“Freud divides adult love relations into two broad categories, those modelled on ‘anaclitic’ attachments, and those modelled on narcissistic infantile object-cathexes. [...] Freud argues that the anaclitic lover tends to over-evaluate the love-object. This type conforms most readily to the stereotyped image of romantic love, a love based on putting the love-object on a pedestal and abjecting the self. [...] Freud, however, is correct in his cynical assessment of the lover’s state of adoration: anaclisis is not so much based on a valorization of her unique charms and attributes as much as in his position as lover. He suggests that this state is ‘derived from the child’s original narcissism and thus corresponds to a transference of that narcissism to the sexual object’ (1914a: 88). The lover transfers narcissistic self-regard onto the love object and is thus able to love himself, as it were, in loving the other. [...] Freud’s description of anaclitic and narcissistic types of love-object seems, on a superficial reading, to confirm the stereotyped image of romantic love: the woman seems to be in the powerful position. She is distant, aloof, self-preoccupied, on a pedestal, regarded as a queen or goddess whose every wish is her lover’s command. The man seems to be her willing slave, happy to satisfy her needs in order to remain in some relation with her. However, as Freud astutely obseves, these appearances in fact belie the real power relations invested in romantic myths. He observes that the anaclitic lover directs all his ardour and passion to a woman whose unique identity, ‘personality’, beauty, are his avowed object. However, her identity is surprisingly irrelevant to his passion. The anaclitic lover makes this kind of passionate commitment not once, to a rare, exceptional woman – as he professes – but to a large number of women with whom he forms a number of serial romantic liaisons. [...] By implication, it is not any particular woman whose unique identity is the privileged object of his desire. Its is the loving attitude itself he desires.” – Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan, pp.126-30

2.3 Critique by Marta Traba

2.3.1 “Desencasilla a Safo, la extiende meticulosamente sobre las naranjas, oh! amor, ardiente amiga, traéme el aceite y los higos ... Y Safo, formidable poetisa, mucho mejor que los hombres, por supuesto, pero con su mala memoria no da con nada más que la única estrofa del único verso, del único Neruda que recordará siempre, me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente” – Marta Traba, Las ceremonias del verano (1966) p.51

2.4 Critique by Slavoj Žižek of episode recounted in Neruda’s memoires: “El encuentro fue el de un hombre con una estatua”

2.4.1 “Entró por el fondo de la casa, como una estatua oscura que caminara, la mujer más bella que había visto hasta entonces en Ceilán, de la raza tamil, de la casta de los parias. Iba vestida con un sari rojo y dorado, de la tela más burda. En los pies descalzos llevaba pesadas ajorcas. A cada lado de la nariz le brillaban dos puntitos rojos. Serían vidrios ordinarios, pero en ella parecían rubíes. Se dirigió con paso solemne hacia el retrete, sin mirarme siquiera, sin darse por aludida de mi existencia, y desapareció con el sórdido receptáculo sobre la cabeza, alejándose con su paso de diosa. Era tan bella que a pesar de su humilde oficio me dejó preocupado. Como si se tratara de un animal huraño, llegado de la jungla, pertenecía a otra existencia, a un mundo separado. La llamé sin resultado. Después alguna vez le dejé en su camino algún regalo, seda o fruta. Ella pasaba sin oír ni mirar. Aquel trayecto miserable había sido convertido por su oscura belleza en la obligatoria ceremonia de una reina indiferente. Una mañana, decidido a todo, la tomé fuertemente de la muñeca y la miré cara a cara. No había idioma alguno en que pudiera hablarle. Se dejó conducir por mí sin una sonrisa y pronto estuvo desnuda sobre mi cama. Su delgadísima cintura, sus plenas caderas, las desbordantes copas de sus senos, la hacían igual a las milenarias esculturas del sur de la India. El encuentro fue el de un hombre con una estatua. Permaneció todo el tiempo con sus ojos abiertos, impasible. Hacía bien en despreciarme. No se repitió la experiencia.” – Pablo Neruda, Confieso que he vivido, p.45

2.4.2 “This passage is remarkable not only for obvious reasons: a shameless story of rape. with the dirty details discreetly passed over (“she let herself be led away, and was soon naked in my bed”—how did she come to be naked? Obviously, she didn’t do it herself), the rnystification of the victim’s passivity into a divine indifference, the lack of elementary decency and shame on the part of the narrator (if he was attracted to the girl, wasn’t he embarrassed by the awareness that she was smelling, seeing, and dealing with his shit every morning?). Its most remarkable feature is the divinization of the excrement: a sublime goddess appears at the very site where excrements are hidden. One should take this equation very seriously: elevating the exotic Other into an indifferent divinity is strictly equal to treating it like shit.” – Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, p.25.

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”

4. Political poetry: “Sobre una poesía sin pureza”

4.1 Sudden change in poetic theme and style: “Entrada a la madera”

4.1.1 In the “Tres cantos materiales” (1934-35) of which “Entrada a la madera” is a good example, things suddenly signify in contrast to the forces of erosion suggested by the tarnished objects of the real world in “Arte poética”

Moreover, material things here signify the self: “Es que soy yo ante tu color de mundo, ante tus pálidas espadas muertas, ante tus corazones reunidos, ante tu silenciosa multitud. Soy yo ante tu ola de olores muriendo, envueltos en otoño y resistencia: [...] soy yo con mis lamentos sin origen, sin alimentos, desvelado, solo, entrando oscurecidos corredores, llegando a tu materia misteriosa.”

4.2 Manifesto in Caballo verde para la poesía

4.2.1 Calls into question the institutional role of the aesthetic

4.2.2 This is the main constituent of Peter Bürger’s definition of the historical/ revolutionary/ political avant-garde as opposed to aesthetic modernism (Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde)

4.2.3 Desire to trasnscend the aesthetic, dissolve it into life, produce an “eyeball-to-eyeball encounter with the real” (Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism”, Against the Grain p.142)

4.2.4 Poetry should be made of sweat, worn away by acid, should be stained with food, impure like clothes, something you wear, something you use

4.3 The Civil War: España en el corazón

4.3.1 Poetry now aligns itself with the Republican struggle, and all the power of poetic rhetoric is deployed in its defence

4.3.2 Rejects previous poetic mode: “Preguntaréis: Y dónde está las lilas? Y la metafísica cubierta de amapolas? Y la lluvia que a menudo golpeaba sus palabras llenándolas de agujeros y pájaros? Os voy a contar todo lo que me pasa.”

4.3.3 Poetic trope of the simile is still rejected but for a different reason than in “Galope muerto”

“y por las calles la sangre de los niños corría simplemente, como sangre de niños”

To make a simile out of the blood of children would be an obscenity: it cannot be compared to anything

4.3.4 YET: the writing here is markedly logocentric, as opposed to the poetry of the first Residencia where the Logos was in crisis

There is a grounded subject who speaks to his audience, who has a simple but urgent message to impart

Rhetorical devices such as repetition with variation are used: “Venid a ver la sangre por las calles, venid a ver la sangre por las calles, venid a ver la sangre por las calles!”

The use of the vosotros form lends the poetry the authority of the pulpit (in Latin America, vosotros is used only in Church)

5. Performance of the Dialectic: Canto general

5.1 Epic poetry

5.1.1 Epic poems which enact a split between structure and texture, between an overarching view of the pattern of history and the holes, “vacíos”, or points of failure of meaning/signification out of which that history is built

5.1.2 Desire to narrate an entire continent, ranging in time from pre-Columbian society to “Yankee imperialism”, from Tierra del Fuego to the USA

5.2 Dialectics

5.2.1 Yet the poems project a rigorously dialectical view of history, with history being made through class struggle, of the proletariat, slaves and silenced workers, versus the various overlords

5.2.2 Metaphor of the coral reef in “Alturas de Macchu [sic] Picchu” sums up this dialectical structuring process. Reef is a metaphor for the lost city of Machu Picchu, because the reef is built slowly over the centuries out of the dead bodies of the coral polyp. A living structure emerges out of the death of billions of organisms. This is like the city built with the sacrifice of ordinary workers and slaves, which in turn is like human “civilization” built out of the labour of ordinary, silenced, enslaved, impoverished or hungry human beings.

Madre de piedra, espuma de los cóndores. Alto arrecife de la aurora humana. Pala perdida en la primera arena. Ésta fue la morada, éste es el sitio: aquí los anchos granos del maíz ascendieron y bajaron de nuevo como granizo rojo. [...] Pero una permanencia de piedra y de palabra: la ciudad como un vaso se levantó en las manos de todos, vivos, muertos, callados, sostenidos de tanta muerte, un muro, de tanta vida un golpe de pétalos de piedra: la rosa permanente, la morada: este arrecife andino de colonias glaciales. [...] Hambre, coral del hombre, hambre, planta secreta, raíz de los leñadores, hambre, subió tu raya de arrecife hasta estas altas torres desprendidas?

5.2.3 Yet this is also like the poem itself, which is a dialectical process in which a monumental structure (the epic poem) is built out of the silenced voices that it gathers together from across history

Hence the basic self-other dialectic of Poem 15 of 20 poemas de amor or “Ritual de mis piernas” remains intact: the Other is still silent, and the poetic discourse is constructed, dialectically out of that silence (or is predicated on it)

Yo vengo a hablar por vuestra boca muerta. A través de la tierra juntad todos los silenciosos labios derramados y desde el fondo habladme toda esta larga noche como si yo estuviera con vosotros anclado, contadme todo, cadena a cadena, eslabón a eslabón, y paso a paso, afilad los cuchillos que guardasteis, ponedlos en mi pecho y en mi mano, como un río de rayos amarillos, como un río de tigres enterrados, y dejadme llorar, horas, días, años, edades ciegas, siglos estelares. Dadme el silencio, el agua, la esperanza. Dadme la lucha, el hierro, los volcanes. Apegadme los cuerpos como imanes. Acudid a mis venas y a mi boca. Hablad por mis palabras y mi sangre.

Dr Geoffrey Kantaris	SP12 Learning Resources
Dr Geoffrey Kantaris	Last updated: 6-10-11

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