UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Secret Histories/Impossible Objects: Toward a Hemispheric Poetics of Twentieth-Century Long Poems Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2md397r8 Author Leslie, Juliana Isabel Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ SECRET HISTORIES/IMPOSSIBLE OBJECTS: TOWARD A HEMISPHERIC POETICS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY LONG POEMS A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree in DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Juliana Leslie September 2013 The Dissertation of Juliana Leslie is approved: _______________________________________ Professor Tyrus Miller, chair _______________________________________ Professor Norma Klahn _______________________________________ Professor Rob Wilson _______________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Juliana Leslie 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iv Acknowledgments vi Introduction: A New Mind 1 Chapter One: The Shape of War 55 Chapter Two: Industrial Palimpsests and Open Questions 149 Chapter Three: The Ruins of the Voice 255 Bibliography 302 iii ABSTRACT Juliana Leslie Secret Histories/Impossible Objects: Toward a Hemispheric Poetics of Twentieth-Century Long Poems This dissertation offers a comparative study of Anglo-American and Latin- American long poems written in the twentieth century and analyzes how these works remap the emergent geographical, historical, and spatial realities of late modernity. The long poems I investigate include works that respond to disaster, war, and other forms of large-scale social transformation, such as David Jones’ In Parenthesis, which records the author’s experience fighting in the trenches in World War I, and Jose Pacheco’s “Las Ruinas de México,” which responds to the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that brought the city close to ruins in a context already defined by the ruins of colonial conquest. I argue that poems since the first decades of modernism have engaged with complicated notions of time framed by disaster, crisis, and change. I thus consider how these poems meet the demands of various historical problems in late modernity by grafting together materials from different time periods and traditions, by relying on the resources of local geographies and natural histories, and by exaggerating difference and asymmetry as spatio-temporal forces that rearrange the discrete categories of literary history and national belonging. The texts I consider—David Jones’ In Parenthesis (1937), Cesar Vallejo’s España, aparta de mi este calíz (1937), iv H.D.’s Trilogy (1944), William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946-1958), Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (1938), Gabriela Mistral’s Poema de Chile (1967), Jose Pacheco’s “Las Ruinas de México” (1986), and Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1965)—compose a heterogeneous archive that does not cohere within a single tradition associated with either modernist or avant-garde aesthetics or with the long poem. Rather than situate these texts in linear relation or according to a linguistic or national tradition, I group them according to shared themes or topoi, such that the particular discursive interventions in the poems provide the larger organizing principle for interpretation. The topics I consider are war, specifically the modes of modern warfare that emerge in three different historical sites in the first half of the twentieth century: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II; the emergence of the industrial as a potentially dehumanizing or alienating feature of capitalist development; and the role of violence in everyday life, particularly the role violence plays in extending beneath and defining but also in threatening the preservation of the coherence of the everyday. By grouping poems within these thematic contexts such as war and industrialization rather than according to language, period, or national tradition, I explore the potential of this framework to open new contexts—material, phenomenological, cultural—for reading, interpretation, and engagement. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many, many thanks to my dissertation committee—Tyrus Miller, Norma Klahn, and Rob Wilson—for their insight, support, encouragement, patience, and enthusiasm. Above all, I thank them for taking the time to work with me on this project and for helping me to see it through to completion. This dissertation was completed with the support of a Chancellor’s Dissertation Year Fellowship, a Graduate Division Sabbatical Fellowship, and a Literature Department Summer Fellowship, which allowed me to visit the Yale Beinecke Library archive to research the H.D. and William Carlos Williams Papers. Special thanks to the members of The Poetry and Politics Research Cluster, especially Andrea Quaid, Keegan Finberg, and Eireene Nealand, who provided me with necessary community, conversation, and friendship over the last seven years, and to the Literature Department staff, especially Emily Gregg and Carol Stoneburner. Thank you to my dad, for reading to me when I was a child, to my sisters, for reading with me, and to my mom, for always wanting to read what I’ve been writing. Michael Labenz has supported me, listened to me, read portions of this dissertation, given me advice, nagged me, asked me questions, and put up with this work as a part of our everyday life for many years. This dissertation is dedicated to Mike and to my teachers. Thank you. vi Introduction: A New Mind The same shoes will fit whoever climbs without trails to his body & whoever descends to the form of his soul! Entwining one another the mutes will speak, the paralyzed will walk! The blind, upon coming back, will see & throbbing the deaf will hear! The ignorant will be wise, the wise will be ignorant! Kisses will be given that you could not give! Only death will die! The ant will bring little pieces of bread to the elephant chained to his brutal gentleness; the aborted children will be born again perfect, special, & all men will work, all men will beget, all men will understand! —César Vallejo España aparta de mí este cáliz Without invention nothing is well spaced, unless the mind change, unless the stars are new measured, according to their relative positions, the line will not change, the necessity will not matriculate: unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness: without invention nothing lies under the witch-hazel bush, the alder does not grow from among the hummocks margining the all but spent channel of the old swale, the small foot-prints of the mice under the overhanging tufts of the bunch-grass will not appear: without invention the line will never again take on its ancient divisions when the word, a supple word, lived in it, crumbled now to chalk. —William Carlos Williams Paterson 1 I. These selections from César Vallejo’s España, aparta de mí este cáliz and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson feature some of the shared concerns that emerge in long poems written in the twentieth century, features that help dramatize the way many cultural, political, and spiritual concerns of this period in history fostered new modes of awareness, engagement, and action. For example, Vallejo’s España offers an extended homage and elegy for the Republican volunteers that fought on behalf of the elected government during the Spanish Civil War, and thus evokes an almost occult mode of ritual invocation or remembering, an effort to bridge the gap between the living and the dead or the material and the divine. Though perhaps no less ritual in its modes of signification, Williams’s project in Paterson seeks to invent and communicate a specifically American literary tradition that emerges out of archival, natural, geographical, and experiential sources and materials of the New World, specifically, in this case, of Paterson, New Jersey. In both cases, the poems become sources of cultural and ritual memory enabled by poetic processes of figuration, citation, association, and collage, the effects of which provoke new modes of historical and cultural awareness. Although the styles and thematic concerns of these two poems are different and worth maintaining in comparison, I find in them a shared desire to redefine and measure anew the historical materials that enable (or disable) modes of composition. Both trace a new relation to knowledge, to writing, and to work that relocates the processes and products of the mind (cognition, figuration) within the body’s 2 experience of space, and both seem to thus evoke a spatial imaginary that eclipses or evades a unidirectional “line” that runs from Europe to the New World. Imagining a New World that resists the snares of inherited tradition thus requires forms of begetting, inventing, working, and remembering the dead, the mute, the particular, and the material relations that exist outside of the speaker’s inherited circumference. For Vallejo, an inherited tradition offers silence and dismemberment, features of a colonial history that wrest bodies apart from their material potentials. Paul Bové makes a similar observation about Williams’s desire in Paterson to “to de-code or interpret the falls of unintelligible language we, as Americans, inherit from Europe and…from a metaphysical tradition whose reifications have usurped all language and made it unavailable for the representation of a non-metaphysical world” (585).