SOURCE: Pearsall, Priscilla. “Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera: Modernity and the Destruction of the Romantic ‘Angel Consoladora.’” In An Art Alienated from Itself: Studies in Spanish American Modernism, pp. 40-65. University, Miss.: Romance Monographs, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Pearsall considers Nájera's defense of romanticism and the changing perspectives on life and literature reflected in his poetry.]

In the late summer of 1876, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera published, in a series of sections, a long article, “El arte y el materialismo,” which is often considered to be the first Modernist manifesto.¹ Many of the conflicts about literature which would continue to be present in Modernist writings were already found in this early discussion of the new art. Nájera insists that his study is a defense of poetry's spiritual nature against Positivism and its manifestations in literature, Realism and Naturalism—the “materialism” of the title—which he perceived to be encroaching upon contemporary art. The work is basically, however, a defense of a derivative Romantic esthetic which had dominated much of European writing from the time of Hegel at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nájera's definition of artistic freedom, which is exalted throughout “El arte y el materialismo,” is clearly Romantic, for it often reads like a Spanish translation of Poe's Poetic Principle,² in its endorsement of lo verdadero, lo bueno y lo bello as the goals of art in its aspiration toward “un ideal misterioso que llamamos belleza,”³ reminiscent of Poe's “wild beauty beyond.” As in Poe, the “torbellino vertiginoso de las humanas pasiones” is rejected because it is an obstacle to the pursuit of “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” Nájera's concept of the beauty sought through his newly liberated poetry makes clear his dependence upon the Romantic search for transcendence through art: “Para nosotros, lo bello es la representación de lo infinito en lo finito; la manifestación de lo extensivo en lo intensivo; el reflejo de lo absoluto; la revelación de Dios” (55).

In his defense of Romanticism, he attacks not only Realism and Naturalism, but also the decadence which dominated European literature from the time of Baudelaire on. Nájera, in fact, explicitly exalts Victor Hugo, whom he mentions twice in the article, at the same time that he rejects Baudelaire: “Aún hay poetas que rinden culto a la belleza; aún hay poetas que elevan su espíritu a los celestes espacios del idealismo; aún hay artistas que conservan en toda su pureza el fuego sagrado. Al lado de Las flores del mal de Charles Baudelaire, podemos ver aún Las contemplaciones de Víctor Hugo …” (62). By the time Nájera wrote this, Hugo had become virtually the symbol of Romanticism. The following quotation from Manuel González Prada reveals the impact Hugo had on Hispanic culture in the nineteenth century, an influence greater than that of any other writer: “Para estudiar el espíritu de nuestro siglo necesitamos leer las páginas del gran poeta: conociendo a Víctor Hugo, sabemos lo que fuimos, lo que somos, lo que anhelamos ser. Más que el tipo de una raza, debe llamarse el hombre representativo de una época.”⁴ Baudelaire had no less importance for European poetry of the latter half of the century; Nájera, however, exalts the Romantic poet over the author considered one of the first great Modernists by scholars of Modernism in a context not exclusively Hispanic.

What divides the art of Baudelaire from that of Victor Hugo is not only decadence, with which Nájera is obsessed, but, above all, the increased interiorization of Baudelaire's poetry. In his insistence upon art's “spiritual” nature, Nájera unfortunately confuses post-Romantic introversion with so-called “materialism,” for he considers even interiorization to be in conflict with Romanticism's “spirituality”: “Volved la vista a la poesía, a la música, a la arquitectura, en todas verás perfectamente delineadas … la materia y el espíritu en su perpetua e incesante lucha; el arte degradado que afianza y liga al hombre en la tierra, y el arte sublime que lo purifica y arrebata al cielo; el trabajo tenebroso de las sombras para purificar los más ocultos senos de nuestro espíritu, y los rayos del resplandeciente sol de la belleza, iluminando con su luz celeste la sima cavernosa de la vida” (160). Nájera describes explicitly the literature which he considers to be degraded by its contact with “materialism.” It will be noticed that the role of the woman is central to Nájera's characterization of any given genre:

En el teatro, a las idealistas obras de Calderón de la Barca; a las ingeniosas sátiras de Moreto y Tirso de Molina; a las graciosas tragedias de Racine y Corneille, y a las creaciones gigantescas de Shakespeare, ese coloso inmortal del pensamiento, han sucedido las rastreras producciones de Sardou, los repugnantes cuadros de Alejandro Dumas, el asqueroso realismo de la escuela francesa. Ya no miramos en la escena los blancos tipos, esas bellísimas encarnaciones de la virtud y la pureza; ángeles de luz que despertaban en nuestra alma los más nobles y elevados sentimientos, que como benéfico rocío oreaban nuestra imaginación calenturienta, y nos elevaban a los espacios más hermosos del arte. ¿En dónde está Julieta? ¿En dónde Margarita? A aquellos ángeles de luz ha sucedido un cortejo de sombras; a aquellos blancos espíritus, espíritus de fuego; al amor del alma, la pasión fisiológica; a la virtud el vicio; a la pureza la crápula; al ángel la ramera.

(61)

As we have seen, Théophile Gautier and Casal believed that decadence captured the essence of modernity, for its destruction and pathology reflected the crisis of contemporary civilization.⁵ Nájera could not accept a decadent esthetic which saw art as the expression of a crisis of consciousness, although the ambivalence present in his writings reveals deep psychological and cultural conflict.

In Nájera's later works, a return to the Romantic esthetic of idealization and transcendence found in “El arte y el materialismo,” which he confused with creative freedom, undermines the real sense of renewal present in his most original poetic expression. The Modernists' tendency to identify the artistic liberation they sought with an outmoded, derivative Romantic concept of literature would repeatedly present a problem for them, for instead of liberating them, the return to a nineteenth-century search for metaphysical vision entrapped them in the past, and subverted the radical modernity—the real freedom—of their poetic vision. Nájera's own most original writings are an implicit rejection of the rigidly idealized and, therefore, inhibiting definition of artistic freedom found in “El arte y el materialismo.”

Lying at the beginning of Modernism, Nájera's works reveal the dynamic tension which governed the period from the outset. In the poetry of the woman in Ala y abismo one can observe Modernism's birth in the disintegration of Romanticism. “Ignota dea,” the first poem of the collection, is especially important for the study of the transition from Romanticism to Modernism, because it makes evident the fantasy nature of the Romantic ángel consoladora. Ricardo Gullón has called the don Juan myth the central myth of Romanticism,⁶ and in Modernism, too, the portrayal of the woman is closely linked to what can only be characterized as a donjuanesque vision. The Romantics did not question the emotional basis of the idealized woman when they gave her expression in literature. In Don Juan Tenorio, for example, Doña Inés is a character who functions, within the limits of a personality relatively lacking in complexity, as an integrated whole. Nájera, in his Unknown Goddess, bares the psychological mechanism underlying his obsession with the remote Oedipal vision of the woman. Ala y abismo, in fact, can be read as an exposition of the ángel de amor's existence on a fantasy level exclusively, i.e., as the final destruction of the Romantic myth of the ángel consoladora.

In this opening poem the woman is no more than a stimulus for the poet's fantasies; remote and unattainable, she is the “estrella que ninguno alcanza, / nieve de un cráter que ninguno pisa.”⁷ The title, “Ignota dea,” makes apparent the uncertainty of her identity; this remote, unreal being, however, acquires life (“cobra vida”) in his dreams. His visions of her separate the poet from surrounding reality; he insists almost paranoidly upon his isolation: “Extrañan todos mi apariencia fría / y curiosos inquieren mi secreto, / buscan, preguntan, pero yo discreto, / burlo con mi cautela su tesón” (II, 10). The non-human elements which populate his poetic world, i.e., the camelia, the gardenia, etc., reveal how far removed he is into the recesses of his own mind. The repetition of phrases beginning with “ni” heightens the sense of incantation of the poetry:

Nadie lo sabe: ni la sombra muda
cuyos ojos de estatua nada miran,
ni las brisas nocturnas que suspiran
bajo los verdes tilos del jardín;
ni la camelia que tu pecho besa,
ni la gardenia que mi ojal decora,
ni los ojos azules de la aurora,
ni la tímida luz del camarín.

(II, 9)

The poetry of the woman in “Ignota dea” is unrelated to any sense of connectedness with another human being. Even literature is no longer a bridge of communication, for he muses that, when she reads his poem, she will wonder who the woman is. The verses are “llenos de ella,” (II, 13), an indication of Nájera's belief that poetry has the capacity to capture and contain the identity of the person. It is not primarily the woman, however, but the poet himself who is entrapped within this solitary world.

In “De vasallo” Nájera would return to the theme of himself as prisoner of his beloved: “Cuanto existe, señora, es prisionero: / la perla, de su concha nacarada; / de las nocturnas sombras el lucero; / la vida de la luz; yo de mi amada” (II, 57). Although he draws upon a commonplace of courtly poetry, it has deep significance in Ala y abismo, for Nájera became entangled in a nightmare web of fantasy about the woman. She is both the ala which Nájera depends upon to lift him out of his depression and, when his fantasies of her disintegrate, a significant force in the psychological abyss into which he is plunged.

When Nájera writes that the Unknown Goddess acquires life in his dreams, it is a projection of his own fantasies upon her; his poem does not ultimately portray the woman, but his own existence within his imagination. The Modernists' portraits of women were generally deeply narcissistic. This was a way of controlling the woman who was often perceived as threatening, for they stamped their own identity upon her, and made her into a reflection of themselves.⁸ This obviated their relating in any depth to another human being, and facilitated their flight into the recesses of their own minds. The poetry of the woman in Modernism, therefore, tends to be a mirror of the poet's isolation, his alienation from surrounding reality.

Conflicting fantasies co-exist in “Ignota dea,” making the nature of the woman's existence in the poet's reveries extremely confused. She is the Chaste Goddess whose “divine image” he worships:

Púdica Diosa, con amor te escondo
en el altar de triste catacumba,
y allí, como en el seno de la tumba,
el culto que te rindo nadie ve;
los cirios aromáticos chispean
alrededor del místico recinto
y la esencia del rojo terebinto
de tu divina imagen brota al pie.

(II, 11)

Desire, however, continually threatens to break in on the dream of the chaste, remote goddess. In his imagined idylls with her, there is a constant threat of fantasizing a full-blown sexual encounter: “Mi boca recorre tu cabello / y las azules venas de tu cuello / que hinchadas se estremecen con pasión” (II, 10-11). But in words permeated with sexual symbolism he describes his rejection of eroticism: “La Diosa permanece en el sagrario, / los cirios son aún de virgen cera …” (II, 12).

This obsessive search for an ideal woman represents a regression to an infantile view in which the mother is seen as pure, remote and idealized. Nájera's love, even as an adult, had to be seen as “spiritual,” a continuation of the child's relationship with the mother. Eroticism was, as a result, perceived as destructive, because it represented the antithesis of this “spirituality.” Because the woman excites his fantasies, she must be controlled, for she has the power to excite not only “good” visions of the chastely remote goddess, but also erotic reveries which can destroy that illusion. The psychological roots of the clearly sadistic overtones of Modernist decadence merit examination in Hispanic criticism. Turn-of-the-century sadism originates in the need to control not so much the woman as her power to excite fantasies which represent a threat to the illusory world the writer struggled to maintain.

Nájera's drive for possession and domination of the woman is apparent: “Conmigo vives: vas dentro de mi alma / como en el arca santa del hebreo, / yo solo te contemplo, te poseo” (II, 10). The repression of many of the fantasies which she excites (“Calla sumiso mi deseo / encarcelado en férrea voluntad …” [II, 12]), leaves him with overwhelming sexual frustration, expressed in the imagery of the unopened bud and the iceberg:

Mi cariño detiene su perfume,
esparcirse quisiera y se consume
en la cárcel estrecha del botón;
como ocultan los témpanos polares
una mar de tranquila transparencia,
así, tras aparente indiferencia,
se extiende ilimitada mi pasión.

(II, 12)

Nájera's illusion of the ángel consoladora is explicitly based on sexual repression. Much more introspection and self-awareness underlie this creation than the version of the ángel de amor which we find in Don Juan Tenorio or Don Álvaro.⁹

Another type of power over the woman is provided by the ritualization of the relationship with her. When love becomes a rite in which the poet worships at the woman-goddess's altar, it has the effect of depersonalizing the woman, for any female is interchangeable with any other who can stimulate his fantasies that she is simultaneously remote and desirable.

“Desconocida” reveals a further way in which the poet struggles to control the eroticism which threatens to break in upon his illusory world. The ambience of this second poem of Ala y abismo is even more unreal than that of the first, for, unlike the Ignota Dea, this woman has no basis in reality. In her, Nájera recreates one of his most powerful fantasies: the woman who will bring him perfect domestic happiness. The vision of the woman is again based on sexual repression; sensuous elements are present, but they are explicitly rejected:

Ningún brazo rodeó su talle
en las curvas lascivas de la danza.
No ha tocado jamás mano ninguna
de su corpiño los sedosos nudos,
ni retrató la veneciana luna
sus hombros escultóricos desnudos.

(II, 15)

The function of the perfect wife, like that of the woman-goddess, is to recapture for Nájera the experiences of childhood; she is specifically expected to restore his lost childhood religious faith: “¡Ven! Purifica la existencia mía, / envuélveme en la nube de tu velo: / que mire a Dios, como antes le veía, / a través de tus rizos, en el cielo” (II, 17). In Nájera as well as in other Modernists, the woman will continue to be seen as a route to the absolute. Modernism, however, also developed a neomysticism of the senses, and in the poetry of Darío, especially, the female will become a means to cosmic vision not through the repression of sexuality, but through heightening the sensuousness associated with her.

Destructive eroticism is controlled by Nájera through the fantasies of marriage and family life.¹⁰ This has roots in Hispanic Romanticism in which domesticity was often exalted over passion outside of marriage.¹¹ Nájera's desire to idealize conventional, middle-class values at the expense of any recognition of the woman's emotional and sexual being, is not atypical of Latin American society of his time. Literature does not negate social values; Becky Sharp, in her determination to marry well or be damned, marched at the head of legions of Victorian women.

The poetic world of “Desconocida” is very unstable, for it is entirely illusory. Nájera himself concedes that this fantasized bride may be his own creation: “¡Si tú no existes en la vida / mi amor tiene la fuerza de create!” (II, 16). The stable, even prosaic, values of domesticity and traditional Catholicism are inseparable from Nájera's ephemeral dream of the woman, for they are the cornerposts to which he attempts to anchor his tenuous artistic vision.

In “Musa blanca” we find still another incarnation of the idealized woman, the muse. In this poem, which is written as a relationship with a woman is ending, the poet is alone in his study; the room is filled with objects which evoke the memory of the woman with whom he was involved as recently as the night before. In the midst of his pain and loss, he fantasizes the arrival of his muse. His pathological dependence upon the fantasy woman is nowhere more evident than in this poem, for the experience with the real-life woman has led only to the depression evoked in the images of the frozen fountain and the deserted meadow in the night outside the study. Nájera denigrates the woman by comparing her with the supposed muse, for the latter is portrayed as his wife, with whom he has an on-going relationship, while the real-life woman is the treacherous mistress for whom he abandons the muse only temporarily. Nájera's hostility toward the mujer de carne y hueso is apparent, for he blames her for the failure of their involvement; only the fantasized muse is faithful: “¡Tú sola nunca engañas, ni olvidas, ni abandonas!” (II, 55). More important, the relationship with the woman is antithetical to artistic creation. The apparition reminds him that when he was with the woman he wrote nothing: “Tu amada entre tus brazos, las sombras en el lecho, / afuera la mañana … y virgen el papel” (II, 54). It is only after the mujer de carne y hueso leaves and the muse can return that he will again write. Seen in another light, the absence of the woman is a strong motivating force in Nájera's poetry; when a woman is present, there is no poetry.¹²

The arrival of the Musa Blanca brings the promise of life and springtime:

¡Despierta ya, poeta! Despierta, soy la ausente,
muy pronto los cristales helados de la fuente
en la marmórea taza cantando bullirán;
veremos nuevas rosas cubriendo la pradera,
y atravesando lentos el amplia carretera,
cargados ya de mieses, los carros crujirán.

(II, 52)

This fantasy muse is Poetry; she herself declares: “¡Yo soy la Poesía!” (II, 52). Poetry offers him rebirth and vitality, whereas the involvement with the woman led only to failure and depression. The poet seeks refuge, therefore, in the life his muse offers him: “Extiéndeme tus alas, y en ellas escondido / calor y fuerza cobre mi espíritu entumido, / y olvide, dormitando, las dichas que perdí” (II, 54). It is Nájera's belief that this fantasy life into which he retreats is undying. A commonplace of nineteenth-century art was that, whereas everything else perished, art remained. As we shall see in “Non omnis moriar,” Nájera believed that the fusion of his being with the enduring works he created held the promise of his immortality, for his being would continue to exist in poetry after his death. His muse in fact reassures him, “¡Tu alma es inmortal!” (II, 55). Because the visionary woman-muse is Poetry, moreover, her nature has strong implications for Nájera's poetic world; i.e., his art and the fantasy stimulated by the woman are one. The poetry which contains his identity, therefore, belongs to an entirely interiorized realm, an evanescent world of the imagination.

This poem also makes clear the isolation and alienation which underlie Nájera's artistic vision. The involvement with the woman, which offered the possibility of a poem capturing all the rich psychological nuances of an encounter between two people, leads only to a deeper retreat into fantasy. This withdrawal takes the place of poetry which would fully analyze the emotions of sorrow and loss experienced at the ending of the love affair. At the same time, the first poems of the woman in Ala y abismo reveal the way in which modern life is lived at a psychological level. Because the visions of the woman are fragmentary, shifting from one fantasy to another, modern life and identity are themselves perceived to be fragmented and unstable.

The evanescent fantasies of the woman are concretized in an attempt to provide some form and permanence to the elusive vision. The muse appears in the form of a statue:

Y atónito contemplo, soberbia, esplendorosa,
de blanco revestida, la estatua más hermosa
con que soñado hubiera pagana antigüedad.
Sobre sus blancos senos, erguidos y redondos,
cae una trenza rica de sus cabellos blondos
cuya delgada punta le llega casi al pie;
sandalias marfilinas son cárcel de su planta;
sin flores el cabello, sin perlas la garganta,
vestida de sí misma, mi espíritu la ve.

(II, 51-52)

Nájera avoids dealing with the woman both by etherealizing her and concretizing her. She is at different times both incorporeal and sculptural, but never a real person who must be dealt with in all the complexity of human interrelatedness.

In the course of the development of the poetry of Ala y abismo, the dream of the ángel consoladora disintegrates. She was, from the beginning of the work, so illusory that she bore the seeds of her own destruction. The poet's fantasy of her, from “Ignota dea” on, was so evanescent and delicate that it ultimately had to shatter. In Nájera's treatment of this myth, moreover, it is apparent that Romanticism was coming to an end.

In “Monólogo del incrédulo” at the end of Ala y abismo, the long-awaited novia is finally present, the ángel de amor with whom he can potentially live in the domestic bliss of which he has dreamed. Predictably, however, the woman in life does not conform to the perfect woman of his reveries. In the first place, she does not restore his lost childhood faith, for the poem was written at a time of deep religious crisis; the poet is the “incrédulo” of the title.

In Modernism, as we have seen in Nájera's works, the woman is rarely valued except as a stimulus for fantasy. Since it is the fantasies of her that are sought, the woman herself is desirable only when she is unattainable and, therefore, a source of imagined happiness. Two of Nájera's most powerful poems, “La Serenata de Schubert” and “De blanco” are written about women who are remote and unattainable; the first poem recalls the beloved who is now dead, and the second evokes the image of his future bride. The poetry written when the previously unattainable novia is present, however, is some of Nájera's most depressed and suicidal. He reverts to an obsession with the mother, furthermore, where the Oedipal fixation all began.

In “Monólogo del incrédulo” the poet denigrates the novia in life, in comparison with his exaltation of her in fantasy. He now finds her ignorant and unstimulating for, while he has learned that life is painful, in her youthful innocence she has not. Much of what Nájera sees in the woman is a projection of his own emotional patterns upon her. He believes that her image of him is as deeply rooted in dream as is his of her, and therefore, as unsubstantial and easily shattered. He contends that she was impressed by something as ephemeral as a line of his poetry, and as a result, believed herself to be in love with him. Because the portrait of the woman is so involved with Nájera's illusions of her, and with the failure of those illusions, we can grasp no realistic idea of what the woman's psychology may actually be.

With the disintegration of his illusory visions of the novia, the poet begins to doubt seriously that love ever lasts. In his confusion he broods over whether or not she loves him: “¿No me ama? Tiembla mi fe / y algo muy hondo, muy hondo, / de mi existencia en el fondo / me contesta: ¡no lo sé!” (II, 96). The uncertainty of her affection for him reflects his own problematic feelings: “¿La quiero? Y más tarde ¿la querré?” (II, 97). The theme of love's incapacity to endure had appeared previously in Ala y abismo in the poem “Con los muertos”: “Sólo tú, la mujer que ya no amo / y que tanto adoré, queda conmigo” (II, 82). Nájera's inability to love any woman continuously takes its toll in “Monólogo del incrédulo” where he writes:

Amar y no ser amado
no es la pena mayor:
ver el cariño apagado,
no amar ya lo antes amado
es el supremo dolor.

(II, 97)

When his adolescent concept of love is shattered, there is no deeper, more grown-up affection to take its place. The mature love poetry of a Shakespeare is inconceivable in many nineteenth-century poets, including Nájera.

His relationship with the woman and his relationship with himself are intimately linked. The self-punitive attitude of another of the final poems of Ala y abismo, “To be,”—a title obviously based on the phrase from Hamlet's soliloquy—only reveals what the function of the poetry of the woman has been throughout Ala y abismo. The earlier fantasies of the woman had provided a means of escape for Nájera, for they gave him a world into which he could withdraw from reality, including the woman, and ultimately from himself. At the end of the collection, because the collapse of his dreams deprives him of the means of flight from himself, he is plunged all the more deeply into uncertainty and self-destruction.

In his despair, he identifies the primary impulse in life as the drive to “perderse en la nada, aniquilarse, / dormir sin sueños …” (II, 88). In a perverse echo of Quevedo, however, Nájera writes that human suffering continues after death so that even suicide offers no release from pain. He turns against the woman, depersonalizing her by identifying all women with the archetypal female who, because she brings forth life, is responsible for the unbroken chain of suffering: “¡Que la matriz eterna, / engendradora del linaje humano, / se torne estéril … que la vida pare!” (II, 89). One realizes how completely the earlier illusions have been shattered when this imprecation against the matriz eterna is compared with the exaltation of marriage, domesticity, and family life in poems like “Desconocida.”

One of the most profound works of Ala y abismo is “Tristissima nox;” underlying the poem are the poet's fantasies of separation from the significant women of his life: “la madre que del seno de la fosa / nos llama y acorrerla no podemos;” “la culpable esposa / que en otros brazos iracundos vemos;” “la casta sombra de la amada muerta” (II, 36). These losses leave the poet with a sense of vulnerability which plunges him into one of his most deeply-held poetic images of himself: the pilgrim asleep in the midst of threatening forces. His anxieties concretize into nightmarish visions:

Es el inmenso sueño; paso a paso
la pantera que ha poco devoraba
a la mísera res, busca en silencio
el hediondo cubil; ya no se oye
de la culebra rápida el silbido,
y entre grandes lumbradas que alimentan
las rajas crepitantes de la encina,
recuéstase el viajero de los bosques
al lado de su vieja carabina.

(II, 30-31)

Because Ala y abismo and Elegías,¹³ the collections of his middle period, contain Nájera's poetry of deepest interiorization, they are, to the reader of a century later, the most modern of all of his works because of their expression of modern angst.

Soon after he finished Ala y abismo, he turned against the psychological world reflected in the final poems of the volume. In 1888, Nájera published an article entitled “‘Tristissima nox’,” a renunciation of the poem by the same name, originally published in 1884. He satirizes his own feverish nightmare visions because they belong to an affective artistic realm, instead of to exterior reality, and cannot, therefore, be “real”:

Y en mis versos que son puramente descriptivos, quise pintar lo que jamás he visto: la noche y la madrugada en la montaña: noche y madrugada observadas en libros, en pinturas y versos ajenos, en sueños, en pesadillas, pero no en la naturaleza misma, que es maestra suprema. No podía, pues, en modo alguno, resultar real lo que no era nacido de la propia observación, y consiguientemente describí una noche en la que se acuestan los viajeros cuando comienza a clarear, y más llena de lobos, tigres, leopardos, osos y panteras que un museo de Barnum. He releído mis versos y encuentro que no son obra de poeta, sino obra de cornac. Son el sueño de un febricitante, pero no son de ningún modo la verdad.¹⁴

In his search to stabilize the pathology emerging from his own writings, Nájera, not surprisingly, turned to the sculptural qualities of Parnassian art; the frenzied pursuit of form in the face of an elusive world would be a hallmark of Modernism. In his article, he insisted that this form must belong to exterior instead of interior reality. Interiorized images, as we have seen in Casal's art, were all too readily transformed into a mirror of the poet's psychology. Nájera writes of the French art he increasingly admires: “Creemos en Gautier; buscamos la paleta de los Goncourt …” (327).

In his vicious attack upon his poem, he denies that he even remembers the motive that caused him to write it, other than that he wanted to “presentar un estudio de claroscuro, hacer un mal lienzo de la escuela de Rembrandt, oponerle luz a la sombra, el negro intenso al blanco deslumbrante” (317). He writes that, instead of limiting himself to this simple contrast, “me perdí en selva enmarañada de sueños y de fantásticas visiones …” (318). It is, however, these sueños and fantásticas visiones which make Ala y abismo and Elegías compelling to the modern reader. Nájera notes the influence of Victor Hugo upon him at the time he wrote “Tristissima nox”: “¿Qué quiero decir, por ejemplo, cuando digo en mi ‘Tristissima nox’: ‘La noche es formidable’? Pues quiero decir, simplemente, que he estado leyendo toda la semana a Víctor Hugo. Porque esa frase, amigo mío, no dice absolutamente nada más” (318). Thus Nájera rejects some of his most profound and most tortured poetry by refusing to face its reflection of his own psychology. The problem of an art which revealed the self was a central problem for Modernism.

In his later works, Nájera again avoided a poetry which would be too introverted, and fled from the interiorization of poems like “Tristissima nox” and “Ondas muertas” of Elegías in search of a poetic mode which would be a revelation of the self without being deeply introspective. He admired and paraphrased, in his article “‘Tristissima nox’,” an esthetic set forth in Eugène Véron's Esthétique: Origine des arts, which strictly controlled the expression of emotion in the work of art: “Lo que constituye el arte no es tanto la emoción comunicada, cuanto la intervención de la personalidad humana en la emoción misma. Para que sintamos la emoción estética, se ha menester que podamos encontrar al hombre en su obra” (323). In this article Nájera railed against the deep introspection of Baudelaire, as he would continue to do throughout his critical writings.¹⁵ This is in sharp contrast to Casal who took Baudelaire's esthetic of modernity as the basis for his own formulation of a Modernist esthetic. Nájera's journalism reveals that at the same time that a nineteenth-century vision of the world was collapsing in his poetry, he clung to the Romantic concept of art which had been present in his prose writings from the beginning, and which he never relinquished. In a major article of literary criticism entitled “Luis G. Urbina,” Nájera defined modern poetry: “La poesía moderna, la gran poesía, o es creyente como la de Hugo, o escultural y fría como la de Leconte de Lisle o pesimista.”¹⁶ Nájera repeatedly refused to identify modernity with his own deepest experiences in art. Modern poetry in his definition was many things, but never the reflection of psychological depth, which for the great European Modernists from Baudelaire and Dostoevsky through Beckett has constituted the essence of the modern. In Nájera's definition, his deep nostalgia for Hugoesque Romanticism, his desire for a concretized Parnassian art, and his acceptance of a psychological literature of very limited introspection all show his drive to control the emotional chaos of his tortured, deeply interiorized poems at the end of Ala y abismo.

The poetry of his final period represented for Nájera a means of flight from the deep introspection of Ala y abismo and Elegías; the desire for escape from introversion pervades his prose writings on esthetics. Although critics have judged his last works to represent an abrupt shift from the earlier volumes, the poetry of the woman remained to the end closely tied to the Romantic don Juan myth, for with the failure of the vision of the ángel de amor, Nájera withdrew into a donjuanesque exaltation of eroticism. But in Modernism the simple, swaggering, donjuanesque world of bravado and conquests found in a work like Don Juan Tenorio has died, and the erotic takes on much darker psychological overtones.

Critics have tended to emphasize the atmosphere of celebration and optimism of the Nuevas canciones, but if it is examined, the web of erotic fantasy which the poet weaves is, at its deepest level, singularly lacking in joy. While Nájera was writing this erotic poetry, furthermore, he was in the process of drinking himself to death, a feat he would accomplish before his thirty-sixth birthday. The frenetic vitality of his erotic poetry may be compared with his alcoholism in that it is a world of self-annihilation into which to escape. This search to lose the self in eroticism links the Nuevas canciones and Odas breves closely with Ala y abismo, for in the earlier work Nájera had also sought evasion in the poetry of the woman, in the pure, remote Oedipal dream, and in “To be” he had written that the principle desire of all living things was for self-annihilation, the drive to “perderse en la nada” (II, 88). Ironically, although he wrote his last poetry as an escape from the vision of the middle period, the final poetry reflects, and is in large part determined by, many of the very values which it was designed to negate.

The study of Nuevas canciones and Odas breves is instructive in an examination of Modernist esthetics because Nájera explicitly reveals his intent in writing these last volumes. One of his longest discussions of his poetics is found in “A Justo Sierra,” written in 1888. Nájera believed that classicism, i.e., literature which recaptured the psychological and esthetic properties of classical art, was an artistic mode which could provide an escape from the emotional torment of his earlier works. One of the ways in which he rejects his introspective poetry is by comparing it negatively with the model provided by Greek art. He affirms the joy of the author who writes in the classical manner, and compares him with the unhappy bard of introspection when he writes of the classicizing poet:

En él Virgilio, cual un dios habita
y cuando a Horacio sonriendo llama,
Horacio acude a la sagrada cita.
El dios de Klaros en verdad le ama,
y ya su copa, de oro cincelado,
Hebé, para escanciársela, reclama.
Dichoso él, y mil veces desgraciado
quien con la musa descreída brega
y ver quiere, insensato, en el nublado.

(II, 156-57)

In “A Hidalgo,” the poem with which he began Odas breves, Nájera was specific about the nature of the classical poetry he sought. It is specifically erotic:

Mientras exhalen su lascivo aroma
los mirtos a Afrodita consagrados,
mientras espume generoso vino
en áurea taza, y corra enardecida
la sangre por mis venas ¡te lo juro!
no dejaré jamás que en ocio grato
repose el corazón. En vano quieres
que del templo de Venus me desvíe
y que a Hermes fecundo me consagre.

(II, 227)

At the beginning of his collection of odes, Nájera makes clear that his are not the hardy choral odes of Pindar, for his are inspired by a sensuous muse of eroticism and pleasure. His later muse represents a sharp contrast with the earlier ethereal, idealized Musa Blanca. She is another fantasy of woman, the sex object which is the other side of the coin from the fantasy of the pure, remote Oedipal mother.

The instability of Nájera's vision of the woman is already apparent in “A Cecilia,” a relatively early poem. He writes that he has two muses; the two kinds of poetry they inspire contain the two different fantasies of the woman—the Oedipal virgin or the sex object. Nájera first invokes his “innocent” muse:

¡Ven tú, la blanca, tú, la inocente,
la que levantas limpia tu frente,
la que a mis padres canta en mi hogar,
la que a la virgen púdica reza,
y en la guirnalda de su cabeza
trae los botones del azahar!

(II, 69)

She exists in contrast to the muse who personifies the irrational, uncontrolled side of his personality which emerges when his repressed sexuality is released. Cecilia, however, to whom the poem is written, is judged by Nájera to be a woman of such extraordinary purity and beauty, that the muse of his orgiastic poetry would have nothing to say to her:

Tengo otra musa, la profanada,
la que insensata, desesperada,
en los festines su canto alzó;
pero esa Musa, de suelto traje,
llevar no puede ningún mensaje
para la amiga que tengo yo.

(II, 69-70)

It is apparent throughout his poetry that Nájera was never able to integrate sexual needs with emotional intimacy; the one is considered quite apart from the other. The woman who is seen as pure and virginal, a copy of the infantile vision of the mother, must be celebrated in only the most ethereal poetry. This rarefied verse, however, in its elusiveness, prefigures the extreme tenuousness into which Nájera's poetic vision will finally disintegrate: “Busco en mi alma lo más oscuro, / lo más secreto que exista en mí, / la estrofa virgen, el verso puro … / ¡y nada encuentro digno de ti!” (II, 68).

Nájera perceived his eroticism to be a restoration of serene, joyous classical erotic art. He rejected the European eroticism of his time because he found it crudely lustful instead of voluptuous: “Huyó la voluptuosidad de esta poesía bacantemente hermosa, en cuyo desnudo cuerpo se enroscan las víboras de la lujuria” (463). It is apparent in the poem “¡Bacante!” from Odas breves, however, that his own poetic expression at times degenerated into the same monotonous exaltation of lust which he had criticized in the works of nineteenth-century French authors. “¡Bacante!” is written to a bacchante, a priestess of Bacchus who is a participant in an orgiastic Dionysian rite. She is identified in the text of the poem only as “bacante,” in lower case. As we have seen in “Ignota dea,” the effect of making the woman a priestess or goddess and love a ritual is a means of depersonalizing the woman,¹⁷ for one female is interchangeable with any other; it also makes love abstract and cliché-ridden:

¡Tu destino es sagrado! Un dios infunde
su voluntad en ti: las rojas vides
que ciñen tu garganta y la corona
de pámpano silvestre, con orgullo
debes mostrar. Virtud germinativa
de inextinguible amor en ti reside …
¡La sacra voluntad cumple sumisa
y el ígneo foco del vivir mantiene!
¿Quién a tus brazos pálidos no viene?
¿Quién te niega su amor, sacerdotisa?

(II, 247)

In these lines there is no reflection of the richly varied emotional texture of an encounter with the “other,” only the substitution of one fantasy world for another. Whether the poet idealizes the woman, or denigrates her as a sex object, his fantasies are a screen which isolates him from her. The passivity of the man's relationship with the woman is apparent, for he writes that they are both slaves of Venus; as a result he becomes as depersonalized in the course of the poem as she. He renders even more sterile their contact by addressing her as “lesbian” in a touch of turn-of-the-century decadence. The will to render her in sculptural terms, furthermore, is apparent in the question: “¿Quién lapidarte con osada mano profana intenta?” (II, 246).

When he addresses the woman, it is apparent that classicizing poetry is not, after all, the antithesis of introverted art. His retreat into classicism ultimately reveals the impossibility of flight, for Greece is increasingly an interiorized idea: “¡Grecia, la madre del amor y el arte, / sólo vive en tu espíritu y el mío!” (II, 246).

In the eroticism of “¡Bacante!” Nájera withdrew into a strangely impersonal, mechanical world where love was a rite in which tribute was paid to the woman. Sex and objects—including the woman—would increasingly be the limits of an existence where all other values had been lost. This poetry, abstract and depersonalized, was the ideal vehicle for the expression of the alienation which is found throughout Nájera's later works.

In “A un amigo” from Odas breves, the poet elaborates upon the sense of extreme passivity which emerges from his erotic writings. As he is penetrated by desire, it is like a potion, a foreign will which dominates him:

Filtro invencible mi vigor enerva,
ajena voluntad mi pecho manda
y pues dueño no soy de mi albedrío,
deja que en el retiro tiburiano
abra todos mis poros al deseo.

(II, 227)

The final poetry reveals that the poet's sense of identity, or even will to exist, is breaking down. Modernism saw the disintegration of an idealized, monolithic concept of both art and the self. The poetic world of the last period into which he fled to escape the collapse of traditional views of literature and personality, therefore, failed to provide Nájera with any of the securities he sought. Poetry could not be a means of the poet's flight from himself because his identity had become so intimately linked with what he created.

Nájera's problematic being is characterized, in “Non omnis moriar,” as “ondulante espíritu disperso” (II, 249). This poem deals with a common idea of Western culture, that the artist's immortality lies in his art. As we have seen in Nájera's writings, this commonplace is expressed as a belief that poetry has the capacity to contain identity, not only that of the poet, but of the woman he loves as well: “Porque existe la Santa Poesía / y en ella irradias tú, mientras disperso / átomo de mi ser esconde el verso / ¡no moriré del todo, amiga mía!” (II, 250). The artist's life in his art is much richer than his existence in reality: “Todo lo que medroso oculta el hombre / se escapará vibrante, del poeta, / en áureo ritmo de oración secreta / que invoque en cada cláusula tu nombre” (II, 249). Because his being is contained in poetry, even after his death, when she recites his works, the woman will be able to make him live again. It will be almost as if he were there, speaking his verse into her ear, and as his breath moistens the window, it will be as if his thought had crystallized.

The poetry is as tenuous as the being which created it. Nájera has lost faith in words, even the Biblical rite of the name which gives life: “¡El nombre! … ¡Débil vibración sonora / que vibra un instante! ¡El nombre! … / ¡Ídolo torpe que el iluso adora! / ¡Última y triste vanidad del hombre!” (II, 186). Since words are unsubstantial, and the name which has the capacity to give life is meaningless, the identity of the poet contained by the language becomes all the more problematic.

The highly eroticized final poetry exists in opposition to Nájera's growing lack of illusion about love. Nothing, including love, ever lasts; to give some permanence and stability, the artist must concretize his art world: “En mármol blanco tus estatuas labra, / castas en la actitud, aunque desnudas, / y que duerma en sus labios la palabra / y se muestren muy tristes … ¡pero mudas!” (II, 186).

In “Jamás la forma …,” we find the same need to concretize increasingly unstable experience. This poem from Odas breves is written to Venus, the Greek goddess of love, who Nájera feels is the ultimate in human form. In giving himself over to Venus who symbolizes the union of form and eroticism which he seeks, the poet reaches a sense of cosmic unity, in which everything is filled with new life and vitality:

Todo palpita en tu presencia diosa. …
Sed insaciable de hermosura lleva
mi voluntad a ti; tu forma veo
y con espasmos de placer se abreva
en tu mórbido encanto mi deseo.
El alma entonces de placer expira,
la boca tiembla, el seno se levanta,
tus ropas huyen … y la tierra gira
¡oh Venus inmortal! bajo tu planta …

(II, 234)

Nájera's sexual mysticism makes clear a problem which was central to Modernism: the Modernists were not altogether effective in expressing immediacy of experience. In their writings, when sensuous experience is heightened, whether it is erotic or esthetic, or as is often the case, a combination of the two, it frequently becomes a means to cosmic vision, and ultimately a means of evading human communication; in this poem, the author uses eroticism to avoid the immediacy of an encounter with another human being. In Modernism, as in Symbolism, sex as a short cut to the absolute is not far removed from the Romantic idealization of the woman, for in both cases the experience of the woman is valued not in itself, but as an escape to a “higher” realm.

Nájera's poetic vision disintegrates rapidly in the final poetry. He admits that he has failed to recapture the world of antiquity which he sought. Even his failure as a poet is expressed in terms of classical eroticism, in a scene in which a satyr running through the forest pays no attention to him:

Silente oscuridad había caído
de los cielos … ¡ni un astro ni una hoguera!
y por los perros de Hécate seguido,
engrifada la hirsuta cabellera,
corvo y velludo sátiro corría
la hojarasca aplastando en su carrera.
Ninguno a mis clamores respondía,
y el cedro, envuelto en toga tenebrosa,
llamarme con sus brazos parecía.

(II, 156)

Explicit in the poem is the recognition that the frenetic vitality of his final poetry exists in the face of destruction and the certainty of death.

The extremely tenuous nature of Nájera's art is ultimately revealed in “Salmo de vida” in Nuevas canciones. With the coming of springtime, the poet is left out of a world of festivity brimming with joy and vitality, for his poetry has failed to return along with the new life which fills everything else: “Sólo yo, Primavera azul y hermosa, / para el festín no tengo una rosa. / Volviste; los botones se entreabrieron / ¡pero mis pobres versos no volvieron!” (II, 207). The birds of springtime—“el hábil mirlo y el pichón sedeño, / la matinal alondra y la paloma”—who once taught him to sing, have now abandoned him. He prays that Primavera will return his poetry to him, but begs her to go to the festivities in his place. The beauty and life of the season only underline the extreme tenuousness of his last works—this final poetry which he insists is so vital, but which is no more than an ephemeral vision of a celebration in which the poet would like to participate, but of which he can never be a part.

In the face of the emergence of a truly modern sense of the problematic nature of art and the self in his writings, Nájera returned to a Romantic idealization of literature. Above all, as his poetry revealed the break-down of nineteenth-century myths of the transcendent essence of art, and the idealized nature of human identity, he clung all the more desperately to outmoded myths about artistic unity. In “A Justo Sierra” he assigned transcendent value to the beauty sought through poetry by writing of it in quasi-religious terms:

Busca a la soberana redentora
que es luz en nuestra noche de tristeza,
de “murmurante selva” habitadora.
¿No es acaso divina la belleza
y consuelo inmortal la poesía
que brota de la gran naturaleza?

(II, 154)

Art and beauty are exalted as the only values which make life's suffering bearable. They represent the antithesis of introspection:

¿Para qué interrogar la sombra densa?
En medio del dolor y de la duda
el arte es nuestra sola recompensa.
La belleza es verdad: abre desnuda,
como Friné los brazos, y olvidemos …
¡La noche ha sido eternamente muda!

(II, 154)

Art would still seem to belong to an absolute spiritual realm as it had in “El arte y el materialismo”; the emotional and esthetic disintegration which we have seen developing in Nájera's poetry would seem antithetical to artistic activity. The artist's alienation from his own vision is expressed as a transcendent relationship to his own writings, for Nájera's response to the problematic status of art at the end of the nineteenth century is in part what might be called a kind of transcendental escapism. He cannot accept the emergence of literature that is a threat to the esthetic and psychological securities of traditional art.

The fact that Nájera never entirely relinquished a Neoplatonic vision of art is apparent in his giving the title Revista Azul to the literary review which he was instrumental in founding near the end of his life. His idealistic view of the journal and of the writings it contained is apparent in the concluding tribute to Apolinar Castillo, which he added when he published, on June 17, 1894, the speech he had given one week earlier on the occasion of the founding of the Revista Azul: “Hoy le repite (sic) lo que yo dije al terminar mi brindis: ‘Amigos míos, os invito a brindar por el que no sólo ha creído en el rubio azul y no sólo lo ha amado, sino que sueña en vernos arrancar del azul infinito estrellas de oro’” (539).

Notes

1. “El arte y el materialismo” was published in El Correo Germánico on August 5, 8, 17, 24, 26, and September 5, 1876, in Vol. I, nos. 3, 4, 8, 11, 12, and 16. The sections of the article were compiled and published by Boyd G. Carter in Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, estudio y escritos inéditos (Mexico: Ediciones de Andrea, 1956), pp. 113-44. For a discussion of “El arte y el materialismo” as the first Modernist manifesto see Carter, pp. 78-79.

2. The influence of Poe upon Nájera's poetry and esthetic has been noted by a number of critics. See, for example, John Englekirk, Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature (New York: Instituto de las Españas, 1934), pp. 240-47; and Porfirio Martínez Peñalosa, Introd., Obras, Crítica literaria, by Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ed. Ernesto Mejía Sánchez (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1959), I, 33-34.

3. Gutiérrez Nájera, “El arte y el materialismo,” in Obras, Crítica literaria, I, 56. Further references to “El arte y el materialismo” and other journalism articles collected in this edition of Nájera's literary criticism will be cited within the text of this study as page numbers within parentheses.

4. Manuel González Prada, “Victor Hugo,” in Páginas libres (Paris: Tipografía de Paul Dupont, 1894), p. 170. The essay is dated 1885. See also Robert Jay Glickman, The Poetry of Julián del Casal, A Critical Edition, II (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978), p. 9.

5. Gautier affirms in his preface to Les Fleurs du mal that the decadent spirit is in harmony with the crisis of contemporary civilization. See Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 75. Matei Calinescu develops this concept of decadence as the expression of a modern crisis of consciousness in “The Idea of Decadence,” in Faces of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 149-221. Another work useful for an understanding of the period is Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

6. Ricardo Gullón, Direcciones del modernismo (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1963).

7. Gutiérrez Nájera, Poesías completas (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1966), II, 11. Further references to this second volume of Nájera's Complete Poems will be cited within the text of this study as II, followed by page number.

8. See, for example, Priscilla Pearsall, “Julián del Casal's Portraits of Women,” in The Analysis of Literary Texts: Current Trends in Methodology (Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual Press, 1980), pp. 78-88.

9. The illusory nature of the unattainable woman is already suggested in Romanticism in Espronceda's Estudiante de Salamanca in which the woman who is pursued frantically turns out to be a corpse.

10. For a similar treatment of the erotic in another writer of the period, see Ruth Crego Benson, Women in Tolstoy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), p. 14.

11. Emilio Carilla, El romanticismo en la América Hispánica (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1967), II, 24-25.

12. One of the exceptions in Nájera's poetry in which the presence of the woman is conveyed with joy and immediacy is the portrait of the griseta in “La duquesa Job.” Turn-of-the-century writers, including Nájera, often found in the working-class woman the charm and wit which were absent from the aristocratic pretensions of the woman of the alta burguesía.

13. Because of its focus upon the ángel de amor, this study is centered upon Ala y abismo (1884-1887). Elegías (1887-1890), which contains the poetry written immediately after that of Ala y abismo, also contains some of Nájera's most profound and most beautiful poems, including the renowned “Ondas muertas.” The collections of the early period are less interesting because of their exaltation of religion and childhood, both of which were already becoming sources of serious conflict for Nájera.

14. Gutiérrez Nájera, “‘Tristissima nox’,” in Obras, Crítica literaria, I, 316.

15. Nájera's repeated attacks upon the French poet are significant because of Baudelaire's position at the beginning of modern poetry. For references to Baudelaire in Nájera's works see Obras, Crítica literaria, I, 62, n. 6.

16. Nájera published his article on Urbina on three different occasions, which suggests the importance he attached to it. See Nájera, “Luis G. Urbina,” in Obras, Crítica literaria, I, 437.

17. For an excellent discussion of alienation and depersonalization in turn-of-the-century eroticism see Victor Erlich, “The Maker and the Seer: Two Russian Symbolists,” in The Double Image: Concepts of the Poet in Slavic Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), pp. 77-82.

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