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 1. Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes  
 1.1 Early period in Chile 
 1.2 Travels in Asia and Europe 
 1.3 Return to Chile (and exile) 
 2. “Me gustas cuando callas, porq...  
 2.1 Neruda reading poems 15 and 20...  
 2.2 Freud on romantic love 
 2.3 Critique by Marta Traba 
 2.4 Critique by Slavoj Žižek of ep...  
 3. “Un nombre confuso”: Residenci...  
 3.1 The poems of Residencia en la ...  
 3.2 Is this surrealism, automatism...  
 3.3 Avoid biographical readings 
 3.4 “Arte poética” 
 3.5 Self-other dialectic persists 
 3.6 Immense incommensurability (la...  
 4. Political poetry: “Sobre una p...  
 4.1 Sudden change in poetic theme ...  
 4.2 Manifesto in Caballo verde par...  
 4.3 The Civil War: España en el co...  
 5. Performance of the Dialectic: ...  
 5.1 Epic poetry 
 5.2 Dialectics 
Unnombreconfuso_img1.gif 3. “Un nombre confuso”: Residencia en la tierra and avant-garde poetry Image: Remedios Varo, Naturaleza muerta resucitando, México 1963
3.1 The poems of Residencia en la tierra are characterized by oxymoron, truncated similes, negated structures and systems of meaning
3.1.1 Examples of titles: “Sistema sombrío” “Sonata y destrucciones” “Significa sombras”
3.1.2 “Galope muerto”: still life “resucitando”; traditional trope of the simile is broken apart (“Como cenizas, como mares poblándose”)
Language and poetic forms themselves are in crisis
3.1.3 “Unidad”: mocking the Unities of aesthetic systems
3.1.4 Such poems portray a world where the Logos is in crisis
3.2 Is this surrealism, automatism?
3.2.1 Similarities to surrealism
Juxtaposition of incongruous or oppositional images: "entre guarniciones y doncellas"
Broken syntax reveals arbitrariness of human cognitive structures
3.2.2 Key differences
Surrealism attempted to destroy established systems of meaning in order to reach that point in the mind where binary oppositions no longer exist
Their poetry is a battering ram against ossified mental, linguistic and social structures
Breakdown of such structures has a liberatory potential for them
For Neruda, the structures of meaning are already broken
Language also is broken, fails to signify; poetic forms have become meaningless under the pressure of solitude and incomunicación
There is no liberation associated with this breakdown; in almost all the poems of Residencia I y II, it is a cause of intense anguish
Neruda’s work here is closer to a modernist poetry of alienation, à la T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land) than it is to the “profane illuminations” (Walter Benjamin) of surrealism
3.3 Avoid biographical readings
3.3.1 Poor example of bigoraphical reading: “Neruda was lonely and couldn’t speak the local languages so he poured his anguished soul into his poetry...”
3.3.2 Stress instead the performance of avant-garde techniques in these poems
3.4 “Arte poética”
3.4.1 An ironic Ars poetica or poetic manifesto
3.4.2 Syntactically performs the loss of substance (desubstantivization)
3.4.3 BUT: “piden lo profético que hay en mí”
3.4.4 Once again, the voice is constructed out of the silence of the Other, in this case the mute objects of the world which demand voice and meaning from the prophet-poet
3.5 Self-other dialectic persists
3.5.1 “Ritual de mis piernas”: other is generated from the self
3.5.2 Other is space not so much of loss of language, but of language as Other, as alienating system (à la Lacan)
“lo extranjero y lo hostil allí comienza, los nombres del mundo, lo fronterizo y lo remoto, lo sustantivo y lo adjetivo que no caben en mi corazón, con densa y fría constancia allí se originan”
3.6 Immense incommensurability (lack of fit) between Word and World
3.6.1 “Desespediente”: neologism created out of “desespero” and “expediente”
3.6.2 Writing, bureaucracy, even poetry itself erases the body and nature: “La paloma está llena de papeles caídos”
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