ayala surrealism chilean poetry

8/12/2019 Ayala Surrealism Chilean Poetry

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179

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY OF SURREALISM

IN LATE-TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHILEAN POETRY

MATAS AYALA

Surrealism in Latin America had an enormous influence on literature during

the first half of the twentieth century, as evidenced by the many tributes and

publications from Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Argentina dedicated to the move-

ment.Moreover, it is well known that concepts such as lo real maravillosoand

magical realism can be traced to the treatment of the uncanny and the fantasticin surrealism. However, in the second half of the century, surrealist influence in

Latin America was diluted by the general impact of the avant-garde. For exam-

ple, many avant-garde motifs and proceduressuch as chance, automatism,

and montagethat in Latin America appeared to be an influence of surreal-

ism were likewise employed by Dadaism in different contexts and with differ-

ent results. Besides a handful of authors that clearly belong to the surrealist

hinterland, which persists today, the most important Latin American literary

movements (estridentismo [stridentism], ultrasmo [ultraism],creacionismo[creationism]) and magazines (Martn Fierro, Amauta) did not adhere to the

tenets of surrealism.

Surrealism is, then, paradoxically confronted with its inadaptability in a

pure form. As the criticValentn Fernidn states in a polemic article, surreal-ism influenced the most important poets of the Latin American avant-garde

(Oliverio Girondo, Pablo Neruda, Csar Vallejo), but none of them strictly

identified themselves as surrealists. In Latin America, European surrealism

took on a new form, one mixed with romantic subjectivity, political programs,

and the discourse of trans-culturalism, as with the novelist Alejo Carpentiers

concept of lo real maravilloso.Taken as a whole, the poetry of Octavio Paz, the

foremost promoter of surrealism aer World War II, can at best be character-

ized as quasi-surrealist. ere are books by Paz that are more clearly associated

with surrealism, such asguila o sol? (; Eagle or Sun?,), but his work

seems today to be an owl of Minerva flying at dusk, as his insistence on the

importance of this movement for twentieth-century literature is more in recog-

nition of its legacy than its validity as a future program for avant-garde poetics.

In the following pages, I will problematize some of this diluted surrealistlegacy by discussing three Chilean poets who emerged during the s and

s: Juan Luis Martnez (), Ral Zurita (b. ), and Claudio Bertoni


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(b. ). None of them identified himself as a surrealist, but all of them have

recognized the influence of surrealism on their production. Although diver-

gent in their respective aesthetic projects, these poets all incorporated photog-

raphya medium that became an important documentary tool in a troubled

Chile during the s and sinto their literary works to create layers of

meaning and additional complexity, revealing the influence of surrealist tech-

niques.e relationship between surrealism and photography has been studied

from several viewpoints: photographys interaction with text in magazines and

books,photography as the unconscious of surrealism,and the use of photog-

raphy to explore a variety of themes such as the city, desire, and orientalism.

I will show how these poets used photography to renew some classic surrealist

motifs, including the use of text and image as a conceptual enigma in the works

of Martnez, dream and fantasy as the occasion for redemption in Zurita, andthe city as a space of aleatory encounters in Bertoni.

Photography and the Marvelous in Juan Luis MartnezsLa nueva novella

Juan Luis Martnezs La nueva novela(; e new novel)is both a hermetic

and a playful work. is is apparent from the cover of the book, where, in place

of the traditional name of the author, two names are crossed out (fig. ). e

surrealist influence is manifest in the books combination of estrangement and

humor, nonsense and play, and the uncanny and ludic. Indeed, Martnezs work

pushes the bounds of a traditional book of poetry. e work can be justifiably

characterized as an art book due to the consistent design, which features therepetition of different book elementsfor example, title, epigraph, numbered

parts, and footnotes. e actual text, most of which is prose, is minimal and

eccentric. Much of La nueva novelacomprises pastiches of citations, intertex-

tual references, images, and collages.

e images in Martnezs work oen move beyond a supplemental and dec-

orative function to become the centerpiece. ese images have diverse prov-

enance: some are drawings by the author, others are photographs from books

and magazines, advertisements, and even reproductions of high art. More

important than the origin of these images is how the juxtaposition of text and

image creates multiple associations through repetition, doubling, cropping, and

collage. Allusion and fragmentation are brought to the fore, sacrificing seman-

tic clarity. Martnez makes numerous direct references to Dadaist and surreal-

ist authorsas he employs avant-garde practices such as the clear opposition

to realism, the negation of conventional notions of genre, and the rejection oftradition as a source of authority. Just as with the classic works of European

surrealism, La nueva novelaplays with the idea of the book and reflects upon

Fig. 1.

Cover of Juan Luis Martnez,

La nueva novela(Santiago:

Ediciones Archivo, 1985).


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181THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY OF SURREALISM


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Fig. 3.

Front and back cover of Ral

Zurita, Purgatorio(Santiago:

Editorial Universitaria, 1979),

featuring a photograph by

Zurita.

cameras recording the event itself ) nor truly private (a photograph taken later,

of the scar, appears on a book cover). Zurita described the event this way: It

was absolutely conscious and premeditated . . . I locked myself in the bathroom,

I put an iron in the flames of the hot water heater until it was red and I put it

to my lecheek. Aer thatI dont know why, and maybe a psychiatrist could

explain it wellI felt that that action reunited me a little. I was in a state of total

dissociation. Aer a while I realized that if I were to write something, it had to

start from this.e same image appears on the back cover, with the accom-

panying text: Ahora Zurita / que rapado y quemado / te hace el arte // Santiago

de Chile / . (Now Zurita / shaved and burned / art makes you // Santiago

de Chile / .)

Here, we have a series of elements that are further developed in Zuritas

work. On the one hand, there is the literary construction of a subject in a state

of psychic fragmentation. e self-inflicted wound could be a way to over-

come this fragmentation through painful bodily presence. If the cut on the skinis to be understood as a form of writing, it is marked through presence. In

the same fashion, the photograph of the scar functions as a testimony of that


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is the author, the text is in the first-person singular and indicates a different

name and gender (Rachel) from that of the author (Ral Zurita). e text here

also makes an allusion to the famous first tercet of Dantes Divine Comedy:

Midway in the journey of our life / I came to myself in a dark wood, / for the

straight way was lost.

As is evident from the title of Zuritas book, Dantes work is the primary

intertextual link to Purgatorio,both as a narrative of ascension and as a source

of Catholic figures and motifs. At the bottom of this spread of Purgatorio,we

read in Latin, Ego sum qui sum (I am who I am), a tautological quotation

from the Bible (Exodus :) in which God declares the certainty of his exis-

tence and his power. e line appears in a different font from the rest of the text

and is perfectly divided across the pages. e image of the author and the two

texts combine a fragmentation of the self and the fantasy of a godlike certaintyan excessive certainty acquired only through the text.

e photographic representation of the authors wound implies an intersub-

jective gaze. In readings that aim to historicize Zuritas work, this articulation

of a collapsed subjectivity is related to the repressed collective subject of the

nation of Chile under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which

lasted from to . InMargins and Institutions,Nelly Richard asserts that,

during this time in Chile, performance artists used the body to articulate the

private and public spheres of life. Zurita used bodily pain in particular as the

element of suture between the subjective and the collective.Pain, conceived as

the traumatic presence of the body, connects the identification of the artist with

collective suffering. As Richard states, Self-punishment merges with an us in

that it is both redeemer and redeemed in a tradition of communal sacrifice, or

the ritual exorcism of violence.

Another way of relating the subject and society is through the fantasy and

collective redemption of poetic text, as exemplified by the numerous images

of the Chilean landscape in Zuritas work. In these images, the reader is con-

fronted with what the critic Walter Benjamin, referring to surrealist practices,

termed the profane illumination of the poetic image based on material.In

Purgatorio,different spaces interact: on one side are the virtual spaces of math-

ematics, text, and dreams; on the other, the real spaces of Chilean geography

and the printed page. rough Zuritas text, various topologiesthe psychic,

the collective, the geographic, and the politicalcollapse in on one another. In

this new topology, dreams and reality communicate, the marvelous turns real,

life and work coincide, and language and context resignify each other. is is

exemplified in Para Atacama del desierto (For Atacama of the Desert), namedfor a -mile strip of land located in the north of Chile that is said to be the

driest desert in the world:


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For Atacama of the Desert

i. Let us look then at the Atacama Desert

ii. Let us look at our loneliness in the desert.

So that desolate before these shadows the landscape becomes a cross

stretched out over Chile and the loneliness of my shadow then sees the

redeeming of the other shadows: My own Redemption in the Desert.

iii. Who would then credit the redeeming of my shadow

iv. Who would speak of the deserts loneliness

So that my shadow begins to touch your shadow and your shadow that

other shadow and so on until all Chile is just one shadow with open arms:

one long shadow crowned with thorns

v. en the Cross will be merely my shadow opening its arms

vi. We will then be the Deserts Crown of orns

vii. en nailed shadow to shadow like a Cross stretched out over Chile we

will have seen forever the Solitary Expiring of the Atacama Desert.

In this section of poems about the Atacama Desertas in the section reas

verdes (Green areas) of Purgatorio,where a Cartesian space overlaps with the

pastoral landscape of cows out to pasture, creating a sort of virtual realitythe

poet places a new or illusory reality of delirium or messianic delusion upon the

image of the desert. Here, imagination and reality merge and the text occupies

the locus of the unconscious in a gesture reminiscent of Bretons surrealism but

with the added space for collective redemption.

Claudio Bertoni and the Desire of Everyday Life

Claudio Bertoni is a poet, photographer, and visual artist who has succeeded

in incorporating these different media into coherent works. Among Chilean

poets, Bertoni has won a unique and numerous following as a former hippie,a Buddhism specialist, and a connoisseur of soul and jazz music. In his

oen transparently autobiographical poetry, Bertoni refers to himself in a


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self-deprecating manner reflecting everyday speech. His writing resembles a

diary, wherein he registers fleeting thoughts and details of his private life, with

its many contretemps, regardless of how dull, absurd, silly, or bizarre they may

seem. Elements of mass culture, such as his favorite musical genres and TV

programs, are mixed with traditionally serious subjects such as God, illness,

death, and loneliness.

From the start, sex and desire have been important themes of Bertonis work,

particularly the fugitive desire and sexual attraction caused by aleatory encoun-

ters in the city. As Benjamin observes, in analyzing the French poet Charles

Baudelaire, e delight of the city dweller is not so much love at first sight as

love at last sight.In the shocking moment of the visual encounter, the urban

dweller falls in love with someone he is never going to see again. e flneur,

who relishes in the anonymity of the chance encounter, finds an answer to hisdesires in the city. Taken up by the surrealists, this motif was labeled objective

chance and has an important place in poet Louis Aragons Le paysan de Paris

(;e Paris Peasant, ) and Bretons Nadja(),in which an enigmatic

anxiety is perceived in the people and objects found in the city. Bertoni takes

the Baudelairian and surrealist principle of the masculine gaze to its mundane

extremes. He looks for and finds attractive women everywhere in the city: on

sidewalks and buses, in queues, cafs, and shops (fig. ). e urban space is

organized through women as well as time. Bertoni embodies the anxiety of

male desire in the modern city.

e famous line by Pablo Neruda, Love is so short; forgetting, so long,

from Poema , was rewritten by Bertoni in a short poem titled Una vez

ms (Once more), which reads, e miniskirt is so short; forgetting, so long.

e sublimity of love and the complexity of mourning the object of desire are

reduced to the shock that the miniskirtand the fragmented female body

provokes in the poetic subject. e miniskirt is an object of desire as wellnot

as something lost, but rather as an anonymous, ephemeral object that was never

possessed in the first place. e differences between Neruda and Bertoni lie in

their tone (the former solemn and the latter playful) and their positioning of

the poetic subject. In Veinte poemas de amor y una cancin desesperada(;

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,), Neruda embodies the romantic

subject prior to his avant-garde period, while in Una vez ms, Bertoni uses

humor: he references a common urban experience in which daily life is sud-

denly disrupted by the sight of an anonymous and attractive woman.

One remarkable feature of Bertonis poetry is its metonymic articulation

a predominant trope in his writingthrough which chance and desire inter-sect in the urban landscape. e poetic persona does not have to possess the

object of desire but only pass close enough to obtain a certain satisfaction. For


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190 AYALA

example, in the text Algo es algo, (Somethings better than nothing), Bertoni

writes, I take a bus / and I see a woman / who will never be mine // I sit behind

her / and her hair caresses / my fingers.Desire is fulfilled, or at least subli-

mated, by an accidental, unconscious, and light caress of the womans haira

fragment of her body, flitting across the fingers of the poetic subject. Many of

Bertonis poems are so short that they could have been jotted down at the same

spot were the experiences took place, as a literary snapshot of the moment. e

model for this writing is not only the diary but also photography.

Photographs of women caught in the street by chance supplement many of

Bertonis poems. A collection of these photographs taken in the s and s

was published recently in the book Chilenas ().As a veteran street pho-

tographer, Bertoni carries his camera hanging around his neck, and when the

occasion arises, he has to point and shoot the photograph in an instant. Oen

speed is more important than perfect composition in registering the passing

subject. Some of these photos exhibit an awkward framing, and the position of

the photographer does not always seem to occupy the most privileged point of

view (figs. ).e act of taking a picture is oen homologous to a violent act of possession,

in which the camera takes the place of a weapon or phallus. To photograph

Fig. 5.

Claudio Bertoni (Chilean,

b.1946).Photograph from ClaudioBertoni, Chilenas(Santiago:Ocho Libros, 2009), 79.

Fig. 6.



Fig. 7.




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attractive women in the street without their consent could be considered an

act of crass male aggression. In spite of the masculine impulse underlying his

project, Bertoni was a shy photographer; sometimes he did not even dare to

look through the viewfinder to focus and frame. Oen, he seems to have taken

the picture without raising the camera up to eye level; the camera remained on

his chest while he shot the photograph, one could say, from the heart. ese

pictures are not completely conscious in their focus and framing, and thus the

chance encounter in the city is reinforced by a chance snapshot that questions

the power of the male gaze.

It seems that blurred, unbalanced, and unfocused compositions enact the

transgressive form of desire itself: blind and undiscerning, brief in its explosion

but inexhaustible. Nevertheless, these unconscious, or half-conscious, snap-

shots are not violent in their representation of theflneurssurprise encounter

with desire in the urban landscape. Essentially, the instability of composition in

these snapshots undoes the violence of the masculine gaze by highlighting the

male subjects lack of intervention or agency. In this way, Bertoni reinterprets

surrealist automatism by inscribing desire in the work of art without making it aromantic fetish. While avoiding the the creation of suggestive imagery through

the operations of chance,he remains close to the surrealist movement by


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192 AYALA

recording fleeting desire. In Bertonis work, both poetry and photographs are

elements of a project based on chance encounters with the objects of desire.

Bertoni recognizes this desire as a lack, and its literary and visual representation

is likewise always marked by absence.

Martnez, Zurita, and Bertoni use photography, an essentially technical

medium, to complement the romantic aspects of literary surrealism that ide-

alize the Other and that offer synthesis among different elements. Martnezs

literary and visual games combine science and poetry, or knowledge and non-

senseopening marvelous and humorous interstices in the prosaic. In Zurita,

photographs with a referential function that combine life and art resignify the

psychic pain of the poets identity in crisis. Similarly, the geographical space

of fantasy provides the locus of collective redemption. Finally, in Bertoni, thedesire of the city dweller is set free through photography and poetry. e male

gaze finds different ways to compensate its desire, either by a metonymic pres-

ence or a sudden snapshot. Martnez, Zurita, and Bertoni, through the media-

tion of photography, open the literary to visuality, creating unclassifiable works,

and in this way, revitalizing the legacy of surrealism in the Chilean neo-avant-

garde poetry of the seventies and eighties.

Notes

is article is part of the research project Fondecyt number , supported

by CONICYT, Chile. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.

. roughout Latin America, a handful of literary and artistic journals were devel-

oped as a way to experiment at a formal level, to criticize the cultural field, and to

modernize through both the incorporation and reconfiguration of metropolitan

procedures and techniques. Among others magazines, it is necessary to mention

Martn Fierro(Buenos Aires, ),Amauta(Lima, ), Contemporneos

(Mexico, ), Revista de avance(Havana, ),Mandrgora(Santiago,

). . Dawn Ades, Photography and the Surrealist Text, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane

Livingston, eds., LAmour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, D.C.:

Corcoran Galley of Art, ),.

. Rosalind Krauss, e Photographic Conditions of Surrealism, in idem, e

Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT

Press, ), .

. Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography

in Interwar Paris(Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, ).

. David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social

Dissent(London: I.B. Taurus, ).

. Juan Luis Martnez, La nueva novela(Santiago: Editiones Archivo, ).


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. Martnez, La nueva novela, .

. Krauss, Photographic Conditions, .

. Dawn Ades,Photomontage(London: ames & Hudson, ), .

. Enrique Lihn and Pedro Lastra, Seales de ruta de Juan Luis Martnez (Santiago:

Ediciones Archivo, ), . . Rosalind Krauss, Corpus Delicti, October(): , .

. Valeria de los Ros, La fotografa como clave de lectura de La nueva novela,

Estudiosfilolgicos (): .

. De los Ros, Fotografa,.

. Ral Zurita, Ral Zurita: Abrir los ojos, mirar hacia el cielo, in Juan Andrs

Pia, Conversaciones con la poesa Chilena: Nicanor Parra, Eduardo Anguita,

Gonzalo Rojas, Enrique Lihn, Oscar Hahn, Ral Zurita (Santiago: Pehun, ),

, .

. Ral Zurita, Purgatorio (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, ), .Ral

Zurita, Purgatorio, , trans.Jeremy Jacobson (Pittsburgh: Latin AmericanLiterary Review Press, ), .

. is translation by Robert Hollander of Dantes La divina commedia(ca. )

is taken from the Princeton Dante Project, http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/

(May ). e Divine Comedy is divided into three major sections: Inferno,

Purgatory, andParadise.

. Nelly Richard,Margins and Institutions(Melbourne: Art & Text, ), .

. Richard,Margins and Institutions, ,

. Walter Benjamin, Surrealism: e Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,

in Selected Writings,vol. ,, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans.

Rodney Livinstones et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, ), .

. Zurita, Purgatorio, , .

. Walter Benjamin, e Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, in idem,

Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, vol. , , trans. Edmund

Jephcott et al., ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.:

Belknap, ), .

. Claudio Bertoni,Jvenes buenas mozas(Santiago: Cuarto Propio, ), .

. Bertoni,Jvenes buenas mozas, .

. Claudio Bertoni, Chilenas(Santiago: Ocho Libros, ).

. Krauss, Corpus Delicti, .


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Getty Research Institute

Issues & Debates

Edited by DAWN ADES, RITA EDER, and GRACIELA SPERANZA

SURREALISM INLATIN AMERICAVIVSIMO MUERTO


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THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE PUBLICATIONS PROGRAMomas W. Ga ehtgens, Director, Getty Research Institute

Gail Feigenbaum,Associate Director

J. Paul Getty Trust

Published by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Getty Publications

Getty Center Drive, Suite

Los Angeles, CA -

www.getty.edu/publications

Tobi Kaplan, Lauren Edson, John Hicks, and Laura Santiago,Manuscript Editors

Tobi Kaplan, Production Editor

Catherine Lorenz, Designer

Amita Molloy, Production CoordinatorDiane Franco, Typesetter

Stuart Smith, Series Designer

Type composed in Minion and Trade Gothic

Printed in TK through TK

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

[TK]

Front cover: [caption TK]

Back cover: [caption TK]

Frontispiece: Francis Als (Belgian, b. ), Hopscotch (Rayuela),, preparatory sketch for an intervention

in the exhibition Domin canbal(PAC MURCIA, ), Sala Vernicas, Murcia, Spain.

is volume evolved from Vivsimo Muerto: Debates on Surrealism in Latin America, a symposium held at

the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, June .

[Frontispiece]

Francis Als (Belgian,

b.1959). Hopscotch(Rayuela),2010, preparatory

sketch for an intervention in

the exhibition Domin canbal

(PAC MURCIA, 2010), Sala

Vernicas, Murcia, Spain.

Collection of the artist.


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vi Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

DAWN ADES, RITA EDER, AND GRACIELA SPERANZA

Part One. Surrealist Love Letters:

The Art and Poetry of Csar Moro

00 We Who Have neither Church nor Country:

Csar Moro and Surrealism DAWN ADES

00 Semiotics of the Body and the Passions in

Csar Moros Love Letters and Poems

YOLANDA WESTPHALEN

00 Making the Stone Speak: Csar Moro and the Object

KENT DICKSON

Part Two. Surrealist Encounters in the New World:

Pre-Columbian and Northwest Coast Art

00 Benjamin Pret and Paul Westheim:

Surrealism and Other Genealogies in the Land of the Aztecs

RITA EDER

00 Anthropology in the Journals Dynand El hijo prdigo:

A Comparative Analysis of Surrealist Inspiration

DANIEL GARZA USABIAGA

00Wolfgang Paalen:

e Totem as Sphinx

ANDREAS NEUFERT

Part Three. Revisiting the Surrealism Revolution:

Ideology and Action

000 Andr Bretons Anthology of Freedom:

e Contagious Power of Revolt

MARIA CLARA BERNAL

000 My Goddesses and My Monsters:Maria Martins and Surrealism in the s

TERRI GEIS

CONTENTS


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vi

Part Four. The Surrealism Effect: Legacies and Reception

in Art, Literature, and Politics

000 A Note Concerning Causality: Julio Cortzar and Surrealism

GAVIN PARKINSON

000 e Photographic Legacy of Surrealism in

Late-Twentieth-Century Chilean Poetry

MATAS AYALA

000 Wanderers: Surrealism and Contemporary Latin American Artand Fiction

GRACIELA SPERANZA

000 Biographical Notes on Contributors

00 Illustration Credits

000 Index


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ayala surrealism chilean poetry

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