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The late nineteenth century refuses even more the notion of writer as public spokesperson, either as legitimizer or adversary—critic of society. One has only to think of the role of poet—statesman in early nineteenth-century Spanish America to see the contrast with the generation of modernistas. The emphasis on interiority and personal expression even fragments the idea of the author or the book concept. The individual writer is seen on personal terms, and the concept of a coherent work gives way to fragmentary expression. As personal consciousness rather than social or ethical norms becomes increasingly the organizing principle, the individual style itself acquires new functions.

If the frame of reference is personal consciousness and individuality, then style must allow for personal idiosyncrasy, even invention or destruction of genre. If we read these works of modernismo as clues. Except for the clearly defined stance of those who take the adversary role to a certain power group as is the case in protest literature , even national literatures receive ongoing evaluations and reassimilations. In this vein, a general tendency in Spanish American criticism has been to lump together all modernista writers under the label "rubenista" and to assume that the enclosure of the rich poetic forms of modernismo were prisons from which more recent poets have needed to liberate themselves.

Although countless studies have pointed out the many styles, sources, and individual patterns of modernista poets, the survival of a facile critical grouping is difficult to overcome. In "What Is an Author? Texts, books, and discourses really begin to have authors other than mythical, "sacralized" and "sacralizing" figures to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive.

Perhaps it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive value or formal transformations, but according to their modes of existence. The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each. The manner in which they are articulated according to social relationships can be more readily understood, I.

In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject or its substitute of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse. The movement of modernismo, which is usually chronologically delineated between the years and , has been credited with revitalizing the Spanish poetic idiom by means of three major contributions: This type of criticism centers on the rebellious aspects of the movement, its attempt to break away from the models and archetypes of Spain and the colonial heritage.

Variously called torremarfilismo, cosmopolitismo, or decadentismo, the movement of modernismo has been criticized as an aberrant faction of escapist writers who would not accept their immediate environment nor reflect it in their poetry. Less attention has been focused on the reasons for the conscious attempt to join another order of writers, however, an order more far-reaching than their present one. The innovations of modernismo are based on the modernistas ' widening awareness of their dependence, both economic and cultural, on traditional and European models and their decision to fill the cultural vacuum resulting from this dependence.

Their innovations arose from a necessity of invention. Having become aware of the smaller sphere of action accorded to the writer, they sought to reclaim the lost importance and to develop a different role for the poet. In the same manner, their rebellious attitude manifested itself in a willful transgression of the public norm and its tastes. Their rebellion united them in a common purpose, with an emphasis on virtuosity and individual expression. An important element in defining the goals of the modernistas is the examination of the.

A look at their social and economic position can clarify the reasons for their decisions. During the last part of the nineteenth century the major cities in Spanish America, especially Buenos Aires and Mexico City, were assimilating European movements at an accelerated pace.

Un desierto para la nación : la escritura del vacío

The transmission was manifold and simultaneous, and the proliferation of new ideas and styles—in the sciences, in the arts, and in literature—constantly thrust a choice upon the intellectuals. In part, the adoption of a style inaccessible to a large public was a reaction against the narrow range of roles assigned to the writer.

With the diversification of society, due in large part to massive European immigration and growing industrialization, [28] there was no longer an absolute identification between the ruling classes and the intellectual. New immigration, varying degrees of industrialization, and labor-oriented social movements changed the maps of Spanish American cities in the early twentieth century. As the poet was thrust into the marketplace for example, journalism and adoption of new "marketing" techniques , so poetry would follow its poets into turbulent urban spaces. At the same time that modernismo as a poetic movement is flowering, poets and intellectuals are calling for an upheaval of old traditions.

In his "Discurso en el Politeama" of he calls for the overthrow of the old order:. In this work of reconstitution and vengeance we cannot count on the men of the past: We want new trees to give new flowers and fruit! Old ones to the tomb, young ones to the task! Modernismo 's emphasis on the ideal of an intellectual, and not necessarily an economic, aristocracy was part of a persistent search to create a new role for artists in a society whose hierarchies were being dissolved.

As professional roles became more specialized, the role of the intellectual was also being reduced. No longer a sideline activity in addition to other professional ones, writing was becoming a specialized occupation, although a financially precarious one. Literary and social critics such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault have provided cogent explanations for the elevation of art to a religious discipline in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

With the advent of photography and other means of reproduction, literature seemed to be losing its hold on the quasi-mystical role assigned to the artist. The rising demands of egalitarian social movements also threatened to displace the artist's rank. A cult of writing was aroused to restore confidence in literature as a separate reality, rather than as a range of styles, interchangeable and therefore dispensable.

Poets were to be interpreters of a medium that offered mystical insights. Attention to the techniques of such a discipline was therefore of the highest importance. Several studies in Spanish America have been especially influential in their examination of the changes in the writer's status and the impact of these changes of poetic practice. Among the critics who have interpreted the nature of this artistic as well as social phenomenon, some have concentrated more on the socioeconomic aspect of its web, while others have sought its secrets in the rich texture of surging aesthetic theories and practices current in Europe at the time.

The analyses of Rama and Paz point up the two complementary aspects. There is here a primary proof, so general, that it was a commonplace of the last two decades of the century: Yet even to speak of markets, machines, and modernization in terms of the artist hardly brings forth the image of the hurried businessman—writer.

As Rama points out, "Por el momento, el 'mercado' literario no exist??? The book market is completely paralyzed, which naturally is reflected in literary activity, extremely scarce, which has had to take refuge almost exclusively in the press. La Revista Nacional has been the first periodical in Buenos Aires that has paid its contributors, thus demonstrating that it was time for productions of genius to be valued for what they were worth, to facilitate the advent of professional writers, the only ones who can give us our own literature.

Striking is his description of the magical practice involved in pushing out the daily passages, as if the heightened speed of' market rhythm increased the flow of' creative power. He not only explains the economic necessity of working with periodicals but praises it as a new source of' inspiration. Writing about commonplace events provides practice for less mundane efforts:. You know about the struggle of the man of letters, everywhere atrocious or martyred, but nowhere as in these societies of Latin America, where even the soul feels its way about, and intellectual speculation has almost no place.

You have had a good field for experience, and that is the daily newspaper. I have heard it maligned and depicted as the tomb of the poets. Well, if continued work on different topics doesn't make us agile and flexible in thought and in speech, what then will? It is clear, despite his attachment to the ideals of the superiority of beauty, that the changing sounds and rhythms entered his perception.

The dependence on Europe by the financial and social elite had also led to a devaluing of local productions of all kinds. In the case of literary production and outlets for publication, the lack of faith in local writers resulted in little financial support for their efforts.

In Argentina, for example, publishers cited the scarcity of national literary works of quality and the absence of a large reading public as reasons for promoting mostly foreign works. Paul Groussac, when introducing the influential journal La Biblioteca in , describes the attitude he wished to counter with the creation of his new publication:.

It has been said to us, on the one hand, that we will not find in Argentina the necessary amount of contributions to fill monthly the pages of a great journal, lacking among ourselves the necessary. The devaluing of local writers and of the public in general was heightened by the financial crisis of the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Publishers found it more convenient and less costly to copy foreign works for which they did not have to pay royalties, and they were assured of a readership by the already established fame of major European writers:. Between a foreign work that costs nothing and whose success is assured by the popularity of the author, and a national work, for which one must set aside several hundred pesos, running the risk that it will be badly received by the public, the choice is clear.

As if we had made a pact to be constant tributaries of Europe, we maintain ourselves exclusively on what it produces in the arts, science, industry and literature. What's more, even the texts in elementary schools, high schools and even in the University are, for the most part, foreign ones. In Argentina the literary and social elite that immediately preceded Lugones and his generation was losing its sense of homogeneity and its all-encompassing directive role in the establishment of political and social values.

This was due to the realignment of social and economic forces and to the increasing complexity of Argentine society. The Generations of and had seen their role as a political as well as an artistic one, and their task as the stabilizing and maintaining of the authority of their social class.

The majority had defined their role as. Radicalism of the religion of art required a sincere disdain for the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois was anyone who did not think as we did on aesthetic issues, since social and economic issues were secondary to us. It was a complete dislocation of categories which, in its grotesque ingenuousness, led us to the point of believing that the ideal society would be composed of poets more or less Baudelairian, or pickled in absinth like Verlaine, or trained in the satanic chiaroscuro of the watercolorist Rops or in the theatre of black masses like Huysmans.

The style of excess that Tablada stresses took the form of a rebellion in taste and personal behavior, which often led to an unconscious parody of the very codes the modernistas sought to follow. Slavish copying was an attempt to approximate as closely as possible the European mode, and much of Lugones' production strikes this note time after time. The modernistas' cult of the exotic and of the self is in part a reaction to what they saw as their poverty. By striking a blow at the neo-realists among other writers, they were also objecting to diversification and compartmentalization.

Their emphasis on virtuosity arose from the necessity of inventing a place for themselves. Octavio Paz evaluates the movement's negations as a positive search for universals and for modernity:. It has been said that modernismo was an evasion of the American reality. It would be truer to say that it was a flight from the local present reality—which was, in their eyes, an anachronism—in search of a universal reality, the only true reality.

The search for universality was indeed a prime motive, with a keen desire for participation in a cosmopolitan world of modernity as much as for timeless universals. The goal of progress, so strong in nineteenth-century thought, was an important motivating factor, although it is a concept difficult to reconcile with a spiritual ideal of timeless unity, or with a cult of art. The idea of progress for the modernistas was not merely an abstract concept. Increased contact with other nations, growing industrialization, and new immigration from Europe brought an expanded network of communication.

Las ideas no hacen familia en la mente, como antes, ni larga vida. Now the trees of the forest have no more leaves than the cities have tongues; ideas mature on the beach where they are learned and, going hand in hand, and step by step.

The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo

Speaking is not a sin, but a glory. Listening is not heresy, but taste and habit and custom. Everyone's ears are always open; thoughts barely germinate before they are loaded with flowers and fruits, and jumping onto the paper; they enter everyone's mind like fine powder; the railroads tear down the forest; the newspapers, the human forest. The sun penetrates the fissures of the old trees. Everything is expansion, communication, flowering, contagion, dispersement.

The periodical deflowers grandiose ideas. Ideas don't create a family in the mind, as before, nor long life. They are born on horseback, mounted on lightning, with wings. They don't grow in a single mind but through the commerce of all minds. They don't delay in benefiting, after a difficult emergence, a small number of readers; rather, as soon as they are born, they show benefit. Like leaves falling from a tree, ideas are dispersed and lost even as they are born. Yet such an analogy illustrates some of the paradoxical spirit of cosmopolitismo embraced by the poets of the moment.

Although exalting a common language of beauty and universal rhythms, at the same time this mixed analogy rejects the rootedness of a national past profile and the boundaries imposed by strong national identity. Spiritual universalism and a mystical aestheticism combine con-. It is a hothouse flower, a strange and pampered vegetation that could scarcely arise from the venal explosion of wild sap which the youthful vitality of American thought has poured out until now, sometimes channeled into coarse and robust trunks that endure like brutal forms, but dominators of our Nature; and more often diffused in babbling, tropical vines, whose remains enrich the ground with vegetal earth, useful for future flowerings.

It is balance and harmony for which Nature strives, allowing for the occasional orchid, ruby or diamond, swan or pheasant. As they reject the referential emphasis on language and turn away from "realism" and civic poetry, the modernista poets idealize poetry as a striving toward beauty and the ideal. The cult of the exotic, the emphasis on sonority, the enrichment of poetic meter, the delight in verbal play for its own sake, helped create for the modernistas a self-containment for poetry, setting it off from the everyday, communicative functions of language.

By attributing conscious moral decisions to each artistic gesture of its practitioners, critics have either condemned, defended, or condoned the modernista production with its context of "modernization. If we analyze modernity and modernismo not as separate and parallel systems, but as exchange systems, we may examine how such new systems of production are entwined with new systems of representation. In the midst of the shifting systems of representation and the fascination with the new products of science and industry, the modernistas encountered a perplexing situation.

Exposed, by means of greater communication to the images of modernity, nevertheless, it is clearly apparent that the Spanish American did not share fully in the production of such novelties. If Spanish America is new by autonomy, how can modernity be founded without history, without the density of the past and the evolution required for the "breakthrough"? The most striking characteristic of modernity in Spanish America is its awareness of its falseness. If modernity, according to Octavio Paz, is synonymous with criticism and is identified with change, then modernity in Spanish America is characterized more by its fragility, of which it is aware.

Todo artificio es producto, no naturaleza; producto, no proceso. Things proliferate, but precisely because they appear not in a net of relations which reflect reality, but in an immediate, poetic code which joins them together. The thematic hypostasis of this phenomenon is found in the scandalous artificiality of setting created by modernismo. Every artifice is production, not nature; product, not process. Given concrete historical circumstances, it must be noted that such references to new technologies were often part of stylistics rather than a reflection of local realities, since the industrialization and modernization of Spanish America was by no means consistent in different countries.

Far from being innocent consumers of a European series of productions valued more highly because of their origin , these poets, sharing in the critical tradition of philology and science, offered up their own literary productions as an affirmation of this "Yo organizador" that sought to integrate, within a new aestheticism, the multiple strains of both mythic and scientific inheritance. Striving toward an eclecticism of several foreign cultures and literary movements, they also reordered scientific information.

The critical stance of the modernistas was more encompassing than is generally believed.

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They sought to refound literature in its vital connection with the natural world and to discover its secret basic harmonies, its underlying organic structure. From all over Spanish America writers circulated ideas and formed a network of exchange by means of the many literary magazines founded during this period, in addition to those that combined political statement as well. The two most important centers of publications were Mexico City and Buenos Aires.

Despite their insistence on being the enemies of utilitarianism and other manifestations of positivist thought, the manifesto clearly shows a dialectic between the ideals of an art striving toward pure form and an awareness of the role of the artist in society.

Although the aim expressed is that of a quasi-religious striving toward ideal perfection in art, the terminology has a utilitarian and combative import: This crusade, despite its direction toward realms of art and regions or dream, retains a sense of place, time, and political motivation. Although stressing the merits of innovation to revive poetic traditions deadened by lifeless imitation, the possibilities of the "Nuevo Mundo" are inextricably linked with a past, though partly buried, tradition. According to most of the modernista generation, the responsibility to develop or mine these treasures is in the hands of the intellectual aristocracy, the group formed within a strong poetic tradition.

Instead of a break, this change in poetic process is to involve a new focus. Significantly, the direction of the crusading impulse is inward-turning, to better recover elements from a distant past, as well as the outward turning to exotic realms of legend and history. The notions of mission and combat—the holy crusade—are constants in the poetic manifestoes of the modernistas. They view their role not as visionaries who have chosen isolation but as prophets who have been forcefully removed from certain spheres by their enemies, the forces of utilitarianism and bourgeois conservatism.

In our Latin republics, the wind of mediocrity blows over the Creole spirit. Our recently formed societies don't take care of the spirit; Art cannot have life where Religion is losing ground, and where Profit and Politics swell up their enormous bellies more every day. Despite modernismo 's connections with the legacy of romanticism, a closer look shows a refusal of many of romanticism's values. This legacy is more in the spirit of the monstrosity of Victor Hugo, in the suspended time of Baudelaire, than in Wordsworth's or Coleridge's attempts to mingle mind and nature.

It singles out oddity, distorts organic form, and exalts discontinuity. The spatial dimensions of modernista scenes give an idea of the rearrangement of values that romanticism linked with organic form. The mountain and the abyss are more likely to appear in miniature form perhaps enclosed in a Parnassian literary landscape painting with their scale reduced to manageable terms. Single figures draw the focus, rather than panoramic scenes.

A distinguishing feature of modernista aesthetics is the inclusion of all the arts in theories of artistic creation. The creative function can express itself through music, the plastic arts, and literature, especially poetry. Creative power is bestowed on certain individuals as a mysterious gift, enabling them to perceive the series of concordances between nature, humanity, and divinity.

From this concept arises the belief in the natural aristocracy of the artist. The modernista concept of the artist as one who is divinely inspired and who possesses the gift of perceiving the interrelationship of nature and spirit, has its roots in romanti-. Many of the social doctrines of romanticism, received quite differently in Spanish America at an earlier stage, were partially incorporated along with later doctrines.

The doctrines of romanticism were a primary factor in the later development of the concepts of the poet and poetic function, and the work of Victor Hugo was central to this development. In Hugo, then, all the romantic convictions and themes are summarized: In Hugo the reconciliation of opposites, the stress on the grotesque and evil ultimately absorbed in the harmony of the universe, is particularly clear even in his early aesthetic theories, as in the preface to Cromwell.

Victor Hugo's work, so important for later poets, has a long history in Latin America. The call for liberty, the allegory of nature, and the role of the poet as prophet [62] had a special meaning in the years of the formation of national entities. As will be shown in the discussion of Lugones' early work, Hugo's ideas on the function of poetry left an important and unmistakable stamp on Lugones, as well as on other modernista poets.

Romantic writings on the controlling principles of poetic creation and interest in the symbolic power of mythology showed a tendency to create an allegory of the spirit by means of natural and mythological symbols. In romanticism, a secular theology of language joined with concepts of human creativity and genius. The artist was to be not only artisan but a force for human-. The particular turns of these doctrines in different historical contexts have been explored in the European context. Wellek compares the German movement to its French counterpart and notes that romanticism in Germany was far more pervasive than in other countries, affecting all human endeavors: German romanticism, more so than English and French, was the movement of an intelligentsia which had loosened its class ties and hence was particularly apt to create a literature remote from ordinary reality and social concerns.

Of particular importance is the redefinition of the position of the individual subject with regard to language, sexuality, and the group:. This situation of the bourgeois State determined in the last instance the libertarian, anti-state and anti-nationalist aspect of the French avant-garde since that period, whatever the variations of its concrete political positions across the established parties and movements, from the liberals to the anarchists.

Kristeva's remarks are particularly relevant for a discussion of the exaltation of art itself in modernista practices. If one accepts her explanation of the fetishization of art as a reordering of the hierarchies of discourse patterns, larger meanings associated with the exaltation of art and the preference for aristocratic models emerge:. Hierarchy is then necessary in order to maintain the conflict [the contradiction: In the same way, the adoption of often conflicting symbolic systems of natural and mythological imagery creates contradic-.

Yet within romantic and modernista doctrines, such contradictions are to be resolved through the particular visionary power of the poet. By controlling language, poets might return to the source of thought by creating increasingly complex metaphors. The transmission of the metaphors would have a shaping force on a reading public's personal systems of analogy. With their special gifts, such poets were to transmit radically different ways of perception. The romantic analogy of progress and light, favored by many of the modernistas, was rejected by others. The spirit of the decadents—largely transmitted by the writings of J.

The exotic underworlds of the spirit, usually tinged with satanism, threatening eroticism, and the macabre, presented an alternative to the didactic or sentimental type of poetry offered by the modernistas' Spanish and Spanish American predecessors. By turning to another realm of the spirit, the modernistas avowed their transgression of public standards of morality, asserting at the same time the primacy of interiority over outwardly established canons of conduct and taste.

Baudelaire's exaltation of the dandy and the cult of self found many followers, for example Julio Herrera y Reissig, while for Amado Nervo, religious symbols provided access to a mystical realm. The modernistas generally renounced the goal of material progress and turned away from explicit nature references to a stylized allegorical realm.

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Combining the symbolist theories of language and music with the Parnassian concern for form, they sought to obtain the perfect mingling of form and content. The subtle shadings of color, the focus on symmetry, and the attention to details of objects replace the significance of the objects themselves, and much more attention is given to nonnatural imagery.

Objects and scenes described are chosen from a special range of scenes that are weighted with codes of meaning. Natural phenomena such as sunsets, lakes, and reflections on ancient monuments are stylized according to established procedures. This precept led away from the extended poem to shorter sketches, like those of Verlaine's landscapes. Seeing the preceding generation's interest in the past as a conservative tendency, it is not surprising that the modernistas would turn away from those models, since their social values were not aligned with those of the previous controlling classes.

Many critics of the period saw the inclination toward Europe as a betrayal of an indigenous line of evolution, a series of copying, rather than of original inventions. He saw such admiration as another step in a long line of cultural dependency:. What value could there be in its brusque injection into Spanish literature, which has not [yet] suffered the ten evolutions previous to the French one, and still lives on little more than imitations and reflections, sometimes its own, sometimes foreign?

American art will be original—or it won't exist at all. In modernista theory and practice, newly revived poetic theories are tempered by local realities. There are not two clear stages of modernismo, one being an idealistic, escapist stage, and the other a sudden awareness of the potentialities of the American idiom. For the modernistas, the preoccupation with formal beauty involves a notion of the projection of these ideal forms onto the structure of society by means of language.

Attention to innovative form is the one characteristic of modernismo that is clearly distinguishable in its main practitioners. Whether based on symbolist precepts of synesthetic correspondence or on a desire for experimental surprise and innovation, formal dexterity constitutes an indispensable characteristic of modernismo. Su soporte, su esclarecimiento, su compostura. And the acquisition of a form or of a kingdom is situated inside the absolute of liberty. Only the events of kings are related, the Bible says; that is, those who have achieved a form, a unity, the kingdom. Form achieved is the symbol of the permanence of the city.

Its base, its merit, its dignity. Attention to form, above all, innovative form, and the importance assigned to the nature of poetic language are the two concerns that occupy central place in modernista poetics. Like other aspects of the movement, the changes in poetic theory arise from an expanded percep-.

A constant in the poetics outlined by its exponents is the insistence on the specific nature of poetic language as opposed to language of everyday use. The reading public is perceived as humanity in general, as a brotherhood, and the poet as its redemptive voice. The romantics had stressed the primacy of imagination in poetry, and other artists seized on this concept of the power of sensory freedom as a way to knowledge.

Rimbaud's figure of poet—seer is based on conscious dislocation of sensory perception: The improbable figures and visions presented by the painters of the latter half of the nineteeth century are linked to some of the same sources that poets drew from, and have their origins in much of romantic art.

The Swedenborgian vision that inspired William Blake in the latter half of the eighteenth century also influenced many others. In contrast to the civic, outwardly directed messages found in Spanish and Spanish American romanticism, modernismo, in its rediscovery of the romantics and the discovery of the symbolists, focused on human interiority, which is seen to be physiologically and spiritually connected to an outer reality. In discussing the poets of modernismo Amado Nervo emphasizes the special nature of the poet and the role of introspection in learning to see the interrelationship of outward things:.

Pero los sentidos de la especie, singularmente los sentidos del poeta, que es el ser representativo, por excelencia, de la humanidad, se han ido afinando y hemos empezado a ver "hacia dentro. But the species' senses, singularly the poet's senses—who is the representative being, par excellence, of humanity—have been refined and we have begun to look "within. That, ultimately, all things have a special physiognomy, a soul, a very powerful life; that it is necessary, in the system of the spirit, to place one's ear to the vast breast of the earth to listen to the hundred thousand heartbeats of its hundred thousand hearts; and that to continue singing to the sea, to the mountain, to the sky in that way, in a rough manner, without contemplating their tenuous and infinite marvelous structures, their extremely varied modes of being, their innumerable shades and the miraculous intertwining of their secret affinities, is to offend the sky, the sea and the mountain.

Poetry is to be estranged from all other forms of writing, by virtue of not being used as a measure of exchange. The poet, by using as his material the world's form of exchange, enters into a problematic and paradoxical relationship to it. The poet deals with worldly materials but seeks to transcend them.

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On a certain level, this refusal to use words for their practical exchange value, or communicative usage, deprives the poet of an active participatory function in external reality. Edgar Allan Poe is often quoted by the modernista poets in support of their poetic ideals. He stresses the nonreferential aspects of language, comparing poetry to music rather than to other denotative systems:. It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles—the.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.

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Not only was Poe's poetry influential, but his theories of poetry were in wide circulation. Defined by Poe, poetry owes no acknowledgment to the outside world for its aims; as in romantic definitions, the role of the poet is bestowed by carpicious destiny. Unlike some romantic ideals, however, for Poe the poet's responsibility does not extend outward toward a greater public. Baudelaire, whose work almost all the modernistas adapted and admired, emphasized the higher powers that are an attribute of the poet:. In the word, in the Word, there is something sacred that prevents making it into a game of chance.

To handle a language wisely is to practice a type of evocative sorcery. Poetry is a sacred rite. Deriving from an inner source, its practice and message are not to be judged by utilitarian standards. To narrate, point out, even to describe is fine, and for exchanging human thought, perhaps it would be sufficient for each one to take or put a coin silently in the hand of another. The elemental use of discourse communicates the universal reportage in which all genres of contemporary writings, with the exception of literature, participate. In contrast with an easy and representative numeric structure, as the masses treat it in the first place, speech, above all dream and song, recovers in the poet its virtuality, by the necessity of an art dedicated to fictions.

Poetry is linked to problems of life and death: The art of poetry, of evocation, is a gift, a superior gift bestowed by grace, not by a set of circumstances or an application to cultivation of forms:. No simplemente como signo, puesto que no hay antes nada que representar. Et verbum erat Deus. In the beginning is the word as sole representation. Not simply as a sign, since there is nothing beforehand to represent. In the beginning is the word as manifestation of infinite unity, yet already containing it.

El verbum erat Deus. The word in itself is nothing more than a sign, or a combination of signs; yet it contains everything due to its demiurgic virtue. Poets such as Lugones and Her-. They break with a world view profoundly influenced by romanticism and its artistic legacy. Lugones too points out the superior, sacred nature of language and its powers of symbolic expression. But it is its use-value that determines its sacred or profane powers, not its inherent qualities: But it is at the same time a vile instrument that beheads and poisons, when the spirit that moves it has descended into rage against the ideal".

For Lugones, language being an instrument, its use can be cultivated. A richly expressive language can be acquired not only by natural gifts but by incessant study. Verbal equivalents for all emotions may be found with proper application:. Una lengua rica, y sobre todo, una lengua propia. PL [] in "Negro y oro". One must possess, above all, a rich language, superlatively rich, to such an extreme that no emotion remains without its real and true expression.

A rich language, and above all, one's own language. This emphasis on the necessary richness of poetic language, the belief in the possibility of extracting the exact expression to express any given emotion, best characterizes the nature of Lugones' poetry. It is also the quality in this verse that has attracted the attention of his most fervent admirers and critics. By directing attention to language as a technical instrument, Lugones initiates a dissonant trend in modern Spanish American poetry. The literary productions and public activities of Leopoldo Lugones are vast in scope.

He wrote eleven volumes of poetry, and his work in prose—novels, histories, biographies, short stories, journalistic prose, translations, and philological studies—is even more diverse. In addition to his writing career, he was a public school official and librarian. In politics he was active as a socialist in his youth, but he later moved from the left to fascism, defending an authoritarian state based on militarism culminating in his now infamous speech, "La hora de la espada. An overview of the poetic works of Lugones produces amazement in many readers at such producitivity, virtuosity, and technical skill.

At the same time there arises a certain distrust for the craftsman who could house so many different types of creation beneath one roof. Lugones' eager acceptance of other literary models, his frequent borrowings or copyings from other writers, and their displacement in different contexts combines to make his work seem willfully contrived. In addition, the sometimes grudging acclaim accorded Lugones results not only from his multiple literary poses but also from his rapidly changing ideological stances.

The diversity of the poetry of Lugones raises the question of the proper critical viewpoint. Is there a unifying personality behind the creative process, or is his work merely a succession of very skilled copyings and reworkings of the material offered to Lugones by his epoch? These questions have been posed ceaselessly by his critics since the first publication of his works. Yet perhaps this is the wrong approach, that is, the concept of a single unifying presence of author throughout. These texts instead may be analyzed as the productions of a.

Different codes are combined, transgressed, and transformed by a series of acceptances and rejections. The work of Lugones is best studied within the context of his epoch, by noting the reception of his work and the network of mutual influences. For a writer such as Lugones, who delights in the mysterious aspects of poetry and who wholeheartedly accepts the daimonic powers attributed to its execution, the principles and practices of the code of modernismo are a garden of delights.

Avidly striving to extend to its limits each convention he adopts, he manipulates modernismo 's varieties of symbols into a series of experiments within a hothouse atmosphere. In his crossing of different strains of poetic inheritance, Lugones creates strange hybrids. Like the self-generating process of growth, Lugones' productions point back on themselves, reflecting not only their origins but their differences from their models.

Among the new productions are creations of exceptional concision and beauty, as well as mutations that seem grotesque by their heightening of certain features, such as rhyme, to the exclusion of others. In choosing model texts from different contexts and rearranging them within other contextual system, modernista poets did not adopt the total array of meanings associated with a particular sign. In the move from one language to another, from one culture to another, and from an immediate literary text to another, many associations clustered around a particular image or ideogram are lost or rearranged, and new ones emerge.

For example, certain groups of images in Lugones' early work function as automatic signs, signaling a previously established thematic function. These signs operate not only within his particular aesthetic system but relate as well to the conventions of a total cultural system. In tracing the sign system of Lugones to previous and coexisting ones, as well as tracing the pattern of perception and rearrangement of these sign systems, it must be remembered that certain signs may be emptied of their original content and forced to function as different signals in a different context.

It is the pattern of rearrangement and displacement of previously coded signs and not the continuous presence of the signs themselves that reveals con-. The presence of certain codes of imagery is not necessarily the mark of an organically evolving individual system. Always eager to create an impact with his writings, Lugones sought out culturally approved models, particularly foreign ones, on which to pattern his own productions. Exaggeration and elaboration of given patterns are his favored methods for achieving novelty, and he often seems to unwittingly destroy his own foundation by ranging too far from his starting point.

Rather than overt self-expression, one finds in Lugones' poetry a type of ritualized expression. Speaking from the vantage point of first one platform, then another, the succession of stances creates an aura of impersonality. Lugones' writings have provoked a body of criticism that is astounding in the extremes of its passionate acclaim or derision. Appraisals of his work reflect the contradictory impulses that led to his disconcerting mixture of all the models available to him.

Impersonality, virtuosity, and farce are the characteristics most often attributed to Lugones' work. Although his work has undeniably influenced many other writers, his readers have often labeled him as a gigantic misdirected talent. Giusti's review of Lunario sentimental in shows a negative reaction to the effort to achieve constant novelty: It is a difficult question to answer due to the simple fact that he lacks one". Giusti speaks disparagingly of the heterogeneity of the work, singling out a trait that links Lugones to an important aspect of the modernista movement: There is not an artist whose soul is not dynastic, and for each one we can trace a genealogy; influences are mutual, they are shared, intertwined, joined together.

Although we are influenced by one another, we continue to develop our own personality. Lugones' personality is powerful, the most powerful in our America. Why concur in the childish petulance of analyzing his readings? He has read it all; the outside influences, the variety of reminiscences, the trivial and intimate suggestions of sages, poets, anti artists clash in his soul with his own and diverse ideas.

Like Nervo, he considers Lugones' work as evidence of a new spirit in the young generation of Spanish America. The bonds of a mutually supportive fraternity of artists are as evident as his critical viewpoint when he records his first impressions of Lugones in He is one of the "modems", he is part of "Young America". He and Ricardo Jaimes Freyre are the two most forceful talents to follow the new banners of the continent. He follows the banners due to his temperament of a pure artist, his violent and vibrant spirit, his evident and invincible vocation to suffer under the power of some Pilate of mediocrity.

Many writers, however, have not seen these same traits united in Lugones' poetry. Lugones has always been that way, denying unconsciously in his work the dominant and secret impulses of his soul. We see him change and contradict himself, but we never see him express himself with absolute sincerity. The fact that different generations see Lugones so differently has, obviously, much to do with his political activity and his polemics with other writers. Yet the different criteria applied are also reflections of a differing perception of the poetic function and a changing attitude toward the notion of individuality and the necessity of its expression in poetry.

For contemporaries of Lugones, his verbal excesses create an impact lost to later readers. Lust that is like a design at once detailed and integral in its purpose, like that in the fold of a skirt that lets one see a foot lightly covered by a stocking and through the stocking a rhythmic, serpentine vein on the instep. Winks, fluttering, eyelashes, twistings, postures. Our emotion is like a dark lantern that pierces, untimely, the cubic blackness of rooms. A novelesque instant, from a centripetal novel. There the development of gesture will be telescoped, the winks distorted to grimaces, and theatricality extended to farce and buffoonery.

In the poetic tradition of Argentina, Lugones has been no less polemical a figure. La aventura de 'Martin Fierro'": Y ambas opciones forman una estructura" "From Lugones one learns to write: And both options form a structure". In the vanguardia of the s: For the vanguardistas, Lugones' work served as a symbol of a more traditional aesthetic: A survey of the critical attitudes toward Lugones mirrors almost all the ideological and esthetic debates in Argentina throughout the century. Alfonsina Storni sums up the general attitude of her generation in discussing Lugones shortly after his death in Recognizing him as a rejected master of a generation of poets, parenthetically she lists the lesser attributes of which he also was undisputed master:.

Technical rhyme, restraint in his use of secrecy, insistent search for good language, adscription to the national theme, amatory lyricism of a sacramental order, eclectic influences and desires: Although they admired the ironic and iconoclastic tone of the Lunario and its inventiveness, they rejected what they saw as a narrow-minded attention to form and not to spirit.

Criticizing the obvious copyings from Laforgue, they derided Lugones' self-conscious defense of the introduction of these images and forms into Spanish as useful innovation. They labeled him as a master of style but a poet lacking in inspiration.

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Poets such as Leopoldo Marechal saw Lugones' adherence to rhyme and to dear formal definitions of poetry as evidence of the mind and spirit of a cataloguer of rhetorical tricks. Lugones is a cold architect of the word; he constructs uninhabitable shelters for the emotions, and his verses have the unhealthy odor of empty houses. He once said that "rhyme is poetry's repose"; may I add that it is not only its repose but also its sleep and that poetry has fallen asleep forever in his rhymings.

Lugones retains rhyme as poetry's last vestige of formalism, and often it dominates his poetry, drawing attention to the mechanics of his verse. Rhyme's presence in the Lunario sentimental illustrates the volume's importance as a bridge between earlier poetry in Spanish and the work of the vanguardistas, who sought to strip poetry of its formal aspects. It illustrates the "strenuous work of traditional art forms when they work toward effects which later are effortlessly obtained by the new ones.

The traces of formalism that defined a former type of poetry remain as a reminder of Lugones' directing principles in art. Moving in Lunario sentimental toward a poetry whose subject matter defies previous notions of idealism and beauty, Lugones retains the marks of tradition for its form. Other poets, less intent on retaining for poetry its elevated nature, were able to develop fully some of the techniques of the Lunario sentimental.

Jorge Luis Borges attributes the inclination to parody or caricature in Lugones' poetry to an overloading process. Cada adjetivo y cada verbo tiene que ser inesperado. Esto lo lleva a set barroco, y es bien sabido que lo barroco engendra su propia parodia. Each adjective and each verb must be unexpected. This leads him to be baroque, and it is well known that the baroque creates its own parody. In an earlier article, the criticism is more explicit.

Borges' statement from "Pala-. Le lengua es edificadora de realidades" [19] "The apparent world is a jumble of shuffled perceptions. Language is the builder of realities". This reconciliation was to be followed by a reordering of other categories, thus creating new ways of viewing the world. The Lunario 's element of surprise, its devaluation and reevalution of previous poetic hierarchies, constituted its appeal for the new group of poets. What they refused in the Lunario, however, was its insistence on rhyme, an element they found unnecessary, just as they saw the definition of poetry as music as unnecessary.

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