SOURCE: "Rubén Darío: Latin American Modernism and Literary Tradition," in Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, Vol. 9, 1983, pp. 36-42.

[In the following essay, Pearsall contradicts the traditional view of Latin American modernism as an "isolated phenomenon" by revealing the movement's historical and contemporary literary significance as expressed in Darío's poetry.]

The works of Latin American Modernism written at the beginning of the twentieth century are an ideal source for studying the problem of literary tradition in twentieth-century literature, for they represent a crisis in our cultural history, a transition between two periods: Romanticism and the twentieth century. The "traditionalist" view of Hispanic Modernism has been that it has very little to do with our own present-day literature. Modernismo has therefore tended to be seen as an isolated phenomenon, relatively separate from both earlier and later trends.

The work of the important revisionist critics of the contemporary period, including Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico de Onís, Manuel Pedro González, Ricardo Gullón, and Iván Schulman, has helped to change the sense that Latin American Modernism has little to do with what has followed. They have insisted upon its periodicity and its nature not as a literary movement but as a period. Juan Ramón Jiménez insisted that Hispanic Modernism was a whole century. Ivan Schulman makes clear that its importance in large part derives from the fact that it lies at the beginning of our own time, and that many of its characteristics link it strongly with our own modern sensibility. This vision links Latin American Modernism much more closely with the way in which the late nineteenth century has been perceived by major non-Hispanic critics like Monroe K. Spears and Irving Howe, who perceive Modernism internationally as a cultural crisis; i.e., as a reaction to the collapse of traditional social, religious, and esthetic values at the turn of the century.

One of the major reasons for the extremely narrow, traditionalist interpretation, which holds that Rubén Darío is the major influence upon the period and contends that Latin American Modernism is essentially an esthetic estilo afrancesado, limited to the years between the publication of Azul and Darío's death in 1916, is the writings of Darío himself. Darío was a great promoter of his own undeniable talent, and he wrote on various occasions in the early twentieth century that he was the founder of Hispanic Modernism. It is largely through the works of Darío, and the critics influenced by him, that the period has come to be

viewed according to the terms of Renato Poggioli who, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, characterized Modernism as the degeneration of modernity into its most superficial characteristics. Darío's self-serving and superficial characterizations of modernismo, however, present only a veneer with which he hid the profoundly modern sense of identity and art which emerges from his works, a sense which makes them an important part of a twentieth-century tradition.

Darío ended the 1901 edition of Prosas profanas with the poem "Yo persigo una forma …" which had not appeared in the earlier 1896 edition. He had concluded the "Palabras liminares" of the 1896 volume with the arrogant desafio: "Y la primera ley, creador: crear. Bufe el eunuco. Cuando una musa te dé un hijo, queden las otras ocho encintas." In the final poem of the 1901 collections, however, the bravado of the earlier introduction has disappeared. Darío confesses the extremely elusive quality of creation and, therefore, of his art when he writes: "Yo persigo una forma que no encuentra mi estilo / … Yo no hallo sino la palabra que huye …".

The traditional vision of Prosas profanas is that it represents the most superficial, French-inspired phase of Latin American Modernism. This is in large part due to Darío's own rejection of Azul … and Prosas profanas in the opening lines of Cantos de vida y esperanza, which appeared in 1905: "Yo soy aquel que ayer no más decía / el verso azul y la canción profana …". The 1901 edition of Prosas profanas, with the new conclusion, can, however, in spite of Darío's own evaluation of the collection, be read as one of the first major works of Darío, and of the twentieth century, in which a radical esthetic of modernity is set forth and reflected in poetry. He repeatedly affirmed his commitment to the renewal of art through liberation. The Modernists, both in Latin America and beyond, often sought creative freedom in eroticism because of the sense of prohibited pleasure with which it was surrounded at the turn of the century. The erotic poem, "Divagación," is essential to an understanding of the radical renewal of Prosas profanas. The eroticism of Darío's poem parallels that of Baudelaire's great erotic poems like "La Chevelure," "L'Invitation au voyage," and "Le beau Navire," works in which we find the French author's most complete and original expression of a psychology of mobile desiring fantasy. "Divagación," like Baudelaire's "La Chevelure," is a luxuriant demonstration of sexuality as inseparable from fantasy. For Darío, as for Baudelaire, the woman exists not in order to satisfy his desires but in order to produce them.

In "Divagación" the woman becomes lost among the multiplicity of erotic fantasies; and yet it is not only the woman who becomes lost in the reverie, for if "Divagación" raises the question of where the woman is in the poet's desire for her, it also raises the question of where the poet is in his desire. In his study Baudelaire and Freud, Leo Bersani's assertion concerning Baudelaire's eroticism is also applicable to Darío's: "The mobility of the desiring imagination makes the identity of the desiring self problematic. Sexuality sets into motion a kind of fantasy-machine. But it is not only the woman as an identifiable, stable object of desire who gets lost in the turning of that machine; the poet himself is set afloat among his fantasies."

In Darío, as in Baudelaire, desire has an unanchoring effect upon the poet's and the woman's identities. This is especially apparent in the violent dispersal of the self in the penultimate verse of the poem:

Ámame así, fatal, cosmopolita,
universal, inmensa, única, sola
y todas; misteriosa y erudita:
ámame mar y nube, espuma y ola.

The plethora of adjectives in these lines explodes in a verbal orgasm. As a result, when the eroticism of "Divagación" reaches orgasmic intensity, it becomes overwhelmingly threatening to any coherent self-definition of the poet whose psyche floats among the fantasies. The vision of the self which emerges from "Divagación" is that modern identity is deeply problematic, and modern experience is fragmented.

The tenuous quality of modern art emerges from "La páagina blanca," another poem from the earlier collection which Darío included in the 1901 edition of Prosas profanas. In "La página blanca" Darío reveals that the movements of his fantasies are only the contradictory and exacerbating flux of his being; they are no more than an accumulation of dreams and words which cross the desert of the blank page like slow dromedaries. For all the dynamism of his fantasies, all that remains is what there was in the beginning: nothing, the blank page, the desert:

The words upon the page are not substantially different from the fantasies evoked by the poet. They both are evanescent, and tend to form a fragile mist which contrasts with the luminous and terrifying signs of the constellations.

Anthony Cussen, one of the most perceptive recent critics of Prosas profanas, notes the influence of Mallarmé upon Darío's use of blank spaces on the page, for Darío rearranges the typography to call attention to the poem itself as an esthetic object. Mallarmé elaborated a negative esthetic, for he approached, by means of hermetic paths, the nucleus of the poem filled with silence and nothingness. In Un Coup de dés, he concluded that the only possible language is the negation of language. Cussen compares "La página blanca" with the poetry of Mallarmé to reveal the way in which Darío, like the French poet, perceived the fragility and inefficacy of language, and questioned the essence of poetry itself.

These three poems from the 1901 Prosas profanas—"Yo persigo una forma," "Divagación," and "La página blanca"—in their expression of the problematic nature of identity, the fragmentation of experience, and the tenuous quality of modern art, place Darío's Modernism squarely within a tradition which links him with contemporary Latin American writing. It is especially surprising that in Latin American criticism there has been so little sense of its modernismo as central to the tradition which culminates in the important work of today's Latin American authors. The period's deep sensitivity to the problems of defining modern identity, modern experience, and modern art has, in all probability, remained more vital in Latin American than in any other Western literature.

These three poems not only raise the question of Latin American Modernism's place within a twentieth-century literary tradition, but they also raise the question of its link with an Hispanic past. In the prologue to Cantos de vida y esperanza, Darío was viciously critical of the Spanish poetry of his time. The poet's words reveal the alienation of Hispanic writers from their own literary tradition at the turn of the century. Bernardo Gicovate has noted this disconcerting blindness to and rejection of one's own cultural past: "No se descubre a sí mismo el hombre de habla española en la prosa de Sarmiento ο en la de Pérez Galdós y cuando llega el momento no se oyen más que quejas acerca de la pobreza circundante." Darío also ignored the importance of Bécquer, or at least the deepest, most enduring themes of the Spanish poet's works: solitude, the complexity of his thought, the evocation of the musical qualities of his poetry, and the uncertain quality of being in a ser who exists in a nameless zone between the spiritual and the concrete. Darío's alienation from a specifically Hispanic literary tradition has led critics to look for the roots of the roots of the most experimental vein of his poetry in French literature, including Baudelaire and Mallarmé. And yet the French influences upon Darío necessarily lead one back to the Hispanic tradition from which he emerged.

The Frankfurt School critic and philosopher, Theodor Adorno, offers a specifically Hegelian insight into the problem of tradition and literary creativity:

… artistic innovation … draws its legitimacy essentially from the tradition it negates. Hegel has taught that where something new becomes suddenly strikingly authentically visible, it has been long in developing and now shucks off its hull. Only that which has been nourished on the life blood of the tradition has any power to oppose it authentically; the rest become the helpless prey to forces it too little has overcome in itself.

The bond of tradition, however, is not equivalent to the simple sequence of events in history; rather, it is unconscious. Freud wrote in his late work, Moses and Monotheism:

A tradition which was founded on communication could not produce the compulsive quality characteristic of religious phenomena. It would be heard, evaluated, eventually dismissed like every other piece of external information, and would never attain that privileged status necessary to liberate men from the sway of logical thought. It must have undergone the destiny of repression, the state of remaining in the unconscious, before it could develop a powerful enough influence, upon its return, to force the masses under its spell.

Adorno contends that the esthetic, no less than the religious tradition, "is the recollection of something unconscious, indeed repressed." Where an esthetic tradition has a strong influence, "it is the result not of a manifest, direct consciousness of continuity but rather of unconscious recollection which explodes the continuum. Tradition is far more present in works deplored as experimental than in those which deliberately strive to be traditional."

In spite of Darío's exaltation of a French tradition which undeniably had a positive influence on his development, the most original poems of the 1901 Prosas profanas link him deeply with an Hispanic past. His immediate Hispanic predecessor in the development of a concept of poetry as the attempt to express the ineffable is Bécquer, who placed at the beginning of Rimas his poem "Yo sé un himno gigante …" with its expression of the ineffableness of poetry. Before Bécquer, San Juan de la Cruz had written about the "no sé qué que quedo balbuciendo," which language is powerless to express.

Darío's poetry is filled with resistance to the mobile fantasies of Prosas profanas. He refused to accept his own vision of the fragmentation of modern experience, of identity, and of modern art, for at the same time that we see the development of a new sense of indeterminacy of being, we also find a deep nostalgia for traditional ways of perceiving literature and the self. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Darío repeatedly placed his Modernist esthetic within a larger, more "meaningful" view of art, which almost cancels it out. The poet reaffirms his commitment to the "lofty" aims of art in "Al lector," his introduction to Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905): "Mi respeto por la aristocracia del pensamiento, por la nobleza del Arte siempre es el mismo." The schism between Darío's definition of literature, idealized and Romantic, and the radical esthetic of modernity of the most original poetry of Prosas profanas is evident also when we compare his poems with statements like the following from the "Dilucidaciones" to El canto errante (1907): "Yo he dicho: Es el Arte el que vence el espacio y el tiempo. He meditado ante el problema de la existencia y he procurado ir hacia la más alta idealidad."

Darío not only idealizes art in the poetry which follows Prosas profanas. In Cantos de vida y esperanza, we find a definition of the poet which contrasts sharply with the problematic nature of identity found in "Divagación":

¡Torres de Dios! ¡Poetas!
¡Pararrayos celestes,
que resistís las duras tempestades,
como crestas escuetas,
como picos agrestes,
rompeolas de las eternidades!

Darío repeatedly undermined his own most original experiences in literature through his return to an essentially Romantic idealization of the self and art.

Paul de Man considers the ambivalence present in Darío central to all artistic creativity. Renewal is essential to the nature of literature; the appeal of modernity haunts all writing. Darío's tendency to undermine the renewal present in his own works, de Man finds to some extent in all writers: "… a curious logic that seems almost uncontrolled, a necessity inherent in the nature of the problem rather than in the will of the writer, directs their utterances away from their avowed purpose. Assertions of literary modernity often end up by putting the possibility of being modern seriously into question." Literature is necessarily both renewal and the erosion of that renewal in its own inescapably binding historicity, which is, after all, necessary in order for the possibility of renovation to exist. An image of creativity emerges from Darío's works in which literature is revealed to exist in both the fulfillment and denial of its own modernity. His writings, therefore, not only reflect a turn-of-the-century cultural crisis; they are exemplary of all literary creation, for art's immediacy and renewal are always both dependent upon, and undermined by, the very tradition from which they spring.