This is the paper I presented at the Congress of Contemporary Mexican Literature in El Paso, Texas, on March 5, 2011.
In his provocative and inspiring book "Death of the Critic", the Irish critic Rónán McDonald notes that the loss of poetry in the public space lies in part in interstitial place in critical areas. On the one hand, accuses McDonald, academic criticism (and here perhaps think American critics of poetry of language as Charles Bernstein and Marjorie Perloff) tended to present poetry as esoteric and inaccessible, while generally favoring critical journalistic poetry surface and show the genre most of the remains of social prestige for the specific value of the texts. This assertion, in a book that celebrates the fall of the critical elite, and that raises the critical rescue "public", raised above all the professionalized reader's idea of \u200b\u200bpoetry as a translator between the usual self-referential space of poetic writing and a hearing to which the internal debates in the field of poetry you are irrelevant. Indeed, the self-referentiality of poetry is not uncommon in Mexico, where the echo chamber built from specialist publishers, state and national awards, scholarships FONCA and the positions of the poets themselves have one of the clearest examples of a poetic practice irrelevant beyond itself. If we take the argument seriously McDonald, criticism has an important role to play in breaking this impasse, because poetry can articulate towards relevant forms of social discourse. In these terms, I submit the following few ideas around which, in my opinion, is the most important poetry critic in Mexico, Evodio Escalante, whose work on the poetry of modernism and the art provides a role model the connection of gender with readers.
One of the core functions of the essay on poetry is the construction, repair and reconstruction of the literary canon. Although generally considered a static category, the fee is actually a tradition fixing fluid, always changing, where the text file that is to poetry is put into play by reading and criticism. In this operation, the critical test is essential because the performative nature of the essay genre allows the mobilization of critical categories and the selection of literary texts in a corpus of textual space that reconfigured. Evodio Escalante has been one of the main practitioners of this process in Mexico. His first major book, José Revueltas. A literature side dweller (1979) reestablished canonical place the author of The earthly days, to bring into play their critical reading frames dramatically exceeded the parameters established by the canonical consolidation impressionistic criticism of narrative, led by figures such as José Luis Martinez and Emmanuel Carballo. Although he was unjustly accused "foreign" to be perhaps the first critic to deploy the thesis of Deleuze and Guattari in Mexican writing, the truth is that Revueltas was only readable from a critical language that would deploy its exploration of space in excess of stridently tame parameters of "national literature." This type of operation is prevalent in the work of Escalante and clearly shows how the test can create languages \u200b\u200bthat give meaning to the literature regarding the fee established practices.
A significant example of this is raised Elevation and fall of estridentismo, published in 2002 by Ediciones Sin Nombre and Publishing balance. The book is an analysis of the movement three times strident and illustrates how the critical essay can reinvent language interpreter. Escalante begins with a thorough review and critique of the previous readings of the group, in which figures like Octavio Paz Monsivais and have "buried" the estridentistas. In doing so, Escalante demarcates the boundaries of the canon discourse and the way in which it has privileged the ideological and aesthetic contemporaries. The second part of the book builds reading language into the poetry of the shrill. When reading Urbe, the great Manuel Maples Arce poem, Escalante offers four theses:
a) the poet (archaic) constitutes poet (modern) in and by the catastrophe. The poet working the disaster to make a profit of eternity.
b) The modern poem is only possible if it manages to combine a multitude of flat space-time, similar to Cubism together on the multiplicity of these planes.
c) The shift from archaic to modern individual subject requires a sacrifice libidinal. The woman, romantic object par excellence, will be sacrificed in favor of a new subject, anonymous and multitudinous: the city. Collective, and is imposed on the individual.
d) The sacrifice, however, not amount to a disposal, the weight of the dead continue to weigh on the economy of the poem in the form of a resistance, a burden that sabotages the euphoric ideology of the text. (55)
cite this thesis in extenso because we glimpse the nature of canonical revision in this short but remarkable book. The central idea of \u200b\u200bEscalante is in the process of becoming modern poetic subject in Mexico, which, in the case of Maples Arce, occurs mainly in the constitution of the individual subject of the slaughter collective libidinal raised in the thesis three the catastrophe of archaic space in a thesis. An astute reader of the poetic tradition can be seen Mexican argument here as an outside Escalante raise the central trunk of Mexican poetry represented by certain Contemporary and Octavio Paz. The author's poetic voice as the Cuesta de Canto a God mineral, Gorostiza Death without end or the Peace Stone Blanco Sol, and even operate in the archaic record that places the poetic voice in the very origins of being and word, or in position, also archaic, fullness holistic (remember "filled me in my skin besieged by an elusive god drown me.") The radicalism of Maples Arce is in position the poetic subject in a space that has never operated inside the Mexican tradition. Also against libidinal fulfillment of poems as Piedra de Sol or erotic phantasmagoria Villaurrutia authors as the antipode estridentismo create a script that allows the poetic from the radical social, since the catastrophe of modernity and breaks with the primary space poetry.
The point here is that Escalante you first create a structure that allows you to read the full estridentismo both ideologically and aesthetically. In a sense, Escalante shows the limitations of the paradigm of "literature of strategy" proposed by Luis Mario Schneider to show that it has a space estridentismo poetic operation beyond the institutional debates twenty. The erasure of Stridentism central trunk of the literature is primarily due to the triumph of the poetic voice archaic as the center of poetic modernity in Mexico it became unreadable. To restore legibility through trial, Escalante allows not only a review of the Canon of shrill as evidenced by critical work possible by the Escalante, including books Silvia Pappe, Elissa Rashkin and Yanna Haddaty on the movement-but, More significantly, the compensation of a modern and political way of writing poetry in a literary tradition that, until today, build their legitimacy in the archaic and apolitical. Thus, intervention Escalante from the essay unfolds in three movements is central to the genre: first, the demarcation of borders inherited from the traditional language, the assessment of the limits of readability of this language in relation to the literary corpus and the construction of a new language that allows to map an alternate category canon. For my concerns, this operation revolves around the definition of archaic and modern in stark contrast to the modern notion of inherited poetic texts such as The Children of the limo.
One of the most important intervention is critical of Escalante in his book The lost art, published in 2003 by the UNAM. The book returns to the poetic, a little-known art which aimed late renewal of political poetry after purification and de-politicization of poetry implied by the triumph of contemporary canon. Escalante opens the book with a reflection on literary oblivion in which you can insert the work of a critic. I quote at length:
Between memory and oblivion is a third area in limbo, an area inhabited by ghosts that nobody acknowledges, and which often do not have the slightest idea. To enter all those entities limbo for some strange reason or circumstance never acquired a real presence. Existed but no one remembers them, were busy but unnoticed, raised his fist against the great totems and bigwigs of the time, but they dodged the blow with a masterful and turning left in a vacuum. Since been lost, lost in a fold of the history of culture at the same time the dark clothes with a balm, the subtracted from the view. The poetry is one of the ghosts (9)
In these lines, Escalante outlines one of the possible areas of intervention of the critic, perhaps one of the most important, what he calls the "fold of the history of culture", the "balm dark." The critical test, especially one based on work research, des-fold cultural history to conjure the ghosts of those defeated by the totems of the time and the overwhelming flight of the angel of history. Certainly one could argue that there is an aesthetic reason for the loss of a movement as the poetic, whose two founding members, Eduardo Lizalde and Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, abjured the time later. The critic of poetry, however, is always able to resist the taste category ultimately ideological and constructed as taught by Pierre Bourdieu on distinction. Poeticism aesthetic limitations are recognized by Escalante himself when he says, for example, the fact the poetic density of "Everything is Babel" by Eduardo Lizalde is lost in its own complexity, Jorge Cuesta hurdle that fought in "Song of a mineral God" from his use of a canonical verse, the lira. However, critical in the failure of a movement as the founding gesture poeticism that allows us to show the limits of that which prevailed in the canonical agon. Here we think, for example, the recovery of what Escalante called the "romantic impulse" of the work of Marco Antonio Montes de Oca: "Return their powers of imagination, preaching the return of the Adamic man, sing to the consummation and beauty, to protest against usury and lethal forces that prevent the birth of the real man, the message of a new social messianism can say in his desire to abolish the bonded chronological "(85). This momentum is remarkable, since the sublimation of man in space and primordial myth, the way of peace or Gorostiza, resulted in the erasure of history as barbaric in Mexican poetry. In contrast to the canonical tradition of the "archaic poet, the first Montes de Oca, a version of the modern poet than that of the estridentismo, where modernity is not given for admission to the crowd but by the struggle over time in both history dehumanizing. The point here is that the work of the critic is not only "rescue" the voice silenced, but to reveal a fold that problematizes cultural tradition decisively, as this notion of history and this conception of poetry as protest to "lethal forces that prevent the birth of the real man" have vanished in the air of a tradition passed from myth to language.
In a little-known but essential essay on literary criticism, Escalante produces one of the most productive theorizing on gender: Becoming one
the text is the condition of existence of the text. The setting of the text made by scholars belonging to the order of the concept, its alienation in reading, is the inevitable result of view. The criticism is not only becoming one of the work, in which case she is seen as unrecognizable, but sometimes an explanation of how it was possible this becoming another of the work in time (70).
This fine description of the work of criticism can be broken down precisely in relation to the study of critical essay about literature in general and poetry in particular. From questioning particularly Kantian notion of the trial and the communicability of the work, which explores Escalante in the preceding pages to the quote above, the critical operating in the mutability of the work against its historicity, compared to the old theory that the school's horizons Costanza called reception. However, the critical operating in a complex philosophical space where the hermeneutical task operates in conjunction with a phenomenological calling looking for the work itself and with an awareness of synchrony and diachrony, contemporaneity and tradition, operating in the historicity of the literary text. In these terms, the critical essay fixing tenses implicit in the phenomenological momentum irrevocable mobility with the hermeneutics and operates in the open space of the historical mobility compared to aesthetic. Or, to put it in the language of Marxism and the sociology of culture, literary criticism operates on the premise of "contingencies of value" to use the term of Barbara Herrnstein Smith, to discover not only the cultural meanings that exceed origin of the text, "becoming one", but also the conditions of possibility inward textual space for historical mutation. Perhaps the best example of this comes from the work itself Escalante. In the monumental book José Gorostiza, between redemption and catastrophe, the author's doctoral thesis published in 2001 by Juan Pablos Editor. According to Escalante says, this work, a detailed study of Gorostiza and, above all, endless death, arises from an attempt to connect the Mexican poet with certain Heideggerian thesis of poetry, but in the process of reading became another: an author heavily influenced by the dark philosophical musings Vasconcelos of aesthetics. Considering not only the role of Gorostiza in perpetuating archaic figure of the poet in the national canon, but the fetishization of cosmopolitanism as a mark inside the poetic craft in Mexico. Just to put a brief example, halfway through his book, Evodio notes that Gorostiza literary judgments expressed in his prose, so conveniently forgotten poets among his readers, the author Death without end, agree on the rejection of the followers of pure poetry. In this match, Escalante is the turning point in the aesthetics Vasconcelos contributing to the illumination of Death without End: Vasconcelos
The text, which emphasizes the rhythm-generating element, it concludes by postulating the transcendental orientation of poetry. Would, according to mystical speculation Vasconcelos, a momentous pace, like a seed planted a priori in the mind of man. This rate can only direct his steps so necessary to the beyond, "to the eternal" as an unequivocal expression of Vasconcelos. I think what is intended Gorostiza Muerte sin fin do is to give reality to this pace of speaking his master, who, by breaking the language, to destroy their own impassive integuments, and sprouted coated aesthetic form in the consciousness of the poet, can not direct their action but to the transcendent, to that which would be beyond the phenomenal world in which we are (149)
In Vasconcelos, Escalante is the key to break with decades of cliches about Gorostiza, demonstrating that its exploration of the transcendent no arises from a pre-existing beyond human but in the materiality of writing poetry in the rhythm of the composition Vasconcelos philosophy that becomes the material and inherent paradoxical way to the line of flight of transcendence. In this, break that Gorostiza suspended always in the aesthetics and speculation in the name of an author's strong commitment to the materiality of the text, lies an illustrative example of this becoming another possible criticism while browsing.
conclude these reflections with a last visit to another reflection of Escalante on criticism and essays, this time unexpectedly raised by a discussion about Nietzsche:
The test, I think, must be understood as a zone of resistance to progress technocratic thinking. Test is to resist the totalitarianism of the method is to create those gaps and those areas of darkness in the light of contemporary science embraced could not penetrate (241)
In these lines might read a post would close the debate on poetic criticism Escalante: an interpretive ethos where the rigor is not inconsistent with the freedom and where the strong interpretation of the critical work, even from the academia, is committed to resist technocratic totalitarianism of science and let me add, the canon and the literary establishment. In a tradition such as Mexico, which still exists a fundamental schism between an esoteric reading of poetry as validation of narrow aesthetic and an excess of formalism masquerading as science literature, this resistance is not only urgent, but perhaps the only possible interpretation survival.
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