vallejo alegórico

The Allegorical Gaze of César VallejoAuthor(s): Christiane von BuelowReviewed work(s):Source: MLN, Vol. 100, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1985), pp. 298-329Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905739 .

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The Allegorical Gaze of Cesar Vallejo

Christiane von Buelow

El Libro de la Naturaleza I

"Nature is but a dictionary" for those who have imagination, Bau- delaire says in his "Salon of 1859." Reading the book of nature is a common metaphor based first on nature's availability-that the script be legible- and second on the creative capacity of the artistic imagination to engender a corresponding 'design.'l Nature held the book of experience for the Romantics. But Baudelaire's 'dictionary' is not redemptive; it is a compilation of ciphers awaiting the artistic hand which will "confer on them a totally new physiog- nomy." Baudelaire has nothing but scorn for those who merely copy the dictionary: "the invasion of photography and the great industrial madness of our times" have forced the artist to give up the dream in exchange for external reality.2 But we must ask of Baudelaire's poetry: how does the dream maintain itself when its 'natural' source of stimulation has been undermined?

In Baudelaire's "Correspondances" sonnet,3 it appears that the

I am indebted to the late Angel Rama for several stimulating discussions; to Jean Franco and Herbert Lindenberger who provided helpful suggestions on an earlier version; and especially to Kathleen Newman and Anne Cruz who helped me tre- mendously to bring an earlier version to completion.

I Curtius traces the topos of the two books, the Bible and nature, the codex scriptus and the codex vivus, from its "pulpit elocuence" in theology to the Romantics' ele- vation of the "living book." See Ernst Robert Curtius, Euporean Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. by Willard Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 3 19-26.

2 Charles Baudelaire, "Salon de 1859" in Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 777, p. 772. From hereon referred to as Oeuvres.

3 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal in Oeuvres, p. 87.

298



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dream makes a self-contained, autonomous reply to external reality. The "vivants piliers" and their mirror image (by the inverse ordering of organic and constructed elements), the "forets de sym- boles," together attempt to represent a self-generating aesthetic 'ideal.' This architectural nature is endowed with the ability to ob- serve the poet "avec des regards familiers," arousing in him the expectation that he is a part of a sacred and symbolic unity. Yet the emission of "confuses paroles" intimates that the 'ideal' may consist of nothing more than a dream perception. Hence, what are often called Baudelaire's "horizontal (aesthetic) correspondences" actually lead a tenuous existence owing their allegiance to the de- nigrated origins of their linguistic signs: at one level, to the com- piled lexical entries of nature's dictionary, and on another level, to the emulation of a divine purpose which is at best obscured.

Cesar Vallejo's exile from both the natural and sacred books of nature is only more total than Baudelaire's. A relatively little dis- cussed poem from the Poemas humanos, "Un pilar soportando consuelos," gains intelligibility and places Vallejo within an allegorical interpretation of modernity when the intertextuality with Baude- laire is brought to the fore:

Un pilar soportando consuelos, pilar otro, pilar en duplicado, pilaroso y como nieto de una puerta oscura. Ruido perdido, el uno, oyendo, al borde del cansancio; bebiendo, el otro, dos a dos, con asas.4

These pillars are a response to the "vivants piliers," rewriting the poem of sacred and organic architecture by subjecting nature to the same abstracting process begun in "Correspondances." Vallejo strips down the architecture of correspondences to that of profane objects-geometric forms spawned from identically shaped human legs. "Confuses paroles" taken to their logical, cacophonous endpoint become "ruido perdido." The Baudelairean synaesthetic response of the senses one to the other also finds its abstracted counterpart in Vallejo's poem, as this line from a following stanza makes evident:

Los pilares que vi me estan oyendo

4 Cesar Vallejo, Obra poitica completa Lima: Francisco Moncloa, 1968), p. 351. From hereon referred to as Obra poetica.



300 CHRISTIANE VON BUELOW

The purposeful unity of the "Correspondances" is absent, or rather, present in form only. Indeed, the process of 'grafting' animate to inanimate, organic to architectural, hardly marks art as a ritual moment within a dream perception. Juxtaposed organic and architectural elements are equalized in an oscillating enumeration of animate particulars and inanimate spatial forms; the organic generation of offspring ("nieto") is conspicuously initiated by a mechanical production ("pilar en duplicado, pilaroso"). The last stanza makes clear that the linguistic spawning of neologisms ("pilaroso") is all that remains of Baudelaire's "Correspondances:"

Consolado en terceras nupcias, p.Alido, nacido, voy a cerrar mi pila bautismal, esta vidriera, este susto con tetas, este dedo en capilla, coraz6nmente unido a mi esqueleto.

The "pila bautismal" or baptismal font, the generative and linguistic source of the repeating, interchangeable "pilares," is an image-producing machine that shuts down self-consciously at the end of the poem ("Voy a cerrar mi pila bautismal"). The words engendered by the poet simultaneously designate numerical reduplication and human birth, a point that gains tremendous significance if one recalls the ominous determinism associated with the nine months of human gestation in quite a few of his poems.5 The newly created "third" is, needless to say, a "pale" imitation of the timeless correspondences. Not only is nature a mechanistic, repeating landscape; more significant yet, human perception cannot but be shaped by that mechanism. Tremendous social and technological changes underlie the different artistic treatment of "vivants piliers" and its survivor eighty years later, "pilar en duplicado."

Technology's development far outran artistic innovation in the mid-nineteenth century. While industry and technology developed a purely functional role, art, especially poetry, was banned to an exclusive realm insulated from everyday activities. Almost all artists of the time reacted with unequivocal repugnance to the mass pro-

5 The most significant example is perhaps "Los nueve monstruos."



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duction of goods, the assembly line and the commodity market. The situation changed drastically, however, after the Russian Rev- olution when constructivist artists brought together technology and art, spurred on by ideological commitment to a newly formed society. The plastic arts and the newly formed film production were an art in movement attempting to bridge the gap with modern realities. A new notion of "the author as producer," as Walter Benjamin calls it,6 flourishes in the 1930's as cinema becomes the model for a new dynamic art; the Surrealists and their precursors like Blaise Cendrars and Apollinaire enthusiastically embrace the possibilities for artistic experimentation. Walter Benjamin, a few years later, sums up with great optimism the new art form that had the potential to express modern dynamism: the cinema is a medium based on distortion, closeup and montage, all of which would make the "exhibition value" of easel painting antiquated, while the technical reproducibility of film would communicate to a wider audience.7 Although his praise for cinema's potential is unqualified, Benjamin's praise of technological innovation is lim- ited only to the moments of its inception in which the creative expression and the initial marketing of technological advancement allow a utopian dream (as for a classless society) to achieve material formulations

Walter Benjamin and the majority of the cineastes of the 1920's and 30's did, however, differ in their interpretations of how art, technology and political revolution were to coincide. The Surre- alists' attempts at rescuing everyday objects from oblivion and searching in them for some sign of transcendence achieves what Benjamin calls "profane illumination."9 The Surrealists are vision- aries and augurs perceiving revolutionary energies in factory buildings and in early photographs, as well as being critics of the poverty of modern life. But when it comes to statements about ''winning the energies of intoxication for the revolution," Benjamin finds the Surrealists' individual 'revolutionary' experiences unable

6 "The Author as Producer" in Reflections, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1978).

7 See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc- tion" in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969).

8 See Benjamin's "Paris die Hauptstadt des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" in Illu- minationen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1969). English translation in Walter Ben- jamin, Reflections

9 Walter Benjamin, "Der Surrealismus" in Angelus Novus (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1966). Translated in Reflections. All citations to the German edition.




to make a bridge to political action with any larger group. The Surrealists belittle the role played by the thinker who, like the "flaneur," Benjamin says, attains a more "profane illumination" than the opium eater, dreamer and ecstatic. The trick by which the Surrealists master the world, (and Benjamin stresses that it is a trick and not a method), is to ensure that the poet is the keeper of the keys to the world's magic. The aesthetic of the artist, "en etat de surprise," is enmeshed in pernicious romantic prejudices "an overprecipitous embrace of the uncomprehended miracle of the machines" being not the least significant among these prejudices.10

Benjamin lauds the Surrealists' attempts to reproduce in some autonomous way the new social and technological realities; but he also makes clear that the graphical experiments accomplish this, in part at least, by uncritically subsuming the concepts of modern life into their magical formulas. He quotes Breton's "Introduction au discours sur le peu de realite:" "philosophic realism of the Middle Ages was the basis of poetic experience. This realism, however-that is, the belief in a real separate existence of concepts whether outside of things-has always quickly crossed over from the logical realm of ideas to the magical realm of words.""1 Ben- jamin points to the Surrealists' attempts to recapture a medieval courtly love and a medieval spontaneous ease with concepts. It is precisely this ease with which concepts "cross over from the logical realm of ideas to the magical realm of words"- the ease with which the abstract can be rejuvenated-that Benjamin suggests is an easy romantic reconciliation of the totally heterogeneous elements of twentieth century society.

It is against this backdrop of Benjamin's critique of the Surre- alists that we will interpret some of Vallejo's later poetry. The relevance of Benjamin's critique does not lie in any influence that the Surrealists exercised on Vallejo's poetry-Trilce, his most experimental work, was, after all, published in 1922, before the pub- lication of the Surrealist manifestoes. Rather, Benjamin's critique of the Surrealists will call our attention to Vallejo's unease with concepts and to the resulting rough and jagged configuration of disparate discourses within a single poetic text.

For Vallejo's poetry uses scientific vocabulary and abstract con-

10 Walter Benjamin, "Der Surrealismus," p. 206. 11 Walter Benjamin, "Der Surrealismus," p. 207.



M L N 303

cepts in deliberately unmagical ways. Moreover, he rejects the poetic concreteness of nature that could potentially redeem those concepts. "Nature is a dictionary" means for Vallejo that the organic world is not available to us unmediated by the concepts of science and rationalist thought; and in the poems inspired by the vision of a new socialist society in Republican Spain or those celebrating the poor and exploited workers of his native Peru, this technical mediation becomes all the more blatant, though in this case reconciled with, rather than opposed to, human purposeful- ness ("aparatos de boca," "Mecanica sincera y peruanisima," "la tierra/tropieza con la tecnica del cielo"'2). However, in the majority of the later poems, in which a politically rejuvenated society is not providing a radical redefinition of the use to which technical and conceptual knowledge is put, it is as though Vallejo were continually forced to juxtapose the two unintegrable realms-science and poetry-as a constant reminder that science, like poetry, is built on metaphor; and that poetry, like science, relies on the con- ventional linguistic sign.

In one sense, Vallejo and the Surrealists have two projects carried out against a common enemy, reason-in particular positivistic thought and the hardened linguistic forms that flow from this continuous abstraction of experienced life. Both attempt to dis- order the hierarchy and domination of reason over experience through "planned incongruity." (This is Kenneth Burke's definition of metaphor, more often called "perspective by incongruity," developed in Permanence and Change, a book written while the Sur- realists were still at their height.) Certainly the vocation of the Surrealist poet, like that of most poets since Romanticism, has been almost continuously to reconcretize and respiritualize words that have become incorporeal and intangible like concepts.

Vallejo denies that such poetic regeneration is possible through purely aesthetic means, at least not through the selection of a new and "modern" vocabulary. He accuses the "new poetry," quite possibly the Futurists in particular, of celebrating a new vocabulary- "las palabras cinema, motor, caballos de fuerza, avion, radio, jass-

12 "Los mineros salieron de la mina," and "Telkrica y Magnetica" in Obra poetica, p. 295 and p. 299.




band, telegrafia sin hilos"-without changing the readers' perception of reality in the least:

Muchas veces un poema no dice 'cinema' poseyendo no obstante la emocion cinemnatica, de manera oscura y tacita, pero efectiva y humana. Tal es la verdadera poesia nueva.13

Vallejo's poetry assumes an inevitable victory of science and technology, precisely at the level of perception. Like Benjamin, he believes there is a formal artistic response which corresponds to that victory: we share in both a scientific, conceptual gaze as well as a defamiliarizing cinematic gaze. Both modes of perception have broken with the illusion of distance, the sacred distance from which we look at what we respect (the main attribute of an art work's "aura," according to Benjaminl4). "Los ojos acostumbrados al cinema y los ojos acostumbrados a la lejania"15 Vallejo writes crypt- ically in his notebooks, leaving the two opposed 'ways of seeing,' the analytical dissection inherent to the celluloid art, and the dis- tant contemplation of the revered, sacred object, in unsynthesized opposition.

One of the famous experimental films of the time, "Ballet Me- chanique," (1923-4) self-consciously investigates the human reac- tion to a mechanical environment: in two scenes, enormous eyes open slowly and in amazement at the whirling machinery. Leger, who made "Ballet Mechanique" and was also the major spokesman for the new "machine aesthetic," announces in a manifesto-like style: "I invent images from machines, as others have made land- scapes from their imagination."'6 The object as one finds it ar- ranged in shop windows, be it a pair of shoes or a leg of lamb, is already a work of art. "It belongs to the realm of pure plasticity, the sculptural and constructed realm." Objects come to our senses much more clearly mediated by geometric form. The steam en- gine, which is almost a perfect cylinder, is, says Leger, "born from the geometric order."'7 Geometric form is dominant; it penetrates every area of life with its visual regularity.

Vallejo's poetry too focuses on the process of perception as it is

13 Quoted in "Desacuerdos sobre Vallejo" by Juan Carlos Giano in Approximaciones a Ct'sar Vallejo, ed. by Angel Flores (New York: Las Americas, 1971), p. 68.

14 See "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Illuminations. 15 Cesar Vallejo, Contra el secreto profesional (Lima: Mosca Azul, n.d.), p. 75. From

hereon referred to as Contra. 16 Ferdinand LUger, "The Machine Aesthetic" in Functions of Painting, trans by

Alexandra Anderson (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 64. 17 Ferdinand LUger, p. 78.



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penetrated by the "geometric order," as "Un pilar soportando consuelos" makes clear. This essay hopes to reveal the kind of knowledge and truth Vallejo sees as emerging from the cinematic age.

On the one hand, cinema opened up the seemingly infinite possibilities of capturing the interaction of nature and the machine. Leger says of Abel Gance's great experimental film, "La Roue:"

You will see moving images presented like a tableau, in the center of the screen with a judicious range in the balancing of moving and static parts (the contrast of effects); a stationary figure on a moving machine, a hand modulated in contrast to a geometrical shape, disks, abstract forms, play of curves and straight lines ... dazzling, wonderful, a moving geometry to amaze you.'8

Vallejo, for all his interest in the cinema, expressed some uneasi- ness about the imposing abstractness of the closeup and the sure association of human movement with mechanistic motion: "Solo nos hace ver unos cuantos movimientos," thus breaking "la tray- ectoria continua de un gesto o de un movimiento." "Solo que con ello tendriamos una impresion mecanica del gesto."'9

Both Vallejo and Benjamin ask one of the essential aesthetic questions of modernity: what kind of perception and knowledge corresponds to the cinematic age? Benjamin responds,

Impartiality [Unbefangenheit] and the free gaze here become a lie, perhaps the whole naive mode of expression sheer incompetence. Today the most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It tears down the free space where contemplation moved and all but hits us between the eyes with things as a car, growing to gigantic proportions careens at us out of a film screen. And just as the film does not present furniture and facades in completed forms for critical consideration, their insistent, jerky nearness along being sensa- tional, the genuine advertisement hurtles things at us with the tempo of a good film.20

Film perception is imposed on us as a "mercantile gaze," just as the shocks of mechanized motion control production on a conveyer belt.2' Benjamin gathers together the most diverse images of society, constantly setting up the kind of "unmediated" parallels to

18 "Abel Gance's Film 'The Wheel'" in Functions of Painting. 19 Contra, p. 76. 20 Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstrasse (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1972), p. 95. 21 Walter Benjamin, "Ueber einige Motive bei Baldelaire" in CB, p. 126.




which Adorno, H. R. Jauss,22 and in a more conciliatory manner, Frederic Jameson,23 have all objected. While there may be defi- ciencies in Walter Benjamin's work from the perspective of a critique of ideology, his aphoristic theories have been enthusiastically received by certain art historians,24 and have the potential, as this essay will demonstrate, to illuminate the more obscure poetry of Cesar Vallejo. I believe that both Baudelaire's and Vallejo's poetry participates in the "mercantile gaze," (Vallejo's in the specifically cinematic, mechanically reproduced version); and, more important, that through this participation, meaning comes to be expressed as "sign allegory."25 In the sections that follow, Benjamin's notion of sign allegory will be shown to explain with tremendous precision the split attitudes of both Baudelaire and Vallejo in con- fronting a mercantile modernity: in the case of Vallejo it will become clear how the rhetorical term, allegory, can be employed to designate the subject's continued expectation of a qualitative synthesis of experience, despite the total adaptation of poetic form and perception to the fragmentary geometric and mercantile order of modernity.

El Libro de la Naturaleza II

El Libro de la Naturaleza

Profesor de sollozo-he dicho a un arbol- palo de azogue, tilo rumoreante, a la orilla del Marne, un buen alumno

22 Hans Robert Jauss attempts to dispute Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 57-66. Also in "Zur Frage der 'Struktureinheit' aelterer and modernerer Lyrik" in Germanisch- Romanische Monatsschrift (Band X, 1960), pp. 231-66. His thesis is that Baudelaire is able to break the spell of 'Melancholy' through the poetry of memory which creates an "autonomous world of the Beautiful." (p. 261) His interpretation ends in a kind of romanticism that sees the poem "Le cygne" as a "surnatural" creation of the imagination, a 'beaut6 inutile' that opposes the emptiness of external objects.

23 Fredric Jameson has suggested in Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1981) that Benjamin overemphasizes the materialist forces of production by stressing "invention and technique as the primary cause of historical change." (p. 74) But Jameson also states that Benjamin's preoccupation with technological invention in fact "does not lead to a theory of historical causality" because the sphere of analysis is only "in appearance historical" and in reality psychological and aesthetic.

24 Cf. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972). 25 Benjamin quotes the negative reference of Friedrich Creuzer to the allegorical

nature of writing in The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, p. 179.



M L N 307

leyendo va en tu naipe, en tu hojarasca, entre el agua evidente y el sol falso, su tres de copas, su caballo de oros. Rector de capitulos del cielo, de la mosca ardiente, de la calma manual que hay en los asnos; rector de honda ignorancia, un mal alumno, leyendo va en tu naipe, en tu hojarasca el hambre de la raz6n que le enloquece y la sed de demencia que le eloca. TUcnico en gritos, arbol consciente, fuerte, fluvial, doble, solar, doble, fanatico, conocedor de rosas cardinales, totalmente metido, hasta hacer sangre, en aguijones, un alumno leyendo va en tu naipe, en tu hojarasca, su rey precoz, telurico, volcanico, de espadas. Oh profesor, de haber tanto ignorado! iOh rector, de temblar tanto en el aire! iOh tecnico, de tanto que te inclinas! iOh tilo! Oh palo rumoroso junto al Marne!

From its title, Vallejo's "El Libro de la Naturaleza," (1937)26 like Baudelaire's "Correspondances," promises to be an ars poetica. The rhetorical figure of catachresis, the hyperbolic use of the mixed metaphor, outlines the sphere of meaning in which the poem op- erates. "Profesor de sollozo," "Rector de capitulos del cielo," "Technico en gritos:" each apostrophe wrests a word associated with the rational transmission of knowledge out of its usual sig- nification by combining it with another word (or words) expressing uncontrollable emotion and untenable expectations ("cielo"), both of which contradict the surrounding logical, circumscribed sphere of meaning.

What does a professor of sobbing transmit? Nothing more than his own uncontrolled and indecipherable speech. The first quality attributed to the tree, namely the metallic quicksilver, is the very opposite of what is natural, though it obviously refers as well to the tree's continuous state of motion. But this motion hardly implies a transformation. The personified, murmuring linden tree, emits a muffled human speech (as with "ruido perdido"), and sig- nals in this condensed form the pathetic fallacy of the Romantics (to whom nature's rivers "murmured" their secrets). The student-

26 Obra poetica, p. 409.




subject of the poem is an unusual reader of the "book of nature:" he seeks among the phenomenal evidence available, "en tu hojarasca," amid literal dead leaves, and "en tu naipe," amid figurative leaves (playing cards) of a predetermined and predictable sort, for his own predetermined and numerical fate ("su tres de copas, su caballo de oros"). Replacing the expected number of a playing card with "caballo" (the "queen"), foregrounds the fact that what is read in this card game is merely a gap or a slot which is filled in by a word equivalent to purely quantitative integers. It seems that Val- lejo purposely subverts the usual metaphorical value given the card game-namely, drawing one's fate as a chance lot-in order to insist upon the pre-determined, yet still arbitrary, and always already printed 'fates' inscribed on these 'dead leaves.' One is tempted to recall Borges' vertiginous play of chance and predetermined (pre-written) fate in "The Babylonian Lottery," where chance has become defined as the outcome of a lottery that pre- scribes further drawings in other lotteries, and hence the dictates of chance are less and less "the simple doing of chance."

The substance of what is read in this "book of nature" is defined by its spatial location ("entre el agua evidente y el sol falso"): meaning is sought between (self-) "evident water"-the exact mirror reflection of the tree which tells one the obvious-and "false sun"-the brightness of reason and truth, far away and in- applicable to the way we constitute the world. Already, it seems, this poem will be an allegorical search for truth and knowledge in the world.

The apostrophe of the second stanza ("Rector de capitulos del cielo"), places the tree, the natural object educating human beings into knowledge of the world, spatially closer to the "false sun" in the heavens. As a result, God's "book of nature" is not so much created as it is classified, divided up into "chapters." This rector- god of the heavens determines the ascription of classificatory ad- jectives to noun-species (and rather arbitrarily, though with more than a bit of humor, classifies flies as ardent and donkeys as full of "manual calm"). These less than profound meanings earn him the title, "rector of deep ignorance." To this new ignorance on the part of the teacher, there corresponds a new "bad student" whose search has become more frenzied: "el hambre de razon que le enloquece/ y la sed de demencia que le aloca." Three semantic equivalents-two verbs that occupy the same syntactic location ("enloquece" and "aloca") and the noun "demencia"-so outweigh



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the single "razon," that this imitation of the mystical oxymoron (as practiced in Golden Age poetry), instead of unifying the contra- dictory spheres of reason and madness, actually draws reason into the opposing semantic sphere, "demencia." With this identity of reason and madness, the archetypal Biblical context of hunger and thirst for the spiritual life has been perverted into the hunger and thirst for the identical fates of reason, knowledge and truth on the one hand, and ignorance, madness and a functionary's classificatory 'administration' of knowledge on the other hand.

This modern allegory of the unending process of enlight- enment27 begins with the desire for knowledge, the overwhelming urge to "read the book of nature," and ends with the narrowing of knowledge into pure "technique," (professor and rector give way in the third stanza to "technician"). And, in keeping with the mechanized production of meaning, the evident water and false sun of the opening stanza are re-produced in "doubled" form: "fluvial, doble, solar, doble, fandtico." The frenzied 'doubling' of self evident, "fluvial" mimetic meaning and false, "solar" Platonic truth reaches its logical and emotional endpoint with the adjective, "fanatical," the syllogistic outcome of the student's "razon-demencia." Hence, the "fanatical" search for truth displayed by the student produces a conditioned response to the teacher's (i.e., nature's) lack of self-revelation and endlessly entangles the identities of student and teacher. Precisely the point at which the technician- tree is declared "conscious" and "strong," we also learn what his pedagogic abilities consist in; namely, the violent emptying out or extraction of life's blood ("conocedor de rosas cardenales totalmente! metido, hasta hacer sangre, en aguijones"). And the student's response again partakes exactly of the teacher's substance; he reads a card, a kind of fortune for himself, which corresponds precisely to the violent, 'monarchic' rule of the teacher. And the 'bleeding' of raw and heterogeneous life which could have ended in self-sacrificial violence on the part of the student, instead seems to ally the student and teacher in the technician's craft that pre- serves the further search for knowledge and truth.

This allegorical "fortune" can be read as the violent bleeding of nature by the scientific or positivistic "technician," the latest man-

27 The term 'enlightenment' here corresponds to the denunciation of formal reason in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans by John Cum- ming (New York: Seabury, 1972).




ifestation of the philosophic reduction of the world-what Vallejo elsewhere calls "la tabla de Locke de Bacon"28-which reduces the multiplicity of sensuous detail to forms of perception, reduces the forms further to position and arrangement, and reduces this re- stricted knowledge even further to number. Does the student-subject participate in this violent reduction of life to playing card "leaves," or is his sword drawn against it? Although the poem begins with a clearly designated subject and object, by the last stanza, when the attributes of the professor-technician are reiterated, the student-subject has quite possibly changed positions with the teacher-natural object. The student was the reader of one book of nature and becomes the writer of another one as soon as he suc- ceeds in "reading" his own forceful, eruptive as well as self-con- cealing identity ("precoz, telurico, volcainico, de espadas"). Entry into the discipleship of producing written knowledge about the world seems to be an ambiguous calling, at once self-preserving and self-defining, but also a violent, monarchic exertion of an ex- clusionary and abstracting power over heterogeneous life; Vallejo places himself within this kind of ambiguous role as a poet, at least in part to distance himself from the kind of exclamatory romantic exaltation of nature which the last stanza parodies.

Vallejo is concerned with the fiction that preoccupies many modern writers, namely, the "I" that perceives nature and creates meaning. His subject has not been de-throned, but colonized by forms of knowledge totally alien to human purposiveness. The model of human communication which asserts itself in political action and is celebrated in the Spanish Civil War poems ("Espafia, aparta de mi este calliz") and in several select poems of the Poemas humanos, is conspicuously violated in the great majority of these poems. In "Panteon," one of his most stylistically accomplished poems, human perception has itself become the major victim of the abstraction and reification process that knowledge has fallen prey to. As a result, perception becomes interchangeable with the larger and smaller units of temporal classification. The very spatial sphere occupied by the body appears to have been placed on a

28 "Tengo un terrible miedo" in Obra poetica, p. 311.



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linguistic continuum riddled by consciousness of temporal succession; and the temporal, linguistic continuum of the poem repro- duces with biting exactitude the infinitely sub-divided human existence that corresponds to the classification systems elaborated by formal philosophic reason, or what Vallejo elsewhere calls the accomplishments of "the eminent Aristotelian earthworm."29

Panteon

He visto ayer sonidos generales, mortuoriamente, puntualmente alejarse,

cuando oi desprenderse del ocaso tristemente, exactamente un arco, un arcoiris.

Vi el tiempo generoso del minuto, infinitamente

atado locamente al tiempo grande, pues que estaba la hora

suavemente, premiosamente henchida de dos horas.

Dejose comprender, liamar, la tierra terrenalmente;

negose brutalmente asi a mi historia y si vi, que me escuchen, pues, en bloque si toque esta mecinica, que vean

lentamente, despacio, vorazmente, mis tinieblas.

Y si vi en la lesi6n mentalmente de la inc6gnita, si escuche, si pense en mis ventanillas nasales, funerales, temporales,

fraternalmente, piadosamente echadme a los fil6sofos.

Mas no mas inflexi6n precipitada en canto liano, y no mas el hueso colorado, el son del alma

tristemente erguida ecuestremente en mi espinazo, ya que, en suma, la vida es

29 "La eminente lombriz aristotelica," "Dos nifios anhelantes" in Obra poetica, p. 311.




implacablemente, imparcialmente horrible, estoy seguro.30

Here the synaesthetic correspondence of the senses conceived by Baudelaire and the French Symbolists as a metaphor for the ideal functioning of the senses is inverted. To "see" "general sounds" and "hear" the unfastening of a rainbow cites the redemptive syn- aesthesia of co-mingled sensory perception, but only with the purpose of separating sensory functioning from the objects toward which perception is directed. The substitution of "ver" for "oir" (and vice versa) marks the unexceptability, the foreignness of the exact reduplication and infinite division of time to the human subject. Time is "generous" because it is continuous; the usual semantic content of "generous" as an intentional human quality is completely distorted by its placement between reified larger and smaller temporal units ("tiempo" and "minuto"). Individual words are fundamentally re-valued by their placement in this restrictive metaphoric field. Similarly, subjective human desires are broken into component parts which, like temporal integers, are seamlessly transferred over to the ubiquitous "tiempo grande," the moving 'essence' of cumulative temporality.

In Vallejo's poetry, the subjective response to a mechanically, pre-determined field of meaning gains formulation only through the overt manipulation of the very limitations against which the poet rebels. Thus, while the "general sounds" clearly designate the clock's ticking, we are led to believe that the word-sounds of Val- lejo's poem have no choice but to reproduce the temporal continuum with displaced, mechanized human cries ("sonidos generales" are later picked up by the emotionally charged "son del alma"). In this way a stark poetic landscape emerges: emotion, the recessive voice of the lyric poet, turns into pure motion. A demys- tification of the symbolic unification of the subject with nature and with a transcendent source of meaning reveals here, as in "El Libro de la Naturaleza," that meaning is created in precisely the mo- mentary equation and ironic juxtaposition of opposed human experience and mechanistic, repeating forms of perception and language.

In much of Vallejo's poetry, metaphor has come under the sway of philosophic and scientific modes of knowledge; hence, poetic particulars are openly substituted one for the other, wresting them

30 Obra pogtica, p. 355.



M L N 313

from one sphere and relocating them in another. "Arcoiris" is wrested ("desprenderse") from "arco," and "terrenalmente" is spawned from "tierra." The senses have been reduced to interchangeability because they have been overwhelmed by the single dimension of time that dominates all levels of abstraction and reified concreteness. The simultaneity of "ver" and "oir" in the first stanza allows the senses to apprehend nothing but the spatial ex- tension of time; and the inescapability of this fate is embedded into the dramatic movement of the poem by the pattern of repeating temporal parts of speech. The adverbs, "mortuariamente," "puntualmente," "tristemente," "exactamente," and so on, mark the poem with an intrusive temporal consciousness; and out of this overwhelmingly temporal consciousness, a "pantheon" of illus- trious dead sound-moments is created.

Kenneth Burke calls science and poetry "partners" in the use of metonymy, which he defines as the figurative trope of reduction.3' Synecdoche, according to Burke by far the most common trope in poetry, is the figure of representation which "stresses a relationship of connectedness that, like a road extends in either direction from quantity to quality or quality to quantity; but reduction follows along this road in only one direction, from quality to quantity.32 I mention this specialized distinction given the rhetorical tropes because I think Vallejo makes a similar separation of metonymy and synecdoche in "Panteon," as in other poems. In Vallejo's poetry, the senses are reduced to mechanistic functioning, human consciousness is routinely reduced to an animal state, and meaning is reduced from quality to quantity. If the senses have been reduced in the capacity, when, if ever, can they perceive and in turn "represent" what they were intended for? In "Panteon" there is only a moment in which this purposiveness becomes a possibility: "Y si vi, que me escuchen, pues en bloque/ si toque esta mecainica, que vean/ lentamente,! despacio, vorazmente, mis tinieblas." This direct address to an audience, though not as clearly desirous of communication as the often-cited "embrace" that breaks through "Con- siderando en frio," ("le hago una sefia/ le doy un abrazo emo- cionado"), does nevertheless reorganize the interchangeable sensory functions into "blocks" of potentially complementary sensory

31 Kenneth Burke, "Four Master Tropes" in A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: U.C. Press, 1969), p. 509.

32 Kenneth Burke, p. 509.




responses. A reference is made to sensory functions that have not been confused or distorted and that will respond in an appropriate manner to his own disrupted senses. The hope is abandoned though, because "la lesion de la respuesta" can only reproduce the quantification of all qualities, as "la incognita" (the mathematical unknown) quantifies "lo incognito." The violent bleeding of the communicative act-"la lesion de la respuesta," "la lesion . . . de la incognita"-as in "El Libro de la Naturaleza," implies the end of all synecdochic sense perception.

Metonymy, then, should not be understood in its purely figurative usage, but as a way of interpreting truth and formulating knowledge about the world. The striking quality about Vallejo's poetry is that metonymic reduction should so completely dominate the majority of the Poemas humanos, without the redemptive coun- terbalancing of synecdochic completion. The objects of everyday life which the Surrealists imbue with transcendent meaning are, for Vallejo, in the rare instances in which they enter his poetry, interchangeable, enumerated parts that do not add up to a whole. "Las cosas sencillas,"33 as he calls the comb and stained handkerchief of everyday life, are no more than the "tres de copas" of "El Libro de la Naturaleza." They are above all a priori particulars of time and space. However, the expectation of synecdochic completion, when seen in the light of the Poemas humanos as a whole, does not die; something called "mi historia" as in "Panteon," or "un drama proprio,"34 desires expression, but barely pierces through the grid of spatial and temporal determinants.

In "Panteon" we saw the expansiveness of symbolic meaning which unifies the poet's purpose with the natural order recede and be replaced by reductive, contiguous figures of meaning. These are expressed ultimately as tautological (self-"evident") truth by the poet: "Dejose comprender, llamar, la tierra/ terrenalmente." After denying access to the one possible redemption-shared and in- herently political communication-only empty, syllogistic reason is left standing. Piety and fraternity, in temporalized, adverbial form, modify his being thrown to the philosophers; in the ironic tone typical for Vallejo, piety and fraternity are chosen precisely because these are the qualities that are excluded from the nom- inalistic knowledge of "la tabla de Locke, de Bacon." Syllogistic

33 "Y, si despues de tantas palabras" in Obra poetica, p. 371. 34 Dos ninos anhelantes" in Obra poetica, p. 31 1.



M L N 315

reasoning wins a formal victory, "ya que, en suma, la vida es/ implacablemente,/ imparcialmente horrible, estoy seguro." Teinporal determinants dominate much of Vallejo's poetry, and the spatial dimension is not idealized for its expansiveness as it is in much of modern poetry.

Philosophic complicity in the reduction of heterogeneous life to a priori spatial determinants becomes the unusual problematic of one of Vallejo's most obscure poems. Again, the specifically human qualities of fraternity and compassion, whether in their greatness or decline ("decayendo o subiendo"), appear obliquely, but only to register them as screened out of philosophy's "dry" sustenance:

A lo mejor, soy otro; andando, al alba, otro que marcha en torno a un disco largo, a un disco elastico: mortal, figurativo, audaz diafragma. A lo mejor, recuerdo al esperar, anoto marmoles d6nde indice escarlata, y d6nde catre de bronce, un zorro ausente, espureo, enojadisimo. A lo mejor, hombre al fin, las espadas ungidas de afnil misericordia, a lo mejor, me digo, mas alla no hay nada. Me da la mar el disco, referiendolo, con cierto margen seco, a mi garganta; jnada en verdad, mas acido, mas dulce, mas kanteano! Pero sudor ajeno, pero suero o tempestad de mansedumbre, decayendo o subiendo, eso, jamas! Echado, fino, exhumome, tumefacta la mezcla en que entro a golpes, sin piernas, sin adulto barro, ni armas, una aguja prendida en el gran atomo ... jNo! lNunca! jNunca ayer! lNunca despues! Y de ahf este tuberculo satAnico, esta muela moral de plesiosaurio y estas sospechas postumas, este indice, esta cama, estos boletos.35

In "A lo mejor soy otro" an overtly schizophrenic ego must repond

35 Obra poetica, p. 407.




to a single overpowering spatial form ("un disco largo") that contains all other space as a part in a kind of Kantian nightmare. The poet is made to ingest, to internalize, this "elastic" and "audacious" disk, around which he had first walked. The poetic "I" believes it is itself an "other" precisely because this giant disk is simultaneously an external, all-inclusive boundary around all things and a mental, "figurative" container of opposing qualities ("alcido," "dulce"). The liquid which must be swallowed is "dry" because it excludes the teeming fluids of life: "sudor ajeno" and "suero/ o tempestad de mansedumbre." The "zorro ausente, espureo, enojadisimo," the vehicle onto which intense emotion seems to have been displaced, metonymically represents the "other" ego which distances itself from this abstract reduplication of reality. Even longings for transcendence are accommodated by this all-encompassing spatial category; the metonymically reduced man, literally split in two, ironically is "a man at last" when a surrogate profane ritual "anoints" him from behind ("las espadas ungidas de aflil misericordia").

Added to the "probability" ("a lo mejor") that "I" is "another," is the "probability" that nominalist philosophy and science elimi- nate all transcendence: "mas alla no hay nada." The ritual ingesting of a totality devoid of transcendence, such as science and philosophy offer, assures an existence of classification: "anoto mairmoles/ d6nde indice escarlata, y d6nde catre de bronce" implies a system- atic, almost bureaucratic, registery of fragmentary monuments, monarchic metonyms which are long since 'dead' memorials. Swal- lowing the fluid disc brings on the "exhuming" of the body, as decomposition generates a helpless, and, one should add, undif- ferentiated, indistinguishably human, fetal 'form.' One would not expect a poetic metamorphosis or rebirth to reduce the body to its organic component parts, let alone to its smallest, inorganic particles. Hence the surprise when the final metonymic reduction attributed to the "I" is the oxymoron, "gran altomo." The last imag- inable reduction, and simultaneous spatial abstraction, consists in a piercing of the "great atom," which should be read as both a killing and a bringing to life.

Once again the combined influence of an all-encompassing philosophic synthesis-here the Kantian categories-seems to press poetic language from one side, while a microscopic investigation in- terested in the most minute particles of matter seeks to impose itself on the other. Clearly the Kantian division of the individual



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into empirical and transcendental egos prefigures all subsequent discursive distinctions between those aspects of the human being that are amenable to empirical calculation and causal investigation, and that part which is separated off as the active and free source of moral agency. Again and again in Vallejo's poetry the transcendental ego has shrunk to a paralyzed monad of outrage, emotional suffering and simple counterfactual expectation of what will never come.36

The Allegorical Gaze I

These abstracting and sub-dividing processes which permeate so thoroughly the perceptual capacity, while no doubt partially attributable to a consciousness attuned to an overwhelming temporality, reach intelligiblity only as the products of formal reason constituted by philosophic and scientific systems. Without the re- juvenating potential of a substantive reason, for Vallejo synony- mous with the merger of theory and practice in Marxism, a true 'vision' in the literal sense of seeing objects or in the figurative sense of seeing their redemption, cannot come to pass. I would like to refer to the "way of seeing" that results from this spatial and temporal devaluation of the world of objects as the "allegorical gaze" (die allegorische Anschauungsweise), a term which Walter Benjamin develops from The Origin of German Tragic Drama, with specific reference to modern literature, in the Baudelaire essays and fragments.37 Here are several of the many definitions-or better, contexts-given allegory by Benjamin:

Allegory is the armature of the modern.38 The allegories stand for what the commodity makes of the experiences of people of this century.39 The allegorical gaze is always built on a devalued world of appearances. The specific devaluation of the object world exposed by the commodity is the foundation of the allegorical intention in Baudelaire.40

36 Cf. "Acaba de pasar el que vendrd" in Obra poetica, p. 359. 37 The essays on Baudelaire are collected in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the

Era of Capitalism, trans. by Quentin Hoare (London: New Left Books, 1974), but "Zentralpark" is not included. I will thus quote from the German volume Charles Baudelaire (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1974). Hereafter referred to as CB.

38 "Zentralpark" in CB, p. 177. 39 "Konspekt zum 'Baudelaire'" quoted by Rolf Tiedemann in his afterword to

CB, p. 203. 40 Passagenwerk, quoted by Tiedemann in Afterword to CB, p. 203.




Allegory both conserves and destroys the connections of life. Allegory clings to the ruins. It offers the image of rigid unrest.41 The destruction of appearances [the destruction of the organic and the living] is identical with the decay of aura. Baudelaire puts in their service the artistic means of allegory.42

Clearly the concept of allegory here means something different from the rhetorical technique allegory, much as Kenneth Burke's opposition of metonymic and synecdochic concepts has shed its reliance on a self-evident, classificatory system of rhetorical figures. Moral allegory or the allegory of courtly love separate sense appearances and transcendent meaning, but there is no question that the concrete image is an emblem of a timeless spiritual world. In Baudelaire's poetry the image-idea separation is maintained, but allegory loses its transcendent referent. It is crucial to note that all the 'contexts' of meaning allegory accrues in Benjamin's writings are essentially negative-i.e., the commodity is a negation of a natural object and "the devalued world of appearance" is a sign of the decay of aura. Hence, allegory does not in itself create meaning; rather it unmasks the disaccord of word and referent, image and meaning-the 'unseeing' imitation of the "Correspondances."

The allegorical emblem as Benjamin discovers it in Baudelaire, and as I hope to reveal it in Vallejo, exists on a kind of middle ground, recalling the organic "Correspondances" between nature, the human being and God, but pointing incontrovertibly to the arbitrariness of image and idea and the historical emptiness of the "Correspondances," redemption. It remains to be explained how, with this concept of allegory, Benjamin uncovers a distinct interpretation of Baudelaire, as well as how a designation of Vallejo's poetry as allegorical will draw together his rhetorical proclivity for tropes of reduction and his special attention to the human being as constituted by European philosophical and scientific reason.

If Benjamin derives the rejuvenation of concepts such as allegory from an equal immersion in the literary and extra-literary particulars of an era, it is in his specific attention to the visual, attributable at least in part to his affinity for the French tradition of Proust and Valery, that Benjamin's usefulness for the study of modern poetry lies. In his lengthy study of Baudelaire's writings and of

41 "Zentralpark" in CB, p. 162. 42 "Zentralpark" in CB, p. 166.



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'Paris, capital of the nineteenth century,'43 Benjamin's attention is drawn again and again to the simultaneous seduction and repul- sion which the ever-new capitalist commodity exercised over Bau- delaire. In the particular seductiveness of the commodified 'crowd' Benjamin locates the magnetic pull of lyric poetry between modernity and antiquity. It is to modernity's disorienting shock stimuli, usually guarded against by the ego's defenses, that Bau- delaire's sensory functioning is particularly receptive. And it is the counter-pressure of antiquity-the 'remembrance' of pre-historic "Correspondances"-that recasts modern "lived through events" ("Erlebnisse") into the fullness of historical "experience" ("Erfah- rung"). What Benjamin accounts for in Baudelaire is "how lyric poetry can have as its basis an experience ("Erfahrung") for which the shock-event ("Chockerlebnis) has become the norm."44

Benjamin compares the commodity on display to the violent dis- memberment of things from their familiar connections (contexts), and refers his case to several stanzas from Baudelaire's "Une mar- tyre."45 The first stanza of the poem portrays a headless corpse cascading in a flood of hot blood, the pillow beneath it soaked like the mud of a wet field. The second stanza describes the severed head: "Sur la table de nuit, comme un renoncule/ Repose; et vide de pensers,/ Un regard vague et blanc comme le crepuscule/ S'e- chappe des yeux revulses."46 The eyes which gaze with a vacant expression stand diametrically opposed to the reciprocated gaze that is attributed to the "regards familiers" of the "Correspon- dances." These lines make use of an allegorical oxymoron: the rigidity of death, displaced to the gaze of the eyes, flows from the severed head, like the life blood that has already left the body. By comparing a lifeless head with a banal ranunculous, what begins as a reference to a classical work of art, becomes instead an emblem of the allegorical gaze: the commodity and the gaze appropriate to the commodity are enveloped in one allegorical object, a head torn from its body.

A poem Benjamin deals with at length (two paragraphs dedi- cated to a particular poem or work are a rare occurrence) is "Le

43 The name given the expose Benjamin wrote for the Arcades Project (Passagen- arbeit). Cf. Susan Buck Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics, (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 143-5.

44 "Ueber einige motive bei Baudelaire" in CB, p. 110. 4 "Zentralpark" in CB, p. 166. 46 Les Fleurs du Mal in Oeuvres, p. 181.




cygne."47 While the "Correspondances" sonnet had placed Erfah- rung within a timeless present, "Le cygne" judges modernity from an exiled position within rememberance. "The 'Correspon- dances,'" says Benjamin, "are the data of rememberance [Einge- denken];"48 "what Baudelaire meant by 'Correspondances' can be designated as experience that seeks to establish itself in crisis-proof form."49 Thus, in "Le cygne" the "Correspondances" have withdrawn from the physical landscape and been internalized within rememberance: "Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville/ Change, plus vite, helas! que le coeur d'un mortel)." The "forme d'une ville" (as it was experienced) is now a "form" banished to remembrance ("ma memoire fertile"). These lines prompt Ben- jamin to comment:

The city, understood in its constant flux, rigidifies. It becomes brittle like glass, but also transparent like glass, that is as far as meaning is concerned ... The stature of Paris is surrounded by symbols of frailty living creatures (the negress and the swan) and historical figures (An- dromache, 'widow of Hector and wife of Helenus'). Sadness over what was, and hopelessness about the future is their common feature. What finally weds modernity to antiquity is this frailty.50

Benjamin captures the opposing forces of the poem; first, the constant flux from one "forme d'une ville" to another; and then, the hardening of these images as they are brought into the sphere of meaning associated with Andromache's exile. The intrusion of modernity (the "nouveau Carrousel") has relegated the motley confusion of the menagerie, as it is remembered, to a mythic past on a par with the Trojan War. "Le cygne" traces the continuous converion of sense impressions ("je vois," "je vis") to mental "forms" ('je pense"). This is the process that defines the inter- penetration of modernity with antiquity, as Benjamin describes it. "Tout pour moi devient allegorie," Baudelaire says, because the image of the swan bathing in a dusty stream "rigidifies" that impression in an imposed meaning; the "form" of Paris, old and new, offers the rigid fragments for the construction of allegory. As the organic connections of the city are destroyed, so the successive layers of antiquity are lost to the present. The structure of re-

47"Die Moderne" in CB. 48 "Ueber einige Motive bei Baudelaire" in CB, p. 135. 49 "Ueber einige Motive bei Baudelaire" in CB, p. 134. 50 "Die Moderne" in CB, pp. 81-2.



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membrance cannot but be altered by this fact. Thus the "organic connections"- the histories -of the allegorical emblems have been lost, for this allegorical remembrance "corresponds" in many ways to the fragmentariness it is trying to escape.

It is no coincidence, then, that Benjamin thinks of remembrance-"Andenken"51-as the "key figure" of nineteenth century allegory, analogous to the corpse of Baroque allegory:

Remembrance [Andenken] is the form of transforming the commodity into a collector's item. The 'Correspondances' are accordingly the endlessly multiple accord of remembrances on to the other. 'J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans.'52

The objects of 'spleen' rigidified into an always similar commodity are turned into the objects of allegorical remembrance, ie., into formally identical nostalgic obsessions. Thus, it is in terms of these endlessly repeating remembrance-objects that Benjamin has con- cretized the relationship between modernity's "shock events" ("Chockerlebnisse") and the internalized correspondences of pre- history; at this point of intersection, between the reified commodity and the uniqueness [Einmaligkeit] of the remembrance-object, the "shock experience" ("Chockerfahrung") of nineteenth century lyric poetry is born.

Perception under these 'allegorical' circumstances does not discover nature in its particularity; instead, a ready-made landscape, composed specifically of symbolic language, stirs in the poet the expectation of personal transcendence. Like the "symbols of frailty" that form a predetermined anchor point for contemporary sense impressions in "Le cygne," the bells that ring furiously in the middle of the "Spleen" poem (which beings "Quand le ciel bas et lourd pese comme un couvercle") convey the preoccupation with lost symbolic meaning. The symbol of qualitatively different time is itself now in exile from Erfahrung, "des esprits errants et sans patrie."53 Benjamin's interpretation assumes that Baudelaire gives up the symbolic mode of meaning after the first few poems of Fleurs du Mal. The poet cannot be identified as the creater of symbols when symbols are already embedded in the landscape, just as the "gibet symbolique" appears on the (once symbolic), now alle-

51 "Andenken" is also a noun meaning souvenir or memento. 52 "Zentralpark" in CB, p. 185. 53 Oeuvres, p. 146. Also mentioned by Benjamin in "Ueber einige Motive bei

Baudelaire" in CB, p. 139.




gorical Isle of Venus.54 This allegorizing of symbol often takes place in a condensed juxtaposition of styles, as, for example, the symbolic interpretation of nature is evident in "Le ciel etait char- mant, la mer etait unie," only to be withdrawn in the next line, "Pour moi tout etait noir et sanglant desormais."55 Together, these lines characterize allegorical meaning as the absolute human es- trangement from the "Correspondances" of a sacred, pre-historic nature.

The question arises, what is the relation between the "Corre- spondances" and allegory? When commenting on the "Corre- spondances" sonnet, Benjamin suggests that Baudelaire's insight into the reciprocity of nature in this dream perception ("regards familiers") assures that aura ("invest[ing] the objects of nature with the ability to look at us in return") will always appear in its disin- tegrated form. Hence, Baudelaire is to be sharply distinguished from certain romantics whom Benjamin characterizes elsewhere as having voluntarily renounced the infinite.56 The disintegration of aura occurs

in the form of a cipher which we encounter in the Fleurs du Mal invariably whenever the gaze of the human eye appears. What is involved here is that the expectation pushing against the gaze of the human eye comes away empty-handed. Baudelaire describes eyes of which one is inclined to say that they have lost the ability to gaze.57

It is of special significance that the empty sign designate the meeting place of the reified human gaze-the gaze that corresponds to the commodity-and the expectation of aura. Thus, the mercantile and the reciprocal gaze come to dwell in the same resting place; and-here we are at the heart of Benjamin's inim- itable, paradoxical logic-the search for the "regards familiers" all the more assures Baudelaire that he will encounter an empty (or absent) gaze. Modernity responds to the poet's search with a literal "commodity gaze:"

Tes yeux, ilumines ainsi que des boutiques Et des ifs flamboyants dans les fetes publiques, Usent insolemment d'u pouvoir emprunt6.58

54"Un Voyage a Cythere" in Oeuvres, p. 187. 55Jonathan Culler also cites these lines to show the allegorization of symbol in

"Literary History, Allegory, and Semiology," New Literary History (VII, No. 2, Winter 1976), p. 267.

56 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 163. 57 "Ueber einige Motive bei Baudelaire" in CB, p. 144. Emphasis mine. 58 "Ueber einige Motive bei Baudelaire" in CB, p. 144.



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The Allegorical Gaze II

Parallel examples of the simultaneous revaluation of reciprocal sight and symbolic language on the one hand, and intercepted vision and allegorical meaning on the other, are not difficult to locate in Vallejo's poetry. The eyes seem to be the intense site of all expectation and denial: "Se dira' que tenemos en uno de los ojos mucha pena/ y tambien en el otro, mucha pena/ y en los dos, cuando miran, mucha pena." In this poem which begins, "1Y, si despues de tantas palabras,/ no sobrevive la palabra!," both eternity, in the form of the indivisible word ("la palabra"), and the everyday in the form of plural, interchangeable "words" of concrete specificity ("el peine y las manchas del pafiuelo"), are de- prived of autonomous existence.59 The poem ends with ironic am- biguity: "Ni palabra!," meaning both familiarly, "don't say a word!" and in this context, "not a word can be said." The point here is that the unmet expectation of the gaze that prevails in Baudelaire is carried over in Vallejo to the expectations aroused by language that cannot be met. I will discuss this allegorical aspect of writing that appears in Vallejo's poetry in further detail shortly.

For the present I wish to return to the cipher-"Correspon- dances" or the "empty-handed" "Correspondances." The relation of the "Correspondances" to allegory is a dialectical one, since allegory, as Benjamin describes it, acts as a dismembering, emptying trope. Allegory is fatalistic form that drains the vital unity of reference out of the particulars adhering to mythic remembrance, and condenses the mobile appearances of reality into a few rigid allegories of meaning. The allegorist is continuously starting the venture anew, beginning with a profusion of images-"la sensation du neuf"-which await transfer to Erfahrung, and to the realm of symbolic "Correspondances," but are instead seized by allegory. Allegory is the quintessential 'form' that robs the visible world of its abundant heterogeneity. Hence, the frantic "starting anew" of Baudelaire's "Le voyage." And hence, the first lines of many Val- lejo poems admit to a doomed repetition compulsion: "Y, desgra- ciadamente,/ el dolor crece," "Y no me digan nada," "De disturbio en distrubio/ subes a acompafnarme," "Y, en fin, pasando luego al dominio de la muerte," and a parody of the beginning that pre- tends it is no beginning, "Al cabo, al fin, por ultimo,/ torno, volvi y acabome." The reason for these frantic startings-anew is that the

59 "Y. si despues de tantas palabras" in Obra poetica, p. 371.




appearances linked to meanings by the allegorist are only flash identifications that are quick to disperse.

"Not a word of [Baudelaire's] vocabulary is pre-destined for allegory [ist von vornherein zu Allegorie bestimmt],"60 says Ben- jamin, characterizing the specifically modern form of allegory. The following fragment aptly describes the modern allegorists, Bau- delaire and Vallejo:

The allegorist is one who tears a piece out of savage existence, holds it next to another piece and attempts to fit them together: that meaning to this image, or this image to that meaning. This outcome does not allow itself to be foreseen, for there is no natural mediation between the two. So it is also with commodity and price ... How a commodity arrives at a price cannot be predicted, not in the production process or later when it finds itself in the market. Just this is the fate of the object in its allegorical existence. The meaning that the profundity of the allegorist would convey to it, is not sung to it at the cradle. But once the object is endowed with such meaning, another meaning can at any time withdraw the previous one. The fashion of meanings changes almost as fast as the price of commodities does. Actually the meaning of the commodity is called: the price, another meaning a commodity cannot have.61

The concept of allegory, far from designating an ahistorical rhetorical trope, like all other aspects of cultural production is per- ceived to be meaning permeable to the transformations of the social structure (infrasturucture). This identification of the allegorist's task with the unnatural "creation" of the commodity by its price illuminates the endlessly provisional nature of allegorical meaning. Precisely this mobility of meaning excludes the allegorist and the allegorical sign from participating in the natural mediation of image to meaning.

A poem from Vallejo's Poemas humanos clearly alludes to the allegorical nature of writing-the "sign allegory"- and thus places the poet-allegorist precisely in the sphere of commodity-meaning described by Benjamin. It begins,

Tengo un miedo terrible de ser un animal de blanca nieve, que sostuvo padre y madre, con su sola circulaci6n venosa

60 "Die Moderne" in CB, p. 99. Benjamin calls the flash-like appearance of allegorical figures like "la Mort, le Souvenir, le Repentir, le Mal" "centers of poetic strategy."

61 Passagenwerk, quoted by Tiedemann in afterword to CB, p. 204.



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y que, este dia esplendido, solar y arzobispal dia que representa asi a la noche, linealmente elude este animal estar contento, respirar y transformarse y tener plata.62

Here, the biological connections of the most basic kind, between child and parent, are contradicted by the "circulaci6n venosa"' which by definition cannot "circulate" nourishment to the body. This "flowing out" of the veins' blood figuratively designates the "lines" of poetry, the temporalized adverb "linealmente" explicitly attributing to language complicity in the depletion of life-sus- taining meaning. For this very reason, the "poetic-I" fearfully re- cedes-one might even say, in keeping with Benjamin, "rigidifies"-into the white transparency of semantically tautological ''white snow."

It is significant, I think, that on this most particular level of meaning creation, Vallejo follows Baudelaire closely. What is usually thought of as simply Vallejo's penchant for contradiction and oxymoron can much more adequately be described rhetorically as an allegorizing of symbolic meaning. The line, "este dia esplendido/ ... que representa asi a la noche," expresses the symbol/ allegory distinction in condensed juxtaposition; only the explicit positioning of irreconcilable meaning alternately within the world and within the poet, as in Baudelaire's poetry, is omitted. Later in the same poem, symbolic meaning is allegorized when the mechanical, the transcendent and the human are brought into an equalizing proximity with "el gonce espiritual de mi cintura." Hence, Vallejo's irony often springs from an allegorizing of the vertical "Correspondances," as we saw in "Pante6n" with the soul that becomes a displaced body part ("el son del alma/ tristemente/ erguida ecuestremente en mi espinazo").

The activities of this writer of poems are interchangeable, equalized actions ("estar contento, respirar/ y transformarse y tener plata"). These actions have become mere motion on a time-line ("una sola circulacion," "linealmente"), and consequently, physical necessities ("respirar") and spiritual qualities ("transformarse") have become equalized with the exchange value of the commodity ("tener plata"). The poem ends with another chaotic enumeration of verbs, making the connection with writing even more explicit:

62 Obra poetica, p. 41 1.




1Oh revolcarse, estar, toser, fajarse, fajarse la doctrina, la sien, de un hombro al otro, alejarse, liorar, darlo por ocho o por siete o por seis, por cinco o darlo por la vida que tiene tres potencias.

Verbs of pure physical existence ("estar," the originating linear verb) are followed first by "fajarse," implying a holding in of life's blood-a protective, instinctive gesture against death-and second, by "fajarse la doctrina, la sien," equating his writing to a body part that must be held close for fear of dissipation. It is not surprising, then, that the poem's last few words are a literal selling of his words, the arbitrary price-numbers also being interchangeable with "life" as it is metonymically reduced.

What happens to the "Correspondances" when the allegorical gaze is the dominant interpreter of reality? A fragment from Contra el secreto profesional, Vallejo's notebooks, contains the concise answer for the twentieth century. The title, "El movimiento consustancial de la materia" is of obvious importance:

Las paralelas no existen en el espiritu ni en la realidad del universo. Se trata de una mera figuraci6n abstracta de la geometria. No cabe para- lelismo dentro de la continuidad, una y lineal, de la vida. La historia y la naturaleza se desenvuelven linealmente y, en esta uinica linea solitaria, los henchos humanos y los fen6menos naturales se suceden uno tras otro, sucesiva y nunca simultaneamente.63

Against the Kantian spatial and temporal categories that structure perception, and certainly in direct opposition to any Platonic notion of ideal geometric forms-the French Symbolists would be the most immediate representatives of this idealization of pure geometric space-Vallejo constructs an allegorical relation between geometric form, ie., spatial expansiveness, and the primary reality of linear and temporal succession. There is no simultaneity in nature or in history, as there are no parallel railroad tracks, only lines on a chalkboard that represent parallels. The title, "El movimiento consustancial de la materia," is a claim for the "natural mediation" between image and meaning, and for the representation of symbolic meaning, the "Correspondances." But the belief that the blood and body of Christ are consubstantial with the bread and wine of the Eucharist is a "mere abstract figuration of geometry," a "geometric illusion."

63 Contra, p. 23.



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We have seen that Vallejo's poems displace the transcendent to the realm of the "geometric." The expectation of transcendent meaning must be aroused, however, so that Erlebnis can be revealed as the essence of Erfahrung. Baudelaire and Vallejo "give up the magic of distance;"64 unmask, but continually employ "the geometric illusion"-what Baudelaire calls "the useful illusion" of "my favorite dreams;"65 and perform the allegorist's task of fitting "that meaning to this image, or this image to that meaning."

Allegory, New and Old

We should ask, by way of conclusion, to what extent Benjamin's contextual definitions of allegory are a deviation from the rhetorical definition. Strictly speaking, allegory is defined as a technique of fiction writing, not applicable to lyric poetry, or any other genre without a narrative basis. The differences between symbol and allegory were not that great until the Romantics turned them into warring theories of meaning. Both figures locate meaning in a transcendent source, but allegory is a more continuous reference to that external source. A typical definition of allegory appears in this eighteenth century introduction to The Fairie Queene: in allegory, "the power of raising images or resemblances of things, giving them Life and action and presenting them, as it were, before the Eyes, was thought to have something in it like creation: and it was probably for this fabling part, that the first authors were called poets or makers."66 This essayist employs what is to be a favorite romantic comparison -the artist reproducing symbolically the creative powers of nature-only here it is said of allegorical creation. The only difference, though perhaps a substantial one, is that allegory gives life to what is not alive, to images and resemblances of things. The Romantics, on the other hand, insist on the organic nature of form, on the identity in kind of the image with the transcendental meaning.67 Coleridge lifts the symbol out of its

64 "Zentralpark" in CB, p. 166. 65 From the "Salon of 1859" quoted by Benjamin in "Ueber einige Motive bei

Baudelaire" in CB, p. 146. 66 John Hughes, "on Allegorical Poetry" quoted in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and

the Lamp (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 289. 67 Belief in the organic nature of form derives from an idealization of the plastic

artistic symbol, Greek sculpture being considered the most perfectly executed example. A definition of symbol that steers away from this Romantic philosophy of beauty would focus on the symbol's meaning formation in the 'mystical instant,' its




status as a mere ornament of language to the privileged position as "the product of organic form," possessing the all-important quality, translucence. The revolutionary change brought about by Romanticism was the expansion of subjective experiences that could be represented literarily. An infinity of experiences could be fit into the symbol, and this magical figure would unite them into a totality through the translucence of the general in the particular. But Romanticism achieved its unity of the subject and nature at the price of completely internalizing these relations. Symbolic meaning is inherent to an object, and in order to preserve these qualities from simple arbitrariness of meaning, the mind must force a congruence between image and idea.

What interests me here is that symbol and allegory have again interchanged attributes. In other words, we now perceive symbol as a forced congruence of mind and world, while Coleridge described allegory in exactly the same terms:

We may safely define allegoric writing as the employment of one set of agents and images with actions and accompaniments correspondent, so as to convey, while in disguise, either moral qualities or conceptions of the mind that are not in themselves objects of the senses, or other images, actions, fortunes and circumstances, so that the difference is everywhere presented to the eye or imagination, while the likeness is suggested to the mind.68

Allegory's main attribute, then, is the mechanical linking of ideas to objects. From Vallejo's perspective, this is the only way that meaning can be attributed to objects in the world when the temporal origin of existence converges so exactly with philosophic and scientific classification and reductive abstraction of the world. More generally, one could say that allegory furthers the mutual exclusion of two analogical realms, be they the sign and its referent, objects and their meaning, or experience and the representation of that experience. Coleridge says that the allegorical images are in dis-

idealization of destruction and its offer of redemption. See "Allegory and Trauer- spiel" in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Paul de Man cites Benjamin, among others, to support the contention that allegory is the metaphorical figure that assumes a leading role over symbol in the post-Romantic period. The symbol, ac-. cording to de Man, once again designates a simple figural use of language without the Romantic's claim to philosophical and historical totality. See "The Rhetoric of Temporality" in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. by Charles S. Singleton (Bal- timore: John Hopkins Press, 1969).

68 S. T. Coleridge, "Allegory" in The Portable Coleridge, ed. by I. A. Richards (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 399. Emphasis mine.



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guise because they refer in a linear manner to moral qualities, without that translucence of the general in the particular, without that inherent necessity that binds the two together. Coleridge refers to the chaos of detail and the absence of heirarchy that is characteristic of the allegorical mode which does not try to redeem time-bound repetition through identification with the substance of ideas ("the difference [between images and ideas] is everywhere presented to the eye or imagination"). And, Coleridge suggests, the form imposed on experience by allegory is qualitatively different from experience ("while likeness is suggested to the mind").

Rhetorical forms, and as Benjamin suggests, socially mediated "forms of perception" such as the commodity produces, necessarily mediate the creation of meaning. Thus Coleridge's definition of what is to be avoided, allegory, proves to be the very process of attributing meaning that corresponds to the contradictions of commodity production and to philosophic and scientific abstraction and interchangeability. One should add that allegory allows a critical assessment of these facts without isolating the subject in an internal, purely poetic, resolution. In "A lo mejor soy otro" we saw the process often undergone by Vallejo's poetic self: there is a realization that the rationalist invasion of the object world is "everywhere presented to the eye," and that the subject cannot but submit his or her senses to this alienated structuring of life. The subject has been re-externalized from the Romantics, but not without leaving behind an "absent other," who seems to watch hauntingly over the continuous imposition of foreign forms that reduce life down to the inorganic "gran atomo."

University of California, Irvine



vallejo alegórico

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