© Rafael Dueñas

Because in we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Our existence is interwoven with the world,
is a dialogue with the world.
Remy Kwant

The eye and the senses are made to supply
not merely the ornaments but the very plot of truth.
Vincent Leitch

A través de la literatura, lo que se expresa es una rebeldía,
una crítica, un cuestionamiento de la realidad.
Mario Vargas Llosa

            Pablo Neruda is perhaps one of the most prominent and influential poets of the past century. During his lifetime, and after his death in September 1973, much of his oeuvre has been edited and reedited multiple times. When one reads the immense body of criticism about his oeuvre, it is not difficult to sense that the poet was harshly and ferociously criticized by his homologous that did not understand the magnitude of his venture. When one takes into account Mario Benedetti’s claim about the poetic trends in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century, it is not difficult to sense that Neruda’s poetic discourse has been set against a “stronger force”: César Vallejo’s poetic and aesthetic discourse [i] .  

            Through Vallejo’s poetic discourse, Neruda has been downgraded along with his cosmological writing. In fact, by comparing him to Vallejo, Neruda has been highly criticized as a poet who has only contributed to the “dehumanization of the Arts,” while Vallejo has been seen as a poet who wanted to explore and rescue the humanness still hidden in mankind. Moreover, Vallejo has been proposed as the prototype for the poet who is “crushed” by the New World Order that has been established through the systematization and homogenization imposed by capitalistic logic. Such a system, according to this hypothesis, only leads to the repression of the senses. It is for this reason that Susan Sontag warns us that “all conditions of modern life –its material plenitude, its cheer crowdedness -conjoin our sensory faculties… what is important is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more” (168).

            Vallejo has been presented as “an agonizing poet” whereas Neruda has been presented as the poet who implemented and reinforced an oppressive system that engenders the alienation of the Self which in turn leads to the separation from its “brute senses.” It can be argued that the arts and sciences have only contributed to the regression to barbarism that is alienating the Self, as well as making it cut itself from its brute senses. In fact, Jacques Rousseau in his preliminary essay, Has the Progress of Arts and Science Contributed More to the Corruption or Purification of Morals?, argued essentially that the “progress of arts and sciences” has contributed only to the dehumanization of the Self. It is this dehumanization that Kristeva diagnosed as one of the New Maladies of the Soul; in-itself this dehumanization is a sign that there exists an abyss between the Self’s affective and psychic space.

            To construct a critique such as the one formulated above is counterproductive because it only perpetuates the same kind of system heretofore developed to criticize Neruda’s poetic venture. Furthermore, it is not a matter to “retroactively regress” to a time before mankind knew itself as a Homo Sapien or as a self-conscious being, nor the solution can be argued as Rousseau did by simply demanding a supreme Being, “give us back ignorance, innocence, and poverty, which alone can make us happy and precious in thy sight” (Reed,63).

            What I am trying to illustrate here is a Neruda that is not as inhuman [ii] as he has been proposed to be by most of his critics. We have to read and criticize him in terms of his “humanness,” without having to discredit his epistemological and aesthetic commitment to understanding life. We need to liberate Neruda from the “perpetual dehumanization” inherited in our contemporary human condition.    

            The question now becomes, how does one “rescue” and “liberate” Neruda while simultaneously proposing a critique that measures against the systems heretofore postulated? An answer to this inquiry requires a treatise rather than just a short explanation about the dilemma in question. For this reason, I am going to invert the problem and simply state that in order to achieve such a task, it is not necessary to “review” the criticisms that have dehumanized Neruda’s venture. Such a method is effortless, unproductive and pointless since the goal is to “illustrate” a more “human” Neruda rather than to discredit his critics. This is a conjecture about Neruda’s poetry not a critique about his critics. Therefore, I will concentrate in presenting a “human side” of Neruda’s oeuvre through a rather unconventional means: phenomenological inquiry.

            How can one read Pablo Neruda phenomenologically? One needs to point out that although the question asks something about “reading,” phenomenology is not a “reading,” “strategy,” or “method.” One of the most basic ways of understanding phenomenology is to say that, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a manner of thinking, that it existed as a movement before arriving at a complete awareness of itself as a philosophy” (Kockelmans, 357). Phenomenology is a practical philosophy concerned with the field of experience (as in existentialism: awareness) and the field of meaning (as in hermeneutics: thinking). However, on the one hand, one is not over-cautious about declaring that phenomenology is not an existentialist philosophy. The reason is that phenomenology does not frivolously reduce its principles to stating, as Sartre proclaimed, that existence precedes essence. On the other hand, neither phenomenology is hermeneutics per se because it is not entirely concerned with the question of truth within the triad subject, object and world. To paraphrase Edmund Husserl’s philosophical scheme, phenomenology is not an ontological project, but an epistemological philosophy concerned with the possibility of experience and meaning. Although there are differences between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological construction, both of them reduced their practices to “the study of essences… (where the philosopher) puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity’” (Kockelmans, 356).

            To talk about experience and meaning one needs to introduce some extremely important, yet debatable terminology. However, I am not going to defend it here, but postulate its necessity to the given task. Experience and meaning do not occur in an empty space (or vacuum), but along with the concepts of subject and object. Phenomenologically speaking then, this practice becomes a desire to “return to objects as experienced by the subjects” (Leitch, 151). At the affective level, phenomenology is a contemplative description of experience, where as Leitch continues to argue, “objects come to a subject through direct intuition, (and) the subject constitutes the objects in acts of bestowing meaning” [iii] . Nonetheless, a subject, in order to bestow meaning, needs to be conscious of the object being experienced. Husserl called this being “conscious of” intentionality. As Colin Smith argued, in his introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s book Phenomenology of Perception, “it is a question of recognizing consciousness itself as a project of the world” (XX). Here, consciousness becomes the union-and-interception of the field of meaning and the field of experience between subject and object. Furthermore, as Joseph Kockelmans clarified, “intentionality is the characteristic property of our consciousness, always directing this consciousness to that which it itself is not… (yet) intentionality has nothing to do with “real” objects, but is essentially an act that gives meaning” (34).

            Deconstructively, subject and object work in tandem rather than against each other. “Our relationship to the world,” says Merleau-Ponty, “as it is untiringly enunciated within us, is not a thing which can be further clarified by analysis: philosophy can only place it once more before our eyes and present it for our ratification” (Kockelmans, 370). In fact, as I will argue, there is no subject without an object (and vice-versa). There cannot be pure consciousness divorced from everything else. Pure consciousness does not make sense because the Self is conscious of something. Therefore, the Self as a conscious being is not empty, and since it is not empty it must work in relation to the experience and the meaning it posits: intentionality is a projection of the subject.

            In order for a subject to be conscious of his/her-Self it must first posit itself as an object in the field of experience and meaning, thus producing a subject conscious of being conscious. However, this construction does not necessarily imply that the subject is

conscious of being Self-conscious. It is insufficient to argue that the conscious is not empty because I must be conscious of something if I am conscious at all. This argument is too idealistic since being conscious of One’s self leads to pure consciousness. Merleau-Ponty tried to resolve this problem by claiming that “there is not inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself” ( Kockelmans, 361). In order to avoid this problem, one needs to postulate that in order for a subject to be Self-conscious of being conscious it must reflect back into its own subjectivity as an object: consciousness needs to make itself an object in order to see itself as a conscious being. Only as a double-consciousness does Self-consciousness take place. Also, it is through this “reflection” that one becomes aware of being present to Oneself; furthermore, it is this practice that leads one to discover the possibility of an “outside spectator.” Following this argument, subject and object are united-and-intercepted in the field of experience, thus they “spring together” creating meaning for the work of art. Only in this manner, The Origin of the Work of Art, as sought by Martin Heidegger, becomes the groundless and emanating truth of the triad subject, object and “world”.

            As implied before, the fundamental origin of the work of art lies between the union-and-interception of the field of experience and meaning. This means that literature is the “embodiment of human experience” and meaning (Leitch, 161). This is an astonishing new way of looking at literature because it implies that through it humankind can reactivate its affective space. However plausible it sounds, this position also sets us up against other emancepatory discourse practices. This position also sets literature against itself, forcing it to fragment into different genres. Therefore, whether one chooses to integrate a discourse to another one is just a matter of choice. I chose poetry not as a genre like Heidegger had in mind, or as a form that emancipates itself from literature. Nor I choose poetry’s “pole” like Hegel, Sartre and Foucault in their “prose of the world.” I chose poetry as an aesthetic discourse because there the poet is a privileged figure since he must practice, as Leitch elaborates, “radical forms of bracketing… while craving for the most intense and pure representation of Self and reality” (162). Phenomenologically this means that the poet reincarnates in writing his/her experiences, bestowing it with meaning: writing becomes a form of bracketing. Hermeneutically, this means that the poet’s oeuvre is a reflection of the subject’s experience as it is projected into the field of meaning, and imprinted onto the textual web. 

            It is impossible to try to escape the question regarding the autonomy of the work of art. However, I am not going to question here its autonomy, otherwise I will end up with a contradiction. For the Geneva Critics, for instance, literature is not a manifestation of social reality. Intrinsically, this means that “a text” is not an object per se, otherwise, as readers one would not be able to reveal the consciousness of the writer as it is presented in time and space. For these critics, literature is an act rather than an object. As Leitch explains, for the Geneva Critics “literature was a process, not a product” (214). Basically, this contradicts one of the propositions in this analysis: the positing of a subject brings about the positing of an object, or as Theodor Adorno from the Frankfurt School proclaimed, in his essay Subject and Object, “an object (is) also a subject” (Arato, 502). In fact, he continues “objectivity can be conceived without a subject; not so subjectivity without an object”. After all Adorno’s conclusion reminds us that “the object….is not so thorough dependent on the subject as the subject is on objectivity… If one wants to reach the object… its subjective attributes or qualities are not to be eliminated, for precisely that would run counter to the primacy of the object” (Arato, 502)

            Strategically, I am going against the grain of the Geneva Critics, who also saw as a weakness in phenomenology the extrinsic idea of choosing one sample out of the entire oeuvre. To some extent, I do agree with their argument that one must not use “a piece” to present a revealing and coherent vision of the writer’s experience. The reason they claimed this as a weakness is that a work is not self-enclosed [iv] . Although I disagree with their claim, I do not disagree with their reason. I think it is a matter of knowing how to choose the “best” piece that would bring together the oeuvre, like a hinge holds and brings together the door and the wall without being part of either space.

The principal characteristic of Pablo Neruda’s poetry is his insistence that the logic of the Self is the same as the logic of the universe. This reminds us of Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that, as Remy Kwant synthesizes, “the human subject, the body-subject, is simply real mutual compenetration with a real world. Not matter how profoundly we penetrate into the subject, we always find the world, the real world, in it… the subject is nothing else than the project of the world, mutual compenetration with the world” (Kockelmans, 387).  Therefore, it can be found everywhere. In fact, his poetry is an attempt to capture and frame the Self as something portraitable. Thus, one finds some sort of painting in books such as Odas Elementales, Los Versos del Capitán, Tercera Residencia, El Canto General, Confieso que he Vivido, Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada. To illustrate this theme I will use one of his lesser known poems titled Autorretrato.

 It is first necessary to offer a frame for Neruda’s account of a retrato. The portrait (el retrato) is an object which “represents” a person by way of painting. It could also be the description of a person’s figure. What I would like to point out is that in this account, el retrato is not necessarily a “composed image.” Moreover, it can also be a “description,” which is to say that it is some sort of history of a person. In this sense, el retrato can be directly associated with a biography. Here a portrait, usually understood as a biproduct of painting, is linked to writing.

Painting and writing. Writing or painting. Both activities require a body movement, in order to be produced. Of course, in painting the movements can be seen as having “more room” and freedom, since I can start a painting any place I want on the canvas. However, on a page I can only begin from the left side and move to the right side, as in English and Spanish. In fact, our obsession with images goes as far as to claim that “a picture speaks more than a thousand words.” The comparison is valuable to the framing (as in assembling or bracketing) of the account, because as Jacques Derrida says, “framing always supports and contains that which, by itself, collapses forthwith” (Truth,  79).

I do not wish to develop an account of the frame in Neruda’s poem. But it is necessary to explain the prefix in the title autorretrato, since the poem deals with the Self rather than the product of someone other than the Self. In his account of “self-portraiture,” in the essay Cézanne’s Mirror Stage, Hugh Silverman notes that the Spanish noun autorretrato is placed in a space of ambiguity in which we do not know whether “the prefix is auto- or autor-” [v] . Furthermore, he mentions that the Greek prefix implies “of itself” (mismo) and “of oneself” (propio), which is important to the framing of Neruda’s retrato.

According to the frame mentioned above, as Silverman states, “the author portrays and is portrayed. To the Spanish way of speaking,” he continues, “the self is an author –the direct connection with autobiography is established –the self originates the painting, the self produces its own picture of itself as a writer might write about his or her own life, as an autobiographer might write his or her own life” (264). His essay deals with the problem of “self-portraiture,” as it is postulated by a theory of visibility proposed by Merleau-Ponty, and as Remy Kwant reminds us, “all looking takes place within a field of vision” (Kockelmans, 380). In this sense, Silverman’s analysis gives us the possibility to say that self-portrait is a portrait produced by the Self who is painting it, or autobiography is biography produced by the Self who is writing it. What needs to be added to this proposition is that in Spanish the noun author (autor) implies that one is the cause of something, specifically dealing with an action that can either be scientific, literary or artistic. Therefore, in Spanish there is a difference between being an author and being a writer.  

Unlike the English word, autorretrato implies two different activities: to paint and to write. Moreover, the activity dealing with the product called “self-portrait,” as an object of some action executed by the Self, can be understood either as a visual image –as is the case in painting –or as a mental image –as is the case in writing. The final product as an object of either painting or writing is a self-portrait. A careful reading of Silverman’s essay will introduce us to the action, and activity of self-portraiture. In Spanish, the activity will not be defined by the object itself: portrait implies a painting made by someone other than the Self, whereas self-portrait means an activity executed by the Self to render itself in painting.

The verb implying the reflexive action of painting one’s Self is retratarse. Thus, the self (“uno mismo”) brackets the Self as an object. The Self thus becomes a “patient”. However, one needs to ask, how does the “Self” become the “agent” in the action of retratarse? The verb is linked directly to the action implying to retrieve oneself after taking a position. This action has a counterpart in the English verb to retract, meaning “to take back,” “to withdraw,” “to draw in,” “draw back,” “to pull in,” “to pull back.” The agent of the action in the English word is not necessarily the Self. In the Spanish language retractarse means “desdecirse de lo que se ha dicho,” that is, to undo or unsay what the Self has already said or done.  The translation of all the verbs (their meanings) given in English are contained in the Spanish verb Retraer.

Neruda posits the problem that brings together writing and painting by asking at the beginning of his poem, 

¿Cómo arreglarse para parecer mal y
quedar bien?

 

Here, the poet gives us an inverted image. He asks how is one to fix one’s Self to look bad, and at the end look good in the object. The question is, how can I fix myself to be myself without having to look like some else? Silverman reminds us that the problem is that “often rectifying the self to look like the pose of another, self-portraiture offers a pictorial account of the self. In self-portraiture, the self constitutes itself as other” (263). Of course, this brings us to an account of self-portraiture as painting not as writing. In the autobiographical sense, writing is a “mask” (fachada) for the Self, so what needs to be done is to uncover it, to make it visible to the eye.

            The inverted image mentioned above comes from identifying the self-portrait with the mirror that the painter uses in order to paint his-her-Self. For Neruda, the action of retratarse

Es como cuando uno se
 mira al espejo (o al retrato), buscándose
el ángulo bello (sin que nadie
lo observe), pero sigue siendo uno mismo
siempre.

 

But, what happens when this “self-portrait” is in writing instead of painting? What is the mirror in this case? The mirror in this situation is language composed by a chain of signifiers producing the words the poet uses in order to render itself visible to the reader’s eye. But, we have learned from Saussure, Heidegger, Lacan and Kristeva that there is a gap in-between; thus Merleau-Pointy points out, “it is the office of language to cause essences to exist in a state of separation which is merely apparent, since through language they still rest upon the ante-predicative life of consciousness” (Kockelmans, 367). Reflecting back into painting, according to Silverman, the painter’s or writer’s eye, “sees lacks and rectifies them in painting (writing) because the painter (poet) enters into the texture of the world with its multiplicity of sense” (266). Moreover, he also says that “to everyday seeing, the lacks remain invisible”. Since “the lacks remain invisible” one is always, as Neruda explains, trying to render the true self. He makes this position apparent by saying,

otros imprimirán la verdad de lo que
quieren ser, otros se preguntarán, ¿cómo
soy? Pero la verdad es que todos vivimos
acechándonos a nosotros mismos,
declarando sólo lo más visible, escondiendo
la irregularidad del aprendizaje y
del tiempo.

 

When painting/writing itself the Self will always look as if it is an Other. For the poet, the moment of portrayal becomes the moment when one seeks the Self while fixing Oneself as Another [vi] . An example of this is the smile one usually puts on when a picture is being taken. The smile offers an alternative to the Self while trying to frame (bracket) itself in the picture. The question regarding pictures will not be explored here, although it may offer a third paradigm to the binary constructed before.

            One important question Neruda asked at the moment of portrayal is that of presentation (¿cómo soy?). The question –or interrogation –is essential to the activity of painting since this captures the image of the Self and not the soul. However, through the activity of imagination [vii] , in writing the Self must paint the soul as something alive. After all as Immanuel Kant argued, “los conceptos de experiencia tienen… su territorio en la naturaleza, como conjunto de todos los objetos del sentido” (99). Kant’s argument still remains obscure, not completely clarifying the role the imagination plays in bracketing both painting and writing. Geoffrey Hartman, one of the foremost phenomenologists of the New Critic group, while examining Wordsworth’s poetry writes, “the imagination goes out to nature, becomes fertile, and produces a ‘creation’” (161). Thus, retratarse and retractarse, closely associated with the activity of retraer, is an extracting of the soul as if it is coming out of the body. In fact, Silverman suggests that “the self-portrait cannot be a drawing or image of the self understood only as soul (psychē or anima); it must involve the body” (264). This is one reason why Neruda, after postulating that the mirror is the portrait where one must look when nobody is looking, says in his poem

…soy o creo ser duro de
nariz, mínimo de ojos, escaso de pelos
en la cabeza, creciente de abdomen, largo
de piernas, ancho de suelas, amarillo de
tez…

           

As one may already expect, in Neruda the body, as a whole and specific object to be “seen,” is an indefinite object of the mind to be created by the imagination. In fact, here the poet offers a theory dealing with the concept of nationality as it is compared with self-portrait and the construction of a nation. For the poet, it is easy to proclaim to be “chileno a perpetuidad.” Of course, the connection between imagination, writing and literature as founding(s) of nation is a theme that has been highly debated after the monumental book by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, was published. Nonetheless, self-portraiture is not seen as creating “an imaginary” which would lead to the creation of a nation. As an activity, self-portraiture is not linked to the founding of a nation [viii] because in order for a nation to be, the subject constituting that nation must forget. Ernest Renan reminds us that “forgetting… is a crucial factor in the creation of the nation” (Bhabha, 11). Whatever the definition is, it cannot be denied that there is a direct connection between “to be born,” the nation (natio) and culture. Perhaps, this is one of the most fervent critiques done against Neruda, since here nation and culture are linked to barbarism. This connection may not be at all apparent, but as Max Horkheimer declared, “reason has to master rebellious feelings and instincts, the inhibition of which is supposed to make human cooperation possible” (Arato, 30). Thus, reason becomes the foundation of culture, so culture has as a telos “to tame this element of brute force imminent in the principle of bodily strength” (Arato, 38). Thefore, as Adorno concludes, “there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Arato, 233). 

            The previous point is just theorizing about nationality, since Neruda’s poetry in fact offers a paradigmatic interpretation regarding nationalism. His poetry crosses over frontiers made by the politics and geography of the countries. In this sense, for Neruda a human is a citizen of the world in which all things inhabit. As a poet, it is that “inhabiting” that he tries to frame (bracket) in his poem autorretrato. In a way, the poem questions –the asking in the between of interrogation –the possibility of writing within the crossing of the seen and seeing.

            According to what is said above, the poet needs to interrogate the relationship between the body and the world, and the function of poetry. To ask that question is to create a poetry that escapes the artificial (the dead) and enters life (movement). By questioning the crossing –the visibility in the case of Merleau-Ponty –the poet articulates the function and meaning of poetry in contemporary societies. The poet in writing him or herself must write the world, the universe and the problems that affect our societies. As Leitch points out, the reason the poet has “access” to this “special sacred place” called the universe is because “poetic language embodied the richness and promise of man’s most noble and holy self” (52). This is critical to understand because through its poem, the poet becomes an individual who tries to liberate the subject from the tyranny of his/her culture. Therefore, the poet expresses the resiliency, soul and genius of the human race.  This position is expressed by Heidegger, when he asks the same question Hölderlin asked,“what are poets for in a destitute time?,” in his piece titled “What are Poets For?” (91).

Reid Alstair says about Neruda, “he had legions of friends. Only some of them were human beings; the others were plants, animals, trees, landscapes, objects of all description, and houses. Neruda appeared to live on terms of intimacy with the world of things, and to carry on secret conversations with all kinds of beings, animate and inanimate, conversations that often became poems” (Poirot, 9) Therefore, the role of the poet for Neruda seems to be that in painting/writing him or herself  the poet must portray the world through his body. The body here serves as a filter, as an in-between the imagination and the world of things.

The movement characterized by the distance between the body and the object, is allowed to be written/painted by the visibility that exists between the imagination and the seen. In fact, here the poet offers us a bracketing and a frame in which visibility has been captured as a movement between both the seen (the visible) and the seeing (as in the case of painting) or imagination (as in the case of writing). Here this distancing is associated with the “unsaying” proposed above when retracting and rendering one’s Self. Moreover, between the saying and the unsaying, an abyss opens up putting at stake the truth that emerges out of the center of both sides. It is in that truth that the poet needs to be on in order to begin a dialogue with the world. Neruda accomplished that task, and as result his “conversation(s) often became poems” where one can see/read that the poet was able to retrieve something from the object with which he or she was talking to [ix] . For this reason Neruda claimed to have had knowledge of everything,

llegué a ser uno solo con mi tierra,
conocí a cada uno de sus hijos...

           

Neruda as a poet uses his body and imagination to know and write/paint about the things of the world; about the universe. As well as Merleau-Ponty, Neruda is interested in framing “the net of brute sense” that characterizes “the very texture of the sense of things” (Kockelmans, 266). The poet captures the “sounds” and movements of things as they converse with one another. The poet writes those conversations by becoming one with them. For this reason, Neruda has no problem saying

 

Me llamo pájaro Pablo,
ave de una sola pluma,
volador de sombra clara
y de claridad confusa,
las alas no se me ven,
los oídos me retumban
cuando paso entre los árboles
o debajo de las tumbas
cual un funesto paraguas
...
estirado como un arco...

 

            Neruda’s Self extends in and on the world as an umbrella does over a head, embedding everything as to bring it with him and write/paint about the world. His work (obra) in this sense is an autobiography of Neruda and at the same time an autobiography of the world. Becoming one with the world, the world writes itself through the poet, and it displays it as a canvas in arching form. This “bird’s eye” view of things allowed Neruda to frame the visibility in its complete movement, or as Silverman says about Merleau-Ponty, he “grasp(ed) the totality from a distance” (265). Of course, the distance which allows for visibility to happen is already framed between the seen and the seeing, what Neruda does is bring the self to the world and on his way back, visibility is “captured” by the world of the poet: the poem and the wor(l)d. Extending himself to the world, the poet leaves something of his in the things he has written/painted about in the poem. José Venturelli says that Neruda “believed that things were charged with the presence of others –that is, an object had been lived with by other people, and something of the life of the other person remained in it, tangibly” (Poirot, 140)

            Those “tangible” traces Neruda wanted to retrieve (retraer) to write/paint them in his poems. The poem for Neruda is a residence which houses a world composed and ordered by the language (word). And as can be expected, the world created by Neruda’s words are intertwined (entrelazados) with the objects in the physical world. Thus, the poem in itself is not only an autobiography and self-portrait, but also a recipe where Neruda’s Self (incarnated and poetic) holds everything together by his use of the words. Towards the end of his poem Autorretrato Neruda states that he is

…resplandeciente
con mi cuaderno, monumental de
apetito, tigre para dormir, sosegado en
la alegría, inspector del cielo nocturno,
trabajador invisible, desordenado,
persistente, valiente por necesidad, cobarde
sin pecado, soñoliento de vocación,
amable de mujeres, activo por padecimiento,
poeta por maldición y tonto de capirote.

 

The most astonishing line of the poem happens to be the account he gives about being a poet. As a portrayer and writer of the world, the poet must remain active to the movements happening between the self and the world. He or she must give them life as well as to paint and write the movement in his poetry. The poem as a movement presents the life that keeps the world moving together. So, if the poet has the privilege to see, hear and capture the thingness and beingness of the world, why is the poet cursed? The reason is that as a presenter of the world, the poet must display his-her-Self while simultaneously revealing the happening of the world. It is for this reason that the poet must remain absent even though his writing/painting is an auto-. Neruda claims this in another poem where he says,

no llames a mi pecho, estoy ausente.
Vive en mi ausencia como en una casa.
Es una casa tan grande la ausencia
que pasarás en ella a través de los muros
y colgarás los cuadros en el aire.
Es una casa tan transparente la ausencia
que yo sin vida te veré vivir
y si sufres, mi amor, me moriré otra vez.

            In this sense, the poet must be everywhere and nowhere. The poet must remain absent while his presence requires for him/her to be a present. The poet in order to capture the self of the world must live in contradiction with itself. In fact, it can be said that the activity of presenting the visibility of the world as a movement that ceases to be seen by the everyday eye is the fate of the poet. Once the poet fails to continue to do this he/she might as well disappear, becoming extinct and remembered only as part of the historiography of poetry. The poet must suffer his-her-Self while at the same time suffer the self of the world. What other great burden could there be for a poet if not to know that in the great destitute time he/she is condemned to become one with the world that sees him as an absence rather than a presence? Neruda had hopes that the world one day will accept the poet, and for that future he says, 

Cuando quieran verme ya saben:
búsquenme donde no estoy
y si les sobra tiempo y boca
pueden hablar con mi retrato.

 

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[i] “Stronger force” does not necessarily mean that one force is greater than another, but it points to the fact that the impact one had that the other did not achieve. Indeed, many poets “confessed” to be followers of Vallejo while refuting Neruda. In the end, many accepted to have started from Neruda’s poetic universe, thus indicating that both “forces” can be intrinsically found in any analytic discourse about Latin America poetry.

[ii] I have borrowed and used the term with the same meaning Lyotard does in his book by the same title.

[iii] I have changed the tense of the structure to imply a present activity.

[iv] Leitch; “for Geneva Phenomenologist a literary work was not an object; genre was an unproductive extrinsic concept; an individual work in isolation from the oeuvre did not offer a coherence vision; the individual work, in effect, was not self-enclosed”(158).

[v] See chapter 14 of the book The Merleau-Ponty Asthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Translated by Galen Johnson. For Silvermans citations, all quotes come from this book, although an extended version of his essay is found in one of his books.

[vi] This linguistic construction is introduced by Paul Ricour.

[vii] Derrida tells us that “imagination is the faculty of presentation”(110). The Truth in Painting.

[viii] One may want to claim that Norman Rockwell tried to portray the nation. The problem is that he did not try to form a nation. In other cases, painting has been use as propaganda, as it was the case with fascism.

[ix] This critique is similar to the one offer by Derrida when he says that truth “opens the abyss… what is at stake in painting is truth, and in truth what is at stake is the abyss”(7)

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