SOURCE: “Phenomenological Hermeneutics and Vicente Aleixandre's Self-Reading,” in Revista de Estudios Hispanicos, Vol. 26, No. 3, October, 1992, pp. 32-43.

[In the following essay, Poust contends that Aleixandre's belief that his works represented a unified poetic whole aligns with the conception of “phenomenological hermeneutics.”]

While the celebration of multiple beings and perspectives within a united world is one of the best-known aspects of Vicente Aleixandre's poetry, the Spanish poet's insistence that his diverse poetic works constitute a unified corpus has received little critical attention in its own right. For the most part, Aleixandre's attitude toward his own writing has been taken into account by critics only as it illustrates his world view. I propose, however, that Aleixandre's belief in the unity of his poetic works is as significant for his understanding of literature as his belief in the unity of all creation is for his understanding of the world. Indeed, Aleixandre's presupposition of the unity of his work underlies several key aspects of his self-reading, such as his tendency to interpret the sense or meaning of his poetry, his emphasis on the stylistic and thematic evolution of his work, the recognition of his multiple perspectives on the world and the consciousness of his poetry's dialogue with tradition. This combination of elements, all of which reinforce the idea of unity, links Aleixandre's reading of his poetry to hermeneutical and phenomenological interpretations of literature.¹ Because of the intertwining of these two critical threads in Aleixandre's thinking, I have adopted Mario Valdés's term “phenomenological hermeneutics” to describe the poet's reading of his work.²

In his comments about literature Vicente Aleixandre alternates between assuming the unity of the world as a given, and concluding that unity is the sense of the world. At the same time, he implies that the wholeness of his own work mirrors that of the world. In “Prólogo y notas previas a Mis poemas mejores,” for example, he affirms, “El tema de la mayoría de los libros del poeta era, si la expresión no parece desmedida, la Creación, la naturaleza entera, yo diría mejor su unidad, y el hombre quedaba confundido con ella, elemento de ese cosmos del que sustancialmente no se diferenciaba” (538). In effect, Aleixandre's use of the word “theme” here approaches hermeneutical theorists' use of the term “sense.” Pere Gimferrer's evaluation of Aleixandre's complete poetic works, emphasizes the link between “unity” as theme and “unity” as sense:

Desde sus inicios … la poesía de Aleixandre puede resumirse en una palabra: unidad. Cada ser [referring to the being of each work], en la luz total—inseparable de la tiniebla total—, es idéntico a los otros, y todos son el poeta: el ojo que, ciego, se ve a sí mismo, la palabra que se designa al designar el mundo, la pasión erótica que se reencuentra en los cuerpos ajenos, la percepción que asume la unidad de mente y materia. Conocimiento de lo unitario, fragor y quietud de un cosmos hecho idea, de una idea que es el cosmos.

(32)

In this passage Gimferrer superimposes Aleixandre's unifying vision of the world onto the sense of his poetic texts as a whole. My analysis begins, in effect, with Gimferrer's conclusion that the sense of Aleixandre's poetry is its unity. My purpose is not to determine whether this conclusion is sound, but to describe the nature and the parameters of Vicente Aleixandre's efforts to promote the idea of his works' wholeness.

In his reading of his own and others' poetry, Aleixandre assumes both the unity of the works of an individual writer, and the “unity of sense” of texts written by different poets of a particular time and place.³ His most explicit reference to a unity of sense, a concept employed in both phenomenology and hermeneutics (Husserl 128-29), occurs in his lecture “Algunos caracteres de la nueva poesía española.” Here he affirms that the various kinds of poetry being cultivated at the time in Spain can be construed as a unit: “Hoy, como ayer, se hacen en nuestra lengua, por españoles, muchos tipos de poesía aparentemente incongruentes. Pero no somos pocos los que creemos con fe viva que la literatura de una generación (y abriendo el círculo, la de una época, la de un siglo, la de un pueblo) es siempre congruente, es una obra, una unidad artística, cuyo sentido sólo es cabalmente aprehensible vista desde el armonioso conjunto” (492). This search for a sense that lends coherence to a single or multiple texts and Aleixandre's belief that the sense of a work can be perceived only from the concept of the “wholeness” of that work form part of an attitude common to hermeneutics (Gadamer 60) and phenomenology (Husserl, Ideas 80).

Aleixandre defines the critical task he undertakes for the aforesaid lecture as “aislar, en lo poético, lo que llamaríamos unidad espiritual del tiempo propuesto, dentro de la variedad aparentemente caótica de sus dispersas manifestaciones” (491-92). His critical method, “isolating” a unity of sense from the multiplicity of literary phenomena, in addition to his implicit reference to a pattern of relationships or a “congruity” parallels the method of phenomenological analysis. In addition, his assertion that the varied poetic manifestations of the day and the unique focus of each writer harmonize with the idea of the unity of poetic works corresponds to Husserl's reconciliation of multiple appearances and perspectives with the understanding of the unity of an intended object (87-88).

As a reader of his own poetry, Vicente Aleixandre engages in a variety of interpretive practices that support the idea of his works' unity. In the first of these, he converts what might be considered prominent themes of his work, such as love, “aspiration to light,” communication or knowledge, into the sense of his work.⁴ Aleixandre arrives at love or “aspiration to light” as meanings through a kind of poetic “reduction” to essence. In “Dos poemas y un comentario,” for example, he declares that his belief in the unity of the world, over and above its diversity, underlies all of his poetic work to date (650). In order to illustrate this unity, the poet/critic affirms that in his poetic vision the world, with its “formas diversas” (“mares, montes, ríos, selva, fauna”), “está reducido a una sustancia única que el poeta llama amor” (650). By means of this poetic distillation, Aleixandre arrives at a common substance, love, that in turn generates an opposite movement of expansion on the part of each being toward an all-encompassing unity: “En esta poética, todo aspira, hasta los seres inanimados, a un enlazamiento, más exactamente, a una integración amorosa” (650). Through this integration, Aleixandre asserts, the beings of the world acquire a transcendent being or meaning. They participate in “una consumación amante general en que destrucción o amor, unificadores, tienen una sola significación” (650). Aleixandre's description of his poetry, with his emphasis on a “reduction” that subsequently allows for a fullness of meaning, all within a structure of unity suggests a phenomenological understanding of literature.⁵

Aleixandre not only sees love as a unifying theme in his own work, but emphasizes its role in uniting the Western poetic tradition. In his speech “En la vida del poeta: el amor y la poesía” before the Real Academia Española (395-423), he examines love poetry from medieval times to the Romantic period, concluding that in each moment love has been “un intento de comunión con lo absoluto: esto ser ciegamente el amor en el hombre” (422). As with his own poetry, Aleixandre pursues the idea of the unity of tradition by linking together a variety of poetic visions of love:

No importa desde qué posición espiritual o temporal descendida y transmitida: un neoplatonismo, una tradición petrarquesca, una delineación provenzal o una sede romántica. Sigue siendo lo mismo. Por sobre lo mudable, por sobre el color, por sobre la línea, por sobre el espacio y el tiempo, más allá de la variante perspectiva, la fiel poesía, hija de la constante naturaleza humana, nos estará rindiendo el tronco que no se muda: la unidad del amor, en la unidad del hombre.

(423)

Aleixandre presents love here as an attitude that works toward unity on different levels, first as a concern shared by all people, secondly, as an attitude of seeking communion with the absolute, and finally as a theme that allows us to perceive and confirm the unity of our tradition. His portrayal of love as a dominant theme that is inextricably tied to the unity of the world and to that of the body of his own works is echoed in his vision of the European poetic tradition. This clearly suggests that Aleixandre sees his own work in the mainstream of the larger tradition. The expansion that he describes from diverse, individual expressions of love to love as a multidimensional attitude permeating the various stages of his career, and beyond, to the Western tradition, itself united by aspects of love, illustrates our poet's tendency to place the individual within an expanding structure of sense.

While in some moments of Aleixandre's poetic creation the poetic subject's attitude of love manifests itself as a desire for union with the other, usually portrayed as the beloved (652), at other times it is expressed as a feeling of solidarity, based upon the recognition of the self in the other (542), or as an attitude or experience of knowledge (669). In each of these manifestations, love establishes a relatedness among beings which reinforces the overall unity of the world. By the same token, the poet's development of new understandings of love and the linking of love with the other major Aleixandrian themes of communication and knowledge serve to maintain a sense of the unity and continuity of the poet's work across different stages of his career, as we shall see below.

In a second poetic “reduction,” Aleixandre speaks of his poetic trajectory as an “aspiración a la luz” (541, 546). This image is invoked by Aleixandre to describe his poetry from the mid-1940s on. Like the theme of love, that of light transcends the individual differences among the various Aleixandrian works, while adding the idea of a coherent progression, beginning with the “black light” of Pasión de la tierra, passing through the “red light” of La destrucción o el amor, on to the “white light” of Sombra del paraíso, and finally to the transparency of Historia del corazón (542). On at least three occasions Aleixandre refers to the gradual movement from darkness to light as a “proceso de clarificación,” employing a term with phenomenological overtones, to describe one of the principal characteristics of his poetic evolution (530, 537, 548).⁶ Aleixandre appears to refer to a process at work in his poetry across time, an evolutionary process in which the poet moves, intellectually and stylistically, from zones of darkness to those of light. This process accounts both for the gradual movement from non-rational to increasingly rational poetic thinking as well as for the poet's departure from the “difficult” language of such works as Pasión de la tierra and Espadas como labios, to the language of Historia del corazón, which, by comparison, courts the reader's understanding.

Ironically, Aleixandre invokes the process of clarification as he reflects upon the meaning of Pasión de la tierra, the work that initiated his exploration of his inner world and his use of nonrational modes of expression (528). In the prologue of the first Spanish edition of Pasión de la tierra, published twelve years after its composition, Aleixandre confesses that while he only recently discovered “la claridad y el espacio celeste, … desde la angustia de las sombras, desde la turbiedad de las grandes grietas terráqueas estaba presentida la coherencia del total mundo poético” (528). Once again, Aleixandre's affirmation of the underlying presence of a “coherence” that would become evident only later, in the context of the poet's entire creation, points to a phenomenological and hermeneutical reading on his part.

Vicente Aleixandre's mid-life conversion to the belief that the poet belongs to a social as well as to a literary community leads him to a third interpretation of poetry as communication. His desire to communicate with his readers can be seen first in his introductory remarks to the second edition of La destrucción o el amor and to the first Spanish edition of Pasión de la tierra. In the former, Aleixandre emphasizes his long-standing commitment to the universal themes of “love,” “sadness,” “hate,” or “death,” that “essentially unite” humankind (525). Portraying himself as a poet of the majority, he distances himself from a “minority” aesthetic that tends to limit poetic materials and to exclude “unprepared” readers (525). In his introduction to Pasión de la tierra, a work that Aleixandre considers in retrospect to be inaccessible to all but the most prepared readers, he attempts to explain what he intended in terms that contemporary readers would understand. Underlining the human quality of Pasión de la tierra, he appeals to the readers' ethical consciousness and invites them to make an effort to recognize themselves in this poetry (530).

Over the years Aleixandre comes to conceive of a greater social role for the poet, beyond the invocation of themes common to all people, to the convocation of a “human community” (508). In this way, his poetic search for unity becomes transformed into a meta-poetic task. This attitude toward poetry places Aleixandre in line with other contemporary writers who affirm the need for the poet to fulfill a social as well as literary role in post-civil war Spain. By adhering to this view of the poet's task, he is able to see himself, once again, as part of the mainstream of contemporary Spanish poetry. Thus, the idea of poetry as communication links up with the theme of the unity of beings in the world and reinforces the unity that Aleixandre seeks with his poetic tradition.⁷

While the importance of knowledge has been highlighted more by literary critics than by Aleixandre himself, it too has served to unite the various works and periods of the poet. In contrast to the theme of communication, which appears almost halfway through Aleixandre's poetic career, knowledge as theme and as intellectual process figures in a number of his works, including Ambito, Sombra del paraíso and even Pasión de la tierra. It becomes most prominent, however, in the last stage of his career, with Poemas de la consumación and Diálogos del conocimiento, as José Olivio Jiménez has demonstrated (55-59). Although Aleixandre dwells little on knowledge as an isolated aspect of his poetry, it is clear he sees it as being interconnected with the themes of light, love, and even communication. Knowledge for him is associated with the image of light, whether the gaining of knowledge is sudden, as with a moment of “illumination” or occurs as a gradual process of “clarification.” Likewise, his understanding of his poetry as “una forma del conocimiento amoroso” relates knowledge of the other to the theme of love (669). The pronunciation of this aphorism linking love and knowledge in “Poesía, comunicación,” from 1951, implies that both erotic union with the other and communication with the other can be understood as forms of knowledge. Because of the ways in which knowledge can define various modes of relating to the world and because of the way it combines with the other Aleixandrian themes, it, like love and aspiration to light, weaves its own pattern of relationships that binds individual works to the whole.

It seems appropriate to consider Vicente Aleixandre's “reduction” of his poetry to a single although expandable sense, such as “love” or “aspiration to light,” as part of a more general tendency on his part to seek and to evoke a world of meaning. As such, Aleixandre's interpretation of his poetry parallels the phenomenologist's rendering of the intended object “a meaning for consciousness” through the reduction (Ricoeur, Conflict 257). In addition, the fact that Aleixandre foregrounds the attitude of love and the aspiration to light in the interpretation of his poetry suggests that these meanings hold a special and personal significance for him. His reduction, in this way, departs from the purely phenomenological focus on the intended object and traces a hermeneutical circle in what Ricoeur calls a “return to the self by way of its other” (Conflict 261).

Aleixandre's contemplation of his poetry as a whole places him at a distance from his individual works and, to an extent, from himself as creator of the texts. The frequent reference to himself in the third person, as “the poet,” demonstrates his recognition of the “otherness” of his own creation. This attitude, however, does not represent Aleixandre's alienation, but prepares the way for a new understanding of his work. As in Paul Ricoeur's dialectic of distanciation and appropriation, the distance assumed by Aleixandre allows him to perceive the meaning of his work on another level, not as a “possession,” but as a “dispossession of the egoistic and narcissistic ego” (Theory 94). Yet, as Ricoeur affirms, this appropriation promises a new understanding of the self, which Aleixandre seems to celebrate as he embraces the idea of his poetry as multiple perspectives on the theme of love, on the one hand, and as a gradual movement toward light and clarity, on the other. In this way Aleixandre's reading forms part of the pursuit of self-knowledge in the latter part of his poetic career.

Vicente Aleixandre's self-reading shares with phenomenology and hermeneutics not only the belief in the unity and the “unity of sense” of an intended object, in this case the poet's own work, but also the idea of the unitary flow of a subject's mental experiences. Aleixandre uses the image of a current or stream primarily to describe his poetic evolution which he describes as his consciousness of the world, unfolding and transforming itself in time (540). He suggests that his poetry exemplifies the idea of “un estilo en movimiento” (541). “La evolución continuada, sin saltos,” [of this style], “mostrar … la unidad presidente, en cada momento reconocible” (541). Aleixandre's idea of the temporal flow of consciousness, sustaining itself as a unit, parallels Edmund Husserl's description of the ego's temporal field or “stream of mental processes” as “the whole, essentially unified, and strictly self-contained stream of temporal unities of mental processes” (196).

Aleixandre's understanding of the relationship of his individual works to the whole is analogous to Husserl's idea of single moments within the stream of mental processes. On the one hand, the poet recognizes the individual identity of each of his works and affirms his solidarity with them, yet on the other, insists that they be viewed as part of the organic body of his work: “un poema extraído del organismo a que pertenece mutila, no ese cuerpo general, sino el poema mismo, que no significa igual separado de su contexto” (543). According to Husserl, “every mental process belonging to the stream … has an essence of its own which can be seized upon intuitively” (69). At the same time, Husserl asserts, “no concrete mental process can be accepted as a self-sufficient one in the full sense of the term. Each is ‘in need of supplementation’ with respect to prescribed concatenation …” (198).

Just as Aleixandre insists that his poetry be perceived as following a smooth and continuous course in its own right, he is also concerned that it belong within the flow of contemporary poetry. In “Prólogo y notas previas a Mis poemas mejores,” he manifests the desire to be remembered as a participant in the most vital literary currents of the moment, but also as a poet who is conscious of his debt to the past and his responsibility to the future. He expresses this in a kind of literary epitaph, referring to himself, as he frequently does, in the third person: “En su tiempo no quedó del todo al margen de la corriente viva de la poesía: había enlazado con un ayer y no había sido materia interruptora para el mañana” (543). In my opinion, Aleixandre's projection of his ideal relationship with the poetic tradition is similar to Hans-Georg Gadamer's conception of belonging: “Tradition is not simply a precondition into which we come, but we produce it ourselves, inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition and hence further determine it ourselves” (261). In the formulation of his participation in the flow of literary tradition, Aleixandre shares with both Husserl and Gadamer the assumption that any single experience in the present presupposes a “before,” a past experience which gives rise to it, and an “after,” a future experience toward which it is directed.

Aleixandre's recognition of the critical difficulties posed for the subject (as creator or reader) by the flow of experience also suggests a link to phenomenology.⁸ When asked to choose poems for an anthology of his “best poetry,” he protests, “El poeta es su propio transcurrir anímico, y no existe el momento absolutamente inmóvil desde el que situarse para elegir fuera del tiempo” (543). In this understanding, too, his thinking parallels that of Husserl who recognizes, “my whole stream of mental processes is, finally, a unity of mental processes, which, of essential necessity, cannot be seized upon completely in a perceiving which ‘swims along with it’” (97). For Aleixandre, the fact that his judgement is necessarily situated in a “here and now” means that any selection of past works will be colored by his present experience or perspective: “Cuando el lírico escoge lo hace desde su propia fluidez en curso. Lo que, quiéralo o no, equivale un poco a decir desde la etapa suya que vive. Sé bien que una selección … no sería la misma ayer, como no mostraría probablemente idéntico cuerpo si congregada mañana” (544). Despite his skepticism with regard to the importance of his selection, Aleixandre complies with his publisher's request, but not without playfully undermining the validity of the entire enterprise: “He aquí, pues, algunos de los poemas que en este momento yo reuniría para representar … una posible fisonomía, reteniéndola un instante, ahora mismo, antes que sea otra la que en el instante siguiente yo hubiese de recoger, sorprendiéndola en la mudable corriente” (544). Yet, this is not the last word; the poet follows with a more positive statement of what he intends with his selection: “He preferido … dar una imagen del caz (sin más interrupción que la que lleva el hecho de escoger, separar), para que se pueda seguir el dibujo del cauce y, dentro de él, parada un instante, de su corriente” (544). Clearly, Aleixandre's doubt is limited to the possibility of his choosing poems that constitute the proper coordinates for the “course” of his poetry without his being able to occupy a position outside the flow. The poet affirms, however, the belief in the existence of his poetic creation as a kind of being that unfolds in time, and whose trajectory can be perceived.

Vicente Aleixandre's awareness of his assumption of different perspectives as writer and as reader jibes with Wolfgang Iser's application of Husserl's “stream of mental processes” to the experience of the reader: “Every articulate reading moment,” affirms Iser, “entails a switch of perspective, and this constitutes an inseparable combination of differentiated perspectives, foreshortened memories, present modifications, and future expectations” (116). Like Aleixandre, Iser speaks of the moments in which the subject “intends” its object as perspectives. Iser then goes on to explore the structure of the subject's cognitive experience: “Thus, in the time-flow of the reading process, past and future continually converge in the present moment, and the synthetizing operations of the wandering viewpoint enable the text to pass through the reader's mind as an ever-expanding network of connections” (116).

Iser's idea of the interaction of the past and the future with the present is exemplified in Vicente Aleixandre's critique of two of his poems, the first of which formed part of an existing collection, while the second was part of a work in progress. In his critique, written in 1950, Aleixandre reflects on “A ti, viva,” published in La destrucción o el amor fifteen years earlier, and on “Mano entregada,” from Historia del corazón, not published until four years later. His comments make it clear that he has chosen these two poems because the similarities linking the two, as well as the differences that separate them, serve to illustrate an aspect of his poetic evolution. While Aleixandre expresses the belief that La destrucción o el amor is the work that most completely develops the theme of love to date (649-50), he announces that in Historia del corazón he returns to the theme of love, albeit with a new, more limited focus on the poet's intimate experience with his beloved. At this point a footnote, added with the publication of Aleixandre's Obras completas, indicates that the poet subsequently pursued another course in Historia del corazón (652). In 1950, however, it seems that Aleixandre was conscious of an evolutionary line in his poetry that established a special relationship between a past work (La destrucción o el amor) and a future one (Historia del corazón). From his viewing point at that time, which after all was “in the stream,” the poet formulated an expectation for the future that was not entirely fulfilled. Historia del corazón actually came to incarnate Aleixandre's idea of poetry as communication and as an expression of solidarity with others. Not surprisingly, his later interpretations of his poetic trajectory deemphasize the link between La destrucción and Historia. Aleixandre's reflection/projection of 1950 shows that he reads his own poetry much as Iser's subject reads a novel, pausing at times to integrate new information into the already existing structures, to reinterpret the past in light of present discoveries, and to anticipate events to come.

The protagonism of perspective in Vicente Aleixandre's thinking as poet and as reader of poetry is worth noting, both because his systematic play with perspective is one of the most original features of his poetic creation, and also because his use of perspective illustrates another aspect of his phenomenological approach to poetry.⁹ As a reader, Aleixandre uses the term “perspective” primarily to describe the standpoint from which he views works written years earlier (491, 531, 538, 550). This temporal distance allows the poet/reader to distinguish qualities of individual texts or his work as a whole that may not have been evident to him as the work was unfolding. More importantly, perhaps, this distance allows him to understand the ways in which the works relate to each other and assume their place within the total poetic creation.

When reflecting on his artistic intentions for a particular work, Aleixandre often highlights the multiple perspectives assumed by his poetic subject as he contemplates the world (557, 558, 563). In one such instance, in 1962, Aleixandre comments on what he calls the “variada perspectiva” of Sombra del paraíso (563). This variety of perspectives is closely connected to the meaning of the work in his eyes: “Sombra del paraíso intenta ser un cántico de la aurora del mundo desde el hombre presente … es un canto a la luz desde la conciencia de la oscuridad” (563). The primary perspective, then, is that of a subject who is simultaneously conscious of his present condition in a reality characterized by darkness, and of a previously existing world illuminated by the light of dawn. Aleixandre goes on to say that the dawn, “esa primera edad del universo,” is sometimes identified with his own personal experience as a child in Málaga (563). On another level, Aleixandre intimates, this dawn represents the world before the arrival of humankind. Yet another perspective taken in Sombra is that in which the poet sees “la realidad actual humana desde la resplandeciente luz del paraíso” (563). The last perspective described by Aleixandre is that in which the poet considers “el hombre perecedero actual, desde la conciencia de su precariedad y su fin” (563). The creation of parallel structures, such as the dawn of the day and the beginning of the world, the newly created world and the poet's childhood, darkness and the consciousness of death's presence or imminence, in addition to the spatial and temporal interweaving of these structures through changes in perspective produce the impression of a complex, yet united poetic world. To this end Aleixandre employs multiple perspectives in what Iser terms a “network of connections” (118), through which the poetic world can expand while maintaining its unity.

In comments on his last two works, Poemas de la consumación and Diálogos del conocimiento, Aleixandre also addresses the way in which his poetic perspective influences the theme and style of the texts. Poemas de la consumación, he affirms, “intenta cantar con grave voz y ademán consecuente la situación del viejo que vive la plena conciencia de la juventud como el equivalente de la única vida” (557). This simultaneous consciousness of the present and the past affords the poet a special knowledge, which he terms “una sombría iluminación” (557). At the same time, Aleixandre combines the idea of perspective with that of the evolutionary flow of his poetic trajectory in order to situate Poemas de la consumación with regard to his previous work. He explains that after writing three works (Historia del corazón, Retratos con nombre and En un vasto dominio) that belong to the new literary “realism” of the late 1940s and the 1950s, he felt called to employ non-rational elements in his verses once again. He takes care to inform the reader, however, that this does not constitute a return to his use of the irrational in texts like Espadas como labios or La destrucción o el amor (557), but corresponds to an attempt to “irracionalizar el elemento expresivo ‘desde’ la experiencia del realismo” (557). This distinction between the “pre-realist” and the “post-realist” stages allows the dialectic between the rational and the non-rational to proceed in an orderly fashion within the evolutionary course of Aleixandre's poetry.

Aleixandre's reading of his poetry from different temporal and thematic perspectives establishes various patterns of relationships among his works. From the perspective of poetry as love, La destrucción o el amor, Sombra del paraíso and Historia del corazón each stand out as distinctive formulations of the poet's love of the “other.” As individual works, they also model the unity that Aleixandre seeks for all of his poetic creation. He speaks of these three works, in particular, as texts that were conceived of as organic wholes or that most clearly function as integral units. From the perspective of Aleixandre's poetry as a process of clarification, the sequence of works from Pasión de la tierra to Historia del corazón are linked together. Aleixandre modifies the linear image suggested by this process by affirming that his poetry “se muerde la cola” (524) as Sombra del paraíso doubles back to confirm the place of Ambito within his poetic evolution. Aleixandre's work, viewed from the perspective of knowledge, becomes a circle, with Poemas de la consumación and Diálogos del conocimiento returning to a central theme of Ambito. Finally, the idea of poetry as communication joins together such texts as Historia del corazón, Los encuentros, and Aleixandre's own prologues, as well as his published correspondence with other poets.

Vicente Aleixandre's changing critical perspectives yield a variety of scenarios, each of which reveals a special pattern of relationship among the poet's works. The interweaving of these perspectives and the concomitant play of approximation and distanciation as works are moved into the foreground or recede into the background lend Aleixandre's poetry a rich texture. As a result, Aleixandre's poetic trajectory appears, not merely as a temporal flowing, but as a structure possessing the complexity, as well as the dimensions of length, breadth and depth to model the world effectively (Iser 116).

A close examination of Vicente Aleixandre's affirmation of the unity of his poetic creation reveals that he pursues this unity actively in his reading of his own poetry. While Aleixandre's role as reader appears to mirror his role as poet in this respect, the systematic nature of his reading suggests that it is informed not only by a poetic vision, but also by critical theory. Aleixandre's emphasis on the coherence of his work and his tendency to focus on its unity of sense, his understanding of individual poems and books of poetry as perspectives on the world, and his view of his entire poetic trajectory as a stream of experience, all point to the presence of phenomenological hermeneutics in his self-reading.

Notes

1. Critical hermeneutics interprets the sense of literary works. In twentieth-century hermeneutics, this interpretation deals primarily with the elucidation of the reader's experience of the work, in contrast with nineteenth-century attempts to reconstruct an author's intentions. The idea of the unity of experience is basic to both hermeneutical and phenomenological investigations, according to Hans Georg Gadamer (59-60). Hermeneutical theory, in particular, has focused on the author's relationship to a literary or cultural tradition.

2. Valdés asserts that if “hermeneutics is a reflective theory of interpretation, then phenomenological hermeneutics is a reflective theory of interpretation grounded in the presuppositions of phenomenological philosophy.” The primary presupposition corresponds to Heidegger's discovery that each being is a “being-in-the-world” (Valdés 59). Paul Ricoeur, like Valdés, recognizes the grounding of much of twentieth century hermeneutics in phenomenology (Hermeneutics 101).

3. Several of the elements that I shall discuss (unity of sense, reduction, process of clarification, stream of experience, and perspective), may figure in hermeneutical investigations, but can be traced to phenomenology.

4. José Olivio Jiménez's “una aventura hacia el conocimiento” first called attention to Aleixandre's tendency to “reduce” his poetry to a single sense. Jiménez identifies three stages in Aleixandre's poetic development, “comunión,” “comunicación” and “conocimiento” (57), which he places within Aleixandre's overall search for knowledge.

5. Husserl understands the reduction as an “operation necessary to make “pure” consciousness, and subsequently the whole phenomenological region, accessible to us” (66), and expresses its goal as “the acquisition of a new region of Being …” (101). Paul Ricoeur interprets and attempts to clarify Husserl's ideas on the reduction: “Husserl saw in the reduction the primordial philosophical act by which consciousness cuts itself off from the world and constitutes itself as an absolute; after reduction, every being is a meaning for consciousness …” (Conflict 257). According to Ricoeur's analysis, the Husserlian transcendental reduction “transmutes every question about being into a question about the sense of being. … Our relation to the world becomes apparent as a result of reduction; in and through reduction every being comes to be described as a phenomenon, as appearance, thus as a meaning to be made explicit” (Conflict 246-47). It is this rendering of a sense that has clear ontological significance for the subject that I see at work in Vicente Aleixandre's interpretation of his own work.

6. In phenomenology, the term is used to refer to a method for arriving at essence (Husserl, Ideas 156-57). For Aleixandre, there is some indication that in certain works, such as Sombra del paraíso, he engages in such a clarification as he “makes evident” an essential reality.

7. Santiago Daydí-Tolson emphasizes both Aleixandre's sense of belonging to a poetic tradition (2) and the fact that the poet's work, itself, models the flow of tradition because of its association with a series of twentieth-century literary movements (5, 7, 22).

8. Although Dorion Cairns criticizes W. R. Boyce Gibson for translating Husserl's Erlebnis as “experience,” insisting that the expression “mental processes” is more exact (46), Ortega y Gasset translates the term as vivencia in Spanish (Phenomenology and Art 110), while Paul Ricouer opts for le vécu in French (Idées 522). These Spanish and French translations, as well as the English “experience” suggest a broader understanding of Erlebnis than Husserl might have intended. This broader sense of the word has been assumed and further developed by hermeneutics.

9. Critics Carlos Bousoño (18) and Leopoldo de Luis (10) view Aleixandre's systematic use of perspective as an important contribution to the richness of his poetic production. Ciriaco Morón-Arroyo addresses the importance of perspective for José Ortega y Gasset, whose philosophy was a probable catalyst for Aleixandre's own use of perspective (233-43).

Works Cited

Aleixandre, Vicente. Obras completas II. Madrid: Aguilar, 1978.

Bousoño, Carlos. “Grandeza y evolución en Aleixandre.” Insula 458-59 (enero-febrero 1985): 1, 18-19.

Cairns, Dorion. Guide for Translating Husserl. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.

Daydí-Tolson, Santiago. “Vicente Aleixandre: A New Voice of Tradition.” Vicente Aleixandre, A Critical Appraisal. Ed. Santiago Daydí-Tolson. Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual Press, 1981. 1-35.

de Luis, Leopoldo. Vicente Aleixandre: Antología poética. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: The Seabury Press, 1975.

Gimferrer, Pere. Lo mejor de Vicente Aleixandre. Antología total. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1989.

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982.

———. Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie. Trans. Paul Ricoeur. Paris: Gallimard, 1950.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Jiménez, José Olivio. “Una aventura hacia el conocimiento.” Vicente Aleixandre, A Critical Appraisal. Ed. Santiago Daydí-Tolson. Ypsilanti: Bilingual Press, 1981. 55-85.

Morón-Arroyo, Ciriaco. El sistema de Ortega y Gasset. Madrid: Ediciones Alcal, 1968.

Ortega y Gasset, José. Phenomenology and Art. Trans. Philip W. Silver. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975.

Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

———. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: The Texas Christian UP, 1976.

———. The Conflict of Interpretations. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1974.

Silver, Philip W. Ortega as Phenomenologist. The Genesis of Meditations on Quixote. New York: Columbia UP, 1978.

Valdés, Mario. Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987.