View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by KU ScholarWorks COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/228 JONATHAN MAYHEW Fragments of a Late Modernity: José Angel Valente and Samuel Beckett for John Kronik, in memoriam, “il miglior fabbro” HAT DOES IT MEAN to be a modernist poet at the end of the twentieth Wcentury? Perhaps no poet more clearly embodies the ethos of “late mod- ernism” than José Angel Valente, whose final book, Fragmentos de un libro futuro, was published after his death in the final year of the millennium. This book is not only posthumous but also designed to be posthumous. According to its front flap, “José Angel Valente concibió una suerte de obra poética ‘abierta’, un libro que—como la parábola cervantina de Ginés de Pasamonte o la novela de Proust —no acabaría sino con la desaparición misma del autor” ( José Angel Valente conceived of a sort of “open” poetic work, a book that, like the Cervantine para- bole of Ginés de Pasamonte or Proust’s novel, would not end until the author himself disappeared; my translation here and throughout). The book’s futurity, then, lies beyond the lifespan of the poet. Yet, in relation to the avant-garde movements of the earlier part of the twentieth century, Valente’s book is decid- edly nostalgic rather than forward looking. Its predominant tone is elegiac. While steeped in the culture of modernity, it ultimately exemplifies an arrière-garde rather than an avant-garde spirit. Given Valente’s pre-eminent position within the canon of late twentieth-century Spanish poetry, an examination of his work during the last two decades of his life can also reveal the degree to which the modernist aesthetic has maintained its vitality in the contemporary period. This essay is divided into two relatively autonomous sections. The first defines Valente’s late modernism in relation to that of a key precursor, Samuel Beckett, perhaps the prototypical late modernist writer. I might have chosen another com- parable figure, such as Paul Celan, but, as it happens, I have addressed Celan’s strong influence on Valente at length elsewhere (Mayhew). Valente’s deep affini- ties with Beckett have yet to be explored in the critical literature, and the cente- nary commemoration of Beckett’s birth in 1906 makes this an appropriate time to devote an article to the Irish writer. The second section addresses the question of Valente’s late modernism in the context of contemporary Spanish culture, FRAGMENTS OF A LATE MODERNITY/229 where the problem of “modernity” is of central importance. If Valente’s literary modernism derives from a belated, Beckettian model (as demonstrated in the first half of the article), how then can it serve as a modernizing force within con- temporary Spain? I. Valente and Beckett: Residual Modernism That Valente’s poetics derive largely from modernism can hardly be disputed. His admiration for high modernist icons is self-evident. It is not at all the same thing, however, to be a modernist poet at the beginning and at the tail end of the twentieth century. The later work of Valente, produced from the late 1970s through his death in 2000, stands at several removes from the original period in which the “great moderns”—poets like Rilke, Pessoa, Jiménez, and Breton—were forging new styles. Valente’s closest literary influences, I would argue, are writers who comprise a second wave of modernism. In historical terms, the classic pe- riod of literary modernism is the teens and twenties, when modernist writers like Joyce, Stevens, Kafka, and Woolf were active and the historical avant-garde was taking shape in movements like Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. Late modern- ism, then, is a second wave of modernist writing arising after World War II and exemplified by such figures as Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul Celan —all greatly esteemed by Valente. Born in 1929, Valente is somewhat younger than these post-war European writ- ers: Beckett was born in 1906, Blanchot in 1907, Celan in 1920. (Late modern Latin American poets—for example, José Lezama Lima [born 1910] and Octavio Paz [born 1914]—also form part of Valente’s pantheon, although his personal relations with Paz eventually became strained.) The birth dates of such canoni- cal Moderns as Pound, Joyce, and Kafka, on the other hand, are clustered in the 1880s. Valente’s poetry of the 1950s and early 1960s bears the mark both of the social realism prevalent in Spain during that decade and the existentialist cur- rent exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre and Beckett himself. If Valente’s turn to- ward a more explicitly “late modernist” aesthetic first becomes wholly visible, perhaps, in the 1971 Treinta y siete fragmentos, his mature work of the 1980s and 1990s clearly exemplifies the minimalist late modern ethos and in fact influenced many younger poets writing in the “essentialist” style. It is in this later period that he takes an intransigent stand against the anti-modernist “poesía de la experi- encia” of Luis García Montero. One way of locating Valente in literary history is to see him as writing “after Beckett,” that is, not only after the great moderns of the earlier part of the cen- tury, but also after the culmination and virtual “death” of modernism in the later texts of Samuel Beckett, who writes with an acute consciousness of being at the end, rather than the beginning, of the modern movement. As I demonstrate below, Beckett’s evocation of the literary death of modernity resonates strongly in Valente’s late and posthumous poetry. In addition, Valente also writes “after Beckett” in a more direct sense, rewriting Beckettian motifs in a minimalistic style resembling that of the Irish writer. The presence of Beckett in the Spanish poet’s work is implicit rather than COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/230 explicit: he rarely mentions Beckett in either his poetry or his prose, and critics have not made much of their connection either.1 However, according to the Gali- cian scholar and poet Claudio Rodríguez Fer, Valente was in fact a devoted reader of Beckett (personal correspondence). Moreover, Beckett helped to shape and define the European literary habitus of the entire second half of the twentieth century—a period coinciding almost exactly with Valente’s life’s work. Although Beckett’s influence was felt most immediately and directly in the theater—in the works of Harold Pinter, Fernando Arrabal, and a whole genera- tion of post World War II playwrights on several continents—it has never been confined to a single genre. His novels and short-stories are as significant as his plays in this regard, and prose-works like The Lost Ones and Ill Seen Ill Said are closer to avant-garde poetry than to conventional fiction. Thus, while he wrote few “poems” in comparison to his work in other genres, it is safe to say that con- temporary poets have been counted among his most assiduous readers. Although it may be impossible to determine precisely how much Valente took directly from Beckett and how much he borrowed from the Zeitgeist that the author of Waiting for Godot helped to define, there are at least four main elements of Beckett’s work that would have made him an indispensable figure for the Spanish poet: (1) A terminal vision of human existence, namely a vision that focuses on the very last stage of life, dilating it to the extreme and often fixing on the limi- nal state between life and death. In several works, Beckett envisions an afterlife that is almost indistinguishable from this liminal state. (2) An extremely inward- looking consciousness in which social reality all but disappears and the only avail- able resources are those within. Because the mind is impoverished, however, it is seemingly incapable of any “rich inner life” that would be the source of poetic vision. (3) A negative mysticism, in that, while Beckett’s work makes constant allusion to theological and mystical concepts and texts, his mystical asceticism fails to lead to a transcendent vision of God. (4) A terminal and residual literary lan- guage, austere to the extreme—in short, a conception of literary art consonant with this ascetic vision of life and death. It is virtually a commonplace to identify Beckett as “the last modernist,” to borrow a phrase from the subtitle of a recent biography (Cronin). Taken together, the elements I have outlined above suggest an exaggeration—or a critical parody, perhaps—of certain elements associated with canonical high modernism. Liter- ary autonomy turns into a residual, seemingly inarticulate solipsism. “Purity”— the rigorous exclusion of “extra-literary” reality—becomes ascetic minimalism. The prophetic vision of Yeats or Rilke is only visible as a form of “negative the- ology.” Nevertheless, critical interpretations of Beckett show—rightly or wrongly —a strong tendency to recuperate negativity in the service of positive value. In his apparent renunciation of all forms of beauty and transcendence, in his ex- treme askesis that seems to leave no room for positivity, critics are often able to 1 Beckett’s name appears once in Las palabras de la tribu, but only as one item on a fairly long list of names. Lopo makes note of a passing reference to Krapp’s Last Tape in Valente’s Galician poetry, collected in Cantigas de alén (Lopo 49). She does not, however, provide any further commentary. Nor, frankly, does this reference seem particularly significant; I would argue that Beckett’s invisible presence in Valente’s work is more significant than these few visible traces. FRAGMENTS OF A LATE MODERNITY/231 find an ultimately transcendent impulse.