposedly well-defined beginnings embodied in the monument. In the case of the Americas, such literary formations simultaneously embody and challenge the formations of national identity. By evaluating instances of creative critiques, confrontations, and textual analogues of the monument, I seek to demonstrate that commemorations of a valorized European- Indigenous past are constructions of an originary moment that mitigate, if not outright elide the complexities of Conquest and its attendant legacy of transculturation and miscegenation. My project aims to explore in certain poetic texts that have attained to monumental status the ways in which the American monument simultaneously instantiates and interrogates certain master narratives imposed upon a people. I aim to focus on the ideological manifestations of the monument through the works of writers 2 who figure prominently in the Americas and well beyond the Western Hemisphere. My purpose in tracing what I see as the phenomenon of alienating monumentalism in various cultural products—not only books, but sculpture, murals, and other artifacts produced in the Americas —is to expose the formation of asymmetrical cultural relations within these