SOURCE: "Nicanor Parra and the Question of Authority," in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 36, July-December, 1990, pp. 59-77.

[In the following essay, Lopez Mejia traces Parra's attitude toward authority as expressed in his poetry.]

In the years between 1954 and 1968, Nicanor Parra published various poems that refer to the humorous, aggressive, and deliberately mundane nature of his own "antipoetry". During that same period many European and North American artists were gravitating towards what is currently termed a postmodern aesthetic, in what Fredric Jameson describes as a reaction "against the established forms of high modernism". In Spanish American literary criticism, "high modernism" proves a confusing and awkward term. Parra's "antipoetry" came as an exasperated response, not to the modernista school of Rubén Darío, but to the visionary, surrealist voices of the 1920's and 1930's in Spanish American poetry, most notably those of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo. Parra's early "ars poetica" pieces have more in common with the iconoclastic strain of the twentieth-century European avant-garde than with the style of aesthetic production called postmodern in the First World today. Poems such as "Warning to the Reader" and "Roller Coaster" impose a normative aesthetic on their audience, vociferously proclaiming the need for a new poetic language. Postmodernist thought, on the other hand, tends to suspect any form of totalizing discourse, and many contemporary artists associated with the movement do not fetishize innovation for they fail to experience the past as oppressive. Nonetheless, the debate surrounding postmodernism raises issues that are quite pertinent to the poetry Parra published during the late 1960's and early 1970's, and I find that the complex rubric of "postmodern" effectively characterizes the work he wrote after 1968. My intent is to analyze the shifting figurations of authority in his writing, focussing initially on his "ars poetica" pieces, and to describe that change in the context of a transition from surrealist to postmodern in Spanish American poetry.

Two of Parra's commentators interpret "Warning to the reader", "Name changes", and "Manifesto" as parodical echoes of the serious "ars poetica" poems of Vicente Huidobro and Pablo Neruda, as well as of the manifestoes of Dada and Surrealism. Self-referential parody, cited by Linda Hutcheon as a definitive characteristic of late twentieth-century literature, makes an undeniably early appearance in Parra's antipoetry. His first "ars poetica" poems, however, primarily re-enact the familiar drama of a young poet struggling to achieve and establish his originality. They locate authority and repression in literary tradition and the reader, and participate in and continue the Western avant-garde rejection of the past. During the late 1960's, coinciding with the emergence of the notion of the postmodern in North America, the Chilean poet begins to inscribe more specifically political figures of authority in his work. When Parra grows increasingly attentive to the drama of Chilean politics during the early 1970's, the paradoxical coordinates of postmodernism as they are defined by Hutcheon, namely a self-conscious parodical urge and a nervous attention to history, combine in and mark the antipoet's work.

"Warning to the reader" first appeared in Poems and Antipoems (1954), the book that brought Parra his international reputation after Alan Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti translated it in 1958. The poem promises aesthetic innovation in the same breath with which it brandishes a series of admonitions:

      The word rainbow can't be found anywhere
      Much less the word sorrow.
      Sure there's a swarm of chairs and tables.
      Coffins. Desk supplies.

The antipoet contests the authority of literary tradition when he decides to exclude sublime images and tragic subjects from his writing. By censoring rainbows, me poet prevents his text from becoming a vehicle for the representation of beauty. By expurgating sorrow, he devalues expressions of emotional depth or private anguish. He claims no privileged or transcendent meaning for his utterances; he will write only about utilitarian objects related to everyday experience. This speaker seems determined to incorporate poetry into the fabric of ordinary human existence, to graft that everyday experience onto the leisure time of reading, so that the act of reading poetry, too, takes on the quotidian significance of doing the laundry, brewing coffee, or eating lunch. Parra's later poem "Manifesto" underscores the intention that underlies most of his work: that of replacing the notion of poetry as ornament with one of poetry as utilitarian, everyday utterance.

     For the old folks
     Poetry was a luxury item.
     But for us
     It's an absolute necessity.
     We cannot live without poetry.

Here Parra's poetics echoes the European avant-garde's call to break the barriers between art and everyday experience, to force art back into the praxis of life.

Although "Warning to the Reader" does not promise to transport us out of or refine everyday experience, its speaker gropes for the precise words, the correct diction, to convey the ordinariness of a new "antipoetic" experience. Parra's struggle to write a new kind of poetry surfaces in the lines: "like the Phoenicians / I'm trying to develop my own alphabet." Arguably, in Harold Bloom's terms, this is the voice of a "strong" poet at the crossroads when he undertakes the task of shaking off tradition. To develop a personal alphabet implies a rejection of the communal institution of language, and "Warning to the Reader" defiles traditional poetry by transforming it into a corpse in need of burial. First, the speaker compares himself to the birds in Aristophanes' play that "buried the corpses of their parents / in their own heads". After evoking this gesture of cannibalistic incorporation of parental identity, he threatens to "bring this ritual up-to-date": to "bury my quill in the heads of my readers". Again, the antipoet's provocative belligerence affiliates him with the avant-garde artist, who, according to Hal Foster, acts as the "defiler" of civilization. More importantly, Parra represents the poet's quill as a modernized, transformed parental corpse. When the antipoet buries his writing instrument in the heads of his readers, we become sepulchres of an object that is both weapon and burden, for it both alters and perpetuates poetic tradition. The murderous gesture with which the antipoet victimizes his audience also paradoxically invests us with judgmental authority and bequeaths us the prestigious legitimacy of the cultural past.

Parra's pugilistic speaker also assaults his audience in "Roller Coaster" (1962); in this poem, the figurative amusement-park ride of antipoetry leaves the conventional reader bruised and bleeding. Here Parra, like the Italian Futurists, relates aesthetic effect to notions of speed and collision. In "Roller Coaster", the poem's ability to shock becomes a measure of its worth, and Parra shows contempt for readers who might find experimental art more jarring than exhilarating.

     Go up, if you feel like it.
     It's not my fault if you come down
     Bleeding from your nose and mouth.

This text casts its readers as the stuffy enemies of the innovative writer, as the wardens of a stifling literary tradition. The European avant-garde, when addressing a bourgeois audience, adopted a similarly insulting stance. By mocking his audience's purportedly conventional expectations, Parra implies that readers of poetry, like poets themselves, must be prepared to take risks. The Chilean author finds the hostile dialogue between poet and audience pleasurable; in a recorded interview he states, quite emphatically, that needling the reader prolongs the aesthetic delight of his work.

Yet the antipoet does not always emerge victorious from his duel with the audience. Uneasy with the reader's power of judgment over his text, the speaker in Parra's poetry oscillates between aggressive attacks on tradition and a deceptively self-emasculating insistence on his own poetic impotence. I have argued that in "Warning to Reader", the writer who victimizes his audience also invests us with the authority of a judge. In "I Take Back Everything I've Said", the poet grovels before a reader who is deferred to, asked for forgiveness, entreated to burn the author's work. With mock-humility, the antipoet ingratiates himself with the perceived representative of literary tradition: his own audience. Instead of ranting against an unspecified, authoritative poetry, the speaker self-consciously adopts conventional standards of literary value when he asks to be punished for his writing's failure to transform emotion into art: "In spite of the fact that it was written with blood / It's not what I wanted to say". In this poem Parra plays at surrendering the fate of his poetry to the faceless audience he treats elsewhere with overt disdain. In the uneasy drama of his first "ars poetica" poems, now the poet, now the audience, occupies the coveted, potentially sadistic space of power.

In a direct, metaphorless language that accentuates his sense of himself as an artistic failure, the defeated speaker of "Tres Poesías" ("Three poems"; 1962) abdicates his authority almost before he begins to speak.

    I have nothing left to say
    Everything that I had to say
    Has already been said many times.

Although Parra eventually comes to challenge the notion of originality, in this poem he represents its absence as his own inadequacy and shame. Purportedly crushed by the weight of tradition, he dwells compulsively on his sense of incompetence. Parra's readers often encounter a voice insisting it has nothing new to say and cannot say anything well, an apologetic persona for whom both the classical myth of the virtues of imitation and the Romantic myth of originality have run dry. Both the antipoet's battering of an implicitly conventional reader and his occasional exhibitionist insistence on failure reveal a competitive relation to tradition that is not yet postmodern.

The self-denigrating tone of "Three Poems" and "I Take Back Everything I've Said" accompanies a certain unresolved attachment to metaphor as a poetic device. The writer begs for punishment from his reader in the very poems most devoid of figurative speech, as if his metaphorless language were the source of his worthlessness and shame. Furthermore, although José Miguel Ibáñez-Langlois argues that Parra's avoidance of metaphor lies at the heart of his antipoetry, I find that the early Parra playfully but strategically uses metaphor in many texts where he defines and proposes a new aesthetic. In "Puzzle" (1954), the poet admits to a lack of confidence in his verbal ability:

      I'm the one who can't say what he means
      I stutter
      Thinking one thing I say something else.

Although the speaker deliberately refuses to cast himself as a verbal wizard, he has not exactly banished metaphor from his utterances. The last verse is markedly ambiguous: it might be heard as the voice of a poet attempting to name things in his own way. Miller Williams translates "Yo digo una cosa por otra" by "Thinking one thing / I say something else"; a more literal translation would be "I say one thing for another". Perhaps the antipoet acknowledges that his works serve no communicative purpose precisely because he "says one thing for another", because he still speaks as poets have traditionally spoken, obscurely and metaphorically.

In "Changes of Name" (1962), Parra ironically invokes the Aristotelian dictum that great poets must be the masters of metaphor.

    My position is this:
    The poet is not true to his word
    If he doesn't change the names of things.
    … Know that from this day forth
    Shoes shall be called coffins
    … Every fool who respects himself
    Has to have his own dictionary

Were this poem merely parodical of the fetishized status of symbol in Western poetry, it might unequivocally indicate Parra's postmodern rejection of metaphor as a decadent poetic device. I hear little irony, however, in the statement that only poets who change the names of things are true to their words. Just as in "Warning to the reader", the speaker wanted his own alphabet, in "Changes of Name" he needs his own dictionary. Even an antipoet, then, needs a private storehouse of language, a stash of unique metaphors; this speaker strives for a personal and self-generated language. Undeniably, however, he also turns symbolic utterance into willful play. The antipoet's humor transforms the solemn, authoritative device of metaphor into a comic game. When Parra calls the sun a cat and refers to shoes as coffins, he no longer speaks as a privileged visionary who uncovers hidden resemblances between apparently unrelated phenomena. The poet's coded language, no longer divinatory or sacred, reveals a childlike love of confusing labels, of stripping words of their denotative value and revealing their arbitrary value as signs.

It is no accident that images of corpses, tombs, and coffins predominate in the very poems where Parra set out to deride traditional poetry and conventional audiences. The antipoet inscribes a comic funereal imagery into his critique of an oppressively serious literary tradition. "Warning to the reader" and "Changes of Name" both include references to coffins; the speaker in "Puzzle" declares "I shift tombs back and forth". Similar funeral images crisscross Parra's well-known poem "Test". This parody of multiple-choice tests begins with the question "What is an antipoet?"; one of the eighteen definitions that follow states that he is "someone who deals in coffins and urns". Several of the answers to a second question, "What is antipoetry?", play on variations of the image of a coffin:

      A jet-propelled coffin
      A coffin in centrifugal orbit
      A coffin run on kerosene
      A funeral parlor without a corpse

Whereas in "Warning to the Reader", the image of the quill as a dead parent suggested the burdensome authoritative-ness of literary tradition, in "Test", antipoetry disposes of an absent, unnamed corpse. With the iconoclastic and regenerative spirit characteristic of the avant-garde, Parra's metapoems represent tradition as a dead body, as both the burden and the plaything of his own writing.

In two somewhat more personal "ars poetica" pieces, Parra conducts an understatedly passionate defense of the value of humor in poetry while recreating a conventional agonistic struggle between death and the voice of the poet. The figure of the audience still wields considerable authority in the first of these poems, but the speaker's hostility towards literary tradition seems tempered, and the primary threat to his identity now seems to be his own mortality. In "What the Deceased Had to Say About Himself", the voice of a fictive dead poet declares that humor was one of the cornerstones of his technique, a lure, in fact, to catch his readers' attention.

     I wished to startle my readers
     Through humor
     But I made a most unfortunate impression.

Since a sardonic wit characterizes Parra's own antipoetry, these lines read like a wry, self-reflecting commentary on the Chilean writer's work. With the self-disparaging admission that his humor failed to dazzle his audience during his lifetime, the antipoet casts readers as judges whose approval he strove to attain. "What the Deceased Had to Say About Himself" implicitly distinguishes between readers who rejected the speaker's humor when he was alive, and the potentially appreciative audience of this pseudo-posthumous "ars poetica", to whom the dead poet appeals from beyond the grave. Because he can still speak about his poetry, death fails to decenter the poet's comic, ghostly voice.

In "Absolute Zero" (1968), humor provides the speaker no reprieve from the silence death imposes. Quite conventionally, Parra depicts death as a judge whose final verdict no one can escape. To inscribe death as a somber figure of authority hardly constitutes a novel topos in Western poetry; more striking is the high value Parra's poem places on humor as a heroic human attribute. The speaker locates the origin of laughter in the human awareness of death and suggests that humor arises out of the recognition of our own mortality. Sigmund Freud, too, described humor as a method "which the human mind has constructed in order to evade the compulsion to suffer". In "Absolute Zero", laughter emerges as a defense against the fear of death, as a stoical response to its threatening inevitability.

     Death doesn't even respect genuine humor
     for him every joke falls flat
     even though it was Death
     who taught us to laugh in the first place

The poem also implicitly invokes comedy as a literary tradition worthy of imitation, a significant gesture in the work of an author often hostile to tradition. Artists whose work provokes laughter possess a greater right to immortality than other men or women.

     Take the case of Aristophanes
     kneeling on his own knees
     laughing like an energumen
     in the very face of Death:
     I would have spared that priceless life
     if it had been up to me

The dramatist most closely associated with the origins of Western comedy refuses to be cowed by the contemplation of his mortality, and his laughter reaffirms life. By pointing to Aristophanes as a paragon of courage, Parra represents humor as a dignified reaction to the humbling vulnerability of the human condition. The poem's reference to the Attic comedian as an "energumen", an epithet Parra and his speakers often use to describe themselves, also indirectly affiliates the antipoet with the Greek playwright. In "Absolute Zero", Parra provides a defense of and commentary on his own humorous poetry.

Comic verbal artistry manifests itself more often in drama than in lyric poetry, and Parra tellingly prefers to mink of his poems as "pariamentos dramáticos", as works that must be spoken publicly to gain artistic validity. Similarly, he insists that he wants his work to reflect the informal rhythms of street conversation. Indeed, the opening verses of "Letters from the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair" (1968), one of Parra's most puzzling metapoems, privilege speech over written language.

     I call a spade a spade
     … The only choice given us
     is to learn to speak correctly

This long poem lacks the aggressive, formally wrought closure of "Warning to the Reader", "Roller Coaster", and other earlier metapoems. "Letters From the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair" offers no totalizing, unified view of poetry. The disconcertingly fragmented development of its seventeen disjointed stanzas undermines the validity of the text's initial, provisional description of poetic practice.

The title of "Letters From the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair" probably alludes to the long tradition of poets writing letters of advice concerning their craft to younger ones: Horace, Schiller, and Rilke are illustrious examples. At the same time, the title's humorous reference to a sleeping poet subverts the reader's sense of any firm authorial control over the text. The poem begins with a reference to a "correct" manner of speaking, but this dogmatic notion of a "correct" poetry collapses when, in the fifth stanza, the voice of an apparently aging writer addresses younger poets and encourages all forms of aesthetic experimentation:

     Young poets
     Say whatever you want
     … You can do anything in poetry

These verses negate the first stanza's more prescriptive mandate, so that the text can no longer be said to originate from a cohesive, centered artistic identity. A trembling, increasingly incoherent voice slowly takes the place of the optimistic speaker of the first stanza; this fissure in the identity of the speaking subject suggests the heterogeneity of voices associated with postmodernism. As the poem unfolds, the poet's initial self-assured lucidity gives way to a series of increasingly disconnected statements on illness, physical decrepitude, and death. In part three, the speaker wonders at a God who abandons his creatures to old age; part four consists of the single, morosely ironic line "I am one of those who greet the hearse". Parra's funereal images operate somewhat differently here from those in his earlier "ars poetica" poems: most references to death in "Letters From the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair" seem deliberately unmetaphorical. Even the hearse functions less as a comical trope for a defunct literary tradition than as a metonymical reminder of the poet's mortality. Thematically as well as formally, Parra thwarts his readers' attempt to locate a stable, authoritative source of meaning in the speaker. The passage of time, traced by the very development of the poem, alters and finally silences poetic discourse. In the last stanza, the inevitable victory of death and disease over the human body renders writing a futile gesture.

      Only death tells the truth
      Even poetry convinces no one
      … Old age is a fact of life

In "Letters From the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair", as in "Absolute Zero", the speaker who contemplates his own mortality concedes death the space of ultimate power and authority.

The fragmented structure of "Letters From the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair" suggests a postmodern renunciation of the desire for autotelic aesthetic forms. Furthermore, Parra sets aside his avant-garde idealization of originality when he re-utilizes lines of verse from previously published texts and inserts them into different sections of the long seven-teen-stanza poem. In the already-cited exhortation to young poets, Parra virtually repeats several lines from "Jóvenes" ("Youngsters"), a poem he had published in 1966:

     Write as you will
     … Too much blood has run under the bridge
     To go on believing
     That only one road is right
     In poetry everything is permitted

He reworks a second fragment from the same 1966 poem when, in 1968, he writes in stanza thirteen: "The poet's job is / To improve on the blank page / I don't think that's possible". Through self-quotation, inserting pre-existent poems into new ones, devouring his own texts and transforming the material he finds there into a different work, the antipoet begins to question notions of poetic originality. Foster has criticized analogous trends in the visual arts, in which "old and new modes and styles … are retooled and recycled". "Letters From the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair" engages in a similar postmodern recycling of previously produced, already consumed poetic material: it uses metapoetic aphorisms from Parra's earlier work with very minor modifications.

The Marxist perspective on postmodernism, exemplified by Jameson and Foster, condemns the work of several contemporary North American artists for nostalgically mourning antiquated stereotypes. Both critics expound the need for a resistant postmodernism, or as Foster writes, for "a critique of origins, not a return to them". A mix of nostalgia and critical parody certainly informs Parra's representation of the artist in "Letters From the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair".

Readers tread a shifting ground as the poem alternatively awakens and undermines our sympathy for the figure of a suffering artist, a stereotype often invoked, according to Foster, by conservative postmodern artists. Parra grafts a clown-like, drowsy figure onto the pathos-laden background of conventional Christian iconography: "The poet asleep on the cross / greets you with tears of blood". The reference to sleep neutralizes any potential empathetic response to the crucified artist. The concluding lines, "Reading my poems makes me drowsy / And yet they were written in blood", appear to perpetuate the Romantic and Modernist identification of suffering as the source of art. Nonetheless, the ridiculous figure of the nodding poet exposes and undercuts the sentimentality of the reference to an oeuvre "written in blood". Readers of Parra's poetry may remember that those last lines echo an earlier poem. "I Take Back Everything I've Said", where the poet asked his audience to burn a book "written in blood" because it was not what he "wanted to say". Once again, the insertion of old verses into new poems suggests a postmodern questioning of the validity of the notion of originality.

Although "Manifesto", too, was published in the watershed year of 1968, that poem resists the diffident plurality of voices which informs "Letters From a Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair". "Manifesto" offers an unwaveringly self-confident description of the role poetry should play in an ideal society. The poem's title openly invokes the European avant-garde as legitimating precursor, especially since the speaking voice defines itself exclusively in terms of its rupture with the past. In "Letters From the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair", a fragmented speaking voice moves the text towards its own silence. In "Manifesto", a monolithic group of poets stridently attempts to censor the writing of the past. A collective voice stoutly proclaims its belief in a writing uncluttered by arcane metaphors ("We don't believe in cabalistic signs"). This militant stance necessarily silences an older, rival group of traditional poets for whom poetic meaning is best left veiled. In previous "ars poetica" poems, Parra often pitted the "I" of the speaker against the judgmental "you" of his readers. In "Manifesto", the speaker's quarrel is no longer with his audience. The poem undeniably urges us to choose a poetry of direct statement over one predicated on symbol and allusion, but the primary confrontation takes place among writers.

In "Manifesto", the ideal of an egalitarian society motivates the speaker's advocacy of a poetry of straightforward utterances. In certain ways, the poem's optimistic description of a society where poetry addresses the everyday concerns of men and women lacks Parra's characteristic irony. Another of the text's anomalies lies in its strategic use of the first-person plural pronoun "nosotros" ("we"), as opposed to Parra's earlier, individualistic persona who bemoaned his creative sterility or vaunted the shock-value of his texts. Whether the antipoet spoke as a self-doubting novice or as an "enfant terrible", he raised a private, individual voice. "Manifesto"'s "we" implies a public community of poets with a socially conscious aesthetic not unlike Bertolt Brecht's. For the first time, Parra suggests that poets might have a didactic responsibility in society: "The poet is there / to see to it the tree does not grow crooked". Such an overtly ethical stance sets the poem apart from the Chilean poet's earlier work, in which the intention seemed more iconoclastic than moral. By the 1980's, legitimizing a new form of writing came to preoccupy Parra less than voicing the possibilities of nuclear and ecological catastrophe. In "Manifesto", the antipoet's desire for literary legitimacy still takes precedence over the inscription of the political choices that face his community. Nonetheless, the poem's focus on the social responsibilities of a poet presages the quizzical political voice that surfaces in Parra's later work.

The contrast between the centered, political subject of "Manifesto" and the doddering, self-contradictory speaker in "Letters From the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair" may serve to mark the Chilean antipoet's arrival at the aesthetic crossroads of the late 1960's. The former poem, with its avant-garde rejection of the past, suggests Parra's lingering attachment to a Latin American surrealist aesthetic. "Letters From the Poet Who Sleeps in A Chair", on the other hand, with its fragmented structure and its parodic recycling of the author's own past work, bears the imprint of postmodernism. Parra's publications after 1968 also provide increasingly frequent signs of a growing tendency to repeat and quote himself. "Absolute Zero", "Manifesto" and "Letters From the Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair" appear in print in Emergency Poems (1972) for the third time; these "ars poetica" poems already had been reprinted in his collected works Obra gruesa (1969). Perhaps significantly, in 1972 Parra did not reprint "Test" and "I Take Back Everything I've Said". In "Test", the antipoet anarchically entrusted the definition of poetry to his readers, in effect nihilistically abdicating much of his own authority over the text and conceding us significant power. In "I Take Back Everything I've Said", a punitive audience sat ready to judge the masochistic, self-deprecating speaker. The authorial exclusion of these two "ars poetica" pieces from Emergency Poems indicates that the antipoet no longer intended to place his reader in the figurative space of power. By 1972, Parra had silenced the more self-disparaging strains of his poetic persona, a result, perhaps, of his new and liberating lack of concern with the task of measuring up to tradition.

The shift that occurs in Parra's location of authority coincides with a period when his production of "ars poetica" poems dwindles. In the only new piece in Emergency Poems that offers a direct commentary on poetry, the poet has donned the mask of a self-aggrandizing braggart. He constructs his claims to originality with the devious, self-perpetuating rhetoric of arbitrary power. "As I Was Saying" reads like a list of farcical boasts: the speaker claims he was the first bishop, the first hatmaker, and one of the first filmmakers in Chile. In a crude identification of virility and artistic creativity, the speaker combines boasts concerning his sexual exploits with claims to Gargantuan contributions to Chilean culture. After engaging in erotic reminiscences ("once I got a baby sitter / to come seventeen consecutive times"), the sexist speaker insists on his literary pre-eminence ("before me no one knew anything about poetry") and claims to have discovered Gabriela Mistral. This last claim sounds chillingly cynical; historically, it was Mistral who helped Parra when he was a young poet. The speaker's repeated and exaggerated insistence on origins, on being the "first", eventually exposes his words as a comic series of lies. The text shatters any notion of poetry as a privileged vehicle of expression for communal or personal truths. Not only does the poem suggest the endless ways in which language and rhetoric fabricate untruth, the speaker's exaggerated claims to originality make a grotesque travesty of the figure of the artist as heroic innovator. Swollen with self-importance, the poet presents himself as a pioneer of his culture; he no longer has any quarrel with the past because he has pervertedly identified himself with origins and national tradition. By making a caricature of his speaker's claims to innovation, by inscribing the ways in which power uses language to conveniently recreate and distort reality, Parra strips the notion of originality of its legitimacy and divests himself from its debilitating.

During the late 1960's, the antipoet sets aside his grudge against literary tradition and the reader. As he begins to contest the authority located in the notion of the State, Parra listens carefully to the language of politics, particularly the everyday expression of political opinion, and humorously incorporates it into his poetry. In "Warnings", "The Discourse of the Good Thief", and "The Last Battle", originally published in The Straitjacket (1968) but reprinted in Emergency Poems, the poet directs his satire against various social and political institutions. "Warnings" appropriates the syntax of public street signs and ridicules the language with which society displays its arbitrary regulations and prohibitions: "No praying aloud, no sneezing". This poem highlights the coercive, repressive potential of language and depicts social rules not as rational incentives to order but as rationalized objectifications of power. Similarly, "The Discourse of the Good Thief" denounces the empty rhetoric of Latin American bureaucracy and questions the power and status conferred on men and women by official titles. Appropriating the voice of the good thief next to Christ on the cross, the speaker drones on in a litany of requests for a worldly position; the reader witnesses the grotesque spectacle of a man grasping for social influence and prestige, even when close to death. Official titles, like patronymics, often legitimize and provide a stable sense of identity. In the bureaucratic society evoked by Parra's poem, any official appointment seems better than none, as the speaker's absurd final request attests: "If it comes down to it / Put me in as Superintendent of Graveyards". The title of the poem cunningly represents State bureaucrats as thieves; the ensuing monotonous list of official titles inscribes the meaningless complexity of most bureaucratic systems. Finally, the closing verses effect a satiric representation of those systems as a corrupt and deathly space.

A postmodern appropriation of the conventions of the media is particularly evident in Parra's poem "The Last Battle". This witty imitation of the syntax and graphic design of newspaper headlines describes a futuristic clash between a force of police-like robots and a group of "energumens". The latter group, figures of that instinctual irreverence towards authority that characterizes much of Parra's poetry, identify funeral parlors as emblematic sites of culture's repressive artificiality. Heirs to the cultural nihilism of Dada, invoking a familiar opposition between culture (funerals) and nature (death), the energumens chant the absurd slogan: "death sí / funerals no!". The street demonstrations of the 1960's probably provide a reference for the poem. A demonstration against the social ritual of funerals seems more than a little puerile; nonetheless, the closing reference to police brutality during a pacificist protest suggests that, at the time the poem was written, Parra's political sympathies lay with the radical student movement.

In the older texts of Emergency Poems, Parra's representation of political authority remains safely vague. Bureaucracy, language, police-robots: these constitute unpolemical targets. The new pieces, however, inscribe critical historical developments in Latin America, often by appropriating popular culture's pat representation of politics and history. An upsurge of radical social movements marked the late 1960's and early 1970's, but Parra's poems from that period question the effectiveness of political action and commitment. When the untrustworthy speaker of "As I Was Saying" boasts that he foresaw Che Guevara's death in Bolivia, a hyperbolic claim to prophetic vision frames and perhaps trivializes the reference to a real, dramatic failure of revolutionary idealism in Latin America. Since the details of Guevara's death remain incompletely understood, Parra's choice of historical event enforces a postmodern notion of the inaccessibility and unrepresentability of the past. The poem's reductive allusion to the asthmatic guerrillero appears to reproduce consumer culture's neutralization of the man whose face became a safe, domesticated symbol of dissident idealism.

With the exception of the dead, mythologized Guevara, few Marxist figures escape the barbs of Parra's irony in Emergency Poems. The book was published during the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–73), in a political climate necessarily wary of or even inimical to the antipoet's anarchist sensibility. Ricardo Yamal has interpreted the strongly anti-Marxist rhetoric of the volume as parodical of Latin American bourgeois conservatism. Without intending to minimize Parra's irony, I shall argue that the acerbic critique of twentieth-century socialism in Emergency Poems is not intended as parodic play. The Chilean poet's characteristically anti-establishment writing could not resist taunting his country's fragile socialist government; Parra turns Marxist political leaders and intellectuals into the primary targets of an often bitter critique. The tone of "Viva Stalin", for example, recalls the antipoet's deceptive subservience towards that earlier figure of authority, the reader. A dead man's voice recounts his humiliating last moments in front of a Stalinist firing squad, in an enunciative strategy identical to that of "What the Deceased Had to Say About Himself". There, the tranquil voice of a dead poet wryly recalled the lack of appreciative response to his humor. In "Viva Stalin", where State repression silences the fictive speaking voice, Parra no longer addresses issues of poetic technique. Instead, he gives voice to the dead victims of a political terror unleashed and legitimized by Marxist ideals of revolution.

Parra's critique of socialism did not confine itself to the predictable example of Stalinist Russia as the nadir of Marxist regimes. In one poem, Parra appropriates and twists the slogan used by Allende in his 1970 campaign ("la vía pacifica hacia el socialismo") [the peaceful road to socialism]. The title's play on words, "I don't believe in the peaceful way", sardonically questions the effectiveness of the elected socialist government. The title of a second poem. "If the Pope Doesn't Break with the U.S.A.", satirically upholds the figure of the Pope as a stereotyped exemplar of morality. The speaker then exposes the Left's frequently dogmatic insistence on ideological purity and points to the political contradictions within the Left itself: "if the Kremlin doesn't break with the USA / … why the hell am I supposed to do it?". The dogmas of the Communist party, Parra suggests, are as inflexible as those of the Catholic Church. In the speaker's shrill reaction to crude Marxist representations of the United States as a demonic villain, readers might hear Parra's angry response to real attacks levelled at him by the Latin American Left when he accepted an invitation to the White House. The poet's satirical use of the Kremlin and the Pope as cultural icons again effects a reduction of complex institutions and systems of belief into stereotyped popular images.

Resistant to the coercive demands of both socialism and capitalism, the fickle speaker of Emergency Poems refuses to participate in either system's moralistic dichotomies; according to Hutcheon, a similar ideological ambivalence distinguishes most postmodern literature. In "Modern Times", the antipoet rejects the dogmas and rhetoric of dialectical materialism, ironically signalling the abuse of the word "contradiction" in certain forms of Marxist discourse. Whether the poet speaks or remains silent, an unnamed, implicitly socialist spectator finds his stance politically evasive, tacitly pro-imperialist.

     you can't speak without committing a contradiction
     or keep quiet without complicity with the Pentagon.
     Everyone knows there's no alternative possible
     all roads lead to Cuba
     but the air is dirty
     breathing is a futile act.

By implying that the ideological stalemate between socialism and capitalism obscures the ecological plight of the planet, Parra voices the salient political concern of his later Ecopoemas (Ecopoems; 1983). The poet frames his reference to the Cuban revolution in the mnemonic form of a proverb, reworking the proverbial "all roads lead to Rome" into the contentious motto "all roads lead to Cuba". His formulation wryly concedes the 1959 revolution its significance in modern Latin American history, yet questions its enshrinement among Latin American Marxists as an iconic event.

Emergency Poems exploits many of contemporary culture's simplistic representations of global political conflict. In "Well Then", the proper names of the Kremlin and New York encode and simplify the references to competing political systems. The poem also nostalgically invokes the notion of a subjectivity that transcends cultural parameters, as the speaker locates his sense of identity outside language, culture, or political system.

      hearing mass in a chapel of the Kremlin
      or eating a hot dog
      in a New York airport
 
      I'm the same person both places
      although it seems absurd I'm the same person

This detached yet apparently centered subject claims ultimate immunity from cultural and political difference, insisting that whether he stands at the center of the Communist world or at the threshold of the capitalist, his identity remains invariable. Poststructuralist thought, of course, takes this humanist notion of an immanent identity to task. Perhaps Parra's ironic (though tentative) reference to the absurdity of just such a notion marks his burgeoning postmodern awareness of the social and cultural circumscription of subjectivity.

The figure that occupies the space of power in Parra's poetry, I suggest, undergoes various metamorphoses. The "ars poetica" poems of the 1950's and 60's, where a self-reflecting poetic voice deciphers its own artistic technique, provide a useful locus in which to analyze the first manifestations of the antipoet's complex and belligerent relation to authority. In many ways, the early Parra casts his audience in the role of a judgmental, authoritative figure. Confronted by the weight of the literary past, the threatened poet displaces his hostility onto the figure of the reader. His playful, elliptic representation of literary tradition as an unburied corpse repeats the Western avant-garde attempt to immolate the traces of its cultural past. Occasionally, in texts that reflect upon Parra's own comic aesthetic, the antipoet arms himself with the fragile weapon of humor and confronts the threat posed by his own mortality. Perhaps late twentieth-century culture's loss of faith in totalizing systems of thought accounts for the paucity of Parra's "ars poetica" poems after 1972. During the late 1960's, Parra begins to direct his irony at social institutions and to parody the language that represents and encodes political conflict. At this point, Parra's writing appropriates the peculiarities of mass-media syntax, in a postmodern embrace of consumer culture mat continues to honor the formal techniques of the avant-garde. In the early twentieth century, the practice of collage quietly subverted the notion of art as an autonomous, privileged realm of the imagination. Parra achieved this collage-effect in his poetry by parodically incorporating the stereotyped, formulaic language of political slogans, newspaper headlines, advertisements, and other public forms of writing and speech. These stylistic strategies document the impact of the media on postmodern culture.

During the early 1970's, the antipoet's habitual rejection of another's authority took as its object the ill-fated government of Allende. Many lines in Emergency Poems mock the political rhetoric of the socialist state. To readers with the advantage of hindsight, to those who view Salvador Allende as a tragic figure of Latin American history, Parra's mockery of the brief socialist experiment in Chile is jarring. His rejection of socialism seems particularly virulent in Artefactos (Artifacts; 1972), a disturbing collection of epigrams that is beyond the scope of this argument. Parra's reactionary critique of his country's socialist government during a politically incandescent period in Latin America develops out of his early antagonistic stance towards all forms of authority. Foster's scathing indictment of postmodernist visual art during the 1970's and 1980's, for its neo-conservative recuperation of history and its "flight from the present", does not strictly apply to the Chilean poet. Parra does not ignore the tensions of his historical present. Significantly, however, a figure like Che Guevara appears in Emergency Poems and in Artifacts as the cliché he has become for us: a handsome martyr to his idealism. Jameson rebukes contemporary culture for its production of precisely such stereotyped representations; Hutcheon, often impatient with Marxist critiques of postmodern artists, recognizes the movement's double ideological edge. Even when Parra mocks the utterances of conformist political opinion, he runs the postmodern risk of perpetuating them. Perhaps the conservative implications of postmodern formal techniques in First World art find their analogue in the unfortunate political implications of Parra's work during the early 70's. His anarchistic questioning of authority unwittingly allied him, during Salvador Allende's government, with those who worked towards the socialist president's downfall. The coup of September 11, 1973, ushered in the most repressive regime of Chilean history. In Jokes to Mislead the Police and Sermons and Homilies of the Christ of Elqui, under a brutal military dictatorship, Parra began to reassess the implications of his own previously indiscriminate, anarchistic opposition to all institutions of authority.