Text imprint - Mexico City, Fondo de Cultura Economica, (c1970)
Table of Contents
I. Literature and Revolution
II. Portrait and Selfportrait:
The Hispano-american Novel Confronted with Society
III. "Der Zauberberg" in the Literature of Latin America
IV. Miguel Angel Asturias, Novelist of the Old and the
New Worlds
V. Alejo Carpentier: Magic Realism
VI. Rayuela: or, Order out of Chaos
VII. Cesar Vallejo: The Mestizo Masks
VIII. Parra anti Parra
IX. Anti-literature
X. Antipoetry
Chapter 8 - Parra anti Parra
Nicanor Parra is the Chilean poet of greatest
influence of the so-called Generation of 1938. He lives
in the hills of the Andean mountain range, in a place
neighboring Santiago called La Reina. There, he has
placed a prefabricated house, full of a number of lamps
of dubious functioning. There are pictures on the walls
of rustic scenes, and also a wind-up horn phonograph, and
a guitar or two. For reasons a little inexplicable, the
house still had neither water nor electric light when I
visited him. For water, the neighbors provided it; as
for light, he made it himself burning, not far from the
door, huge branches of bramblebush, whose signals could
be clearly seen from Santiago. His nearest neighbor,
Arturo Edwards, had insured the house for him against
fires.
Very relaxed, carefully dressed, with curly hair,
balding, the eyes deep-set and face creased with thick
wrinkles, Nicanor Parra travels daily from La Reina to
the University of Chile, where he gives mathematics
classes. Occasionally he calls conferences about
interplanetary travel and celestial phenomena. In
general, however, he writes poems on all types of paper,
which later he meticulously copies; in moments of leisure
he dances the "Cueca" or discourses with his numerous
friends. When he is not in Chile he travels through
Switzerland, China, England or the United States. He
reads and speaks English; on the other hand, he neither
smokes nor drinks. That is to say, he might partake one
or two bottles of wine so as not to lose the thread of a
conversation, just as he may also imbibe regular glasses
of fermented "aguardiente" so as to survive any
earthquake. But in reality he does not drink. He only
accompanies those who drink.
Among the Chilean writers of the Generation of '38,
Parra is the only one who has formed a school. Those who
imitate him are young poets of clear statement, of
eccentric imagery within their regional tone, sarcastic
and bitter, acid critics of the daily routine in which
they evolve wittily yet always over-crowded. Beneath the
humorous bitterness they hide powerful weapons with which
they break the facade of the bourgeois institutions'
condemnation and arrive at the creation of a poetic
atmosphere of lucidity and dynamic disorder. Nicanor
receives them like a rooster with his chicks. He serves
them spice in hand, so to speak; animates them, defends
them, to release them, later, with the newest anti-poem
upon their lips. This personal ascendancy is so much the
more unexpected given that Nicanor seems more like an
individual retiring and sparse in his publications. To
his name he had only: "Cancionero sin Nombre" (1937);
"Poemas y Antipoemas" (1954), "La Cueca Larga" (1957),
"Versos de Salon" (1962) and "Canciones Rusas" (1966).(1)
Nevertheless, his books provoke movement, his
pronouncements raise dust and his very presence awakens
curious reactions of sympathy and even of passionate
devotion. Numerous are the poetesses, schoolgirls and
schoolmarms who follow and pursue him with suicidal
fervor. He has married with several of them, of distinct
nationalities.
Describing his literary beginnings and the evolution
of his aesthetic ideology, Parra says this:
"Politically we were in general apolitical, more
exactly, non-militant leftists. In religious matters we
were not Catholics: theology had us casually, although
not much. I inclined towards oriental philosophy, which
made me suspicious before my most intimate companions:
Oyarzun and Millas. For his part, Oyarzun believed in
the cyclops, as in dreams, and Millas, despite his solid
academic formation, allowed himself to be dazzled by a
passing philosophy of the Fifth Column, which affirmed
that man should take inspiration from the domestic
animals in matters of personal manners: from the rooster
he should learn pride, and from the horse, chivalry...
"Five years after the anthology of the creationist,
free-verse, hermetic, ironic, priestly poets, we
represented a type of spontaneous, natural poet, within
reach of the ordinary public... Of course we brought
nothing new to Chilean poetry. We signified, in general,
a step backwards, with the exceptions of Millas and of
Oyarzun, who, according to my way of seeing, were already
totally vertebrate poets.
"But our initial weakness, as I really think of it,
was a legitimate point of departure for our final
evolution. In it resided that strength that later has
given us the right to live. Fundamentally, I think we
were right to declare ourselves tacitly, at least,
exponents of clarity and naturalness in the expressive
media. At the least, in this direction the body of
Chilean aesthetic ideas has subsequently moved. Tomas
Lago...becomes in 1942 the representative of the new
doctrine, whose content he synthesized with the phrase,
Light in Poetry, title of the preface to his "Tres Poetas
Chilenos."... This title of that preface was not
arbitrary: in those same days, the writer had announced
a book called La Luz del Dia. That book never saw the
light of day, but, augmented and diminished, it later
came to form a part of "Poemas y Antipoemas."
"There is to say further that we constituted the
reverse of the surrealist stamp.
"Events have served to show that at least 50 percent
of our principles had not been badly taken. The other 50
percent...were with the surrealists, who in that epoch
represented, rigorously, the next step from creationism
and Nerudism: the immersion in the profundities of the
collective subconscious.
"The anti-poem which, finally, is nothing other than
the traditional poem enriched with the surrealist sap--
native surrealism or whatever you wish--should still be
the result from a psychological and social point of view
of the country and continent to which we belong, in order
to be considered as a true poetic ideal. It ought to be
shown that the child of the marriage of day and night,
celebrated in the ambit of the anti-poem, is no new form
of twilight, but instead a new type of poetic dawning."(2)
In the beginnings of his literary career and, later,
in moments of diversion, Nicanor Parra cultivated certain
forms of popular poetry. He was attracted to a wide zone
of Chile and to Chileans: a zone of Romantic dedication
to the epic values of the guitar and of wine. In "La
Cueca Larga" the improvising grace of the old procurer
and the thick sensuality of singers and dancers are
appreciated. There are the native names where
nationality is sanctified in consonants and vowels of
solid prestige, the casual jests of the country and the
ambiguous, urbane and acid humor of the Chilean city.
Parra says:
I am not from Coihueco
I'm from Niblinto
where the oxen squeeze
the red wine.
I was born in Portezuelo
was raised in Nanco
where the ducks swim
in white wine.
I'll fail in the meadows
of San Vicente
where the monks float
on aguardiente...
Above the commotion or, better said, off apart in a
fresh corner of willows and eucalyptus, the poet devoted
himself also to the holy office of transmuting the human
to the divine. "I toast to the celestial/ and I toast to
the profane," exclaims Nicanor while he works with a
potter from Quinchamali so as to remove from surrealism
its European decadence. He puts wings where the poncho
goes. The liquor expenditures are furnished by angels.
Taps with heel and toe and, in his counterpoint, crowns
the Romance metre with spurs of modern discord:
With my mausoleum face
and my old butterflies
I too make my presence
at this solemn festival...
In this poem, composed to be sung and danced (3),
the minstrel tradition is kept living. Across plazas,
courtyards and countryside, its verse has gained the
mastery of rhythms which impose the epic enthusiasm of
the people; has given a vehicle to hide the flower of
evil and certain duplicities of sensuality; it arms
itself with hard shapes, with virile accents, with
aggressive lyricism. The popular poetry of Nicanor Parra
is red and palpitating like a fighting cock crowing in
the ring. I have had occasion to hear this poetry in
Donihue and Quilicura, surrounded by shouts, laughter and
bottles; I have seen it gravitate to the head of the
table and sustain its battle of wits against the wisdom
of the age upon the rough earth; and I saw it emerge
victorious beneath the weight of the jingles, the images
and the toasts allotted to it.... But let us put light
in the corners. What function does the anti-poet play in
"La Cueca Larga"? We shall eliminate the colors of the
poncho and the brilliant silver of the spurs; we shall
hear the calling of the singers and individualize the
words; we are left with the turbulence that maintains the
fire of the "Cueca" dancer behind the pallid front, the
lock of black hair and the killing eye. Nicanor Parra,
as he himself would say in "Poemas y Antipoemas," carries
together the angel and the beast which are the
characteristics of the Chilean earth. There is some
dissimulation behind the breezy joke and the malicious
ingenuity, some fox-like trickiness. The dominance of the
belly. When Nicanor Parra triumphs with "La Cueca Larga"
in the groves, beneath the willows, by the culvert and
the train line, it is because the common people have
considered him one of theirs: they have recognized and
appreciated his cynicism, his gastronomic appetite, his
aggressive belittlement of the woman and his ability to
keep her subservient, his noisy bitterness and his bloody
parodies of bourgeois institutions, his indirect manner
of exalting the stoicism of those he describes as rotting
amidst the decadence.
If we judge him, again, upon "Cancionero Sin Nombre"
and on the first compositions of "Poemas y Antipoemas,"
Nicanor Parra moves us especially when he writes of the
nostalgic sentiment that man discovers in his possession
of things in that secret sense which only their mortality
deposits in them:
My God, yes indeed! no one knows
how to appreciate a true word,
when we imagine it most distant
just when it is closest.
Oh me, oh me! something tells me
that living is no more than a chimera;
an illusion, a dream without boundaries,
a small passing cloud.
Let's take it easy, I don't know what I'm saying,
emotion is rising to my head.
Since it was already the hour of silence
when I started my singular assignment,
one behind the other, in dumb procession
to the empty stable the sheep returned.
I greeted each personally
and when I was near the grove
which sharpens the traveler's hearing
with its ineffable secret music,
I remembered the sea and reviewed the pages
in homage to my lost sisters.
Very well. I continued my voyage
like one who expects nothing from living...
How much time has passed since then
I could not say with certainty;
everything is the same, surely,
the wine and the nightingale upon the table,
at this time my younger brothers
should return home from school:
Just that time has erased everything
like a white storm of sand! (4)
Nostalgia follows him like a dog, sucking at him,
biting him, lacerating the smooth skin of his memories.
The sweeter the hour evoked, the more painful. On a
summer afternoon, smelling of oranges and jasmine, thick
with warm country dust, open like a sky without clouds,
dying hurts more.... Parra responds to the nostalgia
with a poetry that grows in liturgical waves. He himself
has said that in his poetry he does what God creates
ceaselessly from wave to wave. Only that he does his in
ten-syllable verses. I do not say this facetiously.
Parra watches over the exigencies of meter with an airy
but arithmetic eye. As if for a party he seeks
pentameter's polished stirrups, as if for the show he
utilizes the resonant, joking, medieval and blasphemous
romance. To be a modernist, that is, when it occurs to
him to replace the swan of Dario and the owl of Gonzalez
Martinez with a fruitfly, he reaches into some syllabic
corners cut with a scissors from the garlands and doves
of a glossy magazine. I refer to his poem "San Antonio."
On the other hand, for his self-portrait and for his
epitaph he prefers the "silva," which permits him to
revel in the long phrases and the short phrases. In 11
syllables there is respect and in seven a lack of
respect, at free intervals. The nostalgia, nevertheless,
is decasyllabic. Parra presents it like a slow
consummation of the wise, mature man, who knows his place
and maintains it without deviations.
The great work of Nicanor Parra is not, contrary to
what might be thought, in the poems of nostalgia, but
instead in "The Vices of the Modern World," "The Viper,"
"The Tablets" and "Soliloquy of the Individual," all
poems of desperation. "The modern world is a great
sewer," Parra says in one of these poems. Further we
need not take his pronouncement letter for letter. The
world for him is a trap. It is important to note that
Parra judges a world in which he finds neither order nor
sense. Without himself bringing a sense of form--ethical
or aesthetic--either, so as to create an order where
there is none, the beings and the objects are charged
with violence and seem constantly capable of leaping onto
the neck. In "Rompecabezas" Parra says:
I give no one the right.
I worship an old rag.
Transfer the graves.
Transfer the graves.
I give no one the right.
I am a ridiculous type
under the sun,
soda fountain cowboy,
perishing of insanity.
I have no choice,
my very hairs accuse me.
On the altar of the day
the machines don't pardon.
I laugh behind a chair,
my face covers with flies.
I am the badly expressed,
expressed in view of what.
I the stammerer,
with my foot I touch dirt.
What are stomachs for?
Who made this mess?
Best is to make an indian.
I call one thing another.(5)
His vision of the world comprises a deliberate
simplification, a synthesis specific to an directed at
the modern decadence. To dismantle all in order to
attack certain gestures, certain acts, certain ideas, and
exhibit them in their senselessness. His is a world of
equivocations. A tragic absurdity that begins by being
a trait of genius. What is clarity? To see clearly how
rotten is the world, how impotent and toothless and timid
is man. That is to say, clarity so as to see the
crossroads behind the sombrero. His form of expression
is conventional. The flourishes of conversation attract
him and allow him to affirm himself, as with Cesar
Vallejo. The images of Parra are concrete, but not
precisely logical, yet instead absurd and full of
consciousness of sin, of failure, of the emptiness that
soon is transformed into a cold bitterness and,
particularly, into a strange wrath, a fury which, in
general, explodes in attitudes and words of self-
destruction. Here is his "Self-portrait":
Consider, boys,
this eaten-away tongue:
I teach in an obscure school,
I've lost my voice giving classes.
(After all or nothing
I put in 40 hours a week.)
How do you like my ragged face?
Truly to see me inspires sadness!
And what do you say of this nose rotting
from the dust of the flaking chalk.
On the question of eyes, at three meters
I don't recognize my own mother.
What will follow me? Nothing!
I have ruined myself giving classes:
The bad light, the sun,
the miserable poisonous moon.
And all, for what!
To gain some unforgivable bread,
hard like the face of the bourgeois
and with the smell and taste of blood.
Why were we born as men
if we must perish like animals!
From overwork, at times
I see strange shapes in the air,
I hear crazy voices,
laughter, criminal conversations.
Observe these hands
and these nails white as a ghost,
these few hairs that remain,
these infernal black wrinkles!
Nevertheless I was just like you,
young, full of beautiful ideals,
I slept mining the copper
and polishing the faces of the diamond:
Today they have me here
behind this uncomfortable podium,
brutalized by the monotony
of the 500 hours per week.(6)
Disorganized and violent, the world provokes man and
induces him to destroy himself. Suicide adopts
circumspect forms until becoming a slow, progressive and
fruitful onanism. The fundamental brutality to which the
anti-poet refers as one of the characteristic traits is
also the central theme of "The Tablets." Man, solitary
and infuriated, without hopes of an apocalyptic ice,
heats up burning for God and striking his mother. The
woman persists and there is left the legend of love. The
anti-poet does not hesitate to destroy them in a poem
that is a true compendium of his macabre vision of the
modern world. Love is debased to a routine and everyday
condition, its problems deriving from hunger: sexual
hunger and nutritional hunger. The obstinate and
tenacious woman seeks the money, the good, the
gratification and the abuse of the man. He, for his
part, defends himself to the measure of his strength:
copulates when he may, more than he might in order to
save the money from his beloved. Little by little it is
she who exhausts her rival and submits him to a sexual
and economic slavery. She encloses him in a round room
through whose only window enter the rodents from a
neighboring cemetery. The man begins to turn
indifferent. She tries to seduce him with the bait of a
property she possesses near the stockyards. He refuses.
The enchantment has been broken: old and weak, the man
cannot copulate any more, his children grown, his true
wife perhaps appearing at any time to ruin him. Used up,
he says:
I cannot work any more for you,
everything has ended between us.(7)
In this poem, like in "The Vices of the Modern
World," Parra confronts a world that has lost the key to
its most essential mechanisms. Perhaps sensing that in
the loss is involved an act of voluntary condemnation, he
does not try to recover that key, but instead insists
upon the spiritual deformation that originates the
attitude of renunciation. With cold beauty Parra
isolates the niches in which man hides to perish and
disappear without witnesses. These niches are the
symbols and myths of a bourgeois society afflicted with
an incurable illness. His conclusion is unequivocal:
Nevertheless, the world has always been this way.
Truth, like beauty, is neither created nor destroyed
and poetry resides in things or is simply a
reflection of spirit...
But what matters all this
if meanwhile the best ballerina in the world
dies young and abandoned in a small village in
southern France
and Spring returns to man
some of the disappeared flowers.
Let us try to be happy, I say, clasping the
miserable human rib.
We extract in it the renewing liquid,
each in accordance with his personal inclinations.
We affirm this divine swindle!
Panting and trembling
we suck those lips that craze us;
the die is cast.
We inhale that enervating and destroying perfume
and follow one more day the path of the chosen:
From his axles man extracts the necessary grease
to anoint the face of his idols.
And from the female sex the straw and the chaff for
the temples.
For all of which
I carry a flea in my tie
and smile at the imbeciles who lower from the trees.(7)
The funerary establishments, the arsonist, the
phallic cult, the blood of the virgins, tobacco, movie
stars, the anemic capitalists, the grease in man's axles,
the straw and the chaff of the female sex, are symbols of
a dying without metaphysical projection, symbols of the
betrayal of art, symbols of sexual aggression and of the
mass murder of the sentimental symbols of the abuse of
sex and subsequent impotence, symbols of an individualism
without individuals.
If Parra were to have an ethical form to confer
order upon the world that surrounds him, it be an Anti-
Christ and not an anti-poet. The truth is that from the
criminal system he knows no system of defense. The traps
approach him. He allows himself to be imprisoned
possessed of a loose but severe madness, that constricts
his body like a black suit. He multiplies the occasions
to sin. Men, objects and places become the traps. Soon
we notice that all form part of a single universal trap:
humanity, art, religion, philosophy. In each trap he
discovers bloodspots, hairs and finger marks that retain
the odor of the last victim. This odor is the only
warning of the danger. The anti-poet defends himself.
He wishes to strike, wound, set aflame. He imagines and
believes victory present. But succumbs before the
unexpected. In combat he uses the tricks that
civilization has perfected and attains modest triumphs
whenever the battle requires the use of tricks. In the
final duel, nevertheless, the anti-poet becomes
disoriented and confused. He collected scalps of the
enemy which he meticulously nailed with pins to the walls
of his trophy room; he could keep accumulating scalps;
but his trophy room, in the end, would not suffice.
The poetry of Nicanor Parra, non-decorative,
concrete, direct and turbulently narrative, hides in its
most intimate crevices a profound spiritual convulsion.
I know no other antecedent for it in Latin America except
the poetry of Cesar Vallejo. His is, however, a pained
expression of an instinctive and subconscious
Christianity; that of Parra is an implacable lash against
a humanity conceived frozen in its decadence. Both work
with elements of everyday reality and hide their dismay
behind conversational formulas that serve as the sign of
pathetic humor. Vallejo is more transcendental in his
anguish, Parra, more stylized. Of both we may say that
they shake the intellectualism of Hispano-american poetry
with a crude and brutal dissection of the contradictions
characteristic of the contemporary world.
At 50 and some years Parra is immortalized in his
"Canciones Rusas" (1966), as if his knowledge of the
world had bathed him with a timeless dust; he seems sad,
now neither violent nor enraged; nostalgic, yet wounded;
victorious yet, nevertheless, infirm; ill form something
that fell little by little upon his face and from his
face went inward and drips, drips, drips to infinity,
that is, until the dawn that will find him seated beneath
the stars. I see him now a little more aged: his eyes
have deepened, the wrinkles of his face contain shadows,
he has lost almost all his hair, carries on his lapel a
little Russian astronaut and in his pockets letters of a
woman who left him for another. He goes from one nation
to another nation and, in reality, is not like that. He
leaves and enters the rooms of his dark house, seeks some
seat in which to sit and does not find it, goes out to
the street, the Chilean people smile at him with
fraternity, goes to the place of his sister Violeta and
there, seated next to the fireplace, and me as well, with
the heat burning our hands, Rosita, Roberto, Catalina,
Panchita, Chabela, Angel, The Captain, Domino, Nicanor
Parra toast a day that will never return. The violets
have left us. We all toast. Him at the foot. The
penultimate.
Notes
1 "Obra Gruesa," 1969, is the edition of his complete
works.
2 "Atenea," nos.380-381, Apr.-Sept., 1958, pp.46-48.
3 The music for "La Cueca Larga" was composed by the
folklorist Violeta Parra...
4 "Poemas y Antipoemas," Santiago, 1954, pp.30-32.
5 Ibid., pp.77-78.
6 Ibid., pp.55-56.
7 Ibid., p.127.
8 Ibid., pp.140-141.