THE STRUCTURE OF THIS STUDY
In my analysis of the first cycle, “The Formation of Juan Larrea and Lorenzo García Vega,” chapters one through four examine each poet’s pre-literary period, their literary apprenticeships and concurrent entry into literature, their individuation within the literary collective via the literary magazine, and their poietic emergence with their first independent literary publications. The first chapter examines the precursor stage to the onset of their formation. Each subsequent chapter is presented as a bidirectional meditation on transformation: the literary object as an organizing space for psychic understanding, and the psychic state as a provocation for a specific literary object. It is within this persistent interaction so indispensable to the development of each that the distance between them diminishes and suddenly, as individuals, a strain of writerly
19 Portmann writes, “The discovery of this mechanism does not reduce the egg to a mosaic of patterns, functioning together as a machine; rather, it leads us to view the mechanism of growth as a system “developing itself,” a process embodying the whole specific nature of the living creature” (299).
evolution steps into the foreground. Their formation is divided here according to the following structure:
Chapter One: “A Framing Darkness: Faith and the Reality of Youth”
Chapter Two: “The Descent into Literature: Appropriate Encounters”
Chapter Three: “Individuation within the Collective: Ascent into Favorables París Poema (1926) and Orígenes (1945-1955)”
Chapter Four: “Eruption of the Poietic Self: Suite para la espera (1948) and Oscuro dominio (1934)”
CHAPTER ONE, titled “A Framing Darkness: Faith and the Reality of Youth”
and corresponding to the oceanic plate as it approaches the subduction zone, is divided into three sections. In the first, I examine Juan Larrea’s early life from 1895 to 1919 between Bilbao and Madrid, Spain, while the second section is dedicated to the analogous moment for Lorenzo García Vega from 1926 to 1945 and his move from Jagüey Grande to La Habana, Cuba. For both adolescents this period was an agonizing time of maladjustment as they attempted to make sense of their surroundings, the framing darkness to which Bloom refers. I use their memories to reconstruct environments they saw as riddled with political instability and opportunism, including the instruction they received from religious educations that were unsuccessful at providing them with satisfying answers. I simultaneously refer to the studies of historians and historical testimonies of others to corroborate the corrupt character of these eras that was so
influential to their development. I then use a psychoanalytical approach, an integral part in each poet’s process of self-understanding, to dissect the individual’s unsuccessful negotiations between interior and exterior worlds and present this as the operating structure in the psychological suffering that provoked their search for an alternative to the existential darkness.
In the third and final section, I argue that poetry emerged for them as the primary artistic liberator because to a large degree their suffering found its origin inside a meaninglessness experienced in their environment’s mistreatment of the word, a result of many around them mistakenly believing themselves, as Heidegger states, to be the master of language (“Building, Dwelling Thinking” 46). Their distinct sensitivity to the disjunction between word and image, and to an apparent absence of meaning were at the root of their feelings of alienation and were the reasons why they turned to literature in particular as the art form in which to place their faith. In this way they could give material to their instincts, restore a certain power to the word by realigning it with the image, and therefore remedy reality with the meaning it lacked. Their suffering first appeared due to an imaginative need that laid a foundation for the arrival of a maestro to then lead them forward into the literary world.
CHAPTER TWO, “The Descent into Literature: Appropriate Encounters,”
examines each poet’s first step into the literary world via their appropriate encounters with the great poets who would take them into their confidences as a maestro does with an apprentice; the oceanic plate collides and descends below the weight of the continental plate. At the conclusion of Chapter One, the early suffering of Larrea and García Vega
had expanded to include a feeling of artistic paralysis where, once sensing literature to be a viable outlet for their expression, they were unsuccessful at accomplishing this next leap alone. They expressed their need for a guide to open literature’s door to them, to teach them the vocation of the poet. The encounters with Vicente Huidobro and José Lezama Lima, respectively, gave form to that lacking by opposing their sterile attempts at selfhood with the fullness they perceived in these poets’ dynamic selves in possession of poietic tools. I divide this chapter into two sections, in each of which I consider both the biographical developments, the autobiographical testimonies of this moment’s significance, and the particularities of the aesthetic and ideological influence communicated by each maestro at their own stage of development by comparing their writings with those of the maestro. Also, throughout the chapter but particularly in the conclusion, I consider a conference that each apprentice gave after their maestros’ deaths:
García Vega’s “Maestro por penúltima vez” (2009) and Larrea’s “Vicente Huidobro en Vanguardia” (1979). When revisiting their apprenticeships fifty years later, they recognized not only their indebtedness and the vital importance that this period represented in their lives, but also the faults of their teachers and the substantial influence that each later needed to escape.
In the first section I look at Lorenzo García Vega’s encounter with José Lezama Lima in 1944 as it marked the start of a two-year apprenticeship known as the Curso Délfico. This period consisted of his participation in a Lezamian style of Socratic maieutics where García Vega read works chosen particularly for him from the maestro’s library, the first of which was Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, then to return later
and engage in discussion through a series of questions.20 For the adolescents who experienced the Curso, it revealed a dimension of reality accommodating “la lucha contra la desidia y la abulia” (Prats Sariol, “El Curso Délfico” 20). García Vega’s early disposition for the aesthetics of the avant-garde, for Cubism in particular, was channeled into and through the three formative steps of his literary education under Lezama’s poetic system, recognizing the image as a historical protagonist, and he set about externalizing his inner chaos. During these two years, he wrote in 1993, he became “una especie de solitario monje loco que sólo vivía para leer y para escribir los poemas de mi primer libro” (OP 13), several of which would later appear in the Orígenes magazine (Chapter Three), as well as in 1948 in his first book Suite para la espera (Chapter Four). He develops an architectural confidence and experimentalism in genres that demonstrate a clear Lezamian utilization of the poem as the ground on which to bring together the innumerable pieces of his psychic view.
The second section turns to Juan Larrea’s apprenticeship to Vicente Huidobro itself composed of two distinct stages: an initial textual revelation in 1919 after his discovery of Huidobro’s Poemas árticos (1918), and a later friendship and personal loyalty in 1921 when they met at the Ateneo in Madrid. This period marks the moment Larrea declared his decision to give himself fully to literature, placing his trust in
20 Describing his own experience in the essay “El Curso Délfico” Manuel Pereira wrote,
“Siempre que yo le devolvía un libro, comenzaba un ciclo de preguntas, nada académicas, que podía originarse en La Eva futura de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam para terminar en un monólogo sobre el yin y el yang o las delicias de un mamey. Su abrumadora erudición, expresada en un torbellino de citas y anécdotas –que iban desde las Vidas paralelas hasta La montaña mágica–
entreveradas con golpes de humor popular, hacían de su charla todo un acontecimiento. Cuando Lezama empezaba a hablar, el mundo se detenía para escucharlo” (599).
Huidobro and the radical newness of Creationism as an illuminated path forward. With the guidance of Huidobro he managed to separate himself from his early years of uncertainty, redirecting his personal trajectory as he discovered meaning and power in the image brought into existence by the poet. He began vigorously writing, forming poems both explicitly and implicitly determined by the work of his maestro. Some of these poems made it to the pages of contemporary avant-garde literary magazines, but most were left unedited in letters and manuscripts until they were recovered more than fifty years later and published under the title Versión celeste (1969). As directed by Huidobro’s poetics, Larrea chose his poetic elements from reality, formulating his concept of sense, and from this creationist freedom allowed his self to begin to build. He would eventually recognize the limitations of Huidobro’s thinking and move beyond them, but it was during these several years of formation that that beyond became conceivable.
CHAPTER THREE, “Individuation within the Collective: Ascent into Favorables París Poema (1926) and Orígenes (1945-1956),” looks at each emerging poet’s participation in the literary magazines with which they were associated immediately after their apprenticeships: Larrea in Favorables París Poema and García Vega in Orígenes. This coincides with the stage of subduction when sufficiently high temperatures and overlying weight cause the oceanic crust to release essential gases and liquids upwards into the mantle provoking melting and the formation of magma. A certain amount of the magma remains inside a subterranean magma chamber, while the rest continues its ascent towards eruption. In this chapter I draw a parallel between that
separation and reincorporation of metamorphic elements and Jungian individuation amongst the collective space of the literary magazine. Following the periods of apprenticeship each self was in possession of an organizing knowledge and a new language through which they were eager to undertake expression. However, these new forms were not authentically theirs having gained them from the maestro. Individuation refers to the process through which the unconscious and conscious enter into greater collaboration, and Larrea and García Vega write in their early texts of certain dualities, concepts at odds that they struggle to resolve. I identify the two components of each duality with the poets’ unconscious (early self / framing darkness) and their conscious (transforming self / apprenticeship). With the progress of this stage their creative self-assurance grew and the degree of receptivity began to shift as each evaluated their position among the numerous encounters they experienced as part of the literary world.
Surrounded by artists, and through a developing poetic apparatus, Larrea and García Vega published their first creations, appearing as part of a collective that I choose to represent synecdochically with the literary magazine. The instinct, that which had originally refused their incorporation into the adolescent environment, finds its voice through the learned language of the maestro to bring the apprentice to greater self-definition.
At the end of 1923 Larrea considered his apprenticeship to Huidobro over and after years of wavering moved to Paris to start, together with César Vallejo, the literary magazine Favorables París Poema. This brought him into direct collaboration with Huidobro as well as with Vallejo, Gerardo Diego, Pierre Reverdy, Juan Gris, Pablo
Neruda, Dadaists Tristán Tzara and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and others. The magazine was short-lived ⎯only two issues were printed⎯, however, it marked a moment of burgeoning originality for Larrea as he established himself alongside and against his colleagues. He took the lead opening the first issue with his anti-manifesto manifesto “Presupuesto vital” and included several poems that would later appear in his poetic anthology Versión celeste. These works struggle with the duality of intelligence and emotion, addressed directly in “Presupuesto vital.” His increased concern with vitality, that is, humanity engaged in its dramatic adventure, replaced Huidobro’s intellect-governing poetry for the sincerity of embattled spirit in crisis, the two forces in constant interaction. He demonstrated early indications of distancing from Huidobro’s polemical self-importance, and towards a conceptual poetry concerned with universal evolution of a transcendent poetic spirit. His work in Favorables also paralleled an intense period of writing leading to the publication of his first work, Oscuro dominio, and his critical decision in 1932 to abandon verse altogether, a choice that signaled the end of his first formational cycle, that of his provisional false self, and the start of the second.
For García Vega, his encounter with Lezama also meant his acceptance as the youngest member of the Orígenes group, an uncomfortable and incomplete absorption as one the ten Cuban poets: Lezama Lima, Ángel Gaztelu, Virgilio Piñera, Justo Rodríguez Santos, Gastón Baquero, Eliseo Diego, Cintio Vitier, Octavio Smith, and Fina García Marruz. The Curso Délfico ended, García Vega began putting his literary formation to practice, and the results appear starting in 1946 with his first poem “Variaciones.” For all of the benefit that Orígenes had offered ⎯he had to choose between Lezama Lima and
electro-shock treatments⎯, the Orígenes spirit shaped by the “catholicity” of the group’s members awarded a transcendental religious level to the image that García Vega resisted.
He was inspired by an ethical intellectualism favoring active creation and individual expression, but his acceptance did not extend beyond a certain faith in the poetic word to search. He was a part of the group until its dissolution in 1956, but a study of the texts he published in its pages reveals a solitary figure, a poet ill at ease as he suffered to give expression to his obsessive skepticism through his learned Orígenes language of trust. In this dualistic struggle his poietic voice (the reverso) ascended to the pages of the magazine, searching for the other side of the word. With time and advancing further in the individuation process, he became more critical, processing or discarding interactions with the system he had learned during his apprenticeship.
CHAPTER FOUR, “Eruption of the Poietic Self: Suite para la espera (1948) and Oscuro dominio (1934),” centers on the emergence of each poet from the initial formational experiences of their maestros, apprenticeships, and the literary communities that surrounded them. The subduction zone cycle concludes once the oceanic plate has descended, metamorphosed, risen, and erupted from the previously prevailing continental plate. I analyze this ascent by way of an exegetic study of their first published literary works: García Vega’s Suite para la espera (1948), and Larrea’s Oscuro dominio (1934).
García Vega’s Suite para la espera was published in 1948 reuniting what he called “textos cubistas con inventarios surrealistas” that he had began writing while shut inside his mother’s house obsessively learning the literary profession in the assigned readings of his Maestro (OP 353). Though several of the poems had appeared earlier in
Orígenes, Suite para la espera was his first published work. By way of his newfound writerly confidence he employs a method of self-reflection which permeate the 38 poems of this book, collections of repeated and disassembled objects, sometimes reassembled, sometimes left in pieces, broken apart to allow for the poet’s searching gaze to recover the reminiscences they encapsulate. They vary between cubist and surrealist in character, but, as a student of Lezama’s poetic system, he practiced the “digestión metamorfósica”
freedom letting psyche, not fashion, dictate form, and even adding a playful character to his writing that differed from the Catholic solemnity of Orígenes poets such as Vitier, Diego, and García Marruz. He simply built, at times in a way similar to automatic writing, while at others consciously constructing the words of his Joseph Cornell assemblage, Duchampian boîte surréaliste, or Proustian bœuf en gelée,21 fragments in suspension inside poetic matter, but jointly the poems of Suite para la espera emit the optimism of the young creator finally gaining control over his suffering adolescent self by exploring the power of poiesis and the self-organizing structures of language.
Larrea’s 1919 discovery of Huidobro and subsequent individuation set him about a feverish period of poetic composition, poems largely written in French, traversing a shifting layer of influence as he migrated through and out of his apprenticeship.
Embracing Huidobro’s lesson of poetic commitment but rejecting his maestro’s need for recognition, he demonstrated little interest in publishing, and his poems only occasionally appeared in contemporary literary magazines (Cruz y Raya, Grecia, Cervantes).
Nevertheless, he was respected and became an example of poetic authenticity for many of
21 “…une daube de bœuf où la gelée ne sente pas la colle, et où le bœuf ait pris parfum des carottes, c'est admirable !” (Proust, Du côté de chez Swann 458).
Spain’s Generation of 1927 poets, though his reclusiveness led some to suspect that Juan Larrea was merely a pseudonym for Gerardo Diego. It was on Diego’s insistence that the short-run 50 copies of Oscuro dominio were published in México in 1934. Its eight prose poems, written between 1926 and 1927 during the renewed period of creative activity that followed his move to Paris, represent his first published work, and the only book of his poetry to exist for the majority of his life. When it was published Larrea had already abandoned writing poetry, bringing to a close what he called his “experiencia poética total” and signaling the end of his first metamorphic cycle. The poems of Oscuro dominio represent a generic shift giving discursive primacy to the latent vision in his early creationist, ultraist, and surrealist poems. As poetry, he continued to construct the evocative image, but he tautly stretched it over prose, an anticipation of the mystical essayistic studies to come. Larrea gradually approached a second existential crisis that would march him once again into the subduction zone, but Oscuro dominio was the brief eruption of his poietic self that enabled his subsequent metamorphosis into his true self, a writer of a particular prose qualitatively elucidating poetry’s visionary power to expose the world’s meaning.
Larrea and García Vega reached the end of their first transformative cycle having given shape to indecisive early selves and found movement out of their early paralysis.
They became poets actively finding order in the world. Nevertheless, they would feel the weight of the formational experiences that had created them and the confident momentum returned to neurotic suffering as the reality of being the product of an apprenticeship revealed itself in the disagreement between the impulse of their new poiesis and the
still-present adolescent instinct beckoning for fulfillment. The next cycle began, both surrounded again by the darkness of incomplete authenticity due to the overbearing influence that had provoked a concurrent revelation and deviation of self. The false self (the result of the first cycle) would again be subducted, advancing onward and downward before the eruption of the new, true self.
* * *
CONCLUSION
This study brings together the paths of four poets, four tectonic plates producing two subduction zones cycling in parallel, with the spotlight following the transformative journey of the oceanic plate sent into the metamorphic temperatures of the Earth’s mantle. Two poets collide and are arranged alongside two other colliding poets. What is it
This study brings together the paths of four poets, four tectonic plates producing two subduction zones cycling in parallel, with the spotlight following the transformative journey of the oceanic plate sent into the metamorphic temperatures of the Earth’s mantle. Two poets collide and are arranged alongside two other colliding poets. What is it