Angel Rama seems to think so. I am skeptical. While I have no problem seeing Latin Americanism in Martí, who mentions Cuba, discusses Cuban issues such as slavery and sings to the Cuban landscape, I have a hard time seeing Dario as consciously intending to create a distinct American poetic aesthetic. Not that he doesn’t create an aesthetic, and an interesting one at that, but in Prosas Profanas he hardly ever MENTIONS Latin America. He mentions Buenos Aires in one poem. Darío is like Jesus who was never a Christian, in other words the aesthetic that Darío created was identified as an American aesthetic by those who came after.
Darío’s aesthetic might be considered a mish-mash of various European and classical poetic forms, motifs and themes filtered through the heightened idealism of the poet’s own vision of art, myth and history. Darío shows his poetic muscle by utilizing a variety of musical forms from the courtly lay and the to the sonnet and eclogue. Darío is experimental with many of the forms, throwing in extra syllables here and there and utilizing enjambment and slant rhyme. There are interesting nods to the culteranismo movement such as the use of Greek, Latin and French cultisms (words like hetaíra, bicorne, linfa, dea…that make me have to run for the dictionary) and a progressive use of hyperbaton (which makes me have to put the poem together like a jigsaw puzzle…there’s a reason why I never got into culteranismo…the sheer sweat-inducing effort of trying to figure out what the hell the poem is saying precludes any enjoyment one might garner from the experience of reading or from the delicious aesthetics of it)
Volumes of paper have been written on Dario, so I’m not sure what to say about him that hasn’t been said. All of the modernist tropes are there, laid out in a dazzling array of sumptuousness. Experimental language, check, francophilia, check, sensuality, check, eroticism, check, pale blonde women named after goddesses and heavenly bodies, check, love of art, check, visions of nymphs, satirs, centaurs, muses and other mythological beings that nowadays require the ingestion of a great deal of leisure chemicals to reproduce, check. Darío is a poet’s poet, dripping in excess, exuding an eroticism that pushes the senses well beyond their natural capacity, exhuberantly playing and toying with language and the music of words. Actually, in many ways Dario reminds me of the Spanish Renaissance poet Garcilaso de la Vega, who seemed to discover an inheirent beauty in the Spanish language which was not perceived before. Garcilaso did this by playing with the Italian sonnet form and creating Spanish endecasyllables that sounded natural. Dario does it by playing with the musicality of single words and creating rhythms out of old forms that are occasionally irregular and yet interesting.
Here’s a sonnet that just seized my attention: both for its rhythm, imagery and form. Actually it was hard to choose, but sonnets are compact, cool little mini-essays which are interesting to analyze…so: here goes:
Ite, Missa Est.
Yo adoro a una sonámbula con alma de Eloisa,
virgen como la nieve y honda como la mar;
su espíritu es la hostia de mi amorosa misa,
y alzo al són de una dulce lira crepuscular.
Ojos de evocadora, gesto de profetisa,
en ella hay la sagrada frecuencia del altar:
su risa es la sonrisa suave de Mona Lisa;
sus labios son los únicos labios para besar.
Y he de besarla un día con rojo beso ardiente;
apoyada en mi brazo como convaleciente
me mirará asombrada con íntimo pavor;
la enamorada esfinge quedará estupefacta;
apagaré la llama de la vestal intacta
y la faunesa antigua me rugirá de amor!
Sonnets in general contain two parts, the opening eight lines develop the story and the final six conclude it. In this way a sonnet can fit many different types of discourse, from argument to narrative to lyrical evocations. It’s quite an ingenious form that way. Sonnets can say so much in so few words. This sonnet follows a very simple rhyme pattern “abab, abab ccd, eed”, the vuelta, or turn which completes and concludes the sonnet’s argument occurs in between lines 8 and 9, as is expected (the emotion or argument and rhyme pattern change at the same time). In this poem the evocation of the woman as virginal and mystical changes to an exploration of the poet’s desire to ravish her and reveal the drooling sexual beast within her. The rhythm of the lines is irregular, not conforming completely to the endecasyllable pattern, and yet it is no less musical or rhythmic.
Of course one of my favourite figures in modernism is the female mystic. I love the play between the erotic and the divine as a play of simultaneously existing contradictions. The beloved in the poem titillates the poet precisely because of her chastity and her role as a mediator between the material world and the ecstatic. The modernists -most of them iconoclasts or atheists- generally believed that eroticism was the only true gateway through which a person could experience a transformative ecstatic experience, a religious jouissance that obliterates the self and frees the soul from the confines of a nihlistic, meaningless material world. The female mystic, with her double play of eroticism and spirituality was an irresistable figure for the modernists who idealized purity and at the same time sexuality. The beloved in the poem represents Dorothy Soelle calls a “presloin” figure, accessible yet inaccessible: she titillates precisely because she is untoucheable and untouched. In this poem Dario fantasizes about possessing her and revealing deep within her a sexual beast, a sphynx or devourer. I have recently been reading a rather interesting book by Terry Eagleton called “Holy Terror” which talks about the doublesided nature of spiritual ecstasy: as both a live-giver and a life-taker, one that exalts the soul and devours it at the same time. In the modernist vision of ecstasy, the same woman who is purity is also self-destruction (albeit a very pleasurable kind of destruction). Dario plays with the subtle similarity between the spiritual communion of the eucharist and the physical communion of sexuality (a similarity which most Catholics are aware of but are too nervous to actually admit, receiving communion is A LOT like having sex). This twinning of the erotic Mass of sex and the spiritual Mass of communion is a common image in modernism.
OK, but before slating Rama, it would be good to engage with his arguments. Indeed, more generally, you always need to engage a critic before you can really criticize him or her. (I mentioned similar themes last semester.)
Also on this topic, take a look at Julio Ramos’s Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina.
Or even Borges, who famously declared that you could tell an authentic middle eastern writer by the absence of camels. In other words, the very fact that Darío doesn’t mention Latin America could suggest he is more fully Latin American that you suspect.