Beyond Human

Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes

Tara Daly

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781684480692
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the Andes, indigenous knowledge systems based on the relationships between different beings, both earthly and heavenly, animal and plant, have been central to the organization of knowledge since precolonial times. The legacies of colonialism and the continuance of indigenous cultures makes the Andes a unique place from which to think about art and social change as ongoing, and as encompassing more than an exclusively human perspective. Beyond Human revises established readings of the avant-gardes in Peru and Bolivia as humanizing and historical. By presenting fresh readings of canonical authors like César Vallejo, José María Arguedas, and Magda Portal and through analysis of newer artist-activists like Julieta Paredes, Mujeres Creando Comunidad, and Alejandra Dorado, Daly argues instead that avant-gardes complicate questions of agency and contribute to theoretical discussions on vital materialisms: the idea that life happens between animate and inanimate beings—human and non-human—and is made sensible through art.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

1

César Vallejo’s Lithic Poetry

Stones as Material Guides

The event that is bumping up against César Vallejo (Santiago de Chuco, Peru, 1892–Paris 1938) and his poetry has traveled countries and cities, couches, desks, pens, and air. It has settled into my elbows and ankles, my 20 (+ 1 virtual) fingernails and my hair, as the latter grow, and I read him.1 Every Thursday that it rains, Vallejo. And every ¡Yo no sé! (I don’t know!), Vallejo in the bloodstream, a shrug, as his thoughts slip through me. In choosing to read Vallejo, my fingerprints touch his verse, and I meet him in the transient space of his words for a shared interpersonal moment, entrambos (among both of us). Although he is no longer physically present, su cadáver (está) lleno de mundo (his cadaver is full of world).2 There is nothing conventionally alive about a cadaver, and yet, I sense what Vallejo wants to imply in this line as the logical ruptures in his language disorient me, leaving me reaching for something more: precisely, this “worldliness” that inhabits his language and the physical effect of the literary encounter. And “Vallejo” as a concept also gives off “world” through the energy that he invokes in readers as his poetry and prose continue to be read and transformed into new artistic forms, taken up even in the present.3 The pull toward his grave, first in Montrouge then in Montparnasse, is one way in which the stone that stands in for him now magnetizes fellow human passers-through of the world to the call of Vallejo, no longer a living human, but still materially vital.4

In this first chapter, I approach Vallejo through the lens of a monistic material philosophy of life that sees the subject and the object, and the animate and the inert as coming-to-be together. I make manifest this vital life philosophy in Vallejo by looking at the way he troubles the differences between doll and human being, rock and body, stone and corpse as part of his disorientation strategy. He demonstrates the capacity of things like rocks, suits, and bones, to “act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own,” while not negating that the human subject partially differs from them. Instead, pebbles, stones, bones, boxes, chairs, drawers, lizards, and dogs also are granted partial agency and are called forth by the poetic voice, as if the corecipients of his poetry all along.5 Sara Ahmed writes, “moments of disorientation are vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up, or throw the body from its ground.”6 Vallejo’s disorientation of his readers is the starting point for his critique of human hubris. Each poem brings new materials into an ethical fold—that is, into something readers sense and approximate—as witnesses to, and agents alongside, the human. Vallejo’s poetry is an example of a “poetic ecology of things” that makes sensible “the material agency or effectivity of not-quite-human things.”7 The not-quite-human things that Vallejo makes sensible demonstrate the inextricability of natureculture. The ways in which his poetry manifests these material relationships constitute the matter and the ongoing potential of his avant-garde orientation as it continues to move us closer to a new way of life in the present.8

I argue that Vallejo’s poetry is purposefully disorienting because it pulls the ground from under the subject, destabilizing the material world. As has been said countless times, Vallejo’s hermetic language is at times enigmatic and at others plain indecipherable.9 His writing or unwriting—what Julio Ortega names his “poética de tachadura” (poetics of erasure), and Julio Prieto names “escritura errante” (wandering writing)—returns readers relentlessly to the materiality of their body. Because language has been naturalized as what differentiates the human from other species, Vallejo undermines this difference by partially negating that which makes humans unique from other animals: the ability to reason and conceptualize the world through language. But as Manuel DeLanda recently reminds, “to assume that human experience is structured conceptually is to de-historicize the human species; we spent hundreds of thousands of years as a social species, with a division of labor (hunters, gatherers) and sophisticated stone tool technology. Language is a relatively recent acquisition.”10 Vallejo’s stumbling poetic points to this very fact: humans’ acquisition of language, considering geological time, just occurred. He uses language as a pretext to ironically orient readers toward life as it existed prior to its human form. As a result, the poems humble us before the absurdity of insufficient attempts at logic and the failure of language to fully express the concrete reality around us. By extension, subjectivity is undermined and shown to be partially a cultural performance in relationship to the naturalcultural web of worldly things. It is acquired through our interaction with the other living and dead materials of the ecosystem and the technology of language.11

In what follows, I embark on three interpretive inroads into, and out of, Vallejo. First, I turn to the writing of Vallejo’s friend and compatriot Antenor Orrego, whose work serves as an initial entry point into our appreciation of the animate materiality of Vallejo’s poetry. Orrego’s “Introduction” to Trilce, published in the original 1922 version, makes evident Vallejo’s tendency to trouble the difference between the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead.12 These two writers became friends as part of el Grupo Trujillo (The Trujillo Group) during the years when Vallejo was studying at the University of Trujillo and Orrego was the intellectual leader of the city’s growing bohemia. Orrego walks us through his firsthand perceptions and description of that which differentiated Vallejo from his peers from the start. Orrego helps illuminate the intellectual trends of early twentieth-century Peru with which, and against which, Vallejo wrote.

Second, I interrogate the ways that Vallejo animates rocks, stones, pebbles, and statues—among other materials—to make clear that the human body is only one material form among many, via analysis of poems from Trilce (1922), Poemas humanos (1937), and the play Piedra cansada (c. 1936). Rocks are evidence of the duration of the material world, of which the human, in its current form, is at once an inseparable and a dispensable part. Rocks might seem like the dullest of natural matters, yet they are the concrete base of culture and interwoven into it, in the Andes and beyond. The materials of Vallejo’s poems form an ecosystem that the poet might have described as “los enredos de enredos de los enredos”13 (the knots of the knots of the knots). These knots symbolize the articulations of materials within natureculture as they are inextricably bound. Humans are simultaneously active travelers and passive passengers through those material planes, neither completely autonomous pilots nor fully inert bodies. When Ortega describes Trilce as presenting a “a conceptualization of the human in terms of what he or she lacks,” he signals the ways in which Vallejo’s language fails as an adequate representation of the experience of the world.14 But the other side to that coin is that the poems also dwarf the human as a tiny speck in the chaotic cosmos. “To be” within Vallejo’s corpus is to be within a poetic ecosystem that forces us to reorient before the materials in which we are embedded and to the evolutionary bare materials of which we, and the stars themselves, are assembled. This avant-garde philosophic contribution of Vallejo is increasingly timely in an era of contemporary environmental decay.

Third, I conclude by making the case that Vallejo’s poetry acts as if it were a prosthetic addition to the human body. Because his vital materiality troubles the status of the human being as a closed system and demonstrates to readers their intimate connections to stones, to animals, and to other animate and inanimate beings, they, too, become a temporary addition, and a demonstration of the incompleteness of a single human experience.15 The poems are prosthetic in the sense that they “hook up” the human to both concrete and virtual alternative worlds: to the “ciliado arrecife donde nací” (the ciliated reef where I was born) and to the offerings of journeys “a lo largo de otros mundos”16 (across other worlds). Like Vallejo’s “Sombrero, abrigo, guantes” (Hat, overcoat, gloves) in the Poemas humanos collection and the multiple “suits” that inhabit his world, his poetry is like a prosthetic material that revitalizes a mutilated, decrepit, and always partial subject. “Prosthesis” means “an addition, an attachment, or an add-on” to the human form. But in its original Latin, “prosthesis” also means to add a syllable or a letter onto a word—something Vallejo practices with his notorious neologisms like “hombligo,” “heriza,” “todaviiza,” and “cuadrumano,” among myriad others. Through prosthesis, I argue that Vallejo’s poetry orients us to a beyond-the-human horizon line that approaches a human life as always necessarily lacking and thereby dependent on the naturalcultural worlds in which the human is embedded.17

In sum, I argue for the continued relevance of Vallejo’s poetry to future transformations of our understanding not just of the human as he or she “is” today, but of the bare potential of life, as a materially based continuum and part of an ongoing avant-garde impulse.18 Because Vallejo’s poetry expressed so early in the twentieth century the relationality between nature, culture, and technology while acknowledging the blind spots of any human in understanding the ecosystem of which he or she is already partially made, I argue that it contributes to twenty-first-century discussion in the Andes on new approaches to transforming and organizing life that move away from the inert approach to matter of Marxist ideology while recognizing that the critical subject is a necessary agent in catalyzing social change alongside and in the interest of other materials essential to the sustainability of life in that subject’s environment.19 Vallejo’s poetry makes us radically aware of objects that, even if they come from language in the poem, affect us in such a way as to throw us back to the bare material of the universe. Just because his poems start from a human body (his own), the rational human is not their only philosophic “end.”20 Instead, his ability to perceive and articulate the relationships between the single human, the terrestrial world, the globally connected world, and the cosmos keeps his work contemporary.

Vallejo’s Early Search for Life’s Secret

Antenor Orrego (1892–1960) and César Vallejo are related through their shared birth dates, their material conditions, and the complementary content of their early writing. Vallejo spent his university years at the Trujillo area and overlapped at the same events on numerous occasions as part of the bohemian cultural collective “el Grupo Norte” (The North Group) or “el Grupo Trujillo” (The Trujillo Group) until 1918, when Vallejo relocated to Lima. Older than Vallejo, Orrego was one of his earliest teachers, readers, and promoters and, by all accounts, a lifelong friend. Orrego wrote the original and alluring prologue to Vallejo’s Trilce (1922), one that Vallejo requested always accompany the work. However, because Orrego became a member of the polarizing Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana party in Peru, his Introduction was subsequently left out of some versions of the collection due to political animosity that shaped the publishing world.21

In addition to the Introduction that he wrote to Trilce, Orrego also wrote a biography on Vallejo that detailed the early years of their friendship, but that was left unpublished until 1989.22 This book, Mi encuentro con César Vallejo (My encounter with César Vallejo), traces Vallejo’s earliest years of production as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• A Note on Translations
• Introduction: Revitalizing the Andean Avant-Gardes
• 1. César Vallejo’s Lithic Poetry: Stones as Material Guides
• 2. Alejandra Dorado’s Installation Art: Material Transmutations in Contemporary Cochabamba
• 3. José María Arguedas’s 1960s: The Air as Space of Material Encounters
• 4. Mujeres Creando Comunidad: Communitarian Feminisms from the Bolivian Soil
• 5. Magda Portal’s Bare Life in the Sea
• Conclusion: New Material Orientations in the Andes and Beyond
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author