Neotipografia Material Poetics In
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NEO-TIPO-GRAFÍA: MATERIAL POETICS IN THE SPANISH HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDE Zachary Rockwell Ludington Severna Park, Maryland Master of Arts, University of Virginia, 2009 Bachelor of Arts, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese University of Virginia August, 2014 © 2014 Zachary Rockwell Ludington 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND DEDICATION I must first extend my warmest thanks to my advisor, Andrew A. Anderson, for his scholarship and for his sharp and supportive critical eye. My work in this dissertation owes a great deal not only to his previous research but also to his helpful comments and his guidance throughout the course of the project. I would also like to thank every member of the Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese at the University of Virginia, past and present. I owe specific debts of gratitude to a few friends in the department who have especially enriched my experience during my time at the University, both academically and personally. They are Fernando Operé, David T. Gies, Gustavo Pellón, Randolph Pope, Mané Lagos, Daniel Chávez, Eli Carter, Omar Velázquez Mendoza, Tally Sanford, Shawn Harris, Julia Garner, Luca Prazeres, Diana Arbaiza, Stephen Silverstein, Jülide Etem, Sarah Bogard, Alejandra Gutiérrez, Keith Howard, Tim McAllister, Adriana Rojas Campbell, Gabrielle Miller, Gillian Price, Melissa Frost, and Diana Galarreta. Friends and colleagues outside the department but ever present and interested in my work are Ana Elia García Pérez, Nathan Brown, John Lyons, Paul A. Cantor, Shaun Cullen, Chicho Lorenzo, Tico Braun, Antonio Reyes, Manuela Jiménez, Brian Carr, and Erik J. Broman. I also would like to thank all of my students, in Charlottesville, Valencia, and Nice. Thanks also to Professors David T. Gies, Randolph Pope, and Stephen Cushman for serving on my committee. Para Tony Cella, con quien he compartido gran parte de este proceso y con quien espero celebrar su fin, un gran abrazo fraternal. Para Pedro Larrea; te quiero, Pedro. Gracias y no sé qué más decirte. Uno de mis más altos deseos es que este trabajo merezca tu aprobación. A Alicia López Operé le debo mi sempiterna amistad. Ali, gracias por todo lo que eres y todo lo que has hecho en mi vida. No more sincere friend or human being than Églantine Morvant. Merci, Églantine. Many people helped me in various ways during the course of my work on this project. I would like to thank the Library Staff at Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, especially the people working on Interlibrary Loans and Miguel Valladares- Llata, an invaluable human and academic resource. Thanks to John Lyons and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a stimulating dissertation seminar over the summer of 2013. The staff of the Residencia de Estudiantes and the Hemeroteca Nacional of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid were helpful to my research in Spain. I am also thankful to both institutions for maintaining the excellent digital archives which were central to my work on a daily basis. Thanks also to Federica Costa, for her friendship and hospitality in Madrid. A life of thanks goes to my wife, Desiree Peña. Desi, everything is for you. Thanks to my brothers, Sandy and Philip, and my sister Leslie. I know we are proud of each other. I dedicate all my efforts and their imperfect products to my parents, E. Whit Ludington and Karen P. Rockwell. 3 ABSTRACT My dissertation analyzes the poetry of the beginning of the twentieth century in Spain with an eye to its material characteristics. The project analyzes the work of the poets in Spain who found inspiration in innovative work from across the European avant- garde, and it contends that their typographical experimentation was not just visual and not just mechanical, but was rather a key method for enacting the poetics of “l’esprit nouveau.” These poets wanted to abolish the museums, kill insincerity and bombast, and get rid of the idea of the poet as prophet of the ineffable. Their goal was to herald a new age of intellectual rather than sentimental poetry. Typography was essential to this goal, for attention to the material qualities of the poem could make the artwork a material rather than a spiritual artifact. I trace the development of avant-garde material poetics theoretically to the historical avant-garde’s challenge to Symbolist transcendence. I analyze the various techniques for enacting this material poetics in writers like F.T. Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, and Vicente Huidobro, and then in Spanish writers Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Guillermo de Torre, Juan Larrea, Antonio Espina, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, and finally Manuel Altolaguirre. My analysis shows that the material poetics of the avant-garde goes much deeper than simple typographical antics. While it is true that novelty was a driving motivator for many artists in the historical avant-garde, their typographical experimentation was anything but directionless buffoonery. Through my close readings of these works from Spain’s historical avant-garde I show how a material poetics united the praxis and the theory of the avant-garde’s attack on the institution of art. The effects of these poets’ efforts in material poetics are still with us today. 4 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………6 CHAPTER 1: THE BREAD RISES…………………………………………………………...14 CHAPTER 2: FLORILEGIO: A Little Anthology of Avant-Garde Material Poetics..............60 CHAPTER 3: THE NEW TYPOGRAPHY…………………………………………………..124 CHAPTER 4: THE POSTER BOY OF THE AVANT-GARDE: Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s “Carteles literarios”…………………………………………………………......173 CHAPTER 5: ENCAJADAS LAS FORMAS: Material Poetics and Typography in Manuel Altolaguirre………………………………………………………..…………....209 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………...261 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………….269 5 INTRODUCTION Whatever happened to the dark sublime, sin of the third eye, cross-gap between flesh and abstraction? Contemporary American poet Charles Wright asks this question in his poem “Lines After Rereading T.S. Eliot” (4). The simple answer is that the “gap” between flesh and abstraction was closed and the “dark sublime” got squeezed out of poetry. It disappeared from art in the twentieth century, along with concepts like “sin” and “the third eye.” But how and why did these things disappear? This is indeed a historical question, but we live immersed in its answer, reiterated in the myriad shapes and colors of language in every moment of the present. Ours is a very visual culture, enacted and maintained in the ubiquitous codes of advertising, social media, traffic signage, and entertainment. Writing now rarely appears in the form of handwriting. We are accustomed to produce and consume highly mediated forms of written language, conditioned by the conventions of typography, graphic design, and the user-computer interface. We take in language with two eyes and we decode it by using our vast but mostly passive knowledge of typefaces and layout. Wright, then, is even himself providing an answer with the very lines that ask the question. The offset typographical layout of his poem proves that the locus of poetry in the twentieth-century is not in the clairvoyant or spiritual “third-eye,” but in the material stimuli captured by the two organs of human sight. Poetry happens on the page. This study will look to the historical period in Spain where this reality begins to take shape. For all the historicity of the historical avant-garde, however, its typographical and poetic advances remain influential in the way we read and write today. “Typography 6 is what language looks like,” writes historian and teacher of typography and graphic design Ellen Lupton (1), and if we accept that poetry is made of language, then typography is what poetry looks like too. But Lupton conceives of language much differently than did the poets of influence at the end of the European nineteenth century. So does Charles Wright, a twentieth-century poet and necessarily a product of his time. In French Symbolism and Hispanic modernismo, poetry (or more likely Poetry with a capital P) did not look like anything. It could not be held or torn. Poetry was felt, intuited, it was more musical than pictorial; it was an energetic impulse, more wave or potential than material, like light or an electric voltage. After all, the poet for Rubén Darío was ‘God’s lightning rod.’ Following a very different conception of what poetry was and should be, the pugnacious heirs of the Symbolists and modernistas in the European avant- garde, while nonetheless children (or grand-children) of Romanticism, fought with history and with themselves to establish a poetics whose focus would lie, as does Lupton’s, on the page itself. They strove to create a poetry made of language, built out of typography, and indeed out of other materials as well. The historical avant-garde in Spain, a period in Peninsular literary history entangled in the thorny notions of the Generation of 1898, modernismo, the Generation of 1927 and other labels and schema (including wider Western Modernism), enjoyed the inheritance of French Symbolism and Hispanic modernismo at the same time that its artists strove to produce works vehemently present, aggressively modern. Typographical experimentation was a key tool towards this end. My dissertation analyzes the function of typography in the work of the poets of the historical avant-garde