Gender, politics, and poetry in twentieth-century Argentina PDF
Preview Gender, politics, and poetry in twentieth-century Argentina
Gender, Politics, and Poetry in TwentiethCentury Argentina Jill S. Kuhnheim University Press of Florida Gainesville Tallahassee Tampa Boca Raton Pensacola Orlando Miami Jacksonville Page iv Copyright 1996 by the Board of Regents of the State of Florida Printed in the United States of America on acidfree paper All rights reserved 01 00 99 98 97 96 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Kuhnheim, Jill S. Gender, politics, and poetry in twentiethcentury Argentina/ Jill S. Kuhnheim. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0813013933 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Argentine poetryWomen authorsHistory and criticism. 2. Argentine poetry20th centuryHistory and criticism. 3. Literature and societyArgentina. 4. Subjectivity in literature. I. Title PQ7633.K84 1996 9520489 861dc20 The interview with Olga Orozco is published with her permission. The following poems and poerty extracts are reprinted by permission: Inés Aráoz, "Estampar los intersticiales . . . , "from Los intersticiales. Courtesy of El imaginero, Poetry and Criticism Notebooks, Buenos Aires, Argentina. /Oliverio Girondo, "Aridandantemente," from En la Masmédula. Courtesy of the Estate of Oliverio Girondo. /Liliana Lukin, "Si yo hubiera . . . , "from Cortar por lo sano. Courtesy of Liliana Lukin./Olga Orozco. "Densos velos te cubren," from Mutaciones de la Realidad, 1979. Copyright by Editorial Sudamericana S.A., Buenos Aires, Argentina. /Cristina Piña. ''Oficio de máscaras," from Oficio de máscaras. Courtesy of Cristina Piña. /Alexandra Pizarnik, "has construído tu casa," "silencio," and "sólo la sed," from Extracción de la pedra de la locura 1968. Copyright by Editorial Sudamericana S.A., Buenos Aires, Argentina. The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprised of Florida A & M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611 Page v This book is for my father, E. James Kuhnheim Page vii Contents Preface ix Chapter 1. Defining the Subject 1 Chapter 2. From a Distance: Posmodernismo and Other Modernisms 20 Chapter 3. The Limits of Poetic Discourse: Oliverio Girondo and Olga 46 Orozco Chapter 4. The Struggle of Imagination: Alejandra Pizarnik and Olga Orozco 64 Chapter 5. Succeeding Silence: Recent Women Poets in Argentina 90 Chapter 6. The Author as Subject 123 Conclusion: Shifting Subjects 145 Appendix 149 Notes 175 Bibliography 183 Index 193 Page ix Preface This book began from a desire to examine the separation between social and aesthetic concerns characteristic of the analysis of twentiethcentury Latin American poetry. I wanted to reconnect the aesthetist strand, founded in modernism, that viewed the poem as an artistic construct, distant from the world, to the social thread that came to fruition in the late vanguard emphasis on literature's role in social transformation. With this theoretical problem in mind, I also sought an answer to a question frequently posed to me by my students: Why read poetry today? This study combines these problems and attempts an answer via the specific case of Argentina. I suggest that twentiethcentury Argentina may offer us an instance in which lyric poetry's increasing marginality from mainstream social discourse and from an escalating attention to narrative has allowed it to work against hegemonic discourse and to open a space for the construction of different subjectivities. Highlighting the work of female poets, but not reading them in isolation, I also wanted to bring some part of the Spanish American women's tradition to an English speaking audience. To do so I construct a lyrical overview by reading a constellation of voices that lead us to comprehend this poetry historically, in terms of literary, social, and political changes. In the process it becomes clear that while gender differences are always a factor to be considered, the construction of a gendered subjectivity is not monolithic—in every case it is necessary to speak in the plural, of subjectivities. Adding to the growing corpus of feminist scholarship in the Latin American realm, this study should interest scholars of the region, those who work in comparative literature, and readers attentive to contemporary theoretical approaches to the lyric. Page x My work on Argentine poetry began at the University of California, San Diego, and I am indebted to Jaime Concha, Susan Kirkpatrick, and Rosaura Sánchez for their generous interest in and comments on my early work. I have received helpful feedback from Linda Krumholz, Kathryn McKnight, and Alberto Moreiras, who each read and reflected on sections of this project, and from Margarita Zamora, who responded to an earlier version of the manuscript. I am also appreciative of the careful and perceptive remarks of Francine Masiello and the other anonymous readers of the manuscript. I am grateful to the Tinker Foundation of the University of CaliforniaSan Diego for a grant to travel to Argentina in 1988 and to the Graduate School of the University of WisconsinMadison for summer support, enabling me to revise and expand my manuscript. Olga Orozco generously lent me materials during my stay in Buenos Aires and met with me on several occasions, and I am indebted to her for her participation in my project. Myriam Osorio's detailed attention to the nuances of her native tongue are apparent in the translations with which she assisted me; any missteps in this realm, however, are my own responsibility for I had the final word. Thanks to Luanne Ransley and Bruno Browning for their help with the electronic elements of the book's appearance and to Melissa McNeill, my friends, and my family for their continual encouragement. Chapter 2 originally appeared, in a modified form, in Confluencia 5, no. 1 (Fall 1989) and part of chapter 4 in Monographic Review/Revista Monográfica 1, no. 6 (Spring 1991); I am grateful to these journals for permission to republish these pieces. I would also like to thank the following publishers and individuals for permission to reproduce copyrighted material: Editorial Sudamericana, S.A. (for material from Pizarnik's Extracción de la piedra de la locura and Orozco's Mutaciones de la realidad), and Cristina Piña (from her own Oficio de máscaras), the editors of El imaginero (from Aráoz's Los intersticiales), Liliana Lukin (from her book Cortar por lo sano), Susana Lange (from Girondo's En la masmédula), and Olga Orozco for permission to print the text of our interview in Buenos Aires. Page 1 Chapter 1 Defining the Subject Questioning the construction of subjectivity in literature and cultural criticism has become an accepted, even popular, practice. This interrogation has been stimulated by poststructuralist consciousness of the constructedness of speaking positions, by the "death of the author" as heralded by Barthes, Foucault, and others, and by a generalized trend toward historicization which has to some degree denaturalized certain concepts by identifying the specificity of their practice. Feminist, "post" colonial, nonEuropean voices are receiving increasing critical attention, competing for subject positions while challenging accepted notions of subjectivity. We have learned to examine the social construction of subject positions, to ask who can occupy them and how. In a Latin American context, the problem of the subject in Argentina caught the interest of many cultural critics in the 1980s. This attention may be in part due to a strong tradition of literary selfreferentiality in Argentina (begun in the nineteenth century with writers such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Esteban Echeverría, and José Hernández, and continued into the twentieth by Martínez Estrada and Jorge Luis Borges, among others); it may be due to the clear twentiethcentury interest in Lacanian theory, which depends upon a notion of the Law of the Father and intersects with the continual presence of strong authoritarian figures in the national culture (both discursive—as exemplified by authors such as Leopoldo Lugones—and literal, as seen through Juan Manuel Rosas, Juan Domingo Perón, and the military junta). It may also be linked to readers' fascination with contemporary Argentine narrative—the work of authors such as Borges, Cortázar, Puig, and Valenzuela— which has led to a reexamination of earlier sectors and periods in Argentine litera Page 2 ture. After a hushed 1970s, recent attention has been fixed on postdictatorship cultural production in Argentina, as critics search for seeds of cultural change in the nation's reconciliation with the horrors of its recent history. We find examples of this in Ana María Amar Sánchez's treatment of the testimonial form in El relato de los hechos, a consideration of the work of Rodolfo Walsh, and in the metacritical elements of Ricardo Piglia's 1980 novel, Respiración artificial. One part of the effort to come to terms with the present has necessarily entailed an exploration of the past. Reconsiderations of turnofthecentury Modernism and the Vanguard of the 1920s, such as Gwen Kirkpatrick's The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo, Beatriz Sarlo's La modernidad periférica, and Francine Masiello's Lenguaje e Ideología: las escuelas argentinas de vanguardia, have focused on evidence of dissonance present in hegemonic authors and movements (Kirkpatrick, Masiello) or examine previously marginalized perspectives in an attempt to reaffirm the plurality of speaking positions present in Argentina's early twentiethcentury cultural production (Sarlo, Masiello). Several other critics return to nineteenthcentury literature and politics; Josefina Ludmer explores the gaucho in his double inflection as both Argentine and Other in El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria and Adolfo Prieto and Nicholas Shumway (in El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina moderna and The Invention of Argentina, respectively) scrutinize the country's early discursive disparities and "guiding fictions," in order to uncover the ideological underpinnings of present day contradiction in Argentine thought. Each of these studies in some way touches upon the conflictive construction of national identity and the disaccord produced by the continued call for a homogeneous social subject, a demand which has often been controlled by authoritarian means in Argentine history. This study adds yet another perspective to the collective rereading of Argentina's literary legacy; by approaching the problem from the other side, tracing the construction of subjectivity in a genre and a poet whose texts distance themselves from historical events, we will find that the struggle for (or against) a cohesive social subject can be observed at every level of cultural production in Argentina, not only those which most overtly address it. Evidence of a fragmented identity is deeply embedded in the lyric poetry we will examine, even though many of these texts appear to be far removed from social realities. This very distancing can be read historically; for the "lost generation" of the forties it is an elementary mode of survival, of perpetuating a role for the poet in an increas Page 3 ingly hostile society, and a way of disguising certain "transgressive" differences in the positions and demands imposed upon particular poets (most notably, differences in gender, class, and, in some instances, sexual orientation). Argentina, Olga Orozco, the forties generation, and the other poets considered in this study provide specific examples of a larger problem; a problem that Svetlana Boym has articulated as "the tension and interdependence of literature and life," which, she asserts, "constitutes the central aporia of modernity" (9). It is a tension that has been very apparent in Spanish America, as different nations contend with the often irreconcilable ideas and realities of "modernity." It has also been at the center of the struggle between conflicting ideas about twentiethcentury Spanish American poetry, a struggle between a valuation of literary autonomy and the effort to relate literature to the world. Reading the Receding 1940s Olga Orozco, born in Toay, Las Pampas, in 1920, has produced more than nine volumes of poetry, a play, and a narrative work. She published her first book of poems, Desde lejos [From afar], in 1946. This date places the beginning of her career in something of a literary interstice; between the vanguard of the 1920s and the more political poetry of the 1960s and, in narrative, between the 1920s and 1930s novelas de la tierra, their urban counterparts, and the later, overshadowing boom in narrative. Historically, Orozco's entrance into the literary scene coincides neatly with the advent of peronismo; she continued to publish through the turbulent fifties and sixties, during the recent years of Argentina's dictatorship and the "dirty war" until the present (her most recent work, published in 1994, is Con esta boca en este mundo [With this mouth in this world]). The connection between Orozco's aesthetic production and her particular context is not immediately apparent; her lyric style creates another linguistically defined dimension that seems independent of constraining social conditions. Still, starting from the assertion that "all uses of language are interpretations of reality" (Fish 1023), we will see that Orozco's work is crossed by a number of discourses that situate it in terms of its historical, social, and aesthetic positions. Subjective, metaphysical, cosmopolitan traits seem to dominate Orozco's poetry and are augmented by a rigorous formal construction. But these are only some of her text's most obvious characteristics. Rereading her work with a Bakhtinian notion of intertextuality, using his concept of the "'literary word' as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed Page 4 meaning)" (Kristeva Reader 36), will disclose other strands. Orozco responds to earlier and contemporary poets in language that does not release her from reality but places her in her society and marks a particular historical moment. Orozco's work has a specific relation to the symbolic realm, a relation that indicates a gendered, regional identity as well as a degree of alienation from society. In spite of the continual erasure of specific times and places in her poetry, Orozco's language frequently discloses a speaker who is both female and Argentine. At the same time this poetry fits into a broader modern Latin American tradition of negation, taking its place as a part of a larger ideological struggle. In Argentine literary history, Orozco is sometimes included as a late member of the Generación del 40, a categorization which would define her as a neoromantic poet. Carlos Giordano, in El 40, situates this generation as publishing between 1935 and 1945, in conjunction with the appearance of the journal Canto, and the later revista, El 40 (1951–53). In an antiromantic vein, however, Orozco frequently decentralizes the speaker of her poems and concentrates instead on language itself. For these traits, Orozco is called a surrealist. The poet acknowledges her use of surrealist techniques: Aunque no sea una surrealista ortodoxa, creo que hay elementos en común: el predominio de lo imaginario, búsquedas subconscientes, el fluir de las imágenes, la inmersión en lo onírico y en el fondo de sí mismo como cantera de la sabiduría, la creencia en una realidad sin límites, más allá de toda apariencia y de toda superficie, y la avidez de captar esa realidad por entero, en todos sus planos. (Páginas 277) [Although not an orthodox surrealist, I believe that my work has some surrealist elements: the predominance of the imaginary realm, unconscious searches, the flow of images, the immersion in the oneiric and in the depths of the self as the source of wisdom, the belief in an unlimited reality, beyond appearances and surface, and the desire to capture this reality completely, in all of its dimensions.] 1 But her use of language is not strictly surrealistic either; this author still creates a coherent symbolic structure that can be interpreted in the course of her work; meaning is not solely associational. In fact, her poetry shows traits of both these movements and contradictions as well. As with her chronological position, Orozco does not fit precisely into any category.
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