Goytisolo and Valente

Goytisolo's book on Valente, which is basically all of his short articles on the Spanish poet collected between two covers, reveals that these two were very close. Goytisolo basically agrees with everything Valente stood for (and vice versa) and shares Valente's feeling that Valente is a great poet, the only true heir to San Juan de la Cruz. The only difference in their intellectual posture is that Valente emphasizes Judaism and Goytisolo Arab culture. Of course we are used to seeing Arabs and Jews as enemies, but in the Spanish context intellectuals like Goytisolo, Valente, or Subirats view them as the two peoples expelled in 1492. Goytisolo was more influenced by Américo Castro and Valente by María Zambrano, but Valente also buys into Castro's theories with few if any reservations. Valente strongly identified with Celan and Jabès and at one point investigated his genealogy to see whether he was Jewish. Alas, he turned out to be an Old Christian.

The relation between Valente and Goytisolo is not very interesting, because complete agreement is rather dull. For my purposes, though, this is perfect, because I want to show that there is a single, monolithic and rather absolutist (intransigent) position. If it makes any sense, I agree with this position, more or less, but disagree with its rhetorical forms of assertion. I do agree that the expulsion and forced conversion of the Jews in 1492, and the subsequent persecution of nuevos cristianos or conversos (remember the Inquisition?), was a tragedy for Spanish intellectual life. I disagree that this invalidates almost everything in Spanish culture and intellectual life that is not in direct relation to the lost legacy of the Sephardim. When Goytisolo says that Valente is the first Spanish poet to recapture the extremity of language of Saint John of the Cross, I have to say, What about Lorca?

The Gilbert-Gubar Hypothesis

Gilbert* and Gubar, in The War of the Words, argue that modernism arises out of a "battle of the sexes" and the growing prominence of women writers in the late 19th century. This has never seemed very plausible to me. The entire modernist movement, with all its linguistic experimentation, arose out of a desire to contest the growing power of women in the literary sphere? This does not seem plausible to me as a historical explanation. In the first place, you cannot attribute to a single cause a phenomenon that is overdetermined, that has multiple causes. If gender antagonism is one source of modernism, then we could discuss its relative importance. For example, it is true that some, but by no means all, modernists saw their writing as explicitly masculinist. Of course, only the male ones did that.

Secondly, the G&G hypothesis does not seem applicable to any modernism other than the Anglo-American kind. For example, could we explain Pessoa, or Cafavy, or Proust, as modernists threatened by the specter of female creativity? How exactly is this supposed to work? And it is also in the Anglo-American context where the most significant female modernists appeared: Barnes, Stein, Moore, H.D., Sitwell, Richardson, Woolf, Loy. These writers, as a group, seem more significant to me that Champourcin, Méndez, Chacel, etc... I could make a case for Zambrano, but I cannot see Rosa Chacel in the same category as H.D. or Virginia Woolf. So in a national literature in which women were already prominent, there were also more significant women modernists. The 19th century novel in Britain has the Brontes, George Eliot, and Austen. The most significant novelist in the 20th century in England is Woolf.

Of course, G&G usually write as though English and American literature were the entire enchilada. Their subtitle doesn't even include the word "English." It's just The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. I wish I could get away with something like that. Write a book called Twentieth Century Poetry and include only writers in Spanish and Catalan!
___

*I took courses from Elliot and Sandra Gilbert as an undergraduate. Both excellent professors. Elliot died prematurely at age 60 due to botched medical care. I have never met Susan Gubar, but obviously the Gilbert and Gubar books have had a huge impact, despite the criticisms mounted on various front against various facets of their work.

Duncan, Bloom, HD, and Psychoanalysis

Ok, I know that I said psychoanalysis was a bullshit field. Here I am going to take a slightly different perspective. From the historical vantage-point, Freud's ideas were very influential, and you cannot look at the modernist and late modernist periods without knowing something about him. It would be embarrassing not to know something of the intellectual history of these literary movements.

H.D. was the only major modernist poet who was also analyzed by Freud, and she even wrote a book about him. Duncan deals with H.D's Freudianism, also, in the H.D. Book. Bloom's theory of poetic anxiety is also rooted in Freudian concepts like repression. The Freudian concept of the "narcissism of small differences" might explain the way in which people like Duncan and Bloom, or Bloom and Rothenberg, could not talk to one another. H.D could be analyzed by Freud, but Pound, the subject of another H.D. book, dismissed Freud completely, as he did Marx. Two Jewish thinkers uncongenial to Pound's antisemitic sensibility.

Duncan connects HD's Freudianism to the idea of the occult, the hidden, and hence to gnosticism. It is not an orthodox reading of Freud, by any means, but how interesting would that have been? Duncan's view of the differences among major modernist poets and thinkers, Pound, Williams, Yeats, H.D., Freud, is very nuanced.

If I could connect Freud to Lorca, I would be doing very well. I don't mean doing a Freudian reading of Lorca, but connecting the two from the perspective of intellectual history.

The Age of Criticism

Reflecting on the mid-century cliché about the "age of criticism," Duncan wrote:

An age of criticism does not mean Pound’s Calvacanti essay, Cocteau’s ‘Call to Order,’ Dame Edith Sitwell’s notebooks or H.D.’s ‘The Guest,’ Charles Olson’s ‘Projective verse,’ or Louis Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare

Duncan / Zambrano

Duncan is really opening the door for me on Lorca and Zambrano, in a way I didn't / couldn't see in Apocryphal Lorca, where I only looked at at his response to Lorca himself. Of course, the H.D. Book had not yet been published, so I'm going to cut myself a break here. Also, it is nice when another angle presents itself to me. My own distrust of gnosticism and mythopoesis creates a certain blindness and insight, in that it cuts me off from certain experiences while also giving me a somewhat original viewpoint on them. I am very excited about this new direction my work is taking. I STILL GOT IT. An intoxicating feeling. Pieces of the puzzle are falling into place with little effort on my part. When I invited Ron to give a talk in Kansas and he chose to talk about Duncan and the H.D. Book, I never suspected that this book would end up meaning so much to me. And it is not that I am a Duncan fanatic, either. Just being around Ken Irby for so many years I have grown in my respect for RD, by sheer contagion. By no coincidence, Irby for his first talk in the poetics seminar also talked about Duncan. I think people are trying to tell me something and I haven't been listening very well.

Duncan's scorn for the New Critics who dismissed H.D. helps me understand why Lorca's poetics was not recognized in the age of Dámaso Alonso and Jorge Guillén, the poet-professors. Duncan's scorn for Jarrell is like Valente's for Alonso.

HD and Zambrano

I think I'll read the relation of Duncan to HD as following the same paradigm as the relation between Valente and Zambrano. Eureka.

Gender Balance

Since I am not that interested in most strains and varieties of feminist criticism, I tend to deal with female authors just because they are ones I happen to be interested in. I want to deal with them more or less as I would with male authors, without any kind of special pleading. Most criticism on male authors doesn't deal with gender at all, so having to make most criticism of women authors feminist already means that there is a differential treatment. I've proposed before that we should highlight gender in male authors and pretty much ignore it in female ones, just to correct the balance. We might start by gratuitously putting the word "male" in front of male authors, like "Federico García Lorca is one of the most significant male authors in Spanish literature." Sounds funny, right? Good, that's the point. By the same token, we might refer to Baraka as a poet and Frank O'Hara as a "white poet."

Anyway, if I devote myself to poets I am interested in, without respect to gender, I still end up with about a 75 / 25 ratio in favor of my own gender. (The Lorca book was pretty male dominated too, with an even greater masculinist slant.) The female authors I've written about, including my current book in progress, are Concha García, María Zambrano, Blanca Varela, Olvido García Valdés, Lola Velasco, and a few others. I am also interested in a few that I haven't written about yet.

So I've added a chapter in my book in which I address the problem of female subjectivity and modernism. Basically, the idea is to reflect on why (certain forms of) modernism seems to be at odds with ideas s of female subjectivity, insofar as these tend to fall into more realist modes. I'm going to contrast the Anglo-American mode, in which women writers played a more prominent role, with the Hispanic one. I'm using this as an excuse to buy Duncan's H.D. Book, which I wanted to buy anyway.

Old Table of Contents

I found an old table of contents from Dec. of 09. It made me realize that 18 months is a long time, and how much progress I've made on this project. I hardly recognize anything in this older plan.

Chapter 1: Modernity and its Discontents
Chapter 2: Spanish Modernism and the Paradoxes of Literary History
Chapter 3: Contemporary Spanish Poetry: Late Modernism and the Cutlural Logic of Anachronism
Chapter 4: Alternate Models: Machado, Jiménez, Cernuda
Chapter 5: Play and Theory of Lorca's Duende: Nation and Performance
Apocryphal Postscript
Appendix: Glossary of the Duende

Claudio

I'm returning to Claudio Rodríguez for the last chapter I am writing, making a full circle with my dissertation about this same poet, that I completed in 1988. I remember a graduate student thinking that Claudio was nothing special, and dropping a few notches in my estimation. If you don't think Claudio is great, you simply don't get it. I return to him with a deep sense of awe. He is to the second half of the century what Lorca was to the first.

Part of my argument is that Claudio and Lorca complete (make whole) the idea of poetic "thought" that is usually identified only with poets who have a more elaborate theoretical apparatus, like Machado or Valente. I am making Spanish poetry whole again by restoring this missing half, against the arbitrary separation of other critics.

The project is coming together nicely. I have kept tinkering with the chapters and their order until I got things right, with no repetition of content between chapters, and sufficient uniqueness to both each individual chapter and to the book as a whole. It starts off with an introduction mostly on intellectual history, then the chapter on Zambrano and Valente. Chapter 3 is on Lorca's duende. I've just gotten an invitation to send this article to a special issue of a journal. Chapter 4 is on Lorca vs. Jiménez as influences on contemporary Spanish poetry. Chapter 4 is something I've already written on Gamoneda. And chapter 6 expands the field to include Latin American poetry. That's it. There are five main chapters left to be written. At least two or three will be done before the end of 2010, if all goes well.

Ok. The new Lorca is not going to work as planned. I realized there wasn't enough Lorca there, in my plan, and that I didn't really want to analyze actual poetic works by Lorca very extensively, and that a reader would expect that in a book with Lorca in the title. I realized I was too swayed by the momentum of Apocryphal Lorca and by the potential marketability of the Lorca name.

So it's back to the new modernism project, which will be called something like Modernism and the Paradoxes of Spanish Literary History:.

Here's my new outline. The problem I was having was the feeling that I was writing pretty much the same book as I just published. To avoid that, I've taken out some chapters that I've already written or are about to publish as articles, that are too similar to what I've already done, and de-emphasized Valente, who was a dominating presence up to this point. Material from various half-begun chapters will go into chapter 1, which will do double duty as an intro of sorts. Since I've already written 2 and 3, I can work pretty much chronologically, after i finish the Spanish version of the Ullán paper. PART ONE deals with literary-historical issues and has more to do with my previous book, The Twlight of the Avant-Garde. PART TWO deals more with actual poetics/poetry, taking Lorca's duende article as a theory of poetic performance, moving on to a translation from a paper in Spanish I've written on Claudio Rodríguez, and adding the chapter on OGV.

Of course, I'm anticipating that all this will change a few more times before I'm done, probably in the direction of even less overlap with previous work. Articles already published can be a kind of crutch, in that I don't have to start the new project from scratch. Once I come up with a few more ideas I won't necessarily need to reprint this work.

The other alternative is to just go back to being "article guy" again, instead of "book guy." The book, though, provides a way of structuring my work, even if it doesn't ultimately become a book.

Fragments of a Late Modernity: Spanish Poetry from García Lorca to García Valdés



Preface
Acknowledgements

PART ONE: Fragments

1. A Map of Modernism
2. The Persistence of Memory: Antonio Gamoneda and the Literary Institutions of Late Modernity**
3. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Valente and Beckett**

PART TWO: Performances

4. Performative Poetics: Lorca's Duende
5. Claudio Rodríguez: "Manuscrito de una respiración" **
6. José-Carlos Ullán: Performativity and the Visual Text
7. Olvido García Valdés: [Interesting Subtitle]

Conclusion: The Unfinished Business of Modernity

Voice and visuality are not in opposition to each other in modernist poetics, though they may appear to be at times. Emphasis on both or either entails an emphasis on the materiality of the sign. The relevant opposition is between voice and visuality, on one side, and Billy Collins-style transparency on the other. In other words, anti-modern emphasis on the communicative function of language. Poetry cannot be transparent by definition.

I've figured out why I've always hated concrete poetry: it moves quickly to a certain transparency of effect. Once you see that the words form an image of the Eiffel tower, and once you see what the words say, and put the two together, you are done. I prefer Ullán's opaque signs, where visuality takes us in the direction of abstraction.

A new dimension of the project is emerging: performativity, visuality, etc... in tension with the emphasis on intellectual history / philosophy.

Perloff usefully distinguishes between 4 approaches to literature / poetry. Poetry as a branch rhetoric; as philosophy; as an art form alongside of other forms of art; as document of cultural history. The tension in my project is between philosophy, intellectual history, and cultural history, on the one hand, and art. Ullán is bringing me closer to performative and interartistic, performative aspects of Lorca.

Ed Ruscha's another one I'm interested in. Like Twombly (but so unlike Twombly) the painted WORD is at the center of his work. Ruscha has that pop art, slick commercial art craftsmanship, Twombly, the faux-naif scribble.

I saw some amazing Twombly in an exhibit in Chicago at the Art Institute a couple weeks ago (mid June.) Ruscha I don't know much about aside from leafing through a few catalogues. I like his photos and paintings of gas stations and swimming pools.

The pop art nexus from Cornell to Warhol and Lichtenstein to Ruscha, Johns, Rivers, Hockney, Guston, and even Joe Brainard is pretty interesting, once you get past the clichés. There's a complex relationship to surrealism and dada, and to AbEx too. It's not a simple binary between pop art and other forms of twentieth century art that are more modernist (less postmodern). There's that pop art gesture of mimicking the "painterly" brushstroke.

***

This is one of those areas where my knowledge is not extensive but not at all systematic. I am sure there are fairly important painters I don't know, since I only heard of Ruscha for the first time maybe two or three years ago, I think when Gary Sullivan mentioned him in a blog post or essay. There are maybe a half dozen artists I know pretty well, like Cornell, Tàpies, Rothko and then a little bit about a lot more. Then numerous blank spots where I don't even know what I don't know.

I re-read Fenollosa's "The Chinese Written Character" again yesterday. I couldn't believe how naive the underlying theory of language was in this seminal text--naive to the point of stupidity in the privileging of transitive verbs and subject verb object word-order. The orientalizing gaze of Pound and Fenollosa is almost unbearable. What is most unbearable is that opinions of Chinese scholars are never cited frequently enough, that there really isn't a depth of knowledge here adequate to the task at hand.

I also spent some time with some Twombly catalogues and a huge, recent Yale UP book of Chinese calligraphy. My ideas are coming together nicely.

Concrete poetry also seems kind of naive and hokey to me--most of it. Wouldn't it make sense that if I only like 10% of poetry that I would also only like 10% of visual and concrete poetry? What I don't like is the regressive move back toward naive mimesis, when the aim should be to move in the opposite direction, toward abstraction in both language and the visual, iconic sign. Here I'll bring in John Yau's point about Creeley's abstract language in his catalogue of Creeley's collaborations.

This chapter of the book is going to end up being the center in a way I hadn't anticipated, taking me in new directions.

There are four direction in which modern poetry re-emphasizes visuality:

(1) The hypervisuality of imagism and related movements.

(2) The dedication to the printed or type-written page.

(3) The exploration of typography for its own sake, as an extension of (2).

(4) The collaborative impulse, reaching out to forms of visual art.

I think I want to write about what Ullán's visual poetry does to the idea of the "speaking voice" or subject of enunciation. I'll argue that his poetry already lacks a strong "voice" of this type. and the extension into visuality increases this tendency.

At the same time, there is no sacrifice of "expression." There is still a strong authorial presence, there's just not a poetic "speaker" in a dramatic situation telling us stuff, or talking to some other imaginary person. There's obviously nothing wrong with this paradigm of a little imaginary person talking to a little imaginary woman or man, or a vase or the western wind--and indirectly to the real reader, with the little imaginary speaker being the implicit voice of the "poet."

I got this idea while mowing the lawn this morning. I say this because of the idea that a lot of hostility to professors comes from the we can mow our lawns any day of the week. I.e.: we don't do enough work.

If there is a dogma of late modernism in Spain, it is more or less the opposition between an informational use of language and the poetic language, which rejects all use values, whether commercial or ideological. The clearest place to find this dogma is in Gamoneda's book on Valente--since Gamoneda and Valente are the two heroes of this movement and Gamoneda purposely brackets off his own differences from Valente. Gamoneda is great poet but not a great theorist, so his writings have the advantage of presenting the opposition in very understandable, but a bit simplistic, terms.

I don't want to be (simply) the American ideologue of this Spanish movement. That's what I already am, to some extent, but I am more interested in the problems internal to it, its inner contradictions. What interests me particularly is its anti-modernism, that is, its resistance to modernity itself, and where this resistance is most evident is in the return to Spanish mysticism. Olvido García Valdés wrote a very interesting book on Santa Teresa de Ávila, for example--just as Valente devoted much attention to Molinos and San Juan.

I read Gamoneda's book of lectures on Valente. It's a little disappointing because I didn't learn much new from it. On the other hand, it confirms exactly what I already thought, so that's a good thing: it shows I'm on the right track.

Ullán, I'm coming to realize now, is a really key figure of Spanish culture of the past 40 years. I'm thinking I do need a chapter on him--or at least a good part of a chapter.

Collaborated with artists: Miró, Tàpies, Chillida, etc...

One of the only major poets who experimented in visual poetry.

Early translator in Spain of Jabès. Valente himself comes to Jabès through Ullán.

Knew María Zambrano; his poetry was admired by Octavio Paz.

Friend of Miguel Casado...

A significant career in journalism, in a country where the cultural supplements of newspapers have an importance they don't have in the US.

Yet Ullán never won the major awards and prizes. In a literary world where such prizes really are a driving force, and come almost automatically to writers with a certain longevity, he was not the one raking in all those awards. Perhaps it's better that way, because it makes us realize that prizes recognize value rather than creating it.

i feel horrible about not writing about him when he was alive. I was always too intimidated by his work, I suppose.

One of my favorite poems by Ullán is a sonnet, consisting of 14 lines of hieorglyphics of his own invention. There is a rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet-- ABBAABBACDCDCD--since the characters that end the lines recur in that order. Some are mimetic images--a fish, a bird, etc... Other glyphs are more abstract, but still highly expressive, hand drawn or maybe stenciled with real craftsmanship. It's visual poetry of the highest order, because it's not just conceptual: the written signs are dense and meaningful, and recur in a classic form, that of the sonnet.

***

If you google "Mayhew" with "García Montero," as I did last night, you will see that several people disagree with my most notorious position. This doesn't bother me. In the first place, if your work has a polemical edge, then people are bound to disagree. Protesting that is like protesting the fact that the player on the other side of the net is hitting the ball back at you. Once a critical position is a virtual consensus, then the issue is a closed one. Secondly, it's me they're disagreeing with. That is, I'm the one defining the terms of the debate. Thirdly, I am still right; I still have the stronger arguments on my side as far as I'm concerned. My position has always been that I could be mistaken, but you'll have to show me how. Fourthly: I don't take it personally if someone doesn't agree with me, even when their responses take on a personal or insulting tone (which is rare in any case). When I read that "Mayhew" says this or that, it almost seems like a different person to me. Seeing my own name in print has always done that to me.

I've been fooling around with the outline of my project. This is what it looks like today. Two asterisks mean a finished chapter, one means a chapter begun. I've decided not to write only about Ullán and Núñez but to write a more panoramic chatper about poets of the late 60s / early 70s. That really should be a book of its own. What the critics have neglected is scandalous.

FRAGMENTS OF A LATE MODERNITY: The Intellectual Traditions of Modern Spanish Poetry

Introduction: Catching Tigers in Red Weather*

PART ONE: LORCA

1. Lorca and the Paradoxes of Modernity*
2. The Contested Legacy of the Duende*

PART TWO: VALENTE, GAMONEDA, RODRÍGUEZ

3. Jorge Guillén, Luis Cernuda, and the Vicissitudes of Spanish Modernism**
4. From María Zambrano to José Ángel Valente: The Origins of Late Modernism*
5. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Valente and Beckett**
6. The Persistence of Memory: Antonio Gamoneda and the Literary Institutions of Late Modernity**
7. Claudio Rodríguez*

PART THREE: MODERNISM AFTER MODERNISM

8. The novísimos: Modernists or Postmodernists?*
9. The Catalan poetry of Pere Gimferrer
10. Olvido García Valdés*

Conclusion: The Unfinished Business of Modernity