The Hiccup
In his early novel Monsieur Pain, the Chilean poet Roberto Bolaño recounts the death of the Peruvian one César Vallejo, ailing in a Parisian hospital with a fatal case of the hiccups. While the Chileno is being lax with the facts of the matter—Vallejo did die in Paris, the adoptive city of his life’s second half, albeit from a reactivation of the malaria contracted in his Andean youth—he does hit upon a poetic truth. Any metaphor for poetry itself—Coleridge’s water strider, Derrida’s hedgehog, Moore’s “real toads”—should convey something of its “essential gaudiness,” and the hiccup is an apt one for Vallejo’s.
Like poetry, hiccups are an anomaly of breath. Just as poetry is an audit upon the nexus of spirit and matter, the hiccup is a brunt intrusion of the body upon language, a glitching register of alterity: the automatic belying intention, the spasmodic instant piercing the drawl of experience, the animal in the human. It embodies Bergson’s definition of comedy as the “mechanical encrusted upon the organic”: its abiding irony is that as a convulsion of the diaphragm, its cause is also prime mover of the speech it afflicts. Language tripping over its own shoelaces. It encapsulates the twining of paroxysm and bathos that is one of Vallejo’s signatures: “I want to write but only foam comes out, / I want to say so many things, but I get stuck […] I want to be crowned with laurels, but I’m stewing in onions.”
Vallejo is a humorous poet but not a funny one. His poems do not provoke laughter out of any subtlety. They are nothing if not theatrical. Instead, the stuttering irony that shrouds even his amplest professions of human suffering beguile rather than trivialize. Vallejo’s topoi are those of any “great” poet—love and fate, god and void, pain and ecstasy, the human voice and faceless language—and yet, like a pinball ricocheting under the glass, or Chaplin cavorting in the maw of “modern life,” he hiccups as he is buffeted by the drub of these forces, absorbing their blows to ironically repurpose their momentum towards unexpected trajectories, freak contortions of language. His is a poetry that rolls with the punches, refusing both the whining pathos of defeat and the faux-machísmo of forbearance, evincing its power only indirectly through an alien glibness to the mores of capital-P Poetry. To read Vallejo is like hearing a joke in a different language, one we do not understand and yet uncannily can tell where the punchline falls.
De Profundis Clamavi
The hiccup is an especially obnoxious mode of the caesura, which is the only rigorous criterion of poetry: language that bears punctuation not merely out of syntactic necessity but as a stigma, a symbolic task. In Vallejo, the hiccup becomes the logical operator of a poetics of syncopation, a meditation upon the caesura in the expanded field. He is thus eminent as a poet of first principles, foundational in a proper sense. His work’s most immediate feature is its rife and headlong volte, not only of meter, but image, theme, and temper; what’s most surprising that these vertiginous swings always insinuate an oblique center of gravity. This course interrogates the caesura’s logical paradox as the knot of continuity and discontinuity: if there is truly something we can call “poetic thought,” form that thinks, it resides in the caesura’s dramatization of the most basic opposition of Western metaphysics—that of Difference and the Same. Poetry metaphorizes these (and so much depends on the degree to which they are a metaphor) as caesura and analogy, the gap that is simultaneously a figure of its traverse.
The measure of the caesura is that of the risk endemic to poetry. And risk is the limiting condition of reward: the caesura’s span determines the wager of the analogical vault that articulates its ellipsis into form. The compass of this leap, the plumb of its depths, is the ambit of what we typically call a poet’s vision. These stakes are purely technical for most poets: the caesura as merely a device of rhythmic counterpoint. The more grandiloquent indulge metaphysical speculations, seeing in the caesura the plenum of collective breath or void of existential alienation. Yet whatever its object or scale, poetry’s wager demands that something inhabits the caesura. Its syncope is not a blackout but augurs a dream, a Janus-face to language, so that the poem is truly an encounter with alterity, a vision rather than a solipsistic act of self-reference. The caesura is the locus of poetry’s abiding paradox that, like the Baron Munchausen who must extricate himself from the swamp by pulling on his hair, it must jailbreak the prison-house of language with aught save its own mind-forged manacles—words.
Our astonishment before Vallejo stems from the prodigiousness of his wager. In the perforations of his work lies a synoptic vision of that most ineluctable fact of existence—pain.
and, unfortunately,
pain is growing in the world all the time,
it grows at thirty minutes per second, step by step,
and the nature of pain is pain twice over
Pain countenanced in its classical valences—the social and existential, the lovelorn and anomic—but also that pain inherent to thought and language itself, a mutilation paradigmatically exacerbated in the poetic act. Against the commonplace that pain is inexpressible, articulate only in the pathos of silence or total vocalization of the scream, Vallejo’s poetry is a saying of pain. His recuperative labor of analogy is not a healing but a scarring—no absolution from pain but the scarring of its wounds so they may bear the legibility of stigmata. Our astonishment is that from the prolific depths of dehumanization testified in his poems, across this Difference, there appears that most modest and yet miraculous mark of the Same: the idiosyncrasy of a human voice.
…Clamantis in Deserto
Vallejo is a rejoinder to the ease with which we can mistake voice—a poetic quality—for personality—an existential one. Too often is style taken as a metaphor for character and so the poem for a physiognomy. Poetry is not expression. Its interest does not hang on persons, which would make of it little more than verbose biography, the instrument of a presupposed self. Voice is immanent to the poem. Vallejo insists upon this insofar as his poems dramatize the birth to presence of the voice: a miraculous humanity emergent not in spite of but from the arrayed imperious figures of inhumanity—language, mathematics, fate—that he countenances. His voice bends and gurns beneath their insuperable burden and yet can only articulate its ignominy since it finds furrowed in each caesura a clinamen: an irreducible chink in its cage that may turn its convulsions into a tarrying. Its every cry is also a vagitus, burgeoning with every blow laid upon it. This is what absolves Vallejo’s poetics of pain from sentimentality. In fathoming the cardinal premises of the construction of voice, he foments one that is at once utterly singular and yet uncannily apersonal. A voice at once universal and particular. Q.E.D.
A Basqueness of the Soul
Vallejo is a unicity in the poetic firmament. He is one of a select group to whom might be extended Mallarmé’s description of Rimbaud as a “meteor, lit by no other reason than his presence, arising alone then vanishing.” His poetry is a linguistic isolate, and he a solitary Basque in the republic of letters. He is perfectly nonchalant towards Great Art, a perennial anomaly to even trained ears. In his tics of diction, queer fixations, and the spasmic logic of his cadence and imagery, Vallejo is non-deducible from the Latin-American Modernismo of his milieu, which for all the political zest of Darío, the exoticism of Lugones, was formally but a minor variation on a Symbolist theme. And, despite his unanimous recognition as a great poet of his century, far lesser figures of his generation, the Huidobros or Mistrals, had a greater influence on its poetry. Vallejo is both the product of a virgin birth and himself a eunuch. As a consummate idiosyncrasy, he stages with unusual visibility yet another of poetry’s paradoxes: it is at once the attempt at a private language, the eloquence of a sovereign self, that nevertheless must must communicate. Our comprehension, however minimal, is the disproof of private language and so at once the poem’s condition and collapse, its practical success and theoretical failure. Vallejo’s conspicuous singularity, his voice, is an unprecedented approach of this boundary, the asymptotic bristling of a zone where freedom and absurdity are shorn by the most infinitesimal line.
A Crypto-Quevedismo
One nicety of Spanish literature is that its poets may be neatly divided into one of two camps: those of Góngora and Quevedo. The Naïve and the Sentimental; the libidinal theater of effusion, yearning and Duende, or the gymnastics of high-Baroque artifice. In the black density and byzantine metaphorics of his work, Vallejo might seem a Góngorista archetype. And yet occasional couplets like “This afternoon is sweet. And why wouldn’t it be? / Dressed in grace and sorrow, dressed like a woman” hint at a more surprising truth: that he could well be something quite rare amongst the poetas, the acolyte of a crypto-Quevedismo. In an inhuman universe, “artifice” can only be a relative term.
Un Coup de Dés – Los Dados Eternos
Mallarmé: It is a poem only for so long as a gamble underwrites it. Ça n’abolira jamais l’hasard. It will never abolish Chance.
Vallejo: Well then, let the House be my god. If divine Will is truly inscrutable to us, Fate cannot be anything except another name for total Contingency. The lottery seller calling out, “Buy the winning ticket,” / has something of God about him.
Mallarmé: If all is Contingency, then all might well be a Poem. From the Nothing’s caesura, the trembling blanc soucis of the virgin page, might well erupt the Parousia of Being.
Vallejo: Or else the bet is never settled. The highest piety assumes a divine gamble that is truly infinite. The lucky ticket in that bohemian god’s, […] will end up / where he neither knows nor cares.
Pain. Erudition. Light.
The opening line of Vallejo’s first collection is perhaps his most famous: “There are blows in life so hard… I don’t know!” Its demur announces an experience at once dismally private and yet supremely universal, “the undertow of everything we’ve suffered […] And man… Poor… poor man!” If poetry is not an expression of pain—a kick in the shins must smart infinitely more than any line from Lautréamont—it remains to clarify their obscure alliance. This is preternaturally clarified in those select poetic extremists—of whom Pindar is the paradigm, and Euripides, Dickinson, Clare, Hölderlin, and Vallejo are some of the highest exemplars—where pain becomes coincident with ecstasy. In these poets the “decreation” concomitant with pain, its unraveling of the fabric of self, language, and world, is also a loosening of the strictures that otherwise narrow our all too human ambit. In them the radical depersonalization inflicted by pain brooks no vacuum, premising the inrush and commune with alterity. Again: the wager that a dream inhabits the blackout. In short: the hypothesis of kenosis.
Entertain for a moment that cynical hypothesis of the anthropologists—the Girards, Durkheims, and Mausses—that all culture is an elaboration upon sacrifice, a therapeutic economy whereby pain is rendered tolerable when made meaningful. It is a downpayment for our entrance into the universal: the Passion that underwrites the perpetuity of the sacral Word over mundane words. Yet in our own era of dead gods and dawdling nihilisms this mechanism is severed, pain divorced from the universal’s coddle. Vallejo’s pain is a modern one because it interrogates its situation under the aegis of this “broken middle,” the diremption of universal and particular that once bound it in a meaningful environs. Where divine pain as a fount of total meaning is foreclosed, Vallejo refuses the bravado of those artists who seek to reverse this through the inauguration of a new myth, a new Sacrifice, a strategy nostalgic at best, politically suspect at worst. Nor does he consign himself to the animal pain of total meaninglessness. He is not a sentimental poet of the absurd (total meaninglessness being only a form of total meaning after all.) Vallejo is a poet of human pain since he recognizes man’s estate to be inextricably liminal, a floundering speech of the middle that refuses the resolution of pain into an all-or-nothing, but a Passion (that is to say, meaning-forging) bereft of end. Infinite agony.
The Topology of Grace: The Black Heralds
The consummate Vallejo is entirely in germ in his first collection, Los Heraldos Negros. His pet themes and formal gamut (neologism and catachresis, its U-turns of temper, and lyric forms pitched slant) stand present and correct. And yet while there are undeniably stirrings of Vallejo “the meteor,” these are still mired in a syncretism with more conventional etiquettes of trope and theme. The Vallejeno idiolect is yet to decant from that most mawkish of things: a Catholic poet. And yet by seeing how more ordinary poetic matieralis modulated by the Vallejo-machine, we may induce the machinations of this black box, the seal and signature of its imprint. After all, for almost two millennia, Catholicism was, without peer, Western Culture’s prime mechanism of Universalism, a conatus towards the unanimous conjugation of souls. Needless to say, Vallejo’s Catholicism is not standard. It is a bedfellow of Baudelaire’s—an affliction of extremes. The Deus is either woefully absconditus or beatifically Omnipresent … and, if he is absent, it is naturally we who have killed him (“it’s you I’m pointing at with this deicidal finger”). Desire may only court utter fulfillment or its own extinction (“A desire for an embrace so huge it would enshroud Life, / ending in the africa of a burning, suicidal agony!”) Man is only bequeathed the prospect of salvation or ineluctable damnation (“[you] feel nothing of what your creation feels. /And it’s man who suffers: he is the god!”). Naturally, this melodrama is precisely what makes Catholicism such a famously enticing aesthetic option. It is also what underpins its tremendous brawn as a conceptual load-bearing mechanism: by its ecumenical impulse, it may assimilate even the most heterodox extremes into the prodigious capacity of its orthodoxy. For Vallejo, as for so many others, this logic of conjoined opposites is epitomized by the mystery of Grace—the figure of salvation as extreme traverse, the absolute caesura. Qui potest capere capiat runs the volume’s epigraph (Matthew 19:12): he who is able to receive it, let him receive it. Heraldos is a labor of preparation for this reception. It assays a Boolean Catholicism, a “virginal plenitude of 1.”
Absent here is the cynical view of Grace, which makes of Catholicism such a famously enticing moral option—that one may always be good, but just not yet. Instead, Grace is a topological proposition. “But, Lord, can’t you do something about death, / about boundaries, about things ending?” he pleads. A later poem responds:
And they don’t know that the mystery synthesizes…
that it is the hump,
sad and musical, which, from afar, foretells
the meridian crossing from the borders to the Borders.
This saving meridian is analogous to the renowned one of Celan (who, in turn, excavated it from Kleist): that by the intimation of a higher dimension, the interminable line, figure of infinite distance, becomes one of self-coincidence swaddling a globe. In a non-Euclidean register, Perdition becomes synonymous with Salvation. It is such a meridian that delivers that archetype of righteous suffering “John the Baptist who waits, waits, waits… / And, riding past along an intangible curve, / a foot bathed in purple.” And yet this is a Grace only “foretold” or “awaited.” Manifested, it is a more ambivalent portent. In “Absoluta,” that “virginal plenitude of 1” is infected with “a flurry of serpents,” symbol of phallic evil, as the meridional “borders shrug their shoulders / in coarse irreducible disdain.” This Absolute renders no absolution from limits. Indeed, in the above quotation from “Espergesia,” while the “mystery” furnishes an exemption from “borders” unto a Platonic vision of Form, in a high irony this is only the Idea of “Borders” itself. This is echoed in a more rapt mode in “Enereid”:
And when the morning full of grace –
from its breasts full of time,
which are two renunciations, two offers of love
reaching out and endlessly praying for eternal life –
sings and unleashes plural Verbs,
shreds of your being
The border harbours no beatific exit. At its infinitesimal limit is not salvific recuperation into the plenitude of the One, but a bristling of infinite difference, the vertiginous abyss of infinite boundaries always intervening between us and beatitude. There is no Word but only plural “Verbs.” For all that poetry, and Catholicism for that matter, is overwhelmingly concerned with the melodrama of extensive infinities (Eternity, Cosmos, Omnipresence, etc.), in Vallejo we find that strangest of thoughts—a poetics of intensive infinity, of fathomless difference involuted upon itself without end. An ordinary mind would find in this license for the most extreme, if straightforward, pessimism: if Grace lies beyond an insuperable limit, are we not thereby consigned to the exile of the asymptote’s infinite approach? And yet Vallejo probes an ulterior mode of deliverance residing precisely in the interminable furrows of this gap. Elsewhere he proclaims “you have no Marys who will leave you!” This otherwise baffling motif of plural saviors recurs throughout:
In every number
May an even better Jesus from another great Embryo
Pulsate, imprisoned in fragile dawns!
In Vallejo we are acquainted with the strangeness of that infinity which can be held in the palm of your hand. Clearly it is a thinking to which the pedestrian binaries of Boolean logic, the drama of the zero and one, are inadequate. We must forage in Vallejo the rudiments of a cannier arithmetic.
A Love Without Small Print
Alienation is one of Vallejo’s most recurring themes. It is also one of his least interesting. Mental pain, after all, is but a vestige of the physical kind. That modernity in its various avatars—the city, the crowd, technology, capital, etc.—evacuates us of some “true self” has obviously dispensed ample grist for poets. Vallejo is alert as any to the human depredations of our era and yet he is, unlike the overwhelming majority, no hysteric of authenticity. Too blithely do poets lapse into a nostalgia for a lost “real” self: a sentimental reduction of the poem to a negative expression of the ego. Rather, in Vallejo, we see alienation slyly redeployed into the positive condition of a novel ethics. In “Ágape,” token professions of solitude (“Today no one came to enquire; nor, / this evening, did anyone ask me for anything”) become the basis of a spiritual generosity (“I feel like calling out to everyone: / If you’ve lost anything, it’s here!”) Despite the poem’s outwardly somber tone, this beneficence is the only way to read its otherwise incomprehensible refrain—“Forgive me, Lord: how little I have died!”—wherein alienation becomes radical donation, a suicidal alms. It presents the uncanny actuality of Agape itself—a love divorced from all material circumstance.
The Induction of Infinity: Trilce
The avant-garde pointedly embodies the paradox of the modern desire for the universal: the idiosyncratic clique Annunciating a total renovation of Life and Art. Published in that fateful year 1922, Vallejo’s second collection Trilce is both subtended by this same impetus and of his works resembles most the radical experiments of high modernism. Yet caution behooves easy equivalencies: marking his maturation into idiosyncrasy, Trilce is at once its formal zenith and the nascence of a poetic logic at odds with the avant-garde’s that, for all its iconoclastic bluster, was an heir of Romanticism.
For one, Trilce is no work of coterie but isolation. Whereas Vallejo’s first and last collections confront the wider vistas of religious angst and political militancy, his second is a thing hunched up upon itself, a claustrophobic gasp: “Oh, the four walls of this cell. / Ah, the four whitewashed walls / that always come to the same number.” This is a matter of literal circumstance—much of it was composed during a 112-day imprisonment—yet, needless to say, the poet’s prisons are sundry: the mires of the libido, love’s crippling albatross, the horizons foreclosed by social class, the mind too much or too little alone, and, above all, the confines of language itself. “There’s a place I-me knows / in this world, no less, / that we will never get to.” runs the refrain of the poem “Trilce” (confusingly, not included in the eponymous collection): a subject at once nominative and accusative, shackled in place by grammatical recursion. Where Heraldos indulged an amor fati and so dramatized the dismal pathos of confinement, a wailing beneath those “blows in life so hard,” Trilce inveighs against its circumstance. It marks the entrance of the third term that, with pain and the universal, composes the conceptual triad at his work’s center: freedom. Freedom after all is felt most keenly in friction, the telltale animus of counterforce that accrues in us when we are most pressed upon. Thus must Trilce’s wild formal divagations be read as a wrenching upon the bars of its cell, an excruciating convolution of language in order to slip its limits and garner a more capacious vision of the universal. Vallejo recurrently employs the image of the wing, that canonical symbol of both poetry and emancipation:
…and will hatch out the as-yet-unborn wing
of night, sister
of this orphaned wing of day,
which, being one, is no longer a wing.
The correspondence of linguistic experimentalism and existential freedom is obviously not novel. The idiolect professed by the Zaumists or the mysticisms of the Surrealists, to take two extreme examples, are forms of linguistic transcendence buoyed by irrational exuberance, grounded in an extra-poetic logic. They are nominal freedoms declared by diktat, rather than dialectically raked out of the muck of words. The shackles of language can hardly have been all that binding if emancipation were merely assertoric rather than the wager of roiling, painful revolt. Indeed, Vallejo’s asymptotic logic does not claim the freedom of transcendence. It knows the exit from language is only in fact an entrance into the prison of solipsism. Instead, it is that freedom forged in the interval’s infinite cleft: the “wing” is no longer one when it is one—a self-identical thing untroubled by self-division. Where “Death is soldering each limit to each strand of lost hair,” the plummet into the interstice is an iterative disjunction, an incitement to combat with the bounds of ossified form. This inverts the classic image of language’s infinitude. It is no longer the Word that elevates finite words, metaphorically imbued with the breath of Spirit, but finitude becomes the midwife of infinity where any finite set of words, what we call a language, entails a generative limitlessness through a metonymy of self-division and permutation. This is the containment of multitudes not by conjugation but the insisting parry of division: “I sdrive to dddeflect at a blow the blow… in succulent reception from multiplicand to multiplier.” To be not multiplied but instead the happy genius of multiplication.
The Gematria of Pain
Yet this flight from the One entails a new prison in the inertia of the binary: “So don’t strike 1, which will echo into infinity. /And don’t strike 0, which will be so still… Ah bicardiac group.”* Thus does the Three intrude as an insuperable excess over the bondage of the Two:
How fate,
mitred monodactyl, laughs.
How, behind the scenes, whole juntas
of contraries are evicted. How the number always appears
beneath the line of every avatar […]
How, in their turn, the latter rest their cubed beaks under a third wing.
How we saddle up face-to-face with monotonous haunches
The unprecedented number, the Three as emblem of irreducible remainder, is not only an insurgency against the imperious mono- but a snare upending the synthetic sclerosis of the Two. The contraries that pinioned the angst of Heraldos are now “evicted”: “I stretched out as a third part.”* The Three in Vallejo is allied with the recurring motifs of numerical oddness (the foreclosure of a Two produced from the division of the One) and the orphan (the foreclosed lineage of the One from the addition of the Two): “Make way for the new odd number/potent with orphanhood!”* These are the elements of a virulent anti-Classicism that sees in all symmetry an incarceration:
Refuse, all of you, to set foot
On the double security of Harmony.
Truly refuse symmetry.
Intervene in the conflict
Of points that content […]
For the leap through the needle’s eye!*
Here is also the grand role of bathos—no longer a tragic falling short before the Absolute, but precisely what preserves its prospect in the dynamism of freedom’s interminable furrow. It is an exculpation from finality: “Endings! Married in nature, / of two days that do not come together, / that do not reach each other ever.”* Comedy in its modern sense of lapse and anti-climax is reconciled with its ancient sense of reconciliation, albeit in eternal convolution. In Vallejo’s Gematria, the persistent oddness of the Three is insurance against the enclosure of the Four: “Cerberus four times / a day wields his padlock.”*
And above all, this renders poetry a “coming of age in unending pain”*:
We might have pulled out against it, from under
the two wings of Love,
Lustral third feathers, daggers.
Each division is not merely an abstract operation, but a laceration upon the stuff of thought. Vallejo’s intensive infinity is a vision of Passion by a thousand cuts: “Never, fellow humans, / has there been so much pain in the breast […] in arithmetic!” This is a reformulation of his wager: it is no longer a question of whether the poem does or does not graze the Absolute, but whether this Passion is an apophasis or radical freedom itself. Imminence or immanence.
The Breathing of Language
Neologism and catachresis are two of the most common, and jarring, figures throughout Vallejo’s corpus. They are, of course, commonplaces of modernist poetics, but in Vallejo they reciprocally collate an image of language: catachresis is more than simply a defamiliarization; neologism not just a mark of creative ingenuity. They must be seen as inverse functions: neologism as language’s miraculous birth of a novel referent into the world; catachresis as language’s retraction into itself from the world, becoming its own reflexive object. The breathing in and out of the poetic Word upon the World.
Dicotyledonous group. From it petrels
overture, propensities for trinity,
finales that begin, ohs of ayes
believed to be rhinestoned with heterogeneity.
Group of two cotyledons!*
The catachresis of petrels takes language back up into itself wherein it divvies—inviting the trinity’s Three, the impossibility of any “finale”—this burgeoning heterogeneity inflicts back upon the world with the neologism avaloriados (cannily translated by Eshleman as “rhinestoned”). The linguistic fetters enforced by the word “dicotyledonous” have been dissolved to produce a reality of disjunct singularities.
Two Cotyledons
The uncanniness of twins, that metaphysical bugbear of modern literature, is that they conjure a zone of indetermination between the Same and Different. Vallejo’s protest of identity, his insistence upon the plethora divulged in Sameness, means they abound in his work: “Am I going to write then about my double? […] How can we talk about the Not-I without screaming?” If mental pain involves a reflexive realization of our mind’s disjunction with the world, the double is a whetted symbol of this disillusion, a puncture in any word’s fantastic pretense to bind the irreducible singularity of objects under a single term. The double invites then thwarts this delusion:
Again the border tests
two stones that don’t manage to occupy the
the same spot at the same time.*
For Vallejo, the most basic fact of physics, the non-superposition of matter, not only grounds the difference that upends the best-laid designs of the categorical mind upon reality, but the logic of physical pain itself: it is only because sentient flesh cannot coincide that it can suffer the agonies of compression, this staunched only by the leeway given in the Third, the salve of its slippage forestalling the squeeze. This logic underpins one of Vallejo’s most curious motifs, that of chirality:
So now I feel my little finger
In excess on left. I see it and think
it shouldn’t be me, or at least that it’s
In a place where it shouldn’t be.*
Chiral forms are mirror-images, the left- and right-hand: identical in every respect except for that by a ruse of space, they cannot superimpose. An ideal algebraic identity thrown open by the reality of geometry. Thus the specific discombobulation of reading Vallejo—to feel one’s soul six inches ajar of the body: “because I stand at the very center, and to the right, and, likewise, to the left.” Chirality is metastasizing difference:
This crystal has passed from animal,
and now goes off to form lefts,
the new Minuses.*
It is a prion disease of language.
The Poetry of the Twenty-First Century
God famously died in 1882 with the publication of The Gay Science. The ensuing era was accordingly one unmoored from the anchor of a “transcendental signifier,” damned to falter under the burgeoning proliferation of “narratives” unhinged from consolidation under Value. The poetry of the twentieth century was thus a reckoning with the death of the extensive God, the God that, as the set of all sets, underwrites the unity of natural numbers (infinite sequence). The poetry of the twentieth century was a mourning. The God of the twenty-first century is He who circumscribes the infinity of real numbers (infinite divisibility). His most well-known avatar is the binary, the imperium of zero and one that bridges their intervening abyss. The God of the twenty-first century is the digital God. The poetry of the twenty-first century is beholden to two major directives. One: it must twist the knife upon God, assert the freedom inhering in the involuted expanse of the continuum against the tyranny of the one and zero. Two: it must see in this not simply a capricious nihilism but a political project. The digital is not merely the technological fundament of the new fascisms of our age, but the basic logic of necrotized opposition that is the basis of all domination. The poetry of the twenty-first century is necessarily political. The work of César Vallejo, its inveterate research into the topology of the interstice and its refusal of the inertia of boundaries, is a prolegomenon to the poetry of our century.
Realpolitik vs. The Politics of Realism
Politics is in essence a binary transduction. Its difficulty is that it must always reduce an inordinate gamut of considerations into an ultimate either/or decision: friend or foe. Vallejo’s sworn enmity to the binary —“how very old your figure 2 looks there in your exercise books!”—might lead us to expect an apoliticism from him, a principled demur from any side. Or else that his partisanship of the multiple might chime with a lame liberal pluralism, as polite as it is vacuous. How then to account for Vallejo the militant, the Vallejo of the epic Spain, Remove This Chalice From Me, the Vallejo who vociferated for the Republican cause in the Civil War? For one, the Spanish Civil War offered a moral starkness uncommon in modern conflict, a Manichaean simplicity in choosing a side: these were fucking fascists. Not to fight them would entail an impermissible moral relativism. Vallejo rallies behind martial airs: “The poet salutes their armed suffering!” He engages that touchstone of war poetry, the elegy, seeing in the commemorative function of the poem a corrective to the fascist cooption of it towards beautified violence: “And in the battle of Toledo a book, / book, a book behind, a book above, was sprouting from the corpse.”
This is a politics of Commitment, albeit one inflected by the idiom of his post-Trilce work: having brushed the abstruse limits of intelligibility, he garners an unusual candor, the plainspokenness often typical of late style, yet bearing the marks of labor of all that came before—an achieved simplicity. Like the philosopher returning to the cave, he ostensibly speaks our language while something irremediably other weights his parlance. It recalls the stilted speech of the stroke victim apprised of the difficulty of saying the ordinary. This is to say his politics run much deeper than a matter of outward proclamations. For one, he tempers his Commitment with a suspicion of all blind ideological subscription —“Beware of your heroes! / Beware of your dead! / Beware of the Republic!”—a rather more pointed position for a socialist of the thirties than the castrated liberalism of our day.
Otherwise we might turn to the broad, almost unnervingly guileless, professions of humanitarian concern that lace Spain and the poems posthumously collected as Human Poems—a name chosen by his widow, but whose grandeur, so simple and yet universal in span, reflects that of the poems. “What comes to me on certain days is an abundant, political desire / To love, to kiss affection on both cheeks”: the kernel of his radicalism is the recognition of this kiss as a necessarily political act. His poems are suffused with an unswerving fidelity to the confraternity that, as the twentieth century is so apt to make us forget, is the indispensable loam of any real communism—“Ah, unfortunately, fellow humans, / brothers, there’s a lot to do.” In Vallejo is a riposte to that major mode of modern politics that, from Machiavelli through Lenin and Schmitt, sees its prerogative in the cumulative addition of power, a binary worldview of friend and foe that instrumentalizes the former to lord power over the latter. His is a vision of human being-together premised on our camaraderie not division, of politics not as a realpolitik of cynical management but the cultivation of a fundamental sympathy indentured to our condition.
Outwardly this is hardly an original stance and yet transcends the lame humanism that is its usual vehicle because universalism, for humanism, is an empty platitude justified by dictate. Thus is it always bound to make the insidious decision as to the limits of this universal—an assumption of what is human implies one of what is not. In Vallejo, our union is not presumed but wrenched from a capacious portrait of our common status as animals agonized by the very medium of our communal being—language. In Vallejo is an acknowledgment that saying what is most simple, our prima facie fellow-feeling, is a truly difficult task. As in mathematics, his ingenuity lies not in the apodictic intuition of a truth but the gymnastics of its proof. This is to say that his poetry is dialectical. And it is a materialism because it is a realism of pain. It refuses the tyranny of the Idea that sees historical reality as the handmaiden to utopia, a fantasy of neat, dialectical resolution grotesquely oblivious to the curdling barbarism that was its real cost. In Vallejo’s insistence of the Third is a recognition of the dialectic precisely as the interminable subversion of this resolution: it is the vexing needle ever stuck in our craw, afflicting our speech. It is an infinite sitting with the pain of others, a prodigious act of empathy, that refuses the callow abstractions of humanism or romanticism that dissemble the lived reality of this pain. It evinces the basic integrity implicit in all true realisms: a fealty to real circumstance. It is politics become an immanently ethical endeavor:
Ah, I want this, this to be mine, the universal,
interhuman, parochial project!
*All translations by Margaret Jull Costa except those asterisked, which are by Clayton Eshleman
R.K. Hegelman
R.K. Hegelman is a writer from London.