There's a great deal of writing about the
neobarroco in Spanish beyond Sarduy, though he
and the Brazilian Haroldo de Campos seem to have
invented the term. Sarduy's description of the
neobarroco is largely an extrapolation from the
practice of Lezama Lima, whose poetry and essays
have been the major reason for the neobarroco's
prestige in Latin America. For those with
sufficient Spanish that's the place to go. Of
the very few translations of Lezama into English,
those by James Irby in the UC Press Lezama volume
are by far the best. The rest of that book can be
safely ignored. There's an interview in it
(translated by Irby) that's helpful to any
discussion of the neobarroco, though Lezama never
used the word. His collection of essays, La
expresion americana, screams out for translation,
though I pity the poor soul who undertakes it.
Again, for those with Spanish, the enormously
influential poetry anthology Medusario (last I
looked copies were still lurking around, even on
Amazon), edited by Roberto Echaverren, Jose Kozer
and Jacobo Sefami, has a good intro by
Echavarren; other essays of his on the subject
are at various websites. On the prose primarily,
Celestinas Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in
Spanish and Latin American Literature, by Roberto
Gonzalez Echevarria, is sound and has the advantage of being in English.
I've written a few brief summaries of the
neobarroco, as applied in poetry. It's focused on
Lezxama, but, except for the specifically
Catholic content, is broadly descriptive of the
aims of neobarroco poets. Here's a snip from my
forthcoming Cuban anthology. Conversacionalismo
roughly corresponds to what we usually call
mainstream. Padilla was one of its important Cuban spokesmen.
Like most forms of thought, poetry usually
requires that the overwhelming amount of language
and other phenomena that are always present be
radically filtered. For conversacionalistas, as
well as for their English-language counterparts,
that filtering is in the service of the
presentation of a logically coherent argument
that should be understandable by any competent
reader. As such, its focus is on the end to be
reached–an end known to the poet beforehand–
rather than on what’s encountered in the process
of getting there. Since 1937, when his first book
was published, but reaching its fulfillment in
his poetry of the 40s and thereafter, Lezama
elaborated a very different practice. Taking his
cue not from the poetry of another culture but
from Spain’s Baroque, out of which had grown its
New World colonies, and particularly from the
work of Luis de Góngora, he brought attention
back to the world of undifferentiated phenomena
which we all inhabit. So, in his major poems, the
reader confronts an unfiltered glut of
information, presented without syntactic or
ideational hierarchy–in the “Ode to Julian del
Casal,” for instance, details of Casal’s Havana
and the Havana of Lezama’s day; obscure,
sometimes private, references; allusions to the
crónicas; objects from Casal’s, as well as
Lezama’s, collection of art and oddities; inner
thought and outer experience presented without
boundaries or inhibitions; appear to be thrown at
us helter-skelter, by means of an enormous
vocabulary borrowing from the idioms of different
trades, times, dialects and places.
Padilla was to tell us in his memoir that reading
Lezama “I found myself violently dispatched to a
realm of pure language, his one and only
kingdom.”[i] From the beginning Lezama had
confronted the accusation that his work was
obscurantist, hermetic, a mere construct of
language, disengaged from ordinary life,
disinterested in social reality. He would answer,
famously, that “sólo lo difícil es
estimulante,”[ii] only the difficult stimulates
growth (which I find myself recasting as a
statement at once Darwinian and from the realm of
religious and therapeutic practice, “only
hardship begets change”), but also that
“understanding” was beside the point–the poem was
to be experienced as a thing in itself, not as a
subject for paraphrase. An analogy that comes to
mind is a first encounter with a forest or any
complex ecosystem. One can deconstruct the
forest, catalogue its species and their
interactions, but it can’t be paraphrased, one
has to experience it as simply there. The
Lezamian moment is of that order of reality–all
the confusion of the unfiltered moment present at
once. As such, he claimed, it was a more profound
engagement with everyday life than the clarified
narrative of conversacionalismo.[iii]
There is no way to cope with this except to
submit oneself to the moment and be carried along
in a fugal current, where words, references, and
motifs recur and recombine in changing,
progressive guises, creating an inexorable propulsive force.
Haroldo de Campos and Sévero Sarduy were to name
this kind of art neobarroco,[iv] a term that
Lezama and his companions never used, but it’s
apt enough that it’s become the term of choice,
not only, I think, because Lezama had invoked the
Baroque masters, but because behind his practice
is the central metaphor of the Baroque, the
neoplatonic concordia discors, harmony out of discord.
To paraphrase a large body of theology, out of
the apparent chaos of the disjunct phenomena of a
moment, a life, the natural world and all of
human history arises a harmony only perceivable
to the mind of their maker, who alone is capable
of simultaneous awareness of all things. To
approach that state (and it is the function of
the immense polyphonic structures of Baroque
music, art and architecture to help us do so) is
to approach the state of profound, endless
ecstacy of the saved, who in the afterlife are
joined to the mind of god, recapturing the
harmony of the paradise garden from which humans
were expelled for their discordant sin.[v]
Lezama thought of himself as a Catholic, but his
version of Catholicism scandalized the more
orthodox members of his circle. Hell, he thought,
didn’t exist, or if it did, it was and had always
been empty.[vi] He seems also not to have had a
strong personal sense of a sinful nature to be
overcome. And he apparently wasn’t willing to
consign paradise to the next life, pointedly
naming his autobiographical novel Paradiso, in
Italian, rather than the Spanish paraíso, so that
his reference to the final book of Dante’s
allegorical Divine Comedy would be unmistakable.
The ecstatic moment for Lezama was in the full
experience of the garden of this world, not the next.[vii]
[i] Ibid., p. 169.
[ii] José Lezama Lima, “Mitos y cansancio
clásico,” in La expresión americana (Santago,
Chile: Editorial Universitaria, (1969), p. 1. The
first edition, published in Havana in 1957, is extremely scarce.
[iii] For an early statement of what became the
standard objections to Lezama and the neobarroco,
and Lezama’s customary answers, see Jorge Mañach,
“El arcano de cierta poesía nueva. Carta abierta
al poeta José Lezama Lima” (Bohemia, September
25, 1949), and José Lezama Lima, “Respuesta y
nuevas interrogantes. Carta abierta a Jorge
Mañach” (Bohemia, October 2, 1949).
[iv] Haroldo de Campos, “A obra de arte aberta,”
Diário de São Paulo, July 3, 1955. Sarduy wrote
exhaustively about the Baroque and the neobarroco
for several decades. Of special importance is
his “Barroco y neobarroco,” in César Fernández
Moreno, América Latina en su literature (Mexico
City: Unesco/Siglo XX, 1972), pp. 24-27. D
e Campos (1955)
[v] There are useful discussions of the concordia
discors in C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An
Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance
Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1964); Robert E. Stillman, Sydney’s Poetic
Justice (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press,
1986); and, for the concept’s neoplatonic
origins, Andrew Scholtz, Concordia Discors: Eros
and Dialogue (Washington: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2007).
[vi] Recounted by David Huerta, in “Trece motives
para Lezama,” the introduction to his selected
Lezama, Muerto de Narciso: antología poética (Mexico City: Era, 1988), p. 9.
[vii] For an important reading of the Baroque and
the neobarroco, though for the most part focused
on prose, see Roberto González Echevarría,
Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in
Spanish and Latin American Literature (Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press, 1993), particularly the last chapter.
Lezama elaborated a complex metaphysical system
of the image, the poem and history, not dealt
with here. For an introduction in Lezama’s words,
see “Interview with José Lezama Lima,” by Armando
Álvarez Bravo (translated by James Irby), in
Ernesto Livon-Grosman, editor, José Lezama Lima:
Selections (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
University of California Press, 2005), pp.
122-137. For a concise summary of Lezama’s
system, see Emilio Bejel, Gay Cuban Nation
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 117-120.
At 07:12 AM 12/13/2008, you wrote:
>Speaking of Muse, here's a free article.
>
>Kaup, Monika. The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes
>
>http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/toc/mod12.1.html
|
