The Intimacy of Humankind: Convergences and Divergences of Love in Latin American Poetry 1950- 1990
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THE INTIMACY OF HUMANKIND: CONVERGENCES AND DIVERGENCES OF LOVE IN LATIN AMERICAN POETRY 1950- 1990 by Barbara Kelly Fraser M.A. The University of Victoria, 2007 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Hispanic Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) February 2014 © Barbara Kelly Fraser, 2014 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the interchange between individual and social love, eros and philadelphos, in the writings of four Latin American poets of the Cold War era: Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal, Gioconda Belli, and Raúl Zurita. Chronologically, I frame this work beginning with Neruda’s return to writing love poetry in the early 1950s, up until the breakdown of collectivist movements in the late 1980s with the expansion of capitalism and the return to democracy in the Southern Cone and in parts of Central America. Geographically, I focus on two countries that have had democratic revolutions in the twentieth century in which literature has played a social role: Chile and Nicaragua. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories on Romanticism and territorialization, I establish several major points of divergence between eros and philadelphos and then examine the ways each poet manages these differences in their attempt to create a committed poetry oriented towards expressing collective realities and promoting social change. ii PREFACE This dissertation is original, independent, unpublished work by Barbara Kelly Fraser. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .......................................................................................................... ii Preface .......................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents .......................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements........................................................................................ v Dedication ..................................................................................................... vi Introduction .................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. Pablo Neruda and the Conversion of Love ................................ 43 Chapter 2. Ernesto Cardenal and the Tao of Love ...................................... 96 Chapter 3. Gioconda Belli and the Liberation of Love ............................. 151 Chapter 4. Raúl Zurita and the Apocalypse of Love ................................. 201 Conclusion. The Multiplicity of Love ....................................................... 253 Works Cited ............................................................................................... 261 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I acknowledge the support of my committee members, Rita de Grandis and Kim Beauchesne who have provided both insightful readings and constant encouragement. I especially acknowledge my advisor Jon Beasley-Murray for his dedication, time, and counsel, as well as for inspiring me to take this analysis in some rather unorthodox directions. You have helped me to find a fresh approach to this oldest of topics, and also encouraged me to keep going when I felt like giving up. I thank my husband Mauricio Valencia for taking the kids to the park so many times. And my parents, for their endless support—mostly financial, sometimes moral. v DEDICATION A Blanca Isabel y Elías. A vos mi gran amor, la otra mitad de mi universo. Y a Ti, entre los doctores vi INTRODUCTION Y pienso que la poesía es una acción pasajera o solemne en que entran por parejas medidas la soledad y la solidaridad, el sentimiento y la acción, la intimidad de uno mismo, la intimidad del hombre y la secreta revelación de la naturaleza. Y pienso con no menor fe que todo está sostenido—el hombre y su sombra, el hombre y su actitud, el hombre y su poesía en una comunidad cada vez más extensa. (Neruda, “Towards the Splendid City: Nobel Lecture”) In Pablo Neruda and the US Culture Market, Teresa Longo uses the term “wonder- bread” to describe what emerges as Neruda’s sensual late period poetry is mediated through the enthusiasm of English-speaking American audiences in the 1990s. Neruda experienced a surge in popularity thanks to mass-media exposure that followed the 1995 academy award win for Michael Radford’s film, Il postino. Played by French actor Philippe Noiret, the poet is one of the film’s main protagonists, and his love poems are cited by various characters throughout and given a prominent role in the plot. Subsequently, Neruda’s name and selected lines of his verse began appearing in a wide variety of television programs and movies including The Simpsons, Ellen, Patch Adams as well as the Broadway musical Rent! The film’s success also led to a flood of publications of anthologies, translations, and sound-recordings of romantic verse. Bruce Dean Willis notes that for the millennial reader trapped in the malaise of urban sprawl, ubiquitous mass-media, and global warming, Neruda’s poems—anchored to nature and to expressions of eros and passion—evoke a kind of pastoral “Golden age” of (supposed) emotional authenticity (93). The lover-Neruda of Il postino and subsequent mass-market publications, appearing just as the USA became the world’s sole superpower, is in Longo’s terms a “romanticized, de-politicized, pre-packaged” version of the poet, rebranded for North American audiences and conveniently stripped of any of his discomfiting politics. This version of Neruda brings to the North American consumer 1 “love,” “nourishment,” and “healing” for the ideological and social divides that plagued the country at the turn of the millennium: Through the poetry itself and to an even greater extent, through the packaging of the poetry, this Neruda promotes a vision of communion, community, hope and wonder. The message is clear: a romanticized Neruda can heal the divided nation; an essentialized Latin America exists to serve and nourish the United States. (xvii) It is no coincidence that Longo attributes the poet’s “healing properties” to the region as a whole. Latin America at the turn of the millennium was, for the US consumer, the land of Like Water for Chocolate: a transnational signifier for sensual delight, wonder, and emotional authenticity. At the same time as the “Latin Craze” made Salsa-inflected synth-pop peppered with first-grade Spanish expressions a ubiquitous presence on radio and music television, Latin American writers and artists became “all the rage” among both middlebrow and academic cultural consumers as the mass media rendered literary works and historical biographies into easily digestible bits of escapism. Oprah Winfrey’s book club, which reached the apogee of its popularity in the year 2000, featured Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, introducing the Colombian writer’s work to middle America. Hollywood brought to the screen novels by Isabel Allende, Sandra Cisneros, and Julia Álvarez. In 2003, Julie Taymor turned Frida Kahlo’s memoirs outlining the artist’s tormented marriage and revolutionary politics into an Oscar- nominated film starring Salma Hayek. This, along with Madonna’s interest in her work, led to a surge in popularity for the Mexican painter’s images of self-immolation. This fascination with all things Latin American is not a new phenomenon. Jon Beasley-Murray identifies a complex and long-standing exchange between “Western rationalism” and “Latin affect” in which the West—referring both to Europe and Anglo- 2 North America—accumulates raw commodities and discursive materials charged with “affective energy” that range from stimulant monocultures such as coffee, coca, chocolate, sugar, and tobacco to marketable experiences of titillation, both vicarious and direct, such as “travelers’ tales describing cannibals,” “magic realism,” “salsa,” “package tours,” and “commodified sexuality” (129). The relationship between North and South, he argues, has long involved an “exchange of consumer goods” closely intertwined with “a no-less material affective economy, also often structured by a distinction between the raw and the refined” (129). Latin America thus “marks the Western imagination with a particular intensity. And the figures who stand in for the region are distinguished by their affective charge” (130). Beasley-Murray thus places Longo’s turn-of-the-millennium fascination with Neruda within a broader context, connecting the neoliberal to the colonial, the modern “tourist gaze” to the “orientalism” of the pre-modern explorer. What interests me in particular is some of the affective “matter” that has been so refined in the modern North American consciousness. In spite of having been created many decades earlier and in diverse artistic and socio-historical contexts, the artistic works that achieved commercial success at the turn of the millennium did so by exploiting and refining for North American audiences two intensely affective experiences: eroticism and revolutionary political engagement, combining the two as forms of “authentic passion,” one singular, the other collective. To take another example: Isabel Allende’s novels La casa de los espíritus and De amor y de sombra, both written in the 1980s and made into moderately successful Hollywood movies, center around passionate erotic relationships cast against a backdrop of human catastrophe in the form of a totalitarian regime using torture and disappearance