Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature

Body Articulations

B. Willis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137268792
• eBook ISBN: 9781137268808
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Social Sciences

Featuring canonical Spanish American and Brazilian texts of the 1920s and 30s, Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature is an innovative analysis of the body as site of inscription for avant-garde objectives such as originality, subjectivity, and subversion.

CHAPTER 1

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Body, Language, and the Limits of Ontology

Un poema es una cosa que será.

Un poema es una cosa que nunca es, pero que debiera ser.

Un poema es una cosa que nunca ha sido, que nunca podrá ser.

Vicente Huidobro

[A poem is something that will be.

A poem is something that never is, but ought to be.

A poem is something that never has been, that never can be.]

Trans. Eliot Weinberger

To invoke the ontology of poetry is to recognize the independence of the poem, qua object, that any text can enjoy, while acknowledging the hermetic and volatile semantic interface between writer and reader. That the poem exists independently of any meaning that a particular reader or group of readers may ascribe to it strengthens the poem’s independent existence theoretically, but does not aid the practicality inherent in the need for participation in the arts; the poem, or any text, may exist as a printed object in an old briefcase in someone’s closet, but until it is engaged beyond appearance only, and thus judged semantically, its ontology is nil. Moreover, although a poem may occupy relatively little space in a textual sense, or even, like concrete poetry, may strive to engage in an advanced interplay with the spatial arts, it pertains unavoidably to the temporal art of literature, which means that it can readily explore changes to ontology over time. Nonetheless it can accomplish this less well than the longer prose genres, and it is perhaps this shortness of textual space, coupled with the perceived frenetic pace of interwar modernity, that yield the avant-garde preoccupations with fragmentation and simultaneity so evident in poetry from this time period. Not only do the vanguard poets “break” from most inherited poetic norms, but they also break up the verses, building on the French symbolists’ dispersal of words-of-imagery as images themselves distributed along the spatial plane of the page. All of the properties of words as medium—the range of their graphic, oral, and semantic characteristics—become the domain of poets who, inspired by vanguard movements such as cubism, desire to depict a multiplicity of perspectives. The word becomes very much embodied but always embedded, as an object within the poem-as-object, and as an ontology within the poem-as-ontology; the poem is “una totalidad viviente, hecha de elementos irremplazables” (Paz Arco 45) [a living totality, made of irreplaceable elements].

The works of the avant-garde Latin American poets I have chosen to consider in this chapter—Mário de Andrade, Oliverio Girondo, Vicente Huidobro, Manuel Bandeira, and Solano Trindade—represent a variety of strategies for pushing, breaking, and reforming the limits of linguistic output that limn human expression, engaging with ontological categories as specific as race or ethnicity, or as general as the human condition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Brazilian poets featured here (Bandeira, Mário, and Trindade) more thoroughly address racial issues vis-à-vis poetic imagery, linguistic speech markers, and most especially poetic voice; these poets may choose to exemplify racial types in their poems, but they also problematize the limits of “race” as a concept through juxtaposition or through redefinition, while to varying degrees engaging with the ideology of “whitening” or branqueamento, often presented even into the mid-twentieth century as a strategy for national strength in union through the “dominant” culture (Skidmore 173–218). Mário and Bandeira share a more introspective poetic voice, concerned with the lyrical expression of emotional responses to corporeality—whether to the heterogeneity of bodies in a crowd on a São Paulo street (Mário) or to the magnified body of a lover in an intimate embrace (Bandeira). Trindade, who began writing in the 1930s, revolutionized the idea of the poetic body from perspectives within Afro-Brazilian culture: the celebration, and thus recuperation, of the black body. For Trindade, poetic ontology became the matter of the speaking subject, the enunciator of “Sou negro” [I am black] and that subject’s construction of a poetic body that would redeem words, memories, and identities from institutionalized oppression based on the divorce of Afro-Brazilian culture from the Afro-Brazilian producers of that culture.¹ In contrast, Girondo’s interest in the interface with corporeality manifests mostly, in his Veinte poemas, in poetic exvotos, or urban caricatures based on dehumanization, fragmentation, and decay, whereas for Huidobro these themes link more directly, in Altazor, to a metaphysical awareness of the poet’s own ontological and artistic limitations.²

What unites the works of these poets, and indeed those of many early twentieth-century poets in general, is their pioneering insistence on exploding the properties of the medium: augmenting that range of graphic, oral, and semantic possibilities to push toward a new expression that, because of its sui generis contextualization, can border on the loss of comprehension in works of extreme linguistic inventiveness such as Huidobro’s Altazor.³ Most often, however, these vanguardist, limit-pushing poems’ stances of being operate as bridges between levels of discourse, invoking the human body as host of simultaneous registers or signifieds. As I shall explore later in this chapter, for example, in Bandeira’s “Balada das Três Mulheres do Sabonete Araxá” and Mário’s “Ode ao Burguês,” corporeal sites—the phenotypically distinct women as depicted on the soap wrapper, the caricature of a bourgeois gentleman—house contradictory registers within a single poetic entity while exposing them to the reader’s scrutiny in ways designed to exaggerate their differences. For Trindade, in contrast, the range of discourse levels operates to recuperate lost meaning and to heal injurious epithets through a recontextualization that functions as ethnic rehistorization. Whether in Girondo’s depictions of an animated collection that is less than the sum of its parts, or Huidobro’s creation of a corporeal-linguistic semantic continuum that decomposes even as we struggle to stitch it together, the body is the privileged site for these avant-garde explorations of meaning, origin, and the limits of artistic expression.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESPAIR: URBAN BODIES IN GIRONDO’S BUENOS AIRES AND MÁRIO’S SÃO PAULO

In the 1920s, many Latin American cities experienced a frenetic cycle of industrial expansion and population growth. Metropolitan hubs such as Mexico City, São Paulo, Lima, and Buenos Aires already dominated national economies while spilling over into neighboring municipalities. During this growth period, Latin American importation of foreign-owned electric streetcar systems, originally developed in the 1880s, not only allowed greater city traffic of both people and goods, but also influenced the construction of services and markets along the trolley routes (Middleton 213). A route would generally stretch from the satellite immigrant communities through the liminal industrial zones and on into the commercial and cultural heart of the city. A network of trolley routes—webbing the city like the circulatory, lymphatic, or nervous systems that crisscross the body—thus connected the city’s disparate citizenry while disjoining users from nonusers and otherwise segregating riders by route, fare, or schedule.⁴ For vanguard artists, streetcars thus became emblematic of both fragmentation and simultaneity, since they allowed multiple perspectives at a rapid pace, juxtaposing neighborhoods, dwellings, and citizens representing different social and economic classes along the same trolley line or united by the same urban landscape perspectives; the streetcar initiated “novas modalidades de proximidade corporal” [new modalities of corporeal proximity] and “a mistura de classes e o diálogo nos espaços públicos” (Giucci 231, 233) [the mixture of classes and dialogue in public spaces]. The streetcar system forged a new sense of the poetics-city relationship, identified by Richard Sennett, that mobilized the flâneur while still privileging the forms and capacities of the human body in its urban space so that “people could create and understand their own condition” (85). For Oliverio Girondo, the zigzagging possibilities of this fast-paced transport phenomenon facilitated his portrayal of city-dwellers as bodily collections of exvotos in his 1922 Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía [Twenty Poems to Be Read on the Streetcar], whereas for Mário de Andrade the streetcar served as a catalyst for expressing in verse the bodily subtleties—phenotypical, emotional, linguistic—of fleeting quotidian interactions among urban subjects in his 1922 Paulicéia Desvairada [Hallucinated City] and 1926 Losango Cáqui [Khaki Lozenge].

Moreover, the streetcar represented a human-scale interaction with the new passion for the technological advancements of the machine age and with the cosmopolitan appeal of growing cities. Jorge Schwartz enumerates: “Abundan en la poesía de vanguardia de los años 20 vehículos como la locomotora, el tranvía, el avión o mecanismos como la hélice o el paracaídas” (Vanguardias 43) [Vanguard poetry of the 1920s is filled with vehicles like locomotives, streetcars, and planes, or mechanisms like the propeller and the parachute]. Juan Cano Ballesta notes the general change effected on life in the city: “Los signos de la modernidad—automóviles, tranvías—despiertan al ciudadano y le hacen saltar de su viejo ambiente de cafés de aire tristón y deprimente” (83) [The signs of modernity—automobiles, streetcars—awaken the citizen and make him jump from his old milieu of sad cafes]. A new invention, the streetcar nonetheless became an object of everyday city life, and the avant-garde artists could incorporate it in this sense to oppose the exotic escapism of their predecessors, the Spanish American modernistas and the Brazilian parnasianistas.⁵

Yet by the mid-1920s the streetcar displayed a certain familiarity associated with an affirmation of the bourgeois lifestyle or, more tellingly, with the plight of exploited workers, often newly arrived European immigrants, who rode daily from the shantytowns to the factories. As David T. Haberly notes, this new and needy group threatened the political status quo and yet promised material development: “The immigrants were . . . blamed for bringing in the radical and dangerous new ideologies of socialism, communism and anarchism [however] foreign immigration meant modernization and industrialization” (127–28). The streetcar was therefore an ambiguous sign not only encompassing the potential of literary and political renewal and the economic hope invested in urban technology, but also representing the specters of exploitation, poverty, and political instability.⁶ In many senses the trolley forced a new ontology on city residents, expanding identitarian possibilities through movement and mingling in ways previously unknown or only achieved with considerable difficulty. For these reasons the streetcar provided an intriguing target of social satire as well as a mobile point of phenomenological reference for the reader in Girondo’s and Mário’s works.

Girondo hops on to the trolley for the title of his first collection, Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía, his most important concrete reference to the streetcar. The seemingly mundane title suggests a sort of functional poetry, with the instructional phrase “to be read on the trolley,” remarkably similar in objective to the “furniture music” composed by Erik Satie during the same time in France.⁷ For Schwartz, the title’s mention of the “popular e ruidoso bonde, verdadeiro emblema urbano” [popular, noisy streetcar, veritable urban emblem] lends a certain “cunho pragmático, vinculando [a obra] irremediavelmente ao urbano” (Vanguarda 121) [pragmatic seal, linking (the work) inevitably to the urban]. However, as Delfina Muschietti notes, the instructional phrase is not without irony, given that the first edition—a large-size, luxury volume—came out in France at an exorbitant price. The second edition, however, which was the first in Argentina, was indeed a pocket-size version at greatly reduced cost that even proclaimed on its cover “edición tranviaria a veinte centavos” (159,162) [twenty-cent streetcar edition]. Only dubiously espousing a truly egalitarian, city-street readership, the title’s instructional phrase more accurately serves to orient a voyeuristic perspective; the tranvía incorporates the implied reader’s mobile point of reference, whereas the prose poems of the collection correspond to the often sordid scenes viewed from the streetcar.⁸ These scenes often portray foreign cities, such as Venice, Dakar, and Rio de Janeiro, but the majority of the vignettes show Girondo’s chaotic view of the Argentine capital and its environs.⁹

Girondo’s Buenos Aires throngs with cubist-style citizen caricatures, such as the uptight, anxious adolescent girls of a particularly conservative neighborhood in “Exvoto,” who “viven en la angustia de que las nalgas se les pudran” (158) [“live in dread that their buttocks will wither” (159)]. The young women are resigned to the inevitablity of male desire, because “no tienen el coraje de cortarse el cuerpo a pedacitos y arrojárselo, a todos los que les pasan la vereda” (158) [“they can’t quite bring themselves to chop their bodies into little pieces and sprinkle them on all who pass along the sidewalk” (159)].¹⁰ These images exemplify Girondo’s use of a body-centered lexicon that promotes a kind of ironic dismemberment or sparagmos. Muschietti has studied the function of fracture in Girondo’s early works, leading to her description of the texts’ reliance on metonymy and synecdoche as a semantic “desarticulación y desmembramiento” [disarticulation and dismembering] constituting a discourse of irreverence and desacralization (156).¹¹ In Veinte poemas, there is not yet any semantic or phonemic decomposition, although the mere abandonment of rhyme, meter, and rhythm suggest “un anterior y más elemental deseo de destrucción” (Scrimaglio 17) [a previous and more primal desire for destruction]. But on the level of imagery, corporeal disintegration strengthens societal disintegration through Girondo’s ironic mix of registers: for example, his portraying the daughters of the well-to-do while employing indecorous, even scandalous, terms for certain parts of their bodies.

Similarly, the bodies of men and women depicted in the poem “Plaza” continue to reveal cartoon-like corporal features that typify social breakdown. Though the title, “Plaza,” might seem to conjure the nostalgic Buenos Aires of Borges’s early poetry, the poem is in fact another ostensibly objective view that conceals more satire. The affirmation that simple city life is only complicated by a few people is undermined by the ways in which they do so: men exploiting wet nurses, another man posing as statuary, and a woman motioning for help with traffic-signal gestures. Even the unborn babies are drastic and violent; these dehumanized caricatures of citizens-in-need lace the lauded “progress” of modern urban life with dark humor, while echoing the poet’s rhetorical question from the “Carta abierta a <<La Púa>>,” which was published as a preface to Veinte poemas: “Lo cotidiano, sin embargo, ¿no es una manifestación admirable y modesta de lo absurdo?” (26) [The quotidian, however—is it not an admirable and modest manifestation of the absurd?]. “Plaza,” while apparently embracing organic growth in the “rechonchez de los parterres” (50) [exuberance of the gardens] and the references to pregnancy and breastfeeding, more accurately catalyzes a mix ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Articulating the Body
• 1.  Body, Language, and the Limits of Ontology
• 2.  Language Immersion: Return to the Original Tongue
• 3.  The Body Politic: Immediate Breakdown, Renewal Deferred
• Conclusion: Anthropophagy, Legacy of a Body Aesthetics
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index