The Exile Poetry of Juan Gelman, Ferreira Gullar, and Gonzalo Millán
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PARADICTATORIAL NOSTALGIA: THE EXILE POETRY OF JUAN GELMAN, FERREIRA GULLAR, AND GONZALO MILLÁN BY C2009 Omega Sunshine Burckhardt Submitted to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ______________________________ Dr. Jonathan Mayhew, Chairperson ______________________________ Dr. Jill S. Kuhnheim ______________________________ Dr. Paul Sneed ______________________________ Dr. Vicky Unruh ______________________________ Dr. Tamara Falicov Date Defended: 11 September 2009 The Dissertation Committee for Omega Sunshine Burckhardt certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: PARADICTATORIAL NOSTALGIA: THE EXILE POETRY OF JUAN GELMAN, FERREIRA GULLAR, AND GONZALO MILLÁN Committee: ___________________________ Dr. Jonathan Mayhew, Chairperson ___________________________ Dr. Jill S. Kuhnheim ___________________________ Dr. Paul Sneed ___________________________ Dr. Vicky Unruh ___________________________ Dr. Tamara Falicov Date approved: 11 September 2009 ii Acknowledgments This process would not have come to fruition if not for the encouragement of many people. The guidance of my committee members at the University of Kansas has been fundamental to this project: Dr. Jonathan Mayhew, Dr. Jill Kuhnheim, Dr. Paul Sneed, Dr. Vicky Unruh, and Dr. Tamara Falicov. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Michael Doudoroff, whose reading of “Mi prima Agueda” during my first semester as a graduate student inspired my love of poetry. I am indebted to many other faculty members of Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas, as well; I thank Dr. Danny Anderson, who gave composed and thoughtful feedback, and Dr. George Woodyard, whose encouragement and easy smile made the process more enjoyable. I also am also thankful to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Marquette University, in particular, Dr. Belén Castañeda, for support during the writing of this dissertation. I would not have been able to complete this project without the advice, encouragement, and levity that many friends and colleagues provided: Dr. Sarah Gendron, Janet Banhidi, Colleen Coffey, Dr. Jane Peterson, Dr. Christopher “cheerleader” Bolander, and Dr. Paola Hernández. I am grateful for the insight that Dr. Eugenia Afinoguenova and Dr. Jennifer Vanderheyden shared, as well. Above all, my family members have shown incredible patience and understanding, and without their help I would not have been able to persevere: thanks iii to my parents, Betty and Michael; a “Yes, mama can play now” to my children, Maxwell and Indigo; and my deepest gratitude to my husband, Eric, for his consistent love and support. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction 7 Chapter 1: Hijando: Nostalgia in Juan Gelman’s Epistolary Poetry 37 The Epistolary Tradition and Gelman’s cartas: The Desire for a Receptor 48 Derridaean fort:da and the Rupture of Epistolary Correspondence 53 Nostalgia for the Past and Postmemory in Carta a mi madre 60 Nostalgia for the Future in Carta abierta (a mi hijo) 78 Epistolary Nostalgia Without an Object: Summarizing Gelman’s cartas 93 Chapter 2: Vomitando a memória: Saudades in Ferreira Gullar’s Poema Sujo 99 Brazilian Saudade: Cultural Specificity and Comparisons to Nostalgia 112 Onde canta o Sabiá: Primordial Brazil and the Contradictions of Cultural Heritage 116 Water Symbolism, Antropofagia, and Saudade: Vomiting a Memory of Cultural Inequity 129 Urban Space and Sex: Physical Union as a Saudades –Longing 140 Exile, Travel, and Transportation in Poema Sujo 146 Testemunho final: Concluding Gullar’s Poema Sujo 160 Chapter 3: Shock and the Intersubjective Utopia that Contests It: Nostalgia in Gonzalo Millán’s La ciudad 170 v “Vvms mrdzds”: Crushing Dissent with a Doctrine of Shock in La ciudad 183 “Vvmos mrdzdos”: Capitalism and the Negation of Memory and Nostalgia 200 “Vivimos mordazados”: The Collective’s Objective 210 “Se cierra el poema”: Concluding La ciudad 227 Never Again? An Afterword 233 Bibliography 241 vi Introduction Paradictatorial Nostalgia: The Exile Poetry of Juan Gelman, Ferreira Gullar, and Gonzalo Millán In his presentation of a collection of essays on exile and Latin American literature, Myron Lichtblau states: “The concept of remembrance and nostalgia are inherent in all forms of exilic literature” (11). As Lichtblau suggests, the nostalgic sentiment can be traced from the earliest poems and songs in the Hispanic tradition to the formation of mythologized Latin American identities (the Gaucho, for example) and themes of inner exile (11).1 The central concern of this study, however, is the intersection of more recent nostalgia theory and Latin American poems of exclusion, expulsion, and exile at the end of the twentieth century. My conceptualization of nostalgia with regard to these poems relies on current theory that affirms the importance of idealization as a means of processing trauma. Nostalgia, in this study, goes beyond the traditional Greek roots of nostos (home) and algia (painful feeling). I propose that, in the context of selected poems of Juan Gelman, Ferreira Gullar, and Gonzalo Millán, exile nostalgia is not merely a melancholic desire for the past (as traditional notions of nostalgia would have suggested), but rather an attempt to recreate the self as an excluded member of a community wrestling with problematic progress and modernization. Nostalgia studies have grown out of scholarship on memory and the trend of investigation of the past as a means by which to better frame the current cultural and political situation, especially in the context of trauma and suffering. Also informed 7 by the boom in testimonial literature and its related study in the early 1990s, nostalgia theories have been developed over the past few decades to question the relationship between the individual and his or her community, and how longing and idealization can play an integral part in personal and community identity-building.2 In the current investigation, I employ Svetlana Boym’s theory that a contemporary conceptualization of nostalgia can be multi-temporal and related to the formation of social or group identity, as well as personal identity already assumed in traditional melancholic nostalgia. Boym’s study, The Future of Nostalgia (2001), traces nostalgia as a “historical rather than psychological genesis” (7) within the context of Russian literature and culture. Boym positions modern nostalgia at the end of the twentieth century as an evolution of longing and a “defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (xiv). She continues by asserting that nostalgia “is not merely an expression of local longing, but a result of a new understanding of time and space that made the division into ‘local’ and ‘universal’ possible” (xvi). Most pertinent to this study, however, is that nostalgia, according to Boym, is unlike melancholia because it reflects the problems of the individual as a member of a community and that community’s sense of identity based on the past: Nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective. Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future. Consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales. The future 8 of nostalgic longing and progressive thinking is at the center of this inquiry. Unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory. (xvi) For Boym, nostalgia is a response to rapid modernization in the twentieth century, especially in the context of personal, community, and national trauma.3 The nostalgia in the poems of my study incorporates, at times, the melancholia of traditional nostalgia, but it also differs in its multi-temporal nature, active voice, and exploratory poetic form and language. It is my view that Gelman, Gullar, and Millán nostalgically turn to a different time or place as a result of the violent rupture of exile and the ideals of neoliberal modernization put forth by the authoritarian regimes that, either directly or indirectly, caused their alienation. Therefore, of particular interest to this study are those poems which question the power structures that have resulted in problematic modernization and ambivalent progress in the poets’ native countries, producing a need for nostalgic idealization. The concept of idealization is fundamental to my study, since, as Aaron Santesso suggests, “nostalgia [is] not the desire for the past but rather idealization . Nostalgia . .[is] an impersonal, highly literary mode of idealization responding first and foremost to present need” (13). Even though Santesso’s study, A Careful Longing (2006), considers nostalgia in 18th century poetry, his characterization of nostalgia as a response to a “present need” sets up my investigation since all three 9 poets idealize, while in the ambiguous state of exile, absent people, places or time periods: the mother figure in Juan Gelman’s epistolary poetry, the city of Ferreira Gullar’s birth, or Gonzalo Millán’s pre-dictatorial Santiago.4 Santesso’s proposition, nevertheless, requires modification in the context of this investigation and the theories offered by Boym. I question Santesso’s insertion of the “impersonal”