Notes on Pablo Neruda
As for politics, well, Neruda’s a Chilean. As I’ve probably mentioned, los Estados Unidos has a long and troubled history in central and south American politics. We have generally supported the business and military interests that suit us, not necessarily the ones that would improve life for people in Chile, or Peru, or Costa Rica, or wherever in Latin America. United Fruit was huge in central America, and in Chile, for instance, you had to reckon with Anaconda and its mining interests. Such multinationals aren’t interested in nation-states except as a hindrance to the flow of capital where they – the companies – want it to go, a hindrance to how they want to deal with labor arrangements and standards, and so forth. When Chile got its independence from Spain in the 1820’s, things may have looked promising, but then the Brits sort of stepped in and got control of many of Chile’s resources, and of course the USA had interests of its own, so we tried to foil the Brits. Anyway, it gets ugly and complicated, and the worst of it is probably our campaign to discredit Salvador Allende, Chile’s socialist but legitimately elected president, in 1973. After which Pinochet established a military dictatorship. I don’t know that the CIA planned the coup itself, and considerable evidence suggests otherwise, but it’s ridiculously obvious that the US benefited from the change and that the militarists were encouraged by the money and effort we put into destabilizing Allende’s presidency.
Neruda became very much a “poet of the people.” But that title seems to come in the course of his political development towards leftism. He starts off as a love & nature poet, moves on to the impure/pure poetry debate, with the “impurists” being something like advocates for surrealist description of objects, not “ego-centered.” That’s not the same thing as realism, of course: the point is rather, I think, to embrace the fully human and reject the too-well-arranged and centered self of the bourgeois ideologue, and to embrace heterogeneity of the object world. See “Walking Around” for this influence (2443-44). In André Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, dreams and free imagination take precedence over waking, orderly reality and its prim associations between one thing and another. In the visual arts, think Salvador Dalí. Openness to contradiction is vital. Neruda writes,
"Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.
A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophesies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.
The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding, willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.
Source: "Toward an Impure Poetry," [date 1935] in Pablo Neruda, Five Decades: A Selection ( Poems: 1925-1970), translated by Ben Belitt (New York, Grove Press, 1974), pp. xxi-xxii.
But as he develops, Neruda’s belief in the material-reality-rendering possibilities of language really comes into full play: see “I’m explaining a few things” (2445-46). Why is he rejecting flowery erotic or pastoral poesy? Well, “Come and see the blood in the streets” of Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. That’s the imperative – to bring together the ordinary people against a fascist such as General Franco, whose rule, unfortunately, outlasted his allies Hitler and Mussolini right on through the early 1970s.
In the portion of Canto General that we have, the great Andes mountain, Macchu Picchu, at once seems to swallow up humanity and to become the symbol of its permanence, the permanence of Peruvian and indeed Latin American culture, in spite of what the Spaniards did to the Incas, Maya, Aztecs and other early civilizations. “The Heights” and its imagery, as the editors point out, works against pure linearity as a principle of understanding history; the technique is instead to amalgamate or fuse many memories, many images, many periods into something like a unified vision founded on hope for the future. This is a mainstay of Latin American literature, with its emphasis on what’s often called “magical realism.” The past is never entirely lost; it haunts the present but also affords vision and opportunity to those who are willing to confront and embrace it rather than deny it. All you need do is read Marquez’s Cento Años de Soledad to realize that.
I'll post notes on the other two authors as time permits....
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Week 13, Luigi Pirandello
Notes on Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author
Traditionally, theater has been theorized as providing distance from “real life” so as to afford us perspective and intelligibility. Paradoxically, it achieves this distance by means of emotional intensity – dramatic illusion is actually part of the mechanics, I suppose, necessary to the moral and didactic aims of theater. Aristotle (384-22 BCE) says that of the six elements of a play (plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song), by far the most important is plot, or mythos. That’s because the plot arranges the incidents of the drama to provide us with the pattern of a single coherent action that rivets our attention, eliciting pity (éleos) and fear or terror (phóbos); the process as a whole leads to catharsis (cleansing, purification, etc.) and, at least in the usual interpretation, teaches us something about ourselves and our relationship to other human beings and to the divine realms.
What Pirandello explores in the present play is not so much the erasure of the usual distinction between art and the rest of life, but rather an experimental alteration in the logic of dramatic illusion. It has become characteristic of post-modern drama to break this illusion or do other strange things with it, but in Pirandello’s day that was still a novelty (even though you can find it at work in Shakespeare). We are in fact watching quite a spectacle and we know that that’s what it is, of course – it’s pretty hard to get around Dr. Johnson’s C18 pronouncement, “The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players” and that “If there be any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment.” Still, it seems possible at times to draw in the audience until they feel as if they are something more like participants in a “happening” (to borrow a sixties word) than mere spectators of a dry proceeding on a stage. Pirandello’s way of doing this is by way of a species of mise en abîme, wherein we behold the preparations for a real play (that Pirandello himself wrote) interrupted and taken over by the realer-than-life imaginative projections of characters from an unfinished novel – these characters astonish and captivate the actors onstage, convince il produttore (who initially sees himself as pretty much what a producer is – not a creative agent like the regista or director but rather as a sort of glorified handyman seeing that everything comes off smoothly) to let things tumble on as they subsequently do: the characters generate chaos on the stage when they insist that their passionate melodrama must be acted out and expressed just as they know it has to go. It’s their sole purpose in their fictive life, after all – they’re not just actors who have memorized lines that they then have to din up the feeling to speak. It seems this author had failed them, had failed to round off the necessary actions and give the characters the relief of finality.
In a sense this is absurdist realism: it’s a trick of art to impose order and significance and comforting truisms on the events and emotions that make up life. One of the most powerful views of art is that it’s a species of illusion or deception that lends clarity to other areas of life, opens up a space for reflection on them. That view places art on the side of civilization and order. The illusion created is usually smooth, even seamless. But the modern sense of reality is permeated by complexity, incompatibilities of all kinds, and a strong dose of incoherence: in plain English, it’s messy, not an unbroken, polished surface. In so far as there’s dramatic illusion in this Pirandello play, I suppose, it’s one that tugs us into this messy modern reality: what’s taking place on the stage is supposed to capture our attention and seem real to us or at least as compelling as if it were real, at least at times. Isn’t that what Coleridge meant by “a willing suspension of disbelief”? So the question may not have so much to do with illusion but rather with the nature of the reality that we are being led to experience and contemplate. If the world beyond the play’s confines isn’t one in which people’s passions and actions are easily manageable and ordered to lead to a predictable outcome or a firm set of rules by which to live, perhaps art need not imply such a smooth and satisfying reality. Modernity tends to construe grand concepts like “civilization” itself a species of pleasant illusion or even delusion.
Not that the play is particularly bleak in what it implies about “real life.” The Father character insists that what he and the others want to put on is more real than real life or an ordinary play. His point seems to be that in everyday life, we can squirrel out of being pinned to who we are and in fact we can change somewhat, so our notions about eternal verities always turn out to be premature. By contrast, the situation he’s in is inescapable and eternal, almost a version of damnation: he must keep reliving his reality, while ours turns out to have been an illusion tomorrow. At least we can move on. And this eternal recurrence, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, isn’t one he or any of them can easily or finally embrace. I’d say the relationship the play posits between life and art is uneasy, but not necessarily that its vision of life is hopeless. The possibility of change cuts both ways: we may end up “the puppets of ourselves,” trapping ourselves into various harmful and inauthentic roles, but maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.
Traditionally, theater has been theorized as providing distance from “real life” so as to afford us perspective and intelligibility. Paradoxically, it achieves this distance by means of emotional intensity – dramatic illusion is actually part of the mechanics, I suppose, necessary to the moral and didactic aims of theater. Aristotle (384-22 BCE) says that of the six elements of a play (plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song), by far the most important is plot, or mythos. That’s because the plot arranges the incidents of the drama to provide us with the pattern of a single coherent action that rivets our attention, eliciting pity (éleos) and fear or terror (phóbos); the process as a whole leads to catharsis (cleansing, purification, etc.) and, at least in the usual interpretation, teaches us something about ourselves and our relationship to other human beings and to the divine realms.
What Pirandello explores in the present play is not so much the erasure of the usual distinction between art and the rest of life, but rather an experimental alteration in the logic of dramatic illusion. It has become characteristic of post-modern drama to break this illusion or do other strange things with it, but in Pirandello’s day that was still a novelty (even though you can find it at work in Shakespeare). We are in fact watching quite a spectacle and we know that that’s what it is, of course – it’s pretty hard to get around Dr. Johnson’s C18 pronouncement, “The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players” and that “If there be any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment.” Still, it seems possible at times to draw in the audience until they feel as if they are something more like participants in a “happening” (to borrow a sixties word) than mere spectators of a dry proceeding on a stage. Pirandello’s way of doing this is by way of a species of mise en abîme, wherein we behold the preparations for a real play (that Pirandello himself wrote) interrupted and taken over by the realer-than-life imaginative projections of characters from an unfinished novel – these characters astonish and captivate the actors onstage, convince il produttore (who initially sees himself as pretty much what a producer is – not a creative agent like the regista or director but rather as a sort of glorified handyman seeing that everything comes off smoothly) to let things tumble on as they subsequently do: the characters generate chaos on the stage when they insist that their passionate melodrama must be acted out and expressed just as they know it has to go. It’s their sole purpose in their fictive life, after all – they’re not just actors who have memorized lines that they then have to din up the feeling to speak. It seems this author had failed them, had failed to round off the necessary actions and give the characters the relief of finality.
In a sense this is absurdist realism: it’s a trick of art to impose order and significance and comforting truisms on the events and emotions that make up life. One of the most powerful views of art is that it’s a species of illusion or deception that lends clarity to other areas of life, opens up a space for reflection on them. That view places art on the side of civilization and order. The illusion created is usually smooth, even seamless. But the modern sense of reality is permeated by complexity, incompatibilities of all kinds, and a strong dose of incoherence: in plain English, it’s messy, not an unbroken, polished surface. In so far as there’s dramatic illusion in this Pirandello play, I suppose, it’s one that tugs us into this messy modern reality: what’s taking place on the stage is supposed to capture our attention and seem real to us or at least as compelling as if it were real, at least at times. Isn’t that what Coleridge meant by “a willing suspension of disbelief”? So the question may not have so much to do with illusion but rather with the nature of the reality that we are being led to experience and contemplate. If the world beyond the play’s confines isn’t one in which people’s passions and actions are easily manageable and ordered to lead to a predictable outcome or a firm set of rules by which to live, perhaps art need not imply such a smooth and satisfying reality. Modernity tends to construe grand concepts like “civilization” itself a species of pleasant illusion or even delusion.
Not that the play is particularly bleak in what it implies about “real life.” The Father character insists that what he and the others want to put on is more real than real life or an ordinary play. His point seems to be that in everyday life, we can squirrel out of being pinned to who we are and in fact we can change somewhat, so our notions about eternal verities always turn out to be premature. By contrast, the situation he’s in is inescapable and eternal, almost a version of damnation: he must keep reliving his reality, while ours turns out to have been an illusion tomorrow. At least we can move on. And this eternal recurrence, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, isn’t one he or any of them can easily or finally embrace. I’d say the relationship the play posits between life and art is uneasy, but not necessarily that its vision of life is hopeless. The possibility of change cuts both ways: we may end up “the puppets of ourselves,” trapping ourselves into various harmful and inauthentic roles, but maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.
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