IMAGING LITERATURE: PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM IN SALVADOR ELIZONDO AND ROBERTO BOLAÑO A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Rafael Orozco Ramírez January 2014 © 2014 Rafael Orozco Ramírez IMAGING LITERATURE: PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM IN SALVADOR ELIZONDO AND ROBERTO BOLAÑO Rafael Orozco Ramírez, PhD. Cornell University 2014 Imaging Literature studies the depiction of the human form and its fragmentation in visual images analogous to the fragmentation of the literary discourse. An analysis of the novels, short stories, and essays written by Roberto Bolaño and Salvador Elizondo pays particular attention to the way in which new means of mechanical and technological reproduction continue to enrich a representational paradigm within the arts. Imaging Literature is a study that, perhaps found closer to an essayistic exploration than to a theoretical analysis, tries to understand how literary works achieve the effects they do, how they relate to other literary texts, and how they affirm or contest literary conventions regarding structure and meaning. Attending not only to content and form but also to the thematic convergence of the texts explored in each chapter, this study is arranged into four chapters: a poetics of the superficial, a poetics of light, a poetics of the body, and finally, a poetics of pornography. The artistic possibilities writers of literature first saw in a medium such as photography may be read as the anxieties generated by literary innovation projected onto the visual medium, ultimately reflecting back onto the literary endeavor itself and shedding light on the limits of literary representation. The fragmentation of narrative, found with greater clarity in Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf (1965) and Roberto Bolañ’s Antwerp (2002), has a dual purpose. First, the fragmentation of the literary discourse becomes analogous to the fragmentation of the human body in its visual representations and, second, it articulates the pervasiveness, and perhaps the impossibility, of escaping representational conventions dating back to Aristotle’s postulates in his Poetics. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Rafael Orozco Ramírez was born in Puruándiro Michoacán, México on March 20th, 1981. He completed his B.A. in Spanish Literature the University of California, San Diego in 2004 and M.A. in Spanish at San Diego State University in 2008. For the academic year of 2002-2003 he studied at the Universidad de Alcalá in Spain. Rafael Orozco Ramírez came to Cornell University in the summer of 2007 for his doctoral work in contemporary Latin American literature. v A mi familia, que me ha apoyado en cada uno de los pasos de esta larga carrera. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Edmundo Paz-Soldán for his advice and encouragement during the writing of this dissertation and throughout my graduate studies at Cornell. I also want to thank my special committee members, Dr. Debra Castillo and Dr. Patricia Keller, who have provided me all along the completion of this dissertation with their insight, their invaluable comments and feedback. I would like to thank as well my colleagues and friends at the Department of Romance Studies with whom I shared numerous readings and endless conversations about literature, work, and life. I am grateful for all the support received from the administrative staff in the Department of Romance Studies, particularly from Rebecca Davidson and Callean Hile. I want to Tomás Beviá and Jeannie Routier-Pucci, my language course coordinators, from sharing with me their passion for language instruction. Finally, I want to thank Rodrigo Fuentes, Camila Silva Flor, Emily Eaton, and Melissa Figueroa, for making Ithaca feel a little more like home, time and time again. vii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION IMAGING LITERATURE ............................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1 A POETICS OF THE SUPERFICIAL ......................................................................... 15 CHAPTER 2 A POETICS OF LIGHT ............................................................................................... 60 CHAPTER 3 A POETICS OF THE BODY ....................................................................................... 97 CHAPTER 4 A POETICS OF PORNOGRAPHY ........................................................................... 132 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................... 175 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................... 180 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Roberto Bolaño “Sión” Figure 2 José Juan Tablada “Impresión de La Habana” and “Madrigales ideográficos” Figure 3 Guillaume Apollinaire “Lettre-Océan” (1914) Figure 4 José Juan Tablada. Li Po y otros poemas (1920) Figure 5 Marius de Zayas, “Elle” (1915) Figure 6 Francis Picabia “Voilà elle” (1915) Figure 7 Marius de Zayas, “Alfred Stieglitz” (1914) Figure 8 Marius de Zayas. “José Juan Tablada Psicografía” (1920) Figure 9 José Juan Tablada “Madrigales” Figure 10 Roberto Bolaño “Mexicans seen from above” Figure 11 José Guadalupe Posada “Oratoria y Música” (1911) Figure 12 Abel Quezada “El Charro Matías” Figure 13 Abel Quezada “One-dimensional peasant” Figure 14 Roberto Bolaño, “Ventanas” Figure 15 Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y. “Francisco Lezcano, ‘el Niño de Vallecas’. (1636-1638)” Figure 16 Gironella, Alberto. “Fco. Lezcano en su taller (1965-1966)” Figure 17 Leng Tch'é. Photograph viii INTRODUCTION. IMAGING LITERATURE As Ezra Pound read Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscript for The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, a study he would ultimately translate into English and which would animate his own Ars Poetica, Pound wrote on the margins of the manuscript “Compare Aristotle’s Poetics: ‘Swift perception of relations, hall-mark of genius’” (Fenollosa, 54). In Fenollosa’s articulation of the ideogram, Pound read a reconfiguration of the metaphor as a process where the use of material images suggests immaterial relations, conceptually adding a visual element to the writing of literature in the West at the beginning of the 20th century. The advent of photography and film as new media for artistic representation and mass reproduction coincides in this study with Pound’s reconfiguration of the metaphor, providing a point of departure for creative experimentation in the endless quest for artistic relevance sought by no small number of authors and artist studied here. Imaging Literature is anchored on the literary production of Salvador Elizondo and Roberto Bolaño as it explores the relationship between the photographic/cinematic visual image and the creation of a literary text. The visual representation of the human body emerges as central concern in the work of Elizondo and Bolaño, and although this concern is explored differently, I argue that in both cases the fragmentation of narrative, found with greater clarity in Farabeuf (1965) and Antwerp (2002) respectively, has a dual purpose. First, the fragmentation of the literary discourse becomes analogous to the fragmentation of the human body in its visual representations and, second, it articulates the pervasiveness, and perhaps the impossibility, of escaping representational conventions dating back to Aristotle’s postulates in his Poetics. 1 The Chinese Written Character was not the first of Fenollosa’s manuscripts Pound would translate into English: most notably, in 1915, Pound published Cathay: For the Most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from the Notes of the Late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga. Competing with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium (1923) “for the title of the most influential English-language poetic collection of the century”1, Cathay bears in its English-translation title Pound’s explicit will to acknowledge and trace back the path followed by this collection of Chinese poetry before reaching his hands, for Though he knew the name of Li Po he let the Japanese form ‘Rihaku’ stand when the little book went to press, content to leave it on record that the Chinese had come to him by way of Japan, as ‘Jupiter’ comes from ‘Zeus’ by way of Rome. That Li Po should reach Kensington by way of Tokyo, through the intercession of a Harvard-educated enthusiast of Spanish descent, was but a global recapitulation of the steps by which the Arabs transmitted Aristotle to 12th century Paris. (Kenner, 222) When Fenollosa wrote that “The chief work of literary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance”, Pound added: “The poet, in dealing with his own time, must also see to it that language does not petrify on his hands. He must prepare for new advances along the lines of true metaphor, that is interpretative metaphor, or image, as diametrically opposed to untrue, or ornamental, metaphor” (Fenollosa, 54). The journey a poet embarks on, dealing with language before the emergence of visual media, aware of his own time, looking back yet moving forward—this remains a constant concern of the texts explored in Imaging Literature. The numerous exponents and works studied here also add to the global recapitulation observed by Pound and inscribed in Cathay’s title, 1 Saussy, Haun. “Fenollosa compounded”. Introduction to Fenollosa, Ernest, Ezra Pound, Haun Saussy, Jonathan