The 1930s

I've been increasingly interested in the 1930s. Zambrano's first works, the beginnings of Lezama Lima. Lorca's duende lecture and Diván del Tamarit, Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, mártir. The 30s represents the end of historical modernism and the beginning of late modernism. The Civil war is 36-39. The years right before are fraught with ideological conflict. The historical avant-garde has its last glorious moments before dying or becoming something else.

The late modernism of the 1975-present period is steeped in the 30s and 40s, that reorientation of modernism that occurs then.

What do you do, then, with social realism of the 1950s and 60s? Speaking of Spain, I guess we could see Sartrean engagement as an influential but short-lived movement. Any good poet from about '55 on was trying to find a way out of the realist nightmare. Even before social poetry reached its high-water mark the good poets were already trying to make an end-run about it. It took a while to develop in the later work of Valente, Crespo, Gamoneda, Atencia, but it was already in early Rodríguez.

Maybe I need chapter on Atencia? It couldn't hurt.

Conocimiento

Is Zambrano's "conocimiento" the same as Valente's? I'm trying to argue that it is. If it were obviously the same, then I wouldn't have to argue it. If it is too different, then my argument is wrong. If it has must enough connections to be plausible, then my point will be interesting.

The same would go for Zambrno's "materialism" and Valente's concept of the same name. It would be too coincidental if Valente took these terms from Zambrano without thinking about her, right? It's like the detective who "doesn't believe in coincidences."

I've been playing around with the idea of counter-reformation poetics. What I mean by this is a very specific tradition that looks to Spanish mysticism (16th century) in order to create a Spanish cultural poetics for the modern age. There are a few dots I haven't connected yet, but the figures I am looking at are María Zambrano, José Lezama Lima, and José Ángel Valente, with some Unamuno thrown in. My basic question is how secular intellectuals can sign on to this project. Zambrano and Lezama were both practicing Catholics, of course, but their models are influential on many other, much more secular thinkers.

Mysticism almost has to do the work that the enlightenment does for other national traditions.

The notion of the counter-reformation was invented much later, and the term itself is fairly charged. I'm using it with some trepidation but also with some deliberate provocation.

I remember reading Asbhery's introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. He had a list of authors that O'Hara and he had read. A lot of my reading in those days was reading backwards, from O'Hara to Flann O'Brien, from Ashbery to Henry Green, etc... Pound sent countless readers back to Chinese poetry or the Troubadours.

A large part of my reading of Valente has been of this type. I can read him in terms of Lezama, Celan, Zambrano, San Juan de la Cruz, Unamuno, Lorca... Understanding everything he knew and understood.

The opposite method is to take a single figure like Rimbaud, Wittgenstein, or Pound, or Lorca, and study that writer's influence on everyone else. This is what Marjorie Perloff did in a series of books (The Poetics of Indeterminacy; The Dance of the Intellect; Wittgenstein's Ladder). That's what I tried to do in Apocryphal Lorca.

Finishing my commentary on Varela's Libro de barro.

XIX "You rang the empty bell three times and nobody responded." Can you still make music in the absence of human throat and ear? Can you "translate silence." In other words, what is at stake here are the grounds of communication. The speaker call for god to exist and to illuminate an imaginary cavern, a blue darkness.

XX The newly born moon is a "mutilated ear of silver." The speaker and an unnamed oyente are unable to hear the music, and there is a goddess who is somehow inaccessible.

XXI We've shared a table, sat down at the table, but not at the same time. So experience is shared, but not communicated. "I don't know how to give names to these things." The sequence as an urgent, anguished tone at this point. The last three poems have been about missed chances for communion.

XXII This next to the last poem, rather than the last poem, feels like a conclusive ending to the sequence. The poem is defined as an attempt to find "the border between what isn't and what won't be." The specifically female imagery (blood between nubile legs) is surprising, since only a few poems have identified the sex of writing up to this point.

XXIII No more "anecdotes." "These were its [your life's] letters.

Now that I've taken these very sketchy notes I can write a bit about this book in a chapter I'm writing. What I've discovered here is that Varela is closer to Gamoneda than to Valente.

Valente is very, very closely identified with the study of Spanish mysticism, especially Miguel de Molinos and san Juan de la Cruz. Since I've always known this, it's taken a while for the full implications to sink in. Valente criticism just tends to echo Valente's own positions, so there's a problem, or a series of problems, here that hasn't quite been resolved. What does it mean for a basically secular intellectual to be so invested in mysticism? In other words, there is nothing in Valente's writing that makes any more or less secular person reject it: everything is framed just so. The reader doesn't even know the confessional status of the authorial voice. Of course, we take the side of the mystic, Molinos, against the Inquisition that sentenced and imprisoned him, the side of heterodoxy against orthodoxy, but presumably a reader would do that whether he or she was agnostic or a Catholic believer--or the believer in any other creed for that matter. So Valente gets to have it both ways. He gets to be the modern secularized intellectual and the champion of mysticism.

My second idea for the day is this: Valente's poetic theory / combined with Claudio Rodríguez's poetry. Rodríguez is known as a dumb poet rather than a smart poet like Valente (Julián Jiménez Heffernan makes this distinction--questioning if of course). A dumb poet is someone like Lorca or Rodríguez, that is, a poet without a theory of poetry. A smart poet is someone like Valente, who develops the theory of what he's going to do and then does it exactly like that. My idea is that Valente's theory--developed mostly on the basis of María Zambrano's philosophy--predicts and explains Rodríguez's poetry. But that Valente tended to ignore the existence of Claudio, after an early review praising Claudio with some reservations. Claudio's poetry, in fact, is a better exemplification of Valente's theory than Valente's own poetry.

***

This lightbulb went off in my head yesterday evening. The lightbulb flash should happen to you when you are working on a project, maybe an average of once or twice every day. This is when an idea falls into place, the "aha" moment. You should notice when this happens. It calls for a brief moment of self-congratulation. Most of the work of writing does not consist of light-bulb flashes.

There's a lot in Valente that was in Zambrano before: the interest in mysticism, "passivity," the union of poetry and philosophy or "pensamiento," Lezama Lima... He owes as much, if not more, to her as to Cernuda. What kept me from seeing that was my relative unfamiliarity with Zambrano. Of course he's written about her so he wasn't exactly hiding this influence, but for me it was "hiding in plain sight." Zambrano was an exile in Cuba during and after the Spanish civil war, and contributed regularly to Lezama's Orígenes. Valente didn't meet Lezama until 1967. You can see letters where María Z is writing Lezama about this young poet (Valente) who is about to make the trip to Cuba, and then letters afterwards about how happy she is that the two of them got along.

This is significant because there is this religious, mystical strain that comes out of Lezama and Zambrano that gives an interesting twist to Spanish modernism--kind of a de-secularization of Ortega y Gasset. It's interesting for me because as a non-religious type person it provides me with a problem or a source of resistance. I had thought that Valente's religiosity was just a metaphor for poesis, but what if is something more than that?

This is a very inchoate part of my project. I love that word because it means "unformed because in its early stages." A particular kind of formlessness deriving from something not yet having taken shape. That's a cool concept.

(59)

*José Angel Valente. Material memoria (1979-1989).

This is a cross-section of Valente's mid-career work, including the masterpiece Tres lecciones de tinieblas.

I love wire brushes because of the textural dimension and dynamic potential. The take trap drumming a step toward hand drumming, in the variety of available sounds. There's a horizontal movement in place of the mostly vertical, up and down dimension of sticks. There's also a sensuality there. Metal on skin. I had a lesson just on brushes today and I got a lot of good metaphors for poetry out of it. Hopefully I'll be able to play them more convincingly too.

"Conviene percutir"

I've always like that line by Valente. (It behooves {you} to percuss)

Brushes are only part percussive, the other part being frictional. That's where the sensuality comes in.

They work at fast tempos too.

Here I am in the Valente library with the other scholars on my panel.

The Valente-Beckett talk went over well. I had not had much sleep the night before, so waiting till four thirty was not easy, but then I got through it by dint of adrenaline. Claudio Rodríguez Fer showed me Valente´s private library, now housed in the library of the Falcutade de Filoloxía of the University of Santiago de Compostela. Then we went for a dinner at the favorite restaurant of Valente.

There were other talks too, on Celan, Heidegger, and Jabes in relation to Valente, and another I missed in the morning. It is my last day here in Santiago. We have had sun every day I have been here.

It's often seemed to me that the canon of high/late European modernist literature and the canon of capital T "Theory" were co-extensive. Thus an interest in Celan, Char, and Beckett goes perfectly well with an interest in Derrida, Levinas, Blanchot, and Heidegger. Foucault wrote a book on Roussel, after all, and Barthes was an early defender of the nouveau roman. Blanchot himself was a novelist.

This idea is hardly new with me, but I think it has certain implications that haven't been fully spelled out. One is that a certain intellectual proximity between theorists and writers is taken for granted in certain circles. When French theory is applied in English departments, it is often done in a way that doesn't presuppose this proximity. In other words, the "leap" is greater from the theory to the text because there is not that ready-made connection that you find when Derrida writes about Jabès. It's the complaint that French (or European) theory is de-contextualized in the US academy. It would be like taking an essay by Charles Bernstein and "applying" it to some French poet, without taking into account the intellectual milieu of Bernstein, his own intellectual habitus and the way Charles might have been influenced by Creeley or Kerouac or Grenier.

Now when Gamoneda translates Mallarmé (with his daughter who is professor of French), then there is a desire to lay claim to that particular high modern / Blanchot tradition. That is the way Gamoneda is championed, in this kind of language and rhetoric. It is not so much that you need modernist theory to deal with Gamoneda or Valente, but that you want to establish a kind of affiliation, and this takes place through a kind of "high modern" rhetoric that draws on Heidegger and Blanchot for its vocabulary.

Here the theory is not necessarily de-contextualized, because these are indeed European poets, albeit Spanish ones. (The idea that Spain merely aspires to Europeanness!) I'm the guy in the back of the room who wants to raise his hand and say wait a minute, what's going on here? I want to question the naturalness of the move that sees European high modernism as the culmination of everything worthwhile. At the same time, I love this European late modernism myself, so I don't want to question it too loudly either. I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather look at the problematics of affiliation rather than simply produce a high-modernist reading that applies Levinas to Gamoneda, or what have you. Let other people do that.

To return to work written much earlier and revise it suggests a peculiar relationship to time. I'm thinking of Antonio Gamoneda's book "Reescritura," a book consisting entirely of poems he has revised, spanning his entire career. He claims he finds no difference between "words that hesitate in doubt for an hour ... or for fifty years." The effect is to impose a certain uniformity of style on the earlier works, making them seem more like "Gamoneda" before he was Gamoneda--mostly by the elimination of extraneous discursive or ornamental material. (The loss, if there is one, is of historicity.)

If Gamoneda had not gone on to write great works, these earlier texts would have been forgotten anyway. That is, we are interested in them because they are by "Gamoneda." The book is in essence a selected poems arguing for a continuity in his work that might not be visible without these revisions.

Although I still try to publish poems I wrote many years ago I never revise them: it would be like going back and, impossibly, undoing mistakes in one's life.

***

I've been thinking about the unity of references in contemporary Spanish poets I admire. That is, they all seem to be reading from a common code-book. They use similar references and a common language to talk about poetry. The poets I don't admire so much have a different code book. I'm not sure how to translate this insight into an article. I guess what I'm trying to get at is why a certain Heideggerian vocabulary became so central to so many poets at the same time. Is it because of Valente? Is it just because European poets of a certain type all admire Celan and Jabès anyway?