Copyright by Paula Chungsun Park 2014
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Copyright by Paula Chungsun Park 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Paula Chungsun Park Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: TRANSCOLONIAL LISTENERS: DISSONANCES IN CUBAN AND PHILIPPINE LITERATURE Committee: César A. Salgado, Supervisor Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez Luis Cárcamo-Huechante Isaac Donoso Jiménez Enrique Fierro Hannah Wojciehowski TRANSCOLONIAL LISTENING: DISSONANCES IN CUBAN AND PHILIPPINE LITERATURE by Paula Chungsun Park, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2014 Dedication To my family. Acknowledgements This dissertation project would have not been completed or even conceived without the support of my supervisor, César A. Salgado. The four seminars I took with him, combined with his constructive suggestions and encouragement made the process of conducting research and writing the dissertation a truly stimulating journey. I am also very thankful to my additional dissertation committee members. I thank professor Enrique Fierro for sharing his profound knowledge of poetry, his sense of humor and for taking José García Villa’s “comma poems” very seriously. The latter was, in a way, what gave me the impulse to continue looking for parallels between Philippine literature and Spanish American literature. For me, Jossianna Arroyo Martínez is an outstanding model for interdisciplinary research and I thank her for her “Islas virtuales” seminar. I owe her the courage to read, record and closely analyze Severo Sarduy’s radio plays. Hannah Wojciehowski encouraged me to follow my instincts from the very beginning and helped me refine this project’s musical framework. For that, I am very thankful. I also appreciate Luis Cárcamo Huechante’s unconditional support, perceptive feedback and expertise in Sound Studies. Without him, my project would have taken a very different course. Finally, I am grateful to Isaac Donoso Jiménez, for sharing his impressive knowledge of Philippine literature and culture, and for his contagious intellectual enthusiasm. I would like to extend my gratitude to UT professors Lorraine Leu and Stanislav Zimic, for their support during the initial stages of this project. I particularly thank professor Zimic for his Spanish Golden Age poetry seminar. I am thankful as well to Jill Robbins, the Chair of the Department Spanish and Portuguese, for providing research v funds for graduate students, and to Laura Rodríguez, our graduate coordinator, for her guidance throughout all my years at UT. In the Philippines, I am grateful to Jonathan Chua and Shirley Lua, for their generous support and direction. In Havana, Cuba, I thank Rafael Rodríguez Beltrán, for his help at the Fundación Alejo Carpentier, and in Camagüey, I thank Oneyda González and Gustavo Pérez, for sharing their passion for Severo Sarduy. I would also like to express my thanks to Marjorie Evasco and Alex Fleites for their poetry and for making my project magically coherent. I am incalculably indebted to my friends from Chile and Rutgers University, who by live now dispersed throughout the world, for their emotional support. At UT, I thank Enrique Navarro for being a model of strength; Dorian Lee Jackson, for his attentive ear during uncertain times; Verónica Ríos, Franklin Strong and Stephanie Malak, for their friendship and for reading portions of my dissertation; James Staig, for our Sound Studies discussion sessions; and Omar Vargas, Lydia Huerta, Enrique González Conty, Adèle Douglin, Ingrid Robyn, Rodrigo Lopes de Barros, Daniela Sevilla, Sean Manning, Sam Cannon, Matthew Hill and Rocío del Águila, for being great colleagues and friends throughout many years. I am also immensely grateful to Ulrich Bach, for being a divine partner and friend, as well as for reading and criticizing this dissertation in its entirety. Last but not least, I deeply thank my dear family—my parents Ki Chul Park and Hae Soon Kim, my siblings Ana and Moisés, mis cuñados y mis sobrinito/as—for always being there for me. vi Transcolonial Listeners: Dissonances in Cuban and Philippine Literature Paula Chungsun Park, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: César A. Salgado This dissertation compares the origins of an aesthetics of dissonance in twentieth century Cuban and Philippine literature. To do so, it examines Cuban authors Alejo Carpentier, Severo Sarduy, and Filipino writers Jesús Balmori and José García Villa, as critical “transcolonial listeners.” I argue that their elective affinity to radio productions, music and sound effects in texts produced by people subject to colonization or coloniality, helped them refashion their imperial heritage. I first analyze Balmori’s early career as a Romantic poet and novelist, and proceed with a close reading of his war novel Los pájaros de fuego, which reveals the strong disharmonies of Philippines’ relationship with Europe, the US and Japan, during the Second World War. Then, I examine Carpentier’s interest and consequent disappointment with radio production, his interest in Richard Wagner and his novel Los pasos perdidos. I demonstrate that despite Europe’s decline in the wake of the Second World War, Carpentier’s fascination with European musical forms, especially atonality, persisted. The second half of the dissertation focuses on the avant-garde tendencies of exile writers Villa and Sarduy. Revealing that Villa remained a “heritage listener” of Spanish, I prove that before publishing his experimental writings in English in the US, Villa avidly read and translated Hispanic poets. Finally, I vii analyze Sarduy’s early poetry and radioplays, written inspired by travels to Asia, America and Western Europe in the late sixties and early seventies. While Villa, away from the Philippines, realized that Latinidad was compatible to Filipino identity, Sarduy compensated the loss of his Cuba by attentively listening to the music and sounds produced (or reproduced and replayed) in the locations he traveled to, such as African American jazz. Expanding Mary Louise Pratt’s understanding of transculturation, this dissertation proposes that even though these writers inherited “imperial eyes,” their hearing remained transcolonial. viii Table of Contents List of Illustrations ................................................................................................. xi Introduction: Echoes of an Intercolonial Alliance ...................................................1 Listening to Counterpoints and Dissonances in Literature .............................8 The Connective Potential of Listening .........................................................13 Cuba and the Philippines: The “Intercolonial Alliance” ...............................18 Chapter Outline .............................................................................................23 Chapter 1: Jesús Balmori and the Politics of Harmonizing ..................................26 Radio and Jazz in the Philippines .................................................................31 The Function of Modernismo in Balmori’s Poetry .......................................37 The Persistence of Romanticism ...................................................................49 Wagner in Los pájaros de fuego ...................................................................56 Conclusion ....................................................................................................65 Chapter 2: Alejo Carpentier and the Search for Unexplored Sounds ...................68 The Possibilities of Radio .............................................................................72 Wagner in Latin America ..............................................................................81 Los pasos perdidos and the Problem of Tonality..........................................95 Conclusion ..................................................................................................112 Chapter 3: Neobaroque Resonances in José García Villa’s Poetry ....................117 From Resonating Rhymes Towards a Phonetic Notation of Dissonance ...125 The Impossibility of “Killing” Spanish ......................................................147 Conclusion ..................................................................................................168 Chapter 4: Severo Sarduy’s Sonic Superpositions ..............................................172 Duke Ellington and Dissonance as a “Way of Life” ...................................181 Analysis of “Relato” ...................................................................................197 Analysis of “Los matadores de hormigas” ..................................................208 Conclusion ..................................................................................................218 ix Conclusion: Transcolonial Reverberations in the Twenty-First Century ...........220 References ............................................................................................................228 x List of Illustrations Illustration 1. “Centipede Sonnet” by José García Villa ......................................135 Illustration 2. “Il Pleut” and “Four-letter word-square” by Cabrera Infante .......143 Illustration 3. “Sonnet in Polka Dots” by José García Villa ................................145 Illustration 4. “Silencio” by Eugen Gomringer ....................................................169