The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980–2000 LUP_Mayhew.indd 1 28/3/09 14:33:11 LUP_Mayhew.indd 2 28/3/09 14:33:11 The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980–2000 jonathan mayhew liverpool university press LUP_Mayhew.indd 3 28/3/09 14:33:11 First published 2009 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2009 Jonathan Mayhew The right of Jonathan Mayhew to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-183-3 Typeset in Borges by Koinonia, Manchester Printed and bound by the MPG Books Group LUP_Mayhew.indd 4 28/3/09 14:33:11 Contents Acknowledgments page 7 Preface 9 Part One: The Avant-Garde and its Discontents: The Place of Poetry in Contemporary Spanish Culture 1 Aesthetic Conservatism in Recent Spanish Poetry 17 2 Three Apologies for Poetry 32 3 Poetry, Politics, and Power 49 Part Two: Valente, Gamoneda, and the “Generation of the 1950s” 4 In Search of Ordinary Language: Revisiting the “Generation of the 1950s” 65 5 José Ángel Valente’s Lectura de Paul Celan: Translation and the Heideggerian Tradition in Spain 83 6 Antonio Gamoneda’s Libro de los venenos: The Limits of Genre 103 Part Three: Women Poets of the 1980s and 1990s 7 Gender Under Erasure (Amparo Amorós, Luisa Castro) 121 8 Desire Deferred: Ana Rossetti’s Punto umbrío 132 9 Concha García: The End of Epiphany 145 10 Lola Velasco’s El movimiento de las flores and the Limits of Criticism 156 Afterword 165 Bibliography 169 Index 175 LUP_Mayhew.indd 5 28/3/09 14:33:11 LUP_Mayhew.indd 6 28/3/09 14:33:11 Acknowledgments hapter 1 appeared in Hispanic Review (1999) under the title “The Avant-Garde Cand its Discontents: Aesthetic Conservatism in Recent Spanish Poetry.” I am grateful to Ignacio-Javier López for this accepting this article, and to Guillermo Carnero for circulating it among writers in Spain. Chapter 2 was published in Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World, edited by Cecile West-Settle and Sylvia Sherno. Chapter 3 appeared in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Elena Delgado, Jo Labanyi, and an anonymous reviewer were helpful in improving this piece. Chapter 5 appeared in a special issue Diacritics edited by José María Rodríguez-García. Without the help and encouragement of José María and an anonymous reviewer for Diacritics, this chapter would have been much weaker. Claudio Rodríguez-Fer was also helpful to me in giving me background on Valente’s acquaintance with Celan and Heidegger. Chapter 7 first appeared in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. I would like to acknowledge Michael Mudrovic and Randolph Pope for accepting this article, and Akiko Tsuchiya for permission to reprint it here. Randolph also accepted other articles of mine on related topics that did not make it into this book. His generous support of my work over the years is greatly appreciated. The research for this book was supported, over the years, by the Univer- sity of Kansas General Research Fund, the Hall Center for the Humanities, the Cramer family, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas, and the Grant for Cultural Co-operation between U.S. Universities and the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Without the generous support of these institu- tions, this book could not have been written. I owe a debt of gratitude to numerous individuals who have discussed contemporary Spanish poetry with me, or lent their moral and material support to me at various points along the way. This list includes Akiko Tsuchiya, Marjorie Perloff, David Shapiro, Elena Delgado, Silvia Bermúdez, Amalia Iglesias, Lola Velasco, Concha García, Ana Rossetti, Isla Correyero, César Antonio Molina, Juan Barja, Guillermo Carnero, Jesús Munárriz, Juan Carlos Mestre, Antonio Méndez Rubio, Jorge Riechmann, Steve Summerhill, José Manuel Cuesta Abad, LUP_Mayhew.indd 7 28/3/09 14:33:11 8 The Twilight of the Avant-Garde Antonio Gamoneda, Jaime Siles, Laura Scarano, Elena Delgado, Germán Gullón, Chris Soufas, Margo Persin, John Kronik, John Wilcox, and, last but certainly not least, the late Andy Debicki. My past and present colleagues at the University of Kansas and the Ohio State University—too numerous to list here—have also been helpful and encouraging. The participants in the Poetics Seminar at the Hall Center for the Humani- ties have also been crucial to my ability to maintain a high level of intellectual stimulation. Thanks is due to Roberta Johnson and Victor Bailey (past and present Directors of the Hall Center respectively), for their on-going support of the Seminar (and of my own research). Ken Irby, Judy Roitman, Stan Lombardo, Van Kelly, Jill Kuhnheim, and Joe Harrington have been the most assiduous participants in the Seminar. My hunger for constant intellectual dialogue has also been fed on a daily basis by an informal network of “Poetry and Poetics Bloggers”: Jordan Davis, Heriberto Yépez, K. Silem Mohammad, Ron Silliman, Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Jim Behrle, Tim Yu, Josh Corey, Stephanie Young, Henry Gould, Nick Piombino, and about a dozen others. Various audiences who listened to oral versions of the material presented at several conferences also gave me valuable comments that helped me to clarify my ideas. Also, the students in several Graduate Seminars helped me to remain engaged with this material. Leslie Bayers wrote a paper on Concha García for one of these seminars that stimulated me to develop my ideas on this poet. This book would not have existed without Luis García Montero. Although I doubt he will welcome a book that calls his aesthetic values into question, I must admit that his energy in pursuing his vision of poetry has shaped the recent history of Spanish poetry. If I had not read his eloquent essays outlining the ideological basis for the “poetry of experience,” I would never had begun this project. Needless to say, none of the individuals or institutions listed above, least of all Luis García Montero, is responsible for any error of fact or judgment in this book. In fact, I have ignored a great deal of excellent advice. LUP_Mayhew.indd 8 28/3/09 14:33:11 Preface his book arose out of my successive attempts, over the past decade, to define Tthe state of contemporary Spanish poetry. The final section of my 1994 book, The Poetics of Self-Consciousness, was a critique of what I then perceived to be the dominant trend in Spanish poetry of the 1980s: the rejection of avant-garde/ modernist values. In an article written in 1997 and published in Hispanic Review in 1999, I extended this critique by analyzing the explicit rejection of the avant- garde in the poetry and poetics of Luis García Montero and Felipe Benítez Reyes. This article, now chapter 1 of this book, has provoked many reactions. In Spain, it was applauded by poets and critics who shared my own avant-garde bias, and deplored, naturally enough, by the targets of my critique. Many colleagues in the field, including Laura Scarano and Chris Perriam, probably believe that I have gone too far in rejecting the “poetry of experience.” They are correct that my perspective in this article, and in subsequent writings, is a partisan one. Taking the position of a defender of avant-garde values in literature, I attempt to dismantle the arguments made by García Montero and his supporters in order to demonstrate their essentially conservative nature. Others in Spain, on the other hand, have been working along similar lines. Antonio Méndez Rubio’s essays, for example, present a similar critique of García Montero and the “poetry of experience,” using a different theoretical metalanguage but arriving at a conclusion perfectly consonant with my own. My reading of critics like Miguel Casado and José Manuel Cuesta Abad also leads me to conclude that my perceptions are not wholly out of synchrony with those of other well- informed observers of contemporary Spanish poetry. While the “conservative” label is potentially inflammatory, I believe that it fits the phenomenon I am examining in a precise, almost technical sense. The conservative views cultural and social norms as rooted in nature. Any attempt to transgress such norms, from this perspective, are inevitably doomed to fail, since they go against the way things really are. Historically conditioned develop- ments in literature, like nineteenth-century realism, are seen as eternally valid, even biologically based norms, whereas the modernist enterprise of re-thinking LUP_Mayhew.indd 9 28/3/09 14:33:11 10 The Twilight of the Avant-Garde literature from the ground up is seen as an historical anomaly. The return to a realism or verisimilitude based on unquestioned definitions of “human nature” and “normality” is a transparently ideological gesture that cries out for correction. It is true that I fail to explore all of the ways in which poetry written under the rubric of García Montero’s “poetry of experience” might transcend or controvert the ideological presuppositions of this cultural conservatism. This task is perhaps better suited to scholars like Perriam, who are more sympa- thetic to “poetry of experience.” Perriam’s work on Luis Antonio de Villena, for example, shows the limitations of any blanket accusation of conservatism applied to all poets of this group.