Painting Modernism

Ivan A. Schulman

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438449531
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Painting Modernism demonstrates the influence of painting and sculpture on the work of the major writers of Latin American modernism. Through his analysis, Ivan A. Schulman, a foundational figure in the field, offers a concise and new interpretation of works by José Asunción Silva, Julián del Casal, Rubén Darío, José Juan Tablada, and José Martí. Traditional critical discourse on modernism has emphasized the nature of this movement in terms of its self-referentiality, fragmentation, elitist/escapist concepts, and subjective notions of cultural and aesthetic authenticity. Schulman breaks from this approach and examines these works as products of subjectively generated social/artistic practices that are inseparable from socioeconomic transformations and the chaotic cultural crises of the modern world.

1

CROSSING BOUNDARIES

The Search for a New Discourse

NEW VENTURES

Contemporary (re)readings of modernism’s texts as well as the examination of its principal writers’ theoretical enunciations will substantiate our affirmation that among the Latin American modernists there existed a major interest in discovering and developing creative ties between literary art and the practices of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century painting and sculpture. From 1875 forward, Latin American writers were attracted to the unprecedented succession of innovations in pictorial and graphic arts, both European and Oriental.¹ Photography was invented in 1839, and Western writers, including those in Latin America, were immediately drawn to the creative possibilities of the new medium; their work also suffered the influence of the transition in Europe from academic painting to the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, impressionists, and later to that of the expressionists. Modernists in Latin America became obsessed with the notion of innovative visualizations, whether with the human eye or that of the camera. What resulted were aesthetic and stylistic experiments that created a new universe of textualizations based upon the “gaze.”² Writers began to see the world as a picture; they set about writing with the lines and colors of canvases, sculpting statuesque lines, or re-creating with words what they had seen in art museums, reproductions, or photographs of contemporary plastic arts. In addition, the sound of music was subjected to a process of visualization and then transformed into vignettes—impressionistic or expressionistic in quality—and endowed with sensuous images, colors, and lines. However, “what distinguished the modernist literary response from its predecessors stems from a crisis of belief in the continuity between seeing and knowing, and a commensurate cognizance of the subjective mediations of embodied visuality” (Jacobs, 19).

Writers internalized the world in order to perceive it more fully, understand its hidden nature—a generational undertaking that led to the construction of “alternative” realities and to the exploration of the nature of the Other. Painters posited the reverse, that is, they conceived of their art as a form of writing. Picasso, for example, considered that his prints constituted a form of writing. His lithographs and drypoints were for him a form of “writing fiction.”³ For Martí visualization preceded the act of writing: “I need to see beforehand—he wrote—what I intend to write” (Necesito ver antes lo que he de escribir) (1936–1953, 52: 128). And in his first volume of poetry (Ismaelillo, 1882), dedicated to his absent young son, he wrote in the prologue: “I have painted you exactly as you appeared before my eyes. Whenever I’ve ceased seeing your shape, I’ve stopped painting you” (16: 17; emphasis mine). In this same volume he dreams “with … eyes / open and always, by day / … always I see, floating, / a child, who calls to me!” (“Waking dream,” 2002, 52; emphasis mine). On the one hand this volume of poetry proposes a revolutionary form of writing in its use of visual techniques, chromatics, and inventive metaphors, while on the other it preserves and retextualizes traditional Hispanic meters (pentasyllables, hexasyllables, and heptasyllables), demonstrating the fundamental nature of modernism’s hybridity, a discursive quality described in the introduction.

Ismaelillo strikes a counterdiscursive note in the development of modernism.⁴ The traditional “eye” or “gaze” of the poet deconstructs “rational” spatiality; in its place a subjective universe is substituted, one that first has been internalized and subsequently recast much as European expressionist painters re-visioned material reality and then externalized their emotional reaction to it in the form of a concrete but wholly individually perceived perspective and field of vision.⁵ In Martí’s poems traditional spatiality is absent; space is reorganized, landscapes become inscapes: “You float over everything! / Son of my soul!” (2002, 54, emphasis mine); “… red plumes move / Internal birds” (“Fragrant Arms,” 16: 23); “From my dreams I drop down, / They disappear flying” (“Mischievous Muse,” 16: 27); or “Minute eagles / Cover the air: / They are ideas, that rise, / Their prisons shattered!” (“Mischievous Muse,” 16: 29)—all of these are fragments of lines that flow throughout this revolutionary book of poetry. Chaos—born of the structures and contradictions of modernity in its initial phases—invades and pervades the aesthetic space of Ismaelillo, a volume published in New York shortly after the poet’s arrival there in 1880. Its tone reflects Martí’s consternation at the pace of a modernized culture so different from the slower dynamics of life in the nations where the poet had lived or visited—Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Spain. He is fascinated, amazed, energized by what he sees and hears, but at the same time he is terrified by his gaze of life in New York City and along the Eastern seaboard, where he traveled by rail and ferry to organize the Cuban Revolution among Cuban émigré groups and tobacco workers. His first words in the introduction are: “My son: Frightened by everything, I take refuge in you. I have faith in human improvement, future existence, in the utility of virtue, and in you” (Hijo: Espantado de todo, me refugio en ti. Tengo fe en el mejoramiento humano, en la vida futura, en la utilidad de la virtud, y en ti) (16: 17).

Martí is not the only modernist who developed a frenetic interpretation of the incipient modern world and its attendant sense of loneliness and isolation that foreshadows the advent of twentieth-century nihilism and existentialism. Thrown into the marketplace of the early stages of American capitalism, writers in Latin America—including those who had never visited the United States—suffered a sense of displacement and angst. To deal with the loss of self generated by the Age of Modernity, writers like Martí focused their gaze inward in order to find the strength to overturn the fortunes of the world, cope with their social isolation, and attempt to redefine their identity:

Man’s first task [wrote Martí] is to reconquer himself. It is urgent that men be returned to themselves and extricated from the bad government of convention that suffocates or poisons their sentiments, accelerates the awakening of their senses, and overtaxes their intelligence with a pernicious, alien, cold, and false material wealth. Only what is genuine is fruitful. Only what is direct is powerful. What another bequeaths us is like a warmed-over meal. It is up to each man to reconstruct life, and no sooner does he look inside himself then he reconstructs it. (Prologue to “Poem of Niagara,” 2002, 49; emphasis mine)

In the process of this reconstruction, visuality is a constant. It also dominates Martí’s last volume of poetry, Versos sencillos (Simple verses), in which the poet moves about, unfettered in space, and links visions of his poetic discourse with that of all of the arts, with all the sites of nature:

I come from all places
And to all places go:
I am art among the arts
And mountains among mountains. (2002, 273; emphasis mine)

In discussing the primacy of the visual in modernist literature, Martí wrote in 1882 that

[Today] there is no painter who succeeds in coloring the luminous aureoles of virgins with the novelty and transparency of other times. … There are no permanent works, because works produced during times of realignment and restructuring [generated by the Age of Modernity] are mutable and turbulent in their very essence: there are no set paths …

(No hay pintor que acierte a colorear con la novedad y transparencia de otros tiempos. … No hay obra permanente, porque las obras de los tiempos de reenquiciamiento y remolde son por esencia mudables e inquietas; no hay caminos constantes …) (1963–1978, 7: 225)

The rejection of established norms, styles, and schools of writing gave way to an age of experimentation, to the introduction of what was later—in the twentieth century—characterized as vanguard literature but which had its roots in the modernists’ early experiments. The colors of the artist’s palette became a norm in the construction of literary texts. The influence of the French Parnassians was major in this endeavor, especially their interest in the introduction of plastic values in prose and poetry, in the invention of verbalizations capable of creating line and form in the manner of the painterly or sculptural arts. Texts such as Théophile Gautier’s Symphonie en blanc majeur (1852) inspired similar creations in Latin America. Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondances” (1857) followed with its concept of synesthesia—that is the intimate relationship the French poet perceived between sound and color. Other French writers proposed similar or even more daring notions: Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” (1871) and René Ghil’s Traité du verbe (1886–1888) linked visual perception to music and chromatics. These experiments prompted the Latin American writers to extend their interest in the aesthetics of color to visualizations produced by or connected to sounds. The fusion of the two senses resulted in the expression of new intellectual or emotional realities, new discursive ventures that enriched the modernist’s verbal palette. In these new departures Martí was a trailblazer: as early as 1881, clearly inspired by both Ghil and Rimbaud,⁶ he wrote:

Between colors and sound there is a significant relationship. The cornet produces yellow sounds; the flute usually has blue and orange sounds; the bassoon and violin give off chestnut and Prussian blue sounds, and silence, which is the absence of sound, is black. White is the sound of the oboe.

(Entre los colores y los sonidos hay una gran relación. El cornetín de piston produce sonidos amarillos; la flauta suele tener sonidos azules y anaranjados; el fagot y el violin dan sonidos de color de castaña y azul de Prusia, y el silencio, que es la ausencia de los sonidos el color negro. El blanco lo produce el oboe.) (1963–1973, 23: 125)

Other modernists focused their attention on the symbolic meaning of a single color. In his poem “De blanco” (On white), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, through the medium of metaphors, evoked suggestive meanings of the color white:

What is whiter than a candid lily?

What is more pure than a mystic candle?

What is whiter than a tender orange blossom?

What more virginal than a light mist?

What more sacred than the divine altar of a

Gothic cathedral?

(¿Qué cosa más blanca que cándido lirio?

¿Qué cosa más pura que místico cirio?

¿Qué cosa más casta que tierno azahar?

¿Qué cosa más virgen que leve neblina?

¿Qué cosa más santa que el ara divina

de gótico altar?) (Garfield and Schulman, 46)

Pictorial elements, music, symbolic colorings of an externalized previously internalized expressionistic gaze produced poems such as José Juan Tablada’s “Ballad of the Eyes” (“Balada de los Ojos”):

During the minuet, beneath the white lace

I saw your red heel shine …

Ah, Scarlatti’s sonata

Celebrated your sweet eyes!

………………………………………………….

Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Greuze,⁷

Each with their flirtatious brush

Copied roses in your laughter

And blue lilies in your eyes!

………………………………………………….

(En el minueto, entre las blondas

Miré lucir tu talón rojo …

¡Ah, la sonata de Scarlatti

que celebró tus dulces ojos!

………………………………………………….

Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Greuze,

Con su pincel galante todos,

Copiaron rosas en tus risas

¡y azules lirios en tus ojos!) (1971, 192–193)

OLD VENTURES REINVENTED: UT PICTORA POESIS⁸

Other modernists in their mind’s eye captured visualizations in the form of paintings that they transferred verbally to prose, poems, or prose poems. Ekphrasis⁹ became a favored discursive technique, which writers such as Rubén Darío used with flair in his early seminal modernist volume Azul … (Blue …) (1888), especially in the section entitled “En Chile” (In Chile). Krieger, in establishing the theoretical base for ekphrasis, states that

… words cannot have capacity, cannot be capacious because they have literally no space. Ekphrasis involves a desire—since Plato—a romantic quest to attain a pre-fallen language of corporeal presence, using language as we know it to attain the magical transformation. (10)

Darío’s painterly interests were related to his interest, shared by almost every Latin American modernist, in expanding the boundaries of linguistic discourse through heretofore untried plastic techniques. The sections of “En Chile” abound in luminous, chromatic expressions that in their time constituted aesthetic transgressions that nevertheless were not entirely original with the modernists.¹⁰

In the fourth section of “En Chile,” “La Virgen de la Paloma,” Darío alludes openly to the idea of painting in relation to literature and notes that he feels certain that in the hands of an accomplished artist this vignette could be a painting of signal artistic value: “I am convinced [he writes in a note,] that this small ‘watercolor’ if treated by a painter of talent would result in a work of art of signal aesthetic value” (1992, 129; emphasis mine).¹¹ It is clear from this note that Darío is aware of the technique of ekphrasis as he strives to redefine linguistic representation through the incorporation of new artistic techniques and enunciations. This process of hybrid textual construction is consciously manipulated in what might be termed the introit of this section of Darío’s Azul …, in which the narrator asserts that Ricardo, a lyrical poet, seeks to create impressions, canvases he says, but without brushes, palettes, paper or pencil (sin pinceles, sin paleta, sin pincel, sin lapis) (125). It is more than possible, as Lida suggests, that Darío’s early and constant French readings (53) led the author of Azul … to experiment with ekphrastic techniques whose optical values, given the form with which Darió endows them, reveal a hybridity characterized by an aesthetic intentionality combined with a political message: Ricardo, the instrument the narrator uses to express what might be termed enargeia lingüística,¹² seeks to flee from a commodified environment:

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Crossing Boundaries: The Search for a New Discourse
• Chapter Two: Painted Narrations: The Modernist Novel
• Chapter Three: From Painting to Literary Text
• Chapter Four: Facing the Orient
• Chapter Five: Writers as Art Critics
• Chapter Six: An Epilogue and Conclusion: Words That Create Objects
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover