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Cernuda's ‘El indolente’: Repetition, Doubling, and the Construction of Poetic Voice

1988; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382882000365383

1469-3550

James Mandrell,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The bibliography of studies and discussions of Cernuda included in Derek Harris and Luis Maristany's edition of Cernuda's Prosa completa (Barcelona: Barral, 1975) is excellent and should be consulted for the relevant treatments. All further references to this edition will be given in the text by P with page numbers. More recent work not found there includes: Agustín Delgado, La poética de Luis Cernuda (Madrid: Nacional, 1975); Jenaro Talens, El espacio y las máscaras. Introducción a la lectura de Cernuda (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1975); Salvador Jiménez-Fajardo, Luis Cernuda (Boston: Twayne, 1978); Miguel Ramos Ortega, La prosa literaria de Luis Cernuda: El libro Ocnos (Sevilla: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1982); César Real Ramos, Luis Cernuda y la generación del 27 (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1983); Rafael Martínez Nadal, Luis Cernuda. El hombre y sus temas (Madrid: Hiperión, 1983); Manuel Ulacia, Luis Cernuda: Escritura, cuerpo y deseo (Barcelona: Laia, 1984); James Valender, Cernuda y el poema en prosa (London: Tamesis, 1984). See also the essays collected in Luis Cernuda, ed. Derek Harris (Madrid: Taurus, 1977), most of which appeared in various periodicals and homenajes; and the three essays in 3 Luis Cernuda (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1977). Other recent essays include: José Sánchez Reboredo, ‘La figura del poeta en la obra de Luis Cernuda’, CHA, (1976), No. 316, 5–20; Maximino Cacheiro, ‘La problemática del escrito en La realidad y el deseo’, CHA, (1976), No. 316, 54–60; J. C. Ruiz Silva, ‘En torno a un poema de Luis Cernuda: Mozart’ and ‘Prosa completa de Luis Cernuda’, CHA, (1976), No. 316, 61–65 and 77–81; Andrew P. Debicki, ‘Luis Cernuda: la naturaleza y la poesía en su obra lírica’ in Estudios sobre poesia española contemporánea: la generación de 1924–1925, (Madrid: Gredos, 1981), 329–51; Michael Ugarte, ‘Luis Cernuda and the Poetics of Exile’, MLN, CI (1986), 325–41. 2. Octavio Paz is principally responsible for the biographical turn given to discussions of Cernuda and his poetry. See his seminal ‘La palabra edificante’ (1964), which is included in Luis Cernuda, ed. Harris, 138–60. The term ‘mito personal’ comes from Cernuda's essay on the poetry of Unamuno, in which he remarks that ‘Unamuno esperaba crearse a sí mismo, o al menos crear su mito personal, y ser lo que pasó quedando’ (P 359). Despite Cernuda's explicit use of the term ‘mito personal’ to designate the residual effect of an author as a function of a text, i.e. as existing eternally only by means of a literary corpus, treatments of Cernuda tend to use the notion of the ‘mito personal’ to characterize the trajectory of personal growth and experiences which serve as intentional if not overt subtexts for the poetry. For instance, Philip Silver says that ‘there is no point of Cernuda's literary opus that does not correspond to a point on the trajectory of this personal myth’ (‘Et in Arcadia Ego’: A Study of the Poetry of Luis Cernuda [London: Tamesis, 1965], 48); and Derek Harris, although taking issue with Silver's view, comments that ‘Cernuda's own inner man is what he calls the mito personal, the truth of himself that is distilled from the circumstantial experiences of his “figura exterior”, or leyenda’ (Luis Cernuda. A Study of the Poetry [London: Tamesis, 1973], 19). 3. This division between poetry and prose results in studies like Silver's, which is based on ‘Escrito en el agua’ (Ocnos) and the short story that we will be discussing here, ‘El indolente’ (Tres narraciones), and like Harris’, which draws both on Ocnos and on ‘Palabras antes de una lectura’. The most extreme form of this dichotomy can be found in Miguel Ramos Ortega's study of Ocnos, which he concludes by asserting that the prose poems ‘se convierte[n] en algo más que obra literaria en sí misma y pasa[n] a ser, además, la respuesta paralela que el autor va dando a los interrogantes del autor—al mismo tiempo protagonista—de La realidad y el deseo’ (La prosa literaria de Luis Cernuda, 278). In this context, one is tempted to ask, what is non-literary prose? Or what is a non-literary work? Even more acutely, what prevents any ‘literary’ text from functioning as a ‘parallel response’ to any other work? James Valender takes an entirely different approach to the prose and thus avoids the dichotomy between the poetry and prose in his sensitive and perceptive Cernuda y el poema en prosa. 4. This is Coleman's point in Other Voices. A Study of the Late Poetry of Luis Cernuda (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969). It is also dealt with in Delgado, La poética de Luis Cernuda, especially 198–206; and Ulacia, Luis Cernuda: Escritura, cuerpo y deseo. 5. La poética de Luis Cernuda, 252. 6. ‘El indolente’ was published in the literary supplement of number 56 of La Verdad on 18 July 1926. A slightly earlier poem dating from 11 November 1925 and entitled ‘Desengaño indolente’ was first published in Litoral (No. 2) in December 1926. These two works share many similar thematic interests and literary concerns, though the prose poem is somewhat more complex. 7. The chronology is taken from Harris and Maristany's edition of the Prosa completa and from their edition of the Poesía completa, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Barral, 1977). This edition will be cited hereafter as PO. See P 1544 and PO 880, 906–07. 8. In point of fact, Oda is probably the earliest important invocation of mythology. Nevertheless, it does not adumbrate these notions as completely or as complexly as other works. See Maya Sharer's discussion of this and other poems for a useful analysis of the reflected image in Cernuda's verse in ‘Luis Cernuda y el reflejo’, Luis Cernuda, ed. Harris, 314–25. Sansueña is, I think, a literary—rather than imaginary—locale because of its earlier appearances in Spanish literature, most notably in Fray Luis de León's ‘Profecía del Tajo’. On Sansueña in Cernuda's verse see Valender, Cernuda y el poema en prosa, 97–104, in which he also briefly discusses the recurring notion of indolence; and Harris, Luis Cernuda: A Study of the Poetry, 87n. On Cernuda's interest in and thoughts on myth, especially Greco-Roman mythology as opposed to the Christian tradition, see his ‘El poeta y los mitos’ in Ocnos (P 107–08; included only in the edition of 1949), in which he suggests that myth refers not to a ‘mito personal’ but to Western mythology and the poetry that, for him, serves to unite myth and reality. 9. On the literary aspect of Cernuda and the dandy see Luis Antonio de Villena, ‘La rebeldía del dandy en Luis Cernuda’, in 3 Luis Cernuda, 109–55. On some of Cernuda's dandyish traits, see the various texts of Vicente Aleixandre, José Antonio Muñoz Rojas, and Juan Gil-Albert in Luis Cernuda, ed. Harris, 15–17,18–19, and 20–24. See also Edmund M. Wilson's appraisal in Martínez Nadal, Luis Cernuda, 193–94. 10. On the importance of crepuscular afternoon or twilight in Cernuda's poetry see Brenda Wegman, ‘El crepúsculo en cinco poemas de Luis Cernuda’, CHA, (1971), Nos. 253–54, 285–301. Wegman describes a process similar to the one we are discussing here: ‘1) una etapa de ansiedad, exteriorizada en el paisaje; 2) la interposición de una nueva realidad fuera del tiempo y del espacio normales; 3) una distensión espiritual que termina en un mejor conocimiento de su conflicto interior. En tres palabras: ansiedad-alivio-distensión’ (286–87). Despite Wegman's limited focus, this same process can be found at work throughout the poetry and prose; in the end, however, the result is somewhat more significant than Wegman chooses to make it appear. Valender describes an analogous procedure in the context of meditative poetry in Cernuda y el poema en prosa, 39–48. 11. A good description of the nature and effects of this technique can be found in Jonathan Culler's ‘Apostrophe’ in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, New York: Cornell U.P., 1981), 135–54. Despite Coleman's Other Voices this aspect of Cernuda's work receives much less commentary than it deserves. 12. ‘The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1963), 23, 276. 13. Otto Rank, The Double, trans. Harry Tucker, Jr (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1971), 83. 14. On the temporal aspects of repetition see Gilles Deleuze, Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Braziller, 1971), especially p. 100. 15. Rank, The Double, 70. 16. Masochism, 100. 17. ‘Narcissus in the Text’, Georgia Review, XXX (1976), 310. 18. Brenkman, ‘Narcissus in the Text’, 310. 19. Kierkegaard, Repetition. An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. with introduction and notes by Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1941), 3–4.